With all the talk about health care and whether it'll pass or not, you'd think someone, somewhere, would talk about the details of the plan. I guess it falls to me, since I'm the only person I know who actually went to the White House's site and downloaded the summary of the proposal.
Here's the second facet of the plan: The plan would Give tax credits for health insurance premiums. If your income falls between $22,000 and $88,000, under Obama's proposal, you won't have to pay more than 2-9.5% of your income (2% at the low end and 9.5% at the top end) for health insurance premiums. That means that a family with $88,000 per year in income would pay at most $8,360 per year for premiums, or at most $696 per month. Obama's proposal is more generous than either the House or Senate version right now.
Around our house, things have a tendency to break. With five kids -- three still at home -- that's probably understandable, especially when one of the kids is The Boy, who plays defensive line in football, and when two of the kids are the Babies!, who are miniature forces of nature.
That means that I'm constantly having to call in repairmen or fix things myself, and that gets expensive. Even today, I find myself wondering "What's going to be next to go in the house? Will it be the toilets? The television? The front door?"
My money, though, is on the kitchen sink. The sink attracts a lot of attention: people doing dishes, people throwing stuff down the garbage disposal, Mr Bunches playing with the faucet, and so on, and it's my gut feeling that the sink is not long for this world. We've already replaced the faucet, the spray hose, and the garbage disposal, so it can't be long now.
When that time comes that the sink finally is broken -- probably in a fight between The Boy and Mr Bunches -- I'll get a new stainless steel kitchen sink from MR Direct. Their "Mr Direct" kitchen sinks comes BBB accredited and with same day shipping and low prices -- all things I like, because when that sink goes, I don't want to spend a lot of money, and I certainly don't want to have to load everyone into the car and head out to some big-box hardware store: I want to stay at home and monitor the situation while waiting for MR Direct to ship my new sink to me... and then start the countdown until the NEXT thing that goes.
Every Saturday morning, as the sun rises, I sit in our living room and stare at images of Sweetie's Hunk Of The Week and try to think what I'll say about them... and it's no different with Hunk 52:
Ryan Kwanten.
You Don't Know Him Without You Have: Watched True Blood on HBO, where you might have noticed what I first noticed about Ryan Kwanten when I watched that show, and which is also the first thing I said about him when Sweetie told me on the phone earlier this week that he was the Hunk of the Week. I said: "Him? Doesn't he have too small a head?"
To which Sweetie said (over the phone, as she'd called me at work): "Oooh, there's lots of naked pictures of him."
If you see the other pictures from this set, you will realize that Ryan surfs in the buff. (I didn't need to ever know that in my life.)
Keep in mind that Sweetie was, at the time, home minding the Babies!
I did, the first time I saw Ryan Kwanten back when Sweetie and I began watching True Blood on DVD, think "Man, that guy's head seems like it's not quite the right size for him." And I did say that to Sweetie, earlier this week about him, getting the naked comment back. So last night, I persisted again, when I asked her why she liked him. I said "Don't you honestly think his head is a little too small for him? He's like a GI Joe action figure."
Sweetie just nodded and tried to stop her heart from palpitating. I think her palms got a little sweaty.
And then she pictured this.
Ryan Kwanten was also, as you'd expect, on an episode of Law & Order:SVU. I'm beginning to think that Law & Order is more than a TV show. I think it's a kind of universal clock, like the one the Mayans had that will run out in 2012 -- but which might run out a year earlier, because, remember all those losers back in the year 2000 who went around saying in nasal voices that the year 2000 had already occurred because there had never been a year zero and so our year-counting system was actually a year behind? If they were right, that makes this 2011 and the world will end a whole year earlier than we thought it would -- which is the excuse I gave myself last night to take the Babies! to Sonic and get a cheeseburger and fries and a strawberry chiller, which is like a slushee mixed with ice cream and which was so delicious I wanted another one immediately after I finished the first, and I had to leave quickly before I gave in to temptation, because if the world's going to end, I don't mind being a little fat, but I don't want to be a cow in the afterlife.
Law & Order, I think, serves as our society's universal clock, slowly counting down our civilization's time via people who have appeared on it: Each person who appears on an episode of Law & Order, or any of the little Law & Orders that are multiplying, counts as a piece of sand through the hourglass, and when everyone has appeared on a Law & Order, the world will end.
(Which would be a cool concept for a Twilight Zone kind of show, focusing on an actor who comes to realize that's true -- and who then is offered a starring role on the show and who has to decide whether he wants to do it, because he's the only person who knows, which means that if he can resist going on Law & Order for his whole life, he can guarantee that the world will not end on his watch. Cool, right?)
(Hollywood, I'm waiting for your call. I'll be here, looking at pictures of hunks with too-small heads.)
(And eating Chillers. God, I want one right now.) Thing That Makes You Go Hmmm About Him: Well, the thing that makes Sweetie go Hmmmmm about him is, apparently, all the naked pictures of him on the Internet... which is related to the thing that makes me go hmmm about Sweetie, in the sense that I say "Hmmmm... Sweetie, do you know where the Babies! are?"
(I believe that the naked picture day was also the day that Mr Bunches got marker on his face and looked as though he was a rejected clown college applicant.)
The other thing that makes me go Hmmmm about Sweetie is that I didn't know she had a thing for GI Joe action figures. She keeps raising the bar on the physical ideal I'm striving to meet for her: First, I've got to get abs of steel. Now, I need to also have fully rotating hips, and that's tough to do, what with the number of excuses I find to go to Sonic.
And I'll have to be able to do this.
But that's not what makes anyone go Hmmm about Ryan Kwanten. Here's something, though: Ryan is one of only about 100 or so famous people to be featured in the book About Face, a book of photographs of people's faces taken on Polaroid film. Only 1500 copies of the book were ever made, although I'm not sure why that is, other than to make it seem more valuable by artificially making it scarce, and giving it snob appeal, so that if you bought one of the copies of the book you could say "I have that, and only about 1500 copies were ever made," which is about the only reason to spend all that money on a book of portraits that didn't have wide release, right? You're paying extra for the ability to tell other people I have this and you don't.
If you made a book called I Have This And You Don't, and printed one copy, that might well be the most valuable book ever. Outside of that Superman comic people keep overpaying for.
Speaking of comic books, Ryan Kwanten will also be playing some sort of super hero in the upcoming movie Griff The Invisible, who's billed as an "office worker by day, superhero by night," and who lives in Australia. Although I would have figured Ryan would be a natural for Booster Gold, an actual comic book superhero who steals a suit with all kinds of powers and then travels back in time to our era to use the suit to become a rich and famous superhero through heroism and endorsements.
Why hasn't that become a movie, yet?
Reason I Assumed Sweetie Likes Him:In True Blood, Ryan almost never wears a shirt, and it looks as though his abs are molded in perfect form. You know my long-held and entirely-accurate beliefs on Sweetie & abs. I figured that was it.
Actual Reason Sweetie Likes Him: "His face, his body. His face, his body. His face, his body... his body, his face. His face. His body."
So, to recap, in case you didn't quite follow, that's:
His face:
His body:
Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him:She can say what she wants, but I think Sweetie was much more inspired by this scene from True Blood:
Or maybe by this one...
Or almost certainly by this one:
This image brought to you courtesy of Sweetie's dreams.
With all the talk about health care and whether it'll pass or not, you'd think someone, somewhere, would talk about the details of the plan. I guess it falls to me, since I'm the only person I know who actually went to the White House's site and downloaded the summary of the proposal.
