We must begin to hold all physicians accountable, regardless of specialization, to certain quantifiable measures of health, namely cholesterol levels, blood pressure, weight, and BMI. All patients assigned to a physician must meet specific annual minimum standards of health. Bad doctors will be those who do not meet their patients’ annual minimums, and they may be subject to certain penalties if the health scores of their patients do not improve in a reasonable amount of time.

The analogy doesn’t always hold up, and some readers will probably think that certain points would be just as good an idea in medicine as they are in education. But the core points are pretty solid:

I can predict some of the responses that physicians might make: “We can’t control what our patients do or eat outside of our offices to maintain minimum levels of health. Also, these variables — BMI, cholesterol, blood pressure — are limited and don’t adequately measure a healthy person. And one other thing, you can’t expect us to be evaluated based on all patients equally, regardless of family history, poverty, and other complications.”

No. Kidding.

Of course, the difference is that in this country, medical care is mostly private and education is mostly public. We have all these high expectations for Return on Investment when our taxes contribute to something, even though of course most of us pay far more for health care than we do for education. And the government has more room to stretch its regulatory muscle over a public service like education than when it’s “interfering in private companies.”

I still think we need public health care desperately; tying health care to full-time employment is insane and amounts to giving every poor or working-class person in this country the finger. And, for the same reasons, we need good public education. But this analogy does help me see part of the conservative argument against public health care: what if we screw it up the same way we’ve screwed up public education? (…How about we try to fix both now please?)

But clearly the craziest part is how she advocates against Dewey:

“No Dewey decimal system?”

It was what labeled her a rebel in bibliophile circles. She was a heretic to some for her views on the archaic cataloging system. “I advocate shelving books in ‘neighborhoods’ based on subject matter. It makes more sense to patrons and is easier for them to use.”

Bryce seemed to like the idea. “You must be a very persuasive and busy woman.”

This is a romance novel, you guys. Click through for more excerpts. This one’s a winner.

Please, if you know what’s good for you, watch:

Maurice Sendak on the Colbert Report

and then listen to:

Jack Gantos on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

Seriously, though, I think the show does a brilliant job of exploring — or at least addressing in passing — the myriad of things going on in England immediately pre-WWI and during the war. The show seems to have the same sort of conflicted attitude about the economic and social inequality that I imagine (based on things I’ve read, not any personal experience) many modern English people have. Lord Grantham is a benevolent dictator of a beautiful home, and it’s easy to see Downton as a sort of wish-fulfillment paradise, but we never forget that Grantham is a dictator, and that any decent lives his servants or children have is entirely due to his indulgence. In other words, we know this social structure is horribly imbalanced and wrong, but oh my goodness the dresses.

I could go on and on about this show, and probably will at some point. But this is supposed to be about books. Staircase Wit posted this intriguing list of Downton read-alikes, divided into fiction and non-, adult and YA. Can’t wait to try some of them!

I’d like to add The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, by Laurie R. King: Older Sherlock Holmes and his young sidekick Mary Russell team up to solve mysteries in WWI England. Utterly delightful.

Any other suggestions?

Which in turn reminds me that I never posted this fantastic 50th anniversary interview with Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer in School Library Journal last October.  They were roommates my age when they wrote and illustrated the thing (which turned out to be one of my favorite things of all time) as a way to distract Norton from the book he was supposed to be writing, and are still friends 50 years later. The interview is delightfully crotchety about the publishing industry and book critics:

Feiffer: Even the good reviews, many of them, indicated that, well, this was a book for gifted children, for very bright children… [B]ut in many cases, the most important responses I got were from kids who had some learning disability they had to get past, and they did perfectly well with the story.  So that whole idea that this was a book only for gifted kids was insane.

Juster: …. And to top it all off, of course, this was 1961; critics said that fantasy was bad for children because it disoriented them…. You had to be very careful about what you put in a children’s book, [because they believed] no child should ever run into anything that he didn’t already know about in a book.

And later:

Feiffer: There was another element in all of this back then, and even more so now. That is, most of what people know is based on their own tight little world, and what they think is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable. And then a book breaks through, as it did with Maurice [Sendak’s] Where the Wild Things Are or with Norton and The Phantom Tollbooth, and rather than learn from that, they think these books are just exceptions. If anything, it reinforces their prejudices.

But one of the wonderful things about children’s books is that a kid can read something and find in the book a friendship, an ally, something he doesn’t have at home…. And then he can look back on this book and others, as one of the big changing moments in his life. If you turned all editorial judgment over to the people in charge, those moments would never ever happen.

The whole thing is very much worth reading.

(I should also mention that Post-a-Day technically ended on Monday. I missed 11 out of  35 days. Oops. Still, it got me out of my posting stagnation, so I’ll call it a win.)

The folks behind Jewsmas would like a different traditional Jewish Christmas, so everyone will “leave Chanukah the hell alone!” Traditions include The Refusal of the Ham and The Mumbling of the Carols. Sounds like not quite as much fun as The Airing of Grievances, but I’d give it a try.

Time for more Terrible Christmas Things! Erin McKeown, a wonderful singer-songwriter with whom I went to college, has an “anti-holiday album” entitled F*ck That! It’s not her best work, certainly; it’s a bit brittle and obvious, as you might guess from songs like “Go Tell It on the Mountain (That Karl Rove Is Born)” and “Santa Is an Asshole.” But I am in exactly the right mood to appreciate that sort of thing, and have been humming “You wish us happy holidays / But you really mean merry Christmas” for days.

I’ve had Rare Exports, a Finnish horror comedy about “the real Santa Claus,” recommended to me several times recently. I have a pretty limited appetite for horror, but the trailer was entertaining, anyway.

But I’ve saved the best for last: Coping With Christmas Carol Fatigue, complete with Raptor Christmas Carols:

Do you have a Terrible Christmas Thing you’d like to share? I mean, nothing’s going to top “Said the raptor to another one / Do you smell what I smell?” But I’ll appreciate your attempt.

Anthony Bourdain made a Krampus video. It’s a pretty good overview of the story, in case you still haven’t read the Wikipedia page and have no idea what I’m on about:

Here’s a traditional Krampuslauf (Krampus run) in a town in Austria a couple of years ago. These days they’re tourist attractions all over the country in December. (The metal soundtrack might be less traditional, though they are Austrian, so who knows?)

Philadelphia rocked their own Krampuslauf this year. If you want to help me make Krampuslauf Boston happen next year, stop whatever you’re doing and email me right now.

If you still want more Krampus (and why wouldn’t you?) allow me to recommend the Krampus YouTube channel and “official” website.