September 2007 = $45,000
June 2008 = $800,000,000
Every year it's the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you've never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that's been soaked in tea for the past eight decades, attempts to draw attention away from her sagging neck - a droopy curtain of skin that hangs so low she has to repeatedly kick it out of her path as she crosses the royal compound - by balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao's Guggenheim museum on her head, and winds up forming the centrepiece of a light-hearted photomontage in the centre of whatever newspaper you happen to be reading that day, accompanied by a picture of Princess Eugenie in a headdress, and some milky underfed heiress with the physique of a violin-playing mantis, wearing nothing but a diamante cornflake on each nipple and a hat made out of second-hand dentures or something equally avant-garde.
A year ago, 88-year-old Jean Lavender used to find walking any distance a struggle. Now she is keen to get outside for a walk most days. And she puts the transformation down to the most simple of medicines - water. She is one of a group of residents at a care home in Suffolk who have been encouraged to increase their intake of water. And they have all reported dramatic results. Jean says she feels 20 years younger.People assume that if you don't feel thirsty you don't need to drink but this is not the case. In fact in extreme conditions you could well end up dead before you feel an overwhelming desire to drink. Water is also one of the best and least known treatments for anxiety as well as being good for your bowels and your skin. So drink up.
There was a "criminal subculture" at a jail at the time a prisoner was killed by two inmates, an inquest has heard.
Why is it that private hospitals are convinced that their role models should be provincial businessmen’s hotels? As if these were the institutions that inspired a national sense of trust, care and expertise. Imagine saying, “I’ve just had my hips replaced on a Radisson International Discount Break.” Or, “My varicose veins were killing me, until my night with tea and coffee facilities,ensuite and spa access”; “I get all my collagen and nipple-lifting needs at Holiday Inn.”
As you check in, everyone asks how you are, which is an annoyingly asinine question in a hospital. You tell me, mate. I signed in and left my credit card for its own private liposuction. Instead of a porter, you get a management trainee, a lad with a dreadful suit, a corporate tie and either a surfeit of gel or afterbirth in his hair. Somebody really should open a private hospital that looks like a hospital, a proper great monumental Victorian temple to hypochondria, with nurses in starched wimples, doctors with beards, the smell of carbolic, polished brass, ladies with lamps and Salvation Army choirs. That’s what you want when you’re dying, a sense of drama and occasion, not some quietly seedy, partitioned, pastel, middle-management knocking shop.
We meet a ‘self-made’ property millionaire as thick as two short planks (and illiterate to boot) who nevertheless is looked up to by the very people he rents his clapped out clapboard houses out to simply because he’s ‘succeeded’ where they have failed. ‘Failure’ in America is very, very personal, that is to say, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough. Yet, as Bageant points out, even the very poorest who receive government assistance work at least six months of the year. ‘Workfare’ supports, if that’s the right word, only those who fought very hard to get it and are loathe to see it spread even more thinly than it is already.
It explains a lot about the psyche of working class Americans and why they can be manipulated, apparently so easily by the rapacious pirates in power. Simply put, there is no sense of the collective whatsoever, a view borne out by my own conversations with working class people when I lived in NYC and hung out in a scuzzy bar in East Harlem, where, during one evening of drinking, I got into a conversation with a young Puerto Rican guy who worked in Mount Sinai hospital and he told me, with desperation, “This has got to be the best of all possible worlds.”
And it’s a view that’s not lightly challenged, and with good reason, after all, if you think life consists of nothing but you against the rest of the world, then in challenging that perspective, you are inevitably questioning something that is fundamental to every American, the possibility of Success (the Capitalist version). To challenge the notion that the US is the best of all possible worlds is simply a step too far and in my opinion, explains much about why Americans consistently vote in a government that screws them up the yazoo, big time, every time.
Every year it's the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you've never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that's been soaked in tea for the past eight decades, attempts to draw attention away from her sagging neck - a droopy curtain of skin that hangs so low she has to repeatedly kick it out of her path as she crosses the royal compound - by balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao's Guggenheim museum on her head, and winds up forming the centrepiece of a light-hearted photomontage in the centre of whatever newspaper you happen to be reading that day, accompanied by a picture of Princess Eugenie in a headdress, and some milky underfed heiress with the physique of a violin-playing mantis, wearing nothing but a diamante cornflake on each nipple and a hat made out of second-hand dentures or something equally avant-garde. 
