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Recently there was a story that got huge media coverage about the long waits in hospital emergency rooms. Those in dire or critical condition endure waits that are up 40 percent over the last 7 years. The wait time for heart attack victims is up 300 percent! It's as if the emergency rooms have had a nervous breakdown because they're a catch-all for the uninsured, the urgent care patients and those who have been critically injured in accidents. Triage nurses have to see everyone, play traffic cop and hope they don't make a fatal error.

Clark recalls taking his wife to an emergency room once. The triage nurse seemed to hate her job and had no eye contact with Clark or his wife while she was taking vitals. Suddenly, she hit the code blue button and people swarmed in, put Clark's wife on a gurney and rushed her down the hall. That was a situation where triage actually worked. But it's not working in a lot of instances. Nurse-in-a-box clinics can help alleviate the emergency room crunch. Clark's 2-year-old son was sick this past weekend. On Saturday, he took him to a nurse-in-a-box practice and for $59 he was seen, evaluated, treated and they were on their way. The nurse practitioner wanted to see him again the next day because it couldn't wait until Monday when Clark's regular pediatrician was in. The follow-up was free! Not every nurse-in-a-box has free follow-ups, but this one did to encourage continuity of care. Clark's executive producer Christa originally turned him on to this specific nurse-in-a-box practice. She's been there about 8-10 times with her 2 children.

Doctors have been upset with Clark for advocating nurse-in-a-box practices. But so far medicine has failed to come up with an alternative to see people on an urgent, non-emergency basis. So this is what the marketplace has devised. If doctors are upset, they need to find a way to encourage more of their ranks to go into primary care to alleviate the crunch. Primary care docs are the unsung heroes of medicine. They make far less than if they're specialists and have far higher patient loads. Clark thinks we need a nurse-in-a-box in every hospital (like in the TV drama Grey's Anatomy) where triage can funnel people who are not truly emergencies.

Remember the format war between Betamax and VHS? Sony's Betamax offered a superior picture and technology, but lost out to VHS in the home marketplace. Today Betamax is only used in TV newsrooms across the country. Now Sony's Blu Ray hi-def DVD format is competing with Toshiba's HD DVD format. Sony is trying to lock up the film studios for their format, so Toshiba has countered by lowering prices on its player. The new street price is $149, but you can probably find it for about $110-$130.

The picture with either Blu Ray or HD DVD is shockingly good. We're talking about better resolution than broadcast HDTV. But here's the problem: Nobody knows which format will be the winner, so some early adopters will end up with a player that becomes a dinosaur down the road. Clark has a couple of strategies to help you win this war. The cheapest option is for you to take your traditional DVDs and buy an up-convert DVD player ($60 and up) with an HDMI cable ($5-$50). This setup will use digital voodoo to take the picture from your existing DVDs and simulate what hi-def will look like. The second option is sure to please gamers: Get a Sony PlayStation 3 ($399) that plays Blu Ray. Or you can simply buy the Toshiba player for $149. No matter which choice you make, remember to rent your DVDs for the next several years. Do not own -- that way you lower your risk while the format war rages on. The big risk comes when you develop a library of movies in a format that becomes obsolete.

Do you want proof that marketing and ads work -- that our brains are hardwired to believe what's suggested to them? Scientists at Cal Tech recently hooked people up to MRIs to gauge brain activity while they tasted 5 different Cabernet wines of various prices. However, the subjects were only given 3 wines with double samples of 2 of them. The funny thing is that people insisted a $90 wine tasted better when they were told it cost $90 than when they were told it cost $10! Yet when they did a blind taste test, people preferred a $5 wine to the $90 one! We as individuals fool ourselves. You can't change the way your brain works, so all you can do is try to counteract it with the actions you take.

Speaking of wine and food, the day is coming when the way you checkout at the supermarket is going to change. Microsoft and Motorola have both announced tests in supermarkets of an electronic gizmo that will register what goes into your cart and automatically check you out. Microsoft is doing tests with the ShopRite chain, while Motorola has teamed up with the Stop & Shop chain for tests.

Many people feel Clark doesn't give enough emphasis on his show to the environment. They say he's too concerned with one kind of green (money) and not the other sort. So here's a story for all those folks. Clorox is introducing a new line of products called Green Works. The Sierra Club will even be branding these products with its own seal of approval like Good Housekeeping! The San Francisco Chronicle reports that only 1.3 percent of our dollars spent on cleaning products go to green brands. But this will probably grow in the years to come as prices drop. Think about organic food. It grew from a niche market to a more mainstream one as price went down. Meanwhile, Clark's executive producer Christa suggests using white vinegar and water as a home-made green cleaning solution.