Tiger, Drugs, & John Adams

I’ve been watching the golf tournament at Torrey Pines and yesterday they got fogged out. It looked like you could almost walk on top of the stuff. I don’t remember any tournament being delayed because of fog but this day wasn’t only delayed, it was canceled. They’ll try to get in a round today, maybe even a bit of the fourth round, and then finish up on Monday. And Tiger is leading. What a nice start to the year for him. It remains to be seen if he can hold it up in the final two rounds. He’s looked good for two rounds in the recent past, but then he goes in the shit can on the weekend.

I got a prescription statement from my HMO on Saturday telling me what I’d gotten in the last month, what I paid and what my insurance paid. Yikes! I saw that my prescription for Clobetasol Propitionate shampoo, a 4-oz bottle, cost me $6.00 and the insurance paid $337.82. How in the world is that even possible? That figures out to about $85 an ounce. How in the world is that even possible? I’ve complained before about the exorbitant charges for certain prescription drugs—like the salves for my squamous-cell legs, the soriatane pills for my psoriasis, the drops for my post-op eyes. And now this shampoo that isn’t much better than the over-the-counter stuff I’ve always used. When oh when will we finally crack down on pharmaceutical companies and their outlandish prices?

Thanks to Netflix we’ve been watching the 2008 HBO series John Adams and I’ve been very impressed, not only with the acting and authenticity of the costuming and sets and historical details, but with the down-home quality of the story. After all these years, I now have a much better understanding of and appreciation for the history of our nation’s birth and the difficulties that followed. Paul Giamatti is John Adams, Laura Linney is Abigail Adams, and David Morse, with a bunch of facial transformation is George Washington, and Tom Wilkinson is the lecherous old Dr. Benjamin Franklin. If the portrayal is accurate, Abigail Adams was the driving force behind John Adams, counseling him, pushing him, making him more than the well-known barrister he was before the revolution. The acting, especially of Giamatti and Linney, is really excellent.