New Year's Eve

           Another New Year’s Eve, another time for promising to lose that ugly forty pounds hanging over our belts, to forgive and forget past grievances, to think more and say less, to pray that Robert Mueller will finally conclude his investigation. There. That should be enough to resolve.

          In years far past, 365 days seemed to move lazily along, like a meandering stream through the landscape of our lives, with only a few changes in lifestyle and technology, few surprises, just 365 steps from A to B. But now it’s like a dash from alpha to omega. Now, on the eve of year 2019, there’s no way to predict where we’ll be or what the world will be like a year from now. Will we be on the brink of war with China or Russia? Will we be in the depth of a recession almost as deep as what we had in the 1930’s? Will we have a wall on our southern border that actually works? Will our highways be nothing but giant potholes? Will Jeff Bezos own the world? Will Alexa and her sisters become androids to do our bidding, maybe even deciding for us what our bids should be? Will Donald Trump still be our president? So many questions, so few answers.

          Should I put on red underwear tonight hoping for a little romance? Nah, my tighty-whiteys will have to do. Should I eat twelve grapes to represent my twelve hopes for the New Year? Nah, that’s only wishful thinking. We need to do more than hope. We need to consider who to vote for in the 2020 election. The political jockeying will begin a year ahead of time. It looks like there could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty democrats who will decide to give it a run. We may have to draw a bigger circle to hold all those hats. Will Trump be the republican nominee or will the GOP have come to their senses and decided they’ve had enough of him? So many questions, so few answers.

          I haven’t yet decided if this will be my last blog or if I should just take a mini-vacation from blogging. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. But until then, Happy New Year, everyone.

          You will notice that the sofa is empty except for the New Year’s Eve leavings. Rosalie and I never made it to midnight. Our sleep gods called to us at 10:00.

         

POTUS & Medical Costs

President Trump (I’m trying to see if my calling him by his title will help me to better tolerate his many foibles.) and First Lady Melania visited our troops in Iraq over the holidays, and in President Trump’s speech to them he claimed that they hadn’t had any pay raises in ten years and that they were soon going to get a ten percent (or even higher) pay raise. He made it sound like he would be personally responsible for this raise. “Huzzah, Huzzah, for me! See how much I’ve done for you?” But what he said wasn’t true. There have been annual pay raises for the last ten years and in 2019 they will not be getting anything like the ten percent he mentioned. It’s not so much that he was lying; he was just aggrandizing what he thought may have been true. He exaggerates more often than he lies. Words come spilling out of him without any fact-checking or with very little thought and without heeding anything his advisers tell him. And if they tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he fires them and looks for someone who’ll tell him what he does want to hear. His disregard for facts and truth frightens me more than all the other things that frighten me about his presidency.

          And now he’s threatening to close our southern border and continue his federal shutdown until he gets the five billion for his wall. Just like a temper-tantrumy kid, his next move will probably be to stomp his feet and hold his breath until he turns blue. I think I’d enjoy seeing that. How are we going to survive for another two years of this man? No one seems to know the answer. I guess my calling him President Trump didn’t help. I still can’t tolerate him. A POTUS by any other name would still not smell as sweet.

* * * * * *

             Medical costs—what’s billed and what’s approved. I just examined the summary of the medical charges that my insurance provider sent me regarding my recent hospital stay in November. These numbers are for the total charges paid by Medicare and Arizona Blue Cross-Blue Shield. The differences between what was billed and what was approved is dramatic, mind-blowing . . . and very confusing. For example, the hospital bill for five days (room and lab work) was just under $40,000 and what was approved was just under $9,000. Do lawyers get together to negotiate what will actually be paid? Then there are all the charges submitted by various doctors who may have spoken to me or waved hello as they went by my door--$1750 billed, $1060 approved; Sonora Quest Lab for bloodwork, $590 billed, $72 approved. The totals for everything connected to my five-day hospital stay--$44,400 billed, $11,000 approved. Can you understand why I’m confused? These numbers make no sense; these charges make no sense. I wonder how it would all work out if we had socialized medicine regulated by the federal government instead of all these haphazard charges that sound way too exorbitant. I’m sure I won’t live long enough to have an answer to my wonderment.

Financial Stupidity

                It’s the day after Christmas and our life can now settle back into more normal concerns. Gray skies, chillier than usual, high only 58 degrees. Wah! We Arizonans are really spoiled when we complain about highs only in the upper 50’s, while most of the country is freezing or shoveling ass-deep snow. I remember what that daily shoveling was like in my lake-effect-snow life south of Buffalo. I’d rather be complaining about fifty degrees than battling the snow monsters.

          I’ve been looking for something to write about in this blog and came up with socialized medicine. I must confess I’m not very well-informed on the subject. I know it’s one of the sticking points that separate most Republicans from most Democrats, an offshoot of the states’ rights versus federal control. It seems, though, that we’re much closer to socialized medicine that we were only a few decades ago. We now have Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. The question about universal medical care involves the financing. Who’d be paying for it? Employers and individuals or the federal government? Bernie Sanders had quite a few voters who agreed with his plan. Somewhere recently, I saw an estimate of what a totally socialized medicine would cost, a little over three trillion dollars a year. Whew! That a bunch of money. But wouldn’t that cost come down if the federal government regulated what doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies could charge? Canada seems to have a system that works. How are they able to maintain reasonable medical costs? I may be a dumb-head about the issue, but I’m amazed and appalled at the exorbitance of our present medical costs, especially that of the pharmaceuticals. I can also see that we’d have fewer students wanting to become doctors and surgeons if their fees were regulated to levels they considered unacceptable. So, did the quality of medical care come down to unacceptable levels in Canada? I’m betting they didn’t, but I’d have to talk to a Canadian to see what he/she thought. In any case, something needs to be done about universal medical care one way of the other. I’m hoping for the other.

          Another thought about our needs—our rapidly failing infrastructure. When are we going to do something about our highways, bridges, power grids, rail systems, airports, and all the rest of our infrastructure? According to Fortune Magazine, we’d need about four trillion over the next ten years to fix it all. Even now, instead of spending the five billion Trump wants for his wall, why not instead fix at least some of our infrastructure needs?

          Both of these subjects probably reveal my fiscal naiveté. I never got very good grades in economics classes. I still don’t understand national costs and national debts. Where does money originate and when we need some, from whom are we borrowing it?

Happy Holidays

We're only two days away from Christmas and nine days from 2019. This blog may be a bit premature, but who knows what might be happening in the next nine days.

2018 has been for me a most unusual year and for so many unusual reasons. I don’t think any year has ever frightened me more than this past year did. I thought at my age, nothing much could ever again frighten me, but 2018 did. California looked like the entire state might be consumed by flames; in the East villages and entire towns were washed away in torrential rainfall and high winds and tornadoes; mindless shootings became the daily norm; North Korea’s egomaniacal leader had his finger on that awful button; Putin, with his characteristically antagonistic strut, decided to renew the cold war with all the dangers it held in the past; the ice packs north and south are melting at alarming rates; sea levels are rising; the amount of plastic we dispose of in the seas grows to unimaginable amounts; and racism, sexism, white supremacy, neo-Nazism have reared their ugly heads again. And now, after driving another adviser out of his cabinet with his unadvised return of troops from our fight against ISIS, Trump is no longer a jester, someone to laugh at for his exaggerated Tweets and misspellings; now he's become someone to fear. Yes, there was plenty in 2018 to scare the bejeezus out of me.

All right, let’s flip the coin. What good came out of 2018? For better or worse, Artificial Intelligence is here and will become more and more important in 2019 and all years thereafter; all forms of cancer are about to be defeated; the #MeToo Movement got us on the start toward a more equitable relationship between the many, diverse sexes; the Lady’s Star was born and we’re all the better for it; and Tiger began his comeback. Thank you, 2018.

I hope all my readers have a happy, fearless holiday.
Please forgive me if I’ve offended anyone with my secular attitude toward this season. Even the word holidays (or holy days) is offensive to some because it seems to ignore the birth of Christ. According to the dictionary, though, the word can mean either a religious festival or a day or days of recreation.

 I consider these late December days as more a celebration of the winter solstice than of the birth of Christ. Not that I don’t believe Christ’s birth isn’t a valid reason to celebrate, but I view Christ as a messiah more than the son of God, a messenger who brought forth in us the values inherent in Christianity. I know that many of you would say, “But how can you consider yourself a Christian if you don’t believe Christ was the son of God?” I believe in the human values he exemplifies but not his holiness or sanctity. I can’t buy into all the smoke and mirrors in the Catholic faith nor even the softer but no less sanctimonious Protestant beliefs. Am I then a pagan? 

The word pagan, just like heathen, has become a pejorative for someone in the distant past who may have been polytheistic or, according to Christians, a non-believer, but who was actually someone who feared the shortening of the day, the dropping of the temperatures, and the closing in of the darkness. When that time came that all was reversed, the winter solstice around December 21, they celebrated. Who wouldn’t? Here comes light and warmth and out goes dark and cold. The barren fields would spring to life again and all that was good was renewed. 

Most scholars agree that the date of Christ’s birth was probably a tagalong for that pagan celebration. Scholars debate and debate, carefully examining scripture and calendars and come up with a wide variety of possible birth dates. The Mormans believe it was April 6, and most others believe it was sometime in the fall, others in early December, still others on almost any date on the calendar. There is no consensus. So, why not combine it with the pagans’ celebration and clink our glasses for either or both causes to celebrate—the birth of Christ and the lengthening of the days? The birth of Christ as well as Santa Claus and Christmas trees and yuletide carols and a dawning New Year are all elements of and justification for our celebration over the holidays.  Even Gary Trudeau had fun with this debate.

Therefore, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and Welcome 2019.

Bird Box & Plastic

           

            Last week we watched Stephen Colbert interview Sandra Bullock on The Late Show and heard what she had to say about her new Netflix film Bird Box. It sounded like it would be good, so with nothing better to see on regular tv programming, we turned to Netflix to watch it. It starred one of our favorite ladies from Speed, While You Were Sleeping, The Blind Side, and Gravity, still one of our favorites even though she also starred in quite a few stinkers like The Heat and The Lake House. These last two should have sounded a warning but we ignored it.

Bird Box was another take on a post-apocalyptic threat to mankind, sort of like A Quiet Place but with a visual instead of an auditory threat. All about some mysterious alien force that causes people to kill themselves when they look at the sky or into the eyes of anyone affected by this strange disease. So one learns early on not to look at the light or into any affected eyes. Best to cover all windows or to wear a blindfold if one has to go outside. A pregnant Malorie (Sandra Bullock) has narrowly escaped the trap and makes it into a house full of others who have found this refuge, sort of a representative group of mankind’s types, like the folks in Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter. John Malkovich is the leader of the group and carries a shotgun at all times to ward off anyone who tries to get into the house. The story is told over a five year period, flashing back and forth from when the suicides first took place to her harrowing, blindfolded ride down a river in a small rowboat with her two children, called Girl and Boy. I’m not sure what the significance of those names had to do with anything, but it certainly gave us something to ponder. They were making this boat trip because they’d heard about a community along the river that was safe from the danger. We kept waiting for what we were so sure would be good to start happening. I mean, after all, it’s Sandra Bullock. Right?  Okay, it was Sandra Bullock, but it was more wrong than right. It made Sea of Trees look like an Oscar winner. The reviews of Bird Box were mixed, many of them finding it far better than we did. I must be getting too irascible to review movies. I wanted to like this science-fictiony premise but it was just too stupid. Just give me a quiet place and let me take off my blindfold.

* * * **

What about plastic? We’ve all seen and were appalled by that Texas-sized mess of plastic junk floating in the Pacific. But what can we do about it? It seems that most plastic takes about 450 years to biodegrade, nearly half a century. And we keep making more and more products out of this almost indestructible stuff. We can try to recycle it, but one stat I just read said that 90.5% of all plastic is not recycled. I guess that means that most of it makes its way down rivers to various oceans and seas to pollute our waters forever. China, which used to buy our plastic refuse for recycling, has now said they wanted no more. There are so many different kinds of plastic, each of which needs to be separated from the others before any reuse can happen, that the process is too expensive. How could we use all this plastic stuff? We could make highways that are virtually indestructible, or make plastic blocks for building houses. Now here’s an idiotic use I just came across, edible plastic retainers for six-packs of beer or soda. Edible. Now, who in hell would be dumb enough to want to eat fake plastic beer binders? Maybe dunk them in a fake plastic dipping sauce? C’mon, folks, let’s make plastic roads and houses.

The Sea of Trees

         

          Since the holiday season has so flooded the screen with reruns and Christmas drivel, we went on Netflix the other night to find a movie worth watching. We found The Sea of Trees with Matthew McConaughey, Naomi Watts, and Ken Watanabe. I assumed, somewhat erroneously, that anything McConaughey chose to do would be good or, maybe like Mud or The Dallas Buyers Club, even very good. Wrong. Although this wasn’t a clinker, it wasn’t a diamond in the rough either.

          Arthur Brennan has recently lost his wife (Naomi Watts) to cancer and a tragic auto accident and he’s decided he should find “the perfect place to die,” where he might kill himself to show his dead wife that he really loved her despite all their grievances. He flies to Japan (one-way ticket, no luggage—sort of a dead giveaway for his reason to go there) where, at the base of Mount Fuji, he enters a park, a sea of trees where others before him have gone to end their lives.

          The story is told in a series of flashbacks to show us what his marriage was like before and after his wife’s death. On his trek into this vast parkland and just as he is about to take his life with drugs he’s brought with him, he meets a Japanese man (Ken Watanabe) who is in much pain from various wounds, apparently from his own attempt to kill himself. He helps the man, even giving him CPR when he loses consciousness. Together, both now deciding for life instead of death, they try to find their way back to the parking area. After much stumbling and falling they find a small tent left behind by someone who has successfully killed himself where they take shelter from the heavy rainfall. Brennan makes the difficult decision to leave his exhausted companion behind to find a way out of the forest, vowing to the man that he would come back for him.

          Gus Van Sant directed, and one would think that someone who has Good Will Hunting and Milk under his director’s belt that he might have done better with this one. Wrong again. As I said at the beginning, the film was somewhere between not very good and not too bad, sort of that middle ground where low-budget films go to die. Or, in this case, go into a sea of trees.

Stray Thoughts & Neologisms

I may have used some of this in an earlier blog, but I can't remember. So, in case I have, here it is again.

Thoughts:

⧪Isn’t it sad that some people can turn on tv and not find

               a single program that insults their intelligence?

⧪The oral comprehensive (or any difficult test) exam might be

               a situation in which the testers slowly squeeze the testees.

⧪The things that make people laugh say a lot about their intelligence.

⧪The things that make people cry say a lot about their sensitivity.

⧪Note how these adjectives are all close in meaning but all different:

          smart, intelligent, wise, knowledgeable.

⧪One cannot achieve wisdom without first being intelligent.

⧪Intelligence must precede wisdom.

Neologisms:

🔻Arbitrator: A cook that leaves Arby's to work at McDonald's.

🔻Avoidable: What a bullfighter tries to do.

🔻Bernadette: The act of torching a mortgage

🔻Burglarize: What a crook sees withControl: A short, ugly inmate

🔻Counterfeiters: Workers who put together kitchen cabinets

🔻Eclipse: what an English barber does for a living

🔻Eyedropper: a clumsy ophthalmologist

🔻Heroes: what a guy in a boat does

🔻Left Bank: what the robber did when his bag was full of loot

🔻Misty: How golfers create divots

🔻Paradox: two physicians

🔻Parasites: what you see from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

🔻Pharmacist: a helper on the farm

🔻Polarize: what penguins see with

🔻Primate: removing your spouse from in front of the TV 

🔻Relief: what trees do in the spring 

🔻Rubberneck: what you do to relax your wife 

🔻Seamstress: describes 250 pounds in a size 6 

🔻Selfish: what the owner of a seafood store does 

🔻Sudafed: brought litigation against a government official 

🔻Subdued: . . . like a guy, like works on one of those, like, submarines, man

Freedom & Stephen Colbert

          The day is December-fine here in Arizona—calm, sunny, somewhere in the low 70’s. And the boys are out in full force this morning with their rumbling and roaring dissonance cloaking the heavens. Without any intended sexism, by “the boys” I mean the men and women who fly training missions in their F-35’s out of Luke Air Force Base here in the West Valley. Flying in twos and threes, they create such noise that all conversation is suspended until they pass out of sight. Many of us in Arizona like to call it the sound of freedom. Isn’t it sad to think that ours or anyone else’s freedom has to be guarded by such military force that no one would dare to try to take it? You’d think that individual freedom would be the lifelong goal of everyone on earth. But it isn’t. Most of those who live under the iron hand of one dictator or another have no idea what individual freedom means. Does it mean that each of us would be free to do anything we want? No. We would still have to abide by the legal principle that your freedom ends where my nose begins. But the freedom to do and think and say anything we want so long as it causes no harm to anyone else is well worth fighting and dying for. So, fly on Luke Fly-boys and -girls. The sounds you make are welcome to my ears and are a welcome reminder to me that I still have my individual freedom as long as I continue to know where everyone’s nose is.

          Stephen Colbert again. I wonder if Colbert is ever frightened by what could happen to him if one of the Trump supporters decided to take him out for all his jibes against their hero, the Donald. He probably is, just a little anyway, but he never mentions it. Much as I admire him for his intelligence and his comic genius, I wonder if he realizes that he might be a contributor to what Trump calls "Fake News.” Colbert loves to highlight some of Trump’s tweets to demonstrate the man’s fondness for exaggeration or downright lying or his ignorance, especially when it comes to spelling (for example, the comic “smocking gun” Trump in a recent tweet mentions  not once but twice). But Colbert doesn’t always make it clear which tweets are actually Trump’s and which have been slightly or grossly doctored for the sake of humor. A lot of viewers would take them all as true when in fact some would be “fake.” I also heard him say to one of his guests that he had read The Lord of the Rings fifty times, and he wasn’t going for humor. C’mon, Stephen. No one, not even the nerdiest Tolkein fan, has read The Lord of the Rings fifty times. Long before the fiftieth reading, the reader somewhere in the twentieth or thirtieth would have spit up both Gollum and the ring and never gone back for a second helping.

Big Brother

Privacy and Big Brother. Now, in addition to fingerprints and retinas, we have facial recognition. It’s not quite there yet for all of us, but it soon will be. If you buy into all the digital stuff on network cops and robbers shows, it’s already possible to get a name lined up with a face as long as that face is on file somewhere.  Just as BB will soon have all our fingerprints and retinas on file, he will also have photos of all our faces. One of our major airlines now uses facial recognition to allow passengers to check themselves in and board the plane without any help from an agent. And the places where one might go to hide are fewer and fewer. Maybe the depths of Montana or Idaho mountains, but even there a drone might spot us, take our picture, and obtain our name based on our face. I’m not yet sure on which side of the argument I stand. Do I so treasure my privacy that I’m willing to give up the safety of social protection, or would I give up privacy for safety? I don’t know. But very soon now the question will need to be answered.

And speaking of Big Brother, what about Donald Trump? I read everything I can find about him, not from any adulation but from curiosity. Trump news is like picking at a scab. It usually itches like the devil and picking at it too often causes it to bleed again, but the itch just won’t go away. Nor will he, even though a majority of us would like him to. Just examine his base (and what a good name for it—“his base”). Generally, his base is made up of white males who favor guns and oppose abortion, are narrow-minded and less educated than average, are creationists, nationalists, racists, misogynists, white supremacists, and homophobes. Then there are those in the financial top 1% who support his tax policies but not the man. Polls keep suggesting that about 40% of eligible voters support Trump. What does that say about those who make up that 40%? Nothing very good.

He's Baaaack

          Okay, okay, I know there are a few of you out there who said, ‘Nah, he won’t be able to quit. He’ll be baaaaack (like Arnold).” I found that my days were too empty without this task of blogging every two or three days. And my suggesting that I was running out of things to say just wasn’t true. There are always things to write about.

          For example, there’s the five-year-old girl whose parents were so offended by what they called mocking laughter directed at their daughter by a Southwestern Airlines agent that they demanded and got an apology from Southwestern. Mocking laughter? Probably not, at least not mocking. How about laughter at the silliness of the little girl’s given name, Abcde, pronounced, according to her parents, “Ab-city.” What might have motivated them to name her Abcde? The cleverness? The cuteness? The uniqueness? Probably all of the above, in an age when too many new parents are searching for some way, anyway, to find a name that no one else has ever come up with. Did they not foresee laughter in their daughter’s future? I mean, c’mon, Abcde? Yeah, she’ll have a lifetime of listening to laughter, a lifetime of having to explain how she got that moniker. I am reminded of a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. His father, whose last name was Major, as a cruel joke on his recently born son, signed his birth certificate Major Major Major. And then to further the black humor in the novel, Heller involved him in a typical governmental snafu. When Major Major was drafted into the air force in WWII, he was automatically assigned the rank of major, thus making him Major Major Major Major. He spent his entire air force career hiding from anyone and everyone to avoid giving away his false majority.

          See, there will always be something to write about, some topics more important than others, some sillier than others. After all, I’ll always have Trump, at least for the next two years, hopefully for no more than the next two years.