1071 The Doctor is In

1071 The Doctor is In.

How is it dentists have figured out to keep appointments on time, but doctors haven’t?  Maybe it’s the fluoride in the water at dental schools that irritates incoming freshmen in ways that makes them more likely to look at their watches.  Maybe it’s because most dentistry doesn’t have to be done all at once.  Maybe they’ve discovered that you don’t have to fill all five cavities today... that three of them can wait a week and you get a second appointment.

The sign in the doc’s waiting room says “If you’re more than ten minutes late for your appointment, we may ask you to reschedule.”  That’s not a real quote.  It’s much too clear for Medical Officespeak.  And it doesn’t work both ways.

Doctor: “Sorry, kid, I’m running late, but you’re free to reschedule.  We have a few openings at around this time next week.  And don’t worry, that bleeding will stop on its own, eventually.”

We’ve seen amazing medical strides since the days of leeches and cocaine-laced snake oil.  Well, from the days of leeches, anyway.

Medical office practice has strode in the opposite direction, ignoring the one-way signs and the patients.

Kindly Old Doc kept his patient records on 3x5 cards in that infamous “doctor handwriting.”  He never missed a trick, never failed to set up appointments with specialists and never forgot about following up on his patients’ progress.

Of course in those pre-computer, pre-insurance company days, the whole of the medical conversation and action was doctor and patient, maybe augmented by an office manager who knew everything that was supposed to happen and knew most of the people who walked through the door of the waiting room.

Only a few years ago, medical records were kept in huge files on office walls.  Sloppy, slow and with occasional mis-filing, mostly accurate.  Today, it’s all computerized.  And it doesn’t work.  There are virtual cracks for the virtual records to fall into.  Sometimes it’s lemmings heading into the cracks.

Here’s a perfect example.  Recently a patient was prescribed a complicated test which was to be performed at a hospital and required “authorization” from the health insurance company.  Weeks pass and the patient calls the medical office and is told “the insurance company hasn’t approved it yet.”  More weeks.  Then a call to the insurer: “we don’t have any requests on file for you.”

Oh.

Another call to the medical office:  “The insurance company won’t authorize this without a date from the hospital.  The hospital can’t schedule the appointment without approval from the insurance company.

This sounds made up.  It isn’t.  It sounds atypical.  It isn’t.  It happens every day.  And you can’t make this stuff up.  Or do much about it.

Shrapnel:

--Happy 25th anniversary, “Weekend Today,” a staple of NBC’s Saturday and Sunday morning lineups (or is it lines-up?)  In the early years, we worried that it wouldn’t live to see the following weekend.  That worry is long gone.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com unless they’re an invitation to a vocabulary wrestling match over “strode” vs. “stridden.”
© WJR 2012

1070 Too Much News, Not Enough News

1070 Too Much News, Not Enough News

Here’s to Perceptive Paula Poindexter, journalism professor at the University of Texas, Austin, out with a new book that says young people don’t like watching/reading/hearing news.

She says in “Millennials, News and Social Media” that kids today don’t see why they need to be informed, that they consider most news junk and propaganda.

In reporting this, the media website jimromanesko.com does the newsroom unthinkable: it reprints the school’s publicity release verbatim after excerpting parts of it and posting a picture of the book’s cover.

Okay, better than rewriting it without citation, especially these days.

While we’re in a quoting mood, let’s go for someone with the wisdom of the ages under his furry belt, Pogo:  “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

We the newsies have made information unpalatable to an entire generation, even though it was predisposed to being uninformed to begin with.

And how have we done this?  By trivializing the important and aggrandizing the trivial.

The 24/7 news cycle of today takes the specialness away from news... the kind of thing you got from the morning (and then the afternoon) paper, the nightly news on television, the radio newscast on the hour and the wake up programs on TV.

An informed population is necessary to the success of a democratic republic?  Nah.

Everything goes on forever these days.  Repeat and repeat and trumpet and do it over and over and over.  Some of the all-news radio and television outlets don’t even bother rewriting.  See a story on, say, HLN at 11:11 am, you can bet you’re going to see it again exactly the same way -- maybe with another anchor -- at 12:11 pm.  Defenders of this will say they expect their audience to turn over every seven or eight or 15 minutes.  But they’re wrong.

The mind numbing parade of car crashes, missing children, hotel implosions, high speed chases, cats rescued from trees combined with the meaningless and endless political charges, countercharges, he saids, she saids along with the Drew Petersons and uninformed experts, conspiracy theorists, celebrity gushers would drive any sane person away.

All this and the football injury of the week, traffic is heavy on (the Cross Bronx Expressway,) (the 101,) (the Holland Tunnel) (I-395 South) (where it’s heavy all the time and everyone knows it.) And here’s the weather for Anchorage.

What will who wear on the red carpet at the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, the Emmys, the Tonys, the MTV Awards, the BET Awards.  How many red carpets are there, after all?

Oh, and by the way, there’s a civil war in Syria.  With lots of people hurt or killed.  And North Korea exploded an a-bomb. The American Ambassador to Libya was assassinated. And an angry mob stormed the US Embassy in Yemen and another is demonstrating in Egypt. Now back to the speculation about who will be the judges on next season’s American Idol, now that J-Lo and her boy toy have run off to … that traffic jam on the 101... or the one on route 1 in Miami.

Wish I’d said that (with apologies to Jimmy Cannon):  “Big soda drinks banned in NYC. Good. People can kill themselves if they want to, but they have no right to kill me with their second-hand sugar. Next they should ban double burgers, large fries, and extra cheese pepperoni pizza, so I won't have to worry about second-hand fat.  -- Dan Thomas.”

(Dan Thomas is a journalist who knows the difference between Chris Stevens and Fashion week.)

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012

1069 Too Many Choices

1069 Too Many Choices

Shopper 1 is holding two boxes of blueberries and asks “which one looks better?”
Shopper 2:  “weigh each of them and buy the heavier one.”
S1:  But they’re each six ounces.
S2: That’s a minimum.  It’s never exact.

Viewer 1: Do you want to watch “Sins and Secrets” or “NCIS”?
Viewer 2: Whichever has the shorter commercial breaks.

Diner 1: In which plastic chain restaurant do you want to have dinner?
Diner 2: The one with the shortest wait for a table.

There are too many choices.  Some people like choices, for example whether to have an abortion, or who should run Social Security and Medicare.  Often people who like one kind of choice, recoil in horror over another.

Chooser 1:  Do you want to choose?
Chooser 2:  You choose.

Life as a display of nail polish colors or bakery cookies.

So, you want more of a say in what happens to “your” Social Security money?
And to do that you want to put your bucks in the hands of the Wall Street nincompoops who have done such an outstanding job?  You want Bernie Madoff’s “cell” phone number, maybe?

But there are some things about which you have no choice.  Example:  buying a car and you want a radio, heater, air conditioner, MP3 player, cloth seats, and a rear-vision camera.  “Oh, well, you can’t order all that stuff separately anymore, sir,” says Spike Jones (or is it Sid Stone) with the checkered sport coat and the pasted on smile acquired at Whiteners R Us.  “Most of what you want is standard equipment.   But if you want the rear vision camera, it only comes with the Grand Deluxe Accessory Package which also includes 20 inch wheels, a rear spoiler and an ‘upgraded’ front grille, and rubber door bumpers, heated and cooled driver seats and our Sirius/XM and GPS view screen.”

Automotive bloatware.

You often can’t choose your own doctor.  How long before you can’t choose your own lawyer?  

But mostly, it’s too many choices and you know about as much about them as you do about the Persian invasion of Phoenicia.   Like when you picked the items for your 401 K.  Or your spouse.  And when you just couldn’t decide whether you needed 20 inch wheels and a rear spoiler.


Shrapnel:

--The latest soon-to-be-overused-word is “texture.”  All of a sudden, everything has “texture,” even if it doesn’t.  Move over, “premium,” “solution,” “literally,” “impact,” “global,” “motivated,” “ ” and “cool;” there’s a new sheriff in town.

--Katie Couric’s new show, “Katie,” is the perfect program for her.  It’s a good mix of the kind of stuff that made Oprah a success.  Both she and executive producer Jeff Zucker are back in the comfort zones that made “Today” the most watchable show on television when this duo was at its core.


(Please note that Both Financial Balderdash and High Heels Hot Flashes have important things to say about 9/11.  Links are -- as always -- on the right side of this page.)


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012

1068 9-11-01

1068 9-11- 01

(Note to readers:  With some small changes and expansions, this is a repeat of last year’s post on this subject which, ironically and only accidentally, was the 911th post-Bloomberg Wessay.)


(NEW YORK) -- Veterans of the Vietnam War have a saying: If you weren't there, you don't get it. The same can be said of September eleventh, 2001.  Now, years later, it’s truer than ever.  

There were three "grounds zero," not one. The main one was the World Trade Center in New York. There also was the Pentagon and a lonely field in Pennsylvania.

As your distance increases from these points, the impact on you tends to decrease. "It wasn't such a big deal" is heard throughout the land, especially with the intervening death of Osama Bin Laden.

The pint size intellectual then in the White House didn't get it when it happened and didn't get it for the rest of his presidency and doesn't get it now. And if you weren't there, neither do you, even if you think you do.

Time blurs the day and the days that followed. We look at the events and the circumstances with gauze over the lens. Or not. It's like when Kennedy was shot. Everyone remembers clearly where they were that day, that hour. And everyone in greater New York lost someone when the Trade Center came down. Everyone knew someone who was trapped in that hell. If not that, then a cop or a firefighter who plunged into the wreckage and died or who lives on with godawful afflictions acquired in the line of duty and sometimes without compensation.

And now, here we are, more than a decade past, and the World Trade Center is growing back on the land.  Slowly.  But faster than if it had been a re-planted tree.

The mind, gauze on the lens or none, doesn't grasp three thousand deaths in an attack on American soil. The number is overwhelming. But we grasp the death of a loved one or a neighbor or a friend or a guy who worked at the next desk and went to his reward without you because you were running late that morning.

And the mind, gauze on the lens or none, doesn't totally cloud the unity we all felt in the aftermath, a unity that lives in our minds and hearts but eventually evaporated, like the poisoned smoke the EPA told us it wasn't.

Friend and former-colleague Don Mathisen went on the air with me a few years ago, and talked about the lessons of the day. Don said he had hoped that the event taught us that the military is needed to protect New York, and that local police and intelligence should be expanded. Don is right, of course. But what would have happened if a flight of Navy F-14s had brought down a civilian airliner? You know the answer.  And of course, since then, we have learned about the New York Police Department’s ham-handed, jurisdiction-invading investigations of dangerous Muslims in coffee shops, mosques and car washes... investigations that might have been illegal, even if they had resulted in anything but a lot of overtime for the lucky infiltrators.

II.

The stink of this thing took about a week to float its way to the Upper East Side, and it's the kind of stink that stays with you, both in your nose and in your heart. By Tuesday the 18th, we had pretty much the same picture we have now, eleven years later. We didn't have an exact death count, but we knew the round number was 3,000. We didn't know the extent of the maladies that would later strike survivors, but that stink in the air told us SOMETHING was coming, eventually.

The feds and the city did air tests. The Environmental Protection Agency's Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey Governor, Horsewoman, elegant, poised in a Miss Manners sort of way, assured us that everything was clean. The party line.

The subways and the commuter railroads got back to normal on the "day of..." though late, after they'd figured out that they weren't targets. In the hours before that, they stopped. Sometimes in darkened tunnels and without explanation. For hours.

There are shocks to the system -- the personal system -- that take time to sink in. This one sunk in immediately. Something like this could not be happening. Back in the newsroom on 59th, we went about our business. But what WAS our business? Reporting the truth. But what WAS the truth? The TV, our transmissions and everyone else’s had pictures of the planes hitting the towers and the fires that followed. There we were in our individual private hells and in the collective hells shared by everyone. The towers, the Pentagon, and later, the Pennsylvania field, all there for the viewing, over and over.

Noses to the grindstone. Get out the facts. Find the mayor. Find the Secretary of Defense, find the President, find the Vice President.

The first wasn't easy. There were no facts. The second WAS easy. The Mayor was on site, downtown, where he belonged. The secretary was scratching his head. The President was airborne -- somewhere. The vice president was encamped at his now-famed "undisclosed location," presumably pulling strings in his sinister way, insuring there were no more hijackings that day by grounding every civilian aircraft in America.  Dick Cheney says in his recent book that one of the undisclosed locations was the Vice President’s Residence in Washington and another was his home in Wyoming.  Took ten years to find that out.

On the street, New Yorkers were doing something they always do, but in a new way. We were schmoozing. With total strangers. We were walking... no subways quite yet. We were working our way to Grand Central or to Penn Station or to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, trying to get home. Or hoofing it across the 59th Street Bridge. Or the Brooklyn Bridge. Throngs of us. Talking among ourselves quietly. We were, for the moment, a people unified in horror and brotherhood. We passed the southern entrances to Central Park and smelled horses. The Trade Center stink wouldn't block that out for a week.

We were one people determined to seek safety and to avenge. And now, here it is, all these years later. And where is that unity? It has been splintered by partisan bickering, by the fighting of useless wars, an economic near-depression and we have, in a decade, been lulled into complacency by the death of the enemy’s figurehead and remain only slightly closer to bringing the rest of villains to justice.

This is shameful and unacceptable.

Further, over the intervening decade we have become a nation sunk a Balkanizing quicksand with unprecedented and paralyzing in-fighting and factionalization, mired in depression and inability to compromise on anything.

That, too, is shameful and unacceptable.

III.

It has become a battle of ownership.  “Who is the proprietor of this tragedy?” has become a more important question than any other, it seems.  

The White House had issued “guidelines” on how to observe the anniversary, what we should be thinking about, and who.  The White House does not own 9/11.  The strutting Rudolph Giuliani, whose flagging popularity was raised above the drowning line when the planes hit the buildings does not own 9/11.  The intellectually impotent, double-talking political hack  Rumsfeld doesn’t own 9/11.  Nor do the cable networks, the real networks, the tabloids, Life Magazine or the guy next door who’s been to ground zero and the Pentagon just to gawk.  And neither do the reporters who covered though some of them who gave tenth anniversary interviews last year seemed to think so.

Everyone wants a piece of the action after the fact.

And that is the most shameful and unacceptable of all.


I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
©WJR 2012, 2011, 2009

1067 Coffee Break

1067 Coffee Break

Sandy has hung a giant poster of a Keurig machine in the window of his coffee shop on 59th St on the east side.

But when you go in for a cup, there’s no evidence of an actual machine.

On the wall, however, is another large poster, kind of like a menu.

It lists such exotic varieties as Kenyan Highlands, Sumatran Lake Tawar and Tully’s Breakfast Blend.  There must be 200 different kinds of coffee on the poster.  Gourmet stuff.

A customer asks Sandy for a cup of Kenyan AA Extra Bold.   Sandy goes the urn which has been sitting against the east wall of this place since the invention of boiled water and draws a cup.  “Let me know how you like it.”

Down the end of the counter, a woman:  “Hey, Sandy, I want to try the Newman’s Own Fair Trade Vanilla Caramel.”  Sandy ambles over to the same urn, draws a cup, puts it down before the customer and says “let me know how you like it.

So ask the obvious question:  How do you get two radically different kinds of coffee out of the same urn less than a minute apart.

Sandy says he doesn’t.  He gets the same stuff from the wholesaler Gillies in Brooklyn which has been doing bulk coffee for restaurants since two years after the wall urn was installed.  That’s what he serves, and that’s all he serves.

False advertising?

“Notice any prices on all those exotic things?  No.  There are none.  We don’t have any of them.  We just have our usual 59th St. Blend which is exactly the same as my brother Juan’s 86th St. Blend, but with a different label.  Gillies does that for you, if you want.  Same stuff. Different bag.”

“What about the Keurig machine poster in the window?”
“Oh, my guys know we can’t use those here.  They’re no good for the kind of volume we do.  In fact, they’re no good for anything over 30, 40 cups a day.  I’d be replacing the machine every ten minutes.”

“So all of this is just decoration and comeon?”

“Yeah.  So what?”

This is a pretty nose-in-the-air neighborhood.  It’s right off Park.  Sandy says “people here like the atmosphere.  It’s classy.  But this ain’t Starbucks.  Around here, ‘special reserve’ means the bag was torn when we got it.”

Air cured coffee.

Shrapnel:

--Do New York Taxi fares confuse you with all those add ons and special fees and geographic restrictions.  Get ready for more.  The fares and some of the fees went up the other day, but the drivers don’t have to start charging them until the 30th, which means some cabs will cost the old fares until then, but others won’t.

--What would Reagan say about Mark Wolf whom he appointed to the federal bench in Boston?  Judge Wolf has ruled that the government must pay for a sex change operation he says is needed by M. Koselik, born a man, living as a woman in an all male prison and serving a life sentence for murdering his wife in 1990.  Talk about your welfare queen!

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012

1066 The Orangeman

1066 The Orangeman

(STATE COLLEGE PA) --  Meet Roddy O’Malley, a cranky, funny hardworking guy who came over from Armagh, Northern Ireland before they started calling it a city, and settled here.  You can say it either AR-mah or ar-MAH still be right.

Anyway, Roddy and some brothers and a sister settle here in County Centre and do what some Irish do when they get to America, work hard and don’t bother about a driver license because before long it’ll get suspended anyway.

Roddy works long hours in small jobs and buys himself a palatial home.  It’s called a “manufactured home,” earlier known as a “mobile home,” and before that, a trailer.  A nice house on a rented patch in a mobile home park, earlier known as a trailer park.

Sometimes he has a brother or two in the house, other times -- which he prefers -- he’s by himself.

Walks to work across the road, walks home afterward.

Now comes a notice from the landlord:  “You have until July, 2013 to find new accommodations.  We have sold the property -- the neighborhood -- and are putting up a new slum.”

That’s in quotation marks but it’s not exact.

This is the first of two such neighborhood shutdowns in this vicinity within a week. You can add another 100 or so to Roddy’s 299 neighbors for the second park which is to become another overpriced student housing “complex.”

Roddy says “We knew it had to happen.  After all, a shopping mall goes in front, big, expensive houses on the back.  Looks nicer than all this...” as he waves his hand toward a bunch of trailers, some pristine, some ramshackle, most somewhere in between.

Won’t the town stop this?

“Nah... they get rid of us undesirables, put in some new stuff and the taxes go way up.  You know a town doesn’t have its tongue hanging out for more taxes and fewer of... us?”

So how will you get to work?  No answer.  It depends on where Roddy and the rest of the worthless, dirty, unsightly bums land.

Most of the folks in these communities are underemployed.  Some get food stamps.  Others could but don’t and won’t.

The county has a whole program of relocation services because over the last while, many of these neighborhoods have fallen to the wreckers.  The money spent on relocation services maybe would have bought the land and started an ownership co-op for the residents.

But there are those tax increases and those municipal hanging tongues.  

Roddy and his guest crack open a couple of Buds and watch the kids minding this community’s perpetual bike sale which has been going on in the front yard since Ignaz Schwinn was a boy.

“You make any money on the bike sales?”

“Nah, nothing much.  But people see the bikes here.  Bring us more all the time.  We got a nice Fourth of July party out of about a year’s worth.  And we’re going to get some new Christmas decorations this year. Well, we were but maybe not now.”

It’s a community.  People work together to keep it looking decent.  They watch out for one another.  They work in the jobs that the rest of us don’t want in places where we don’t really see them even when we look at them when they’re checking us out of Wal-mart or cooking up ribs-to-go at the takeout or rotating our tires.

Roddy is putting on a little weight and has lost yet another tooth.  But his back and his hands are still able.  He speaks three languages.  Really one and two halves.  But enough to get by back in Armagh and in Shanghai. He’s an avid reader.  He’s an avid storyteller.

He doesn’t want to have to tell the one that’ll uproot him in just a few months after decades of supervising the perpetual bike sale.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012
(Certified as all original by the Dustball Plagiarism Checker.)

1065 iVote and GoogleChoose

1065 iVote and GoogleChoose

First off, happy labor day to all my union brothers and sisters in Sagaftra, Nabet/CWA, the Wire Service Guild and the WGA.  And to members of IATSE, IBEW, and the Newspaper Guild. Solidarity forever!

Now, to the business at hand.

Time to download the latest pad and phone app, the most important one since Solitaire for Android or Backpage Cruiser for iPhone.  It’s the internet voting application, iVote for iPad and iPhone and GoogleChoose for the rest of us.

Since the latest mobile devices have front cams to go along with the back cams, all the states that are insisting on photo i.d.s can use live pictures and their facial recognition software to certify that you are not using a the name of a dead person stolen from a tombstone to vote twice or three times.  (Voter fraud is more widespread than you think!  Especially among poor and minority and illegal immigrant voters!  Can’t have enough security.)

And think of the money everyone will save because there need be no absentee or military duty ballots.  You can vote from your villa in Switzerland or from the battlefields of Pakistan, Iran and Syria at the same time as everyone else.

So you pass muster, the ballot opens up on the screen and there you are on the 6:35 to Seaford, doing your patriotic duty.  No worries about finding a parking space at the polling place.  No need to rub elbows with your moron neighbors.  And best of all, no lines.

Of course right thinking Americans will try to blast this out of the 4Gsphere.  Republicans fear big Democratic turnouts, you know -- something over 12 percent.  So they’ll cluck about community and the importance of making a special effort.  But they will lose -- both on the pollingPAD and in the various offices into which they are trying to lie their way.

But with the major players in the tech world behind this great leap forward, the Republicans have no chance of trashing it.  They’ll need help from like minded Democrats.
Voila! Instant end to inter party gridlock.  Everyone wins.  Except the jerk behind you on line who insists on violating the laws that sane states have: no electioneering within 50 feet of the entrance to a polling place.  Soon you’ll be rid of him, too.

Shrapnel:

--Why did the Republicans invite Clint Eastwood to speak?  Because John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston and the other four conservative tough-guy actors are dead.  And Fred Thompson is seen as soft on unions.

--We salute the recent push to buy local fruits, vegetables, meat and baked goods.  It helps build community, neighbors helping neighbors in a grand kaleidoscope of warmth and a spirit of cooperation.  And at no time worry about the work-downsized over the road trucker who kills his kidneys to bring in that icky outside stuff, even though he's somebody's local, too.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012