StatisticalOutlier

I'm talking about the serendipity of flipping to random pages.

I'd completely forgotten about the transparencies! Those were cool. I remember being bored one summer and poking around the encyclopedias and I ran across a chart of the manual alphabet for sign language. I learned to fingerspell that day, and can still run through the alphabet with only a couple of mis-steps. I also remember doing a book report on the badger. I wanted to illustrate it but I can't draw for shit, so I tried to trace the photo that was in the World Book, using my brother's G.I. Joe tracing machine (a piece of plastic with a light bulb behind it). It was in black and white so it was hard to see it through the paper, so I decided to up the contrast by using a white crayola to lighten up the badger, but that didn't really help, so I used a pencil to darken the background, and that didn't really help. Fortunately, I stopped before I got to the marks-a-lot. I don't know what ever happened to that set, but if a new owner got it, I'd love to know what they thought when they got to the entry on the badger, with that really messed-up photo. I still think browsing a set of encyclopedias is far superior to randomly surfing the internet. If nothing else, there's no algorithm guiding it.

Back in the 1960s, did anybody else have a gigantic Merriam Webster dictionary that sat on a tilted stand, probably open to this page? When we moved into the motorhome, a red Collegiate American Heritage dictionary made the cut, and we still have it. I like being able to look up a word without anybody else knowing.

Well, now that you've pushed me to my baser instincts, I'll have to watch the whole movie. Because I'm thinking, "Aren't diamonds kind of sharp?" Good to know! People really should see that helicopter sequence, if nothing else. Also, I went to the TCM page for the movie, and here's the photo they have: I love it! Redford's sticking his tongue out just like I do when I'm concentrating.

I'm sure YeahNo will be along to answer, but someone said it might have to do with insurance reimbursement. Also, this needed to be an open-ended stay, and that can be tricky to arrange if you're not in a hotel, where the rooms are more or less fungible and rooms are assigned upon arrival. But really, the only reason I'm posting is because this is an opportunity to say that I'm hoping I can go my entire life without supporting an industry that has ruined neighborhoods, driven up rent for people who want to actually live in a given town, and made neighbors of short-term rentals miserable. Not to mention that lots of them are illegal.

When you first described something an Advantage plan does as "government waste at its best," I was going to point out that Advantage plans aren't Medicare--they're a privately administered managed-care alternative to traditional Medicare. But then I thought, "Who knows, maybe the government meddles into Advantage plans when it comes to formatting their EOBs." Seemed unlikely, because the whole idea behind Advantage plans is having them, instead of the government, take care of all of their members' healthcare needs and claims. But it turns out that not all Advantage plan EOBs are the same, and you muse that the outcome could be based on the provider/company. If that's the case, then obviously it's not the government making them format their EOBs in the way you describe and object to.

Oh, how times have changed since the olden (and dare I say golden) days when parents dropped their kids off at the show, and left them there all day Saturday, in a theater jam packed with nothing but kids.

I couldn't care less about blood in my urine. It's the constant urgency that makes my life miserable, and antibiotics stop that immediately. They really are a wonder drug sometimes.

Okay, this isn't on TCM but in the past we've discussed movies that are shot in New York City, and I just have to bring up The Hot Rock, starring Robert Redford and George Segal. It's on this over-the-air channel called Movies! I'm not really watching it--it's on in the background. But I stopped and paid attention to a scene where they're in a helicopter in NYC. It starts with them going under the bridges on the East River, and circling around the lower tip of Manhattan, and then over Lower Manhattan and around the World Trade Center as it's under construction, almost finished. It looks like they filmed the one helicopter from another helicopter, and at one point they were were catty-corner from each other at the level of an unfinished floor of the WTC--you can see the helicopter in the movie through the support beams or girders or whatever on the unfinished floor. And there are other shots of the streets below, including what looks like the entrance/exit to the Holland Tunnel, and it isn't gridlocked. It's really something else, and would be a nice companion to the justifiably famous NYC car chase scene in Side Street. I actually wondered if they were having some sort of theme, because the movie before The Hot Rock was An Unmarried Woman, a very NYC-y movie. But before that was Palm Springs Weekend, and after Hot Rock is The Incredible Mr. Limpet, so probably just a coincidence. 😀

I buy the Spring Valley one at Walmart. Good luck finding it--it's hard to find because it's not in the alphabetized section, and they have a subsection of "women's health" or somesuch. The "serving size" on the label is 3 capsules. I think I was taking 2 or 3 a day at the beginning (a couple of years ago) and since then my "maintenance" amount is one per day. If I feel a twinge, I'll take three or four at once, and do that a couple of times a day for a couple of days. I've done that two or three times over the last few years, and haven't had a bladder infection since I started doing this. Of course the twinge might not have been a sign of a bladder infection at all, in which case the D-Mannose didn't do anything. But as far as I know it doesn't hurt anything, so I'll keep up this regimen. I'll do just about anything to avoid a bladder infection.

I'm the type who goes to the doctor only when there's a bone sticking out, and even I seek professional care as soon as I have any indication of a bladder infection. There's no reason whatsoever to suffer when antibiotics will stop the symptoms almost instantly. I had three in one year, after only two or three in the course of my entire lifetime before that. I got antibiotics for each one, and haven't had a recurrence after that third one. They say menopause can trigger bladder infections--maybe that's what happened. I did start taking D-Mannose, and I'm a big fan of the placebo effect. I'm a big fan of data, too, and I'm normally the type to stop taking something to see if anything changes, but the symptoms of a bladder infection are so damn miserable that I'm not going to risk it. Also, if you have a relationship with a regular doctor, it's possible you can just call and say you have a bladder infection and they'll send in a prescription for antibiotics without making you come in. If not, the doc-in-a-box at CVS or whatever can handle bladder infections.

I was an early adopter--almost 50 years ago, the Los Angeles Times published my letter to the editor calling for abolishing the electoral college.

Also, I was at a theater on the north side of Chicago a few years ago, and the guy at the box office said I was the only one who'd bought a ticket for the show I was going to. I probably said something like, "Works for me!" and he said he once had a woman get a refund because when the movie started, she was the only one in the theater. I appreciated his disapproving tone. The thing is, she can obviously handle the mean streets of Chicago, but is apparently too scared to be the only person in a theater. If I were a scaredy-cat, I think I might prefer to be in there alone than to have someone hanging out behind me.

I've found that in some areas the second showing tends to be less populated than the first, depending on the crowd the theater caters to. I see mostly foreign movies and art films, and my fellow geezers like that first weekday showing. In August of 2020, when some movie theaters were opening back up, I started keeping track of how many other people there are in the theater at every movie I see. Since then, I've had 67 private screenings. And 42 where there was only one other person in the theater. To me, there's just no substitute for the immersion of seeing a movie on the big screen.

They make tablets to put in the air conditioner pan. At one place I lived, a neighbor would set the tablet on the end of a yardstick and insert it through some opening (maybe a vent?) and drop it into the pan. I had an access door for mine so I could just reach in there and drop it. This place had a funky arrangement, where the upstairs and downstairs units' air conditioners were above each unit's closet, and the drains were connected. So when they came to blow mine out with compressed air one time, it blew through the line into my downstairs neighbor's pan, which was full of water that blew all over everything in her closet. I warned them that I thought they might be connected, but they ignored me. My sideways neighbor's bathroom sink drained into my bathroom sink drain, which I found out only because it developed a hole so I stopped using it, but water would still come out. I don't know what my neighbor was doing in that sink, but when the plumber came he complained about how bad it smelled. When a plumber complains about the smell, you know it's bad.