After reading “Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini,” I happened upon this extraordinary site:
Parody, Comedy, Satire, or Tragedy? You Decide!
Congrats to Coleen Monroe and her adventure of speaking over other ether, i.e., the radio waves.
When you go shopping, does your subculture encourage you to haggle over the price of the object you want to purchase?
Or do you walk into the market, see the price on display, and readily pay the posted amount without asking for a discount?
In my local subculture, I walk into a doctor’s office or hospital and see no posted prices for services to be rendered.
Instead, I hand the receptionist my medical insurance card(s) and after services are completed, I hand my credit card or cash to cover the cost of copay.
Days, weeks or months later, I receive a bill for the services.
The bill most often details the amount of money the doctor/hospital negotiated with the medical insurance company to cover the rendered services.
For instance, a recent surgery on my right wrist was listed as costing ~$9000 but the insurance company only paid about ~$900 and I owed a small copay ($250, if I remember correctly, that I paid before the surgery). [Followup office visits, usually $25 copay, were included for “free.”]
And now, I get to my mother in-law’s recent hospital stay that concluded in death.
Yesterday, a third-party payment company (which my wife jokingly calls an “ambulance chaser”) called to see if I planned to pursue payment from the nursing/assisted living home for the hospital bill.
Why would they do that?
Well, if my mother in-law’s insurance (Medicare plus supplemental) pays for the hospital bill, the negotiated amount will be substantially less than the hospital’s stated total (think “retail” (the hospital’s stated total) versus “wholesale” (the negotiated amount)).
However, if the third-party payment company (contracted by the hospital, if I understand their relationship to the medical community correctly, in this case) is giving given authorisation to pursue payment, they will try to extract the hospital’s stated total, taking for themselves, I’m sure, a flat fee or percentage, if successful in charging the nursing/assisted living company, where my mother in-law fell, for the full hospital bill.
In other words, should you find yourself having to pay for medical services, you will be charged the full amount. Therefore, be advised that you have plenty of room to negotiate a lower amount, easily down to the amount that insurance companies will pay; that is, if you have any haggling skills in you at all, unless you’re a retail shopper unaccustomed to bargaining for a deal.
In that case, ignore what you just read, and I’m going into the medical business, accepting only patients like you who are willing to pay retail.
By the way, this partially explains why doctors don’t perform as many free/pro bono services for the community as they used to, because it falsely gives medical insurance companies the right to claim that doctor services can be valued at zero.
More as it develops…
Are some phrases ever overused?
You know, “Don’t Give Up . . . Don’t Ever Give Up.” [or the cinema version, “Never give up, never surrender!“]
I’ll quote Jimmy Valvano’s speech a little more (from here):
“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.
“Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever. I thank you and God bless you all.”
During his speech the teleprompter stated that he had 30 seconds left, to which Valvano responded, “They got that screen up there flashing 30 seconds, like I care about that screen. I got tumors all over my body and I’m worried about some guy in the back going 30 seconds.” He died less than two months later.
In the past three days, the doctors thought my mother in-law had lost the use of her left side. The doctors thought my mother in-law had lost the ability to swallow. The doctors have said that, at 94, my mother in-law’s road to recovery from stroke is probably going to be too long, considering the increased chance of the next major stroke, to be worth the effort.
And yet, here she is, after her second time getting up to use the bedside commode with assistance, urinating about 600 mL, asking to get dressed for the day.
Sure, she’s tired. The only nutrition besides water she’s had since Wednesday evening is 6 ounces of apple juice.
In a little while, I’ll see if she wants something more substantive – apple sauce, yogurt or ice cream.
If she wants to make herself better, I’ll assist her, as will the rest of the family, as we have done in the past four years and three previous “spells” in 2007, 2008, and April of this year.
My mother in-law is a quiet fighter full of fortitude, one of the last members of the Greatest Generation – her two children by birth, a son and a daughter, becoming a physicist and rocket engineer, respectively, and her “adopted” daughter, or charge, marrying and supporting a man who became a gastroenterologist.
Because of the doctors’ recommendation to let my mother in-law go quietly into the night, we held back our hope that she’d recover this time.
Of course, she could have a major stroke or myocardial infarction at any time.
Life is uncertain so keep making your way through life with certainty, no matter whether you’re a member of the Greatest Generation or the Un-Generation.
Time for this caretaker to help his mother in-law gain strength.
Family first, galaxy second.
It began innocently enough.
Years ago, while our local government experimented by inoculating innocent people with viral material, the forerunner to BONS devised a plan to deliver an unknown substance into the not-yet-fully-grown members of a species.
But how…?
Then, during an emergency message session with early members of MORTIE, it hit us.
Halloween candy! Of course…
But when…?
Now.
The microorganisms and nanobots have been tested until our test subjects got blue in the face and could no longer breathe…but that’s not important right now.
This year, people across the world will stuff their faces with [non]sugar[free] substances that have been molded and coloured with Halloween themes.
Forthwith, this great nation shall finalise the species interconnection dream of a scientist some claim came from another world.
But as you know, what’s the difference between celestial bodies among friends?
No more relying on our main five senses.
Straight-to-nanobot communication will greatly increase our propaganda productivity.
The illusion of freedom of the individual will be complete.
All the old arguments about racial/genetic inequality won’t matter because we’ll all be equally connected.
What’s the point of mind reading if every one of your thoughts has been written by NBN, this new nanobotnetwork?
Those who’ve argued about the detrimental effects of the MSM (mainstream media) will happily embrace the NBN unknowingly.
In fact, most of you already use cars, mass transit, computers, and mobile phones without blinking an eye in revolt.
So eat your Halloween candy, breathe in the clouds of smoke machines, drink bottled/tap water/soda/beer/wine/liquor, bob for apples, drive/ride to parties, and join your families/friends in the holiday revelry.
In the future, don’t call it the contagion. Call this period in the transition of our species our destiny with technology.
The more candy you, your friends, and family eat, the more the microorganisms and nanobots become part of you, exhaled when you breathe out, passing into the atmosphere and speeding toward full saturation of Earth.
We need this global expansion of the laboratory experiment in order to start the next phase, seeing if atomic level transformation will allow us to modify our species for space travel.
With seven billion specimens as test subjects, we can pick and choose which genetic mutations ensure our highest survival rate while in-transit between celestial bodies.
Besides, the law of unintended consequences will surely create a few new industries we haven’t thought of yet.
Speaking of which, time to get out the Book of the Future and see which industries it tells us will make the out-of-work, frustrated street protestors happy again.
That’s the one thing we haven’t figured out how to solve with the microorganisms and nanobots we’re integrating into the worldwide populace – emotion control.
We can tell you what makes you happy. We can create enticements that make you want to seek happiness. You get to the point where you seek happiness without our prodding.
But we haven’t found a 100% unhappiness cure/antidote.
Our soothsayer on staff keeps trying to tell us that unhappiness is an important part of what makes us alive.
Who’m I to disagree with the soothsayer?
Thanks to John at Pizza Hut; Cheryl at Gibson’s BBQ; Shalyn, Connie, Sam, Darrel and others at Publix; Rave Motion Pictures; Brittany at Target; the staff at Brookdale Place.
Happy Halloween – the gobbling will get you if you don’t watch out! Oh, ho ho, ha ha, he he…
Stain with a stitched-up nose after volunteering to carry a dresser, smiling at Beauregard’s – happy early 21st!
A young woman attempting to test students and categorise them into standards without administering a standardised test.
Stephanie from Brookdale Place Dining Services delivering sandwiches while we finished moving in.
Morgan with blue eyes at the PetSmart checkout counter.
Tommy’s Pizza.
Saying goodbye to Leonard, Brenda, Rob, Kerri, Daryl and the rest of the HarborChase staff.
Kelly the herbalist, Jenn the rocket propulsion specialist, April the doctor of chiropractic.
Was that Todd Lumpkin visiting a relative at HarborChase?
Thanks to Robert, Matt and Kennedy at Two Men and a Truck; Tonya H at the Gondolier in Athens, TN.
Getting your husband a one-day pass on the local military base so he can drop you off and take your car for its scheduled maintenance.
Thanks to Mike at Bill Penney Toyota service dept. for taking care of our 2002 Camry with 190k+ miles.
To Mrs. Rozier, happy early 85th!
In one week, it’s possible to find out your company lost a government contract, you get hired by the winning company, move your mother from one assisted living community to another (arranging a lot of background logistics), attend dance class for two hours, take your mother to visit friends at her hometown, stroll through a street festival, attend a college football game, see friends at a ’70s sock hop for high school classes 1970-1980, eat lunch with in-laws and…what else? Wash clothes, buy cat food, prepare to teach a scrapbooking class…oh yeah, and think you lost an important refund check that causes you to say out loud in a carpark, “I can’t take it anymore…I’m going crazy!”
Frustrated, you return home, rummage through some old bills and find an envelope full of dividend checks and the all-important refund check.
All is good.
You can jump on facebook and read happy messages from your friends.
And then put clothes in the dryer / clothes in the washer, fold clothes, pet/feed the cats, and finally, after washing your face and brushing your teeth, crawl into bed with your husband in a safe and secure middle-class home.
Life is grand.
And then you get to do it all over again!
As I divide my personality into dozens in order to build scenes, to give depth and conflict and time for characters to grow, to learn about themselves while interacting socially, gracefully, awkwardly, the self walks Earth in limbo.
A woman brings her beautiful young child to an adult event and we are all transported back to moments in our early years, where every new sight and sound was a joy to behold, an uninhibited laugh to share with the whole universe.
One weekend, city streets are deserted for Oktoberfest.
The next weekend, Big Spring Jam attracts the crowd on autumnal equinox.
Couples sway in time with the music. Or not in time, enjoying the simple moment together in imperfect dissyncopation.
Helicopters hang in the air and practice firing maneuvers in the dark.
Missile batteries are charged and employed.
The value of life, the definition of culture, of maturity, of health – relativity is general, if not subject to objects faster than the speed of light dancing Viennese waltzes.
Kelly with the curly red hair.
Dan bagging groceries in the checkout line.
We…there’s that word, defining “us,” not them, together, teaching, learning…we work and play as one.
One people, loving, fighting, birthing, killing.
A part of our planet and our solar system, trillions of states of energy within trillions and trillions more, spinning, bouncing, colliding, combining.
Ageless.
We are the listeners, musical instruments and conductors of the narrated soundtrack of our living screenplay, written and played back in realtime, of now.
No rehearsal, no editing.
Watching musical acts, computer games and physical theories come and go like tides.
In the postdisclosure world, we tell you lies and then explain later how we lied to you, all of us just happy to understand we share this narrative while playacting, some “winning,” some “losing,” all of us living and dying, regardless of a sense of fair play.
Being cruel and kind to each other at the right time.
At the wrong time, too.
Like lovers who don’t know how to dance but are willing to try, rhythm not the issue, togetherness is.
If the paying gig stereotypes your behaviour, do you keep renewing the contract despite personal objections?
Do we reinforce the behaviours of our subculture or spend time putting down the behaviours within other belief systems?
I no longer keep track of the number of times I’ve transferred hypnotising microorganisms in a handshake or hug.
Wavelength synchronisation is such a natural state of existence for me, I stopped counting the people with whom I’ve synchronised and passed along the messages that my subculture wants broadcasted.
Body language.
Does insecurity or overconfidence drive Berlusconi to brag about his sexual encounters?
When despots are no longer in power, does the will of the people exert itself through insecurity or overconfidence?
In which subculture(s) do the people believe and act?
In the Middle East, “Turkey” and “Egypt” are forming a new alliance as if those two words account for every subculture within the two, nearby but distinct, geographic regions. [A side thought asks myself “geographic or geographical?”]
Israel and Palestine are very close to becoming legitimate neighbours, sharing the status of countries and, like many political entities, a brewing mistrust of each other’s true long-term intentions.
What makes one person set up a website like http://www.barrelhouseboys.com to promote a book about historic events and others to turn their lives into a future bestselling autobiography in the making?
Do you remember the first time you told your significant other “I love you”? [What a difference “I love you?” would have made in that sentence.]
= = =
These questions set up situations for colonists – on Mars, the Moon, an asteroid, and/or space schooner – to examine as they take root and spread their branches.
= = =
Meanwhile, back in the R&D lab, my mad scientists have created a monster from microbes found living in the frozen Arctic.
One of the scientists, angry about spoiled food he bought at the supermarket and couldn’t get a refund for, wants to let the microbes loose in the frozen foods department, hoping for devastating economic impact on the supermarket.
Another wants to launch a probe loaded with microbes into near-Earth orbit that’ll circle the planet for a few months and then safely parachute back so she can study the microbes’ ability to survive in space.
I’ve asked my supercomputer programmers to estimate the microbes’ mutation paths over the next thousand or so generations, feeding some of them (the microbes AND the programmers) common material on the Moon and some of them common material on parts of Mars.
= = =
My friends in the “drug lords” business ask me why they get such a bum rap. They provide protection and a living wage for their growers, processors and distributors. They’ve killed fewer people than the food manufacturers who’ve turned our species into obese diabetics. They prey on the weak, eliminating those who probably wouldn’t have contributed much to society, anyway. They should be rewarded for their efficient operations and beneficial economic impact. Instead, they’re punished worse than common criminals.
How do you argue with comments like that, especially when the drug lords have deposited large sums of money in anonymous offshore bank accounts to assure me of their legitimate accounting practices, insure my future retirement and ensure my loyalty?
Sure!
What are my seven billion friends for?
I don’t judge where you got or how you made your money, just that you give me enough money (or its purchasing power equivalent) to spread life in appropriate form outward from our home planet, Earth.
= = =
Manage your innersubcultural practices well and leave the intrasubcultural interfacing to the so-called professionals. Professionals you can fire. Amateurs, like rowdy family members, are harder to get rid of.
Remember, after the cat’s out of the bag, you have more room in your sack for goods and services to use in the next moment – the cat can fend for itself.
= = =
A friend showed me a line of adhesive bandages he’d invented that use body heat and motion to power a watch and changing colour display. He’s trying to convince his favourite comic book company’s executives to license their popular characters to appear as moving images on the bandages. In version 2.0, he hopes he can add sound, with characters speaking multiple languages, saying phrases like “You’re healing well, my friend” and “Your bravery makes you a hero in my book!”
How long before our bandages contain time-released microorganisms and medication, little bots and their tiny toolboxes repairing our bodies, enhancing our “natural” healing, removing scars and fighting off infections that our weak bodies can’t handle, detecting fatal conditions on the micro scale and alerting medical professionals before the fatal conditions become macroscopically pathological (or is that “pathologic”?).
The existence of this post betrays its existence.
At the same time, the Anarchy Party is planning to…well, wait, isn’t anarchy about the lack of organisation?
The list goes on.
Poking fun at ourselves with complicated symbology is the best form of innerspecies flattery.
Pretending to be enraged/mad or insane/mad or happy/dull or unsharpened/dull.
Or just plain mad/dull.
Rewriting Lysistrata and the Art of War for the seventeen-thousandth time.
Or perhaps happy/mad.
The pursuit of the pursuers of happiness – that’s the sole purpose of the Patriot Act.
“By God, man, don’t you know my version of the Great American Way is the only true path to happiness?”
“I don’t know, boss. I’m too busy cleaning your floor while earning less than minimum wage and getting no benefits in order to feed my kids who dream of anything better than what I’m doing, even if they simply become slaves to technology and monthly roaming rates like you, rather than my parents, who were slaves to the dry soil and fickle weather of my home country, which inspires many there to seek the easy life of drugs and gun running, which your country buys from us and supplies to us, respectively. But, hey, I’m nobody, right?”
To stay on my path, which includes sitting here and watching a cicada body trapped in a spider thread spin in the wind, is what it is, neither THE way nor just any way to live in happiness and peace.
A person my age is the most-recognised political executive of the Western Hemisphere.
To control a vast network of people hidden from view is like being in charge of the Apathy Party – no one cares to know the truth because it would shatter every dream or wish we have in saying we are in control of our personal destinies.
I overheard an elderly person make a toast with a glass of wine:
“Here’s to those who wish me well,
The rest of you can go to hell.”
Then they proceeded with a fashion show at the assisted living facility, including a lady who wore a hat made of pill bottles, much more inventive than any of the haute couture creations that pass for wearable art these days.
I’m in a wickedly vicious mood, wanting more out of life than what a passive, nonadventurous, monotonously monogamous, family-oriented, suburban existence offers.
Let the moralists cry over the sex crimes of the IMF chief and others who make good conformist news headlines.
Quite frankly, I am not them, although I live among them and support their subculture like any other.
At the same time, I suffer buyer’s remorse over putting my mother in-law in a “cruise ship” firmly planted in the middle of urban sprawl, wondering if she’ll get the intellectual stimulus she’s enjoyed at a small town pace her whole life.
And finally, not worried about readership, I return to the life I had, coordinating with my network of nonconforming individualists to herd the lives of most of the rest of the seven billion of us states of energy hanging out around this orb, none of you fully aware of what’s really going on, some of you getting a rare glimpse behind the illusions you were handed in your formative years.
Time to complete a few tasks for my mother in-law’s move and then meditate on nothing in particular – the best part of being inactive and uncaring in relation to the voices of extremists and whiners.
The start of a warm day. Retelling thoughts to myself of previous moments.
Noting the difference between a public persona and the private self, no matter how in/famous one may be (or imagine one is).
Allowing that some will control their selves with drugs – the so-called modern life – crafting states of energy like a microscopic logic board designer or chainsaw-wielding ice carver.
Some subcultures maintaining a separation of gender roles.
Others going with the flow, allowing people to assume they know best what they want to learn/do best.
Is monogamy innate or learned?
And if innate, is it gender-specific?
And if gender-specific, how does one gender teach the other the perceived importance of monogamy?
As our population continues to crowd in, how many other innate behaviours become commonplace in place of the formerly common behaviour of lifetime monogamy?
How do we signal zygotes to become antisocial and will RNA independence later wreak more havoc in one’s genetic tendencies?
Does the sound of a lawnmower influence the mating behaviour of cicadas?
What about an old B-17 flying overhead?
Will cosmic rays change space travelers into a distinct sub/super species due to changes in our copassengers: bacteria in our guts and pores?
The following was going to be part of this blog entry but I’ve decided to challenge myself to stop blogging about politics as a unique category of our human behaviour…
[Someone told me that if my culture eliminated Glenn Beck it would also eliminate the usefulness of a person named Jon Stewart because of the duality present in our cultural subconsciousness.
What if I don’t believe in duality?
Could Tina Fey then complete against Sarah Palin for mass media supremacy and have more real nonviolent power than anyone in the U.S. government?]
Seven billion people, no matter how unimportant or unempowered they may feel, lead this planet but rarely do we act like wise leaders.
We play at competing against each other while ignoring our effects on the states of energy around us that aren’t our species.
Is this a 100% redeemable quality?
Can I lose myself in the fun of the moment and yet be aware of my effect on the environment and the future?
On the dance floor last night, looking into the beautiful eyes of a stranger, having a brief conversation, and then changing dance partners, I felt the concept of opportunity costs and sunk costs as it pertained to social relationships rather than business management.
Soon, I will celebrate 25 years of marriage, my first and only marriage. According to statistics, less than 50% of my local culture has households with two people being married as the single head of household.
How those statistics account for widows/widowers, young people buying a first house or renting a first flat before finding a marriage partner, or others who believe in marriage but are unmarried at the time of the statistics-taking, I don’t know.
The statistics do not imply, and we cannot infer from the statistics, that monogamy is no longer a preferred innate trait of our species.
Marriage and monogamy are not synonymous. Neither is marriage and compatibility or monogamy and harmony.
For the most part, our species reproduces by sexual intercourse between the male and the female and subsequent fertilisation of egg by sperm.
We can prevent the fertilisation through contraception and we can fertilise eggs without sexual intercourse.
If contraception and artificial insemination were universally available for subcultures that accept these modern conveniences (and gently encouraged for subcultures that don’t), would we in those subcultures naturally breed monogamy out of our genetic trait set?
If we removed headlines that say overpopulation is an inevitable fatal train wreck for our species and started noting that we had solved the problem of overpopulation and are now managing resources for our population, would our bodies’ reproduction systems adjust accordingly and stop producing antisocial types?
In other words, when we see natural changes of other species in population sizes that peak and shrink, can we honestly tell ourselves we’re just as susceptible to these changes, including nonmonogamous relationships?
My thoughts are clouded by a stressful family situation right now so I can’t be sure if I’m looking at today’s blog as if I’m staring at us outside our species and/or applying [non]relativistic moral/ethical constraints on my suppositions.
We talk about the birth and death of civilisations and cultures as if we’re not the same as any other social species on this planet.
Take away the labels “civilisation” and “culture” and look at simple population growth statistics.
Certainly, as a population grows, the social interconnections grow and thus the population’s interface with the surrounding environment grows more complicated.
The birds in these woods are fattening up on cicadas this year. Next year, assuming no major environmental disasters in the next nine months, we should have a bumper crop of birds born of this year’s wellfed avian breeders.
Eliminating all our innerspecies squawking and carrying on, I observe our change in population growth.
In previous overpopulation studies I’ve read, not knowing the mindset or intent of the researchers or the sponsors/producers of the studies, a species that contains a supermajority of paired-off male/female breeders will start producing offspring that do not exhibit male/female breeding preferences.
Of course, we say we’re the only species that can objectively observe the behaviour of other species (we are not the only organisms that can control the behaviour of other organisms), which makes us believe we may be similar to other species but we have a great advantage over them because we don’t have to just react to environmental changes.
In fact, we can create our own environmental success or destruction stories!
If marriage, as a cultural example of monogamous behaviour, is no longer necessary for species survival in our current global civilisation’s modern condition, is it just a temporary reaction to our population growth or a permanent change in our genetic makeup?
Concluding this train of thought, if a sudden environmental megadisaster reduced our population dramatically, how would we view marriage and/or monogamy?
And finally, as a test of my mental state, has this blog entry indicated a family crisis fogged my usual rational yet humourous reasoning?
There…is…a…slow…Internet…connection…today.
While listening to a press conference on NASA TV and estimating how much of the engineering analysis is boiled down for lay reporters, I wonder how soon one of the talking heads (the one in the center) will have a heart attack, his earlobes clearly pinched on the bottom.
My hat’s off to all the personnel involved in the development, politicking, deployment and management of the US Space Shuttle and ISS program from the 1960s to today and beyond.
Meanwhile, I’m amazed at the advancement of medical and astronomical knowledge.
Time to meditate.
treetrunkdings 