The octopus dines

My best friend was ordered a couple months ago by Senior Care Plus, a Medicare advantage company, to switch primary-care doctors, from the woman who has treated her for 17 years, to anybody working for the Renown congolmerate that is expanding its take-over of Northern Nevada.

Senior Care Plus is owned by Hometown Health Plan, which is owned by Renown.

I ended up with Renown Medical Group without a deliberate decision some years ago and I like the man who is my primary care physician.

BF and the doctor filled out forms this month to protest.

I don't have high hopes.

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A touch of the Twilight Zone

I woke up this morning to see my Toshiba flat-screen TV exhibiting a stylized strip of animation: people doing wintery things outside such as ice skating with a panorama of mountains in the background.

Except I turned the TV off at bedtime last night.  Also the DirecTV box.

A couple of hours later this morning, I turned just the TV on and the animation returned.

Later, I turned off DirecTV and left the TV running. Got the standard "no video signal" message.

Not WTF, just what the hell?

Cue the theme music again.

I left a friend's house around 5 p.m. today, when it was dark enough to require headlights. The right-side headlight refused to lift its cover.

It did that in October, but started working again in November as mysteriously as it quit. I haven't driven after dark for a month.

Got home, parked, turned headlight(s) off. Turned them back on.

They both came on properly.

Not WTH ... all the way to WTF.

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Happy birthday

Happy natal day, Nana, 125 years ago.

You are missed, great lady, 45 years after you went wherever you went. I hope you arrived where you wanted to be.

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Waste of bytes

The people who post "witty" comments on GoComics and other comics sites are totally unnecessary in this world.

They're the opposite of witty. Fatuous?

As commanded by People Who Write Letters to the Editor: Think about it.

(PWWLE are also totally unnecessary.)

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Get this man a clue

Comment deep in a story about sexual harassment in the workplace (paraphrasing): There's no harassment here because my employees are treated like family. This is a family business.

Sorry, jerk. Employees should be treated like employees: equal pay for equal work, equal respect ... and all that.

Nobody treats family as equals. The patriarch knows best.

I pity his employees.

And I apologize for not clipping the story so I could quote him by name. I was too stunned at the thought of my bosses treating me like a daughter instead of a professional.

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Great job

Watching the clusterfuck that is the Trump Administration brought to mind a piece of wisdom from my first mentor in the newspaper business.

Nobody hires anyone who is smarter than himself.

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Inhale this

The next vital breakthrough in drugs: Inhalers and nebulizers for COPD that don't cause the patient's hands to shake for hours afterward.

It is amusing to watch the patient try to do anything ... write, eat, pick up objects.

But thousands of people would be deeply grateful.

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Police no more

The commericals for the CBS TV show, "S.W.A.T.", are disturbing.

Those are not fictional police officers. Those are commandos, with military weapons and tactics.  Attacking citizens.

On main-stream-TV.

Another step in the (I hope) undirected, unplanned transformation of the USA from a democracy to Trump's autocratic despotism.

This country has been at war for so long, in so many places, that combat's accepted as a legitimate way to enforce laws.

It's not too early to say: The terrorists are winning.

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Cracking the Butts ... er, Nuts

I was successfully inoculated Saturday night against a Christmas-season disease: “The Nutcracker,” which I have avoided for decades. 

It’s not Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s fault that his ballet, which premiered in 1892, mutated into a Holiday Favorite. 

Reno’s Brüka Theater targets overly-serious Classical Music aficionados with “Buttcracker.” 

The eighth of that name is short on grand jetés but rich in talent as the festivities swirl through a laugh-out-loud mixture of “Back to the Future,” “The Misfits,” and the Sugar Plum Fairy envisioned as a fabulous Reno showgirl.

##

Fatherhood.gov has a propaganda piece on TV that shows a father and daughter singing and enjoying a tea party. Excellent, except for the USPS carrier peeking through the window.

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