Post-election blues

For some reason, the outcome of Tuesday’s elections makes me think of the most recent Viagra commercial being run by Pfizer.

Because there are a whole lotta new officeholders who are going to want to show who’s got the biggest appendage. And I expect that many of them will require some chemical enhancement.

I found this commercial bizarre—advertising the treatment for a middle-aged man’s dysfunction by showing nothing but a 20-something blonde bimbo with a British accent.

At first I thought it must be a parody, because…well, because it’s even dorkier than the Cialis twin bathtubs in the sunset. 

But then I realized that the target market for Vitamin V is precisely the middle-aged male looking to recapture his (possibly imagined) youth by disporting with endless bimbos. So I suppose never actually showing a, you know, guy with some years on him opens up everyone’s imagination.

I pretty much lost it toward the end, though, with this shot:

Nothing soft-sell about this pitch, is there?

Anyhow, I’m sure that all the newly-elected pols up and down the scale have health insurance that will cover all the little blue pills they could want. Since we’re talking the opposite of birth control.

Don't drive like my brother

Like millions of NPR listeners, I was truly saddened to hear of the death Monday of Tom Magliozzi, half of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers of Car Talk. He was 77.

How do I explain Car Talk to those who’ve never heard it? It’s kind of a call-in radio show, mostly about motor vehicles (sort of), but laced with a lot of commentary on life and massive infusions of laughter. Tom and his brother Ray had been doing a version of the program from WBUR in Boston since 1977.

I’ve been listening to it since the 80s, and I don’t like call-in programming and I don’t care much about cars. But I loved Tom and Ray, who had laughs that would cure the common cold.

You can read about the Magliozzis and Car Talk in several stories on NPR. What’s interesting about them is the comments: This is the first time I think I’ve ever seen any online content, no matter how seemingly innocuous (dog reunited with family, flowers planted along a highway, man emerges from 40-year coma) that didn’t engender at least 15% of mean, political or just plain crack-brained contributions by those with Internet access and a keyboard.

But take a look at any of NPR’s stories, and every single comment (as of time of writing) is about how much Tom (and Ray) brightened our weekend days, year after year. People proudly proclaim that they don’t drive and don’t give a toss about cars, but they tuned in regularly because Tom and Ray just sucked us in to a better world, where there was a solution to your problems—mostly car-related—even if it might involve a Viking funeral. Even commenters who regularly spew ideological bile and political vituperation on those innocuous stories here post nothing but sadness at Tom’s loss and happy memories of his broadcasts.

If you never heard them, I’m truly sorry for you. Go stream some of the shows—although the best way to listen to Click and Clack is to be driving around on your weekend errands, laughing and slapping your steering column like a demented seal, and be forced to park somewhere so you can hear out the program to the very end of their wacky credits.

Car Talk stopped original broadcasts two years ago, but NPR has been airing older shows since then. Because it’s not really so much about calling in to sort your 1998 Nissan Sentra’s whoop-whoop-whoop noise it makes when you turn left at 35 MPH as it is listening to these guys…well, just listening to them.

In such an unexpected way, the Magliozzis spread joy, with the pretext of diagnosing and solving mechanical problems. There’s so little of that around these days, so I’m glad that they’ve been part of my weekends for nearly 30 years.

Remember the tiggies

Apparently there are health and safety issues inherent when you’re building bonfires to celebrate the suppression of religious minorities, as people will be doing all over the UK tonight.

(Oh, alright—officially Guy Fawkes Day is about the foiling of a plot to blow up Parliament in 1605. And the plotters were Roman Catholic. Which gave Church of England Protestants reasons to stick it to Catholics in particular and everyone who wasn’t CoE in general for centuries to come. This evolved into the Bonfire Night activities of today.)

So, yes—check under your pile of wood for any cute little critters that might be inadvertently char-be-cued in your death-to-Catholics ritual.

I expect the danger to humans increases with the consumption of alcohol, as well. But the health and safety folks probably reckon that the lager lout crowd won’t be reading caution posters, so they don’t bother with them.

Getting out the vote

It's election Tuesday. As with all such days, it's a major relief to know that holiday ads will replace the political commercials on TV. 

Case in point: They’ve been running a lot of anti-Prop 45 commercials on TV. (Proposition 45 is an initiative requiring that insurance companies get approval from a state commissioner before they make any changes affecting the rates they charge for healthcare coverage.) Their scare campaign revolves around someone dressed up as a physician or nurse intoning that letting a politician mess with healthcare decisions that should be made only by the doctor and the patient is a very, very bad, horrible, terrible thing.

I’ve no doubt that the anti-Prop 45 campaign can afford these ads; it’s extremely well-funded. Its backers include: the California Hospital Association, California Medical Association, and healthcare insurance giants like Anthem, Kaiser, Blue Shield and United HealthCare. That latter group alone have more money than God, in case you’re at all unclear about the matter. As of a couple of weeks ago, they’d spent more than $57M to defeat the measure.

(Of course, you could sweep out $57M from between the sofa cushions in the executive lounge of any of those insurance companies. But still.)

What I find interesting about this “Healthcare decisions should be made by doctors, nurses and patients—not dictated by one Sacramento politician” rhetoric is the foundational logic that this is currently the case. You know, that medical decisions are made only by the physician and patient.

When, in practice, this is a complete crock of moosemilk.

Under the prevailing payment model, healthcare decisions are in fact made by insurance carriers. Both directly—in terms of what they deem is appropriate (meaning “what we’ll reimburse you for”) treatment, as well as indirectly because providers are driven to see three or four patients per hour under terms of their insurance contracts, so they don’t have the time to properly understand patients’ needs, histories or ailments in order to make truly informed decisions.

You know—just the fact that Anthem is coughing up the kale is pretty much all I need to know about the merits of the anti-45 argument. We’ll see how successful they are at gulling the electorate.

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Also on an electoral theme, I noticed these signs for Cupertino City Council candidates.

Cupertino, as you may know, is the home of Apple. That’s where their physical headquarters are, I mean; I think most of their revenues are filtered through offices in other countries, so that their tax liability here in the US, California and Cupertino is considerably smaller that you’d have expected from their sales figures.

Anyhow—here’s the sign I found particularly interesting:

Andy clearly wants the electorate to think of him by his all-American first name, not his surname. In a city where the electorate is 44.4% Asian, I just wonder what’s up with that, because it obviously doesn't bother either Paul or Sun.

Gratitude Monday: Books by the bed

By way of illustrating what I’m grateful for today, I give you…everything I need for snuggling in for the night:

The pile of books on the left comprises several I own, including my two most recent acquisitions, on the British Commandos of World War II. Look, sometimes a bit of light garroting and timed explosives is just what a girl needs before dropping off to sleep.

The stack on the right is books I currently have checked out from the various library systems here in the Valley They Call Silicon. Depending on the subject matter, I plough through two to five per week. This bunch includes a couple of Judge Dee mysteries (which I don’t particularly recommend), the new biography of Elsa Schiaparelli (ditto), several histories (World War I, and the Gurkhas), a collection of Dick Cavett's columns for the NY Times and a deconstruction of wit. 

Many of the books I read have been recommended by friends. About a third of the present occupants of the surface came to me that way. Several—permanent fixtures beside my bed—are gifts, to which I return often by way of connecting with the friend who gave them.

Then there are scraps of paper I use for jotting down pithy phrases or reminders of things I need to do. (Actually, they’re from the Santa Clara County Library; they’re what mark the books they’re holding for pick-up. Each one is a third of letter-sized paper, and they’re only written on one side. Perfect for scratch paper, as my thoughts are not generally Dostoyevskian in length. Or, now that I think of it, in depth. Um.)

And the bookmarks—almost all of which are also from friends, although I noticed one from Hatchard’s Booksellers, marking their 200^th anniversary.

There was a time when I didn’t actually need no stinkin’ bookmark; I could remember where I’d left off when I returned to a book. But that time, alas, is long past.

Anyway—I’m grateful for the pleasure that having stacks of books right by my bed gives me, and for the connections they continually weave with my friends.