My father had shingles recently. It was very painful, so he recommended that I (and everyone else who had had chicken pox) get the vaccine.
I'm not going to recount the hassles that I underwent, except to mention that I got advice from both my private insurer and Medicare that was contradictory. I finally got the shot, which I paid for myself and then struggled to get reimbursed. This was two years ago, and provided a foretaste of what Obamacare has in store for us.
Now I am trying to get an infusion of Reclast, having found out that women with osteoporosis in their hips, which I have, should either get preventive treatment or start picking out something becoming to wear at the funeral. Because, apparently if you break your hip all that remains is to choose a casket and line up pallbearers.
The local hospital offers these infusions, but refuses to administer them except under a maze of stringent rules and restrictions which make it almost impossible to actually get the drug.
Medicare can't decide whether Part B or Part D covers these infusions, and doesn't care, preferring that patients break their hips and die so they can streamline their patient lists.
I would like to fight this monster, but it has so many tentacles that I don't know which one to tackle first.
If you lined me and my cousins up in a row, we would look like this: 1110111. The round shape in the middle is me. at 5'2" and 116 lbs, I was the fat kid. Since that day, I have expanded my franchise, so to speak.
When I was a kid, I looked like a craft project made of pipe cleaners. Then at the age of about 11, just when you need a boost, I developed a little round stomach. I could guess what was in store for me by looking at mother and bubbe, both of whom were rotund and getting rotunder. I believed and did not want to believe that rotundity was inevitable. Everyone in the family helpfully suggested that I would look really great if I lost (choose one:) 5/10/15 lbs.
I fought the good fight for a long time. Diet, exercise. Exercise, diet. No fat, no carbs, walk fast, walk slow, lift heavy/light weights two/four days a week. Still, the numbers on the scale kept inching up.
I am not alone. Everyone I know is on a diet. And all these dieters are agreed that despite really cutting calories they are really not hungry.
For me, however, I find that when I am on a diet I really am hungry. Very hungry. Waking up in the middle of the night with gnawing hunger pains type hungry. Starving. Every day on a diet is a potential Yom Kippur.
Now here's the tough part. I could totally forget about diets and be comfortable just as I am, except that I don't stay as I am without watching what I eat, I just get fatter.
We have been having some really nasty weather. Hot, humid, sultry, with an unhelpful wind that doesn't blow anything good, but supposedly foreshadows a storm. It's a wind that so far as I know doesn't have a name, like a mistral or Santa Ana, but should.
My plants look like they've died of heat exhaustion, and no wonder. I can almost see them panting for water. I'm thirsty myself.
I wish the storm would come, but when it does, we will probably have another power outage. We had one earlier in the week, and were just comfortably settled down with our candles and flashlights to do a bit of grumbling when the power came back on.
Nowhere in the controversy concerning Helen Thomas is her ethnic origin mentioned. She's not Welsh, like Dylan Thomas, she's not Jewish, like Michael Tilson Thomas.
Ironically for that administration, the crew seemed to have concerns about making sure such job offers were legal. A handwritten note penned in the corner of the memo notes, “Malek: This must be fully approved by AG before any action is taken.”
There are red-light enforcement cameras at 47 intersections in Delaware, and the state is adding 10 more cameras this spring. The first cameras were installed in 2001 in Wilmington. In 2009, the cameras caught about 61,000 violations and generated more than $5 million in fines. The number of violations has dropped in recent years, and DelDOT says the cameras have led to a 15 percent decrease in accidents at intersections covered by red-light cameras.
I don't believe accidents have been reduced. That's bull****. This is nothing more than a scheme to shake money out of the pockets of Delaware residents. If I had wanted to pay more in unreasonable charges I could have stayed in New Jersey.
What I want to know is, what's the total take, and how do they split their ill-gotten revenues with the company that provides the cameras? I hear it's fifty-fifty. Oh yes, and is this "provider" a local business, or foreign?
And can citizens plead not guilty and have their cases heard, and possibly reversed, in court? Or is there an automatic presumption of guilt?
[T]here is a lot of noise of how this raid was especially outrageous since a "Nobel laureate" and a "famous writer "were travelling on one of the ships; how exactly should that give a ship immunity from boarding?
Simple: famous people are much, much more important than clods like you and me. Famous people should be treated much, much better.
Folks, what the hell is so much less delicate about the Gulf of Mexico than ANWR, where we could drill much more safely than in the Gulf? Nothing—that’s what.
Liberals believe certain places or objects which must be venerated in defiance of reason. Muslims venerate Mecca, liberals venerate ANWR. Muslims cannot tolerate pork, liberals cannot tolerate Guantanamo. I could go on, but you get the idea. None of this makes any sense, or is intended to do so.
If you violate the Muslim creed you are an infidel. If you violate the liberal creed, you are a fascist.
Every Memorial Day, black men and women aviators fly in formation over the grave of Bessie Coleman, dropping bouquests of flowers on the grave of the first black woman ever to earn a pilot's license.
Coleman was born in 1892, the twelfth of thirteen children. The family earned their living picking cotton. It was an impoverished existence, and as her siblings reached adulthood two of them left for Chicago, where opportunities were better.
Bessie Coleman followed when she grew up. She trained as a manicurist and got a job at the White Sox Barber Shop, situated on the Stroll,an 8-block section of State Street where black-owned businesses flourished. It was there that she encountered Robert S. Abbott, the editor of the Chicago Defender, a prominent newspaper read widely in the black community.
She developed a desire to become a pilot, inspired by stories of the derring-do of the Wolrd War I flying aces. This was an unthinkable ambition for a black woman at the time. Yet Abbott saw something of the potential in Bessie, and offered her financial help to attend a French flying school. He guessed that she would make great copy, and he was right. On her return from France with her pilot's license, she was greeted by representatives of both the black and white press.
Beautiful and flamboyant, she became an overnight sensation. Barnstorming and stunt flying were all the rage at the time, and no one's exploits were more daring than Coleman's. She became a hero to the black community, who dubbed her "Queen Bess." Her ambition was to start a flight school for black people, to encourage them to follow careers in the promising new field of aviation.
Her career was fraught with peril: many of the barnstorming stunts were daring and dangerous. Coleman also suffered from a lack of sufficient funds and therfore often relied on decrepit and unsafe planes. In California, on February 4, 1922, a plane she was piloting stalled at 300 feet, smashing into the ground. She suffered multiple injuries which landed her in the hospital for three months.
Undaunted, she relocated to Texas and resumed her barnstorming career. She had previously performed in the North, to appreciative white audiences. She now visited venues mainly in the South, where African Americans were her most enthusiastic fans. They opened their homes and hearts to her. Colemans' beauty, skill and daring inspired her African American fans.
According to her niece, "The airplanes she was flying, they were just old things....They weeren't worth a darn." The lack of adequate funds did not stop her, however, from planning a flight in Jacksonville, FL. in a ramshackle plane.
Coleman was planning a parachute stunt, so she went up to scout the territory with her mechanic, William Wills, at the controls. Wills lost control of the plane, and Coleman, with neither seat belt nor parachute, was hurled to her death. She was 34 years old.
Her influence, however, lived on. Within a few years William Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, both to honor her and to inspire other African Americans to follow her example. Her dream lived on, and still lives on to this day.
In 1995, a stamp honoring her was issued by the United States Postal Service.
I looked up the blasted place on Wikipedia because my grandmother's ancestral home seemed to have been moved from Russia to Belarus while staying in the same place. Apparently Pinsk was conveniently located for purposes of invasion, subjugation, and wholesale pogroms. Consequently, bubbe was fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish.
Bubbe actually had nothing bad to say about the place. Mostly she talked about her memories of rowing down the river. She never mentioned her parents or siblings, possibly because they were executed by the Nazis.
In 1939, the population of Pinsk totaled 30,000, of whom 27,000 were Jews. Most of them were killed in late October 1942, after their deportation by the Nazis from the Pinsk ghetto.[3] Ten thousand were murdered in one day.
One detail of the Wikipedia entry interested me because bubbe had talked about it. She had an expression, in Khmelnytsky's tsiten, meaning a long, long time ago, not within living memory. She might have been referring to the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, so remote were the events being mentioned.
Today I learned that this was a reference to Bohdan Khmelnytsky:
During the Cossack rebellion of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1640), it was captured by Cossacks who carried out a pogrom against the city's Jewish population; the Poles retook it by assault, killing 24,000 persons and burning 5,000 houses. Eight years later the town was burned by the Russians.
Not a nice place to be a Jew. I won't be visiting.
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