Category Archives: Society

Used Food

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Pugnaciously parsimonious.

Regular readers will remember that Rufus says I am a “c-h-e-a-p   b-a-h-s-t-i-d” so I also think long about what most things cost before buying.

I’m not the first in the fambly to have that trait. My great grandfather was a Quaker farmer who never threw anything away which largely explains the size of the moving van we needed when we moved to North Puffin. I really believe in reduce, reuse, and eventually, recycle.

My mom coined the term “used food” when the grocery store would mark down the day old meats in the refrigerated meat case. We’ve expanded its meaning.

Dented CanI see an upside down cake in my future.

SWMBO and I keep our own grocery bills as low as we can by shopping the used food store for dented cans. That emporium is a liquidation center that clears out “zoins” — the pallets of rejected non-perishables from grocery stores. My mom always worried that the dent could damage the can coating and at the very least change the taste of the contents. We’ve never had a problem.

There are some rules to follow with used food.

Bulging or bloated can?
What? Are you nuts? Cans bulge and bloat when bacteria outgasses.

Push on the top and bottom of the can
If the lid moves or pops, throw it out.

Rusted cans
Rust weakens the floor of Vermont cars and lets bad stuff in. Does the same for cans, doncha know.

The can sprays when you open it
A can ought not spray or explode when you open the lid with a can opener or screwdriver or Swiss Army knife. Safe dented cans will open the same as non dented cans.

Foods that have abnormal odors should not be eaten.

Lots of new laws went into effect in Vermont this summer.

I hadn’t realized just how just stupid Vermont lawmakers are. All food scraps must be recycled back into consumption by 2020. The best of my food scraps, after sitting on my summer porch, will help feed people, lawmakers say. Oh it’s good to be poor in Vermont.

Oh yeah, bags of trash cost an extra 25 cents to toss now, and bulk trash an extra $10 per ton. Canceling the fees for recycling is just the first step in an effort to keep everything that can be recycled or composted out of Vermont landfills by 2020, the goal of the state’s Universal Recycling law, Act 148. Mandated recyclables. (Sounds really good, except the trash haulers still pay for recyclables by weight.) Otter stuff. And this.

It is the policy of the state that food residuals collected under the requirements of this chapter shall be managed according to the following order of priority uses:
(1) Reduction of the amount generated at the source;
(2) Diversion for food consumption by humans;
(3) Diversion for agricultural use, including consumption by animals;
(4) Composting, land application, and digestion; and
(5) Energy recovery.

Back to the food on my porch. Our trash hauler retired (he didn’t want to buy a new truck to split recyclables) so we make a “dump run” every couple of weeks. In that time we fill two or three barrels with mixed recyclables and one large bag with household garbage. Uncooked chicken trimmins. The bones and skin of that small mouth bass. And the mouse I caught last Monday. Mmmm. Smells soooooo fine. Oh, my.

I good with #1. We do need to cut down on the amount of food we throw away. This is Vermont, for heaven’s sake. Thrifty farmers. Make do folk. And #3, #4, and #5 are great.

I may have to rethink this whole “used food” idea, though.

 

Voicemail

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A very nice surgical physician’s assistant grabbed the couple of cysts I had mentioned. Easy peasy. He mostly shaved my chest and numbed me up with a quick acting, long lasting ‘caine-based anesthetic. Made a couple of cuts. Popped the cyst sacs out intact. Dug around in the bigger one to pull out all the scar tissue and cauterized the grave. Pulled the tissue together so there wouldn’t be too much depression. And did two layers of stitches. There are about 15 stitches all together.

The whole procedure was absolutely painless. And the dermatology practice will bill for just one procedure including the initial consultation, the excision, and even the return visit to remove the 27 miles of stitches. As an aside, people who can tie stitches awe me. I’m good with fine handwork. I can tie up a dinghy or a destroyer. I have no trouble with a reef knot. I have never mastered the surgeon’s knot in 4-0 silk.

They will also send the cysts themselves in for lab analysis. That will cost extra.

The phone call with the results won’t cost extra but it may not be painless.

When Nurse Nancy said she would call me, I reiterated that she could leave a detailed message on my voicemail. See, I know that Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requires privacy so you have to fill out a form in quintuplicate and seal it with the blood of a goat to allow a doc to leave you a message.

I had already given them the blood of the goat.

“Well, maybe I can,” she said.

Errr?

“Does your message identify you?”

Of course it does but apparently some people don’t.

“Lots of people leave the wrong number. Sometimes I don’t dial correctly. If I can’t tell for sure it is your voicemail, I can’t leave the message,” she said.

Geico called my cellphone and left a message for [name deleted] that their insurance wasn’t bound yet because they had not supplied enough information.

I don’t know if the poor schlub gave them the wrong number or if the Geico rep misdialed but not even my “Hi this is Dick Harper. Don’t leave a message and particularly don’t leave one for [name deleted]” outgoing message deterred them.

People.Just.Don’t.Listen.

Then there is the famed, federal Telemarketers’ Sourcebook (the FCC calls it the “Do Not Call” registry but we know they’re “here to help”). The first phone call in history happened on a nippy March day in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell rang up Mr. Watson. “Come here. I want to see you,” he said. The second phone call in history happened later that chilly when a telemarketer called for “Mr. Fell” and offered to sell a genuine medicinal oil. The third phone call in history happened when Mr. Bell asked the Feds for help.

128 years later, a law made it illegal for telemarketers to call people on their list. Uh huh.

I get a lot of calls from “Consumer Svcs,” and “extended warranty” robocallers, and “Skycare,” and more. One enterprising phisherman even “spoofed” Swanton Lumber’s number. I do a fair amount of business with Swanton Lumber, so I answered that one. Snake oil.

The law doesn’t deter them. They just keep calling.

My outgoing voicemail message doesn’t deter them. They just keep calling.

My stadium air horn hasn’t deterred them. They just hire another, not-yet deaf, crook and just keep calling.

There are a number of hinky solutions such as anonymous call rejection, priority rings, and complete call blocking from your phone company to smart phone apps that do the same. My cordless phone has call block built in. All I do is scroll back through the Caller ID screen, select the offender, and save that number to the blocked list. Most amazing of all is that the phone turns off the call to my entire system so all the phones in the house stop ringing. I have no idea how that works. Black magic, I’m thinking.

People.Just.Don’t.Listen. but thanks to my phone’s extraordinary “Call Block” feature, I don’t have to listen either.

 

La La Liberals

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Thought for the Day
Some presidents have talked the talk and walked the walk.
Barack Obama talks the talk and walks the links.

This isn’t a comment on how many vacation days Mr. Obama (or any other President) takes. We know that all modern Presidential staffs are in constant contact with the mother ship no matter where POTUS himself happens to be.

This is a comment on how disconnected Mr. Obama is. He gives good speech. Kind of. With a teleprompter. But he sure isn’t much on follow through.

“If he walked on water,” my friend Lido Bruhl said, “you’d complain that he doesn’t get his feet wet. And that TelePrompTer canard is so 2008.”

Heh.

Here’s talking the talk. A (baker’s) dozen times.

Housing Meltdown:
Create a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners. Fail.

Jobs:
Notarized Campaign Promise• Create 1 million new manufacturing jobs by the end of 2016 and working to double American exports. Fail.
• Stand up for American workers and businesses by combating China’s trade practices. Fail.

Security:
• Develop a Cyber Security Strategy that ensures that we can identify our attackers and a way to respond. Can you spell Snowden? Fail.
• Close Guantanamo Bay. Fail.

Veterans:
• There were 400,000 claims pending within the Veterans Benefits Administration, and over 800,000 expected in 2008. Fail.
• Make the VA a leader of national health care reform. Fail.
• Create a veterans job corps. Fail.

Healthcare:
• Close the “doughnut hole” in Medicare. I still have one.
• Expand eligibility for Medicaid. Not in Florida or 23 other states.
• Move the U.S. health care system to standard electronic health records that providers can share. Not in Vermont or most other states.
• “Help up to 40 million, no 30 million, no 15 million, no 7 million, no 7 people get health insurance.”
• “If you like your plan…” Any other questions?

To be fair to my pal Lee, no politician keeps his campaign promises. In fact today, no politician even plans to keep her campaign promises.

To be more fair to my pal Lee, my rug-chewing friend Rufus had the same love affair with Glenn Beck as lefty loons have with Mr. Obama.

“What Beck does surely is news,” Rufus told me. “He has asked the questions I have been asking for months, and he has turned up some answers. I’ve never seen Beck make a statement without sources.

“Of course, I also like a six of Becks Premium light (64 cal /12 oz),” he said in that 2008 exchange.

That’s wrong, too. A 64 calorie slightly alcoholic soda pop isn’t beer.

The only purpose of a news show is to report the answers. Mr. Beck delivered perhaps five minutes of answers leavened with 18 minutes of advertising and 37 minutes of high volume rug chewing.

That ain’t news.

In fact, all that is is rousing the rabble.

Still the usual Liberal approach to
sing Lalalalalalalalala …
say the science is settled …
or point Oh, look! A squirrel!
and to scamper away does even less for a rational discussion than quoting Mr. Beck (or Keith Olbermann). All that is is rousing the rabble. Sound familiar?

Too many Liberals use the political scientific method: Have an idea and think it’s perfect. Find data that backs up the idea. Conclude it was a great idea and never needs changing.

We can do better.

We could apply the actual scientific method in government: Observe a problem and wonder about it. Do research and gather data. Have an idea. Experiment and gather more data to test the idea. Analyze that real data and draw a conclusion.

Oddly, that could even work on Facebook.

 

I Made a Little Listicle

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We need a Language Cop.

I may not mean what you think.

English may be the greatest language ever invented. It’s certainly the greatest language ever Darwinned.

OxfordDictionaries.com revels in the language trends behind its latest update to the English lexicon.

• acquihire n: buying out a company primarily for the skills and expertise of its staff
OED page• binge-watch v: watch multiple episodes of a TV show, one right after the other
• clickbait n: content whose main purpose is to draw visitors to this web page
• cord cutting n: practice of cancelling a cable or satellite subscription or landline phone
• geocache n: Since my kids have been geocaching for so long, it surprises me this didn’t make the list years ago
• humblebrag n & v: (make) an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud
• listicle n: an Internet article presented in the form of a numbered or bullet-pointed list
• octocopter n: I want one
• side boob n: I like them
• time-poor adj.: spending much of one’s time working or occupied; I’ve always liked the term “land-poor” for families with more grass than cash
• vape v: drag on an e-cig.

I’ll post and tweet some clickbait to this listicle. Two other words in this sentence made earlier Oxford lists.

English may be the greatest language ever.

• Linguist Max Müller said, “English spelling is a national misfortune to England and an international misfortune to the rest of the world.”

Nobody ever said it was easy to be great.

• Where else would we find homonyms, homophones, homographs, and heteronyms?

It was a fair day when I went to the country fair to pay the fare for a pair of pears. Fortunately I did not tear the bag which might have caused me to tear up.

• Our resourceful language borrows most every word you or I speak from some other language and prodigiously lends many of them back.

The band played guitars, a mandolin, fiddle, banjo, and bass at the Summer Sounds concert yesterday. Guitar comes to us from the Arabic qi-ta-ra or qai-thara which originally descended from the ancient Greek kithara. A bass is not a fish when it has strings. There were no hazards at the concert other than the threat of rain. Unlike the linguists in France, we can borrow hazard from the medieval French hasart.

We need a Language Cop. We need to keep the languages of our settlers old and new alive but we also need to assure we can talk to each other. Ket, the language spoken in Central Siberia, is vital. Abenaki is a small but significant member the Algonquian languages of northeastern North America. Zazaki is an indispensable Indo-European language spoken primarily in eastern Turkey by the Zaza people.

I love that some of our words come from Ket, and Abenaki, and Zazaki.

I see red every time I hear “Press 1 for Ket” from a telephone system.

I’m glad we do include Siberians and earlier Americans and Iranians in our culture but if we really want to include Siberians and earlier Americans, and Iranians in our culture, then the phony Liberals have to get out of the way and let the Siberians and earlier Americans and Iranians learn to speak to the English and Spanish and Tag-A-Log speakers who live next door. In the common language their adopted country has adopted.

The best way to do that is for us all to learn English, too.

That’s the key. English is the greatest language ever simply because it remains so common, so accessible, so complete.

The phony Liberals are those who insisted the Voting Rights Act include help for “language minority voters.” Hello? Only citizens can vote. Citizens take the oath in what language? The phony Liberals are those who insisted that school textbooks be printed for “language minority students.” Hello?

We do need a Language Cop. We need a Language Cop who will arrest the phony Liberals who insist on shackling the Siberians and earlier Americans and Iranians and Spanish and Tag-A-Log speakers so they can’t speak with each other.

Carpe dentum … seize the teeth.
–Mrs. Doubtfire

 

Know the Code

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I had my regular annual physical and anal probing last week but I had to make an earlier visit to the doc’s office that they might let some blood.

Regular readers might be aware that I am pugnaciously parsimonious (Rufus says that is spelled “c-h-e-a-p   b-a-h-s-t-i-d”) so I was curious about how much the tests cost and whether or not my Obamacare Gold policy would cover them.

Drawing Blood for a TestObamacare covers preventive care.

I called my insurer, Blue Cross.

“Blood tests aren’t preventive care, even if they are done as part of a preventive care visit,” the rep said. Unless they are coded as preventive care and they fit the government guidelines. And the test is done on Wednesday after 5 p.m. or any time Saturday morning. With a blue-topped test tube. Not the red one.

That means I could need to make my deductible before they would pay 80% of the cost of the two or three hundred bucks worth of tests. Amount I’ve spent toward my deductible this year: $0.

My Blue Cross rep was very knowledgeable about my concerns. I couldn’t tell him exactly what tests the doctor wanted, so he volunteered to call their office to find out.

The doc’s office has no idea what codes they use; they order the tests from the lab in English. Or Latin. Or maybe Abenaki. They sent the Blue Cross guy to “billing.” Billing has no idea what codes they use; they simply invoice Blue Cross for the needle stick.

Ah hah. The LAB codes the analysis but they won’t know what codes they will use until the doc’s office sends in the request. In some non-accounting language.

The doc’s office did admit that they draw blood for three tests.

Complete Blood Count
▪ White blood cell count.
▪ White blood cell types.
▪ Red blood cell count.
▪ Hematocrit.
▪ Hemoglobin.
▪ Red blood cell indices.
▪ Platelet count.
▪ Mean platelet volume.
Comprehensive Metabolic Panel
▪ Albumin
▪ Alkaline phosphatase
▪ ALT (alanine aminotransferase)
▪ AST (aspartate aminotransferase)
▪ BUN (blood urea nitrogen)
▪ Calcium
▪ Chloride
▪ CO2
▪ Creatinine
▪ Glucose test
▪ Potassium test
▪ Sodium
▪ Total bilirubin
▪ Total protein
Lipids Panel

The Complete Blood Count is diagnostic, not preventive, and not covered under ObamaCare. Ditto the Comprehensive Metabolic Panel, except when it is. Both plus Lipids, a PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen), and even the Shingles vaccine could be covered if you code them correctly.

The hospital did tell me a not-covered Complete Blood Count costs about $29 and the Comprehensive Metabolic Panel, $35. The Lipid panel is $46. A PSA test costs between $60 and $80. I don’t get one anymore because the doc says my anal probe is always “fine.” And because it is known to be diagnostically flawed. The shingles shot cost between $200 and $250 alone.

There is a catchall code V70.0 that identifies many of the tests as “preventive.” I just had to remind the doc’s office to use it.

But wait. There’s more!

I should not have to manage this.
As she was filling and filling and filling the gallon-sized test tubes with my blood, I told my favorite nurse she should have a price list on the wall.

“The corner gas station does it. The grocery store does it. Restaurants do it. Even Walmart does it,” she agreed.

She doesn’t know how to get the prices, though. They are hidden and scattered and seem to change by the time of day and color of my belt buckle.

The doc also thinks providers should post a chart of charges. He doesn’t know how, though.

Everyone seems to agree. No one seems able or willing to do it.

As anti-regulation as I am, I suspect regulation or law
will be the only way to get ‘er done.