A Day in the Life: Crazy weather for September in the desert.

I took this picture after The Girlfriend and I had left Marie Callendars.  I had hoped to do more mobile blogging when I started rejuvenating my blog.  Unfortunately, Google/Blogger does not make that easy.  You can upload a picture, or text,  but apparently getting them both on the same page (other than the title) is a bit of a problem.  Either that or I’m not doing it write.  So because of it’s limitations, I haven’t been able to.

I had given thoughts of switching my blog to WordPress, because apparently they do have a mobile application that as far as I know works.  But since I already purchased the domain name through Google, that became a bit more problematic.  Anyway, the gist of that picture is of course, that it was raining, and there was lightening as well.  You just don’t see much of that this time of year in this area.  It was just a little dab of moisture, but any type  of precipitation in these parts is treated as if it were a Tsunami.  Here’s another picture I took outside of the theater.  And you can already tell I forgot to take the good camera with me.

A Day in the Life–6:24 AM, Monday August 22……Of Dreams and Things

So it’s late when I finally am able to go to sleep on Sunday night.  But what the heck.  About four hours of good sleep and I’m ready to go.

Unfortunately, dreams and things sometimes have a way of interfering with the best laid plans of unknown bloggers.  The dream I partially remember.  It had something to do with Honorable No. 2 Son when he was little, and myself.  We were at a movie theater, and we were going to watch a new version of King Kong.  I had already scene it.  But this version surpassed anything you’ve seen in real life.

In this one, Kong actually jumps out of the screen.  But it’s okay because it’s just a mechanical Kong who goes berserk inside the theater.  This Kong is reminiscent of the one that used to be on the tour of Universal Studios before somebody set a match to him and burned his furry ass up.

So in the dream, I take my son to the theater, since I’ve already experienced this myself.  We want to find us some good seats so we can get a good look at all the action.  I’m sure the theater was one from my past, probably the old Laroy were I spent a lot of time as a child.  We find our seats in row eleven, which probably also has some significance, and then I wake up, my legs feeling like dead weights and my arms and hands in their usual numb state.  It is, 4:30 AM. 

There is still time to get some sleep if I can doze off.  But between the feet, the ankles, and the arms, it’s impossible.  If I had taken my meds, it would have helped all that and I would have slept.  But I have to wake up by 7:00, and when I take the Neurontin and the Vicatin that late (or that early) then it’s difficult to get going.  On several occasions I have kept right on sleeping, just waking up long enough to call work to either tell them I won’t be in or that I’ll be late.  So I struggle on without it, in a state of exhaustion.  But it soon becomes apparent that I will not be sleeping anymore.  So at 6:24 AM, I finally give up.

So I will go into work.  I need to take my medication, or I’ll be in bad pain about halfway through the day.  As it is, I’ll be exhausted all day if I don’t take the meds.  If I take them, I’ll be hard pressed not to doze off at my desk.   If it weren’t for the fact that because of all this medical nonsense, I’ve used up a good portion of my sick day and vacation days, I would just call in. But then again, if I did that, then The Girlfriend would bitch, moan, and groan about me missing work again.  Something she’s already doing this morning because of an unlocked door.  I really don’t want to hear about it.  A man’s home is not his castle.

So I’ll take the meds and hope for the best, and probably get the worst.  But that’s a day in the life.

A Day in the Life Stuff: Episode XLIV: A Not So New Hope

When we last left our intrepid medical explorer,  he was anticipating a call from Truckstop Radiation Inc.  to set up an appointment for an ultra sound on his Kidneys because his spinal MRI showed that he had Remal Cysts, or as they said on the official MRI Approved Form, Acquired Renal Cysts.  I don’t really know what if any differences there are in acquired cysts and ones that  aren’t, and I don’t really care.  But the appointment isn’t until the 25th of August or thereabouts.  I had to decide whether to work a partial day that day, or not at all.  But when the lady on the phone told me that I had to drink a quart of water within an hour of the test, then that pretty much settled that quandary especially since once I began drinking, pissing was not permitted.  Whatever that test reveals, I’m sure that under the usual BSOP (bullshit standard operating procedure), it’ll be several days before I get the results. 

As coincidence would have it, my generic PCP called the same afternoon with the news that I had been approved for a new neurologist, thus relegating Dr. A. C. Neurologist into the annals of my medical history for all time, hopefully never to emerge from that cocoon again.   The new neurologist, who unlike Dr. A.C.,  is supposed to be  the real genuine article  neurosurgeon or so I surmised from my conversation with the PCP.  And they wanted to waste no time  setting me up for an 8:45 AM appointment on Friday morning.  This was on  Wednesday, and it was extremely short notice, but you do what you have to do.  Unfortunately my supervisor was off work on Thursday so the best that I could do is leave her a note.   But I did turn in the request to take the day off for next weeks Kidney Family Portrait. Sometimes, standard operating procedures at work fall under the BSOP banner as well.

For the sake of discretion and decorum, which admittedly I am totally lacking in, we’ll call the new brain examiner Dr. Magic.  From where I live, Dr. Magic’s place of business was about as far as you can go and still be considered to be in Bakersfield.  Or at least it seemed that way to me.  But still, after making the trip, it was far  preferable than dealing with the downtown traffic and the traffic from the hospital near Dr. A.C.’s office.  You hop on the freeway, take one exit, make a couple of turns and you’re there.   Well, you do have to spend some time fighting your way through highway  traffic.  But it’s no big deal.

The worst thing about seeing a new physician is filling out the same old same old introductory paperwork.  I wish someone would invent a system where you only had to do itt once and only once then just pass it on from place to place.  Instead, every time I get slapped with an approval for a new specialist, I also get the thrill of writing down the same bullshit information I’ve already written a thousand times already this year: 

Next of kin, spouses name rank and serial number, insurance number, insurance group, insurance provider, children, children’s diseases, children ages,  your diseases, spouses diseases, parents diseases, living or dead, diabetes or not,  what did they die of, brother’s ages, sister’s ages, brother’s diseases, sister’s diseases, living or dead, any injuries, any past injuries, asthma, smoker or not, alcoholic or not,  medications you take, medications your siblings take, medications you took when you were five, are your parents  alive or dead, are they in good health or poor health, what medications are you on, have you had or do you have any of these one thousand possible medical problems or diseases listed on the next ten pages, do you fart out of your ass hole or your belly button? 

You get the idea as I’m sure you’ve been there and done that.  At least at Dr. Magic’s office, I actually felt they paid attention to me, unlike when I dealt with Dr. A.C.  They  knew why I was there and quickly sent for my previous MRI’s along with the results of the tests performed by A.C.

And not once did Dr. Magic make me feel like I was any less than a person.  He greeted me warmly, a major plus over Dr. AC who doesn’t greet you at all.  She starts right out laying her expertise shit on you and belittling you from the get go.  He didn’t act surprised when I told him I had given A.C. the sack from my medical case so it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d seen this scenario previously.  Before going to Dr. Magic’s office, I had checked his rating against that of A.C.’s on one of those rate a physician web sites.  He had an almost sparkling  rating of 3.5 compared to A.C.’s lowly, lousy, and miserable 1.5.  His lowest rated category was office wait time, but that may not be a bad thing if they are being more thorough with their patients.  But it is ironic when you consider how much time I spent sitting in the waiting room, though I blame Blue Shield for that crap.

After an examination, Dr. Magic decided he wanted me to have some lab tests done so he wrote out a prescription:  CBC, Sed Rate, ANA, Rheumatoid Factor.  I had to Google each of those to find out what they were for but I’m not going into a long winded explanation here.  I’m long winded enough as it is and if you’re really curious, I guess you’ll do the work on your own.  Y’all come back when you’re done with that now, y’hear!

Okay, welcome back.  Dr. Magic also wanted to do some tests on my arms and hands that Dr. A.C. should ,have done if she had been doing her job and asked for approval to do them in the first place.  It was something she should have known if she had paid attention to what was on my initial referral papers.  But because of my HMO Group insurance, everything has to be approved, and since Dr. Magic wanted the tests done that day it meant sitting around waiting for Blue Shield to give it’s stamp of approval, something they no doubt would have to consider at an emergency board meeting called by the Chairman.  Too bad the half assed government of the USA didn’t see fit to give us a public option when they were doing their revamp.

I thought it might take a couple of hours at the most.  I was wrong.  I had arrived there at 8:45 a.m. in the morning and by the time I left, it was exactly 3:50 p.m.  Doing some quick math, that works out to just slightly over seven hours.  But it wasn’t so terrible.  They did have a TV set and at least it wasn’t blasting Fox News.  If it had been, there is no way I could have stayed there that long. 

Why is it so many fucking places that do have a TV set in the lobby  to watch while you wait, find it necessary to kill the brain cells of all Americans with the air-headed propaganda bullshit being sent out over the airwaves by Rupert Murdoch’s personal diarrhea of a network?  But here,  they had on CNN for a short while then switched  to some entertainment shows, some soaps, and the other harmless junk that permeates the weekday television hours. 

At other times during this period I dozed off, brought on because I had a major dizzy spell and that’s what usually happens afterwards.  After not having any spells  for a week, leave it to me to have  one right there in the waiting room.  I thought maybe I should let the doctor know, but I didn’t.

A couple of times I became  annoyed because three times I was asked by totally unaware employees who came out to ask  why I was there.  A quick stop with the receptionist and they could have had that information.  Maybe they didn’t like her or something, hell if I know.  But  I guess they thought I was some weird stalker/rapist or perhaps I was hiding a revolver in my underwear. 

So much for everybody in the office  being on the same page.  Yeah, I supposed I could have fixed it with the Doc to come back at a later date, but he gave me the impression he wanted the tests done ASAP, and besides, an extra  80 mile round trip (40 there and 40 back) in my car with the busted air conditioner, in almost 100  degree heat and with the cost of gas approaching $4 bucks an hour is not on my list fun ways to spend a day.

I did watch an episode of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (WGTSE), on my Iphone  as well as an episode of Andy Griffith, thanks to Netflix and a the fact that I could actually get a decent AT&T connection, something that is rare in places like this.  There is no signal to speak of at the office of my PCP, nor was there one at Dr. A.C.’s location.  If I had known I’d be there almost 8 hours and would have a decent signal, then I would have taken the adapter cord and watched  movies and Buffy (WGTSE) all day long.  The next time I’ll plan ahead and take the headphones so I don’t pester anybody.

But finally somewhere around 2:30 or 3:00, Blue Shield had wrapped up their board meeting and given their approval for the tests, although the chairman is probably still out there  somewhere crying about paying for it.  The tests were the same ones that Dr. A.C. had done on my legs and back the week or so before, only this time it was on my arms and hands.  And let me tell you, shooting the juice through your legs is one thing. Pulsasting it through your arms is a horse of a different color.  It was painful, but at least this time I could see what was going on and found it curiously interesting.  I guess I’m weird that way.

There were times he would shoot electricity through my skin  there and get no reaction.  Then the guy giving the test would punch some keys on the keyboard, make a few notes and carry on.  He also asked me a few things that made me think he was either the smartest man in the world or that the test was actually telling him something.  Things like, “The problem is more in your left arm than your right.”  Since my left arm and hand have become practically useless that would be an affirmative.  “Do you sleep with your arm in a certain position?”  That would be true as well.  “Do you crack your neck?”  That was true also, although I have to say that with one caveat I forgot to mention.  It is something I had only  begun doing very recently, no more than a week or so ago,  to try and relieve the pain.  And it is not something I did often because basically, it doesn’t work. 

He  also did the test where they stick a needle through your arm and wrists to see how well your nerves are carrying signals across your appendages.  The thing about this was that I didn’t even feel the needles going in.  I have no clue if that’s normal or not,  but I certainly felt the ones Dr. A.C. had stuck in my legs.  Maybe this guy was just a better needle sticker.  Either that or he studied acupuncture on the side.

When the tests were finished though I was sent on my way to find out out about the restults some other time.  Perhaps when they get my lab work back I’ll here something.   Next up, the Renal MRI.  Sure looking forward to drinking that water and not pissing.

The day wasn’t a total waste though.  There was actually a Blockbuster open across the street, which is a rarity these days.  They were selling blu-rays 5 for $20 which is a pretty good deal.  I also bought the three Twilight Movies for The Girlfriend on blu-ray because they were on sale.  Of course, a couple of days later I regretted these purchases when I saw the old bank account was close to being overdrawn.  Later that evening I joined The Girlfriend at her aunt’s house, and we went to have dinner together at The Sugar Mill.  She had a cheeseburger smothered in chili, and I had my usual Tilapia.

My original plan was to go to a second run theater near the doctor’s office, but after spending the entire day there, that kind of ruled that paln  out.  So maybe we can do that next time.  It’s probably just as well that I didn’t go  since the bank account is so low and there’s still about twelve days until pay day. Should have known that before I spent the $56 dollars at Blockbuster.   It’s going to be a long month, but August usually is. 

 

 

Road Trip–Crazy Stupid Love

It was off to the movies again this Saturday.  This time it was The Girlfriend and I and just as it about 90 per cent of the time when we go together, it’s a ladies choice.  And her choice this day was the Steve Carell film, Crazy Stupid Love.

Since it was a return trip to the Reading Valley Plaza, I can pretty much dispense with most of the travelogue portion.  I had already figured out before hand that we were going to be viewing the film in one of the tiny cigar box auditoriums in the back left hand side of the Cinema, just as we did on this occasion. when we saw Cowboys & Aliens.  But did I say cigar box?  This one was more like a sardine can.  I counted less than a hundred seats in the place, and there are probably less than half of them in which you would really want to sit and view a movie.  We were in Screening Room 9. 

 

And I really have to remember to drag my better camera along.  The pictures I took with my I-phone really weren’t worth a squat.  As you can see, there was too much glare from the light on the sign (or there was until I photo-shopped it.  Let it not be said that I’m not creative), and the interior shots were way too dark although it wasn’t really that dark inside.  But I post them here anyway to give you some idea of the size of the thing.  But thankfully, there was no little brat climbing up and down off of her mother’s lap like there was the last time.  In fact, it was a rather peaceful evening as far as any theatrical disturbances go, and one is always grateful of that regardless of the quality of the film itself.  So was Crazy Stupid Love what the title implied it would be, or was it just stupid?

It was a bit stupid and maybe towards the end a teensy bit crazy.  But not in a good way.  It just wasn’t that good of a film, despite it’s lofty 76 per cent critic approval and 85 per cent audience approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes. 

 

It probably helps you’re attitude towards this film  if you’re a really big Steve Carell fan, but I was not born of that ilk.  I like him well enough, but in every film of his I’ve seen he basically plays the big hapless  shmuck.  His shtick gets tiresome after a while, and Carell’s absolute totally straight faced deadpan portrayal  of Maxwell Smart in Get Smart was an abomination that made that particular film a major disappointment for me..  Playing such an unlikable shmuck like Cal that he plays in this film, doesn’t help to make the heart grow fonder

. 

But my low regard for this film wasn’t entirely his fault.  Cal’s wife Emily, played by Julianne Moore wasn’t particularly likable either.  When your husband asks you what do you want for dessert and your answer is “a divorce” it doesn’t exactly endear you to the audience, even one as small as the non-crowd inhabiting Screening Room 9.  Nor does it make you laugh either.  I suppose that Cal jumping out of a moving car shortly thereafter was meant to draw some guffaws, but it doesn’t.

 

Unfortunately for Cal and Emily, upon returning home, their son, Robbie and the baby sitter Jessica quickly find out the happy news:  She’ll be babysitting for either Cal or Emily but not both at the same time.  Truthfully though, I almost wish they had revolved the whole film around Robbie and Jessica because they have the funniest, most sympathetic plotline..  Even before Cal and Emily arrive home, we discover that Robbie, who is 13 has a giant crush and has fallen hard for Jessica who is 17.  And we also find out that when you’re discovered playing fantasyland  by the babysitter, it’s not such a good idea to go into details about what was on your mind that made you raise the flagpole in the first place.  But while Jessica is busy trying to dampen  Robbie’s not so subtle ardor, she is carrying the torch for his father, Cal.   I guess that’s Crazy Love any way you look at it.

 

Cal tries drowning his sorrows at a local tavern, but does it verbally and loud enough so everybody in the bar soon knows he is getting a divorced and that his wife slept with David Lindhagen.  So ladies man Jacob, played by Ryan Gosling, who is as sick of listening to Cal whine as we are, and who takes home a different woman practically every night,  decides to take Cal under his wing to become Mr. Miyagi to Cal’s Daniel San.  It’s bachelor makeover time, and it isn’t long before Cal is picking up women almost as well as his mentor. 

 

Of course, you have to crawl down the runway before you can fly and Cal’s early attempts end in failure, until he hooks up with schoolteacher Kate played with hilarious abandon by Marisa Tomei, who always seems to rise way above the material. 

 

And let's not forget  Hannah played by Emma Stone whom I absolutely loved in Easy A which came out almost a year ago.  Here, she plays a law student who may or may not be in love with another lawyer, but definitely thinks he will celebrate her passage of the bar exam by proposing.  At the outset of the film, she is one of Jacob’s few failures, and is smart enough to see through his phony suave aura, and cliché pick up lines.  Then, to our chagrin,  she disappears for a long long  time until the plot needs her some more.  When Hannah reemerges, it is some time later  and when the lawyer boyfriend fails to propose marriage, she heads straight for the bar to find Jacob and become a one night stand.  Jacob, for his part, seems more than happy to oblige.  Do  you need for me to tell you what happens next?  I didn’t think so.

 

There are about three really big problems with this film that it never overcomes.  Problem one is that we end up not caring about the main story, which is the break-up of Cal and Emily’s marriage, and the continual “will they or won’t they get back together” that is the bulk of the running time.  It would have been nice, just this once, for Carell not to be such a doofus.  He spends way too time moping around and only becomes partially interesting when he is given a makeover by Jacob.  The problem with that is, now instead of a shmuck, he’s a jerkoff just like Jacob is.

Likewise, Emily fares no better.  We never fully understand her reasons for the divorce and for screwing the guy where she works except that she was bored with her life.  All well and good, but while Cal accepts his share of the blame for the failure of their marriage, she never really seems to come to terms with the part her own infidelity played in the disintegration.  So it’s difficult to root for either one, except that we do keep hoping that Cal will grow a pair of balls and take matters into his own hands.  But he never really does, and is controlled more by the circumstances of the script than anything else.

 

Problem two is Jacob.  Ryan Gosling is excellent as the ladies man so this is no knock on him.  He in fact, reminds me in many ways of Jerry Lewis’s alter ego Buddy Love in the original Nutty Professor.  We’re fascinated by him, but despise his treatment of the woman all  at the same time.  So having spent the majority of the film making us love/hate him, we are suddenly suppose to switch gears and just love him?  The change is so sudden, that we don’t really believe it.  We can’t.  Maybe if the film were called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but I saw no mysterious secret formula’s being served at the bar. Maybe if we had seen more of that aspect of the plot developing and spent more time  with Jacob when this change of heart is taking place we might have bought into it.  But the script couldn’t allow that to happen because it would……..well that brings us to problem three.

 

Problem three is that the film depends way too much on some major improbable, almost impossible,  coincidences that I cannot relate to you here.  The first one, involving the Marisa Tomei character didn’t bother me too much.  I was too busy laughing (when Kate is on the screen is one of the few times the film makes you laugh)  and gave the movie a pass on that one.  But when the really “big reveal” comes towards the end, the absurdity of it, and the astronomical odds against it  are just way too overwhelming to give it a pass.  We are too stunned to find it funny, and too put out by how ridiculous it is.  If this were a whacked out comedy like The Hangover or Harold and Kumar, it wouldn’t matter so much.  Those films are built from start to finish on the absurdness of improbability.   But this film seems to want take a higher road than that and to send a message, despite the fact that it purports to only be a romantic comedy.  And any good will we might have had earlier on is lost in one big swoop.  Even The Girlfriend who was with me for this trip, found it to be a bit much, although she liked the film overall more than I did.

The bottom line is that the film is sweet and entertaining when focusing on it’s subplots revolving around Robbie and Jessica, and when Emma Stone and Marisa Tomei are up to bat, the movie absolutely sparkles.  But those moments are way too few and far between, with the focus being on the main story line that never gets over the hump.

 

Now putting everything on the old Clyde’s Movie Palace Scale, I have no choice but to give Crazy, Stupid, Love, a not so crazy grade of C.   And if you haven’t checked out Emma Stone’s Easy A, now would be a good time to do so.

 

When we left the theater I grabbed this screenshot of the main concession stand.  Notice the huge painting on the wall.  It’s the coolest thing about Reading Valley Cinema’s so I thought I would share.

 

A Day in the Life: Health and Medical Stuff-Angela Has Left the Building, Goodbye to Dr. A.C., And now an ultra-sound.

When I started to revamp the blog, I had decided to write more articles of a personal nature. I wanted this blog to not only be the things I loved writing about, (or as in the case of “Old Blog Crap” stuff so old they still have the smell of Rome burning), but to make it personal with the mundane boring crap that I deal with on a day to day basis. Hey, if I have to put up with crappy life, why shouldn’t you?

But in between reposting old crappy articles like this one, moving crap over from other blogs like this article, and keeping up with writing new stuff like this and this, I haven’t had much time for the boring life stuff. So if you need to catch up on what this entry here will be about, read this short piece that started it all.

At the radiology place, the only MRI’s they took was of my lower spine, which I thought kind of strange since I was sent to Dr. A.C. Neurologist for much more than that. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the one they did on my brain. At least this time I was able to wear noise canceling ear muffs, and in fact almost dozed off a few times.

When it was finished, I once again had the numbness in my hands and fingers, which is why my typing skills have deteriorated about 300 per cent over the past couple of years. Typing, which used to be second nature to me, had become something I struggled with constantly at work, and there was damn little left over for anything else like writing articles or stories. But now I am on some mediation that helps, as you are about to discover.

But all of this goes back to what Dr. Angela AND the radiologist saw was my problem after the initial brain scan: Symptoms that appear and then seem to somewhat disappear over the years, then seem to get better for a while but eventually return. And what the radiologist saw on the brain scan pretty much confirmed it. I had the onset of Multiple Sclerosis. No telling how long I have had it and no way of knowing for sure how bad it was going to get. That’s par for the course for MS though. Some people never have symptoms. For others the symptoms are often mild, while in still others the disease can be crippling. But still, as far as I’m concerned, whether I even have it remains an uncertainty at this stage.

But everything I read fit me to a T whereas no other diagnosis has. So my primary care provider, courtesy of Dr. Angela (but no long, she has it seems, moved on to another gig, more about that momentarily) had set me up the appointment with Dr. A.C. Neurologist very quickly. Even my insurance company, who doles out my HMO care as if every test was an affront to their bottom line, quickly approved the appointment even labeling it stat/as soon as possible.

But Dr. A.C. Neurologist dismissed the diagnosis of M.S. out of hand from the very beginning, even without an examination. As soon as she walked into the examining room and sat her old scrawny and wrinkly ass down A.C. gave off this aura that anybody who dared to even hint at a diagnosis before she made her examination was just a blathering foolish idiot not worthy of her skills or her time. So 99 per cent of the initial session was taken up by questions and answers, and if you didn’t give her the precise and exact answer she wanted, Dr. A.C. quickly became ill mannered, insensitive, and treated you as if you were the dumbest fuck ever to walk the planet. In other words, she was an asshole.

She signed me up for the aforementioned spinal MRI, with insurance approval of course, and then she scheduled some more tests of her own, which she would do as soon as the insurance company agreed to pay her. She prescribed motion sickness pills for the dizzy spells, even though I hadn’t done any traveling for a over a year.

And yes, the pills pretty much turned out to be useless. Between the Meclizine, the Neurontin, and the vicatin, I couldn’t stay awake long enough to know if I was having a vertigo episode. So I suppose if you look at it that way they worked. And I can type like a boy wizard now, so at least that’s a plus. For me though, not for you suffering through this lame ass article.

So about four days after the MRI I returned to Dr. A.C. Neurologist. Once there, she and an assistant proceeded to shoot my legs and thighs full of electricity. At one point she tells me I have some neuropathy in my left leg.

“No shit, Sherlock!” I wanted to say. “You have to pretend I’m your Frankenstein monster to find out what I and several other doctors already know?”

So I asked her, “Does this have anything to do with the numbness in my hands and arms?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” she replied testily. “They didn’t send you here for that. They only sent you here for your lower spine and your legs.” And although you had to be there, the nasty tone in her voice was unmistakable. I had heard it often enough on my first visit.

And that’s all it took to piss me off for the rest of the exam. Every time you asked this woman a question, she acted like either the daily loser on Jeopardy or that you had sent her poodle dog to Korea to become a dog meat sandwich.

It got worse. Moments later she asked one of her aides for the results of the MRI that I had gone for the week before. They didn’t have them. So they had to call Truck Stop Radiology who sent them a preliminary report.

“We have the radiology report,” she told me later while shooting more electrical juice up my spine. I was beginning to feel like Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile. “It shows you have some renal cysts. You should tell your primary care physician about that for follow up.” Just like my head, my arms, my fingers and my hands, I guess my damn kidney’s were not her concern either.

Okay, maybe I’m wrong. But one would think it would be automatic that they would send a report like that to my primary care physician. After all, I wouldn’t even be in Dr. Neurologist’s office without their initial referral. But that’s all she said. She didn’t say if it might be a bad thing or whether it could be something serious, a minor inconvenience, or nothing at all.

Later, she told me she had found a pinched nerve in my back.

“Did I give you any medication the last time you were here?” She asked.

I felt like asking her why she didn’t look at her own files to find that out. I told her that she had given me the medicine for the lightheadedness and dizziness. No reaction from The Wicked Witch of the West.

“Are you taking any other medication,” she asked.

Again, something she should have known without me telling her if she would bother to look at her own paperwork, as if she really gave a shit. As everybody knows, on your very first visit to any doctor, that is one of the most important things you can tell them. But again I repeated it back to her the information.

“What’s the dosage of the Neurontin?” she asked.

Three hundred milligrams three times a day,” I told her. “But I just started taking it a few days ago. I had some 100 milligrams three times a day that I wanted to finish before starting these,” The pills had been given to me by a pain specialist.

“Well, that’s not strong enough,” she said nastily. “You should be taking three times that amount.”

But that’s all she said, other than the fact that I should take the medication and come back in two months. Right away I wondered that if she thought the dosage was too small, why didn’t she offer to get me a stronger dose. And second, the amount of the neurontin I did have would run out in less than a month if I took the stuff the way it was prescribed. So why didn’t she ask about that? I simply made the appointment for October and left. And when I left I made up my mind I wasn’t going to take anymore of their medication until they could give me a convincing diagnosis. And since Angela was gone from my PCP (primary care provider from here on out, I was in no hurry to make an appointment with them either.

But as luck would have it, my PCP called me and said they wanted to make an appointment for me to come in and discuss my newest MRI. Or at least the secretaries did. Frankly, I think this is a racket. They call me in. They get my $15 co-pay plus whatever else the insurance company throws in each time I walk through the door. I don’t even want to know how much that has added up to this year. So I went ahead and made the appointment against my better judgment.

The last time they pulled this stunt was when I found out that my favorite medical person Dr. Angela was no longer there. I was supposed to call after my first visit to the neurologist and make an appointment, which I did only to be informed of Dr. Angela’s decision to suddenly take flight. Her replacement was someone called….well we’ll call her Dr. Britt even though like Angela she is no Doctor and worse, unlike Angela she isn’t even listed as a Physician’s Assistant. She is listed simply as “Aide. I mean, is that like an intern, an orderly or does she just wash out the bed pans?

I don’t know. I do know on my first visit with her now in charge of my bodily functions, she wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the room. She hadn’t even bothered to read my files or any of my case history before I arrived, leaving me to fill in the blanks. Blanks hell, the whole damn page was empty.

I was hoping things would be different this time but they weren’t. After sitting in an empty examining room for over half an hour, she finally poked her head in the door.

“What can we do for you today,” she asked. Honest to God, the only thing I could do was lay completely back, and roll my eyes and shake my head negatively. I would have to bring her up to speed again, since obviously she had the memory retention of a four year old.

I reminded her that they had called me, that I didn’t call them. I reminded her of my complaints about Dr. A.C. Neurologist and that my latest visit wasn’t much better. I informed her that Dr. A.C. said that I should tell them I have Renal Cysts.

At one point, Dr. Britt asked me what Dr. A.C. had said about the cysts?

“She told me to tell you guys, you are my primary care provider are you not?”

She nodded affirmatively, but I can’t be sure she was even positive about that.

“She told me to tell you to get a copy of the MRI done on my spine.” I then went on and on and on about my litany of complaints, the same ones that I have just spent writing about for the past half hour, thus inflicting an enormous amount of boredom on any body who bothered to start reading and stay reading for this long. But have heart, we’re almost finished.

So Dr. Britt eventually left and sent out for the MRI. Finally the report came, and she told me they were going to send a request to the Insurance Company for an ultra sound on my kidneys, and for a new neurologist and that I would undoubtedly like the new Dr. Neurologist. But we’ll see.

The approval for the ultra-sound came in the mail today but I won’t make the appointment right away. I’m sure Truckstop Radiation will be calling Monday wanting to make it for me. I know they’ve lost a big contract recently, so this will be money in the bank for them. No word on the new neurologist. I can see the insurance company being hesitant about that. But if they are, I’m prepared to write them a little note and let them know that in my opinion, Dr. A.C. Neurologist should spend the rest of her medical days studying the brain scans of chimpanzees to prepare for the Rise of the Planet of the Apes. She can say hello to Cornelius and Dr. Zira for me.

Movies on DVD Blogging–The Big Bird Cage

This little gimmick is something I tried on my Facebook Page and I’m sure I’ll have the same success rate here as I did there.  What that means is nobody will read this shit here either.  I  mean, why just have your family and friends ignoring your shit when you can have the whole wide internet world ignore it?  Pretty cool when you look at it that way.

The way this works is that  while I’m  watching something on my TV, I’ll grab the web cam and take a shot of something in the movie that captures my interest and write a comment for it.  It may be a DVD I own or am renting,or  it could be an old Classic TV series.  It could be something I’m watching on Netflix or Amazon, or on the regular TV series.  Whatever floats my boat. 

What kind of comments?    It may be something as dry as a symopsis of the film, something I’ve noticed about one of the actors or the character they are playing, or maybe something I just want to poke a little fun at.

Sure to be Frequently Asked Questions and Answers:

Why are you doing this?

Because I  feel like it.  Next question.

 

What kind of  movies did you try this out on at Facebook?

Eyes Wide Shut, Quo Vadis, Tangled, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Getting Straight, and the last one I did was an episode of Buffy. As you can see, it can run the gamut, there is no set criteria.  It’s just what I’m feeling.

 

Why use your web cam?  Why don’t you just take screen captures on your computer and post them?

A.  Because not everything can be played on my computer.

B.  I would lose my spontaneity.

C.  You would lose the effect of what it actually looks like on a flat screen TV and how it really looks to me in my bedroom sanctuary.

D.  More Copyright issues that way, probably less this way.  It’s not like I’m showing the freakin’ movie or anything like that.  I’m in a sense, actually promoting it…..unless it’s really really bad.  And the pictures should be just crappy enough that nobody would care anyway.  I think.

E.  It would be too much like work to do screen captures and not as much fun as this.  And I’m a fun kind of guy because as Arthur said, “Fun is the best thing to have.”  When this becomes too much like work, I quit.

 

Will you post the ones you did on Facebook?

It’s doubtful.  But it could possibly happen if I need a blog post and don’t feel like screwing around with anything else.  Besides, the pictures are open to the public.  You just have to find them.

 

Why are you swearing so much?

In my real personna, it comes and it goes, same as it does here.  This is who I am sometimes.

Now that we have that idiotic stuff  out of the way, let’s get on with it. 

 

I finally received my copy of Roger Corman’s Cult Classics, the Women in Cages Collection from Amazon.  There are three movies in the set. 

They are: 

 

Women in Cages,  The Big Doll House, and The Big Bird Cage.  Three classic films of the B-Genre from the seventies.

Two of these star the great Pam Grier which most of you may know from her recent stints in the Quentin Tarantino movie Foxy Brown. 

But it was Roger Corman who gave Miss Grier her biggest break when he he cast her in The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, the movie which I’m  going to view tonight. 

 

I originally saw both of those movies as part of a triple feature at a cinema near downtown Columbus back in the early seventies.  I guess you could classify it as a Grindhouse Theater since it was showing films such as this on a continuous basis.  Other films I saw there were fine cinematic masterpieces such as Student Nurses and Private Duty Nurses.  I was very much interested in human anatomy back in those days and those films did not disappoint.  But character and plot development?  I couldn’t tell you a damn thing?  After all , it was 40 years ago.

 

 

Okay, now that we’ve taken care of that, let’s move on.

 

I decided to watch the trailer that was on the DVD first.  It was really grainy, had lines through it  and was  in really bad shape, just like a Quentin Tarantino flick.  He would be so pleased. 

 

Seriously, I did hope the movie wasn’t like that.  And oh yeah, here’s the shot all you pervs out there are craving.  That’s what you came for isn’t it?  Now that you’ve seen this anonymous butt you can move on because there isn’t anymore.  Go read my Jenni-cam article or something, better yet, go find the thousands of nude pictures of her available by learning how to use Google Image search properly.  You have to turn off the search content filter.

I didn’t know who Anitra Ford was.  I know, shame on me  But since her name was in letters as big as Pam Grier’s,  that must mean she has an important role in this film.  So I looked her up on the IMDB and now I feel such shame that I didn’t know she was a Price is Right Girl.  Actually, her whole biography is kind of interesting.  Go read it yourself, do I look like the Freakin Enycyclopedia Britannica?

 

My first glimpse of Anitra Ford.  Or should I say Anitra Ford’s ass.  How did I know it was Anitra?  Do you really have to be a genius to figure that out?  I would also like to say  that it’s a mighty fine ass, something any young actress can really be proud of.  I was also glad to see that, unlike the trailer,  for the feature part of the program, they cleaned the picture up quite nicely.

 

Pam Grier plays a singer.  She doesn’t look so tough here. Did she do her own warbling?  How the hell do I know?  I wasn’t paying attention to that. I was thinking of moon pies.   (Later, by listening to the director’s commentary I found out that not only did she do her own singing, Pam is a very good singer.)

 

Here’s what Anitra looks like from the front.  Just in case you’re interested and don’t see her purely as a sex object like Bob Barker and I do.  I couldn’t help notice how frizzy her hair was though.  Either that was the style back then or Corman wouldn’t spring for a hair stylist.  Another one of those little details you won’t remember from having seen the film forty years ago.

 

Did I say Pam didn’t look so tough?  It’s amazing what a machine gun hidden in your guitar will do for your perception of things.  And I knew all along she wasn’t really a nightclub singer.

 

I  didn’t see this plot twist coming.  The guy with the beard was a member of Pam Grier’s gang.  So after they get all the loot from the patrons at the night club, he decides he wants a piece of Anitra’s ass  and kidnaps her by carrying her out to what appears to be a getaway golf cart.  Except when he gets there, the golf cart is full and they drive off without him, to the 13th hole I suppose. 

 

So he steals a cab and shoves a not very reluctant Anitra inside.  She asks him what he intends to do with her, and Bearded Guy replies something to the effect that  he’s going to rape her.  She says, that’s okay because she really likes sex and wouldn’t mind being raped by him at all.  No, that’s not the plot twist.  That’s expected in these kind of  movies in which all women are sex starved, sex craving  bimbos.  But hey, it’s all in good fun so what the hell!

 

The plot twist is that  the taxi gets cornered on a bridge by the cops.  Bearded Guy decides to say adios and escapes by jumping off the bridge.  So Anitra gets arrested as an accomplice.  I fully expected that Pam Grier would be the one going to prison first, not Miss Price Is Right price tag turner.

So in a bit of irony, the innocent Anitra gets taken to court, is forced to cop a plea by the crooked cops and the crooked judge, and sent up river wearing the same red dress she started the movie with.  I guess besides not springing for a hair stylist, Corman skimped on the wardrobe department as well.  Not that I minded.

 

The prison camp Commandant.  You just know by looking at this asshole that he’s going to be a real bastard before it’s over with.  Think Colonel Klink of Hogan’s Heroes with a different accent and without the laugh track.  Yeah, he’s not going to be a funny guy, even if he does look like Gilbert Godfried.  The actor is Andres Centenara, but you can call him Warden Zappa, no relation to the more famous Frank Zappa or his daughter Moon Unit.

 

One of the girls tries to entice head guard, Rocco, by flashing and playing with her nipples while he guards the shower door.  The problem is that  Rocco, like some of the other guards, is gay.  So no matter how many times they flash their titties, Rocco isn’t in the market.  So I guess that enables him to beat on them with careless abandon whenever the mood strikes.

 

Remember bearded guy?  We catch up with  him struggling to get through the forest and back to his base of operations.  Unlike Anitra, who managed to keep her red ass clinging dress intact all the way up river, Bearded Guy can’t keep his pants or shirt on walking through the jungle for a few days.  Of course, just looking at this screen shot, you can tell he compensates for his lack of worthy apparel with a little over acting.  But I think it’s played that way on purpose.

 

Girl’s, meet Anitra.  Anitra,  meet the  girls.  I’ve seen this scene somewhere before though.  Anitra’s little flesh flash reminds me of something I posted somewhere. Where could it have been?  Oh yeah, now I remember.  It was here. It is here that I finally figured out that Anitra’s character name is Terry.  Although Anitra  is cooler, I guess I’ll call her Terry from here on out.

 

Bearded Guy finally makes it back to his camp and Pam isn’t all that happy to see him.  Being blind as a bat and not seeing the condition he’s in, she thinks he’s been out in the forest screwing Terry for the past couple of days.  Then again, maybe a person doing the nasty with Terry would end up looking like this.

 

As you can see, Pam doesn’t stay pissed with bearded guy and after a mud bath, head up to their shack to play hide the bologna.  We also find out some things.  Pam’s name is Blossom, and Bearded Guy is named Django and he is played by Sid Haig, and this guy has a ton of credits to his name and is still going strong. 

As it turns out, Django and Terry  really are revolutionaries.  I thought that was just a bullshit story.  They never say what they are revolting against (Evil Women’s Prisons or being stuck in  B Movies?) or what country they are in.  Judging from the surrounding area of dense foliate, a nearby river, the heat and humidity, and the general lack of education of the populace, my guess is Mississippi.

Not long after this the Revolutionaries come up with a new plan of recruitment.  They’ll break all the women out of the local prison, who will be so grateful that they’ll join up just out of gratitude.  How does this plan work?  Well, first they have to get somebody on the inside, and since there’s only one woman around, you can guess who the lucky girl is going to be without me telling you.

 

The Big Bird Cage.  And here I thought it would be an actual cage.  No, I didn’t expect it to have giant parakeets in it, and I didn’t think Big Bird was in this movie.  I don’t think they had Sesame Street in those days.  What it is though is a Sugar Mill, built by Colonel Klink-Zappa, so that the harvested sugar cane can be refined, squeezed and processed, then sprinkled on your Captain Crunch Cereal.  The Quaker Oats factory is just down the road and to the left.

 

And although it wasn’t meant to work that way,  it does a good job of chopping up female prisoners as well if they don’t watch their back.  These broads spend so much time fighting each other, it’s no damn wonder they can never escape.  Is this what they call a hand job?

 

I couldn’t go on without mentioning Karen McKevi’s  role as Karen.  For me she, was the big dog in the bone yard.  I think she stands about 6 1/2 feet, which pretty much sums up my feelings about that.

 

Warden Zappa throws a little soirée for some high faluting government officials. In the crazy world of B-Movies, a lot of the girls main goal is not trying to escape, but attempting to getting invited to one of these orgies since  their one desire is to get laid by a man, any man or just to get their brains fucked out in general.  

 

But what I said above doesn’t hold true for everybody.  This gal goes batshit crazy when these viral young handsome fellows come on to her, which causes major problems around Camp Zappa.  I know she looks like she’s in orgasmic ecstasy here, but believe me when I tell you these guys wienies are about to become as limp as a night crawler.

 

Terry tries to escape when her other plans go awry.  Here she comes across some nice Pilipino Gentlemen and asks for their assistance.  Unfortunately she’s about to learn that the words “Help Me Please” means “Rape Me Please” in the Philippines.  And the other reason I posted this outfit?  It gives us a chance to see Terry in another skimpy blouse while being quite wet as well.  Ah!  Life’s little pleasures and treasures.

 

 

This is the punishment for getting yourself raped in the Philippines.  Either that or it’s a new hair treatment, and remember, Terry did have the frizzies early in the movie.  I know you’re saying that it would not be possible for someone to survive such torture.  Well, bub, let me explain some shit to you:  There is no such thing as a light saber either. And yeah, it was really her punishment for trying to escape.

 

While Terry decides to just hang around outside  for a while, Blossom finally get’s herself registered at the  Hotel Zappa Deluxe.  Blossom is the boss now and if these clowns don’t know that yet, they will know it right quick.

 

Blossom:  My name’s Blossom, but that don’t mean shit.  All you have to know is that now I run this place.  Any other  questions?

Girl:  Yeeeahh… where do you want to be buried, nigga’?

Blossom:  That’s Miss Nigga’ to you bitch.

You just have to love that shit.

 

The other part of Django’s plan is to infiltrate the camp by getting himself hired on.  This consists of  putting on a beret, baring his midriff in front of Rocco, and sashaying into the Men’s Room to let Rocco have a good look at his package.  Is this what they call Penis Envy?  Or is it just Penal Lust? 

 

On one hand you want to laugh, on the other hand you’re a bit bugged by the stereotype of gays.  But that’s the way Hollywood portrayed them in those days, and in some cases, still do.  So it is what it is.

 

Unfortunately, a monkey wrench is thrown into their plan when the Warden discovers who Blossom is and proceeds to have Rocco torture her for information.  Unlike Terry though, she gets to keep her hairdo.

 

Okay, I know what you’re thinking.  She’s taking a shower and lathering herself up.  Well, Karen is lathering herself up but not with soap.  And she’s not taking a shower.  That you see, is chicken grease.  And just why should she be covering herself from head to toe with the remnants of a day’s work at KFC?  

 

But there are bigger questions.  Will Django spring Blossom and Terry before sadistic Warden Zappa does them in?  Or will he succumb to the seductive charms of Rocco?  Will the girls join the revolution in support of more B movies like this one?

 

You’ll have to either go to Shout Factory or someplace like Amazon to buy the movie to find that out.  And it’s one helluva deal.  You get three of these movies for the price of what one normally costs and these are good transfers, not the usual public domain shit some companies churn out to throw in the bargain bin at Wal-mart or K-mart.  A couple of things do irk me though.

 

The first is that Netflix has basically quit carrying Shout Factory titles altogether.  So you can’t get this there but you might try to get it at Blockbuster On-line. I haven’t checked.   Sad to say, is that Netflix’s DVD rental service is steadily going downhill which makes their recent big price increase kind of a joke.  Seriously thinking of canceling the DVD portion.

 

Better yet, don’t be such a tight wad and buy the damn thing.  This one  movie alone is worth it.  You get a little bit of everything:  action, comedy both intended and unintended, some surprisingly snappy dialogue,  torture, beautiful naked women, an Ex Price-is-Right tag turner, and  practically everything else you could want in a movie like this.

 

You can’t watch a movie like The Big Bird Cage and be expecting an A List 100 million dollar Hollywood extravaganza.  There’s no comparing the two.  You have to watch it in the spirit in which it was made, and whether or not even on a very limited budget the Producer, Director, Writers, and actors at least put a little effort into achieving the final result.

 

I really had fun watching The Big Bird Cage.  I’ve only watched a little of it with the Director’s Commentary but look forward to more of that.  I’m not sure that today’s jaded young audiences (and yes, they are quite jaded) will ever know the joys of a film such as this, but hey at least it’s in color.  You don’t know how many times I hear some young foolish idiot punk kid proclaim they won’t watch a black and white movie for any reason.

 

But the trick is not to take a film like The Big Bird Cage seriously, and if you can do that, you should be okay.  So grading The Big Bird Cage on the Roger Corman B Movie curve (as compared to other films), I’d have to give it *** out of *****.