This Week in Our Dumb World
Trapped In The Hospital
There are many good parts to our healthcare system. I want to get that out front and emphasize that I appreciate the myriad positive in American health care regarding innovation and treatment.
I say that because when I look at it, I see so many places that we have allowed the relentless drive for profit distort the idea of healthcare into an unrecognizable nightmare. We empower and provide regulatory loopholes for people to abuse their patients and exploit the labyrinthine system of insurance and medicare to choose profits over patients.
Whatever your feelings about the various proposals that have been floated, it is untenable that we can and should be doing better than this. We can be doing better than trapping people in psychiatric care for an extra day over and over in name of making more money.
I read this story and all I can think is “why is this a business?”
He thought about hurting himself after Christmas and knew he needed help. An emergency room doctor sent him to North Tampa Behavioral.
The 89-year-old said he didn’t get the clothes his family brought him and had only a hospital gown. No one told him showers were available. Employees didn’t give him his hearing aids.
Allen asked to leave repeatedly, but staff members insisted he stay beyond the three days, his family said. The hospital’s chief concern: He wasn’t participating in group therapy.
“That blew our minds,” said Allen’s son-in-law, Wayne Dowdy. “He can’t hear.”
The hospital petitioned to keep Allen longer. Six days into his stay, a nurse told Allen’s daughter, Jennifer Dowdy, that his case would be heard by a judge.
Jennifer Dowdy took off from work to attend. On her drive over, she called to find out where the hearing would be held but was told there was no record of her father’s case. Hearings weren’t even scheduled for that day. She pulled over in tears. As she sat in her car, North Tampa Behavioral called to say her father was being discharged and would be waiting for her in the reception area.
Allen was charged $9,000 for the six nights. His insurance paid much of the cost. In July, he received a bill for the remainder: $1,465.
Turkish TV and Global Domination
It’s always interesting to read about the global culture that exists outside of the bubble of American cultural dominance. This is not to say that we should be judged for not knowing more about it. One of the problems of living in the cultural hegemon is that it takes an awful lot of work to step outside of it. That said, it’s been fascinating to watch things like K-pop begin seeping in to regular American cultural discourse. Not that I would know what people are listening to, but I see lots of K-pop references and that’s gotta mean something.
But, more to the point, it’s always interesting to see what is gaining global reach beyond the usual American exports. In particular, it’s interesting to see the way Turkish TV has successfully appealed to particular values in order to grow into a global power.
It’s not the big quote, but it’s worth including this list of rules used by one of the largest producers…
You can’t put a gun in your hero’s hand.
The centre of any drama is the family.
An outsider will always journey into a socio-economic setting that is the polar opposite of their own, eg moving from a village to the city.
The heart-throb has had his heart broken and is tragically closed to love.
Nothing beats a love triangle.
Dizi are built, Eset insists, on the altar of “communal yearning”, both for the audience and the characters. “We want to see the good guy with the good girl, but, dammit, life is bad and there are bad characters around.”
If only because I feel like those are pretty good rules for life in general.
“Most of these audiences feel that their everyday stories are ‘underexplored’ by Hollywood and Europe,” Tatlıtuğ wrote. “This is ultimately a matter of diversity in storytelling. I understand the appeal of a story like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, these are both amazing TV shows. However, some people may also feel disenfranchised from these Hollywood themes, and may want to watch a story they can empathise with.”
“Disappearing family values are not concerns for the west,” Eset says. “For the past four years or so, 40% of the most-watched Turkish shows have been remakes of Korean dramas,” he says, pointing out that the Koreans have been swifter than the Turks at penetrating the Latin American market. “Korea is also a country that gives great importance to family, but in the west, the romantic notion of those good old family values is gone.”
At the time of our meeting, Eset is working with a Turkish-American production house, Karga 7, which has global ambitions for their shows.“When I talk to people about Turkish TV series,” he tells me, “mainly they are taken by this romantic notion of family where everyone is trying to cherish one another. The dangers are external, and socio-economic class plays a great role in the love story of the poor boy loving a rich girl, or vice versa. Normally a story like this in the west would be treated through an individual’s journey, where there is more sex, there is more violence, there are drugs.” Turkish TV has less of that. He points out that the couple in Fatmagül don’t kiss until about episode 58.
That Time The Crew of Titanic Got Dosed with PCP
Why do we even have an internet if it’s going to take decades for the story of the cast and crew of Titanic getting dosed with PCP to come out. WHY EVEN BOTHER COMMUNICATING AT ALL.
James Cameron got stabbed in the face with a pen and I’m only just now finding out about it?
For the more than 60 people who did eat the chowder, it didn’t take long for the effects to take hold. Cameron, who initially thought the shellfish might have contained “paralytic shellfish neurotoxin, which is very dangerous,” immediately stepped away from the set to vomit. “I get back to the set and nobody’s there.” he recalled in 2009, speaking to Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Keegan, reporting at the time for her book on Cameron, The Futurist. “I’m standing at the monitors, near the camera, and the room is empty. It was like the twilight zone.”
“Some people were laughing, some people were crying, some people were throwing up,” Paxton told Entertainment Weekly back in 1996. “One minute I felt O.K., the next minute I felt so goddamn anxious I wanted to breathe in a paper bag. Cameron was feeling the same way.”
Cameron remembers a Russian-Canadian P.A., who was working as a translator on set, summing it up succinctly: “I feel toxic and beside myself.”
The chaotic scene at the Dartmouth General Hospital makes for one of history’s best drug stories, even if the affected crew members didn’t know it at the time. “Eventually we all got put in these cubicles with the curtains around us, but no one wanted to stay in their cubicles,” set painter Marilyn McAvoy told Vice earlier this year. “Everyone was out in the aisles and jumping into other people’s cubicles. People had a lot of energy. Some were in wheelchairs, flying down the hallways. I mean, everyone was high!”
Rob Liefeld Can’t Draw Feet
Every 6-8 months, someone shares this article with me. It is never bad and I am always happy to read it because I too have a love hate relationship with gloriously bad 90s comics and their horribly glorious art.
You know what? Even if this dude weren’t Quadzilla there’s no way he’d be able to put his legs together with all those pouches and garters and whateverthefucks. Jesus, look how high up that one band around his leg is. What purpose could that possibly serve? His pants are so uncomfortably tight that his groin is puckering into some sort of overachieving asterisk. His belt is juuuuuuuust under his nipples. The real capper, though, is the kneepads. What the fuck must go through Liefeld’s head when he’s drawing a character? "Yep, crew cut, I’ll put Boba Fett’s rocket on his back. Hmm, oh, GOTTA go with the metal shoulderpads and enormous Run-DMC gold rope chain. Okay, belt…uh…pouchespouchespouchespouchespouchespouches leg things, oh, KNEEEEEEPADSSSSSS yessss."
List of Sex Symbols
I love the bare bones definition of “person widely considered to be sexually attractive”
I love the incredibly dry nature of a plain “list of people widely considered to be sexually attractive.
I’m not yucking anyone’s yum, but I’m just going to say that there are some really questionable decisions on here (Gary Basaraba?<pictured above!> Christina Cox?). Again, to each their own but “widely considered to be sexually attractive should have some standards. HOWEVER, that brings us to the best part…
EVERYTHING IS SOURCED. So there is a truly spectacular list of really weird articles justifying every selection.