Proust Barbie

Lucy Boynton reports that Proust Barbie was cut from Barbie because audiences didn’t get the joke: “it turns out that contemporary audiences don’t know who Proust is” (Rolling Stone).

This contemporary audience does. When our fambly saw Ratatouille some years ago, my kids had to calm me down when this Proust moment happened. (”Dad!“) I was going slightly bonkers in the theater.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Long-term care insurance: my 2¢

Now that my mom's long-term care insurance (hereafter, “LTCI”) has run out, I feel free to offer some observations. My observations are drawn from experience with a single company, Genworth (hereafter, “the company”), and everyone’s mileage varies. My mom has beaten the house, but my suggestion, nevertheless, would be to avoid LTCI. Here’s why:

~ The premiums are expensive and become more so. Stop paying in and you lose everything you’ve already put in: it’s the sunk cost trap. (My mom’s last premium, four years ago: $10,000.) No one counted on so many people living long enough to try to collect.

~ It’s necessary to have a persistent (and probably much younger) advocate willing to spend considerable time submitting a claim, submitting and resubmitting power of attorney documentation and other paperwork, making repeated phone calls to check on claim status, to argue, to report changes in living circumstances, and to spend lots of time on hold.

~ The company may be reluctant to pay up. Filing a claim begins a “elimination period” of 100 days or more before the claim can be considered. Elimination indeed: the company is no doubt wagering that the policyholder might die as those days count down.

~ When the elimination period is over, the company may still be reluctant to pay up. The two conditions for honoring a claim: (1) inability to manage two of the five so-called activities of daily living (bathing, dressing, eating, “toileting,” “transferring”¹) or (2) severe cognitive impairment. Even a statement from a doctor of geriatric medicine on hospital letterhead may not be enough to convince the company that (1) applies, because the company will perform its own assessment of the policyholder by way of a Zoom call conducted by an outside agency. It’s reported that such assessments may take a policyholder’s answers to questions at face value, though it’s well known that people with dementia will give the “right” answers to questions whether or not those answers are true. As for (2), what counts as severe cognitive impairment seems to be highly subjective. A representative of the company, offering an example: “You don’t need to know what year it is to fulfill the tasks of daily living.” One need not be a thoroughgoing cynic to suspect that the company might use the fuzziness of (2) to avoid paying a claim. Notice, by the way, that making a phone call and managing medication are two activities of daily living glaringly absent from the list. Their inclusion would immediately give more claims a shot at (1).

~ It may be necessary to submit a second (or third? or fourth?) claim as the policyholder’s abilities diminish.

~ If the company does finally honor a claim, the persistent advocate will need to keep up month by month. The monthly cost of assisted living or memory care is borne by the policyholder. The advocate then sends the monthly bill to the company and waits for reimbursement to show up in a bank statement. This paperwork is the easy part of the job, after all earlier obstacles are overcome.

I’m happy that I could do the work of dealing with LTCI for my mom. I don’t begrudge a minute of the time. And I don’t mind going up against a bureaucracy. But it’s far wiser to invest money elsewhere.

A bit of browsing will confirm that my observations about this company are not unusual. But they’re the ones I’ve got.

¹ “Transferring”: sitting down, standing up.

Stormy Monday

It’s the first day of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial. Have a good rest of your day, sir!

Here’s a small section of Trump’s Saturday night fever in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania (my transcription):

”Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was, the battle of Gettysburg, what an unbelievable, I mean it was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious, and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways. It, it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch and, eh, the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice that? — no longer in favor. Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill. They were fighting uphill. He said, wow, that was a big mistake. He lost his great general. And, eh, they were fighting. Never fight uphill, me boys! But it was too late.“

Imagine what he’d be like as a witness (which I don’t think is going to happen).

A portal

[419 West 36th Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I have to imagine that if anyone with children lived in this building, life must have been a constant battle: “Stay out of the tunnel!”

The archive photo has no date for this building, but its construction must have predated that of the Lincoln Tunnel. The building is now gone, and if you type its address into Google Maps, you get, yes, a chunk of the Lincoln Tunnel. And if you type lincoln tunnel into Google Maps and make a U-turn, you can ride one of its tubes all the way to Weehawken, New Jersey, against traffic. Even Tony Soprano couldn’t do that.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[U-turn: in other words, turn the little person around before moving forward.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, dang near impossible at times. I slogged through and got it all, but it sparked no joy. I was happy though to be done, because doing this puzzle felt to me like doing homework.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, five letters, “One of many in night table drawers.” My first thought was NOVEL. But I was probably thinking of the New York Times “nightstand” holding books.

4-D, eight letters, “Not the parental disciplinarian.” Never heard of it. I need to bone up on my stereotypes.

5-D, three letters, “James P. Hoffa alma mater.” Is this answer likely to be known by anyone whose last name is something other than Hoffa?

8-D, nine letters, “Cockney, e.g.” I liked this one.

9-A, five letters, “Residential healthcare provider.” Like 4-D, this answer doesn’t sit well with me.

11-D, nine letters, “Green fish-and-chips side dish.” Is it really going to be — ? Yes, it’s going to be —.

13-D, four letters, “Like M. north of New York.” I didn’t understand until I typed the clue here.

23-D, five letters, “Italian word for ‘bowls.’” I can relate, not as a participant, but as an observer from a passing car.

32-A, eleven letters, “Fliers named for their blades.” I guess I learned something for future crossword use.

34-D, nine letters, “Alien monster.” See 32-A.

35-D, nine letters, “What's best on the block?” An easy one.

42-A, eleven letters, “Go together.” What an odd answer. A more apt clue might be “Go as one.”

43-D, seven letters, “The Buick stops here.” I was trying to recall an answer from some previous crossword, but no, that was ALERO, the last Oldsmobile produced. “Buick,” here for the sake of a pun, is weirdly specific in this clue.

53-D, five letters, “Many a pop.” My first thought was PEPSI. I find the logic of this clue a bit bizarre.

61-A, nine letters, “They have reduced carrying charges.” Nice one.

64-A, nine letters, “Base of some martial arts.” Also a nice one.

68-A, three letters, “Overfilled indicator.” SPILL won’t fit.

My favorite in this puzzle: 17-A, nine letters, “Many a United team supporter.” Just because I knew it.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Siduri and Marcus

Thinking about the joylessness of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations made me recall this passage from the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh story. Siduri, goddess and tavern-keeper at the edge of the world, speaks to Gilgamesh, who seeks a way out of the world of living and dying:

“When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.”

Fear of death isn’t the problem for Marcus. But what he seems not to know is that life can be beautiful. And not mindlessly beautiful but beautiful even when or especially when one understands that it comes to an end.

Related reading
All OCA Gilgamesh posts (Pinboard)

[The Gilgamesh passage is from N.K. Sandars’s highly readable composite The Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Penguin, 1972). For a scholarly translation, try The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Maureen Gallery Kovacs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). “Old Babylonian”: not what’s known as the Standard Version of the story.]

Bacon and Peanuts

[Peanuts, April 15, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

Remember oral reports? Sally is giving one on the importance of reading.

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Hidden Bar

Alas the free app Dozer doesn’t work on a M3 Mac. A fine free replacement to hide menu bar items: Hidden Bar. Found via MacMenuBar, “a curated directory of 900+ Mac menu bar apps.”

This post gives an idea of the things I fuss about when setting up a new Mac. And yes, if you’re switching from an Intel machine, the M3 Mac is unbelievably fast. And fewer typos!

Marcus Aurelius, not wise

Marcus Aurelius:

You will think little of the entertainment of song or dance or all-in wrestling if you deconstruct the melodic line of the song into its individual notes and ask yourself of each of them: “Is this something that overpowers me?” You will recoil from that admission. So too with a comparable analysis of dance by each movement and each pose, and the same again with wrestling. Generally, then, with the exception of virtue and its workings, remember to go straight to the component parts of anything, and through that analysis come to despise the thing itself. And the same method should be applied to the whole of life.

Meditations, 11.2, trans. Martin Hammond (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Of course Marcus lived long before Art Tatum, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and [insert the name of an all-in wrestler of your choice here]. And it seems not to have occurred to him that music and movement take place in and across time.

Also from Marcus Aurelius
On change : On distraction : On Maximus : On revenge

[The translator’s comment on 11.2: “An extreme (and utterly unconvincing) example of the reductive analysis which Marcus frequently recommends and employs.” I’m at a loss to name an all-in wrestler.]

Marcus Aurelius, wise

Marcus Aurelius:

The best revenge is to not be like your enemy.

Meditations, 6.6, trans. Martin Hammond (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Also from Marcus Aurelius
On change : On distraction : On Maximus : On music, dance, and wrestling