Mark Evanier's Blog, page 215

Today's Video Link

It's Randy Rainbow time!  It's Randy Rainbow time!

Today's Video Link

This is for those of you are sitting home wishing you could experience the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland. WARNING: Viewing this video will cause that song to reverberate in your head for a very long time. I'm still hearing it from the one and only time I rode through that attraction, which was in 1969 and every time I see Richard Sherman, I  pay him royalties.

Drug Pusher

Earlier this evening, I got a slightly disturbing call.  "Annoying" might be a better choice of words.  It was from a pharmacist at the CVS Pharmacy near my home…and I should explain the following.  I take a number of prescriptions and I have approximately a third of them filled by a mail order firm, another approximate third filled at a nearby supermarket pharmacy and the rest by the CVS Pharmacy near where I live.  Why do I divide my business up like this?  Here's why…

The mail order firm is connected to my health insurance and they fill what I have them fill at very reasonable prices and in most cases, they'll give me a 90-day supply which is much handier than dealing with monthly renewals.  Of course, it sometimes takes a while for my medicines to arrive.The supermarket pharmacy doesn't take my health insurance but on several — not all but several — medications I take, their price is way cheaper than the mail order pharmacy.The CVS Pharmacy is, as I mentioned, near my house.

A year or so ago, I found it was valuable to me to take the time to go online with the mail order pharmacy and the supermarket pharmacy and look up what each drug I take costs through them.  It took about a half hour but sending certain prescriptions to one pharmacy and certain ones to the other is now saving me a couple thousand dollars a year.  I am not exaggerating.

And when a doctor of mine prescribes something they want me to begin taking immediately, I have them phone it in to the CVS, where because I use my health insurance there, it's the same price as the mail order firm only I get it right away.  If it turned out to be one of those prescriptions that's way cheaper at the supermarket pharmacy, I could switch it from CVS over to there but so far, that hasn't happened.

If this sounds confusing, just forget about it. All you need to know is that CVS only fills about a third of my prescriptions.

So I get this call from a pharmacist there who says he and the CVS computer system have looked at my medical record and determined that there's a certain medicine I'm not taking that may help me. He wants permission to call my physician and discuss it and, I guess, talk my physician into prescribing it for me. Apparently, they do this a lot but it's the first time I've gotten one of these calls. I probably don't have to explain why this bothered me but I will anyway…

A pharmacy is supposed to dispense what doctors order. The folks at the pharmacy know how to do that but they know very little about me, my body, my medical hisory…pretty much everything about me. Oh, yeah — they also know my birthdate. Every time I get pills or ointment from them, they ask me over and over for my birthdate, which is a tremendously secure way to make sure I am who I say I am. After all, my date of birth is only known to me and anybody who looks at my Wikipedia page.

(It's like when you buy something at a store with a credit card and they ask you for your zip code. That's a good way to make certain that anyone who has stolen my credit cards has also stolen my driver's license.)

The folks at CVS have never taken my blood pressure, checked my sugar, done an EKG on me, listened to my lungs, peered in my ears with a flashlight, had me say "Ahh," had me turn my head and cough…anything. My physician has done all that…and they want to tell him what they think I need? If that's useful then I have the wrong physician.

I doubt they can arrive at any informed medical conclusions by looking at a list of what my doctors have prescribed but even if they can, they only have a partial list. And that partial list doesn't tell them if I'm already taking that the particular drug they think I should be taking.  I'm not because it's a drug to which I happen to have a very severe allergy. It is most definitely not a drug I should be taking.

My physician is a great guy and I trust him. He's also one of the busiest people on this planet. He doesn't need someone who studied a lot less medicine that he did wasting his time phoning to say, "We see your patient occasionally experiences headaches. May we suggest you prescribe a remedy called aspirin?"

After I got off the phone call an hour or so ago, I thought for a few minutes, started writing this and then decided to call back on the phone number that my Caller I.D. said the call was from. I wanted to make sure he really was with the CVS Pharmacy and this wasn't a scam spoofing their name.  Since qualified for Medicare, I get a lot of calls from organizations trying to sound like an official arm of Medicare, getting me to let them send me something they've decided I need…oh, and they need to confirm my Medicare number so they can bill Medicare.

The call allegedly from CVS was indeed from CVS.  I reached the man who'd called and we had a nice conversation that calmed me down to the point that I could finish writing this. Why did he call me? Because the computer there told him to call me. He didn't say this but I got the feeling he thinks he should be filling prescriptions instead of making these calls.

Tomorrow when the CVS Customer Bitching Line is open, I'm going to call up and add my voice to the list of folks who think a drug store should not be doing this. If there isn't already a long list, something's wrong. That will probably keep me up all night fretting and that in turn will cause CVS to call up and ask if they can phone my doctor to suggest sleeping pills.

Today's Video Link

This is from The Ed Sullivan Show for May 4, 1969. Because The Beatles had been such a ratings-booster for Ed, he often tried to feature Beatles songs performed by others. Some of these pairings of performer(s) and song were ghastly match-ups but once in a while, like this one, they were kind of charming. This is Joel Grey who, as Ed notes, was the star of the Broadway show, George M. Ed does not mention that George M closed a week before this broadcast…

Blue Skies

Twitter has been doing so badly since it was acquired by Elon Musk that it's now gone into hiding, reportedly working under the name "X."  If I were doing that poorly, I'd start signing my work that way too.  I still check in on it now and then.  Enough people who post interesting things are still posting interesting things on it but I haven't put a message on there since 1/6/23.

I recently opened an account on Bluesky, which strives to be a quieter, less inflammatory place for social messaging.  So far it seems to be that but I must admit to having some trouble with the way it works.  When someone reposts a message by someone else, it doesn't identify who the original author was.  And I frequently am shown replies to messages but cannot locate the message to which that reply is replying.

I'll give it another few weeks to see if they improve the software or I get the hang of it.  If you're a member there, you can follow me there.  I'm @evanier.bsky.social but I haven't decided yet if I'm going to stick around.  If you're not a member there, you need an invite code to join but I don't have any to give out yet.

 

John Regis, R.I.P.

Comedian John Regis died last night at the age of 94. He'd been living for some time at the L.A. Veterans Home and he recently took a bad fall there. I'm told John had a very distinguished military career — he was in the Air Force for nine years — but I never heard him talk about it. He did however have an endless stash of anecdotes about performing in dives, dumps and Playboy Clubs. I never saw him work but he had a rep as a guy who could sing, dance, tell jokes, play an array of musical instruments and so on. Whatever it took to please a crowd.

John was one of those performers who for a long time just worked wherever he could — clubs, cruises, Vegas, industrial gigs, wherever. I don't think he got on TV very often but a lot of folks can make a decent living without that. He did sometimes talk about how his income plunged as those Playboy Clubs closed. I think that's where I first saw his name: In ads for a Playboy Club. He said that for a long time, he just went from one to another, working eventually at every one of them.

I knew him mainly from Yarmy's Army, the social group for comedians, comedy writers and other funny people. The last few times I saw him at meetings, maybe five or six years ago, he had some sort of medical shuttle service bring him over from the Veterans Home and then take him back there after he shared food and jokes with a lot of his friends. Nice man.

Earthquake in Ojai

Sergio is fine. Just picking up a few things that fell over.

Shy and Retiring

Fae Desmond has announced her retirement as Executive Director of Comic-Con International in San Diego Comic Convention. As long as I can remember — and I can remember pretty far back — Fae has been the person at or near the tippy-top of that organization which also runs WonderCon in Anaheim and a few other events. She started as everyone did in the con's early days as a volunteer and was the first such person to transition to a paid position and a longtime job.

Employees at companies may come and go but often the continuity of one or two people provides the continuity of certain principles and working premises. I have found that Comic-Con — which some outsiders still don't understand is a non-profit enterprise unlike most other conventions — is very benevolent and very well-run and Fae's steady hand has been a major reason for all that benevolence and competence.

This sweet lady has been there 47 years and while she (of course) is entitled to retirement, I am sure there will be times when both staff and attendees will miss her a lot. Read what former Director of Programming and Director of Publications Gary Sassaman has to say about her.

Today's Video Link

Today is the anniversary of the day in 1977 when the world lost Groucho Marx. Shelly Goldstein and I were talking today about how his passing didn't get the attention it deserved, coming only three days after the death of Elvis Presley. I remember a hastily-assembled special on ABC hosted by Dick Cavett…and that was about it. Not nearly enough reverence was shown for a man who many of us felt was as important to American culture as Elvis…and maybe more so.

Here's a Groucho appearance you may not have seen. It came late in his career but before the strokes and other ailments that affected his performing and made his last few times in front of audiences rather sad. It's an episode of The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, a little-known TV series produced in the early seventies as some sort of co-production of American and British talent. Larry Gelbart, who was then living in the U.K., was one of its producers.

Aired briefly on ABC, it looked a little like Monty Python's Flying Circus because of animation inserts made by Terry Gilliam, but portions of it looked like The Dean Martin Show because that program's producer Greg Garrison, who I mentioned in the previous post here, took control of The Comedy Machine at some point. He did serious editing on the shows, including but not limited to cutting in segments with stand-up comedians that were taped for Dean's show on NBC.

Mr. Feldman was, as you might imagine, very unhappy at what was done and at the way ABC dumped the series so quickly. I believe what we have here is an episode as aired on British television — one on which Mr. Garrison never laid a finger.

I know more about this series but not a lot more. What I do know, I posted here some time ago. Now I'm just going to introduce this episode which has several segments in it with Groucho.

In case you don't stay around for the end credits, they say this episode was written by Chris Allen, Rudy DeLuca, Marty Feldman, Larry Gelbart, Barry Levinson and Spike Milligan, with additional material by John Cleese and Graham Chapman. I believe the Cleese and Chapman credits are because the series reused material from earlier shows they'd done with Feldman. Either way, that's a pretty impressive writing staff…and Milligan was in the show, as well.

For some time now, we've heard that the original uncut episodes were going to be released as a DVD set in the U.K. but I don't believe that's happened. So here is this episode which you can watch in full — or if you just want to see Groucho's spots, click here, here and here. I think I got them all…

Today's Trump-Related Post

The last few days, it seemed like Trump was trying to get some judge to throw him in jail so he'd have an excuse for not showing up for the Republican debate. In truth, he seems to have agreed to do some sort of show with Tucker Carlson opposite the debate. Me, I think he'd be better off in jail but it's a close call.

William Saletan summarizes some of the revelations of the Georgia Indictment. My, there sure was a lot of lying going on.

Donald Trump and his attorneys have lost a staggering number of challenges and motions and attempts to change the dynamics and/or timing of all the trials they're facing. Still, I have friends who are going to panic if/when Trump and his motley crew of office temp lawyers win one battle even if it's like one out of a hundred.

I may not watch the debate. I have a feeling it's going to look like one of those old Dean Martin Roasts if all the jokes were written by Alex Jones. It's too bad Greg Garrison — who produced and directed Dean's show — is gone. We could have him direct the debate and put in lots of obvious edits and every so often, cut to the stock footage of LaWanda Page and Charlie Callas laughing uncontrollably. I have the feeling Ron DeSantis is studying the DVDs of those roasts and is copying down all the Orson Welles insults to use on Chris Christie.

And someone will do a line like, "Ron DeSantis beating Joe Biden? Are you kidding? Ron had his ass handed to him by Mickey Mouse!"