Cranky News Digest

Blood pressure rising as a result of reading the news:

Body scan or aggressive and insensitive pat down? Well, it's been almost ten years since 911 and we're still idiots when it comes to airport security. Given a choice, I much prefer the Israeli trained agent that looks at you in the eye and asks smart questions. I understand the volume of fliers in this country makes this wish of mine utopian, but the TSA needs to admit they are a disaster. Traveling to and from Israel this summer, no one lay a hand or a scanner on me. I didn't have to take my shoes off. I just had to answer a bunch of questions in a process that was actually faster and less annoying than any gauntlet I've ever went through stateside. Many of the questions were personal. I wonder if Americans, with their concern for privacy, and their sensitivity for political correctness, are willing to subject themselves to this kind of human intrusion. Done correctly, absolutely everyone gets profiled, not just the usual brown and turbaned suspects. I can tell you, it is much more polite, much less humiliating and SAFER than the moronic inferno (to borrow from Martin Amis) we've had for years.

Mr. Hoffman said the administration should move away from adding more layers of security for every passenger in response to every new plot and consider an Israeli-style approach to identify passengers who pose a particular risk, based on advance intelligence, questioning travelers and watching their behavior.
“We’ve had nine years of just grafting security measures one on another,” Mr. Hoffman said. “Maybe it’s time to step back, take a hard look and look for a new approach.”

What the fuck has taken them so long? 

Drivers are incensed about the proliferation of bike lanes in Manhattan. 
Guess what? I'm incensed about drivers. They pollute, make noise and clog the city with traffic. This city needs to have more space for bikes and less for cars. And people who drive should grin and bear it. I've been saying this for years. Americans need to wean themselves off their love for the automobile. Manhattan should be a mostly car-free zone (except for small taxis, public transport and delivery trucks). What happens in Brooklyn I don't care, because with all due respect to my adorable friends from that borough, I don't give a shit. But Manhattan should be like Amsterdam or Berlin, where drivers don't kvetch about bikes invading their space. The nerve.

Some Noo Yawkers go to specialists to get rid of their accents. Noooo! Why? This is such a pity. I love accents. For instance, I learned today that the twang of our beloved Mayor Bloomberg is actually Bostonian. I always thought he spoke kinda funny. We don't all want to sound bland and indistinguishable from podunk, do we?  In my building there are still several people who have New York accents so rich, I feel like I'm in a movie. I don't drink coffee, but if I did, I'd drink cawfee.

Used Car Salesmen

The two worst things about a broken foot are 1. that I can't do whatever the hell I please and 2. doctors and our health care system.
I broke the foot on a Thursday. Because of my deep and longstanding indoctrination into insurance panic, I forgot that I'm paying $400 a month (plus $50 copays and all kinds of other extras) to have the privilege not to need a referral from my primary care doctor to see a specialist. So instead of going directly to an orthopedist, I went to her. She looked at it and said: you need an orthopedist. Well, good luck trying to find a practicing bone doctor on a Friday. Either they are playing golf or they are operating on patients. Next available appointment: 10 days from then.
I didn't want to spend the weekend either at the ER or with the foot getting worse by the minute, so I went to a bone doctor that my insurance does not cover. I figured, I work my ass off so that I can have money for shit like this. I'm not going to start nickel and diming my own health.
Fine. He tells me it should be fine in 2 or 3 months, sells me one single brace boot for the price of a fancy pair of shoes and tells me he wants to see me next week. No dude, next week I'm seeing a doctor that my insurance covers, thank you very much.
So second appointment, third round of x-rays, my insurance covered doctor walks into the room and he starts trying to sell me pretty hard on the idea of surgery. He thinks I'm Margot Fonteyn and my career as a prima ballerina will be over. I quickly disabuse him of the notion. I like the stupid ballet but if you tell me I can't do it, I'll do something else.
So then he changes his tune and says what he should have said at the beginning. This may or may not heal correctly. You can wait to find out or I can cut you open and fix you tomorrow. Your choice.  I find it appalling that the main concern seems to be to ratchet up the invoice, rather than the best and most sensible course of action.
I had been to him once before and he solved a shoulder problem quickly and efficiently, so I don't think he is a bad doctor.  But my feeling is that the system encourages these specialists to behave like merchants in a Turkish bazaar.
Worse than this is that every time you go to a doctor's appointment or diagnostic place, you are treated like a potential criminal, not like a patient.  Where's your insurance card, do you still live where you live, who sent you here?
It's not very nice.

I'm Suing Susan Miller

She goes on and on about Mercury retrograde this month and no mention whatsoever that I was going to break my foot today, dancing a stupid Tarantella at my ballet class. I've always hated that stupid Tarantella. George Balanchine, my ass. Or I should say, my foot. It's not like I was doing a triple axle combination pirouette a la Nureyev. I was just doing these stupid little jumps.
It hurts like a mother, mind you. It's sapphire blue. And swollen like a blue corn tamale. Can't walk too well.
I saw the X-rays (I must say, my bones are gorgeous. Very dainty.)  I can clearly see the fifth metatarsal bone is broken, snapped like one of those Italian grisini bread sticks.
I've heard reports of other sundry accidents today: someone falling down the stairs, someone falling on the street. And as I write this, the light bulb of my desk lamp just gave out. Looks like there must be an eclipse on Planet Pish, or a conjunction of the two most evil planets (one of them has got to be Uranus). As you can see, this foot breakage has also rendered me incredibly puerile.
I don't care. I've decided I'm gonna spoil myself rotten (which in my case means unlimited guzzling of comfort food). But then, who knows when I will be able to exercise again.
I'm no Susan Miller, but I can tell you exactly what my future looks like: It looks like I'm gonna become the size of Moby Dick just in time for the Summer. 
So much for ballet!

Alert the media!

I can't find anything to kvetch or rant about! What is happening to me? Heeeeelp!

I could comment on Rush Limbaugh's broken promise to get the hell out of here and go pester the poor Costa Ricans, but not even that is getting my goat nowadays. These pompous hypocritical, drug addled, fat assed balloons of fetid, putrefying right wing air are so stupid it's almost pointless to make fun of them.
What happened to our healthcare bill? I don't understand the dynamics so I've stopped caring. Where are we on this? Anybody?
By the way, listen to this. I made an appointment to the eye doctor because I think I need new glasses. Can't see, can't hear, quickly becoming an old fartette. Hence, appointment.
They tell me that if I want a new prescription I have to pay $40 extra, because my insurance (which charges a $50 copay) doesn't cover a prescription. What fresh hell, to quote Dorothy Parker, is this? It's like going to the ice cream parlor and they can sell you the cone or the cup or the sprinkles, but not the ice cream.
This country has become an insane asylum. Nothing makes any sense any more. Which is why I am going to Chinatown, to my beloved Mott St. Optical, to get my prescription. This is where I got my bifocals (see old fartette, above), and the saleswoman told me: "You are going to love them. You are going to see everything!".

Perhaps you can enlighten me: why do rich people have reality shows on TV? A world in which the rich behave with even more abject vulgarity than the poor thoroughly depresses me. There are no standards anymore.
Same goes for fucking Lady Gaga. I saw her video with Beyonce (she does not depress me, somehow). Call me an old fartette, but no I didn't like the video. I like the song, but the video's trashy aesthetic is all over the place. What really disgusts me is that it's product placement central, what people in my farkakte business call, with no hint of irony or shame, branded entertainment. That even a music video today has to have product placement makes me gag. So did Virgin Mobile pay for this extended musical masturbation? Or what? Look, motherfuckers, I ain't drinking this Kool-Aid, okay? (unless you pay me handsomely to do it. I'm in advertising after all).
I saw Logorama, the animated short that won the Oscar. This is our world now, and it is not a good thing.
Hey. Looks like I got my kvetching-ranting mojo back.
:)

Major Writer's Block Under Removal

I scan the headlines and I can't be bothered, even if some of them are worth writing about. I have ennui due to over-fragmentation of information. I am also dangerously addicted to facebook in a bad way. I need an intervention or something. I tried twitter and I don't get it. I use facebook as if it was twittter so why bother?

IN OTHER NEWS:

• Obama eases travel restrictions to Cuba. Cool. He should end the embargo tout suite, establish relations and let that paleolithic regime succumb to the forces of greed and money like everywhere else.

• I don't like pirates.

• Yes I saw that poor woman on Britain's Got Talent. So now what? Are people going to take her seriously or they're just going to exploit her weirdness? If I was the ruler of the world, I would ban reality shows. But you are in luck. Or not.

• The other day I went to see a movie which was a master class on what not to do. How not to cast actors, how not to write dialogue, how not to rely on unnecessary, deadly voiceover narration, how not to adapt a novel, how not to take yourself so seriously and be pretentious when you do not know how to do things. It was hard going, but I learned a lot. The Mysteries of Philadelphia, if you must know. Doesn't even approach the mediocre competence of hackwork.

• Let me remind everybody that April in New York is always like this. It's still too cold, it rains too much, the winds are evil and no, you cannot retire your coats just yet. So stop the whining.

• April being the cruellest month, the other day I was thinking of Liz Taylor. She popped into my mind.
I was thinking that she must be very old and, given her poor health history, look very bad nowadays. And I thought that when that happens to formerly gorgeous movie icons, the best thing is either to go into hiding, or embrace your life and aged looks with a vengeance. Having said that, let's be honest: nobody wants to see a current picture of Brigitte Bardot, and nobody didn't jump and almost didn't have a heart attack when they saw Sophia Loren at the Oscars recently. What I'm saying is, being an international beauty icon is not easy, because age stops for no one, regardless of surgeons and treatments. Some stars age with class (Audrey Hepburn, Julie Christie) but it's not easy and I feel sorry for them all. If I, who have always decried the use of plastic surgery, am contemplating my drooping eyelids with something approaching horror and botox with something approaching possibility, well I can't imagine what it must be like when your otherwordly beauty is your identity. Must be a bitch. Which is why I'm glad I'm not that gorgeous.
So I did run into a recent picture of Liz Taylor in one of the cheesier tabloids. Oy. I guess that age is only good to you if you don't fight it.
Youth is fleeting. It makes me feel sad.