It seems strange to have to wear earplugs at a symphony concert…

As a CHL instructor, I have gotten into the habit of always having a set of those memory-foam earplugs in a little case in my pocket. I use them in addition to over-the-ear muffs, since I’m also a musician, and things that hurt my ears are a Big Deal. They also come in handy for several other occasions. In the past year, I have used them several times at work (twice so that the fire drill alarm wouldn’t deafen me).

Three times this year, I’ve had occasion to use them at symphony concerts, twice at the Plano Symphony, and once at the Dallas Symphony. It really strikes me as odd to have to use earplugs at a symphony concert. One concert was the Moody Blues (with the DSO), and I noticed that not only was the band wearing earplugs, but the DSO members were also wearing hearing protection (some of them wearing electronic over-the-ear muffs). The concerts with the Plano Symphony that required earplugs were the Christmas concert, and the concert last Saturday evening featuring the 5th Dimension.

Why is it that I seem to be the only person who considers it really weird that the majority of the people present at a concert, including all of the performers, have to wear hearing protection just to keep the experience from being painful? Why couldn’t the folks putting on the show just turn the volume down a bit?

But then, I didn’t like loud music when I was a teenager either.

It’s a small world after all…

The name Bob Taylor isn’t particularly rare, so I didn’t really think much about my cruise dining companion for the first couple of days. I was on a Western Caribbean cruise with a group of Texas Lions as a fund-raiser for the Lions Sight and Tissue Foundation.

On the third night, however, we got to talking about home towns. My wife and I discovered that the Taylors had grown up near Longview (where my wife is from), and then they had moved to El Paso where Bob was a high school coach for a few years. Well, I’m from El Paso, and we started comparing notes on the old home town. About 2 minutes into that line of conversation, we discovered that he was the assistant principal of Irvin High School, for most of the time I was a student there, including my senior year. Yup, that Bob Taylor.

We spent that dinner trading war stories and trying to remember names of students and teachers from the late 60’s. Fortunately, I was a pretty good student in high school, and never encountered the business end of Mr. Taylor’s paddle.

Bob Taylor is currently retired, and volunteering as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Ennis Noon Lions Club, in district 2x-1. I will probably be the Secretary of the Plano Early Lions Club (also in 2x-1) next year.

And now I can’t get that funky song from Disney World out of my head.

Icy streets in Dallas, Snow in London

It’s cold this morning in Dallas, but the streets appear to be passible, and I don’t anticipate any problems getting to work. Unlike some folks in other parts of the world, who (apparently due to something Liberals call “global warming”) are have some genuine difficulty with unusually cold weather.

I got an email from a fellow in the UK (interesting guy named Martin Avis who writes an internet marketing newsletter) who was complaining about the weather in London today, and it’s effect on the trains. When the locals complain about the train service in London, it must be REALLY bad.

Having been in London three time in the last three decades, I was consistently underwhelmed by the dependability, reliability, and timeliness of their trains. In stark contrast to the trains in Germany and Belgium, which *always* arrived and departed within one minute of the scheduled times.

Which reminds me of my 1st trip to London, about 30 years ago. We arrived at the train station early (about 5am for a 6am scheduled train to the airport), and we were looking for a place to eat some breakfast. I came across a middle-aged man pushing a broom, and asked him if there was an open restaurant nearby.

His answer consisted of at least 50 syllables, not one of which I understood, although I’m certain it was all in English. Probably laid on the accent extra thick after noting that I was a Yank.

At 7am, we went to a ticket window to inquire about the 6am train and we were told that the train was never going to arrive, since it had derailed about 10km outside of London. The lady who told us that did not seem to think that sort of problem was at all unusual, or even remarkable enough to bother notifying anyone waiting for the 6am train. We had to take a taxicab to the airport, but we did manage to arrive (barely) in time to catch our flight. Interestingly, the taxicab fare was about the same as the train fare would have been. Since we were leaving the country, we tipped the driver with all of our remaining English currency, about 30 pounds. He did a heroic job of getting us there in time.

The 2nd and 3rd trips (2nd for business, 3rd as a stopover for a North Sea cruise) were not an improvement. The trains were consistently so late that I had to plan to be at my destination at least one hour early in order to make it no more than an hour late. At least I was able to take a chartered bus to the cruise departure. But by the 3rd trip to London, I knew better than to rely on train transport.

The trains were not the only problem, of course. The prices for everything were so far out of reason that I don’t understand why anybody would want to live in, work in, or even visit London. The only bright spot was that taxicab travel was inexpensive and an order of magnitude more dependable and comfortable than the trains.

I have no particular desire to visit London again.

Funny thing happened on the way to El Paso…

I got on the plane, put my stuff in the overhead bin, and sat down & fastened my seat belt. After a few minutes, a female voice started droning on about the various safety features, yada, yada, yada. I was well on my way to zoning out (in a mild funk about having to fly anyway) when … “our flight time today will be one hour, twenty-one minutes, and fifteen seconds.”

“Huh?” I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard that right. Must’ve imagined it. I started to drift off again.

“yada, yada, yada… our cruising altitude will be thirty-six thousand and three feet, five and one-half inches.”

“Huh?“ Looked around, but nobody else appeared to be reacting. But this time, I’m pretty sure I heard it right.  Stewardess gotta be bored out of her ever-lovin’… “place your own mask on first, then assist any children, or other adults acting like children.”

All right, I get it. I opened up the safety information sheet, read through it, and located the nearest exits like a good boy. Guess it worked, eh?

I adjusted the neck support as best I could, and tried to settle in for a one-hour, twenty-one minute, and fifteen second nap.

40-year High School Reunion

I’m about 5 book reviews behind (yes, I read a lot), but life just happens while you are busy making other plans. I’ve been really busy the last couple of weeks, and the next few weeks will be even busier, but I just have to write about this weekend while the memories are relatively fresh.

I just got back from my 40-year reunion of my high school, and I have a number of mixed emotions from that. I was disappointed that there were a number of people I had hoped to see who did not come this time. I was a bit depressed to see how everyone had aged — with a few notable exceptions.

And I was really glad to see a few folks that I hadn’t seen in 40 years. Melissa, especially. She was one of the few classmates to age quite gracefully. I think that, if anything, she is even more beautiful now than she was when I had that awful crush on her back in my senior year. And still scary-smart. And still one of the most pleasant people I have ever had the pleasure to know. She was one of the three girls that I had a crush on (not at the same time), and the only one of the three that I actually worked up enough nerve to tell about how I felt. She was relatively gentle in disabusing me of any notion that I had any chance at all, but I was still devastated. For about 15 minutes, anyway; I had a pretty clear idea even at that time that it was a really long shot, and looking back now, I can see that she called that one about right. She had been voted the girl Most Likely to Succeed, and I asked her if she thought she had lived up to that. She replied that she had succeeded past her wildest expectations. She’s working as a programmer in linguistics applications, married to a fine artist, and has two daughters who are now grown and pursuing their own careers. She still has that wonderfully infectious smile. I can’t help but be happy for her.

Patty the cheerleader didn’t look like she had aged much, either. I never had a crush on Patty, but I did consider her very attractive back in the day. She still is. Married, widowed, and remarried, she is now doing very well as a Realtor.

Lea and Rosemary (my other two teen-age crushes) could not be there, but I did get to visit with them both at the 30-year reunion, and I’ve heard from others that they are still doing well. Rosemary is a busy family-law attorney, and Lea is making quite a name for herself as an artist. I recall that they were both surprised (and amused) when I told them what a crush I had on them back in high school.

I was really disappointed by the absence of my best friend Roy. We have pretty much drifted apart, but I really expected him to be there, since he still lives only a couple of miles from the old high school.

Zoomer was there. He now has a neurological disorder that has made it difficult for him to walk and use his hands, but he was in good spirits, and appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself. Funny how time alters perceptions. He greeted me with great enthusiasm and a hug as a long-lost friend when I got there, but I recall that he was basically the class clown, and he seemed to take special delight in tormenting me my senior year. As a joke, he nominated me as a candidate for “Most Handsome”, which got quite a laugh (I had one of the most severe cases of acne of anybody in my graduating class). If there had been a category for “Nerdiest”, I might have won that one.

Then there was Andy. Andy just barely remembered me, but I remembered him quite well. Back in 7th grade, we got into a fist-fight. I won, which is probably why he doesn’t remember. He signed my yearbook anyway.

It was a time of melancholy mixed with celebration. It’s sobering that about 5% of my graduating class (of 438) is now deceased, and more so to realize that in ten years, that will be closer to 20%. It was interesting to drive around the old home town, but I haven’t forgotten why I left, and I have no desire to ever live in the desert again. It’s good to be back home.

Now, back to real life…

How to Get the Best Deal on Health Care

Healthcare has been in the news a lot lately, and that has caused me to reflect on some of my own experiences with healthcare.

I had a brief and largely unsuccessful ‘career’ as an insurance agent. (I allowed my licenses to expire long ago, so you don’t have to run shrieking for the door.)

Why insurance sales? Well, I had worked as a contract programmer for a larger life insurance company for about a year and a half, and during that time, I had completed most of the LOMA courses, and would have qualified for the LOMA Life Master designation if they hadn’t discontinued it a couple of months before I would have been eligible. So I knew a lot about insurance, including the math and actuarial science behind it, the laws governing insurance companies, the principles of operation, and owing to my work on a quoting system that agent could use to help maximize their commissions from a given mix of insurance products, I knew a lot about how agents work. Or so I thought. Any rate, when the contract programming market went soft in 2002, I got my insurance licenses (both P&C and L&H), and tried for a while to make a living that way.

Turns out that knowing how insurance works, and being able to sell it effectively are unrelated skills. In fact, one of my observations during my stint as an agent is that the best-performing agents didn’t really know much about insurance at all; what they knew was sales.

Having actually run some numbers, it was obvious to me that the very best deal available (to a non-politician) in the health insurance business is a combination of a High-Deductable Health Plan (HDHP) and a Health Savings Account (HSA). Very few companies actually offer this combination, probably because it is inexplicably unpopular. I tried many times to explain this to potential clients, and it’s like it was talking to a brick wall. With very few exceptions, everyone wanted health insurance that covered EVERYTHING, including such items as yearly checkups, immunizations, and routine office visits.

I was appalled. This is like trying to buy car insurance that covers oil changes, wiper blades, and tires! It is a guaranteed recipe for paying about four times as much as you really need to for healthcare. You will get a MUCH LOWER overall medical care expense if you get insurance that doesn’t cover anything at all except catastrophic injury or illness that costs more than $5000, and set aside (preferably in an HSA) that $5000 in an emergency expenses account. The insurance premiums will be about 20% to 30% of what full-coverage runs, which will probably save you well over $5000/year. The basic principle at work is that if any time you “insure” against something that is predictable, you aren’t really getting insurance. You are pre-paying for routine care, and your money will be skimmed at least 3 or 4 times before it actually pays for that care. The purpose of insurance is to shield you from the unpredictable — the insurance companies are much better at predicting things than you are, and will gladly charge you for that.

There is yet another really important principle at work here — the fact that insurance companies stand between you and your doctor drives up the cost of all medical care dramatically. Part of this is due to the fact that there are 2 or 3 extra fingers in the pie, and part of this is due to the Faustian bargain that the medical industry has made with the insurance industry. The doctor now receives some arbitrary fee for his/her services, and gets that money from 90 to 120 days later. Meanwhile, the doctor has a business to run and employees to pay, and often ends up doing so on borrowed money. If the arbitrary fee happens to be arbitrarily denied, then the doctor has to either eat it, or go after the patient. So they end up playing the “insurance game”.

Let me illustrate this with a personal anecdote. About 20 years ago, I was shopping around for the best deal on an overnight stay in a sleep clinic. I called ten different sleep clinics (back then they were relatively challenging to find), and got quotes that varied from $4500 to $6500 for what amounts to a stay in a high-tech hotel with a couple of full-time attendants (one for each 4-5 patients), strapped to monitoring equipment that costs maybe $25,000. I was getting really discouraged. But the last one I called gave me a shocking clue: The girl that gave me the the quote asked me why I cared about the expense. “After all, your insurance will pay for it, less a small deductible.”

I replied with the explanation that I did not have health insurance (actually, technically, I did, but it had a $5000 deductible), and that I would be paying cash. To my utter astonishment, she came back with, “Oh, the cash-in-advance price is $1750.” Less than half of the first figure she mentioned.

After I hung up, and gave that a few minutes to sink in, I went back and called all of the other sleep clinics again, this time asking for the cash-in-advance (“I’m paying for this out of my own pocket”) price. The prices quoted were in the range $1100 to $1750, down from $4500 to $6500.

Quite a revelation. That’s the cost of insurance that covers “everything”.

Project 2996, Remembering Michael J. Berkeley

I signed up for project 2996 about a month ago, and was assigned a name of one of the 2,996 people killed in the WTC atrocity. The name was chosen at random.

The name I drew was Michael J. Berkeley.

Michael J. Berkeley was murdered, along with many of his co-workers, on his 37th birthday, while working for Merrill Lynch’s sales and trading section at the World Trade Center.

Michael Berkeley was born on September 11, 1963, in New Rochelle, New York. He was a standout athlete as early as grade school, playing both basketball and football, but his real love was golf, starting at the age of 12, when he started caddying at the Winged Foot Golf Club. His passion for golf never subsided. At the time of his murder, he was a member at Winged Foot Golf Club, Atlantic Golf Club, Muirfield Village Golf Club, and Hudson National Golf Club.

Michael is survived by his wife, Lourdes, and his two sons, Eric, and Jason. His wife founded, and serves as the chairperson of, the Michael J. Berkeley Foundation, a charitable organization that provides scholarships and other assistance to minority youth, helping them to realize their highest potential in the sport of golf, through education, business ventures, or a professional golf career.

RIP

Rest in Peace, Mary Jo Kopechne.

My Marksmanship Epiphany

Epiphany (n): A sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

I wasn’t always a good shot.  I studied (and even taught) marksmanship in high school — I was in JROTC, and I tried out for the rifle team, and actually made it.  But I certainly wasn’t the best shot on the team.  In fact, I was usually the lowest scorer on the team in most matches.

Fortunately for my team, in a rifle match, you only had to count the top 5 scores (out of 6), so I was nearly always the “scratch man”.  Good enough to get on the team (just barely), but not good enough to really help them.

I could shoot really well in the prone and kneeling positions.  I would typically shoot 99/100 or 100/100 prone, and 95/100 or better in kneeling.  Respectable, but so could all the other team members.  I would then proceed to drop 30 or more points in the standing or “offhand” position, compared to 10 or fewer for the other team members.

I knew all the theory; BRASS (Breathe/Relax/Aim/Slack/Squeeze), natural point of aim, etc., but I just could not get my offhand score up into a decent range.  I tried a number of things.  I practiced nearly every day, coming in an hour before school started, and coming back to the range after school for an hour. I tried lifting weights and various other strength training exercises. All that helped, but not enough to move me out of “scratch” position.

During the very last match I ever shot with the Irvin HS Rifle Team, something happened that had a lasting effect on my marksmanship skills.  I went into the match with my usual 100/100 in prone, dropped only 2 in kneeling, and then… just by pure dumb luck, my first offhand shot was a scratch-bull.  I knew it when the shot went off; it felt dead on.  That did happen from time to time, so that wasn’t a Really Big Deal.

But then one of the coaches on the other team turned to his assistant coach, and said “I thought you said this Harkness character couldn’t shoot shit for offhand.”  Even with my hearing protection on, I heard it clearly.  That remark had a truly wonderful (in the original sense of the word) effect on me.  It was like a giant hand came out of the sky to steady my rifle.  The next shot was also a scratch bull, but this time, it wasn’t pure dumb luck; I simply COULD NOT MISS.  The next shot was a pinwheel, followed by another scratch bull.  I only dropped 4 points offhand that day, which moved me from “scratch man” to high scorer, and I finished with a 294/300, the highest I had ever shot, even counting practice sessions.

After the match, my coach came up to me, and asked, “What the HELL got into you, Harkness?”  I told him what had happened, whereupon he replied, “Shit.  I wish I’d thought of that two years ago.”

To this day, I can’t put the sights on target without hearing “I thought you said this Harkness character couldn’t shoot shit for offhand” in my mind.  And the effect has never worn off.

Black Friday, indeed

This morning, a WalMart clerk was trampled to death by a mob of morons that charged the door as it was opened.

This Black Friday crap has gone way over the top.

Last year, I thought I’d get out early and shop some of the bargains to be had on the day after Thanksgiving at the local Fry’s. It did not occur to me that I would not even be able to find a parking spot (at least, not a legal one) anywhere in the same zipcode. This year, I slept in, and I enjoyed that a LOT more.