Hearing Aid experiences, The Captain and Tennille and Obamacare, target practice, and black holes

View 807 Friday, January 24, 2014

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

I have made another discovery regarding hearing aids. When I got my new COSTCO hearing aids, the world changed for the better. However, I noticed that sometimes I could not quite hear someone, as for example at a LASFS meeting, where some people speak in lower tones. Everyone seemed to hear them but me; but then I hit on putting a finger in my ear. You would not think that would improve hearing, but it did, reliably.

So today I went back to COSTCO and asked about that, and was told that I probably needed somewhat larger ‘domes’ – the little rubber cones that go on the ends of the little tubes that lead into the ears. This would have the same effect as the larger domes. So we tried that, and lo! while the improvement is nothing like the difference between not having the devices and having them, it is a dramatic improvement – enough so that I have been wandering around the house with an oilcan lubricating squeaking hinges that I had not before known were squeaking.

I also got a fourth program for my devices. This one is the same as the primary program but reduces the sibilant sounds, which I was hearing as too loud. I can retune these things as often as I like until we get it right. I don’t know about other COSTCO outlets, but the people in the Burbank COSTCO Audio department are cheerful, competent, and eager to be helpful. If there are any COSTCO managers reading this, please let the Burbank GM know this…

We bought this house in 1968. Across the street on Laurel Terrace there is one layer of houses, then the beginning of a 50 square mile nature conservancy. If you go west on Laurel Terrace then south on Viewcrest you come to a tiny stub called Shady Oak Road. That goes east about half a block and ends at a gated driveway. A trail north leads up into the conservancy from there, and it’s my usual way of going up the hill to the main fire roads and around to the Tree People headquarters in the old fire station up there. The trail and the roads circle but never come near a large house that stands like an island in the conservancy. When we moved here that house belonged to and was occupied by Carmen Dragon, the conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. If you look for Shady Oak Road you may be able to find it.

About 1972 Carmen Dragon moved out and the house was occupied by his son Daryl Dragon, keyboard artist with The Beach Boys. Daryl applied for the job of keyboard accompanist to Antoinette Tennille, got it, and then hired her as a keyboard accompanist for the Beach Boys, making her the only Beach Girl. Daryl Dragon was known as “The Captain”, and they developed an act called “The Captain and Tennille,” and presently they were married in 1975.

Prior to their marriage the Dragon House up there in the conservancy was the scene of wild parties, and was occupied by a number of musicians, including the Beach Boys. There were off road motorcycles, and although there is no direct connection between the Dragon House and the fire roads through the conservancy, they managed to develop trails, so that at any time when you were taking a walk through the hills you might encounter several young men driving recklessly through the chaparral. Someone painted out “Shady Oak Road” and repainted the street sign to read “Snow Mountain”, and if the wind was in the right direction there was no mistaking the smell of marijuana coming from the Dragon House. And the parties got very loud at night.

The Conservancy is a State Park, and is supposedly in the jurisdiction of State Park Rangers, but there are never very many of them. LAPD almost never goes up there. No one interfered with the Big Dragon Parties.

I have seen LAPD motorcycle units up in the conservancy when a film crew manages to get up to the flats to film a scene, but not otherwise. And one day at the highest point of the fire road – still a hundred yards from the true summit — an LAPD Homicide detective unit was wandering about on the fire roads asking about rumors of cultist activities up on the summit where the fire roads don’t go. Had I been up there? Yes. Had I seen Pentacles and witchcraft signs? Well, yes, sort of.

The detective who was asking me about what was going on up there was wearing Hollywood loafers and silk dress socks, neat wool slacks, and a blazer with brass buttons; he was never going to get up to the places he was asking about. I told him that sometimes a discharged veteran rearranged some of the rocks and brush to improve the area, and someone had drawn a Pentacle with rocks.

Actually there was a partly disabled veteran camping up there, and sometimes local community college fraternities and sororities had ceremonies up there, but there were no bodies up there (and no one was missing for that matter). The detective was clearly reluctant to go up the steep narrow trail to the summit, and I don’t blame him.

I am sure the detective was competent in his element, but he would have made an awful Scoutmaster. We used to take the Scouts up there to collect any trash left by hikers, and sometimes to clear a bit of brush on the upper trails, but of course our kids knew what they were doing in a briar patch. The summit hill is mostly a blackberry and laurel hell, impassible if you don’t know the trails. The thought of this expensively dressed detective finding his way in or out of there was a bit amusing. Nothing ever came of the investigation, of course.

Anyway, just after The Captain and Tennille were married, all the activities at the Dragon House stopped, everyone moved out, and the property went on the market. I could have bought it for half a million or so (in the early 1970’s), but with four boys to get through their educations I didn’t have anything like that to invest; and actually I wouldn’t have wanted to live up there. It’s a good mile from the Studio City village I live in, and half that from its nearest neighbor. A great place to live for a reclusive writer, but not for a busy household like ours. Now, of course, the land alone would go for several million dollars, and the house, although old, is worth at least two million.

The story we heard in the village was that Toni Tennille had laid down the law: The Captain would give up this pie-eyed retinue, stop drinking and doping, and get his act together or she was leaving. They moved – some said to his father’s place in Malibu, others said to Pasadena – and for a while The Captain and Tennille were a popular act. I rather liked their routines.

And over time I lost track of them. Understand I was never part of their circle, and if I met them it would have been at some event or another, and I don’t even remember which neighborhood gossip told me the story of Tennille laying down the law to the Captain. And, as I said, I lost track of them.

This week the news was out: after 39 years of marriage, Tennille was divorcing The Captain. He is quoted as saying he had no idea this was coming and has no notion of why she is doing this. It also transpires that he continues to live with her in the house in Arizona they built a decade ago.

Apparently The Captain has developed something like Parkinson’s and is no longer a reliable keyboard artist. He has no income. Tennille sometimes gets a gig, but mostly they live on the residuals of her backlist. She still gets some royalties. They haven’t had much in the way of a hit in a long time.

He has had the “like Parkinson’s” disorders for some years. Treatments for this sort of thing are expensive.

All of which leads to a speculation: why, after 39 years, should one of show business’s most stable couples break up for no visible reason? What has happened that would cause that? And one answer could be The Affordable Care Act. Consider: the income is very nearly all hers. The medical treatment expenses are all his. Under the Affordable Care Act, if he is destitute he is entitled to subsidies for his health care. He can apply for the best health care available because he cannot be turned down for his pre-existing condition. (He could have been until January 2014 when the Affordable Care Act took effect.) If it were not for his health care expenses, apparently they could live a decent retirement life, but medical expenses are eating up their retirement income. If they divorce and she gets it all, he is destitute and entitled to health insurance subsidies, and no insurance company can turn him down just because he has an expensive disorder.

Note that all the above is pure speculation. I am after all a science fiction writer.

I also wish them well. I would not call myself a fan of The Captain and Tennille, but I did enjoy several of their performances, and I was very much a fan of his father when he was at the Hollywood Bowl. I wish them well.

Virtual Pistol Practice

This is frickin’ awesome!

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

This is pretty cool, you have to click on the trigger in order to bring up the target.

Hand and eye coordination, sight alignment, etc.

VERY ACCURATE AND ADDICTIVE.

Check this one out, see how good you are with a Russian pistol, the Makarov. All text is in Russian.

Save powder and money! When the pistol appears, click on the trigger, aim, and fire. It’s really self-explanatory.

The more you fire, the liklier you are to get NRA solicitations.

You have 3 shots in 30 seconds to hit the target and get your score. It’s addictive.

http://www.deti.mil.by/templates/swf/Pistol/index.swf

I enthusiastically agree with Couv’s assessment. Lots of fun and free. And pretty good practice, too.

 

“An object like that, invisible to telescopes and with such large mass, can only be a black hole because no neutron star with more than three solar masses can exist.”

<http://www.astronomy.com/news/2014/01/spanish-researchers-discover-the-first-black-hole-orbiting-a-spinning-star>

Roland Dobbins

But then we have:

So, Hawking has now decided he was all wrong, and there’s really no such thing as a black hole.

<http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583>

He also notes that we can’t predict the weather with any accuracy; does this mean that he isn’t a ‘warmist’?

Roland Dobbins

I invite explanations from those who think about these things…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.