Dysfunctional Stinking

This is Henry, who belonged to Pat Myers, The Empress of The Invitational. The photo was taken immediately after the family walked into the house. Henry is illustrating a topic you will be talking about in a few minutes: Smart and dumb pet antics. We’re not sure which one this is.

Hello. Today we talk about institutional dysfunction. And after that, dogs and cats. But first, as always, a poll. This one is grisly:

You are driving after having a few beers. You know you shouldn’t be, but it happened. You feel fine, and are driving fine, being extra careful because you know you are legally under the influence. A pedestrian darts out in front of you from the darkness; there isn’t even time to hit the brakes. You kill him, without any question. The accident wasn’t your fault, without any question. If you call the police right then and there, your life will be destroyed, without any question. The victim was an old man, possibly a vagrant. You’re in a dark rural area. No one’s around. No cars in sight. No cameras. Your car is not badly damaged. You are far from home. You have family who depend on you for love and their livelihood.

Obviously no one knows for sure what they would do in a moral crises until it happens to them. But what do you think?

Okay, dysfunction:

Three months ago I had a four-day stay in a fine hospital that gave me excellent care. I was not in great shape after reacting very badly to what was supposed to be outpatient surgery, but for reasons still undiagnosed, I could not leave the hospital that day or any day soon after. I could not walk steadily. My blood pressure dipped and swerved alarmingly, as I wrote here two months ago:

… the biggest problem is that after the surgery my blood pressure began pogo-sticking up and down — sometimes resembling the numbers associated with a professional swimmer of the English Channel, and sometimes the numbers associated with a dying fat guy who had stroked out and was at the bottom of a swimming pool.

It was four days before I could walk safely and my blood pressure began to resemble something quasi-normal. During that time I did not receive elaborate medical care. There were no significant or delicate “procedures.” It was mostly a wait-and-watch protocol, which was fine with me. I ate and slept and worried. At one point, the docs decided that perhaps this was somehow the result of a dissolute lifestyle and ordered a liver sonogram. Startlingly even to me, my liver turned out to be normal. And then I was discharged.

A few days ago, the hospital mailed me an accounting of what they would be charging. It was $79,652.47. I am looking at the document right now, still stunned. This is almost exactly what the Hotel Pierre in New York charges for four days in its Presidential Suite, which is a two-bedroom floor-through stunner with Murano glass tables and chandeliers, damask wallpaper, a silver-leaf dining table, an interior balcony and balustrade with Grecian statuary, floor to ceiling brocade draperies, a Bang & Olufsen home theater system, a panoramic view of Central Park, a conference room, a fully stocked wet bar, a direct private phone number to the Concierge Team, 24-hour white gloved elevator attendants, use of a Jaguar house car, and (presumably), daily hand jobs. My hospital room had a toilet.

It was not a final bill. It was the charges accrued before the hospital had begun negotiating with Medicare, my main insurance provider. Breaking it down, the charge for the use of the operating room and OR staff for four hours was $34,028.01. Medical and surgical supplies were $10,104.71. Recovery room services were $15,594.18. Anesthesia alone added $1,176.32. The bill helpfully included a phone number to determine “your financial assistance opportunities.”

The whole thing came to such an astonishing number that I asked my surgeon about it. She burst out laughing. “Yeah, they do that,” she said. That bill, she said, has no resemblance to what I will pay, or even what the hospital will brazenly attempt to charge Medicare for, prior to negotiations. The two medical behemoths will probably whittle it down to a total of $10,000 or so, she predicted, and I will be responsible for only a modest portion of that.

“Then why do they even bother with that stupid, insulting, inflated, alarming dishonest, manipulative charade of a bill?” I asked.

The surgeon looked sad. Not sad enough, if you ask me, but sad.

“Because that is what they will charge people without insurance, then get what they can,” she said. They’d be negotiating from an advantageous position, based on that terrifying, pants-soiling initial salvo.

Our medical-care system is not, as our politicians are wont to say, “the best in the world.” Our doctors are fine. Our equipment is first rate. But our system blows chunks.

—

On to another systemic societal dysfunction, this one non-governmental. Almost exactly one year ago, Rachel Manteuffel wrote in the Washington Post magazine about an thunderously stupid situation involving the lack of shopping carts at a single Safeway store in Washington D.C. The carts are serially stolen by customers.

Here is her story. It is very short and you should read it. It appeared just months before the newspaper killed its excellent magazine and fired almost all of its writers and editors (in yet another grotesque non-governmental dysfunction).

The Safeway in question is the store Rachel and I shop at, the place from which we buy most of our groceries. So I am there all the time, and I can report to you that a full year later they have not yet figured out some dadgum way to solve the problem. There are still usually zero carts or handbaskets available.

Shoppers have since taken matters into their own hands. One person, for example, who happened to be me, once dismantled a stack of canned tomatoes, and put the cans on the floor, so he could use as a basket the cardboard tray that they were stacked in. I saw one woman who opened a large umbrella, and held it upside down, near the floor, so she could transport her purchases in it. There have been yelling matches over the rights to an available cart, and taut race-walking sprints between two or more people to get to one.

HOW CAN THIS BE AN IRRESOLVABLE PROBLEM?

Supermarket cart-stealing is a common situation elsewhere, but this particular Safeway at 14th and D Streets Southeast seems to have the dubious distinction of being the national epicenter of cart thefts, like Bakersfield, California is for car thefts, and Bessemer, Alabama is for violent crime and Yuma, Arizona is for nosebleeds.

I have been talking to Safeway employees, not for attribution — as Rachel’s story says, official Safeway stonewalls the media when asked to explain this situation on the record. The employees are ashamed and tired of questions, and gladly spew negative comments about their employer’s unwillingness or incompetence to confront the problem … but also about the many hundreds of thieves responsible for the problem. The problem exists because people — presumably those without vehicles — simply leave with the carts and walk home, where they abandon the carts on the street, to rot and rust.

I asked one employee: “You could get security carts, couldn’t you, that are programmed to lock their wheels when they get too far from the store?”

“We bought a lot of those,” said one employee, rolling her eyes. “They’ll still steal ‘em.” They push them down the block, she said, wheels locked, leaning into them as though they were weighted football tackling sleds.

One guy, a hired security officer in the store, said that some of the people who steal the carts also steal the contents of the carts, laden with groceries. It’s hard to tell who has been through checkout and who has not if the merch is in bags, which you can get in bunches, for free. “They’ll just fill their cart and walk the hell out of here.”

Aaand they’re allowed to walk out with the carts — the in-store cop can’t stop them — because, as a courtesy, the store wants people to be able to wheel their purchases to their cars. They helpfully supply a ramp , which means you don’t have to bump-push carts up the stairs to the street. (The ramp is intended for wheelchair accessibility, of course, but that seems to have become a secondary use.)

Again: HOW CAN THIS BE AN IRRESOLVABLE PROBLEM? Are we not The United States of America? (I’d use a put-a-man-on-the-moon argument, but that might have posed fewer challenges. )

I had an idea; a multi-pronged approach. I broached it to one of the customer service officers at the store. What if the company hired two extra guards, one at each entrance, whose sole job it was to follow everyone leaving the store while pushing a cart, and offer to walk them to their cars? And if the person says they are walking it home and will of course return it (this is theoretically permissible), the guard requires ID, and says that if they are not back in a half hour with the cart, they will turn the name and ID over to the police! Wouldn’t that work?

I was pretty pleased with myself. But the customer service rep just laughed.

“Ain’t never gonna happen,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“‘Onaconna this is Safeway. We do things maximum stupid.”

Do you have certain feelings about the war in Ukraine? Are your feelings similar to those of Vladimir Putin? No? Then you might want to drop by Ruta, a new Ukrainian restaurant on Seventh Street in Capitol Hill. The place took over the space that had been occupied by the now defunct Montmartre, considered one of the best French restaurants in D.C. Ruta is a worthy successor. Rachel and I had a spectacular meal there. Order the Salo, which is cured pork fat served on toast with mustard and it is delicate and gorgeous and infinitely better and fancier than it sounds. Or stick to the succulent pierogi dumplings.

Or ask us a question or make an observation I will address right here.

INTRODUCING a new occasional Gene Pool feature: Hypochondria! I will disclose a seemingly benign symptom that can herald the onset of a horrible disease. Today it is … hiccups. These are from my first book, “The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death.” Its subtitle was “Hiccups can mean cancer.”

Hiccups are harmless, except when they aren’s. No other commonly reported symptim has quite so many potentially dire explanations. Persistent hiccups cross into virtually every medical specialty. Neurologists know they can accompany the onset of a deadly stroke or an inoperable tuor in the medulla of the brain. Cardiologists will not rule out an oncoming heart attack or an aortic aneurysm. Nephrologist s]will suspect kidney failure. Gastroenterologists know hiccups can indicate an “irritation” of the diaphragm or of some other organ, particularly one that touches the vagus or phrenic nerves, which control the swallowing and breathing reflexes.

On the inside of the body, an irritation is often a tumor. Hiccups have been associated with tumors in or around the lung, or in the diaphragm, the liver, the pancreas, the stomach and even the sigmoid colon, which is down near the butthole and should not, by the Grace of God, have anything to do with breathing.

Okay, now we move on to the vaunted real-time Question and Answer phase of the Gene Pool, in which I respond to your Questions and Observations, and answer them. Many of these observations will respond to my call, in the Weekend Gene Pool, for stories of startlingly smart, or startlingly dumb, actions you have witnessed from pets. Reminder: If you are reading this in real time, please remember to keep refreshing the page to see new items.

(In introducing this challenge on the weekend, I neglected to mention one of my dogs,  when I was around ten years old. Penelope was a little mutt, and had an enormous vocabulary because she was home all day alone with my ma, who spoke to her constantly.  Penny wasn’t just a “sit” and “stay” dog. She knew what the “refrigerator” was, and the “bathroom,” and the name of every member of the family, and “do you have water?” which she would respond to by trotting to her bowl. But most startlingly, she had the ability to string tasks.  My mother would give her a toy and say “Go to Pop, then bring it to Gene.  And Penny would plance to my father, wag and display her toy, and go to me and deliver the toy at my feet.  Never saw another dog do that.) 

Q: What do you think about Menendez? 

A: He needs to be put behind bars.  But make them gold, in recognition of his awesome status in society. 

Q: I don’t know if empathy counts as smart, but in my book it ranks high: my brilliant yellow Lab Zack was home with my wife when she was sick one day. The phone rang, she took it to the bed and received some devastating news from a dear friend (his wife’s cancer diagnosis). When she hung up, weeping, Zack jumped on the bed, licked her tears and then used his muzzle to push that damned phone (and its bad effect) off the bed.

A: Empathy counts as smart. It’s emotional intelligence. Years ago, my wife was rehearsing a monologue (she acted in community theater.  She was rehearsing a scene from Marsha Norman’s play “‘Night, Mother,” about a woman trying to talk her adult daughter out of suicide.  It is excruciating; the woman is confronting her daughter’s impending death as well as her own guilt .  Our old yellow Labrador, Harry, watched this with increasing anxiety.  He had never seen Mom so unhappy.  She could not continue because he kept nuzzling her hand and jumping in her lap and licking her face to make the pain go away. 

TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this right now on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Dysfunctional…” ) for the full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post from about noon to roughly 1 p.m. ET today.

Also, it would be really swell and greatly appreciated if you supported this here site with $4.15 a month. We need it, and in return you get to be my employer. You can boss me around.

Q: Growing up I had a smart cat. He understood how to open doors by turning doorknobs; he could only get a purchase on some of the ones in the house, but he would try them all. He was an outdoor cat who would often follow me to the school bus stop, except instead of crossing the roads topside (as I did) he’d use the storm drains, going down one and popping out another on the opposite side. And he would charge at golden retrievers who were being walked and were leashed, but the time several raccoons got into the house and ate out of the cat food bowl, he hid himself under the piano bench and knew better to engage.

A: The storm drain thing is REALLY smart.

Q: My Nickelback – something I like and most people don’t – is sitting in the middle back seat of a sedan with friends on mid length (~20 minutes - 2 hour) trips. I’m not tall enough to need the extra leg room, and it’s only on long trips that I want a lot of stuff accessible. Today’s society has a real issue with sexualizing touch, and it’s a good way to experience the actual, physical, irl presence of friends without seeming weird. Until we internalize the scientific articles on how much regular platonic touch we as a species need to thrive, I’ll just be smushed in or falling on top of people during weird turns, please. - a Gen Z reader 

A: At the risk of sounding offensive, this is kinda hot.

Q: This is about two dogs, Paris and Kady, who lived with me at the same time, affording me a wonderful, scientific view of the canine intelligence spectrum. 

SMARTEST: Kady was a terrier mix who once saved my life. I lived in a duplex where, because NYC urban planning is what it is, had the kitchen on the top floor. I was about 165 months pregnant with my first child and had just lain down in bed after cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. Kady usually snuggled up to me and fell asleep right away, but that night she seemed restless. She kept running to the stairs, which were blocked by a dog gate and barking, and instead of getting up and seeing what she was barking about, I tried calling her back to bed. Anyone who has ever lived with a terrier knows that not only do they not listen to reason, but that they are much, much smarter than humans. I waddled over to the gate and opened it, figuring that maybe she wanted one last drink before bed. She tore up the stairs, disappeared into the kitchen and kept barking. I finally hauled my big, pregnant body up the stairs, only to see her with her paws up on the stove and looking back at me. I had left the burners on, and she had been trying to tell me about the potential danger. She also found fascinating ways to mess with Paris’ single brain cell, but that’s another story.

 DUMBEST: Paris, the dog that was ruled by Kady, did not believe in screen doors, despite visual evidence that they existed. We had a sliding glass door out to the backyard and, in nice weather, we would keep it open with the outer screen door closed, so bugs would not get in. When Paris had had enough sun basking, he would run toward the door and take a flying leap through the door that he assumed was open and inevitably, he would bounce off the screen. Even after 10 years of living in the exact same place with the exact same door leading out to the exact same backyard, he would get up, shake himself off, back a certain distance away and take another run at the doorway, absolutely certain that this was the time he would succeed in getting through.

Q: How does one become a John Beresford Tipton? 

A:  One has a great idea and ruthlessly pursues it in an amoral quest for money.  You mean like the recent anonymous gifter of a year’s subscription to the Gene Pool.  (The subscriptions went out yesterday.)  

 There’s a complicated answer  to your question. .  You can do it, and it would be generous.   But you cannot be JBT.  That pseudonym is taken by the first person to come up with the idea. 

I will invent a good pseudonym for the next person who anonymously funds four subscriptions.  It might be Cosimo de Medici, the great art patron of the Renaissance.

The smartest thing I’ve seen a dog do.

Q: When our daughter and her husband leave town, which they do fairly often, we dogsit for their 18 month old Irish doodle, Pippa. Pippa regards these occasional fortnights as summer camp, a heady, exhausting time crammed with activities. Her favorite activities are chase and tennis ball retrieval.

My wife and I both swim laps in the pool. When Pippa, who was intrigued by the pool to begin with but scared to get too near it, saw me going back and forth in the water, she raced out of the house and met me at the far end of the pool, where she growled, pretended to attack, then raced around to the other side of the pool and waited for me to repeat her act - the funnest ever version of chase.

After a few laps, as she waited at one end for me, you could almost see the lightbulb switch on above her head. She sprinted off zigging around the yard as if hunting for something. She sprinted back just in time to meet me at the other end, her tennis ball in her mouth. If pool chase was a blast, obviously combining it with her other favorite game would be even more fun. She bounced the ball on the coping, caught it, bounced it, caught it, until I was almost at the wall, then dropped the ball in the water. I threw it as far as I could, she chased it down before it had even stopped bouncing, snatched it in mid air and ran to the other side of the pool, where she once again dropped it in the water and waited for me to get there and throw it. She kept this up for all 40 lengths of my swim.

A: This is from Tom the Butcher, like me an old man. The entire point of this post was to show he can still do forty laps.  

Q: Around 25 years or so ago a coworker was touring Russia when her intestines got blocked.. The hospital said she had to pay upfront for the surgery before they could operate. The charge was $90.

A: Sigh.

Q: I would like you to address the issue of "patient care advocates," which in former times were known as "people who answer the phone." My scourge is Luminis Health Care, which some years back took over the Anne Arundel Medical Center and hospital complex. Recently it took me two days to make a medical appointment, thanks to their boffo system of "patient care advocates," who shall henceforth be known as "the poor schmuck in Sri Lanka who gets paid $6 an hour for the overnight shift."

Here's how it went: 1. I was given a printout at my doctor's office telling me how to make this appointment. I called the first number, and got a recording saying this person was the coordinator for Drs X, Y and Z-- but not my doctor. 2. I see a second number on the printout, and call that. I get voice mail. I leave a message. 3. Then--by chance--I look at my online patient portal and I have a message from Luminis giving me a THIRD number to call. I call it and get put on hold for 20 minutes; finally leave my number. 4. That patient portal message said if I have trouble getting through, here's another number to call. So, call number 4, I get voice mail, leave a message. 5. I go for a walk and forget my cellphone and of course when i come back....I have missed a call. I call them back and get put on hold for 15 minutes. Then a person comes on and says, "You've called the wrong number." This takes me a minute. "YOU called ME" I said. "Yeah, but this is the wrong number to call. This is for scheduling an MRI."

The lady who I'm now talking to says the very first number I called was the correct one, even though the recording on that line does not mention my doctor. With all of these calls, the problem is that if you leave a message you have to pick up the returned call INSTANTLY, because otherwise they leave a message for you and you go back to the end of the queue. I honestly forget how I managed to make the appointment, but eventually I lucked into a real human being who knew what they were doing. Total time spent over two days: approximately 2 hours. Good thing I can play Blockudoku on my phone while I'm on hold. I know this isn't an unusual story, BTW; it's "normal" these days. Thank god for capitalism and its market efficiencies!

A: Yeah, I call “patient care advocates” “Devil’s advocates.”

Q: I don’t know that this is an especially smart or dumb move on the part of a dog, but it’s definitely a sweet moment. My parents had the most gentle dog ever (she was a Labrador/chow mix) named Hallie. They had a fenced area of the yard off the garage for her where she could run and do her business and enjoy the outdoors. They didn’t want her to have full time access to the outdoors so the set up was that she’d ask to go out, we’d let her into the garage and there was a doggy door in door between the garage and her fenced-in run. We got back from vacation, picked her up from the dog sitter and took her home. She soon scratched at the door to go out to her pen. Less than a minute later she was scratching to come back in so we let her in. She ran to the kitchen, ate a bite of food, ran back to the door and scratched to go out. We let her back out and seconds later, she was scratching to come back in and did the same routine. After the third go round, my dad and I followed her out to the pen and watched her run to the corner of the pen and nose around in the ground. We go investigate and find a little den of baby bunnies COVERED in slobbery dog kibble. She had found them, and was trying to feed them her dog food. We cleaned the dog food off them, and relocated them to just outside the pen at the same corner (so inches away) in a little den we made and mama bunny did return and continue to nurse her babies. Hallie just sat in the pen all day and watched over the little den. Had we let her, I bet she’d have raised those baby rabbits as her own. 

And the smartest (but also the most destructive) dog I’ve had was a Labrador named Maggie. We aren’t sure what her history was because she was a lab rescue foster failure that had been pulled out of a shelter. She wasn’t trained at all and it took a lot of patience because she had insane separation anxiety. Even though we had another dog that was beautifully crate trained, the idea of going into the crate would make her so anxious so I suspect she came from a neglectful situation. One day I had put her in her crate right next to our other Lab in his crate. These crates had pans in the bottom so when you opened the door, you could slide the pan out in case a pup had an accident and you could wash the crate tray, slide it back in, and when you closed the door, the door covered the slot opening for the tray. Without the tray, the wire grid at the bottom of the crate was pretty large. When I came yhome, Maggie met me at the front door… still in her crate. She had bent the bottom of the crate door up, slid the pan out, and was running around the house with the crate still over her as without the tray in it, she had plenty of room between the grids in the bottom of the crate to get enough friction with her paws to move the crate around the house. This would have been just hilarious except she ripped every curtain in the house down….from inside her crate. So I found her at the front door, happily wagging her tail in her now-mobile crate with a pile of drapes she’d pulled down and pulled into the crate with her. 

A: This reminds me of the exploit of Henry, the dog whose photo is at the top of this Gene Pool.

Q; Since you brought up "The Millionaire" how about "Queen for a Day" Do you remember that? Where three people would tell their sad/tragic stories about why they deserved to win the prize/giveaway. The audience would clap to pick the winner and they showed a noise meter on the screen. (And no, I don't know what a noise meter is really called and I am not taking the time to look it up.) The winner, as I remember always a woman, would be brought up on stage, a crown was put on her head and a long cape thing was put around her. Then she would win maybe a washer and dryer or something like that. She was Queen for a Day! I used to watch it as a kid. RLP

This was the worst show ever on TV, made even worse by the cruelty behind it.  Here’s an episode.  It is unwatchable, both because it is boring and because you are horrified by the poor wretches who didn’t win.

Q: Hey Gene - saw something in the Post that bothered me greatly the other day. This article: contains the phrase: "But the internet can only reveal so much, so I decided to continue my investigation IRL." For anyone not familiar, IRL is online shorthand for In Real Life. The Washington Post is okay with internet shorthand in their articles now? SMH I'm 49 and as such, I believe likely younger than the average Gene Pool subscriber. Should this really bother me that much, or am I going into an early curmudgeon phase? Or was this actually tongue in cheek given the reference to the internet earlier in the sentence? Based on the author's bio, I would guess that she's about 22 years old. My theory is that this somehow slipped past the editors.

A: She is exactly 22, but that is the only thing you are right about.  She’s writing this like a Gen Z, deliberately.  And writing it well. It is called voice.  It is just fine. 

Q: Does Kevin McCarthy have a spine?  

A: He has been compared to an amoeba or a planaria, but he is more like an echinoderm such as a sea cucumber. 

Q: Here are my food takes. Please tell me which are right and which are wrong. 1) A hot dog is a taco 2) Knishes, pop-tarts, ravioli, and apple pie are all wraps 3) An open faced sandwich is a pizza 4) if your grilled cheese has anything but cheese, bread, and maybe butter, milk, or similar on it, it is a melt, not a grilled cheese 5) Cereal in milk is a soup 6) Chicago “pizza” is really a casserole 7) A head of lettuce is a lettuce wrap with lettuce in it 8) A loaf of sliced bread is a bread sandwich.

A: You are correct only on 5, 6, 7, and 8.  You are dismally wrong about the others.

Q: I would never leave the scene. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. We are nothing if we cannot be accountable to one another. I’d lawyer up good, though.

A: I think most people agree wit you, based on the poll results. I am not so sure about myself. I think the issue of whether you did anything wrong, in comparison to what your punishment would be, is pertinent. There is a moral calculus involved.

Q: A commentator made the point that Biden may have solved nuclear-blackmail war for all time. That is, the threat that if you confront a nuclear power, they may retaliate with nuclear weapons. NATO as now defined may be safe forever. And China has seen the destructive power of drones, wielded by defensive and technological clever countries, and will consider twice its own imperial ambitions.

A: Wasn’t that in force prior to Biden?

Q: I had extra tickets for one of this weekend's baseball games and offered them up on an online fan discussion forum, first come, first served, with a request that the person who accepted them make a donation to Nats charities. I got multiple "takers," and informed one of them that he'd been first. He sent his contact info to forward the tickets, and since he was somebody with zero history on this forum, I Googled him. He is a member of Young Americans for Liberty, and as Communications Director for a 1-term Republican congressman, he had been accused of squandering money on direct mail campaigns filled with lies about the candidate's record. He has worked at a supermarket for the past 5 years. Would you: A) Send the tickets B) Not send the tickets and tell him why C) Not send the tickets and make up a fake reason.

A: The correct answer is C.

Q: Vehicles in movies and tv can’t depart until someone taps the roof twice.

A: I had no idea what this was about, but Rachel assures me you are right, and a genius for noticing it. . 

Q: Smartest: Two of our cats were at vet, had teeth cleaned so had anesthesia, after which they're always wobbly for a while. Post-op instructions say, "Keep them from situations in which they'll be called on to make sudden decisions". Like what, suspend their day trading accounts? Middle of night after teeth cleaning, one cat is meowing. Wife gets up, looks around, nothing's wrong, tells cat to be quiet and goes back to sleep. Morning, cat is still meowing -- meows, walks a couple steps, looks back, meows, walks. Obviously wants to be followed. Wife follows cat down hall, down stairs, down hall, down stairs to basement, through finished basement, into laundry room. Where her buddy cat has fallen behind the washing machine, can't get out. And we were too stupid to understand she's doing the, "Timmy's fallen the well" trick and needs help.

A: Very nice.

This is Gene. I am calling us down. PLEASE keep sending in questions/observations here. I will answer them on Thursday. I promise.