For months I’ve wanted to write an incisive review of the Kim Philby/Nick Elliott miniseries. After cranking out and rewriting 2400 words or so (surely too long) I find it to be impenetrable. So I clean it up slightly. Will send it to C-C later, with an end-of-year book wrap-up.
Call from Pat Clark today. Actually he phoned first on the Moki landline, then on my landline. Hung up almost immediately. So I rang back on the Moki iPhone. And we had a good chat. Usual stuff. Can I keep the apartment? What is this about him having two kids? Dottie and/or I posted the Manhattan Cremation obit on Facebook and Pat just saw it.
Teeth and gums occupy my thoughts. Back in September I had that awful abscess above the UR 6-year-molar, which I got rid of with erythromycin from that shop on the UWS. It took a few days. Meanwhile the pain migrated over to the UL side, premolar area. In recent weeks pain has erupted again, just above the UL bicuspid, and it’s spread to the adjacent part of the lower jaw. I take antibiotics and aspirin, and after some hours of severe pain it goes away and I fool myself into thinking it’s gone for good. But aha!
Anyway I signed up again for Delta Dental. I was going to do that end of September, when I was working through that phase of the trouble. Having signed up, I find they have my whole Delta history, going back to early days at AmexPub. I didn’t use them at all until I was booted out of there. Then almost immediately I ran up a $4000+ bill because I allowed myself to be upsold into an extensive periodontal program of cutting and scraping. The Delta insurance paid very little of it and was a bitch to deal with. So no upselling this time. I have an appointment at 11am on January 3rd. No upselling. I was attracted to this dental practice because it had an all-American guy named Scott Pope. But it turns out Scott Pope doesn’t really work at this practice on West 54th. He still spends most of his time out in Walnut Creek.
At the moment my gums do not hurt. But just let me try to eat something. The recent phase began a week ago Wednesday, the day Pat E took me to J. G. Melon. I’d bought a Marie Callender’s pot pie, and was about to eat part of it when Pat called me up and led me on a protracted wait that led well into the evening. So I ate some of the pie anyway and got a sharp stabbing pain in the front of my palate. I’d never had that before. So it hung around, came and went for the next week, with colonies of pain elsewhere in the mouth.
Dottie is having me over again for New Year’s Eve. Weird food, a lot involving eggs. I remind her again I can’t deal with eggs. She’s having caviar on toast points. I guess I can stomach fish roe. She wants margaritas. This means getting tequila and margarita mix. What about Cointreau or triple sec? Don’t they make up some drink?
I was at Dottie’s on Christmas Eve and again on the 26th. Bought Bitdefender for myself and installed it on her Mac Mini. She gets annoying notifications in the upper right. Source unknown. I thought the anti-malware thing would cure it, but no.
Pointless arguments with near-identical fools on Twitter re Caster Semenya, the intersex black South African. They keep insisting that Caster is “male,” even though she was raised female and is IS. This sort of insistence betokens something akin to autism.
