How many times I have told you No Credit Card Rate Reductions, EVER!!!!!

 

Cookie is an instigator.  Most of the time I annoy people, but when I put my mind to it, I can really get under people's skin. But piss me off, invade my privacy or try and cold call me on a scam you are trying and I don't play nice.

Take these fools who call our landline.  And yes, we have a landline because of the husband's job we need a phone system that works when the power is out. 

But we get a lot of calls that can get irritating, and mundane.  And I like to stir up the pot. 

We live in a hundred-year-old house without a furnace and no furnace ductwork.  (Boiler and steam heat.) but we get calls from people in India that want to sell us duct cleaning services. 

Caller: "May I talk with the woman of the house?"

Cookie: You're talking to him. 

{Click}

What I have started doing for the month of August is reciting random lines from Mommy Dearest whenever they ask a question.  You know, just to spice it up. 

Male caller from overseas: "Hello, may I speak with *Cookie Blogger* about his credit card rate?

Cookie: "Don't Fuck With Me FELLA'S. This ain't my first time at the Rodeo."

Male caller from overseas: Pardon?

Cookie: "CHRISTINA, Bring me the AXE!"

{Click}

There are also the times that we get these "keyboard" automated calls from some bullshit charity.  What you hear is a humanist voice that is being driven by a human at a keyboard chocking out prerecorded phrases.

Keyboard Voice: "Hello. Am I Speaking with Cookie's Husband?  I hope I have called the right number."

Cookie: "Helga, I am not mad at you. I am mad at the dirt."

Keyboard Voice: "I Can Call Back If..."

Cookie: "HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU: NO WIRE HANGERS EVER!" 

{Click}

And just today I got to use this plum of a line:

Female Caller: "Hello, I'd like to speak with Cookie Blogger about ...

Cookie: "Why can't you give me the respect that I'm entitled to? Why can't you treat me like I would be treated by any stranger on the street? Why? Why?"

Female Caller: "Excuse me, this is Dr. Urologist's office calling about next Monday's appointment.  Can you come in at 7:30AM instead of 11:00AM?"

Cookie: My bad.  I thought you were trying to sell me something.

So I guess I'll have to give that respect line to someone else.  But I need a movie for September.  Perhaps Sound of Music?  Misery? The Wizard of OZ?

Thank God IMDB has an app for that. 

The report is in...

 

The report from the BIG cancer scan is in. 

It was a horribly uncomfortable scan. It started out with radioactive dye (delivered by a man in a radiation suit carrying a metal canister) injected into my arm, allowed to swirl around for an hour while it infiltrated every nook and cranny.  Then, after an hour, I was delivered to the PetScan equipment where I was told to lay flat, arms over my head for 30 minutes while the scan read the locations of the PSAT seeking dye.  "Hold that position!" and thirty minutes of agony later the guy had to help me bring my arms back down.  I was in a foul mood. Even the husband could see the pain I was in. 

The scan would tell us if any PSA was found in any other part of my body other than the previously known cancer in the prostate.  Anyway, it can spread, you know.  And that's the way the find it.

But the report results are officially unofficial - they haven't been shared with us by the surgeon, that comes next week. But the doctor leaked them, and the rectal colo surgeon seconded them (we were afraid that it spread to the colon.  More about that in September.

But results are in and they tell us that cancer HAS NOT spread.  It remains localized. 

Thank Baby Jesus and the Big One too. 

Now, I'll hippity-hop along until next week when we decide on a course of action on the prostate cancer, which will be sometime after September is my guess.  

So Much Drama: Movie of the Week

 

Love me some Uptonking.  

In leaving a comment for the last post, Uptonking reminded me of the staple of ABC television in that started in 1969 and ran to 1975: The ABC Movie of the Week. 

ABC promised us, not movies that were years old on TV, like The War Wagon, or Love is Many Splendored Thing, but "World Premiere" movies were 90-120 minute movies (with commercials) with original scripts "made especially for TV."  Or so the announcer said with great gravitas.  (The hidden meaning was "movies" that break for commercials with mini cliffhangers, instead of mid-scene.)  In actuality, these were 72 to 100-minute or so one-off TV shows. 

To build excitement, Harry Betts got the rights to use Burt Bacharach's 1969 composition "Nikki", rearranged it, and when combined with state-of-the-art graphic animation, the tune became synonyms with MOVIE OF THE WEEK.

     

Some were very good, like Steven Speilberg's Duel, starring Dennis Weaver and the demonic truck intent on terrorizing him.  Others were just awful, like Gidget Gets Married (see below). 

None starred Steve McQueen, Barabara Streisand, Warren Beatty, or Elizabeth Taylor, but the actors were TV staples and some slightly faded stars.  Dennis Weaver, Patty Duke Astin, Henry Jones, Stella Stevens, and Joseph Cotton.   

Some of the movies were just that; movies that were ends unto themselves. 

Then there were movies made as TV pilots.  Take Gidget Grows Up, with Karen Valentine as Gidget who is a tour guide at the U.N., which did not get picked up.  Starsky and Hutch started out as a Movie of the Week.  So now you know who to blame for the second coming of the Torino that swept up car culture in 1975-1976, and David's Soul's "Don't Give Up on Us Baby".

Then there was Gidget Gets Married, which was a *movie*.  In this, the last of the Gidget flicks, Gidget marries Moondoggie and moves to a Stepford-like community, where employees of a company are residentially segregated and socially isolated in their position with in said company, I kid you not.  And it was Gidget who was sick and tired of the Man bossing everyone around and fighting for social justice. The result was something so bad that evidently, the young woman who was chosen to play Gidget walked away from acting. 

While the Movie of the Week tried to rotate its genres, with ratings slipping, and towards the end of the run it became top-heavy with films that had a message.  Comedies, which were seldom guffawed out loud funny became fewer, and dramas and thrillers increased.  And the ratings continued to slide down, down, down.

But it was the 1975 season, at the end of the run that gave viewers its two best camp classics:

1. Episode 246 was a cringe-worthy social drama called "Someone I Touched" which starred Cloris Leachman as a wife in a loving marriage who contracts VD from her husband who liked to fiddle around.  If that wasn't bad enough, Leachman's character - who had desperately yearned for a baby - discovered that she was pregnant.  Also notable is Lena Peterson, who plays the mother of Glynnis O'Connor.  O'Connor sleeps with Cloris's husband and you know what happens.  He gives Glynnis a social disease. In a tearful scene tries to tell her mother that something terrible has happened.  The mother thinks she is pregnant and comforts her daughter saying that there were ways to deal with the situation.  But O'Connor pushes on with the truth: Syphilis!  And Lena Patterson then begins one of the longest slap fests on TV, punctuated by calling her daughter a tramp, while play smacking Glynnis into the next part of the movie. Patterson was a noted actress, and a Tony nominee, but the camera is so close to both actors that the violence isn't at once amplified and muted.   And oh, did I mention that Cloris sings the theme song?
2. Episode 247 is the cult favorite, and I am warning you that you need to put aside reasonable disbelief when you watch it.  Trilogy of Terror, starring Karen Black, in three unrelated mini films inside of mini made-for-TV movies where she plays four different characters.  I would try and explain it all, but frankly, I don't have the strength.  Suffice it to say that Karen emotes.  A lot.  And you can get this one on YouTube for FREE.

Now, of course, cable vomits whole channels like this onto our laps, movies with mediocre plots. For many, only the titles are entertaining.  (A personal favorite was Tory Spelling in "Mother May I Sleep With Danger.") For others, there is a cathartic release for SOME PEOPLE (Yes, you, Dee Dee) for watching movies where the psycho boyfriend locks his girlfriend away in the poorhouse while seducing her loved starved mother, or the new nanny sets out to gaslight the mother of quadruplets so she can send the children to a Swiss boarding school and do craven things to the handsome husband. 

But back in the day, it was a weekly dose of fluff, with a thin plotline, and a great fanfare, starring people whose faces were familiar, and whose names you needed a TV guide to ID. That was Tuesday night living in America. 

The Sugar, The COVIDS, The Cancer

 

She got the RONA?

Back home in north central Ohio, people for some reason or another like to put "the" in front of nouns when those nouns are names for diseases. 

"Estil is feeling poorly; he's got the sugar real bad."

"I told Louise to get the vaccine but she would stop listing to that Margie Taylor Green.  In the end, she ate that horse paste, and because that doesn't work, the COVIDS/RONA got her."

I asked a friend back home about another acquaintance and the conversation went something like this:

"How's Doreen?"

"It's a sad tale.  She got the woman cancer."

"Breast or uterine?"

"Up-top one.  We're all wearing pink hoping she recovers.  She's doing the radiation in Columbus."

Well, Cookie's family generally gets the cancer.  Prostate cancer.  It hit my grandfather, my uncles, and a couple cousins, all on one side. While I am not a gambling man, in the back of my mind, I knew it could come for me.  

And it has.

NOW before anyone says or thinks or does anything, no weepies, no "I'm thinking of you," and no I'm sorry stuff.  DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

I know you are concerned. 

We all are.  It's natural.  With cancer comes the world of the unknown.  The BOHICA aspect of cancers is scary stuff. 

But it isn't something I have failed at.  It's not a failing, its genetic, its tissue that mutated beyond your body's defense abilities.  So we face it head on and we deal with it.  

The good news is that we 1) found it early, and 2) the Gleason score (1 to 10, how they grade cancer, how bad it is, how aggressive, etc.) isn't good, but it also isn't above an 8, and that is really good news. 5 and below is really, really good news if it's caught early.  But I am not walking about, ringing my hands, wailing "woe to be me," through a veil of tears.   And if you are spiritual, God is giving me a "You got this," thumbs up.

So here is what is going to happen: I am getting a PETScan and that will tell us if it has spread.  That isn't for a couple weeks - insurance and finding time in the machine is a factor. The doctor will discuss the results with us, and  THEN the Husband and I will make the best decision for me, for us, and for our future. The more involved it is, then the more involved the treatment will be.  

The horse may be out of the gate, but we'll be on the horse when crossing that bridge, and we will get to it.  

We live in an age when healthcare is, for lack of better terms, a pain in the ass - no pun intended, but it does fit. BUT treatment options are far advanced over 70 years when you died of it, and fifty years ago they used to de-ball you. 

But that was then, this is now.  So Cookie is hopeful.  In fact, Cookie is going to recover. 

Still, I know that people back home will say that "He's got the cancer."  

True, but trust me: the cancer doesn't have me.