Monthly Archives: April 2020

A singing, piano playing hunchback discovers the downside to deceit, even well-meaning deceit, in The Phantom Broadcast (1933) and, for all that it has some technical issues in the cinematography and especially the audio, it works remarkably well. Norman Wilder is the manager and accompanist of the handsome crooner Grant Murdock, whose regular radio concerts, in front of a live studio audience, has made him a national heart throb, with love letters by the pound, a stable of women eager to date him, and even a mobster who’d like nothing more than to replace Wilder.

The hard way.

But the mob boss is unlucky, because the hunchback Wilder is too wily to let himself get taken down in a hit. Drawn car curtains and a quick slip out the door, that’s understated and effective.

But the real trick is that Murdock is just standing around looking good. It’s Wilder, hidden behind a partial partition, who’s doing the real singing. The mob boss would have been wildly unlucky if he’d been lucky.

Meanwhile, Murdock, who is more than complicit in the shared deceit, is also more than willing to take advantage of the money, adoration, and cute singers. As the ego grows, so does the romantic ambitions, and it looks like he’ll be doing exceedingly well for himself.

Or at least he would have, if he hadn’t turned up dead.

Thing is, Wilder walks into Murdock’s apartment, pistol in pocket, ready to take the bullying, womanizing, out of control Murdock down, only to find him face down in a puddle of blood, and a tell-tale compact box in his hand – a compact with the initials of the woman Wilder loves, Laura Hamilton, who already has a husband. What to do? Of course, we know what’s coming, and he confesses to the police over the phone.

And then Laura walks in and says, Whaaaaaa – not me! I just got here!

And now the pickle juice is up to Wilder’s neck. Will he get out of it? Or will he share the fate of gent from Notre Dame? Join us next week for … a not so bad story. I was surprised and pleased, although not bowled over. I just wish someone could clean up that audio.

Getting away from the COVID-19 pandemic, some readers may remember the story about the tiny little pharmacy that could. That is, lower the boom on meds’ purity levels, specifically, that of Zantac and a contaminant, NDMA. Well, looks like they were right:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced it is requesting manufacturers withdraw all prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) ranitidine drugs from the market immediately. This is the latest step in an ongoing investigation of a contaminant known as N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) in ranitidine medications (commonly known by the brand name Zantac). The agency has determined that the impurity in some ranitidine products increases over time and when stored at higher than room temperatures and may result in consumer exposure to unacceptable levels of this impurity. As a result of this immediate market withdrawal request, ranitidine products will not be available for new or existing prescriptions or OTC use in the U.S. [US Food and Drug Administration]

I wonder if you can return unused portions for refunds; I certainly wouldn’t ingest this product, even if you’ve carefully stored it properly, because you don’t know how it was stored post-production, pre-delivery. The FDA does recommend immediate disposal, as visiting stores or other places that accept discarded drugs is not recommended at the current time.

If this is a result of farming production out to foreign manufacturers – and that’s not addressed in the FDA letter – then, in combination with the threat to drug manufacturing posed by COVID-19, we may see a slow withdrawal of previously outsourced manufacturing back to the States, along with redevelopment of domestic sources of materials. According to this CNN article, Sanofi has been experiencing pain and >ahem< feedback over this product for a while.

I suppose it depends on how much actions like these cost the pharmas and their allied manufacturers.

I was rather amazed to read that Bernie Sanders, the all-but-vanquished challenger and former favorite to win the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination committed what I see as the same error as did Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, according to The Daily Kos:

But beside that, it’s clear as always that this was never a campaign built to expand beyond its core base. You can see it in their excuse for losing.

To recap, the campaign decided early on that it wasn’t going to try and expand its support beyond its core base. “Sanders aides believe, he’ll easily win enough delegates to put him into contention at the convention. They say they don’t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.” The assumption was that the field would remain fragmented.

It was a stupid assumption for lots of reasons. But it was their bet, and they were shocked (SHOCKED!) when it didn’t pay out. “In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events—most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign,” the Times wrote. “Mr. Sanders had been ‘on the brink of winning,’ Mr. Tulchin argued, ‘until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.’” …

But fact is, Sanders was running at about half the votes he received in 2016. He wasn’t on the brink of winning. He was just leading a multi-candidate field with a fraction of his previous support. As I wrote previously, “He even managed to lose ground in Mississippi, where he’d only gotten 16.6% of the vote in 2016.”

Much like the Hillary Clinton strategy of ignoring those votes thought to be out of reach – or safe – Sanders, for perhaps different reasons, pursued the same strategy.

And so what happened? Sander’s total popular vote count was at around 30% when there were dozens of candidates in the race, and when the field compacted, it was still 30%. Let’s call that unprecedented—how a candidate so alienated the entire Democratic electorate that he picked up no one when everyone else dropped out.

If the left hopes to achieve power in the future, it’ll have to do a better job vetting candidates. Because we are doomed to eternal failure if people keep baking candidates who proudly refuse to build a majority coalition.

And that’s not a message which will go down well in certain quarters of the left. Much like the fringe-right that has been taking over the Republicans since the days Gingrich was Speaker, compromise is galling to some on the left because they are certain they are absolutely right; all they lack of the right’s mindset is the certainty that God stands behind them.

The fringe-right has gotten around the usual roadblock to power by using a crowbar made of the abortion issue: Democrats are pure evil because they believe in abortion-rights, aka “killing unborn babies!”, and therefore you’d better fall into line. Yeah, my old hobby horse of toxic team politics.

I don’t know that the left will ever find a way over the roadblock of purity, though. If they can’t compromise, then they’re doomed to being idea originators, waiting for years or decades for their ideas to be subjected to robust debate, and only maybe followed by adoption.

And yesterday we found the explanation.

One of us must have bumped the temperature control. Or the fridge has a mind of its own.

Concerning techs and officials a reader writes:

Oh, but you know, those “techs” are just unskilled labor in the eyes of those “officials” who simply gesture in the general direction of the techs and grunt at them to fix the problem, and don’t go to dinner or sleep until it is fixed while taking all the credit once it is.

Heh. Another provides a link to the Washington State Department of Health page devoted to COVID-19:

Oh my! I’ve been following the numbers here for weeks. And I just noticed a couple days ago they moved to a Microsoft BI charting system, whatever that is. Wonder if that’s related.

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus

And, a picture is worth a thousand words … and, if the circumstances were less tragic, I’d say that those thousand words were all “d’oh!”