Self Referential Television: May 2018 (iZombie, BARRY)

iZombie opened with four guys chatting shirts-off in a locker room and slowly getting dressed.

In the next scene, the regulars were with a new teen age girl who's been inserted into the plot.  She says, Hey, I saw by the TV, you have all six seasons of ZOMBIE HIGH.  Who wants to binge watch?

The regulars light up and agree.  "Yes, it's the best Zom Com Rom Dram on TV!  We love it."  "The actors are terrific."   "And even when they're in absurd situations, they act so ... they act just like us!"   "And what about all those arbitrary scenes with a bunch of hot guys with their shirts off?"   "Yes!  And I love the bad guy - he's usually chewing the scenery, but he's funny and bad at the same time."

Cut to:   iZombie bad guy Blaine, stomping around his office with his shirt office and having a larger than life fit.

Later:   The regulars are on a couch binge watching Zombie High, a new seasons starts.   One of them moans, "Oh now, this is one of those cheap seasons where they were low on budget and everything exciting happens off camera and you just hear about it."

Cut to:  One of the detectives barges into a room, with a story.  "It was incredible!  A four story building on fire!"

Later:   Same detective barges into room again, "I got the bad guy!  It was incredible!  We wrestled and fought all around the room, then the balcony, then over the balcony - but a perfect fall 3 stories down into the pool!"

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On the season finale of HBO's BARRY, there's a classic scene in the LAPD police station press room.  Six cops lined up and the captain telling the story of how the crime was solved to the press.  It all has a Joe Friday tone.

"So this led to this led to this - and the bad guys were him, and him, and him.   Basically, it was two rival crime gangs fighting it out and largely decimating each other.   So maybe it was all for the good.   Rather like the classic 1961 film YOJIMBO.  Any questions?"

Waving hand, Press question:  "Captain, how do you spell YOJIMBO?"   "Well, it's Japanese, so it's pretty much how it sounds, Y-O, YO...."

Waving hand, Press Question:  "Kurosawa, has he done other films?"   "Oh yes, quite a few.  Classics.   For example, there's...."

Very Brief Blog: Medicare's Hospital Data Database

CMS has number of web-searchable, big data provider databases.  I've written about the one for physicians and labs.  There's also one for ordering physicians for DME and one for hospitals.

Home page for inpatient hospital data is here.  (For other options, see the column at left on this CMS page).  As of May 2018, the most current data year is 2015.

I briefly explain how to get into the data and download it in a short footnote.[*]

If I've got this right, for Heart Transplant, DRG 001, there were 1,633 cases among 74 institutions.  7 hospitals had 40 or more Medicare heart transplants, the top four being Advocate in Illinois, St Lukes/Baylor in Texas, Barnes in Missouri, and Cedars in Los Angeles.  $360M was paid, for an average of $220,711 per case (standard deviation about $60,000). 

The famous charge:payment ratio ranged from 2:1 for Tufts to 12:1 for Temple.  All sorts of tidbits - e.g. Mother Mayo in Minnesota had 26 cases, but Mayo Arizona had 28.

Recently there have been new calls for more transparent Medicare data, such as hospital charges and drug prices, and admittedly, this is stuff for experts or at least people facile with Excel.  But still, it's publicly available today on open websites and can be accessed in a few seconds.

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[*]  Home page for hospital data is here.   Click on "Interactive Dataset...FY2015."  At the next page, click on the box "View Data."  You've now got a table-format web view of what's a huge dataset.   Let's filter it.  Click on the "Filter" box.  Click, "Add a new filter condition."  Change DRG Definition to "...Starts With" and type 001.  It now displays all heart transplant DRG utilization by hospital.  Click on "Export" and export as Excel.  Finally, I immediately save the CSV file as XLS.

Charlie Munger 1995 Psychology of Human Misjudgement

Charlie Munger, still active at age 94, is a lifelong associate of Warren Buffet.  His collected quotations are legions.  One of my favorites goes like: "If you think about it for a while, I'm sure you'll agree with me, because you are a very intelligent person, and I'm right."  He lives a few blocks from me in Los Angeles, where he started his career as a lawyer and rapidly became a great investor.

See a 27 page transcript and also a video of his 1995 talk on "Psychology of Human Misjudgement."
Here and here.

Easy Jet Verbal Humor in Berlin

The large European budget airline, EasyJet, has a hub in Berlin and a reputation for humorous advertisements.

I remember a couple years ago I was here, and EasyJet had a bold heading, "We can fly you to 85 cities from Berlin" - and a much smaller subtitle and warning, "But they're all pretty boring compared to here."

In May 2018, I noticed new Wortwitz (word wit) posters for EasyJet, as below.




Du kannst es dir urlauben (literally, You can vacation yourself) is a close twist on Du kannst es dir erlauben (You can allow yourself) - a one letter vowel change.



Erholung means recreation.  Erholung is das A und O = Recreation is the A and O.   This plays on "It's the alpha and omega" meaning first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, it's the A to Z. 

But here, you also need to recognize the A is a Swedish A with a little circle on top and the O has a classic Swedish slash.   So it's not the alpha and the omega, but a call-out to vacation choices in Sweden.