Greetings everyone.

MD and I are in the midst of a slapdash quickie trip from California to Texas to Arkansas back to Texas and finally back to California, where we will be in a couple of days. This is the first real trip we’ve taken since my cancer adventure, and it’s going to be a quick one. Our plan was to fly into Dallas, rent a car, drive to Little Rock to see our kids and grandkids there. Then drive to Hot Springs for MD’s high school reunion, then back to Dallas to vote. (We usually spend this part of the year in Santa Barbara, but we’re domiciled in Texas.) Then, finally, back to Santa Barbara.

The entire trip has been one misadventure after another. The shittification of everything is everywhere. It’s a rolling disaster. I know some of you hate these rants; if you’re one of the rant haters, skip on down. Way down, because the whole affair has been a nightmare. I hope to at least give you some actionable insights based on our travel issues.

First, the flight.

Is any flight ever on time anymore? At least any one that MD and I ever take?

Flights out of Santa Barbara are iffy in terms of cost. There is a direct American Airlines flight from Santa Barbara to Dallas. Most of the time, the fight is reasonably priced. But occasionally, for whatever factors the nebulous airline pricing algorithms come up with, the prices can be outrageously high. Generally, we simply go at a time when the pricing is decent. This time we were on a schedule, so we had to leave when we had to leave.

When we do encounter these eye-wateringly-high fares, we simply rent a car for a day in Santa Barbara and drive down to LA and fly out of LAX. American has numerous daily flights from LAX to Dallas. It costs about 75 bucks to rent a car at SB and drop it off at LAX. By doing so, it often saves hundreds of dollars. In our case this time, multiple hundreds of dollars.

LAX is 93 miles from our doorstep, so we usually give ourselves three hours to make it down there. We typically have a leisurely drive, end up getting there way early, and kicking back in the lounge as we wait for our flight.

This time we were plagued by traffic. Car wrecks, mysterious traffic back ups for unknown reasons, etc. We ended up racing to Hertz to drop the car off, which we did without filling it up first, thereby getting charged a premium for the gasoline.

Fortunately, we got the airport shuttle immediately and got to the airport in the nick of time. Checked our bags, and raced through security, walked what seemed to be 200 miles to our gate, only to discover our flight was delayed for two hours.

Typically, when this happens, I get a text from American Airlines. Not this time. Had I received a text, we would not have been so harried by all the traffic. Our cortisol levels would have stayed normal, and we wouldn’t have been pissed about the flight delay. In fact, since we didn’t have a connection to make, we would have been happy.

But little did we know that our troubles were just beginning.

The flight itself, once it finally took off, was completely uneventful. Which is just how you want a flight to be. The only head-shaking part of the trip was the snacks the airline provided us. I have elite status on American, so MD and I get preferential seating, which includes free drinks and larger seats.

After the morning we had, I had to fight down the impulse to get a half dozen of the free drinks. But I controlled myself and had only one. We were provided with snacks to go along with our free drinks. The snacks came in a little packet weighing 0.75 ounces. A mere three quarters of an ounce! Take a look at the list of ingredients in this tiny snack.

I was mystified as to how they could get that many ingredients in only three quarters of an ounce but such are the powers of the food technology wizards. These were chemical snacks. As you might imagine, we did not partake.

When we finally got to DFW and got our baggage, we headed to the car rental pickup area.

Before I tell you what happened next, I’ve got to confess that it was all my fault.

A couple of weeks before we left, MD was trying to find us a rental car. The best deal she could get was about $450 for five days. I thought this was outrageous, so she told me to take over.

I went to Kayak dot com and immediately found a car through Expedia that would tote us and our bags for a mere $201 for the five days, so I booked it. Part of the deal to get it so inexpensively was that I had to pay up front, which I did. I had never heard of this particular car rental company. I figured it was probably a start up or a much smaller company trying to get a seat with the big boys.

While we were waiting for our flight to take off from LAX, I got an email from the rental company instructing me on how to get to where our rental car was. It said to take the shuttle bus from the airport to the car rental center. Then to walk across the street to the ‘inner parking circle’ and wait for the van to pick us up and take us to the offsite car rental place.

We followed the instructions, hogged our bags onto and off of the car rental bus, then hogged them from there across the street and waited for the second bus. And waited. And waited. Finally, I called the rental company and got a recorded message that said to “press #2” if I wanted to find the location of the pick up van. I did so, and got a message telling me “that information isn’t available now.” So, I called back and was informed that all their agents were helping other customers and to stay on the line. Which I did. For about five minutes. Finally someone picked up. And I told her we were waiting to be picked up and had been for over half an hour. (The email I had received before our flight said the pick up vans came by every 10-15 minutes.)

The lady on the phone told me to hold, which I did for at least another five minutes. Finally, she came back on the line and said the van would be there in 8-10 minutes.

It showed up about ten minutes later, but didn’t pull up in front of us. We had to once again hog our bags about 50 yards to where it had parked. We did so and at last got on the van along with several other people who had been waiting.

It took about 20 minutes to get to the rental place, which was in a dodgy part of town. Stores with bars on their windows and that kind of thing. The rental car area was stuck back in some industrial park. MD and I were in the back of the van, so we got out last. The other people with us were at the rental counter first, so we had to wait.

We looked around, and the place was as dodgy as the area. There were handwritten signs taped up on the walls all over the place. It looked more like a pawn shop than a car rental place. One of the signs said “It is prohibited to take our cars to Mexico.” I wondered what we (I) had gotten us into.

We finally get up to the counter, and the guy asks us for our insurance policy. I have rented countless cars in my time, and I have never, ever been asked for my car insurance policy. The rental agencies always try to sell insurance, but I’ve never had one ask for a copy of my own car insurance policy.

I told him I didn’t have my policy with me. It’s not something I carry around. I told him our credit card provides insurance for rental cars. He said it only covers damage to the car, not liability in case I killed someone or damaged another person’s property. He said I could not rent the car unless I used their insurance. I asked how much it was. He told me it was $25 per day. I took a deep breath and said, Okay. It was still less than the $450 price MD had found. And we were there. And I worried they might not take us back to the airport rental place if we refused.

As I said. It was a very sketchy place.

Then the guy tried to sell me on adding collision insurance and a blanket toll package. I said no. Just give us the frigging car.

As he was taking us out to the car, a woman who had been on the van with us, and who was worried that she had made a big mistake by trying to get an inexpensive rental, was in an argument with the agent taking her to her rental. She was screaming at him that the car had chewing gum stuck to the dashboard and cat hair everywhere. “It’s disgusting,” she bellowed.

When we got to our car, which was a Hyundai Elantra of indeterminate age, it had 52,000+ miles on it. And was dirty. It did not have the new car smell that most rental cars do. As we drove away, we noticed that the windshield had a sort of film on it from not ever being washed, a sort of foggy film that you couldn’t wipe off — MD tried.

The next morning, we took off to Little Rock, which is about five hours from Dallas. In the daylight, we discovered the windshield was smeared from A to Z, but I could see through it. We stopped at the first Buc-ees we came upon to fill up with gas. (When we were taken to our car the night before, the agent told us it was half full of gas. He said since it wasn’t full, we could return it empty and he would ‘gift’ us the half tank. And wrote so on the little rental slip.)

We filled the car with gas, but there was no windshield washing stuff to be found, so we headed off to Little Rock. By this time, I was pissed to the max about the whole deal. I asked MD to get the little paper the agent had given us about our being able to bring the car back empty. She looked everywhere and couldn’t find it. In fact, there was no rental agreement given to us in hard copy. And not only that, there was no owners manual, and even worse, no registration. We could find no documentation about the car whatsoever. (Later I discovered that they had emailed the rental agreement to me, but I hadn’t seen it. More about which later.)

I began to worry, given how suspect the whole deal had been, that the car was stolen. I was almost hoping I would get pulled over, so the cop would run the VIN on the car and find out whether it was legit or not. But we didn’t.

Something even worse happened.

While we were driving along at about 80 mph, a rock thrown up by a big truck struck the windshield, and a crack started to run a little.

I had MD check our credit card insurance to see what was covered. Of course, broken windshields were not covered. We had a broken one on one of our own cars a few years earlier for the same reason at about the same spot on a trip from Dallas to Little Rock. It cost almost a thousand dollars to replace the windshield.

I had visions of the same thing happening here.

Fortunately, the crack stayed small. When we got to Little Rock, our son said he had someone who could fix it, but they were in a town about an hour’s drive away. That night, I watched several YouTube videos on fixing rock dings on windshields. I bought one of the little kits from an auto parts store the next morning, and fixed the thing myself. It ended up being a beautiful job. Much easier than I expected.

I ordered another kit through Amazon and had it delivered to Dallas. The kits are small, so easy to stick in a suitcase. I’ll never leave home without one if I’m renting a car.

The moral of this story is don’t try to save money on a rental car. Or, perhaps, it is you get what you pay for.

Oh, and when we took the car back, they didn’t even look at it. Which I should have expected given how dirty it was when we got it.

Now that you have endured this dreary tale of our awful car rental experience, here is some info you can use.

Once I got back to the house, I pulled up the rental agreement I had been sent via email. I didn’t mention it above, but one of the issues I was pissed at myself about was not taking the rental agency’s offer of insurance on the car. They told me it would cost an extra $8 per day. As I was driving along with the rock ding in the window starting to spread, I was kicking myself for not forking over the eight bucks per day. Had I done so, I thought, I could have continued the journey stress free and just returned the car with the cracked windshield.

Then I read the emailed rental agreement after I had dropped the car off. Here’s what it said in the small print about the Collision Damage Waiver, the policy they tried to sell me for $8 per day. The one I thought would cover any damage to the car. Below is what is excluded:

So, had I brought the car back with the slightly cracked windshield (which crack might have been getting larger by the mile), I would have been stuck paying for the windshield AND the $8 per day.

I suspect most car rental agreements have the same small print. So, beware.

Here is the video I found that showed me exactly how to fix the ding and small crack. Once I got the kit from Auto Zone for $20, I fixed it, and the windshield was good as new. From now on, I’ll always travel with one if I’m renting a car.

More shittification…

Before we left, we ordered some protein bars to eat along the way on this multi-city trip. When MD was ordering, Amazon said they would be delivered to us in SB on Monday. We weren’t leaving until early Wednesday morning, so that was fine. On Monday, MD gets a notice from Amazon saying Sorry, but your package won’t be delivered until Wednesday. By which time, of course, we will be gone.

She cancels the order and reorders them and has them sent to our youngest son’s house in Little Rock. Amazon says they’ll be there on Wednesday, which is the day before we get there. We call our kid on Thursday morning. He tells us the bars did not arrive on Wednesday. We figure they will come while we’re driving up from Dallas. Sure enough, MD gets an email showing the package on our kid’s front porch.

When we get there, MD opens the package, and it contains a pair of white fluffy slippers (not even her size) with little pink hearts on them. When she gets on Amazon to try to get a return authorization, Amazon thinks she got the bars. She was finally able to get through to the bot that she wasn’t returning bars. The bars never came. They sent the wrong thing. They immediately refunded her money, but didn’t give her return info for the slippers, which are still sitting here in the box they came in.

In my opinion, COVID is at fault.

Before COVID Amazon was Johnny-on-the-Spot with its deliveries. During COVID Amazon couldn’t keep up with its deliveries because everyone was ordering online instead of going shopping. Which, of course, was a pain because of the idiotic mask mandates, social distancing, and all the other ridiculous rules that stopped no one from getting the virus. People understood and gave online companies a break.

Then COVID was over. But Amazon and others figured, what the hell, people put up with erratic delivery for a couple of years, so let’s keep it going. Plus, it’s a lot less expensive to use slower, less efficient delivery services.

Since COVID, Amazon has sucked.

(Okay, MD read through this seeking typos. She told me that I had better discuss the bars we were trying to get. Otherwise I would get a million comments and emails asking about them. I’m sure she is right, so here goes.)

The bars are Prima Ancestral Protein Bars. I have no affiliation with the company whatsoever. I discovered the bars serendipitously. Our DIL in Santa Barbara bought them for our grandson there, who is going on 16 and much into body building and protein. He didn’t like them, so they sat in the pantry. I happened to go in there looking for something else and found them.

I tried one and thought it was kind of like eating a candle. But since our grandson didn’t like them, our DIL gave them to me. The more of them I ate, the more I began to enjoy them. Now both MD and I eat them when traveling.

The thing that kept me going after the first one is that they are extremely clean. NBS whatsoever. They are dense; they do not melt in your mouth, they require chewing. You actually feel like you’ve eaten something once you’ve downed one.

If you’re interested, you can find them at Sprouts, the natural foods grocery store. At the company’s website. And through Amazon.

Young Robbie

So far, all you’ve heard about is how awful our trip was. There were many great moments, too.

Once we got to Little Rock, we got to spend the day with our son who lives there, our DIL, and our youngest grandson Robbie, whom we haven’t seen in two years thanks to my cancer ordeal, and a brief moment with our high-schooler grandson, Kent. (Busy life those high school guys!).

I was worried that Robbie, like most kids that young, would be a little standoffish since he hadn’t seen us in forever on his time line. But he gave us big hugs as if we had just been there yesterday. It certainly warmed our hearts. When we picked him up from school, his dad asked him if he wanted to listen to his music on the radio, which he loves, or talk to granny and grandad, he replied “talk to granny and grandad.” It about made me blubber.

It was a whirlwind visit, so we had only the one day. Because it all went so quickly, it didn’t occur to me until after we had gone that we hadn’t taken any photos of Robbie with us.

But we did make a trip to our son’s hangar to see his new plane, and we got some photos of Robbie there. The plane is a 1946 Aeronica Champ. Our son has gone through all kinds of flight training. He has his private pilot’s license, his commercial pilot’s license, and his instrument rating. He bought this plane with another pilot so he can build hours flying in order to meet the flying-time requirements for the airlines.

Here is a photo of Robbie with what he affectionately calls ‘his’ plane.

What was amazing about the whole experience is that our son put Robbie in the cockpit and asked him what every instrument does. He was able to tell us what every instrument and gauge there did. I thought it was pretty amazing since he’s only four.

The rest of our trip has been pretty routine. We left Little Rock and went to Hot Springs. MD’s reunion was fun, more so for her than for me. But I had a good time, too. A few guys from her high school class were in med school with me, so we caught up.

On the way out of town, we hit one of my all-time favorite restaurants – the Fish Nest in Glenwood, Arkansas. Glenwood is a small town with the Caddo River running alongside it. (A fictional town on the Caddo River is the setting for all of MD’s Caddo Bend series of novels.) I’ve written about the Fish Nest before. I wouldn’t touch the buffet with a ten foot pole. But the broiled catfish off the menu is divine.

Anything ordered off the menu comes with what the Fish Nest calls a setup. The setup includes generous portions of hush puppies, slaw, pinto beans, and a little condiment cup of green tomato relish. The broiled catfish meal itself comes with two good-sized portions of catfish plus either baked potato or French fries. The first time we ever ate there, I went for the catfish and all that came with it.

When it came to the table, the only thing I really ate (other than the catfish) was the green tomato relish. We’ve been back many times, and each time I tell the waitress that I don’t want the setup or the fries. Just the catfish and a bowl – not a little weenie condiment cup – of the green tomato relish. They always bring me a bowl of it. This time, she even refilled the bowl.

It was outstanding.

MD loves hushpuppies, so she always gets the setup. She eats about half of the slaw and a hushpuppy or three. She loves hushpuppies and says those at the Fish Nest are the very best. I always bag one of hers, but I’m not a big hushpuppy fan. Just give me the green tomato relish.

Here is a photo of my first bowl. It’s difficult from the photo to tell what size the bowl is, but it’s pretty good sized. It’s a soup bowl, I guess. The green tomatoes are cut in large chunks, so it’s not really a relish. But it is out of this world. For me, at least.

Leaving Glenwood for Dallas, Waze took us through the gorgeous, quiet, and peaceful Arkansas backwoods. We probably didn’t see ten cars until we got to I-30 headed for Dallas.

Once we hit the freeway, it was a truck-heavy slog. But we had the kids and the grandkids in Dallas to look forward to. And to get rid of the snake-bit rental car and discover what the denouement of that nightmare would turn out to be. There is still the flight back to Santa Barbara to dread, but since it goes directly into Santa Barbara, and we have no connection to worry about, I’m not stressing over it.

Videos vs No Videos

Here are a few poll responses I received after the last Arrow:

Just confirms the old adage that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. The corollary of which is that it is a fool’s errand to try.

Like the third commenter above, I’m not all that crazy about videos, which is why I minimize their use in this newsletter. I can read a lot faster than people on video talk, but every now and then a video comes along that really captures my interest. That was the case with the Bill Gurley video. Which is why I posted it.

There is a solution to this conundrum.

If you don’t want to watch a video (this applies to YouTube videos), all you have to do is go to the share button, click it, and copy the URL. Once you have the URL in hand, go to Perplexity dot ai and copy it into the query box and ask it to transcribe the linked video. Depending upon how long the video is, it will take a few seconds to provide you with a complete transcript. Which you can read faster than you can watch.

Problem solved for the video haters.

As long as you don’t go crazy doing this, the free version of Perplexity will do you right.

I suspect most of the other AI programs will do the same.

Sunshine Superman

That was the title of a chapter in the Protein Power LifePlan that MD and I wrote back in 2000.

At the time, vitamin D was becoming a major player in the dietary supplement industry. At the time, MD and I suspected that sunlight might be a better source of vitamin D than the supplement version, although we did encourage our patients to take vitamin D, just in case.

At the time, there wasn’t a lot of work being done on natural sources of vitamin D, i.e., the sun. The reason? Just like Big Pharma now drives medicine, at that time, the sellers of sun screen massively promoted the use of vitamin D.

Why?

Obviously, because they wanted to sell sunscreen.

And selling sunscreen was what they had been doing for years by frightening people into slathering it on to prevent skin cancer. Their entire advertising campaign was based on a kind of data switcheroo.

The sunscreen promoters used the rates of skin cancer to sell their product. Their promotion was highly effective, but totally dishonest. At the very least, based on disinformation and a grand deception.

The rates of skin cancer are pretty high. But the vast, vast majority of skin cancers are not deadly. In fact, they really don’t kill at all. And they are easy to treat. What the sunscreen promoters did was to conflate melanoma (often referred to as malignant melanoma), which is a deadly skin cancer (not so much now as it was then, though it is still something you don’t want to get) with basal cells and other relatively benign skin cancers.

There are a lot of benign skin cancers, but not a lot of melanoma. Relatively, at least.

The sunscreen promoters, which included most dermatologists, scared people into glopping on scads of sunscreen to avoid melanoma by citing the statistics for the overall skin cancer rate, which was mainly made up of basal cell carcinomas and other non-life-threatening skin cancers.

The worst part of this whole charade was that the sunscreens in use at the time actually increased the likelihood of users getting the dreaded melanoma.

Let me explain.

It is well known that melanoma risk is lower in people who get a lot of sun exposure all the time. Roofers, for example. And others whose jobs keep them outside a lot. The people who are more likely to get melanoma are those who get occasional sun exposure (as in while on vacation) and tend to burn.

The sunscreens that were available during the huge sunscreen push protected against UVB, the rays that burn. They did not protect against UVA that penetrates to deeper layers and promotes the development of melanoma. In fact, they increased the risk because people stayed out in the sun longer without fear of burning.

Along with being the wavelength that causes sunburn, UVB is also the wavelength that your body uses to produce its own vitamin D. Which is an incredibly important vitamin for many, many reasons.

The sunscreen manufacturers and promoters (including dermatologists, who should have known better) urged the use of vitamin D supplements to replace the vitamin D produced by the sun’s effect. Consequently, as mentioned above, the vitamin D supplement market exploded. Vitamin D is now still one of the largest selling vitamin supplements out there.

But does it do any good?

Not really. It probably does prevent rickets, but no one gets rickets these days.

But it doesn’t really help with much of anything.

Back in 2014, The Lancet published an article looking at over 400 studies on vitamin D and vitamin D supplements. The conclusion was pretty dramatic. The authors found that low vitamin D levels were a sign of poor health and were associated with all kinds of serious medical issues. But the authors also found that the great mass of studies showed that taking vitamin D supplements didn’t do squat.

As the authors put it…

This is not the only study showing the same outcome. There are a number of others that I don’t have time to go into right now.

This long discourse is simply the prologue to what I really want to write about: The positive effects of the sun.

I stumbled into the paper I want to discuss while I was looking for another paper on a different subject. But I was totally beguiled by reading it and wanted to pass it along. It made me think of our chapter in the Protein Power LifePlan, so I took a bit of time to go back and see how the science of sunshine had changed since 2000.

What I found was astonishing. I’m not going to blast you with all of it in this Arrow, but I will be writing on it in Arrows to come. Some of the studies are almost unbelievable. And they’re not out of China, and they have been replicated.

The study I happened upon, titled “Light stimulation of mitochondria reduces blood glucose levels,” demonstrates that a brief (15 minute) stimulation of just a small patch of skin can improve mitochondrial function and significantly reduce blood sugar levels.

Who knew that light could penetrate the skin and have an effect on the mitochondria?

Reading just the first part of the introduction to the article got me fired up. I checked out a bunch of the references and was astonished to learn about light and mitochondrial function. Before we get into what the study found, here are a few of the tidbits in the article info that I found incredible.

Here is how the experiment went.

The researchers recruited 30 subjects and randomized them into two groups of 15. Each subject was given a glucose tolerance test at the start of the study to establish a baseline. Seven days later, all subjects were again given a glucose tolerance test. Immediately after the first glucose finger stick, those in the study group had 15 minutes of 670 nm light projected onto an 800 square centimeter (about 11 by 11 inches) section of their backs around their shoulder blades. The area around the light projection was blocked off, so the light fell only on the 11 by 11 square inch area. The light was projected for 15 minutes.

The other 15 subjects, the control group, went through the same process. They had their backs taped off, sat there for 15 minutes, but had no light projected onto them.

670 nm of light is toward the infrared spectrum of sunlight. Levels are high during early morning sun, late evening sun, and midday sun. You can get a lot of 670 nm light without getting sunburned if you stay out in the early morning light and the evening light. The UV rays that burn are low at those times, so you can get the benefit without the burn.

(MD and I have taken to going out and sitting facing the sun every morning after we wake up. We take our coffee and run through emails on our phones. And do the Wordle and other puzzles. The change in just that one habit has had on my sleep is remarkable. I used to have major trouble falling asleep. No more. I turn off the light, hit the rack, and I’m out almost immediately. MD is lucky. Her head hits the pillow, and she’s out. Not me. At least not until recently. More to come on the value of the sun in Arrows yet to be written.)

The study group of subjects who got the 670 nm light shone on their backs ended up with significantly lower blood sugar than did those who did not receive the 15 minutes of light.

Here is a graphic showing the difference:

The upper chart above shows the difference in blood sugar levels over time based on repeated finger sticks. The lower chart shows the area under the curve, which tells us that the total amount of blood sugar through the test period is significantly lower.

There was no difference in glucose intake between the study and control subjects. The only difference was the light shone on the study group.

The authors calculated that the peak glucose difference in the two groups was -7.3 percent, while the total glucose difference over the course of the study was -27.7 percent. In other words, over the course of the measurement, those getting the light treatment reduced their overall blood glucose by almost a third.

The two groups involved in the study were non-obese, non-diabetic people, who were late 30s/early 40s. The authors were careful to note that the results of this study can be said to apply to the young, healthy, and non-diabetic.

Interestingly, the authors wondered if the fall in blood sugar among the study subjects might be because the 670 nm light initiated an increase in glucose use. In other words, were the subjects who got the light treatment burning more glucose than those who didn’t? Or was some other factor in play?

To look at this, the researchers compared the exhaled CO2 of the subjects. Since metabolizing glucose throws off CO2, those with the light treatment should have higher levels of CO2 in their breath than those who didn’t. As it turned out, the exhaled CO2 was about the same in both groups.

Therefore the 670 nm of light exposure stimulated some other process resulting in lowered glucose levels.

The 11 by 11 inch square of skin the light was shone on represents only about 4 percent of the total skin surface area. I, of course, wonder what kind of glucose lowering might be found in someone in a bathing suit getting morning or late afternoon sun. Probably a lot more than the 27.7 percent shown in this study.

I find studies such as this one to be absolutely fascinating. I hope you do, too, because I’m going to be writing about them a lot. It’s nice to know that the sun, which is free and there for the taking, increases the efficiency and energy production of the mitochondria. Especially in those of us who have a little age on us.

More to follow.

Odds and Ends

Not many Odds & Ends this time around, because I’m on the road and haven’t had the leisure to do my usual gregarious reading.

• An eyewitness account by a San Francisco doctor of the sinking of the Titanic. Shipwreck and sunken treasure buff that I am, I found the account both chilling and fascinating.

• Amazing at it seems, in a 40 year medical career, I've had to do it only once. MD has done it twice. Everybody should be well-versed in how to do the Heimlich Maneuver. Are you?

• Row and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles everywhere. Mares' tails and mackerel scales twelve hours dry. Can you name all the types of clouds and do you know what they mean? Here's your 4-1-1.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

The VOTW this time is a fun one. I recently read an article about how the four-chord song has ruined the music business. I love four-chord songs. I can pick them out on my guitar. Not so with the more complex songs. You may not know what a four-chord song is, but you’ve heard a million of them over the last 60 years. Here is a group doing a funny comedy rendition of many, many four-chord songs everyone has heard. Enjoy!

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back soon.

Please help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you like it.

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Really, thanks. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet. I would really appreciate it.

Finally, don’t forget to take a look at what our kind sponsors have to offer: HLTH Code, Precision Health Reports, and Jaquish Biomedical.

And don’t forget my newest affiliate sponsor Lumen. Highly recommended to determine whether you’re burning fat or burning carbs.