Month: August 2018

EpiPen extended use dates provided by Pfizer

I’ve always sensed that the expiration date was too short

EpiPenMy daughter has been had in her possession (or her mother’s, or mine) an Epipen for nearly a decade.

For those who aren’t familiar, an “EpiPen is an injection that contains epinephrine, a chemical that narrows blood vessels and opens airways in the lungs. The allergic reactions (anaphylaxis) treated with the use of EpiPen include those from insect stings or bites, food, drugs, and other allergens.”

We discovered my daughter’s allergy to peanuts when she was two and a half, and ate a cookie. She also responds poorly to several tree nuts, which we found out a couple years after that. We, of course, are very vigilant about checking food labels. To date, we’ve never actually USED the device, though we have practiced with the dummy version of the Epipen: Blue to the sky. Orange to the thigh.

But, like most health aids, the Epipen has an expiration date, so this requires getting a new device a couple times a year. The schools loathe having outdated medicines on hand.

As it turns out, for a varirty of reasons, there has been a shortage of Epipens in 2018. To address this, “FDA is alerting health care professionals and patients of updated dates through which some EpiPens and the authorized generic version, manufactured by Meridian Medical Technologies, a Pfizer company, may be used beyond the manufacturer’s labeled expiration date.”

If you click on this link, you can look for the alphanumeric batch designation, the manufacturer’s original expiration date, and the new expiration date (beyond manufacturer’s original expiry date).

The thing is, I’ve always sensed that the expiration date was too short, which has made the process of keeping “current” devices at school/camp/et al to be costly and inconvenient.

In a related announcement, the FDA approved the first generic version of the EpiPen this month.

Leonard Bernstein would have been 100

Leonard Bernstein described how composers are able to create an astonishing variety of musical works from just thirteen notes of the Western tuning system

Leonard BernsteinThis is true: I have a stuffed lion named Lenny, named after Leonard Bernstein. He has a wild and magnificent mane, just like the composer/educator often had when he was conducting a symphony.

If he only did those Young People’s Concerts on CBS-TV during my growing-up period (1958-1972) , that would have been enough to make him an important figure in my life.

But, of course, he also composed the music to West Side Story, a movie I saw when I was about 10, and which I’ve seen in various iterations of plays and ballets at least a half dozen times. The Quintet version of Tonight was revelatory.

Leonard Bernstein had such a vast and varied career, I can hardly do it justice.

Here’s a bunch of links:

Leonard Bernstein: Young People’s Concerts | What Does Music Mean (Part 1 of 4) (1958)

Bernstein and Glenn Gould: Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor (BWV 1052) (1960)

West Side Story -Tonight Quintet and Chorus (1961)

Bernstein explains beautifully and eloquently exactly what a conductor does

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major, “The Titan” with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra , conducted by Leonard Bernstein

His Overture to Candide, conducted by Bernstein himself

Leonard Bernstein, conductor AND pianist, George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue – New York Philharmonic, the Royal Albert Hall (1976)

Leonard Bernstein – Kennedy Center Honors, 1980

Jaquandor writing about John Williams: “There’s a wonderful essay by Leonard Bernstein called ‘The Infinite Variety of Music,’ which appears in the book of the same title. The essay is actually the script of one of the wonderful episodes he used to do for the educational teevee program Omnibus.

“In this particular episode, Bernstein described how composers are able to create an astonishing variety of musical works from just thirteen notes of the Western tuning system, by reducing things even further and showing how a number of great composers wrote amazing pieces, many of which are very familiar, by using as their main motif the exact same four-note melody.”

Bernstein at 100

Religion & Spirituality In The Music Of Leonard Bernstein

10 Must-See Artifacts in This Powerful Centennial Exhibition

Amy Biancolli interview with Jamie Bernstein, Lenny’s daughter

Movie review: Eighth Grade

an odd mixture of nostalgia and horror

eighth gradeThere was an easy way my wife and I knew the movie Eighth Grade was definitely on the right track; we brought our recent eighth grader with us to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. She sat between her mother and me at the cinema, and alternated burying her face in into the arm of one parent or another in mortified recognition.

The film is an honest and poignant comedy about Kayla (newcomer Elsie Fisher) as she’s continually trying to figure out adolescence during the last week of middle school. Her father Mark (Josh Hamilton) tries to negotiate the terrain between showing that he cares and trying to give his daughter space, but just ends up leaving her exasperated. (Sometimes I know the feeling.)

I suppose what I like about the film is what it’s not. It largely avoids being a knock-off of Mean Girls or Clueless. Social media plays a large part in this endeavor – Kayla records a bunch of self-help videos – but she doesn’t become a YouTube star. It’s not an emo bummer.

Writer/director Bo Burnham, who says that he’s never been a 13-year old girl, talked on The Daily Show about how his stand-up comedy was really appealing to that middle school demographic.

Maybe it’s that there’s something universal about being person unprepared for the challenges of being on the cusp of adulthood, a period many look back upon with an odd mixture of nostalgia and horror.

The film is rated R for “language and some sexual material”, none of which was ribald enough to suggest you keep your teen home. In fact, some of the sex ed stuff is hysterically funny, and true.

Naomi Fry of The New Yorker says the movie has “queasy verisimilitude.” If you’ve ever been thirteen, you should watch Eighth Grade, and drag a teenager with you if you can.

Covering the regime’s pep rallies

Hillary will team up with George Soros.

ralliesA guy I know and respect IRL posited: “The media shouldn’t be covering Trump pep rallies. It would drive him crazier not to be covered.” I understand this position.

Omorosa Manigault Newman, the former reality show villain turned White House adviser turned regime foe suggested as much: “There’s one way to shut Donald Trump down and that is to just don’t give him the oxygen,” she said on The Daily Show recently. “And the oxygen comes from the clicks, the likes, the shock, the discussions. If you ignore him, then you starve him of the thing he loves the most ― and that is controversy and attention.”

Yet I’m resistant to the idea.

1. He’ll still be covered by FOX, CBN, right-wing bloggers. Do we want to cede the analysis and the reporting of news to them?

2. He’ll tweet about it. I remember some folks early on suggested not covering those. But unfortunately, he makes pronouncements on the platform. He fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Twitter.

3. Failure to cover him will feed into his narrative that the news is biased. Some have suggested that point anyway after the “editorial collusion by dozens of newspapers,” in response to the regime’s “fake news” claims.

4. He announces things at his rallies that the public should be aware of. At the rally in Great Falls, MT on July 5, 2018, he announced, “I’ve directed the Pentagon to begin a process of creating a sixth branch of the United States Armed Forces called the space force.”

It’s also where QAnon, which is either a “a deranged conspiracy cult” or a faux movement, leapt from the Internet to the crowd at the Tampa MAGA tour on July 31.

There are, I imagine from reading enough right-wing literature, some people who DO believe the regime actually “installed Robert Mueller as part of an ongoing plan to capture the Muslim terrorist Barack Obama. At the climax of the consensus narrative, Trump supporters will have to unite for a mighty Good vs Evil fight in which Hillary will team up with George Soros in an attempt to overthrow the government, only to be cast down by Trump, who will then usher in a new age of Christian righteousness.”

(My head hurts.)

I’m pained by the cost of these rallies. While the core event expenses presumably comes from the campaign of the presumed 2020 Republican candidate for President, the taxpayers are on the hook for the Secret Service, which is already overextended, plus state and local law enforcement.

So I say cover the guy, and then read The Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims he’s made since assuming office. It’s about 50 truth-bending comments per week, a goodly number of them at his rallies.

Hunchback of Notre Dame; Ring of Fire

Josh D. Smith, the music director of Ring of Fire, was music director at Mac-Hadyn for nine years.

ring of fireIt’s obviously for my own sake, not yours, that I review shows that my family sees ON THE LAST DAY OF THE PERFORMANCE.

We went to Mac-Hadyn Theatre in Chatham on August 5 to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame. My daughter kept correcting my wife’s pronunciation of the last word in the title; it DOESN’T rhyme with Mame.

Odd thing about the story. I’ve never read the book. Somehow, I had never seen the Disney adaptation BUT I own the soundtrack on CD. I’m fond of that music, particularly The Bells of Notre Dame and Hellfire.

The production was great, as usual. But what I should mention more often is the fact that when the minor characters are in the aisles leading to the tiny stage, they remain in character, not just waiting for their entrances.

And these people can SING! And, seemingly, singing right to the audience, and enjoying our appreciation of their vocal prowess.

On August 12 at Capital Rep downtown, we saw Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash. Coincidentally, Josh D. Smith, the music director of the show, was music director at Mac-Hadyn for nine years.

There were six musicians (plus the drummer, cordoned off) on stage, singing, playing multiple instruments – at least three of them played the upright bass. I was surprised to see a choreographer, Freddy Ramirez, listed, but there WAS a lot of movement on stage.

The first act was more biography, using the songs to tell John R. Cash’s story – and the latter, more of a jukebox musical. But the second act had the a cappella The Far Side Banks of Jordan, which was stellar.

I didn’t know this until afterwards, but there was a
1996 Broadway version of this show, which flopped after less than five dozen performances. This iteration has been whittled down in length, and from various reviews, for the better.

I was personally disappointed that Hurt, Johnny’s last great song, didn’t make the cut, but Ring of Fire. having nothing to do with volcanoes and earthquakes, was a monumental achievement.

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