Have you ever had a health insurance claim denied? Before you run out and shoot an insurance executive, use the Claim File Helper to uncover the paper trail that led to the decision.

ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage. Get your claim file before submitting an appeal.

After you’ve followed the chain of decisions, then you can consider terminating some rich a-hole. It’s the polite thing to do.

My last post was a little cryptic. So let me clarify with some illustrations.

I hope that helps!

Today is the last day of classes! I don’t even have a lot to do: I have one class on Fridays, which is all student presentations, and then I’m free. Sort of. I have a bunch of grading to do, which I plan to wrap up this weekend, and I have to assemble a final exam that will be posted online on Monday. A lot of the pressure is off.

I chose to celebrate prematurely last night by walking to the theater to see Wicked. It was good, I enjoyed it, but of course I have a few complaints.

• It was long at 2½ hours, this is just the first half of the story, yet it stripped out almost all of the complexity of the Wicked novel. It’s fine to greatly change the story when adapting to a different medium, but as long as you’re doing that, why instead bloat it up rather than streamlining it? The first half of the movie took it’s time building up the character, but mostly omitted all the chaos and unrest of the book.

• Movies always do this one annoying thing: they take a character who is supposed to be unsettling and scary, and make her gorgeous. It’s the old trope of putting glasses on a beautiful women to signal that she’s ugly (she isn’t, not in the slightest) and whip them off to indicate that she’s now transformed into glorious beauty. I’m sorry, but Cynthia Erivo was stunning in the role of the Wicked Witch. She might have given me a green skin fetish now.

• I do miss Margaret Hamilton. Maybe Erivo will stop singing and start screeching in the next half.

• There are a lot of characters who are there to fill the stage, doing nothing. I hope they are given something to do in part 2.

• I will say that the flying monkeys are far more terrifying in this movie than they were in the 1939 movie, which is saying a lot, since many children were traumatized by the original monkeys.

Now it’s time to do the responsible adult thing and trudge through the ice and snow to get some work done. The semester isn’t really over until the grades have been submitted.

I got stuff done today. A quiz written and posted online, and I took this huge pile of my late mother’s savings bonds to the bank. Almost 200 slips of paper, and they’re being processed and interest calculated as a I type. Unfortunately, to get that done I had to personally sign each one there at the bank.

I can’t feel my right arm now. It’s simultaneously numb and sore. That represents one tedious chore done, though.

It would be really handy to be able to live on spite and self-loathing.

There’s a new phenomenon sweeping across the social media platform, BlueSky: lists. Lots of lists.

The way this works is that anyone can make a list of other BlueSky users and post about its existence — then everyone who sees it can click on the list and follow, or block, all the people on the list. For instance, here’s a list called “Bug Macrophotography” which contains the names and BlueSky accounts of people who do macrophotography of insects. Handy! With a single click you can subscribe to all of their feeds…or if you’re horrified at bug closeups, block them all. It’s a way to quickly fill up with people you follow.

I mostly like it, except for the fact that, a while ago, the only content you’d see is people posting their lists. I haven’t made any lists, because as some of you may know, I have an aversion to List Lords dating back to my old talk.origins days. Peter Nyikos left scars.

Anyway, there is also a tool called ClearSky.app that lets you see who you, or anybody for that matter, has blocked. Here’s everyone I have blocked in my short tenure on BlueSky:

Pitiful. I have to do better.

I can also see a list of all the people who have blocked me. It’s much longer so I won’t post it here; just go to ClearSky.app and enter my user name, pzmyers.bsky.social for yourself and you can see how many people dislike me. I don’t mind being blocked at all, I encourage more to shut me off.

You can also see a list of lists, all the lists that have my name on them. Some of them are from people encouraging more people to follow me, some are lists encouraging more people to block me. I discovered that there is a list called “FtBullies” that brought back old memories. It’s been years since all the bloggers here were called “FtBullies,” I guess the slymepitters have found a new home.

Still, I think it’s a good development that BlueSky has tools to help you curate your social media feed.