Ten years ago I was working out at the Burbank YMCA when I got to talking to one of my wife’s friends, who was using the machine next to mine. When she asked how my wife was, I said she wasn’t feeling well, that lately she’d had persistent stomach upset.

“She should come see me,” the friend, Donna, said.

“Why?”

“I can make it go away.”

“Really? How?”

She said, “I’m an acupuncturist.”

Now, I knew Donna only slightly, and I knew her as the blonde bombshell mother of one of my son’s grade school classmates (and therefore someone who knew my wife). I didn’t know her as someone who stuck pins in people for medical reasons. But I was about to.

“Can you really make it go away?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then… can I come see you?”

I had had persistent acid reflux for about 15 years. Lately it had been worse. I had been to every doctor in my group and tried all sorts of remedies prescribed, including one that killed all the flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die, and one that put all sorts of new flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die.  I tried not eating many different types of food, and then eating only those types of food, and then eating no types of food at all for a week at a time. Nothing worked. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying out Donna, the attractive housewife formerly from New Jersey, who now wanted to stick pins in me. The pins couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than the acid reflux.

The next week I found myself in her office.  She asked me questions quite different than any of the doctors I had been to. For one thing, she asked me what it tasted like. No one had cared to ask that before. “It tastes like there’s a dead mouse stuck in my throat.” She thought that was pretty descriptive. Then she had me take off my shirt and my pants and my socks and lie down, and then she started to stick pins in me. And almost instantly the dead mouse was gone. I had spent countless hours circulating among doctors with theories, and five minutes of acupuncture cured me.

I make this point because the current Senate version of the health-care legislation now crawling its  way through Congress seeks to allow treatment plans to include “alternative therapies.” This story from the LA Times shares the medical establishment’s take on this, as summed up by  someone at Yale School of Medicine:  “These provisions are anti-science and anti-consumer.” A spokeswoman for the California Medical Association is quoted as saying, “They raise red flags because they could potentially open the door to practitioners with less training and expertise, which could endanger patient safety.”

But, y’know what? Acupuncture never endangered my life. Meanwhile, many years ago when I couldn’t keep any fluids down, a Western doctor  prescribed compazine — a muscle tightener — that came within 20 minutes of killing me. (I was very lucky that the right ER doctor, one who had once before seen someone’s head twisting all the way around behind his back,  happened to be on duty.) I haven’t known any acupuncturist to mistakenly take out someone’s gall bladder (as a surgeon did with my wife), or to recommend that my father-in-law have his voicebox removed (when later it turned out he just had a sore throat).

The people advocating for “alternative therapies” in this story are derided as “lobbyists.” And I guess they are. But so are the people agitating against these treatments getting covered by national health insurance. One way or another, they’re part of the American Medical Association.  There are many fine doctors in the nation, and if I’m struck by a car, please don’t take me to see an acupuncturist. I don’t deny the value of skilled surgeons or orthopedists or optometrists. What I don’t like is the ongoing agitation against other therapies with long traditions of effective healing.

My friend Mark Evanier raves about the Jay Johnson show I so loved.

I took my daughter to see “Jay Johnson: The Two and Only” tonight at the Colony Theatre in Burbank. Whether or not you think you want to see “a ventriloquism act,” you should see this one if at all possible. Johnson is “a ventriloquist” the way Michelangelo was a painter. It’s an astonishing show. Johnson can make voices, noises, sound effects, singing, echoes, and every other sort of sound imaginable arrive seemingly anywhere on the stage. What Ricky Jay can do with cards, Jay Johnson can do with his voice.

But the show is more than that. Johnson gives us a history of ventriloquism that stretches back to the dawn of mankind, illuminating the connections between the Oracle at Delphi, seance mediums, village exorcists, and nightclub performers (all of whom practiced ventriloquism). The history that is even more revealing, though, is his own, as he takes us through a boyhood in Texas spent talking to himself in his room, to countless adolescent performances in his small hometown after getting hooked by the first laugh he got from an audience, to a chance telephone meeting with the much older man who will prove to be his mentor, to his eventual great success on television and the stage. It’s the story of someone who finds his own voice by throwing it into so many different objects. He’s a consummate writer and performer, and a very funny one.

Here’s where to get tickets. (It runs for just ten more performances.) And while, sadly, I can’t embed the trailer to the show, here’s the link so you can watch it.

Imagine my surprise in learning that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is considering reopening the Hall of Justice. Judging by what I was reading just the other night, the place seems to be haunted by people coming back from the dead.

The man who wrote “The Hokey Pokey” has died.

He was 104. Which is a millennium in hokey pokey  years.

The song was written in 1944. And we’ve all been living with it ever since.

A baby called my friend the playwright Max Sparber today. The baby didn’t have much to say, but you can listen to it here.

Two months ago I wrote about Brian Eno’s work with music and art generated randomly by computers. At that time, “Bloom,” his iPhone app that allows one to do similar work on a small scale (and on a smaller screen:  your iPhone), had been out for a while and was a hot download from the App Store. Eno mentioned that the next iteration, “Trope,” had been released on iTunes that weekend, but what he failed to mention (or did not know) was that it was available on the U.K. iTunes, but not on the U.S.

At some point since then, it’s been released here. And so, here’s a brief video that shows the application in action. I haven’t downloaded this yet, but I probably will. How much iPhone “Risk” can one play before needing something new to play with? Moreover, I remain mesmerized with Eno’s work all of which, to credit Rich Roesberg with the point, descends from John Cage.

What’s remarkable here is the degree to which smartphones are revolutionizing our work, our play, and our lives. This tiny device smaller than my hand has most of the technological power I so desperately craved when I was 12: the power to write, or draw, or record, and then distribute that artistic creation freely anywhere in the world. No one younger than 40 can imagine what it was like for homegrown artists 35 years ago to have to choose between the bad options of hand copying, mimeograph, carbon paper, or 25-cents-a-page Xerox copying. None of them was suitable.

Twenty years ago and more, I was a dead shot with most firearms:  shotgun, rifle, revolver, automatic handgun, and, yes, those pump-action air rifles (commonly called “BB guns”). This came from years of steady practice, as well as having eyes and arms that were 20 years younger.  I could ask a companion out in the field to load two clay pigeons onto the thrower, stand with my back to it with my shotgun broken open, yell “pull,” casually load the gun, snap it shut, turn, and pick off both of the skeet before they hit the ground. At that point in my life I probably could have shot the eyelashes off a chipmunk and left the animal alive.

This summer I went shooting again out in a field for the first time in far too long. To say that my skills have dipped is an understatement. I don’t think I could have hit Rush Limbaugh at five paces with a howitzer.  I did get better as the day unfolded, though, shooting the crotch off the assailant marked on a target (I was aiming for the head), and picking off one of the dozen or two skeet my brother-in-law gamely pitched into the air for me. But clearly I need practice, and lasix.

Today that same brother-in-law emailed me the video below, which depicts exciting new technological advances in the sport of shooting. In his email, he said, “You know you want one.” And he’s right. I do. You’ll see why.

If like me you had a perfectly pleasant Thanksgiving, it’s a good time to reflect on people who didn’t, and to remember how lucky we are most of the time.

• I can’t imagine what Thanksgiving was like for this family in Utah, where one of three siblings died after being trapped upside-down in a cave for 28 hours. It’s difficult to think of a worse way to die, and I’m sure this is something that the whole family will live with for the rest of their lives.

• Today when I picked up my car from the dealer, the rental-car guy and I rode through North Hollywood. I told him, as I tell at least one person every day, that one out of every eight people we see is out of work. And then I noticed all the boarded-up businesses. If you’ve got a job right now, this is something good to bear in mind.
• And then a good friend called me today from out of town to tell me that her father had died on Tuesday.

Here’s how I spent my Thanksgiving:  The kids washed my wife’s van and my son’s car while I read the paper and supervised, then I gave the dog a bath while they supervised, then we took the dog for a long walk before going to the Smokehouse for dinner (it was okay). Then we came home and watched “Survivorman,” then a DVD, then we played two board games (Monopoly, then the electronic Doctor Who board game), then the younger kids went to bad, then the wife went to bed, then my eldest and I watched the movie “A.I.” until 2 a.m.  I shared all this with the rental guy. He told me that his girlfriend worked an afternoon shift at the hospital, so they celebrated Thanksgiving at 11 a.m., then he went to another Thanksgiving meal at 6 p.m. We agreed that, all things considered, we both felt lucky.