Montana millionaire buys trophy health insurance policy
May 11, 2008 | Filed Under LOL Feature Stories (satire), Blog | Leave a Comment
On this spring day in mid-May, as the sun begins to melt the snow on either side of a winding private road in Paradise Valley, Montana millionaire Slade Cogwell has agreed to let us inside his palatial health insurance policy. It’s a view that most Montanans would envy, and not too far from this trophy policy an altogether different scene unfolds. In a trailer park off Highway 89, Mary Grey is changing the bandages on her husband Don’s near-crippling leg wound, suffered when Don fell from the roof of their outhouse as he attempted to reattach the roof after it was blown off by the wind.
No such triage afflicts the Cogwell home as we park under the massive log portico and are greeted by Slade himself. He is at the door faster than you can say “Accidental Death and Dismemberment Supplemental Insurance,” and eager to show off the policy he bought with the executive compensation package he received when he left Bear-Stearns.
Slade decides to start our tour with his $2 copay clause, and we have to admit we are immediately impressed. No one could miss the elegance and scope of this part of his McPlan. But not even this entry to his policy could prepare us for what lies within. Full dental coverage! Four bitewing x-rays, periodontal scaling and root planing, and gingivectomies grace this part of Slade’s plan. For sheer opulence, this seems impossible to top. And then we see that Slade has coverage for all emergency room fees and a vision package with free Lasik procedures and non-prescription sunglass coverage. No wonder Slade has a perfect set of teeth and 42 pairs of sunglasses!
[Cogwell home interior at right: We thought the McMansion was swank until we saw the Cogwell’s health McPlan. Their McPlan dwarfs every other health care structure in the neighborhood.]
Who could help but feel a twinge of envy? In fact, if we had health insurance we could be sick with envy. The Grey family isn’t envious either. They can’t afford it.
Don Grey is 48, and because of his age and a brief asthma attack in 1965, his health insurance would cost $1365 a month with a $7500 deductible. So when he fell from that outhouse roof, he and Mary opted for homegrown care. Said Mary, “Well, we keep some old fishin’ line around–never know when that might come in handy–so I stitched up the leg 
as best I could.” Then she refinanced their home, and with the proceeds bought some Bacteen, and with what was left, replaced the hammer Don dropped into the old one-seater when he fell.
[At left. Don and Mary Grey’s home. The equity came in handy when Don fell from the outhouse roof.]
The Greys, who are the kind of fine folks Hillary Rodham Clinton would call “hard-working white Americans with really dangerous pre-existing conditions,” can take some comfort in knowing that they are not alone when health problems arise. Nearly 170,000 Montanan’s don’t have health insurance either.
Log home image from http://log-homes.thefuntimesguide.com/ Seriously: http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2008/04/09/news/mtregional/news07.txt
Livingston turns out to support RuPaul for president
February 23, 2008 | Filed Under LOL Feature Stories (satire) | 2 Comments
Everyone running for president is selling hope this year, but only one candidate has dared to make it fabulous. And she has broad support in Livingston.
Dozens of Livingstonians turned out on a recent wintry day for a rally to show their support for RuPaul for president. RuPaul (born Andre Charles on November 17, 1960) is an American drag performer, dance music singer, actor, and songwriter who gained fame in the 1990s, appearing in a wide variety of television programs, films, and musical albums.
Though a catty attitude is often associated with both politics and drag queens, RuPaul has brought an element of “love one another” to the campaign, and that sets her apart from the likes of that cranky John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and even the charming Barack Obama.
Not even the latest flap in which the verbose and seemingly unfiltered Bill Clinton accidentally referred to RuPaul as a “dark horse in this race,” would deter the outgoing African-American performer from her message of hope. “No doubt moments like this reinforce the feeling among voters that politics can be a drag. But I, alone among those running this year, can make drag fun. It’s my specialty.”
Nor has her lack of political experience dampened her hope or the enthusiasm of his fans her supporters.
Said one ardent supporter at the Livingston rally, “How many of these other guys. .women. . .er. . .other candidates can say they carried the full weight of the lead role in ‘StarrBooty’? You want to talk about pressure.” To another, a sense of history mattered more than experience. “This is our moment to elect both a woman and an African-American man with the same vote.”
A recent poll suggests that many voters are taking the message of a change in Washington to heart. To that constituency, RuPaul represents change more than anyone else. After all, this candidate can change faster than you can say “curtain call,” and do it eight or nine times in one evening.
While that is a positive to some, opposing candidates find it distracting when the debate has to be interrupted for a RuPaul trip to the dressing room. “No one, honey, and I mean no one,” says RuPaul, “can talk about Iraq in the same outfit she’s wearing to discuss health care.”
Equally frustrating for all of the presidential candidates is that RuPaul’s Libertarian streak, 
not to mention her identity, means she gets to have it both ways; she is debating both Republicans and Democrats in what promises to be a long-running election year performance.
[At right, John McCain shows a flicker of impatience after RuPaul resumes the debate in the gown she had made specially for answering questions on national security and terrorism.]
On this day in downtown Livingston, it doesn’t matter what the polls, the pundits, or the rest of America will have to say. Livingstonians are ready to stand by their man, their woman, and the Fabulosity of Hope.
Preserve Ameya; buy my yard! Just $250,000! Makes a great gift!
October 3, 2007 | Filed Under LOL Feature Stories (satire) | 6 Comments
Yesterday Neiman Marcus unveiled its annual Christmas Book to help dolts like us find the perfect Christmas gift for the person who has everything, typically their own stuff and money as well as ours because that is what capitalist democracies are for. Livingston Out Loud thought that you’d want to know that Neiman Marcus is providing us with the opportunity to buy locally this Christmas. According to the Dallas Business Journal online, this year’s Christmas Book boasts “everything from a $20 set of four peppermint tins to a $2.3 million getaway to the Ameya Preserve in Montana.”
LOL doesn’t want to mess with our fabulous trickle-up economy where if you have a slice you can put preserves on it. (We are already reeling from the U.S. Senate Office of the Sergeant at Arms’ repeated visits to this site after our “Ted Kennedy Calls Tester ‘Mister President’” article.) We just want to point out that you can buy closer to home. The Editorial yard, for example (that would be mine), has a lot going for it at 1/10th the price of the Ameya Preserve. But more about that in a $5 tin of pepperminutes.
I went to the Christmas Book online to see what the competition, Mr. Wade Dokken of people-who-question-a-301-family-community-with-a-huge-impact-on-the-environment-suffer-from-“class envy” fame, had to offer. This was a little difficult at first because I couldn’t decide whether a 10 acre chunk of land in the Livingston area would come under “Fur/Outwear” on account of Dokken’s claims that wildlife corridors would not be destroyed in the making of his “preserve.” Or would it be “Jewelry” since he anticipates an audience willing to pay huge sums for a little wilderness bangle.
How about “Handbags” because Ameya seems to be handing out bags of something. Bags of public relations poo for you and me, fellow class enviers, bags of cash for folks like Alice Waters, whom Wade gifted with a home “residence” as well as $500,000 to start a culinary institute at Ameya for her “slow food” movement, and Jack Horner of dinosaur fame who got a home “residence”, too, as well as a $3.275 million dollar endowment for the Museum of the Rockies. Jack also got a longer title, lucky devil; he will now be known as the Ameya Preserve Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies. Take that, Stephen Spielberg! When we aren’t busy calculating our own endowments with fetching little 3-place decimal points, or wondering if we wouldn’t also succumb to the lure of really, really long numbers and titles, we secretly acknowledge among ourselves how boring our mountains and wildlife can be without a little foie de gras, wine, and onsite dino digs, especially if you are a migrating glitz weasel.
This truly factual, but nonetheless amazing info is available on the Web and at the Ameya Web site. (I ain’t giving them a free link, so you’ll have to Google them.) If you find your way there and endure hours of tedious re-touched animations, I take no responsibility if you puke in your shoes. (Hey, “Shoes!” I’ll look under “Shoes!) The home page animation (with music, too) says “In the vast wilderness of Montana’s Paradise Valley a bold new vision is taking shape.” (This bold new vision is accessible, too, to anyone who is used to coming and going using a nearby private airport, that is.) But you really have to visit the Christmas Book to see the rugged male model in the leather jacket standing in front of the vast wilderness. (When I last looked, the vast wilderness was made up of a lot of 20 acre ranchettes, “accessibility” meant bigger bathroom stalls instead of proximity to private airports, and slow food was a wounded deer. But then I am probably suffering from brown grass envy.)
But back to the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book. I found the 2.3 Million Dollar Slice of Heaven with Rugged Male Model And A Home That Comes with A Gourmet Dinner By Alice Waters and Music by Renee Fleming and Joshua Bell under “Fantasy Gifts.” No kidding! Just the cost of making nature actually interesting to people must be in the millions, so you see where the needless markup comes in. “Despite developing less than 10 percent of our 11,000 acres of pristine land, we know that even our 300 home sites will inevitably impact the environment,” said Wade Dokken, founder of Ameya Preserve. “Our philosophy dictates that when taking from the land, we must continue to make efforts to give back.” Like the home residence and the half mill he gave back to Alice Waters, for example. I can’t afford Alice Waters, but I make a mean locally raised pork roast that you can eat as fast or as slow as you please, and I know lots of musicians. Buy my yard, and I’ll get our beloved local band The Fossils to sing for you while you eat the roast. And you can tell everyone that you got to dig Fossils.
So, now that we know it is okay to have a big impact on the environment as long as your philosophy dictates that you continue to make efforts to give back, lets compare the values between Ameya and my yard. The Ameya Web site says that you’ll find a spa and a store and a pavilion and a nature center and a kids camp and your cabin, all “tucked” “amid” (god, I hate both of those words) the mountains. But, oh, “Ameya is by no means isolated. Just minutes away, Bozeman and Livingston beckon with their charm and authenticity.” (That would be the same charm and authenticity that questioned Mr. Dokken’s intentions.) Well, I can give you kids, camping, and nature right here IN the midst of Livingston’s beckoning authenticity. Hell, I get moose walking right by the house, down the sidewalk, natural as you please! And if it’s tucking you want, there’s plenty of opportunity for that right there in the herb tub where the leeks I never tended died, or over by the rock garden that I used to fill in the “fountain” left by the previous owner.
But I don’t want to overplay it. The Ameya site reveals nothing so much as how hard it is to demonstrate sustainability and environmental consciousness without thousands of dollars of Flash animation and phrases like “nexus of conservation activities.” I don’t need to fill you up with sappy music and eye candy animations and meaningless phrases to let you know that, just as soon as I clean up after the dogs, you’ll find that the 500-square-foot slice of heaven with its recycled brick patio, its nexus of fallen leaves, and its ever-evolving programs of discovery, right here behind my house, speaks for itself. You might even say it beckons. Just $250,000. In time for the holidays.
And now my philosophy dictates that I must continue to make efforts to fix the backyard gate that has come untucked amid our mountains. Thank goodness I only need to continue to make efforts; actually doing something right is really tiresome.
———-
10/4: Goat: A High Country News Blog started a new category called “Irritating Websites” this summer and the Ameya’s site was first up. There, you see. I was not exaggerating about the really bad, like 3.275 million times bad, Ameya Web site.
10/15: I see that Charlotte Freeman also weighed in on the topic on her excellent Living Small blog (October 9).
10/17: See also Phil Cubeta’s Gift Hub: Blogging Philanthropy: “Is Super Capitalism Good for Us as Fools?”. Cubeta is a “Morals Tutor to America’s Wealthiest Families”. One can only hope Wade will hire him.
Blog articles on the Alice Waters relationship with the Ameya Preserve:
Charlotte Freeman on the ethicurean.com blog: “Strange bedfellows: Why is Alice Waters involved with the Ameya Preserve in Montana?”
Curbed San Francisco (sf.curbed.com): “Screw Socialism: Alice Waters Heads for The Hills”
Eater San Francisco (sf.eater.com): “Alice Waters’ Involvement in Montana Housing Development: Slightly Confusing