Getting the Knack/Only in NJ: A case-study approach to “ethical texturalism”

A new occasional series

(In given blog entries, this could run concurrently with another, ongoing series.)

Case today: Dealing with Affordable Care Act “tail ends”

[Edits 1/17/15. Edit 1/19/15.]

Introduction

This series, along with covering other subjects (which actually may be more interesting), will continue in some sense the “OFAD” series. It will look at everyday business (and laughs) associated with the implementation, on the jerk-on-the-street level, of the Affordable Care Act (usually and specifically, as I can best discuss, the Medicaid expansion in New Jersey). But it will do more than that.

The more interesting topics under this heading will illustrate how we (as jerks on the street) develop competence to deal with practical problems (which may often seem stupid and needless), as often arise in pursuing a middle-class life in a state (such as New Jersey) with a high cost of living, and when paradoxical issues arise regarding (among other things) your health, your insurance status, and/or your status as viewed by others (ludicrously or not).

This series will look at everyday tactics as well as longer-range “principles of your personal philosophy” that you develop as sum up what it means to pursue your life, and which may constitute a theory (small-purpose or otherwise) that you can improve, adapt, or supersede you develop better skills in life.

(For instance, when you’re young, you may opt not to go to the doctor for very much, especially when you don’t have health insurance. What about when you’re older middle-age? Going to the doctor, then, seems wiser. Do you [at that stage] have health insurance? Maybe bare-bones. How do you, then, choose when to go to the doctor on a somewhat more frequent basis?)

As one example that used to be a bit of a bear for me, I found that, very generally and quite predictably, working in the editorial field—whether at a staff job or as a freelancer with a lot of work per year—means decreased sleep. On average, during roughly 1990-2010, my sleep was about 6 ½ hours a day, with some days less (it could be a lot less), and some days more. It’s beside the point what physiological mechanism and/or predictable set of factors was behind this (much less whether there was much I could have done to mitigate the problem).

“Stress” as a vague idea is a good candidate as an explanation; but it was a fact of life for me (as it might be for you if you had a similar career), and what problems did it potentiate? What passing solutions were there?

For an instance that may be more familiar to you, if you have a demanding job, or an unreasonable boss or project, how do you handle sleep problems that arise as an obvious enough result of the emergent stressors (especially when, acutely, your sleep may get starkly worst with clearly increased, not-terribly-fair work problems going on)? This is one kind of “Getting the Knack” issue.

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Now I don’t want to go marching into a thicket of specifically, and anger-inducing (for me), work “war stories” as I did last winter with the “Dollars and sense” and “Running with the bulls” mini-series (which ended up as two shorter series than I expected, by emerging preference). I want to look at more constructive angles, such as stratagems, methods for resolving difficulties (objective problems and not, and successful resolutions or not-so), and conclusions that you draw about areas of challenge in life (such as may lead you to start pursuing a different line of work or industry).

And I will seek chances for humor among the “friendlier war stories” and “bits of practical wisdom.”

Catching up with the OFAD details

Let’s wrap up quick my goofy odyssey of 2014.

In November, after I tracked down the right person to talk to about getting my Medicaid coverage set up (see this entry for details), my general Medicaid card came in the mail (as I noted here), just before the “seven to 10 business days” I was told it would take for me to get something.

Then I had a standing doctor’s appointment in mid-December. This was a general practitioner I’ve seen for many years, for regular follow-ups. (I did not need to be told by any ACA palaver to see him.) But the question for me: how would my Medicaid coverage affect seeing him? Would I be advised to change practitioners? I strongly did not want to.

Long story short: I saw him, and discussed the insurance situation with workers in his office. They did take Medicaid, but they did not take the specific Medicaid-serving insurance company that I had been automatically signed up with by the state (Amerigroup). If I could change the insurer, they said, they could bill the insurer they wanted, United Healthcare.

Well, I phoned the Medicaid office that I had a number for, and got the ball rolling on changing the insurer. But the new arrangement wouldn’t be effective until Jan. 1. So this could not cover the doc visit. Then I returned to the doc’s office to pay the bill “out of pocket,” which I had been prepared to do on the day of the appointment (and had long done with his office) anyway.

Somewhere in the midst of the later-December jazz, there was an online questionnaire I was invited to partake in, from Amerigroup. I did this, I think before I was signed up with United Healthcare. As a reward for taking the questionnaire, I was offered a choice of gifts (one, a hat, had the Spanish translation—and just about all the Medicaid-related mailings I’ve gotten have had Spanish translations—of sombrero; I chose a water bottle [I forget what the Spanish term was for this]).

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Well, when I got my United Healthcare card (an insurance ID card in addition to the Medicaid one I’d already gotten), it said my new GP was Dr. ____. I didn’t want this; I phoned the number for them and changed my GP to the one I’d long had, which they allowed. I was to get a new card in the mail, which came days ago.

Also in recent days, a bill came from my doctor’s office for the appointment I’d already paid for by debit card. This has happened with them before. I was a bit angered, but last Saturday I put together a mailing, including a copy of a bank statement reflecting the charge by the doc’s office, to show I’d already paid the bill.

This may all sound like an annoying load of business, but another matter has downright angered me a lot. And to this we turn.

The ACA Web site’s harassing e-mails

Starting last fall, I was getting ACA Marketplace–generated e-mails inviting me to come back, to sign up, hey hey. There was quite a flurry of these over some days or weeks. The general assumption in them was that I qualified for privately gotten individual insurance, for which I would likely get a subsidy, and I hadn’t signed up for 2014 yet.

This was bullshit. I’d been in the process of getting my Medicaid coverage going (as I’ve said in previous OFAD entries, and as newspaper coverage for New Jersey has made plain, the Medicaid expansion in this state for 2013-14 was in the state’s hands after people had signed up on the federal Marketplace site in late 2013; and you could not sign up directly, within any state system in New Jersey, for Medicaid-expansion insurance in late 2013). Then, once the state entity handling the Medicaid expansion, NJ FamilyCare, had the info from the feds, there was a backlog, fumbling….

I’d found as long ago as last February (see here) that I had an insurance policy number, but nothing came to me (in the mail or otherwise) showing I had insurance. I would not find out that a Medicaid card had been prepared to me (and mailed out, but to the wrong address) until November 2014 (as I related in OFAD 7).

Well, I did get onto my federal Marketplace page (after trouble dealing with the need for a password change, which was angering in itself) eventually, in December. I saw there was nothing I need do there, but it was good to know I could get on, in case I had to.

The latest problems

Well, just in the past few days, there was a big spate of e-mails from the federal ACA people, haranguing me about signing up, the deadline was coming (Jan. 15), etc., etc. There were three initial e-mails, within hours of each other. Yesterday (Jan. 15) I printed out two. Then, over the past 24 hours or so, there were at least two more. One portentously had in its subject line something about an individual person making a statement.

After becoming aware of these, I was quite angered. I thought in terms of stalking, harassment, tax-fraud case—meaning I saw the ACA people as guilty of all these.

I looked at my printouts of the two ACA e-mails I’d gotten the day before. Yes, there was a way (via a URL) you could “stop receiving messages from the Marketplace.”

Plan for a solution

This morning I was getting ready for my day and went about reviewing what to do to be efficient, and not merely write a ranting blog entry about this situation. Do I cancel the ACA’s sending me e-mails, or not? I had left them coming in the fall because I thought there might be important, relevant info they could tell me. Not so now.

But also, they came to me on the assumption I had yet to sign up for (subsidized) individual insurance. This was the source of the most anger. I was already signed up for Medicaid. Clearly there was some “disconnect” within the ACA system (even after its vaunted improvements following the debacle of fall 2013) for it to be approaching me as if I still needed to sign up, when I didn’t, and when it assumed I had an income level that qualified me for individual insurance, when I don’t. The satirist in me looked at this importunate haranguing as like the insurance salesman in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969), in the prison sweat box with Virgil Starkwell, assigned to apply severe punishment to Starkwell for his attempt to escape.

Aside from the subjective issue of the ACA people seeming intent on drumming up business for private insurance companies from the wrong constituents, like an implacable insurance salesman, there was the possibility that, when I filed for my taxes, the blessed bureaucratic monstrosity in play could have in its files that “I hadn’t signed up for insurance” when I had. I could only find out if they were wrong on this once I filed my tax return.

Then, not entirely an academic matter, there’s the issue of stalking. I’m not one to claim being subjected to this, at the drop of a hat, but look here: there is definitely a solid subjective basis. New Jersey state law on criminal stalking has this provision (in N.J.S.A. 2C:12-10):

“(1)…repeatedly maintaining a visual or physical proximity to a person; directly, indirectly, or through third parties, by any action, method, device, or means, following, monitoring, observing, surveilling, threatening, or communicating to or about, a person, or interfering with a person’s property; repeatedly committing harassment against a person; or repeatedly conveying, or causing to be conveyed, verbal or written threats or threats conveyed by any other means of communication or threats implied by conduct or a combination thereof directed at or toward a person.”  [p. 686 of the 2012 Compact Edition of West’s New Jersey Statutes]

I boldfaced possibly relevant language. Now, it does not cause me to fear, when the ACA e-mails come in to me like a snowstorm with “advisories” based on no reality. But the sort of interference in a person’s life that may cause fear to more naïve people could cause anger and indignation to older, more experienced people. And definitely, it angers me that I get e-mails suggesting I have not complied with the ACA law, when I have, and when I contemplate filing my taxes and wonder if the IRS will have in records somehow connected to an ACA database the false info that I have not signed up.

If the ACA people were fully within their rights approaching me with their e-mails, I might not have a case; but I have been complying, as my OFAD series has shown; so for me to get “delusional” ACA e-mails that seem insistent on assuming I still need to sign up, and that for individual insurance, is to me rather like stalking and harassment.

But I won’t pursue a case for that at this point. I have relevant printouts, against their possible future need. But for now, I will apply through an ACA e-mail, as their copy allows, to have them stop e-mailing me messages. Which [after writing the foregoing] I did.

I also went into my account on the ACA Marketplace site and checked there; the only thing specific for me was a “statement of eligibility,” which I found was the same December 2013 letter (a pdf) I had already downloaded twice before in the past.

And I will hope for the best regarding filing for taxes.

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Hopefully my next “Getting the Knack” entry will be on something far different and more fun.

Movie break (Quick Vu): Woody’s flesh may be weak, but his spirit is willing: Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

This muted comic romp is good for Allen fans, with nice film craft and an imitation of screwball comedies that was overlooked by summer 2014 critics

Fourth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

Subsections below:

A skeptical eye on mediums is part of the message

Magic echoes Manhattan at one point, more as a quaint way a master echoes an old work than trying as a showcase trick to push a controversial point

An ultimate affirmation of a transcendent factor to life

[Edits 1/15/15.]
 

As I’ve said in previous recent entries on Woody Allen films, within the past 15 years or so, he has been revisiting tropes and angles (including story schemes or themes, genre styles, etc.) from the earlier, more original phase of his career; and of course his more recent versions of these aren’t his best. After I first watched about a third of Magic in the Moonlight, I saw he was revisiting his way of treating serious themes with a playful genre style that also aped films from an old cinematic period he esteemed, such as the late 1930s. A good example is The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), whose ~2001-produced DVD package makes note of his fondness for “Champaign comedies” of the late 1930s, as a partial inspiration for Purple Rose. Another example of him aping a filmic period, less with an eye to covering a serious theme, is The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). (See End note.)

Well, Magic seems to pay homage to late 1930s films, especially screwball comedies, while also depicting a period from the decade before, the 1920s. (It’s interesting how these two decades have been conflated, rather anachronistically, in film lore of more recent decades. For instance, The Sting [1973] was about 1930s doings, but the Scott Joplin music that became so big at its time of release, as part of its score, was from the 1920s. Of course, the decades are about as distinct as are (1) 1920s jazz-age decadence and good times versus (2) 1930s economic deprivation and dark gathering historical storm clouds in Europe.)

Of course, like Purple Rose, Magic deals with some serious concerns—and this in a somewhat disguised way, as if the film’s playful way of going about its business is more for entertainment than for serious consideration of such things as whether God exists. Some critics from the past summer, when this film was released, seemed to see it as a second-rate (at best) Allen effort; one glib review even dismissed the film as showing “trite” writing. While I think any serious Allen fan will say this effort is not among his best, and the coverage of serious issues here is perfunctory to a good extent, I was surprised at how good it was (on its own terms), and I think critics really did miss how much Allen was doing a cinematic genre/period homage with this—that is why the script’s writing may have seemed hokey or fussy-and-precious, and the character differences so pointed. I mean, the fact that Magic is a nod to 1930s screwball comedy still might not win a lot of viewers over—I think twenty-somethings and younger especially would be turned off by this film—but it helps explain its style as something more than Allen just being old and irrelevant.

A skeptical eye on mediums is part of the message

I didn’t want to say terribly much of a critical nature about this film—in part because I generally try to avoid chewing over a film that is still “in play” as a current business proposition (this one’s DVDs recently came out on the market, and I had to view it under library restrictions typical of new releases with presumed high viewer demand). After an opening scenario that shows a magician, a supposed Wei Ling Soo who can make an elephant disappear on stage (with background music that at one point sounds a bit like the suspenseful Jaws theme), we find that the man is not a Chinese but a British man with a tart tongue. He is enlisted in performing a service that we later find is his avocation/sideline while his main career/passion is being a magician: on the side, he aims to debunk fraudulent “mediums,” people who claim to have powers of clairvoyance and the like.

Allen’s focus on magicians on the one hand and ESP-related issues on the other (whether the two are interrelated in a story or not) has come up numerous times in his work over decades. A reviewer of this film, Stephen Whitty, in the July 25, 2014, Star-Ledger (weekend review section, p. 14; Whitty was a longtime film reviewer for that paper but has recently become a syndicated writer still used by that paper, but more as through a wire service, seemingly), likened this film—and about as readily criticized it—as being on a par with Allen’s Scoop (2005), Jade Scorpion, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010). (The last of these, I think, Magic arguably shares the most in common with.) To me, in general, Allen seems to “obsess” about ESP and the like more than he needs to (even if he very consistently scorns it); here, he seems to have it stand in for people’s ideas of a “spirit world” that suggests not only that (1) there is more to the world than material reality that is apprehended by empirical means, but by implication, (2) the reality of God.

The film’s magician, real name Stanley Crawford (with stage name Wei Ling Soo) and who poses as “Stanley Taplinger” when investigating the latest alleged fraud, Sophie Baker, is drawn as an elegant, confirmed materialist and cynic. He almost seems like a caricature of Allen in his more skeptical/pessimistic mode, except here Stanley seems the object of some irony. Stanley is played by Colin Firth, who is good at giving life to unlikely characters or those (as here) with the gift of elaborate ways of talking. (In Where the Truth Lies [2005], a film I started to do a review of and haven’t committed to finishing, he plays a sort of show-biz comic partner to a Jerry Lewis-like character played by Kevin Bacon; in fact, in following that film’s logic, Firth would be a sort of Dean Martin, except he is a straight-man comic partner with a British accent, which might in the context be a fish out of water, but he makes his part work surprisingly well—it’s just that you can’t think of him as the more commonly known Dean Martin.)

Stanley goes to the south of France, where the American (from poor roots) Sophie Baker (Emma Stone, with big eyes and earnestly plucky manner) is plying her trade in impressing the mother of a rich family, whose son she is going to marry while aiming to have their money fund a school for the occult arts she wants to start. (Stone, with shaped eyebrows, seems visually in this film like a CGI cartoon character whose voice she would supply; but it happens that—considering Allen’s films of the last ~15 years—she is among the “millennial” actresses who are actually done well by [handled complimentarily] in a film of his; not all are, of course [Evan Rachel Wood is an example of the latter; not her fault].)

Given early intimations of her, Stanley smells a con artist; “A pretty face never hurt a cheap swindler,” he opines at one moment. The jaded Stanley circles Emma, who is somewhat like a Henry James character, an earnest American girl dilating amid sophisticates in the Old World; and eventually Stanley is impressed that she is the real thing as a medium. And he starts to become an impresario for her, to hawk her abilities in accord with the expectations of the scientific world and to the satisfaction of the common-sense public; until, when his own aunt becomes gravely hurt in a car accident, he starts to pray for the aunt’s recovery—and thus, in a whipsaw change from “religious fervor” to recovery of his skeptical head, he suddenly resolves to stand on his original sense that Sophie is a fake.

In short, the story contains some plot twists, though overall it is not a ridiculously shaped story. But its premises may strike some as quaint. Indeed, in the end, things wind up happily for Stanley and Sophie (an unusual eventuality for Allen in his more esteemed films). I would suggest that Allen fans give this one a look; it is not among his greats, as just about anyone should expect; but among his works of the last 15 years, and among his more comic ones among those, it isn’t bad.

Cynics among Allen watchers may say that this story of a middle-aged man becoming a love interest for a twenty-something ingénue is “more of Allen’s preposterous May-December relationship crap,” and (conceding the point temporarily) I think this film puts it in a league with Whatever Works (2009) in this narrow way: in both, a pessimistic, dourly scientific man tries to hold out against the naïve weltanschauung of a young ingénue, and eventually is won to the promise and beguiling verve her youth represents. Or something like that.

But in Magic, the old male sourpuss seems more a butt of irony than he seemed in Whatever Works (even though Stanley was most apt to make me laugh when he was reaching higher than usual to be arch with his insulting and/or self-congratulatory attitude), where Larry David’s character in Whatever Works just seemed a bore, honking out cynical remarks as if Allen was usually too tired to really make that viewpoint sound fresh and entertaining at all.

Magic echoes Manhattan at one point, more as a quaint way a master echoes an old work than trying as a showcase trick to push a controversial point

Another way to look at Magic is to consider that it borrows a story vignette idea from none other than Manhattan (1979), where the male (Allen’s Isaac Davis) and the love-interest female (Diane Keaton’s character) escape a rain storm in New York City and go into a planetarium, where their couple’s-type hugger-mugger is arrayed against a suggestion of the breadth of the universe, adding a sort of accidental cosmos-contemplation to the romantic moment. This yields a dimension that either adds philosophic spice or seems posturing, depending on your sympathy for Allen.

(I believe it is on the DVD for Hitchcock’s Marnie [1964] where, amid commentary, film scholar and director Peter Bogdanovich notes that Hitchcock said, when questioned about reusing an old trope of his, that what some call plagiarizing of oneself is really a matter of the artist’s exercising a “style.”)

In Magic, Stanley and Sophie are in a car (along the French seacoast) and the car breaks down; he tries to fix it, and can’t quite. A thunderstorm comes, and they seek shelter in a nearby astronomic observatory, which he reveals he used to come to years before. He operates the controls to open the dome, and a glimpse of the heavens is impressively exposed. I was struck by how this situation echoed Manhattan, though in this case (if it fully paralleled the earlier film), it would be like a vignette involving Davis and Tracy, the young woman played by Mariel Hemingway, rather than Davis with the Keaton character. But the way Allen, in general, works up a thematic resonance, and prompts a consideration of meaning, via juxtaposing a hectic romantic “cuddle moment” with a glimpse of the cosmos is a way he delivers a trademark manner of making an intended resonant point. Whether, in this case (or in earlier instances), it really strikes an edifying chord with modern audiences is another matter. But in Magic, at least it’s a way to flesh out a story that is, overall, aiming at charm rather than seeking to justify, against the tide of public opinion, an unseemly kind of relationship.

Liberal-arts resonances

Another typical Allen touch is an area where we can easily take stands, but we also generally have to respect his right to fly this cultural flag through his career. Allen alludes to cultural figures that college grads who took some liberal-arts courses might be able to appreciate. Yesterday, on the CBS Evening News, I saw a bit of interview with prospective presidential candidate Marco Rubio, and he said, as part of his idea how to be a kind of updated Republican with ideas appropriate to the current times, that he felt the higher education system should be reevaluated, to get rid of things it did that do not square with the needs of the time.

Whenever a politico talks like a dour old Soviet about paring down cultural offerings (if that’s what Rubio was gravitating toward), one has to groan. No matter what phase of history we’re in, we need liberal arts, and we need plenty of other fields. (Even paleontology, which Rubio with his attitude about the college curriculum might be filed under.) It isn’t just the colleges spilling money into these fields (which they don’t always do as readily as some critics might think), it’s the hungering individual students who seek these areas out, because these fields are the best way these students can fulfill their genuine promise as scholars and future exponents of culture, and as responsible, enlightened citizens.

So, although not everyone will be able to get these points, some liberal-arts scholars will know:

* When Stanley refers (by way of explaining why someone declined in life) to life being “nasty, brutish, and short, as the man said,” the “man” is actually Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century British political theoretician, and the full phrase is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and Hobbes meant that, in a state of nature, that was how Man’s life would be if there was no political organization to things. Though this latter point isn’t exactly what Allen was talking about here.

* When Stanley more tendentiously talks about “Mr. Nietzsche” having “disposed of the God matter rather convincingly,” what he is referring to is the “God is dead” idea, which appears in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. But by this—unlike Stanley, whom Allen may be merely making look like an acquired taste of an old cynic here—what Nietzsche was talking about wasn’t literally that God as a being was literally dead, but that—with the German writing in the nineteenth century—the old (Judeo-)Christian values such as had shaped society closely in the Middle Ages were all but abandoned with how society was developing in the more modern day. (By the way, an old playful reference book I have that compiles real-life graffiti lists an instance of this: “ ‘God is dead. —Nietzsche. ‘Nietzsche is dead.’ —God.”)

* The last instance of Allen flexing his culture-vulture muscles (he also alludes to Shakespeare’s Hamlet at one point, with some reference to “weary, stale…unprofitable”) is when he engages in what I consider a tic of his—his coy reference to death, or (anthropomorphizing) Death: Stanley saying “The only superpower certain to show up wears a black robe.” This is Death, in the Ingmar Bergman sense, and we even saw Allen invoke this so hokily as to have a stagy figure of the Grim Reaper in some playful scenes in Scoop. I hope to address this more when I talk about him as a writer, but why does he obsess about Death so much as to make such references as this, which sound like the clanging mannerisms of an old duffer who, if he doesn’t acutely fear death at times, seems overly apt to sound off with his pet concerns as to show how out of step the bustling world is with him?

An ultimate affirmation of a transcendent factor to life

I would suggest that with Magic, Allen is showing that not all is “atoms and the void,” as the philosopher Democritus summed up. Not only does the story heavy-handedly discuss the “magic” that manages to inhere in the world—which, per Allen, largely seems a matter of love and its ways of entering lives—but there is beauty, too. At one point Stanley grumpily dismisses a seaside view’s beauty as “transient,” but through this film, Allen shows—unless he fully believes that the fact of making money with the appealing diversion of a film is “more real” than the transcendence afforded by appreciation of beauty, wherever it arises—that beauty is still a value and reality that counterbalances the pain and tragedy in life.

The film has a colorful, somewhat flattening patina that makes it seem like his To Rome with Love (2012), where the visual look is almost comic-like, or “from a fantastic world.” In outdoor shots where a low sun is creating some lens flare—the cinematographer is Darius Khondji, who has worked with Allen on several films starting with Anything Else (2003)—and where there is the potential photographic distraction posed by the angle of the sunlight, the color scheme (either during photo’ing or after) is compensated so that the characters in relative shade have their color boosted a bit (I’m not an expert in photography), with the result that they look strangely flat, while colored and slightly dim. Either Allen allowed this passing visual effect as “the best a tight budget could allow,” or he felt this added to the sense of semi-fantasy the film connotes.

In either case, it adds to this film’s being a visual treat, which shows that, within his budgets (this film seems to have been done courtesy of an unusual ad hoc European-related producing arrangement, not with a temporary partnership with a European media studio, as with other of his 2005-and-after films), he can deliver visions of beauty that somehow belie the occasionally bitter, death-pondering, vinegar-striped visions of his later films. And thus he suggests that God may lie in some of the details of life, after all—in moments of beauty, times of wonderful personal exchanges, and collected summing-up when life allows us to catch our breath.

End note.

Allen in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007) speaks (pp. 255-58) about his favorite films, apparent touchstones for his own creative endeavors; though he includes a few more-modern works like The Godfather: Part II among his American favorites (he also has a list of European favorites), his list is of largely works pre-1960. A lot of his favorites are among the more poetic, philosophical, and/or dark-side-of-life film greats. But when he opts for a fun film, his hearkening back, in his obvious influences, to late 1930s or 1940s fluff is clear enough. But it would be a mistake to simply call him a nostalgic sort (overall), as I will try to address when I sum him up in a future entry as a writer.