Thanks to my friend, U. T., for the comment on my previous post. He knows what I'm talking about. His office hours look like the floor of the NY stock exchange. He's a good, enthusiastic teacher and a really smart fellow. He's a good musician, too.

I was diagnosed with influenza today, but I'm suspicious. I had searing, burning pain in my lungs, but no fever or upper respiratory symptoms. A blood test was performed. In response to my inquiry, the physician said the blood test didn't show bacterial involvement, and based on a pattern he had been seeing, that suggested early onset of flu. He said he couldn't perform a specific flu test unless I was further along with symptoms. I was prescribed Tamiflu and Lortab (for the aches and pains that were sure to ensue).

Here's the intriguing part. The clinic I went to adjoins a drugstore. I'm told the drugstore owner is the wife of a physician at the clinic. Presumably Tamiflu does no obvious harm to a patient who does not have flu. Just suppose I don't have flu, but allergy-induced bronchitis. I'll get over it soon enough, I might credit the Tamiflu with "curing" me, and the drugstore makes a sale of a very expensive (and profitable) drug. Hmmm.

I've just spent several hours trying to correct mistakes in my tax returns made by major bugs in TurboTax. Next year, it's back to pen and paper. For years I filed forms I prepared myself in about 20 minutes. I've never spent less than 2 hours with TurboTax, and I now have very little confidence in it. The only advantage I ever saw in it was e-filing and automatically transferring last years' data, but it's not worth the hassle.

We watched Tim Burton's "The Corpse Bride" tonight. Very funny and clever. The skeleton dog stole the show for my 4-year old.