Go Retire Psychiatrist

Pelicans on Parade!

The weather was superb yesterday and we visited our favorite walking trail out at Terry Trueblood Recreation Area—along with a lot of people who had the same idea. It was around 60 degrees and not a cloud in the azure blue sky.

The highlight was the big flocks of white birds with black markings under the wings sailing over Sand Lake. Observers we encountered had different opinions about what species they were.

At first, I thought they were pelicans, which are frequent visitors at the park. On the other hand, a few thought they were storks and for a while I took their side. The further we walked and the more video I got, and the more people we talked with, the less sure we were about these very large white birds. Many people were very sure they were pelicans.

After we got home, I looked on the internet for education about how to tell the difference between storks and pelicans—and was convinced that the birds we saw were pelicans. I was able to enlarge a picture I pulled from one of my video clips which showed clearly the large bill.

I guess this is a good place for Dixon Lanier Merritt’s 1910 limerick about the pelican:

“A wonderful bird is the Pelican.

His beak can hold more than his belly can.

He can hold in his beak

Enough food for a week!

But I’m darned if I know how the hellican!”

Despite the tall tales about storks bearing babies, the fact is their beaks are narrow.

So, this actually takes me back to the one person on our walk who was convinced that the large, wheeling birds were storks. She joked around about the idea a little and asked Sena if she knew the story about how Dumbo was born. It just so happened was lost on us because we’d never seen the 1941 Disney film Dumbo and it turns out that a stork brought Dumbo to the train dragging a car full of elephants, one of which was Mrs. Dumbo.

And there’s a very complicated explanation of the stork myth about them delivering babies to mothers—although not in their beaks but in a bundle.

Aside from the pelicans, we saw many signs of spring, including buds on the trees, the ice melting on Sand Lake, and people gazing at the sky-waiting for spring.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “Dracula”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

I’ve never seen the 1931 Universal production of Dracula and it was a film to marvel, mainly to marvel at Bela Lugosi’s ability to contort those famous hands into spell-binding patterns while commanding hapless victims “I command you; come here!” He didn’t say “bluh, bluh” even once.

I tried to mimic Dracula’s hand gestures and ended up going to the ER to get them unraveled.

Instead of Jonathan Harker (David Manners) traveling to Transylvania according to the Bram Stoker novel, it was Renfield (Dwight Frye) who was the real estate agent making preparations for Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) to rent out the Motel 6 room (“We’ll leave the spider snacks out for you!”) in London.

Renfield is Dracula’s first victim shortly after his arrival at the castle in Transylvania. You never see fangs on the vampires in this movie, which is pretty refreshing actually. Fake fangs interfere with delivering one’s lines, such as when Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) holds up a mirror to Dracula (which shows he has no reflection), who then smacks it out of his hand:

Dracula: Tho thorry, Doctor Van Helthing. My humble apology. I dithlike mirrors.

There’s this ongoing debate about why wolfsbane instead of garlic was used to ward of Dracula. The explanation is pretty simple really. Nobody could find enough garlic to use because most of it was in the spaghetti sauce often served to the actors for lunch.

There is a little humor in this dark movie. Martin the asylum nurse (Charles K. Gerrard), who’s always chasing after Renfield and taking away the dead chipmunks he insists on eating, has a funny exchange with one of the maids when they’re talking about someone else in the house:

Maid: He’s crazy!

Martin: They’re all crazy except you and me. And sometimes I have my doubts about you.

Maid: You got something on your face, dude!

I think right after this is when Dr. Van Helsing hires Count Chocula with a plan to arrange a cage match with Dracula.

It’s not very well known, but if you noticed that most men in the movie have their hair styled in a way which makes them look like they’re wearing helmets, that’s because they were all using Brylcreem, which was invented in 1928 in Birmingham, England by County Chemicals at the Chemico Works which was shipped to California with the warning label “A Little Dab’ll Do Ya” which Universal obviously ignored.

I think this is an OK movie and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.

Update to the Iowa Legislature Bill to Make Ivermectin Available Over the Counter

Pursuant to my previous post about the debate in the Iowa Legislature over a proposed bill to make Ivermectin available over-the-counter (OTC) in Iowa, it looks as though hydroxychloroquine was recently dropped from the bill. Although few people say it out loud, in my opinion, it’s no secret that the main reason for the bill is to make ivermectin available to those who want to use it to treat Covid-19, despite there being no convincing evidence that it’s effective for that.

However, yet another bill was introduced by the governor which has its own ivermectin promotion section; so, there are now two ivermectin bills. They look the same.

The Iowa Board of Pharmacy is opposed to them because the language obliges them to comply with dispensing ivermectin to patients even if it might potentially harm them.

Although the bill removes penalties for dispensing ivermectin, there seem to be no specific penalties to pharmacists for refusing to do so. About 3 years ago, a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription for ivermectin that was intended for treatment of Covid-19.

A similar bill in Utah was not passed about 4 days ago. Supporters of the bill appeared to be engaging in passing misinformation about ivermectin for Covid-19, claiming there was “plenty of data” supporting its effectiveness for it. In fact, the FDA has not approved its use for treatment of Covid-19.

I wonder if there might be a justification for a kind of civil disobedience by pharmacists by refusing to give OTC ivermectin to patients. The other question is what does the Iowa Board of Medicine think about this? Is it right to leave physicians out of the loop in this situation?

It seems ironic that a legislator who is an internist, Dr. Austin Baeth, is on the right side of this debate by opposing the bills, yet the state medical board seems to be silent. Would it be appropriate for the state medical board to take a public position about this issue as the pharmacy board has?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pentagon

So, just for laughs I sometimes watch Ancient Aliens (you know, the UFO show with the hair dude). Last night, they were talking about some guy named Valiant Thor as if he were a real person. Maybe some of you know about the book, “Stranger at the Pentagon,” which you can read for free on the Internet Archive. I just quickly clicked through the pdf of it and it’s pretty interesting. The one I saw had sections about Men in Black (MIB) in it, which of course means Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are even older than we think.

It was written in 1967 by Dr. Frank E. Stranges and it’s supposedly a story of an extraterrestrial named Valiant Thor who presented to the White House in the 1950s and spoke to President Eisenhower and others, giving the urgent message that Earthlings need to shape up or the planet would be destroyed.

OK, the spoiler is that there’s no evidence this ever happened, although many people, like Fox Mulder, want to believe.

I want to believe, too but there’s no official record Vai (as Valiant Thor is sometimes called in the book) ever lived at the White House, although maybe he snorted something you can sometimes find in the White House but nobody officially will admit that ever happens either.

One person stated that the idea for the book might have come from the 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Artificial Intelligence (who always butts in to my web searches) doubted it’s ever been on the Svengoolie TV show, but I found a Facebook post from 2025 which called it a “Sven fan favorite.” It’s probably never been on Svengoolie because it’s far too classy. There’s an interesting article about it on Turner Classic Movies but I don’t know if TCM ever showed it.

As near as I can tell from just from what I’ve read on the web about this movie is that it was made in the early Cold War days and it’s really sending a message to mankind warning them away from killing everybody and the planet and instead strive to establish peace in the world. It’s long been regarded as a cinema masterpiece.

Did it influence Dr. Stranges to write the book “Stranger at the Pentagon”? I don’t know, but some people think so, judging from one social media comment. I think that person might have been put off by the attempt to make it sound like it was historically accurate, which is what many people seem to think.

In my opinion, the whole yarn about Valiant Thor is fiction that, while not historically accurate, is compelling enough to make you think about how important it is for national leaders and people who live on the planet to try and clean up our act. Efforts to make this story seem like it actually happened backfires and misses the point.

By the way, none of this has anything to do with Bigfoot.

One Anecdote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr is Nothing to Sneeze At

I’ve finished reading both biographies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (the one by Jonathan Eig and the autobiography edited by Clayborne Carson).

Both books were fascinating. Many of the accounts of King’s life were familiar to me mainly because I had seen them written about in other books and articles. Some of them are a strange mixture of pathos, terror, and even a little humor if you can imagine it. For me, one of the most touching anecdotes was the one about the white girl who wrote a short letter to King after he was stabbed by a demented black woman on September 20, 1958. It was in both biographies.

He was at an event in which he was autographing one of his books. A black women pushed through the crowd and asked him if he were Martin Luther King. He didn’t look up and said simply, “Yes.” The woman stabbed him with a letter opener. The blade stopped very close to his aorta and the doctor who treated him said he could have exsanguinated if he had just sneezed.

Dr. King got a lot of kind letters from people about that, but the one that is most memorable to him (and me) was from a 9^th grade high school student who wrote that she was a white girl and said “I am so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

Later, King would use the phrase several times in his final speech (“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”) which he delivered at the Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple in Memphis before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel there in April of 1968.

Both of the biographies are riveting documents of the life of a preacher devoted to the principle of non-violence. We can still learn from him.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “Dracula” (1931)

So, the upcoming Svengoolie movie is “Dracula” released in 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. They tried to get George Burns to star in it, but he refused to take the cigar out of his mouth long enough to put the fangs in.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this classic vampire flick in which the story differed from the Bram Stoker novel in that Soupy Sales was substituted to play Renfield who traveled to Transylvania instead of Jonathan Harker to sell real estate to Count Dracula. This, of course, could only be accomplished by contacting the extraterrestrials to create a wormhole in which time travel could be accomplished by bending the wormhole tightly enough to snatch Soupy from the future, which was lucky because it prevented him from making the disastrous on-air joke in 1965 in which he “suggested” to kids to get “green pieces of paper” (money) from their parents and mail it to him.

If you don’t remember the story that way then you’re either suffering from the Mandela Effect or the ETs got to you as well.

Anyway, except for the switch in characters, the action goes pretty much to plan the way Stoker wrote it up except for the ironic issue of Lugosi actually being quite fond of garlic which led to him eating the stuff while filming in addition to filching it in between takes and taking it back to his trailer to share it with Lon Chaney, who was feeling pretty bad for not getting the Dracula role in the first place because, despite it being offered to him first, he was later rejected because he couldn’t stop turning into the Wolf Man at inopportune moments during the screen test when the cue card person kept turning the card upside down. His growls sounded inside out, which struck the director as silly, which got him laughing so much he got the hiccups.

Anyway, Lugosi got the part and he’s remembered for unforgettable lines like the ones below:

Count Dracula: This is a very old wine. I hope you like it.

Renfield: Aren’t you drinking?

Count Dracula: I never drink since I took the pledge.

Well, I may have got a couple of details wrong, but that never hurts anything.

Super Bowl LX 2026 Super Commercials

I watched the Super Bowl last night and I saw a couple of commercials (there’s always a lot of special commercials, only a few of which send healthy messages). I thought they were very positive and affirmed the importance of acceptance of others who are different from you. I’m reading The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. Edited by Clayborn Carson and these two ads are consistent with the book’s theme.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Gorgon”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

Well, last night I saw the 1964 Hammer Films movie “The Gorgon,” and the first thing to clear up is the name of the gorgon relating to the underlying Greek mythology which, incidentally, the Svengoolie show clearly did early on.

The gorgons were 3 ugly female creatures with snakes in their hair and if you looked at one of them, you’d turn to stone. The most well-known gorgon was Medusa, which Perseus defeated by only looking at her indirectly in a mirror and slicing off her head. Medusa was the only human gorgon and the other two were named Stheno and Euryale.

The problem is the gorgon’s name which is Megaera. Megaera was part of another trio of monsters in Greek mythology called the Erinyes (Furies). They also had snakes in their hair and their names were Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone (who is incorrectly identified as a gorgon in the film). They were the goddesses of vengeance who punished men for crimes like murder of relatives and lying. Gazing at them didn’t turn you into stone, but they could drive you crazy, and inflict disease if you didn’t laugh at your father’s Dad Jokes.

Moving right along, the movie begins with a lot of people in early 20^th century Europe being turned into stoners who smoke pot by the bongful, leading to Dr. Namaroff (Peter Cushing) noticing that many of them ended up getting institutionalized in the madhouse he runs in Vandorf, a small village in Germany, and where he occasionally removes the brains of some of the inmates and who also has a crush on his assistant, Carla Hoffman (Barbara Shelley).

Actually, the stoners literally turn into stone, presumed by some to be a result of the unbelievable potency of the local pot, but watch out, Prof. Karl Meister (Christopher Lee) has an amazing grasp of Greek mythology although even he can’t separate the Erinyes from the Gorgons.

There’s something weird going on and Meister gets a letter from Professor Jules Hetiz (Michael Goodliffe) who has a close encounter of the craggy kind which leads to Meister sending Paul Heitz (Richard Pasco) to dig into the mystery and also bring back some of that righteous pot.

However, Paul has a pretty bad trip on the stuff and ends up in Dr. Namaroff’s hospital for about a week convalescing. He and Carla really hit it off, which Namaroff gets pretty miffed about because Carla is his girl even if she is a little spooky. The local constabulary (the head of which is Inspector Kanof (Patrick Troughton, who was the second Doctor in Doctor Who in 1966) and is very protective of the secret which is behind all the broken furniture and homemade bongs in the forbidding castle in the neighborhood.

The gorgonizing secret of the whole affair gradually gets revealed in confrontation involving a snake pit in which a cobra bites Chuck Norris and after 7 agonizing days—the cobra dies.

I think the movie is fair but it gets the Greek mythology wrong. I give it a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating. You can see it on the Internet Archive.

Try to Lift Just One Eyebrow Without Picking Your Nose!

I ran across a couple of interesting articles today and I thought I’d pass this along. One article is about kids who pick boogers out of their nose and eat them. Another is about how to lift one eyebrow only.

I bet a lot of people try to learn how to lift one eyebrow. I also bet that nobody would ever admit they pick their nose and dine on the boogers. Well, I never picked my nose but when I was in the 1^st or 2^nd grade, one of my classmates used to do this. The teacher would get really mad because no matter how many times she told him to stop, he would just do it anyway.

He tried to be sneaky about it, but pretty soon the whole class could catch him at it. We could barely get through class because we were so busy spying on him-and gagging when we caught him.

I tried to see if I could lift just my right eyebrow. I wondered if I could do it without much practice because I had surgery to repair a retinal tear on my right eye a few years ago. Does it look like my brow on the right is a little more wrinkled? See what you think. And can you tell if it’s more prominent if I stick an extraterrestrial up my left nostril? Examine the photos carefully. Take your time and get back to me. I did not eat the ET, I swear.

What Wildlife Does Not Know About Nature Valley Snack Bars

We finally finished up the batch of Nature Valley Chocolate Peppermint Wafer bars. The label says says they are “naturally flavored with other natural flavor.” The comical TV commercials in the last couple of years show cute woodland creatures like squirrels bitterly complaining about the dirty nuts they have to put up with compared to the Nature Valley bars with “chocolatey stuff.”

We think the commercials are funny, but the animals are apparently unaware of the dark underbelly of Nature Valley snacks. The product label clearly lets you know about the “bioengineered” material in the snack bar, which only piques your wonder about what that’s supposed to mean. You can read more about it on the FDA and USDA websites.

And then there’s the flak about the lawsuit back in 2018 which led to General Mills dropping the claim that Nature Valley products were “100% Natural” and settling a lawsuit filed by consumer groups that the products contained trace amounts of the chemical “glyphosate” which is in a common weedkiller called Roundup. The amounts were well below the allowable safe benchmarks.

You know that reminds me of that flap a year ago when a consumer group filed a lawsuit against The Girl Scouts about selling their cookies which were alleged to contain the same pesticide. I scanned the web and it looks like the lawsuit was voluntarily dropped by the main plaintiff although it may still be alive and kicking because there are others who are still part of the litigation. There’s zero evidence supporting their claim.

And then there was the Listeria recall back in 2016 related to specific Nature Valley bars. Do squirrels need to worry about Listeria? Probably not, because they can’t read even though they can talk and play clever tricks on humans.

Our only complaint about the Nature Valley wafer chocolate peppermint bars is that they lack any detectable taste. I used to eat Nature Valley granola bars every day as part of my nutritious lunch and aside from the growth of bilateral 18-inch-long antennae on my forehead, I didn’t notice any problems.