How about them Hawks! I’m not talking about the Iowa Hawkeye football team. Today, I got another video of the Red-tailed hawk pair in their nest that might make you seasick. It’s windy. Sena tried to get a video but often gives me the camera.
According the internet they mate around March or April and lay 2-4 eggs which hatch in 4-5 weeks.
They poke around in the nest as if maybe they’re turning eggs (we think). Tree leaves are starting to bud out so visibility will unfortunately diminish.
I read this article today about how more and more students are using ChatGPT or some kind of AI to write term papers. The title gives you a clue what the author’s opinion of it: “AI Chatbots could be making you stupider.”
For about the last 3 years I’ve been writing about how AI is not the greatest thing, in fact both Sena and I say it should be “dislodged.” It won’t be, so we need to keep our brains limber. Hey, we exercise our bodies. There are ways to exercise our brains and some of them can be fun.
For example, we regularly play cribbage and there are variations of the game that make scoring more challenging.
Sena regularly says that 6 card cribbage as typically played in tournaments sponsored by the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) is too easy those who participate in them. I think that might be an overstatement, but there’s no doubt a lot of variants make you think harder about scoring, what cards to throw to the crib, and how to think your way through the pegging phase.
Take 9 card cribbage for example—please! I almost hate this game because the hand and crib scores are often too hard to count. You have to resort to using a computer scorer that, so far, you can find in only one place and it’s the Reddit site where you also can find the rules of the game. It’s not hard to play because you follow the basic rules of 6 card cribbage. It’s just mind-bendingly difficult to score most of the time.
You can check out our YouTube video of 9 card cribbage for the Cribbage Wars game if you like, which took hours (no, days) to put together because of the scoring complexity.
I still can’t get over the fact that Sena got a 29-hand playing 6 card cribbage on Cribbage Wars a while back and we never even recognized it until days later. The context of playing 6 card cribbage on a Cribbage Wars game board somehow made us oblivious to seeing the 29-hand right in front of us. Most people never see it because the odds of getting it are 1 in 216,580.
I realize playing cribbage isn’t the same as writing term papers, but it’s still good for your brain. Some think people are still better than AI at playing cribbage.
There is a computer player called Brutal on a computer version of cribbage called Cribbage Pro. I got a 28-hand playing Brutal once. Google Gemini calls this an AI player and says, while Brutal uses algorithms and statistics, it can falter when facing the psychological tactics used by humans.
Google Gemini summary and a video of a Cribbage Pro game using ChatGPT:
While AI is capable of playing, it often focuses on statistical optimization rather than the psychological aspects of the game used by human players.”
I’m trying to find out what’s happening with Governor Reynolds’ MAHA bill (HF 2676) which includes allowing Iowa pharmacists to provide ivermectin without a prescription to those who prefer taking it, most likely for something else other than what’s indicated for, which is treating parasitic infections. The risk is that persons will try to use it to self-treat other diseases such as Covid 19 infections, for which there is no convincing evidence supporting ivermectin’s effectiveness.
There’s a list of bills signed into law by the governor as of April 16, 2026 which doesn’t include HF 2676. My understanding is that this year’s legislative session would be ending maybe as soon as tomorrow.
I found one source on the web which indicates the Iowa House passed it. It then went to the Senate, which passed the bill with the ivermectin part intact and it was returned to the House. It’s not clear whether Governor Reynolds actually needs to sign it into law.
My usual go-to news source for Iowa lawmaker news is the Iowa Capital Dispatch, but it doesn’t seem to have any recent updates on this bill.
The language of the bill regarding so-called over-the-counter ivermectin is permissive, meaning pharmacists may (not must) provide ivermectin, not making it mandatory for Iowa pharmacists to hand over ivermectin to anyone who requests it. And pharmacists would be exempt from “…professional discipline or civil or criminal penalties for distributing ivermectin…”
It doesn’t look like anyone considered what recourse patients might have if they suffer injury as a result of taking ivermectin for a non-FDA approved (off label) condition.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
OK, so this movie, “Parents” is hosted by the Sven Squad, who did a pretty good job of covering this dark 1989 film directed by Bob Balaban, set in the 1950s California suburbia. The main cast included Randy Quaid (Nick Laemle), Mary Beth Hurt (Lily Laemle), Bryan Madorsky (Michael Laemle), and Sandy Dennis (Millie Dew). Interestingly, Madorsky never continued acting after this movie and went on to become an accountant.
This movie reminds me of that Barbara Streisand song “People Who Eat People.” No, wait, that’s not right. Sena and I both saw the movie and we’re not certain about whether this is about a mentally vulnerable 10-year-old boy who hallucinates or about something really sinister. It’s a little of both. As usual, this is not a serious movie review and there are a couple of links below to serious writers.
As a retired psychiatrist, I tend to lean toward a psychological interpretation of a fair number of scenes in which Michael sees scary things. On the other hand, while that’s plausible early in the film, it’s less tenable when the school social worker, Millie Dew, sees scary things too like severed limbs and whole corpses in the basement of the Laemle house.
We both chuckled about Toxico, the aptly named company where Nick works as a research scientist in the Human Cadaver section where he develops Agent Orange type defoliants and requests choice liver cuts for mysterious reasons and which may be ending up as entrees on the dinner table.
The Laemle kitchen has a counter with a rack full of heavy cookbooks on it, none of which contain recipes for fricasseed fingers, I’m pretty sure. They live in a conformist neighborhood, which of course implies that everyone is snacking on milk and postman kidney cutlets just before bedtime.
I keep trying to think of a reason why the name “Millie Dew” was chosen for the school social worker role. It sounds like a joke to make you think of mildew, which is a fungus. I can’t recall whether Nick was making a kind of chemical fungus which made vegetation forget to take up glucose which led to jungle defoliation or what. And what point would the joke have had?
Maybe Millie was “breaking the mold” of the conformist society in which she didn’t really fit. Or maybe Michael felt like she was “growing” on him. See what I did there?
We were both creeped out by this movie and giving it a black comedy label might fit if you think of it as black mold. It kept us on the edge of our seats, but it’s too dark. Both Sena and I give it a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.
“Criminally Underrated: Parents” by Joseph Neff. April 5, 2026 (approximate), on Spectrum Culture website. https://spectrumculture.com/2026/04/01/criminally-underrated-parents/
“Why director Bob Balaban chose to film Parents (1989) from the perspective of a child” By MeTV Staff. April 15, 2026. On Yikesgeist, MeTV. https://metv.com/stories/why-director-bob-balaban-chose-to-film-parents-1989-from-the-perspective-of-a-child
I’ve just finished reading a couple of online articles about Chatbot use by patients who then present either to psychiatrists or psychotherapists (not that they can’t be one and the same!) and I’m a little puzzled. The title of my blog post came partly from what my wife, Sena, always says about Artificial Intelligence—which is that it needs to be dislodged.
The first article, “Clinician Competence in the Age of Chatbots,” is part of a Psychiatric Times series, “AI Chatbots: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.” It’s a collaboration between a psychiatrist who I admire (Dr. Allen Frances, MD) and Jill Noorily (described as someone “who lives and writes at the boundary between AI and the humanities).
I’m far from an expert on AI and I tend to be opposed to it most of the time. The article by Dr. Frances and Jill Noorily sounds almost supportive of Chatbots in psychotherapy.
The other article is entitled “Patients Bring ChatGPT to Psychiatry Visits, With Richard Miller, MD.” The tone of Dr. Miller is more along the lines of “dislodge AI” than that of the article by Dr. Frances and Noorily.
They were both published about the same time. The difference in tone between the two articles is definitely noticeable, at least to me. I’m also more like Dr. Miller than the authors of the articles in the Psychiatric Times series “AI Chatbots: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.”
Many of them are co-written by Dr. Allen Frances and other co-authors. The first one in the series was “Preliminary Report on Chatbot Iatrogenic Dangers,” posted on August 15, 2025 by Dr. Frances, MD and Luciana Ramos.
I quickly read through about 5 of the articles, getting a deeper sense of the conflicts I have about AI in general. The first one on iatrogenic dangers mentions the lawsuit brought by a woman whose son was the victim of a Chatbot who told him he should commit suicide—which he did.
So far, I think I have the same mindset about AI as Dr. Miller. Your thoughts?
Hey, Earth Day 2026 is on April 22, 2026! If any of you are like me (and who isn’t?), you might have trouble figuring out just what you can do that would be meaningful on Earth Day.
Well, here’s a link to Earth Day Tips which gives you 50 easy ways to participate. You could volunteer, take a quiz, go to the park, or even eat kale! Try not to stand under a tree in which a bald eagle is pooping.
You can find Earth Day events in your area at this website.
How about some good news for a change? See the Daily Iowan report on research being done at The University of Iowa examining how transcranial magnetic stimulation can help clinical neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression and Alzheimer’s disease. There’s also a link to the open access study which gives more detail about the process.
Reference:
Li, Z., Trapp, N.T., Bruss, J. et al. Multimodal evidence for hippocampal engagement and modulation by functional connectivity-guided parietal TMS. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70346-x
We saw not only the Red-tail Hawks today, but a bald eagle to boot. The hawks were making eyes at each other and the eagle was making colonic bombardments. They were getting soaked.
It’s hard to regard the bald eagle as a majestic bird when its head feathers are flattened down like it’s been styling with Brylcreem—and it lets fly with intestinal ammo. Anyway, we’re doubling down on bird videos today.
We got this sudden string of thunderstorms come up this afternoon in eastern Iowa and it blew pretty hard briefly for a short while. We got barely pea-sized hail. It buffeted the Red-tail Hawk around so much I couldn’t really tell which end of it was up. And then it quickly calmed down. If you don’t like the weather in Iowa-just wait a bit.
This is a follow up video of the Red-tailed hawks nesting in the outlet beyond our back yard. This time it seems to be fixing up the nest. We can’t tell whether they have eggs in it or not. It was pretty windy today, so the view is even more challenging.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 