Go Retire Psychiatrist

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.

Update to My 2019 Post “Black Psychiatrists in Iowa”

Back in 2019, I wrote a post about black psychiatrists in Iowa. What got me interested in updating it is my having just finished reading Jonathan Eig’s biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: “King: A Life.” I have just started reading the other biography, “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr, Edited by Clayborne Carson.”

Looking back on the post I wrote almost 7 years ago, I noticed a difference from today’s context: now, Artificial Intelligence (AI) confirms my impression that I might have been the only black psychiatrist at The University of Iowa Dept of Psychiatry in its history at least until 2021 as far as I know. I didn’t specifically ask AI; as always, I can’t stop it from putting its two cents in whenever I search for anything on the web.

AI Answer: “Based on available records and personal accounts, there appears to be a notable lack of documentation regarding African American faculty in the University of Iowa Department of Psychiatry historically. A 2019 report indicated that the author, a Black psychiatrist in the area, could not identify any other Black psychiatrists on the faculty in the department’s history.

Documented History: A 2019 article stated that “I could be the only Black psychiatrist who has ever been a faculty member here at The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics”.
Emeritus Faculty: The list of Emeritus Faculty for the department does not explicitly highlight African American faculty members.

The department’s history, according to this source, does not explicitly list Black psychiatrists who have served in that capacity.”

I’m the source AI mentions and the “2019 article” is the one I’m updating today.

Not much has changed. There’s no update of the 2019 Greater Iowa African American Resource Guide. Dr. Rodney Dean is still the only other black psychiatrist in Iowa (as far as I know) of the easily locatable MDs/DOs in a general web search of hospitals and clinics in the state and he still practices in Sioux City. That doesn’t mean there are no minority non-physician psychiatric providers. There are many.

Dr. Norman Brill, the black psychiatrist whose book I reviewed (“Being Black in America Today:A Multiperspective Review ofthe Problem”) died in 2001, shortly after I wrote the review. The University of California posted a glowing in memoriam message on the web. You can read his book on the Internet Archive although you’ll just need to log in to borrow it.

I guess I can remind everyone that the University of Iowa Dept of Psychiatry history book mentions me:

There are a few words about me in the department’s own history book, “Psychiatry at Iowa: The Shaping of a Discipline: A History of Service, Science, and Education by James Bass: Chapter 5, The New Path of George Winokur, 1971-1990:

“If in Iowa’s Department of Psychiatry there is an essential example of the consultation-liaison psychiatrist, it would be Dr. James Amos. A true in-the-trenches clinician and teacher, Amos’s potential was first spotted by George Winokur and then cultivated by Winokur’s successor, Bob Robinson. Robinson initially sought a research gene in Amos, but, as Amos would be the first to state, clinical work—not research—would be Amos’s true calling. With Russell Noyes, before Noyes’ retirement in 2002, Amos ran the UIHC psychiatry consultation service and then continued on, heroically serving an 811-bed hospital. In 2010 he would edit a book with Robinson entitled Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.” (Bass, J. (2019). Psychiatry at Iowa: A History of Service, Science, and Education. Iowa City, Iowa, The University of Iowa Department of Psychiatry).”

And in Chapter 6 (Robert G. Robinson and the Widening of Basic Science, 1990-2011), Bass mentions my name in the context of being one of the first clinical track faculty (as distinguished from research track) in the department. In some ways, breaking ground as a clinical track faculty was probably harder than being the only African American faculty member in the department.

If I don’t toot my own horn, well, you know.

Thoughts on the Book: “King: A Life” by Jonathan Eig

I just finished Jonathan Eig’s biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and I have just a few thoughts to share on my immediate impression of the book. Before I read the book, I got the impression that there might be a detailed description of Dr. King’s mental health.

Although I didn’t see any specific speculation by Eig on the matter, he did mention psychiatrist Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s impressions about King based on historical records that Dr. King had suffered from a clinically significant mood disorder. Eig wrote a one sentence summary which followed a comment by King’s wife Coretta about his depression:

“Decades later, the psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi would write that King probably suffered severe depression, a psychiatric illness that can enhance “realism in the assessment of one’s circumstances as well as empathy toward others.”

This was followed by a comment from a psychologist who cast doubt on the idea that King suffered from depression.

I’ve never read any of Dr. Ghaemi’s books. Eig didn’t list any specific books by Dr. Ghaemi. I think the relevant source might be his book, “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” published in 2011.

In a previous post I expressed my skepticism that the suicide attempts sometimes mentioned (although not consistently called that in Eig’s book). The only two such episodes described in his book are reactions to his grandmother being injured in the first instance and after she died in the second. He jumped out of a second story window both times and escaped serious injury. He was 12 and 13 years old respectively. Neither account describes any formal outpatient or inpatient mental health evaluation or treatment. It sounds like these were impulsive reactions based on the descriptions. I didn’t find any accounts in the book of suicide attempts in his adult life.

The Goldwater Rule which has been in the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics since 1972 discourages clinicians from diagnosing psychiatric illness in currently living persons. While that may not necessarily apply to deceased persons and may or may not only be relevant to members of the APA, I’m still unsure whether it’s always appropriate for mental health professionals to publicly entertain speculations or inferences about psychiatric diagnoses in anyone without an in-person evaluation. One possible exception might be for a threat assessment.

All that said, I didn’t find anything in Eig’s book that would contradict a non-psychiatric explanation for Dr. King’s emotional states in the context of the extraordinary pressures and burdens in his life. Although at times he was hospitalized for fatigue and “depression” it’s difficult to tell exactly how often.

This blog post so far takes up a fair amount of space discussing Eig’s book regarding the emotional side of Dr. King. There’s a lot more space in the book that emphasizes his incredible accomplishments, despite his being up against terribly high odds.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Groundhog Day Finally Explained

Well, by now everybody has heard the official news about what Punxsutawney Phil saw this morning since it’s Groundhog Day. On the other hand, the unofficial news is this: for some reason he saw extraterrestrials instead of his shadow. I know about it only because a drunken official calling me from the Pentagon spilled the beans to me and abruptly hung up just before he passed out.

Apparently, they were looking for a decent rib joint, which they’re always on the lookout for after traveling halfway across the galaxy.

You have to question the ETs preference for using so much fuel and creating missing time and hallucinations for thousands of people gathered for this time-honored and totally bogus event which the editors of The Old Farmer’s Almanac repeatedly try to debunk in a futile attempt to educate us about the seasons.

What almost nobody knows is that recently declassified government documents obtained by Brer Rabbit has led to the discovery of yet another conspiracy to hoodwink the American people about the ETs preoccupation with finding the best BBQ rib joint in the galaxy, which is genetically linked to their inability to distinguish humans from woodland creatures whose only real purpose in life is to dig holes in the ground so they can secretly write books circulated only amongst groundhogs about how silly it is for humans to call them ridiculous names like “whistle pigs.”

The truth is groundhogs know perfectly well how the seasons change and it has nothing to do with them—it’s all about the tooth fairy. But…ETs can’t handle the truth, as Col. Jessup has repeatedly pointed out in countless memes and gifs over the years.

We can only hope this deplorable state of affairs will be rectified when scientists eventually back engineer and reverse the polarities of the device (which is, trust me, stored in a cardboard box in a garage in Area 51) ETs use to hypnotize the criminals amongst their own kind into endlessly flying around in their souped up Tic-Tac UFOs in the absolutely pointless search for the perfect rib joint—all because the ET leaders can’t come up with a better solution to close the gaps in their worthless criminal justice system.

I hope I have made all this clear. Happy Groundhog Day!

Svengoolie Movie: “War of the Colossal Beast”

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

I watched the movie “War of the Colossal Beast” last night. Sena saw only the first few scenes of it in the beginning because she took a bite out of a magical cake she got at Hy-Vee, grew into a giant (had to get a new roof), wandered downtown to the Ped Mall until she found a mushroom, nibbled on it till she shrunk down to normal size and didn’t get back home until the movie was over, so like always, I had to explain the show to her. Based on my Svengoolie movie “reviews” you can imagine how well that went!

Anyway, this movie was released by American International Productions in 1958 and it was a sort of but not really a sequel to their film “The Amazing Colossal Man,” released a year earlier. In that movie, a military man, Col. Glenn Manning got exposed to radiation in Las Vegas and grew to a height of 60 feet which meant he could hit the free throw shot from several miles away. He ran amok and the army lobbed bombs and shot bullets at him until he fell 700 feet off Boulder Dam and everybody assumed he died. Although there are restrictions on seeing this movie in certain venues because of a copyright restriction, you can find it on the web, including the Internet Archive.

In “War of the Colossal Beast,” the story picks up sort of where the not-really-a-prequel left off except, in the beginning of the movie, a lot of food trucks are disappearing from the roads. One of them belongs to John Swanson (George Becwar), a food truck owner whose truck got lost and says repeatedly to the police “Get the picture?” when he tells his account of what he knows about the theft. It doesn’t take long to “get the picture” that this is comic relief.

It turns out that Glenn Manning is filching food from trucks and he’s not sharing any of it with the 50-foot woman who has wandered over from a different movie set and is pretty hungry (partly because she drinks too much) after an extraterrestrial has zapped her with radiation leading to a sudden growth spurt.

A scientist, Dr. Carmichael (Russ Bender) and Maj. Mark Baird (Roger Pace) have “cooked up” a plan to catch Manning using Italian bread spiked with chloral hydrate and evidently, Manning’s sister Joyce (Sally Fraser) approves of this plan. Baird and Carmichael both taste the bread, and neither drops dead even though if there’s enough chloral hydrate in all that bread to knock out a 60-foot-tall man, there should be enough to kill a normal size man after just a small bite. Whatever.

After abandoning a plan to hire Manning to round up all the Bigfoot monsters in the country because he’s too brain injured to remember the details which is not to squash them beyond recognition and allow photographers to take photos of the operation, which may or may not have happened when the Van Meter Visitor (a huge pterodactyl) in Iowa hit town in the early 1900s and flew all over the place munching on the cattle until cowboys and farmers shot it down and then took pictures of it which people claimed they all saw in the local newspaper yet those issues are “not available” for some reason so I guess there’s some kind of Mandela Effect going on or some people are prone to telling “tall tales.”

In the meantime, Manning is being held down by ropes and chains and it’s obvious that he was brain injured in that 700-foot fall in the first encounter. His right eye is missing and some of his teeth are pushed to one side, possibly because of a roundhouse kick by Chuck Norris (himself) who caught him trying to steal his chloral-hydrate enriched Italian bread.

Somehow, Manning is able to pick the locks of his chains using the same hypodermic needle he harpooned somebody with in the first movie and which he hid in his giant adult diapers (yes, those would be Shorty’s Adult Diapers that Big Mo aka John Heim the KCCK radio wizard of the Big Mo Blues Show describes, “they’re ready when you aren’t!).

The action and the dialogue start to get more complicated towards the end, which I’m going to defer on revealing in order to avoid spoilers (OK, the butler did it).

This is an OK movie although the dialogue gets a little stilted toward the end. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

Still Reading Dr. MLK Jr Biographies

I’m just checking in to let you know I’m still reading Jonathan Eig’s biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I’m in the last section. I plan to read The Autobiography of MLK Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson next.

I’m not ready to share much right now in the way of my impressions other than to say that it’s at least as painful to read from an emotional standpoint as the other books by great authors I’ve read and which have prompted visits by invitation to The University of Iowa College of Medicine in the past to present the MLK Jr Distinguished Lectures:

“Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity” by Michele Norris.

“Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson (who also wrote “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” which won the Pulitzer Prize).