Month: December 2024

The Greatest Christmas Record of All Time

Last Friday night on the Big Mo Blues Show on KCCK radio, I heard Eric Clapton sing a song that I later found out was a cover of a song originally co-written by William Bell and Booker T. Jones, “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday.” A Wikipedia entry about it reports that it has been called the greatest Christmas record of all time by Hot Press magazine in 2017. It has been covered by many musicians.

That song is still in my head. I had never heard of William Bell. He’s been a top rhythm and blues performer for decades. He’s 85 years old and is still going strong. I hope he has a lot more Christmases to go.

We Tried Wendy’s Salted Caramel Frosty

We finally got over to Wendy’s and tried the salted caramel Frosty. It was available in mid-November but it was so cold then, we didn’t feel like heading out in the weather for it. Today it was in the mid-50s so it was a good day for it.

There are very long web articles written about it by those who can somehow find a lot to say about the flavor and say things like, “It tastes more like butterscotch than salted caramel.”  I had to look up what the difference is between butterscotch and salted caramel. It boils down to cooking caramel to 340 degrees with white granulated sugar vs cooking butterscotch with brown sugar to 289 degrees.

That doesn’t tell me how they would taste different.

That reminds me of the controversy about Miracle Whip, which many people say just doesn’t taste right anymore, which tends to give mayonnaise the edge. They claim Kraft Foods changed the recipe. Maybe. But if they’re comparing how Miracle Whip tastes now compared to what it tasted like in their childhood, the main explanation might be that if you’re past the age of 50, your taste buds have probably fizzled a little.

We think the salted caramel Frosty tasted enough like how it’s billed than not. So maybe our taste buds are burnt, but we’ve been around the block with the Frosty flavors enough to say this one comes pretty close to tasting like what Wendy’s advertises.

Whatever, Sena says the salted caramel replaces the pumpkin as her favorite Frosty flavor. I still prefer vanilla.

Cataplexy and Catalepsy in the Movie “The Comedy of Terrors”

We watched the Svengoolie TV movie last night, “The Comedy of Terrors.” It was my third time seeing it. I wrote a blog post about it in March 2024 partly because the condition of catalepsy is mentioned. Mr. Black’s butler points out that Mr. Black had periods of catalepsy. Much to my surprise, I didn’t write anything about distinguishing cataplexy and catalepsy, but last night I thought about the differences. I finally found a summary of the plot today on the Svengoolie website and you can see it on Turner Classic Movies. You can still see the movie on the Internet Archive.

You see Mr. Black have his “cataleptic” attack about 39 minutes or so into the film. It appears to be triggered by shocked surprise upon discovering Mr. Gille in his house. A bit later, after the butler fetches the doctor, the first scene is that of Mr. Black’s wide-open eyes, which the doctor closes, at the same time saying that he’s dead. In that same scene you hear the butler asking for confirmation because it’s well known that Mr. Black has had fits of “catalepsy” before. The doctor obliges only to confirm, in his opinion, that Mr. Black is dead. However, he wakes up in the funeral parlor, where he has a fight with Trumbull and Gillie, then suffers another abrupt collapse, one of many that occur, always reciting lines from Shakespeare presaged by asking “What place is this?” often from inside a coffin.

This movie made me think about the clinical differences between catalepsy (specific to catatonia) and cataplexy (specific to narcolepsy). Because I was a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I saw many patients with catatonia. However, I can’t remember ever seeing patients with cataplexy. I had to review them by searching the web. I think the most helpful links are:

Catalepsy: Burrow JP, Spurling BC, Marwaha R. Catatonia. [Updated 2023 May 8]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430842/

Catatonic patients often will be mute and immobile vs purposeless agitation. Waxy flexibility can be one of many features. Catatonia can occur in the context of variety of psychiatric or medical illnesses. They may wake up and talk within minutes if given a Lorazepam challenge test, which is given intravenously. It can look miraculous.

Cataplexy: Mirabile VS, Sharma S. Cataplexy. [Updated 2023 Jun 12]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK549782/

Cataplexy occurs in narcolepsy and is the sudden onset of muscle weakness, often precipitated by strong emotions, usually positive but can occur with negative emotions like fear. Eye movements can be normal, and episodes usually resolve within minutes.

Mr. Black’s episodes look like a strange mixture of catalepsy and cataplexy. His episodes are precipitated by fear or anger. Quoting Shakespeare doesn’t occur in either catalepsy or cataplexy.

At the end of the movie, he is impervious to bullets—a feature not seen in either condition.

The Hippeastrum Flop Crisis

Our Hippeastrum/Amaryllis flowers are doing the flop. Whether you want to call it a Hippeastrum or an Amaryllis, they both flop. I think it’s because they both have hollow stems and heavy flowers. I read that Tulips flop for the same reason. They’re doing pretty well; the tallest one is up to nearly 30 inches.

The flower as it grows starts to bend in one direction or the other. We saw this a couple of years ago with our first Hippeastrum. In the beginning, we thought turning it one way or the other towards or away from the sunlight or the space heater would make a difference. Looking back on it now, I don’t think it did. We ended up staking it using a zip tie and a wooden dowel.

Sena stakes our new flowers using zip ties and long metal rods topped by a Christmas tree ornaments you stick in the dirt. The effect is comical, and it makes both of us laugh out loud.

I checked around on the web and found articles and YouTube videos about how to fix the Hippeastrum flop. One even suggested using a wire coat hanger. You can do this if you’re handy with tools. Or you could get a Christmas cactus.

We’re not doing wire coat hangers.

Addendum: Sena tried to replace the zip tie on the biggest plant because she’s ambivalent about the look of them. OK, so she’s not ambivalent; she was “bent” on finding a different staking method. So, she cut the zip tie and, wouldn’t you know, that’s a good way to tell if the stem is really hollow. She accidentally cut it open. It started to leak fluid. She quickly applied a Christmas tree ribbon bandage, one with blood red cardinals on it in fact. We hope the wound is not fatal.

Another Addendum: OK here’s the last adddendum. It’s a set of crude drawings meant to show how to pronounce “Hippeastrum.” I’ve previously pointed out there seem to be two ways and I don’t know which one is preferred. If you know, shout it out. This is a trick I got from Svengoolie, the star of his TV show of the same name. You draw cartoons that are clues which are supposed to translate to a real word. Sound it out. Hint for the first picture; it’s from the 1960s.

Amaryllis or Hippeastrum Trio?

The Amaryllis trio are reaching for the stars, and “star” may be the operative word because I just found out the name of the flower may be in dispute.

It turns out that the actual name of the Amaryllis is probably Hippeastrum due to a change in the genus classification of this striking bloom. My word processor kept highlighting Hippeastrum, so I had to add it to the dictionary.

The usual name, which has been Amaryllis, sounds pretty and has a romantic story behind it based in Greek mythology. The short version is that a maiden named Amaryllis fell in love with a shepherd named Alteo. Alteo insisted that he would fall in love with a girl only if she brought him a new flower he’d never seen before. She went to the Oracle of Delphi who advised her to literally bleed for him—which she did by stabbing her heart every day and spilling her blood on the ground outside his house. On the 30th day, a gorgeous red flower bloomed out of the blood. After that she and Alteo were definitely an item. You can find this story on many gardening web sites.

On the other hand, the unromantic name Hippeastrum (it seems there are two ways to pronounce it, both of which sound like a sneeze) was given to the flower by someone named William Herbert. You can find the complete and erudite story about it on a WordPress blog called Professor Hedgehog’s Journal in the post, “Plant of the Month: February 2018.” The name means something like Knight’s Star.

I’m betting that stores are unlikely to change the name on the boxes, out of which the flowers burst impatiently on to the shelves.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Crawling Eye”

I saw the movie “The Crawling Eye” last night. Sena gave up after about 15 minutes. It was almost 2 hours into the film before you see any of the giant eyesores—and they were in dire need of Visine treatment.

The movie was made in 1958 and it’s about an alien invasion of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland called Mount Trendelenburg, no wait, that’s an inclined position of a patient on an operating table; it’s actually Mount Trollenberg.

The aliens are giant eyes with pinpoint pupils. The hero, United Nations employee Alan Brooks (played by Forrest Tucker) manages to stab one with a secret weapon called a sty-letto. Brooks is apparently heavily invested in pushing cigarettes and booze on the various other characters, a few of whom for some reason get transformed into zombies, probably because they get so stoned on cognac. Brooks deals with them by blowing his whiskey breath in their faces.

Brooks has to be pretty stern to get others to cooperate to a new battle plan against the eyeballs after it becomes clear that dilation drops won’t work. I can’t remember exactly what he barked at them but it was something like, “Keep your eye on the highball!” Maybe it was “Do as your told!”

Brooks also directs them to make bombs, which look like Molotov cocktails, and that was a nice break from drinking the regular cocktails at the hotel bar. Brooks orders them not to fire until they see the whites of their eyes, but by now everybody ignores him. At first, they have a hard time hitting the creatures, I guess because they were eyeballing the distance.

When the crawling eyes get hit with the bombs, they get a severe case of floaters, which makes them realize that they’re now up against something even more irritating than the cigarette smoke Brooks blows at them. Unfortunately for the eyeballs, they left their safety sunglasses on their home planet.

The best part of the movie was the Sven Squad; their jokes were so cornea they saved the day.