Month: April 2025

One Legged Clowning Again

I noticed the other day that I was having trouble doing the one leg stand. It has been getting harder to sustain it past 10 seconds even. It’s not like I’ve been laying off exercising, including the one leg stand. Hey, I can even do a one leg sit to stand (barely). I posted about the one leg stand, including a video, about 2 years ago.

I found another news item and study about old farts like me and it included a new recommendation about the one leg stand. According to this study, if you can’t do a one leg stand for more than 5 seconds, you’ve got one leg in the grave. If you can do 30 seconds, then you’re all good.

So, I practiced a little more and I even tried the one leg juggling trick, which I also tried two years ago—and clearly faked on a video. Well, one leg clowning is back—and this time it’s for real. I think the Latin quote Ars Longa, Vita Brevis fits for this activity. This one leg stand thing is a skill and you have to work at it, even as you age and your life grows shorter.

I still don’t know if this would be called aging gracefully?

References:

Rezaei A, Bhat SG, Cheng CH, Pignolo RJ, Lu L, Kaufman KR. Age-related changes in gait, balance, and strength parameters: A cross-sectional study. PLoS One. 2024 Oct 23;19(10):e0310764. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310764. PMID: 39441815; PMCID: PMC11498712.

Araujo CG, de Souza E Silva CG, Laukkanen JA, Fiatarone Singh M, Kunutsor SK, Myers J, Franca JF, Castro CL. Successful 10-second one-legged stance performance predicts survival in middle-aged and older individuals. Br J Sports Med. 2022 Sep;56(17):975-980. doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2021-105360. Epub 2022 Jun 21. PMID: 35728834.

Learning to Play Cribbage from the Internet

I’ve been looking over the web about learning how and where to play cribbage. It’s a card game for two players usually, but there are variations allowing for 3 to 4 players.

 First, out of curiosity, I started searching the web on where to play cribbage in Iowa.

There are about 200 local clubs across the U.S. connected with the American Cribbage Congress (ACC). You can find them by looking in the Club Directory on their web site. So where could you play cribbage outside of the ACC with others in Iowa?

It turns out there’s a cribbage club in Des Moines, called Capital City. Like many ACC clubs, members play 9 games vs 9 opponents and they are two player games. They accept people of all ages, although one of the main reasons to join is if your interested in tournament cribbage games. Like the web page says, they have fun, but they also have to learn how to play a game in 15 minutes because that’s the usual speed you’d have to play in tournaments. I would expect the atmosphere to be fun and also competitive.

There’s another sort of cribbage club in Iowa and it’s in Indianola, which is only about 20 miles south of downtown Des Moines. It doesn’t have a specific name and it isn’t connected to the ACC. They play in a conference room an Activity Center. Interestingly, they allow only those over 50 years of age to participate. This probably isn’t going to help ensure that the younger generation learns to play cribbage and keep the game alive.

There is a photo of 4 guys sitting at a table and you can see the cribbage board in a corner of the table. So, there is the opportunity to learn the 4-player variation of cribbage. The web site also has a link to a set of rules about how to play the game. The rules have a puzzling suggestion, which is to lead with your highest card. That seems like asking for trouble because your opponent could drop a 5 card on your ten card and get fifteen for two points right away.

Either way, Sena and I are not about to drive several hours just to play cribbage. We’ve only been playing for a little over 5 years now, but over 20 years ago we tried to learn it. Which brings me to the point of how you learn it from the web.

There are so many YouTube videos and other written tutorials, all with variable quality. Some have too much detail for beginners and some don’t have enough detail to keep you interested. The teachers who allow comments on their videos often get heartwarming stories from those who remember playing cribbage with someone they loved.

I like a couple of videos from Jonathan Pinyan. I just watched the shortest one, which is only about 15 minutes long but teaches you all the basics while he plays a game with a friend.

And he made a 20-minute video playing a game with his father. Sena and I watched that one and now she calls the nob jack (one for his nob, the jack of the same suit as the cut card) the right jack because that’s what Jonathan calls it. It’s comical because I always feel like I have to correct her, “It’s the nob jack, not the right jack.”

On the other hand, I just found a web reference which asks about the “his knobs.” You’ll see long, comical discussions on the web about the etymology of terms like that in cribbage, often turning out to be differences between British and American cribbage players’ nomenclature. And the “right jack” is related to the card game Euchre, which is where Jonathan Pinyan got it.

But let’s not get started on that.

CDC ACIP Meeting Today on Vaccines

There’s a CDC ACIP Meeting scheduled to start at 8:00 AM EST today (caught me off guard). The slides are here.

Noteworthy: Dr. Denise Jamieson, MD, MPH is chair of the CMV Working Group. She is Vice President for Medical Affairs and the Tyrone D. Artz Dean, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at University of Iowa. In the Q&A session following the Covid-19 vaccine presentation, Dr. Jamieson expressed a preference for a universal recommendation (citing implementation and uptake challenges, which other attendees mentioned as well) for the Covid-19 vaccine as opposed to a risk-based or permissive recommendation. See slide labeled “Discussion” below:

There was no vote scheduled for today’s meeting on the Covid-19 vaccine.

The presentation by Moderna on the new Covid-19 vaccine, mRNA-1283, was helpful. I gather there will be an FDA meeting about it in June.

The Svengoolie Movie: The Deadly Mantis

I watched the 1957 giant insect movie, “The Deadly Mantis” last night on the Svengoolie TV show, and Sena watched some of it. At times, it was a little hard to tell if this was a romantic comedy or a giant insect horror flick. The reporter Marge Blaine (played by Alix Talton) and Colonel Joe Parkman (played by Craig Stevens) had this fling going on which sometimes took precedence over the huge, deadly papier-mâché praying mantis.

There’s a lot of stock film footage of the military and important military radar dividing lines across the northern hemisphere including the DEW Line (standing for Distant Early Warning Line) which were real. There were a couple of shots of Greenland, which is important to you know which U.S. President—who was probably unaware at the time of the dangerous mantis unthawed from its icebound prison in the North Pole.

If you look carefully in the upper right-hand side of the frame at the 34:48-time mark, in the Internet Archive black and white copy of the film, you’ll see an important goof that Svengoolie pointed out (which I missed at first). It’s the shadow of the large microphone and boom which shows up as Marge and Dr. Nedrick Jackson are leaving the room (Jackson is played by William Hopper, cue Perry Mason music because he played detective Paul Drake on that TV Show). It’s interesting that the Perry Mason show was starting the same year this movie was filmed.

One detail never specified about the monster is its exact species. We can’t tell if it’s the European praying mantis or the invasive Chinese Mantis. That’s not important for the movie, but again, it might be important on the world’s current political stage. Most entomologists advise destroying the eggs of the Chinese Mantis. I don’t know if tariff escalation would work. I think it’s hard to distinguish different mantis species eggs apart and we also don’t know the gender of the giant mantis in the movie.

That’s an important detail, which is only delicately referred to in the film as Dr. Jackson reads aloud from a book about the insect’s mating process, which invariably concludes by the female biting off the head of the male and often eating him (called sexual cannibalism). In the movie, Dr. Jackson reads aloud a gentler description, “The female is larger than the male and invariably destroys her mate when he’s fulfilled his function in life.”

There are interesting parallels to the mantis in the way the male and female lead actors interact with each other in the movie. Colonel Parkman and Dr. Jackson both behave like typical male chauvinists, and Marge never bites their heads off. But the romance doesn’t go that far. Marge dances with the soldiers but there’s no scene with Elvis Presley dancing and singing “Heartbreak Hotel.”

And there’s no time for any of that because the giant mantis is too ravenous after being cooped up for thousands of years in an iceberg. All it wants is breakfast: “Two humans on a raft and wreck’em” or is it “Two humans, dummy side up”? Whatever.

Anyway, the ferocious mantis ends up sort of like the bad-tempered giant cockroach in the 1997 movie “Men in Black.” Agents K and J speed through the New York Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and have a showdown. The soldiers in The Deadly Mantis have their showdown with the monster in New York also, but it’s in what’s called The Manhattan Tunnel, which I found out doesn’t even exist.

But the parallels don’t stop there. Just before that, the terrifying insect climbs the Washington Monument (to get to the top, of course) and buzzes the White House. During the search for the bad bug, the military brass order that every U.S. citizen in the area report any “Unusual Flying Object,” in other words every UFO.

That means the sequel to both movies would need an extraterrestrial giant, bad-tempered female cockroach and mantis hybrid looking to bite the head off a suitable mate who crash-lands her UFO in the 51st state (formerly Canada) leading to the emergency mobilization of Men in Black who partner with Red Green and the rest of the Possum Lodge members to use duct tape and bug spray to overcome the beast and finally ensure peace by neuralyzing everyone in the world using a souped-up satellite owned by Elon Musk. Svengoolie will tell jokes.

It just goes to show you, we’re humans, but we can change, if we have to…we guess.

Music and Change Go Together

We listened to the Big Mo Blues Show last night on KCCK radio 88.3. It was recorded and we noticed that he sounded younger for some reason. Once he remarked that things were difficult because of having to “shelter in place.” The format of the show was different from usual.

That made me wonder if the show was recorded sometime during the Covid pandemic. I’ve been listening to Big Mo for a long time. John Heim, aka Big Mo, been doing the Friday Blues show since about 2005, according to one news story. Another KCCK legend, Bob DeForest, has been doing the Saturday night blues show for over 30 years now.

John Heim, aka Big Mo is still going strong. I think I’ve been listening to his show for about as long as he’s been doing it. He has come back strong since an accidental fall in 2018 in which he sustained a neck injury which led to a long rehab stint. But he’s back.

There have been interesting additions over time, like the Shout-Outs, the Concert Calendar, the Bodega Bay Weather Report, the Big Mo Pod Show in which he and producer Noah on Saturday discuss the music selections he made on Friday. The comedy bits have also been interesting, like MayRee’s hand-battered catfish (It’s better because it’s battered!).

Last night, we heard a couple of songs which we both liked. One of them was “She Don’t Live Around Here” by Samantha Fish. I heard it for the first time on the Big Mo Blues Show and just about every time I hear it, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. I’ve read that music will do that sometimes, although I can’t remember getting that sensation before.

We both liked Delbert McClinton’s rendition of “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember.” He’s had a huge career. Sena asked me if he’s still alive and I foolishly guessed that he died. Nope, he’s 84 years old and evidently still going strong.

I have a personal top ten songs, most of which I’ve heard on the Big Mo Blues Show. They’re not in any particular order. A few of them I like mainly because of the artist’s voice, like Samantha Fish and James Carr.

“She Don’t Live Around Here” Samantha Fish

“The Dark End of the Street” James Carr

“Everyday Will Be Like a Holiday” William Bell or Eric Clapton

“Lean On Me” Bill Withers or Keb Mo

“Mockingbird” Larkin Poe

“I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” Delbert McClinton (written by Otis Redding)

“You Were Never Mine” Delbert McClinton or Janiva Magness

“A Change is Gonna Come” Sam Cooke

“Over The Rainbow and What a Wonderful World” medley Israel Kamakawiwo’ole

“You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks” Seasick Steve

Lately, Big Mo has played Larkin Poe’s “Mockingbird” a fair number of times. I think one interpretation of it is that people’s sense of their identity tends to evolve over time. At different times in your life, you’ll take on a new voice, so to speak, which fits with the idea of the many songs the imitative Mockingbird sings.

Some songs I like because of the message, like “Lean On Me,” or “A Change is Gonna Come.” And I like the song “You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks” just because I identify with it. I realized that runs counter to the theme of many songs, which are often about change: people change, the times they are a’changing, and the like. So, my top ten song list will probably change, too.

Certification of Old Fart Status by Iowa House of Representatives

Well, thank you very much, State Representative Adam Zabner, for recognizing me as an old fart as you prefer to call it, which is fine with me.

I received a similar honor several years ago, from State Representative Dave Jacoby, who was much more prolix in his remarks on my certificate.

A long time ago, I kept a blog when I was a consulting psychiatrist in the University of Iowa Health Care Dept of Psychiatry. I used to mention occasionally that someday those who recognized my greatness would raise a statue of playdoh to me in the Quad.

Funny thing is I don’t know if the Quad even exists anymore. I supposed the statue could be raised (and perhaps later razed when people finally catch on) somewhere else, in a place much more prominent given my eminence, possibly at the state house in Des Moines or outside Pagliai’s Pizza here in Iowa City at least.

I’ll admit frankly, age does bring with it some of the usual markers: deepening wrinkles, receding hairline, fading memory and the like. There are some advantages, such as the tendency to joke and tell little stories of the distant past (chariot races and so on). This helps to bore younger persons enough for them to move out of line at the ice cream shop so that I can move up.

And I still exercise vigorously, lifting the salt and pepper shakers, crossing and uncrossing my legs on the ottoman, walking back and forth between the chair and the fridge, and power napping.

Seriously, I’m still juggling, which I took up about two and a half years ago. I exercise but not too much. A while ago I had an issue with my quads getting so big they were flopping over my knees so I had to cut back a little.

I don’t know that I’ll get many more certificates of senility from the Iowa House of Representatives. That makes it even more important for somebody to get to work with all possible speed on my playdoh statue.

Why Did China Tell President Trump His Tariff Strategy is a Joke?

The title of this post, which is admittedly the lead-in to a lame joke, is inspired partly by the news headlines today and partly by an essay, “Laughter: Better Than a Sharp Stick in Your Eye,” I found on The University of Iowa’s Well-Being at Iowa website. The author, Megan Gogerty, MFA, BA has some pretty sharp opinions about laughter being the best medicine. It’s not always the best.

Anyway, Reuters carried the story “China raises duties on US goods to 125%, calls Trump tariff hikes a ‘joke’,” by Joe Cash and Yukun Zhang, accessed April 11, 2025.

China is pretty upset. So, why did China tell President Trump his tariff strategy is a joke? Because they don’t get it.

Just half-kidding there; actually, I think that might be President Trump’s reply, but I really don’t understand tariffs. That’s probably why I also had trouble with the economist joke below:

Why did the Keynesian psychiatrist get fired? He told his patients to spend their way out of depression.

I found this joke on a YouTube by Jacob Clifford, an economics teacher. I didn’t get the joke, so I repeatedly replayed it because I couldn’t understand the first part. That’s because I didn’t know anything about Keynesian economics. It turns out that it’s based on the belief that proactive actions from the government (like spending) are the only way to control the economy. Get it? Neither do I but it was the only economy joke I could find that included a psychiatrist on a quick internet search.

Here’s twenty economics jokes from Jacob Clifford. They’re pretty lame, but then so is most of the political news.

How About That Goldwater Rule?

I’ve been looking over some of the web articles on the Goldwater Rule, which is the APA Ethics Committee guideline enjoining any psychiatrist from making public psychiatric armchair diagnoses of public or political figures without a formal evaluation or permission to conduct one. It was originally made in 1973, years after Fact Magazine in 1964 sent out a questionnaire to psychiatrists asking for their public opinions about the mental stability of then candidate Barry Goldwater who was running for President against Lyndon B. Johnson. Many thought he was psychotic, although there was no evidence for that. Goldwater won a lawsuit against Fact Magazine, which led to the publisher going out of business. It was a big embarrassment for psychiatrists, which contributed to the creation of the Goldwater Rule.

Over the last few years and currently, many psychiatrists question whether the Goldwater Rule should be revised and abolished, making it permissible for psychiatrists who believe they have a duty to warn the public about political leaders they think might be a threat to national security, specifically President Donald Trump.

I’ve found a few articles on the web which helped me think about my own position about this. McLoughlin says the Goldwater Rule should change, but doesn’t tell us how. Glass calls the Goldwater Rule a “gag rule” and tells us why it should change. He resigned from the APA in protest. Ghaemi and others don’t agree on whether the Goldwater Rule should change, and one discussant says the rule only applies if you’re a member of the APA. Blotcky et al tell us how it could change, using sample conversations between reporters and psychiatrists.

I lean toward Blotcky et al. In fact, the final paragraph gives psychiatrists another way to express their opinions to the public. They can give them as private citizens without calling them professional judgments—which is their right.

On the other hand, if you want to know about my psychiatric interview of President Trump, you can see it below.

Mr. President, you have signed an affidavit allowing me to conduct a thorough psychiatric assessment today.

Yes, Dr. Amos, that’s correct.

Can you tell me why an Autopen was used to sign it?

I decline to answer that question on the grounds it may incriminate me.

Have you ever undergone a psychiatric assessment before?

Yes, but I had to fire her when she started asking questions about tariffs.

Very well, then. Can you tell me a little about your childhood?

It was perfect—as long as the other kids paid their tariffs.

Oh. Was there ever a time in your life marked by any problems with having access to the basic necessities of life?

Well, there was one thing. Water pressure was sometimes low, which is why I just wrote an Executive Order ensuring that low water pressure in faucets and showerheads will never again in my lifetime or yours be a problem. Make American Faucets Gush Again (MAFGA).

Thanks, I’m sure. Tell me, how would you typically go about solving an interpersonal conflict between you and others?

Raise tariffs by 300%.

I see. How about talking to people with whom you disagree?

I would say, “You’re fired.”

Would you try anything else first?

I would try tariffs.

Well, I think we’re done here. Thank you for your time, Mr. President.

Of course, this was satire.

References:

McLoughlin A. The Goldwater Rule: a bastion of a bygone era? Hist Psychiatry. 2022 Mar;33(1):87-94. doi: 10.1177/0957154X211062513. Epub 2021 Dec 20. PMID: 34930051; PMCID: PMC8886301.

Nassir Ghaemi, MD MPH.The Goldwater Rule and Presidential Mental Health: Pros and Cons – Medscape – Jun 07, 2017.

Glass, Leonard A. The Goldwater rule is broken. Here’s how to fix it. Stat News. June 28, 2018.

Blotcky, Alan D., PhD; Ronald W. Pies, MD; Moffic, H. Steven, MD. The Goldwater Rule Is Fine, if Refined. Here’s How to Do it. Psychiatric Times. January 6, 2022. Vol. 39, Issue 1

University of Iowa Will Lead NASA Space Mission to Learn the Music of the Spheres

The big news for University of Iowa will be a NASA satellite mission to investigate how solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere. You can read the whole fascinating story in this issue of Iowa Magazine.

According to the story, “twin spacecraft known as TRACERS—Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites—will begin their journey to study Earth’s mysterious magnetic interactions with the sun. The satellites will be packed with scientific instruments along with two small, but meaningful, tokens.”

The two small tokens happen to be purple guitar picks that belonged to University of Iowa physicist, Craig Kletzing, who died from cancer in 2023. Kletzing and colleagues got a $115 million contract from NASA for TRACERS. It’s the largest research award in University of Iowa history.

Kletzing played guitar in a few bands, and one them was named Bipolar—which is the only connection to psychiatry that I could see. He was dedicated to work in basic science, and he was often heard to ask “How can we make this simpler?” referring to chunking big scientific challenges into manageable goals. He was a rare person in that he was both a brilliant scientist and a great teacher. One example of his work ethic was that he skipped a meeting with NASA’s top brass in order to deliver a morning lecture on introductory physics to 275 students.

The members of the UI TRACERS team call the project “Craig’s mission.” I’m pretty sure he would have called it a team effort “… to help scientists better understand the powerful forces harmonizing throughout the universe—something the ancient Greeks described as the music of the spheres.”

And that’s what the purple guitar picks represent.

Members of the Human Club

I just read Dr. Moffic’s column, “Join This Club for Mental Health” in which he described the Clubhouse movement which got started in the 1940s to help those with mental health challenges to cope with their illness and, more importantly, to recover, grow, and achieve success in life.

It made wonder if there are any chapters of the Clubhouse model in Iowa. It turns out there is and it’s Carol House in Davenport, Iowa. It’s connected with the Vera French Mental Health Center. Its namesake is Carol Lujack, who was a member when the center was called “The Frontier Community Outreach Program” in the 1980s in downtown Davenport.

I was looking at the Carol Center website where you can find many interesting features of the people and activities that go on there. The April newsletter is fascinating and funny. You can find out in the April Newsletter about a few of the current members, April holidays (there’s a slew of them), and famous quotes. One of the quotes is familiar and it’s by F. Scott Fitzgerald,

“Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over,” The quote is worded in various ways, but I remember it because I used it as an inspirational quote when The University of Iowa honored me and several of my colleagues with a Feather in Your Cap award back in 2011.

This was shortly after I returned to Iowa after an unsuccessful stab at trying private practice psychiatry in Wisconsin. And it was the second time I did that—the first time was in Illinois.

Did you know that April is National Humor Month? And have you heard the joke “What kind of candy is never on time?” Choco-Late.

One April holiday is not mentioned and that’s Arbor Day, which varies according to what part of the world you’re in as planting times differ. Sena planted a couple of new trees in the back yard.

Starting new chapters of Clubhouse is a little like planting new trees. They need watering.