Remember that off the head juggle I was trying to learn way back over two years ago? The other name for it is the head stall and I could not get the hang of it. I watched video after video and the performers who could do it all did it the same way—which I could not imitate. You can see the disaster by looking at my post “Off The Head Juggle Trick So Wrong but My Way.”
It never helped that every teacher said it was an easy trick to learn.
That was over two years ago. Every time I tried it since, it was a no go. But yesterday, I found another video of a guy who does the head stall differently. I tried it last night and within minutes I was doing the head stall. This guy has the hack for the head stall juggle.
I’m pretty sure what made the difference for me is throwing one ball high with one hand, but using the other hand to place the ball on my head. Every other video shows the juggler using one hand for the throw the ball and the same hand for placing the ball on the head. At least that’s what it looks like to me. I’ve got a slow-motion clip in the YouTube video I made today showing me doing it and not only that, alternating between left and right.
The idea behind this head stall thing is the same as the one behind learning the under the leg and behind the back tricks in and out of the 3-ball cascade. You throw one ball high to allow you time enough to do the trick ball.
Now I’m doing the head stall boogie using the same method. Sena says I look sexy in the video. I think I look like I’m trying to catch my breath.
I have just noticed that there are over 5,000 comments posted on the comments section of regulations.gov in the section entitled Meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices-September 2025.
The link to the comment section is on the CDC ACIP meeting announcement web page, “Written Public Comments.”
This is the first time I’ve seen a written comment section like this for the meetings. I think it gives people a sense of what health care professionals and others think about how things are going with the current approach to preventive medicine at the CDC.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
This Saturday’s Svengoolie movie will be “Tarantula,” about a giant tarantula in the Arizona desert who developed a huge brain and invented a brand new barbecue-flavored meatballs dish made out of humans and marketed to extraterrestrials who are pretty hungry after traveling from a far-away galaxy and abducting thousands of people who are just looking for a fun new ride on a spaceship and the giant tarantulas have 8 arms and are trying to learn how to juggle 32 persons because it’s well known that people can learn how to juggle 8 items and they have only two hands and—OK, so that’s not quite the story line but fun to think about.
I got a 28 hand in Cribbage Pro scrimmage today against Brutal (the most difficult level). I also won the game. The odds of getting a 28 hand in cribbage is about 1 in 15,028. It’s the second highest hand score in cribbage. The highest score is a 29 hand and the odds of getting that is 1 in 216,580. There are different ways to calculate the odds which yield different results which involve crazy difficult statistics that I can’t explain, but you can find the details here.
The upcoming meeting on the MMVR and Covid-19 vaccines will include voting on the MMVR and Covid-19 vaccines. Usually, the committee posts the actual voting questions, which so far I have not seen on the meeting agenda. I’ll be looking for them in the next couple of days.
Here is the linkto the Center for Infectious Disease and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota article which bears directly on the meeting topics.
I just noticed that the CDC ACIP draft agenda for upcoming meeting on September 18th and 19th has been posted. There will be votes on the MMRV, Hepatitis B, and Covid-19 vaccines.
I watched the Svengoolie show movie, “The Baddest Seed on the Planet” yesterday on the Internet Archive because I wanted to see the Iowa Hawkeye vs UMass football game last night. Hey, the Iowa Hawkeyes and the Iowa State Cyclones both won yesterday!
Actually, I thought “The Bad Seed” was a pretty good movie, just to let the shrilling chicken out of the bag. It’s a good break from the rubber mask, stop motion animation, shlocky howlers. It does run long, a little over 2 hours and at times there’s a little too much lofty psychoanalytic dialogue. At times it seemed like a play.
It’s a 1956 Warner Bros. Pictures production. There was a Perry Mason regular on it; William Hopper played Col. Kenneth Penmark (father of Rhoda). Henry Jones played Leroy, the really creepy sociopath handyman who had a lot in common with Rhoda (played by Patty McCormack), the psychopathic 8-year-old daughter of Kenneth and Christine Penmark (played by Nancy Penmark). Eileen Heckart played the heck out of her role as the tipsy Hortense Daigle, mother of her unfortunate murdered child Claude—who is never seen.
The main underlying theme is the question of whether psychopaths are born bad or victims of bad environments.
How this gets treated in the film is fascinating. When Rhoda saws through a fawn with a dull straight razor while singing Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” it really doesn’t leave much to the imagination.
Things start to go bad early when Claude wins a penmanship award instead of Rhoda who is thinking, “OK bud, over your dead body!” I’ve got to tell you; I got chills just looking at her after a while.
The handyman Leroy pegs Rhoda for a bad seed right away, mainly based on the idea that bad seeds think alike. He keeps telling her he’s got her number until he has a close encounter of the excelsior kind, and “excelsior” means ever upward only in the sense that burning wood shavings used for packing fragile items tend to be carried by the wind.
Just to gloss over the scientific psychiatric literature on psychopathy, the most recent paper I could find on the web suggests that structural and functional brain abnormalities of psychopathic persons contribute substantially to the observed behavioral patterns of callousness and poor adaptability to prosocial motivations beginning early in life and which tend to be resistant to change as one gets older. The younger the person, the more plastic the antisocial traits may be to change via behavioral modification, hopefully leading to greater empathy. (Anderson NE, Kiehl KA. Psychopathy: developmental perspectives and their implications for treatment. Restor Neurol Neurosci. 2014;32(1):103-17. doi: 10.3233/RNN-139001. PMID: 23542910; PMCID: PMC4321752.)
By far, Hortense Daigle has the most awkwardly comical role as she combines grief, inebriation and eerie suspicion of Rhoda in her own son’s death. Every time she shows up to the Penmark house, she’s roaring, dramatically staggering drunk. She helps herself to the booze in the house, even making it clear which bourbon she prefers (Never mind my grief! I said I wanted that martini in a dirty glass!).
Other than the movie being a bit too long, I thought it was very good. I could have done without the theater like credits with all the actors coming out to take a bow (or curtsy in Rhoda’s case), a slapstick bit between Christine and Rhoda, and the warning to the audience not to reveal the ending to anyone.
The Big Mo Pod Show title is about planting seeds in a metaphorical way. One of the seeds Big Mo sows is his comedy bit on MayRee’s hand-battered catfish. It’s just one of his hilarious faux sponsor routines that he frequently tweaks, and the subtle changes are difficult to catch if you don’t listen to his show every Friday night. It evolves, kind of like a shaggy dog story joke. My lame imitation from my crippled memory is below:
You see, MayRee’s hand-battered catfish is better because it’s battered, cooked to perfection with manic delight, packed with nitrates at her shack which you can find at the corner of Highway 6 and Snowflake Drive, and if you tip her and give her a wink, she’ll set you up with a mason jar of her famous kickin’ mule’ not sure if it’s all the way legal, but it comes in 3 flavors, Classic Clear, Golden Grabass, and just right for the holidays, Pumpkin Spice, that’s Mayree’s hand-battered catfish; it’s better because it’s battered.
You get the idea. I’m still trying to sell him on my design for a MayRee’s hand-battered catfish tee shirt. Don’t know why he’s not biting that hook. The catfish could be a fire truck red color, just sayin’.
So, the pod show title is “Planting Seeds” and that’s related to the idea of fundamental, historically important basic elements of blues music, specifically in the case of Jessie Mae Hemphill’s song “Jump, Baby, Jump.” Both Big Mo and Producer Noah agree that this example of North Mississippi hill country folk trance or hypnotic griot music (or grio, pronounced Gree-oh; a kind of West African traditional oral folklorist) which serves as the seed or basis for building on other layers (instrumental or otherwise). That’s just what I picked up from the internet.
Big Mo distinguishes this from “production” style music you hear a lot of nowadays on the radio and I get his disparaging tone about it.
Anyway, that’s the rich music history part of the pod show, which you can get by listening to KCCK on your radio dial at 88.3 or click on the Listen Now to hear by internet.
Now, what is also great about the show is Big Mo’s own historical perspective on music. That’s what you get by growing older. And that’s why my favorite song from last night from the Big Mo Blues Show was Curtis Salgado’s “The Longer That I Live.” I can identify with the lyrics.
I think I just found out why we have to tune in to the upcoming Svengoolie movie “The Bad Seed” an hour early this Saturday. It comes on at 6:00 p.m. because it’s two hours long!
There’s another crisis. The Iowa Hawkeye vs UMass college football game comes on at 6:40 p.m. tomorrow evening.
That means I’d have to choose between watching “The Bad Seed” or watching the football game. In order to see both I’d have to watch the movie on the Internet Archive.
That means I’d miss Svengoolie’s corny jokes. Hmmmm.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 