5 Oct 2025 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Both Sena and I enjoyed the Svengoolie show movie last night, “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.”

This 1966 film directed by Alan Rifkin and starring Don Knotts as Luther Heggs, Joan Staley as Alma Parker, Liam Redmond as Kelsey, Philip Ober as Nick Simmons, and Dick Sargent as George Beckett is a horror spoof that we’ve seen before but it’s still really funny.

Luther Heggs is a typesetter for a newspaper in a little town who sort of agrees to spend the night in a haunted house where a couple of murders took place twenty years in the past which were never solved. Luther wants to be a reporter and gets his chance when Kelsey talks him into writing a filler story on the anniversary of the murders.

In fact, if not for Kelsey’s slick manipulation of the main characters including George Beckett the editor of the newspaper, a lot of the story wouldn’t take place. A big part of the action is related to bringing whoever killed the occupants of the house (who were related to Simmons) to justice.

A lot of the hilarity comes from Knott’s superb portrayal of the extremely nervous guy who does brave things despite his fears. Luther has a crush on Alma and despite his shyness, to impress her he shows her his karate moves which he has been learning entirely from a correspondence course he’s been taking for years and which has made his whole body a lethal weapon.

Luther convinces the town that he has seen supernatural events in the Simmons’ haunted mansion, which makes him a hero worthy of celebration in his honor. His bungles his acceptance speech and then gets a summons to appear in court to fight a libel charge from Nick Simmons because he doesn’t want the publicity about the haunting to interfere with his plans to demolish the house.

The trial is one of the funniest scenes in the movie, leading to a couple of witnesses inadvertently making things a bit more difficult for Luther to beat the libel charge by revealing that he has a lifelong track record of telling tall tales.

The detective part of this story involves the manipulation of Kelsey, the motive of Simmons to demolish the house, and the perseverance of Luther to confront his terror while confronting the mystery of what happened twenty years previously in the Simmons’ mansion.

I have given this very funny film the highest Shrilling Chicken Rating of 5/5.

I’ll deal with the silly KOBWA acronym later. Sena bought some new kitchen utensils and she got these egg flippers (one red and one black). They’re supposed to make it easier to flip fried eggs. I think a regular person who knows how get around a kitchen would do better than I did this morning to handle this tool.

On the other hand, I think I have a legitimate point to make about the egg flipper. I usually break yolks when I try to flip eggs, so they end up not looking pretty.

The egg flipper is a combination of a spatula and tongs. The tong set is above the spatula and you just squeeze the flexible handle to close them over the egg when you’re ready to flip them over.

I’m not sure how to make sure the yolk is out of the way. I hope others besides me notice that unless you position this instrument just right, you’d end up with crushed yolks. This doesn’t make much of a difference to me because I usually find a way to crush the yolks anyhow.

Sena found an interesting article about the inventor of the spatula, although I didn’t actually see that one; she just mentioned it. I think I found it later, though. The writer often doesn’t get credit for the original article but wrote another article in which he says his first one is often misquoted and leaves out his byline. His name is George Billions. For what it’s worth, the line under his name on his blog says “writes fiction and other lies.” Just sayin’.

There was one comment on Billion’s’ original article who requested a reference to support what he wrote about John Spaduala. For complicated reasons, a reference is hard to come by, and I think I’ll just add a reference to Billions’ article out of respect:

“John Spaduala: Inventor of the Spatula.” Spatula Planet. Spatula Planet, 3 Feb. 2014. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

I don’t know why he calls himself Mike because the name of his blog is George Billions.

I don’t usually pay much attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the internet, but sometimes they are too intrusive to ignore. AI essentially says there was no such person as John Spaduala and that the story is a recurring anecdote. It’s an urban legend.

What lends weight to the AI judgment is a web article purporting to be an interview with John Spaduala himself, even though the guy lived in the 19^th century and the interview was conducted in 2017 by Jason Denness who entitled it “Fake Interview: John Spadula.” Denness thanks George Billions for being the “victim of this interview.” While Denness credits George Billions by saying “He is the creation of John Spaduala…” I suspect that’s a typo and maybe what he meant was that Billions is the “creator” of John Spaduala.

That said, the question is who invented the egg flipper? It wasn’t John Spaduala. Technically, even though I have no right to make any judgments about this, there might not be any specific person identified as the inventor of the egg flipper. As near as I can tell, a spatula can be a “turner,” (also called a flipper) but a turner isn’t necessarily a spatula.

The name or acronym applied is KOBWA, which I suspect is not the inventor’s name, but the name of the company that markets the egg flipper spatula. The only thing I found on my admittedly cursory search is the Komati Basin Water Authority, which has no connection to any kitchen utensil. You can find kitchen gadgets with the name Kobwa (or KOBWA), though. However, there are other weird trademark related names for the egg flipper as well. I don’t know why.

I’m pretty sure they weren’t invented by any descendants of John Spaduala—if he had any. You’re welcome.