I'm a retired consult-liaison psychiatrist. I navigated the path in a phased retirement program through the hospital where I was employed. I was fully retired as of June 30, 2020. This blog chronicles my journey.
Brace yourselves! Sena and I are going to break the internet with the never-before-seen YouTube video of our antic-filled cribbage game on our Sasquatch cribbage board—and playing with the Sasquatch cribbage cards!
This had an extremely rare outcome. Wait’ll you see what it is.
I also shared a few nuggets of knowledge about Sasquatch that I learned from the internet. One of them is that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) credits the state of Iowa with 76 reports of Bigfoot encounters (not necessarily sighting per se, but so what?).
I read the article by Dr. H. Steven Moffic, MD, “The Psychiatric Best of: In Awe of Awe” today. I agree that experiencing awe is powerful.
I’m not so sure you can go looking for it. I think of awe as an experience that just happens to you when you’re in a place that gives you a sense of how great the universe is and gives you an idea of how small your place in it is.
We didn’t go looking for awe when we visited the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona many years ago. And we didn’t look for it at Niagara Falls.
But we were awestruck.
On a smaller scale, we were awestruck by the total lunar eclipses this year, in May and November. I’ll admit the cold temperatures at 2:00 a.m. put a damper on my enthusiasm.
On the other hand, I’m more often dumbfounded. It’s not the same thing as awestruck. For example, I’ve been trying to learn how to do the behind the back throw in juggling. I hit my elbow, I drop the balls, and I don’t seem to learn much from watching YouTube videos of jugglers who can do it effortlessly. I’m amazed by their talent and achievement and appreciate the dedication to practice they underwent to reach that level of skill. And I respect them for it.
But it’s not the same as being awestruck. Awe seems to me to be a rare and wonderful accident, something to be treasured in memory, but which might be elusive if sought.
You can’t enter “Awe inspiring destinations” in your GPS. I’m sure everyone has seen tourists at the Grand Canyon or Niagara who seem to be too busy getting selfies with their smartphones to be receptive to awe.
I guess you could ask, “Can you cultivate a readiness to be awestruck?” There is probably no specific brain lobe to which awe is assigned.
And I think Dr. Moffic is right about constant awe being incompatible with living your life doing what you have to do every day to survive.
Awe, like all miracles, should be rare to be appreciated.
We got our Sasquatch playing card deck! The images of Bigfoot are strikingly similar to the carved image on our new Sasquatch cribbage board. And they both resemble the image of Patty, the female Bigfoot supposedly captured on 16mm film back in 1967 by Bob Gimlin.
That’s the legendary Patterson-Gimlin video of Bigfoot. There are two opposing views on the existence of Bigfoot which I think are probably influenced by Patty.
The TV show, The Proof Is Out There, aired an episode of experts who talked a lot about evidence for Bigfoot. I watched the show, which ran on December 3, 2021. The Daily Mail UK ran a big story about it. I honestly can’t remember what they decided.
On the other hand, there are a few people who claim to know for a fact that a guy has admitted that he put on a stinky monkey suit and played the part of Patty—and said he’s blowing up the whole thing because he never got paid for doing it. That was way back in 2004, and the story is all over the internet.
I tend to be skeptical about most things like Bigfoot and extraterrestrials. I’m not exactly saying they don’t exist.
But why can’t anyone find a corpse, roadkill, or a definite fossil of Sasquatch? Is that why people are starting to call Bigfoot an interdimensional being, coming and going through a wormhole vortex? And why does everybody still pay attention to the tale?
I think it’s because just about everybody likes a good story—which is what Bigfoot has always been.
I watched one of my favorite TV shows last night, The Proof Is Out There, and I was surprised to see the rerun of a debunked segment from last year. It was the simulated reality spot in which a photo of a girl showing her reflection in a mirror with apparently two different facial expressions was determined to be an “unexplained phenomenon.” Even the forensic video expert was fooled.
It was the same photo that was debunked on the show last September because an alert viewer notified the show it was a smartphone camera trick which was done in panorama mode. The effect had been known for years. I duplicated the trick and published a post about it, entitled “Proof of Simulated Reality—Or Cool Camera Trick?”
I sent an email to the show this morning and got an automated reply indicating the Proof Team received it, and indicating they might reply.
We’ll see. Anyway, Sena and I made updated weird pictures. I think motion creates artifact—which itself can look pretty cool (see the featured juggling photo in which we minimized it).
Sena and I just watched the original Avatar movie on TV last night. The new sequel just opened: “Avatar: Totally Under Water Without Snorkel or Scuba.”
I can’t recall when we actually saw the original Avatar, although it was probably not long after it was released in 2009. The CGI effects are still mesmerizing.
Sena found a YouTube with a demo showing how the action sequences were made, which pitted Sam Worthington (who played Jake Sully) against what looked like a rubber dragon yanked around by a few guys while other actors played their parts, all of them wearing what looked like ping pong balls and green dots.
It doesn’t take any of the magic away from the finished product, believe it or not.
However, I’m not totally sold on the avatar concept. I get it that Jake’s consciousness jockeyed back and forth between his human and Pandora bodies. But I can’t pin a specific inconsistency on any particular scene in the movie suggesting sometimes Jake was conscious and interacting during the day on the spaceship during the times when he should have been conscious learning how to be one of The People.
You know, when Jake’s conscious in the spaceship and out of the incubator (so to speak), his blue guy avatar should become limp and lifeless out in the Pandora Forest, maybe at the exact time when Neytiri (ultimately his main squeeze, and played by Zoe Saldana) is trying to teach him how to juggle deadly 3-headed zebra-striped iguanas, whose main diet consists of a certain male Na’vi body part involved in reproduction. This is why many of them look like they have Peyronie’s disease. This is available only in the Director’s cut, of course.
I was astounded by the relative difference in stature between the Na’vi and humans. For example, Jake’s main rival for Neytiri’s affection is a guy named Tsu’tey (played by Laz Alonso) who looks like a shrimpy, homely nerd next to his Pandora comrades. But when he’s on the airborne military transport toward the latter part of the movie, he’s several feet taller than the human soldiers and he tosses them around like garbage bags.
I wasn’t clear on why the head scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver), smokes cigarettes. What’s up with that? Her line early in the movie when they are all in their avatar bodies, some of them for the first time: “Don’t play with that, it’ll make you go blind.” Is that supposed to let the audience know that the Na’vi males have penises? Or do I just have a dirty mind?
Sena read an on-line source that the James Cameron, who wrote, directed, co-produced, and co-edited Avatar, called the main bad guy, Colonel Miles Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) in the film a “motherf***er.” I guess he’s been reincarnated in the sequel. Evil never dies.
This morning we noticed that the Amaryllis was bent almost 90 degrees. We found a zip tie and used an old wooden spoon to stake it. Sure, it looks like amateurs did it-because amateurs did it. But the alternative is to cut the stem and sacrifice the blooms, which are still vibrant.
Our Amaryllis is bending over backwards (or forwards depending on your point of view). We’re not sure if we should prop it up somehow or cut our losses and cut the stem. Any advice would be welcome.
Well, I think all of the blossoms that are going to blow have blown on our Amaryllis, Star of Holland. There are 4 of them. They’re huge and glorious!
I didn’t know how it would turn out at first. It started off as just a little green stub. It soared to about 18 inches and then pushed out flowers in every direction.
It grew a lot quicker than I thought. I doubted it would bloom before Christmas. Now I’m not sure it’ll last until Christmas.
We do have a backup Poinsettia. And today, Sena just added a Zygocactus. I gather it’s a Christmas cactus.
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