I didn’t get a chance to watch the June 5th FDA advisory committee meeting on the new vaccine formulation for Covid-19 for this fall. There is a nice summary on the Minnesota CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy).
The committee unanimously upvoted the selection of the JN.1 lineage strain (which includes JN.1, KP.2 etc) for Covid vaccines this fall in the U.S.
As usual, Director Dr. Jerry Weir’s slides (summary slides 22-26) provide excellent background and clear discussion.
I was thinking of one of the Johnson County judicial mental health referees I often worked with years ago. L. Jay Stein died in 2014. I looked up his obituary the other day and was a little surprised to find I had written a remembrance for him. I’d forgotten it.
“I will always remember my first encounters with Judge Stein. I was a first-year resident in psychiatry at The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. He often presided at mental health commitment hearings at which I was often the nervous trainee providing “expert testimony” as the treating physician. Jay taught me and countless other psychiatry residents about the importance of procedure. His knowledge was prodigious. But it was his compassion, his fairness, and his inimitable sense of humor I will always treasure.”
Judge Stein’s vocabulary was impressive. Even his recorded telephone automatic replies sounded amusingly erudite. Occasionally, when I had a question about legal procedures in mental health I would call him but get his answering machine. These out of office replies were entertaining and sounded very much like the way he did during commitment hearings. I can’t remember all of it, but it began with something like, “Once again, your request has been denied…” It made me think of what I might hear at a parole hearing—not mine of course.
L. Jay Stein was wise and funny.
Great mindfulness video below. Millions of views.
The voting question for today’s FDA VRBPAC Meeting on the Covid Vaccine strain for this fall is:
“For the 2024-2025 Formula of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S., does the
committee recommend a monovalent JN.1-lineage vaccine composition?
Please vote “Yes” or “No” or “Abstain.”
The FDA Selection of the 2024-2025 Formula for COVID-19 vaccines briefing document has a thorough review on the issue.
We saw the 1959 movie “The Tingler” starring Vincent Price on the Svengoolie show last Saturday. Price plays a prison pathologist, Dr. Warren Chapin, who’s trying to scientifically study a parasitic creature called the tingler (tingles up and down your spine means you’re scared right out of your mind!).
It sits on your spine and feeds on fear by clamping down on it, eventually breaking it unless you scream. Then it’ll just let go. However, if you’re mute, scared speechless, or it grabs you by the throat—you’re done. So, the tingler lives on fear, although if you express fear vocally by screaming, you escape it.
OK, so I’m going to spoil the opening scene, which shows a prisoner being dragged to the electric chair, screaming all the way until the executioner throws the switch. When Dr. Chapin does an autopsy, he finds the prisoner’s spine is cracked. He says it wasn’t caused by the electrocution, but by the tingler.
Huh? But the prisoner screamed bloody murder (murder was why he got the death penalty by the way) hardly stopping to take a breath. Shouldn’t that have weakened or killed the tingler? You can find examples of inconsistencies like this in any cheesy movie, but where’s the fun in that?
One web article says the tingler creature was modeled after the velvet worm, which looks pretty creepy. In reality, the velvet worm is harmless to humans, but is a predator of many invertebrates. Just keep telling yourself, “I’m a vertebrate.”
You can watch the full movie on the Internet Archive. The most interesting part of it for me was the use of what was called “acid,” (meaning the hallucinogen LSD) by Dr. Chapin. He wanted to experience and record the actual experience of being scared by the tingler, just to see what it’s like apparently. He mainlines himself with a fairly stiff dose of LSD although I can’t remember how much.
Incidentally, an article in JAMA notes, “Doses of 20μg/kg of body weight are known to have been taken without a lethal outcome.” (Materson BJ, Barrett-Connor E. LSD “Mainlining”: A New Hazard to Health. JAMA. 1967;200(12):1126–1127. doi:10.1001/jama.1967.03120250160025). I don’t know how much Dr. Chapin weighs.
This was about the same time as a lot of people in the U.S. were experimenting with the hallucinogen in various ways, including mainlining it. There are web references to psychiatrists using LSD recreationally (this was when it was legal). Bad trips were and still are common, although there is a growing body of clinical studies that involve using the psychedelics as adjuncts in psychotherapy. It’s not for everybody, although tinglers might have a different opinion.
Anyway, Dr. Chapin has a bad trip, gets really scared of hallucinations and screams. Web articles say that killed his tingler, but I didn’t see it flop out of his mouth.
There you have it. Another really cheesy and fun Svengoolie movie. I’m a vertebrate.
Today, I’m going on a tangent about big, mostly antique cribbage boards which were specially made for making the scoring more complex. The main perpetrator (I mean manufacturer), was Drueke (variously pronounced as Drooky, Drew, Drooka).
The Drueke name turns up on most of the big two, three and four track vintage cribbage boards you find for sale on eBay. There are a few other makers, but Drueke is the one you commonly see. I don’t know anything about Drueke except it was a well-known maker of board games including chess and cribbage sets. The company was based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
If you know how to play the basic version of cribbage, you probably think it’s complicated enough as is. But Drueke made boards that allowed you to score many aspects of the game right on the playing surface.
There are other 4 track cribbage boards that aren’t designed to allow players to go crazy with scoring everything you do in a cribbage game. But typically, you’ll see a lot of what Drueke called the “Once-A-Round Scoremaster” boards. I got curious about the rules and found a couple of web pages on which I found out more about them. The rules are a little hard to find and a little vague when you do find them.
I couldn’t find out anything about them even on the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) website—and it’s the main authority about cribbage rules.
Reddit has a page titled Cribbage-Four Track Board (Example Rules). Click the “read more” below the image. It also shows a nice photo of a typical board. It’s tough to follow.
Then I found a Board Game Geek (BGG) page on which a guy named Jeff Bridghman outlined a clearer explanation of how to play on such a board. It’s actually better than the rules included with the Drueke game. By the way, if you have trouble with the web page, just reload it by typing “4 track boards and all the extra mumbo jumbo?” and hit the search button again.
What puzzled me were his comments about the High Hand score. He said his board had something I’ve not seen on pictures of the boards on eBay. The High Hand score goes from 1-10 on every one of those I saw. On the other hand, his board shows actual scores (14 through 29). I think it must have been a custom build. The thread has longevity; it started in 2011 and the latest comment I saw was in 2023.
If you buy the Drueke board, you’ll need the rules. But even if you have the Drueke rules, you’ll probably need something more specific. Maybe Drueke figured people would be more creative than they are. It’s a lot like life. I think sometimes you have to make up some rules.
Here’s the other cribbage version and it’s for 4 players. You play as teams. You can find these and more games on this website.
Hey, I found a great website for learning how to play cribbage with more than two players. In fact, you can learn how to play all kinds of games. If you already know how to play two-hander cribbage, you can learn the other common variations. Here’s the YouTube on the 3 player version.
I was just thinking about the old-time land survey crews. When I was getting on the job training as a survey technician, the typical land survey crews were at least 2-3 persons. One rodman, one instrument man, and a crew chief who organized the job, which could be property or construction jobs.
Nowadays, you get by sometimes with one man doing the jobs using a theodolite that measures angles and distances. You don’t always need a physical measuring tape; you can use something they call “total stations.”
It’s cheaper for engineering companies to use one man survey outfits. On the other hand, one disadvantage is the lack of mentoring for learners who want to become land surveyors or civil engineers.
Mentoring from surveyors on the survey back in the day not only taught me such skills as how to throw and wrap a surveyor’s steel tape—it also taught me how to work well with others as a team. Of course, this was transferrable to working on the psychiatry consultation-liaison service in a big hospital as well.
It’s well known that playing cards in the truck while waiting for the rain to stop was an essential skill. I don’t know how they manage downtime nowadays. We didn’t play cards on the consultation service during downtime, partly because we didn’t have much downtime.
Anyway, as I mentioned in a recent post, we played Hearts in the truck on rain days. I always sat in the middle. At the time, I was a terrible card player in general. It was a cutthroat game and I had trouble remembering which cards had been played.
When you consider that the strong suit of engineers and surveyors is math ability, you’d think that survey crews would have figured out a way to play Cribbage during downtime. You can have a Cribbage game with 3 or 4 people although I’ve never played it that way. If there are 3 players, it can still be cutthroat.
The one problem I can see is that, the guy sitting in the middle would have to set the board on his lap. You’d almost need a special, custom-made board which would have a space for placing the cards to keep track of what’s been played. I think that might have made things easier for me.
The other drawback to one man survey crews is that pretty much the only card game you can play is solitaire.
There will be an FDA VRBPAC meeting on June 5, 2024, 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. ET to discuss Covid vaccines for this fall.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 