Category: books

Remarks on Svengoolie TV Movie Phantom of the Opera 1943 and More

We watched Phantom of the Opera (1943 version) last night. And then, just for good measure, we watched the Phantom of the Opera (1925 silent film) today. We watched the latter on the Internet Archive.

I’ll say one thing, the absence of commercials in the 1925 version is great. Even though I like cornball jokes on Svengoolie, it’s good to have a break from that too sometimes.

We’ve never read the novel by Gaston Leroux but there’s a pretty good Wikipedia article about it. We’ve never seen the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage version nor the 2004 movie.

That said, we’re struck by the differences between the 1925 and 1943 versions. It’s difficult to develop any sympathy for the Erik the phantom (played by Lon Chaney Sr. in 1925). He’s pretty much a monster from beginning to end. We tend to think that it’s easier to be sympathetic to Erique Claudin (played by Claude Rains in 1943) who has a rough path downhill after losing his job and a place to live early on, inability to sell his concerto or get a date with Christine and so on, after which he starts killing people left and right.

It’s worth pointing out that in Leroux’s book (according to the Wikipedia article), the phantom’s childhood was pretty traumatic because he was born ugly and deformed, which didn’t endear him to his mother. She was simply not good enough, which I think appeals to my training in psychiatry.

The 1943 film was pretty comical at times. For example, the two guys competing for Christine’s attention, singer Anatole (played by Nelson Eddy) and Raoul (played by Edgar Barrier) get stuck in doorways and eventually end up going to dinner together instead of one or the other going out with Christine. Their forced politeness with each other in front of Christine is priceless.

On the other hand, the 1925 version is a little more like what you’d expect from a movie on the Svengoolie show—it’s a horror flick, only classier. Lon Chaney’s makeup job makes him look like a proper monster, which made women faint according to some articles. Claude Rains’ makeup is barely suggested on part of his face.

The murders committed by the phantoms in both movies are bloodless, although the comedy in the 1943 version distracts you from what you expect; for example, after the Phantom drops the huge chandelier on the audience. No mangled bodies or gore, move along, nothing to see here. People continue to sing, dance and cavort, possibly hopping over any corpses lying about.

There was mostly dark music in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera film. However, in the 1943 version there was lullaby theme that ran throughout and was even a point of connection between Christine and the ill-fated Erique. Somebody found a full version of it years later, entitled Lullaby of the Bells. The one who posted it mentioned the composer and the performer.

Amaryllis Progress and Other Notes

I have a few messages to pass on today. This is the last day of November and the Amaryllis plants are doing so well Sena had to brace the tallest one using a Christmas tree stake and a couple of zip ties. It’s over two feet tall!

I’m not sure what to make of almost a dozen comments on my post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way I do about the change in taste of the spread. So, maybe it’s not just that my taste buds are old and worn out.

Congratulations to the Iowa Hawkeye Football team last night! They won against Nebraska by a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game. I had to chuckle over the apparent difficulty the kicker had in answering a reporter’s question, which was basically “How did you do it?” There are just some things you can’t describe in words. There’s even a news story about how thinking doesn’t always have to be tied to language.

Along those lines, there might be no words for what I expect to think of tonight’s 1958 horror film on Svengoolie, “The Crawling Eye.” This movie was called “The Trollenberg Terror” in the United Kingdom version. I can tell you that “Trollenberg” was the name of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland.

I’m not a fan of Jack the Ripper lore, but I like Josh Gates expedition shows, mainly for the tongue in cheek humor. The other night I saw one of them about an author, Sarah Bax Horton, who wrote “One-Armed Jack”). She thought Hyam Hyams was the most likely candidate (of about 200 or so) to be Jack the Ripper, the grisly slasher of Whitechapel back in 1888. He’s a list of previously identified possible suspects. I found a blogger’s 2010 post about him on his site “Saucy Jacky” and it turns out Hyams is one of his top suspects. Hyams was confined to a lunatic asylum in 1890 and maybe it’s coincidental, but the murders of prostitutes stopped after that. I’m not going to speculate about the nature of Hyams’ psychiatric illness.

There’s another Psychiatric Times article about the clozapine REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program. I found a couple of articles on the web about the difficulties helping patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia which I think give a little more texture to the issue:

Farooq S, Choudry A, Cohen D, Naeem F, Ayub M. Barriers to using clozapine in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: systematic review. BJPsych Bull. 2019 Feb;43(1):8-16. doi: 10.1192/bjb.2018.67. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30261942; PMCID: PMC6327301.

Haidary HA, Padhy RK. Clozapine. [Updated 2023 Nov 10]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535399/

The paper on the barrier to using clozapine by Farooq et al is very interesting and the summary of the barriers begins in the section “Barriers to the use of clozapine in TRS (treatment resistant schizophrenia). I think it gives a much-needed perspective on the complexity involved in managing the disorder.

So what do you think about Miracle Whip?

Thoughts on the Big Mo Pod Show 034: Laughing in the Face of Death

I heard the Big Mo Blues Show just (Halloween theme) this last Friday night and was not surprised to see that one of the songs discussed on the Big Mo Pod Show on Saturday was Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Devil’s Son-in-Law.”

When I first heard it, it got me chuckling because I didn’t understand hardly a single word until the last line. It was babbling. I can remember googling the term “Peetie Wheatstraw and unintelligible,” which revealed I’m not the only one who thinks he’s unintelligible. It’s a mondegreen mine field. It’s a good thing the lyrics are available.

I want to hastily point out that he’s not always unintelligible—but William Bunch aka Peetie Wheatstraw is speaking in tongues on that song. For comparison I listened to another song, “Sweet Home Blues” and I could understand just about every word in the lyrics.

That led me down the rabbit hole about the artist in a web search that seemed to have no end. I should probably say Brer Rabbit hole since most of my searches pointed in the direction of a character called Peter Wheatstraw, Petey Wheatstraw, as well as Peetie Wheatstraw who had variations in their identities, most often in the context of African American folklore.

I’m not going to attempt a summary of my web search on Peetie Wheatstraw; there’s too many twists and turns. You can start with the Wikipedia article. But from there, you can get trapped in Brer Rabbit’s little tunnels, which can run in different directions.

William Bunch was a blues artist in the 1930s who adopted the moniker “Peetie Wheatstraw.” While Big Mo says it’s sort of another name for Satan, I found confusing references by writers who claim that the Peter Wheatstraw character comes from Black folklore. There are those who believe that novelist Ralph Ellison wrote about a character in his book “Invisible Man” named Peter Wheatstraw and said it was the only character in the novel that was based on a live person—William Bunch.

Is that true? And did Ellison ever meet Peetie Wheatstraw (William Bunch)? I can’t tell from the web articles.

I was prompted to get my copy of “Invisible Man” out after reading a scholarly online essay mentioning the Peter Wheatstraw character, “Re-visioning Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for a Class of Urban Immigrant Youth” by Camille Goodison, CUNY New York City College of Technology. I couldn’t remember Wheatstraw at first, but there he was in Chapter 9.

Goodison reveals there is a lot more texture to the Wheatstraw character then just as a moniker adopted by William Bunch. Wheatstraw is probably more complex than the devil. He has many sides to him and could be helpful—but mostly in an indirect way. His guidance is full of riddles and there doesn’t seem to be a solid way to cut through the metaphorical morass. As Emily Dickinson advised, Wheatstraw may tell the truth—but tells it slant.

I still don’t know why he mumbles the song.

Reading My Old Book in a New Light

Sena bought me a wonderful new lamp to read by and it improves on the ceiling fan light I wrote about the other day (And Then a Light Bulb Went Off).”

The new lamp even has a nifty remote control with which you can choose the ambient feel. There are several selections, one of which is called “breastfeed mode,” a new one on me. There’s a light for that?

The lamp arrived at about the same time I got a notice from my publisher for my one and only book, “Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry,” that people are still buying—after 14 years! My co-editor was my former psychiatry department chair, Dr. Robert G. Robinson. As far as I know, Bob has dropped off the face of the earth. I hope he’s well.

Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry is probably about the same as I left it when I retired 4 years ago. I walked all over the hospital trying to help my colleagues in medicine provide the best possible care for their patients. I put in several miles and stair steps a day. I saw myself as a fireman of sorts, putting out fires all over the hospital. I got a gift of a toy fire engine from a psychiatrist blogger in New York a long time ago.

Now I walk several miles on the Clear Creek Trail, like I did yesterday and the day before that. I have shin splints today, which tells me something—probably overdid it.

So, I’m taking a break from walking and reading an old book in a new light.

Because I Wanted a Hurts Donut…

I got an urge for a Hurts Donut so I walked on the Clear Creek Trail to Coralville get to the little hole in the wall shop. You can easily walk to several places in Coralville on the trail. Actually, I wanted to also check out the Coralville Public Library and see S.T. Morrison Park. I’ve never been to that park so it was a novelty all by itself.

It took about 45 minutes to walk to that part of town. It’s great exercise and beats the traffic. You have to walk under some railroad tracks and there’s a sign warning you not to stand in the culvert below while the train is passing over the top. I can see why.

There are funny signs in the rustic Hurts Donut shop. You can see the corny “Wanna hurts donut?” jokes on the walls. There’s another sign saying “School is important but donuts are importanter,” which reminds me of my coffee mug which says sort of the same thing about cribbage: “Education is important but cribbage is importanter.”

The Old-Fashioned donuts there are so good, but so bad for you. I had two.

The Coralville Public Library has a beautiful skylight. I haven’t been in a public library for ages and so it was fascinating to see that libraries haven’t changed much.

In fact, after I found one of Dave Barry’s books, “Dave Barry Book of Bad Songs,” (published in 1997; I had a copy but it got lost in a move) I asked one of the librarians about the old rule I learned as a kid. You might remember it too if you’re old enough. When you pick a book off the shelf and go to a reading room to look it over—can you just put it back on the shelf where you found it or do you have to give it the librarian who will reshelve it?

If you guessed that you have to give it to a librarian, you’re right and you’ve probably dated yourself. The librarian joked that some things never change. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

Among the things that never change are the difficult to understand lyrics in some songs. Dave Barry wrote a whole chapter about it in the Book of Bad Songs, “Songs People Get Wrong.” He mentions one of them, which I always got wrong but never told anyone about it because it was embarrassing. It’s a lyric in the song “Blinded by the Light” that Barry said was done by Bruce Springsteen, but which I didn’t hear until Manfred Mann’s Earth Band covered it.

So, here’s my deal with that lyric. I always heard “wrapped up like a douche” instead of “revved up like a deuce.” Barry notes that many people made the same mistake. Funny thing, Barry never mentions what that common mistake is called and it’s a mondegreen (a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from mishearing the lyrics of a song). Music is important but mondegreens are importanter.

I finally saw Morrison Park and it’s a very restful place. You can contemplate the sculpture which is placed in the center of a pond. Ducks paddle around it. It’s called “Silver Lilly” and it was made by Professor Hu Hung-shu. Art is important.

Saying Goodbye to Zem the Mattress

We’re saying goodbye to Zem the mattress. This raises important questions. Who the heck is Zem? Why does a mattress have a name? If you’ve ever read Douglas Adams’ book “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Five Novels and One Story,” you’d probably wonder why anyone should ask.

The name Zem is given to every mattress that exists. According to the Guide, mattresses were once living beings who were slaughtered (not clear who slaughters them) and sold throughout the Universe. They are friendly, talkative, and originate on Sqornshellous Zeta, a swampy planet on which Zem the mattress has a long, idiotic conversation with a depressed robot named Marvin. It’s true, at least in Adams’ book. Find it in Chapter 7 of “Life, The Universe and Everything.”

This raises the issue of how to replace a mattress. It’s a difficult thing and it’s likely there are exceptions to the rule that all mattresses have to go to the junkyard.

I should say that the crude drawing of our Zem is an original work by me, using Microsoft Paint. It’s definitely not made by something called Image Creator. Recently, Windows 11 added Image Creator to Paint, which claims to be able to create drawings just by clicking on the AI icon—which appears almost everywhere nowadays.

It’s getting harder to ignore, but I did. That explains why my drawing of Zem looks like it was made by a 4-year-old child. It’s a form of protest against AI. I’m not sure how long I can hold out. I suspect that AI will eventually learn to disguise itself as something completely innocent without formally introducing itself as AI.

Anyway, like most people, it was challenging to find a new home other than the landfill for Zem. It turns out there is an informal underground railroad leading to new homes for Zem. Zem can be recycled, or at least some parts of it can be repurposed, which don’t include going back into mattress production.

And, there are places like Salvation Army, Goodwill, and homeless shelters which may publicly refuse to take Zem—but then not always stick to the rules on the signs. The websites may say they won’t adopt Zem, even if it doesn’t have a port wine stain on its face. On the other hand, there are circuitous, by word of mouth only code talkers who guide you (sometimes from half-closed doors) to what “could” be a new home for Zem, but you didn’t hear it from them. That rhyme was unintentional, but it worked.

The process is a little like the old TV show “Hogan’s Heroes,” in which Stalag 13 outwardly looked like a prison camp, but contained cleverly disguised nooks, crannies, and tunnels which allowed trips to the Dairy Queen if inmates were so inclined.

It turns out Zem might have a new home—but you didn’t hear it from me.

People Remember Hurricane Edna

The hurricane season this year continues to be deadly, and they are not named after women anymore. That stopped in 1979; how and why it stopped is quite a story in itself. The latest one is named Milton, which is a benign sounding name, but the storm is anything but that.

I was reminded of the custom of naming hurricanes after women last night when I reread E.B. White’s essay, “The Eye of Edna.” The essay is subtitled with place and date: Allen Cove, September 15, 1954. It was published in a collection “Essays of E.B. White in 1977 by HarperCollins. It was published originally in the New Yorker, according to an online quote from his essay.

I’m too young to remember Edna. When I did a web search of the term “The Eye of Edna,” I got many hits for both the essay and the hurricane. Reading White’s essay is a treat because he makes fun of how radio news reporters and the people in Maine who were listening to the radio reacted to the weather reports about Edna. Radio reporters often seemed disappointed about the lack of heavy rain and high winds.

I found the abstract of an article published a 1958 issue of the Journal of Meteorological Sciences which the driest summary of Hurricane Edna I could possibly imagine:

“Kessler, E., 1958: EYE REGION OF HURRICANE EDNA, 1954. J. Atmos. Sci., 15, 264–270, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1958)015<0264:EROHE>2.0.CO;2.

Abstract

The eye region of Hurricane Edna (1954) is studied with the principal aid of radar and dropsonde data. Vertical sections show that over the eye there was a thick layer derived from the wall cloud which bounded the eye on the northeast. Precipitation fell from this upper layer into drier air beneath. A reasonable mechanism is thereby suggested by which large moisture values can become associated with air in the eye without producing the wet bulb potential temperatures or high winds characteristic of the rain-filled masses outside the eye.

Radar data giving the height of the “bright band” or melting level show that the warm core structure of Edna was most pronounced within the radius if maximum surface winds. The result is qualitatively confirmed by soundings and by comparison of surface winds and the speeds of radar weather elements in various portions of the storm. The radar photographs also show that heavy precipitation near the eye of Edna was bounded sharply in the western semicircle along an east-west line through the center of the storm. This boundary must be associated with a rather large change of vertical air speeds and therefore has special dynamic significance.”

If you read it the citation too quickly, you might misread the journal’s abbreviated name as my own. It’s actually J. Atmos—not J. Amos.

There is a much more vividly emotional account of Hurricane Edna in the Vineyard Gazette’s 2014 online story, along with a video.

The bottom line is hurricanes are deadly storms, no matter what people name them. Everybody, including E.B. White, would agree on that.

And Then a Light Bulb Went Off

I was sitting in my office last night trying to read a book and noticed that the overhead light on the ceiling fan wasn’t providing enough light. The next morning I flipped the switch and could see through the glass globe cover that one of the bulbs was out. It flickered on about a half hour later and then went out again.

When I got the ladder out and tried to remove the cover, it wouldn’t budge. There weren’t any screws on it, so I looked at a few YouTubes to learn how to remove it. Lot’s of people were using tools and, of course, duct tape. Some methods looked dangerous.

For me, the most helpful hint came from a Wikihow lesson. The first example suggested using those rubber dishwashing gloves. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it right away because I use them to twist off stubborn lids on food jars. It worked on the fan light cover.

Sometimes the simple, old-fashioned tricks for solving problems are the best. In fact, it reminded me of what I’d been reading by the dim light. It was an essay by E.B. White from his book, Essays of E.B. White. The title was “The Winter of the Great Snows,” published by HarperCollins in 1977. Copyright restrictions prevent me from quoting directly, but his point was that tackling challenges with common sense and safety in mind is a good idea.

There are many light bulb moments in life that I’ve missed. I appreciate any help I can get.

A Game of Darts in Frankenstein Movies

I just saw the 1939 film “Son of Frankenstein” on Svengoolie last night. There was a double feature, but I didn’t see the second movie.

I’m anything but a movie reviewer and all I’m going to do is point out a parody of the dart throwing scene between Wolf Frankenstein and Inspector Krogh in “Son of Frankenstein” of the scene in the 1974 movie, “Young Frankenstein” starring Gene Wilder as the son of Frankenstein.

The dart throwing scenes are similar enough in both films to make me laugh. The comedic effect in “Young Frankenstein” of Inspector Kemp (played by Kenneth Mars) slapping his wooden arm around and sticking the darts into it is immediately obvious. While somewhat overshadowed by the “Son of Frankenstein,” melodrama, I couldn’t help but notice the similar behavior of Inspector Krogh (played by Lionel Atwill) goofing around with his wooden arm as well.

You can compare the YouTube dart throwing scene (see below) in “Young Frankenstein” with that of the last few minutes of the “Son of Frankenstein” in the scene starting about 1 hour 32 minutes in on the Internet Archive full movie.

I’m only sorry that I’m not up to the task of comparing either film to the original novel on which all the Frankenstein movies were more or less based: “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” written by Mary Shelley. I never read it. I skimmed the Wikipedia article about it. The section about the novel’s reception finishes with the idea that the novel asks fundamental questions about why we’re here and what our purpose is. Has anyone ever answered them?

A game of darts, anyone?

Thoughts on the Big Mo Pod Show “Funkin’ Down the Highway”

This is a post about the Big Mo Pod Show we heard last night on the KCCK FM radio dial 106.9. Incidentally, the KCCK fund drive was enormously successful this year, earning $100,000 in donations, according to Big Mo (aka John Heim) himself.

One item is the cover by Buddy Miles of the song “Tobacco Road.” This rendition was different from performances by other artists. Big Mo liked it and so did I. I did a little web search on it because I couldn’t catch all the lyrics. It was originally done by John D. Loudermilk in 1960. Miles’ version is essentially the same.

What interested me even more about “Tobacco Road” are the associations I have about it with specific literary works. I’ll admit I’ve never read nor seen the film adaptations of Erskine Caldwell’s books, “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.” But one of my favorite short stories by James Thurber is “Bateman Comes Home,” which was published in a collection entitled “The Thurber Carnival,” in a hardcover edition in 1945. You’ve got to read it to get a sense of how comical the parody is of the regional dialect used in Caldwell’s novels. In fact, Thurber himself gives the game away about his intent in writing “Bateman Comes Home” by adding a wry comment as a subtitle:

Written after reading several recent novels about the deep south and confusing them a little—as the novelists themselves do—with “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.”

He also adds another comment at the end of the short story: “If you keep on long enough it turns into a novel.”

The other thing I noticed about the podcast last night is that one of the songs which was not included in the list, “Joliet Bound,” was performed by an artist I haven’t heard of, the Reverend Shawn Amos, who is no relation to me, of course. But my background as a psychiatrist made me take special notice of details about his family, one of which is that his mother, Shirl-ee Ellis, a singer herself, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Sadly, she eventually died by suicide. Shawn Amos is also the youngest son of the Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie founder, Wally Amos (again, no relation), although I’ve gotten a lot of friendly ribbing about that.

The song “Joliet Bound” is about a guy who expresses that he’s wrongly accused of killing a man over a woman and is on his way to Joliet prison in Joliet, Illinois. The Joliet Prison is a tourist destination nowadays and has other distinctions attached to it. It was featured in the 1980 film, the Blues Brothers. There were some famous inmates there, among them John Wayne Gacy, who was once evaluated and diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder by psychiatrists at The University of Iowa in 1968 as described in Dr. Donald Black’s book, “Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy).”

Congratulations KCCK Radio!