The Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration of Human Rights Week 2023 begins January 16, 2023. See the University of Iowa Healthcare list of events, which will be updated.
Category: History
Sasquatch Playing Cards Arrive!
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’m Running on a Tight Schedule
Because I’m running on a tight schedule today, I’ll have to write this holiday flower-oriented post with lightning speed. There could be minor mistakes and you’ll just have to live with them.
First, we need to talk about the meaning of the usual Christmas holiday flowers. One of them is the Amaryllis, about which I’ve already given the important details in a previous post.
The other flower is the poinsettia, properly pronounced “flower.” Sena brought one home yesterday and it’s a beauty. The lore surrounding this holiday favorite is a bit convoluted. An angel ordered a peasant woman named Maria to gather roadside weeds. Maria was a little hard of hearing and thought the angel said “weed,” so she dug up a lot of marijuana growing wild in the ditches.
She took them to a little church, where the members of the congregation and the preacher lit them up with a little fire at the altar. The smoke got a little thick and everybody got a little confused and really hungry. They giggled a lot and their eyes burned a little, making everything look like it had a reddish color, including the “weeds.” Somebody knocked over the altar, spilling them all over the floor, which everybody swore they could feel through their shoes.
The poinsettia was known by the Aztecs who originally called it “Cuetlaxochitl,” which means “flower you can feel through your shoes, dude!”
There’s another version of the origin of the name of poinsettia. Some botanist in South Carolina named Poinsett (get that, har!) called it the “Mexican flame thrower,” probably because there was a legend in Mexico that extraterrestrials brought a plant with them that shot fire from its flowers, scorching all of the weed for miles.
Anyway, I think that’s how the history goes.
Evolutionary Thoughts
By now, you’ve probably read the digital news article describing how we’re all going to evolve into beings who resemble extraterrestrials (ETs) because of our preoccupation with digital technology.
The authors describe us as eventually developing another eyelid that’ll protect us from the blue light emanating from our gadgets. Our hands will become claw-like and permanently flexed because of the way we’re always gripping our smartphones.
You’ll also develop a third hand that protrudes from your butt so you can catch your cell phone as it slips out of the back pocket of your skinny jeans. Come to think of it, that’ll also give rise to a weird new meaning for the term “butt dialing.”
Of course, the article is a criticism of our preoccupation with our gadgets, but it’s still fascinating as speculation about how creatures, including humans, evolve in response to the pressures in our environment.
This kind of thing makes me wonder whatever happened to Neanderthal. The males were huge, especially their arms, which came from frequent arm wrestling with Sasquatch for the last shred of beef jerky. Neanderthal had a very prominent brow which developed to keep snow and pterodactyl droppings out of his eyes.
And this reminds me of the discovery of the fossil of a giant creature on the Greek island of Crete in 2003 (I think). The skull had a huge nasal opening in the center of the skull. That was probably for a trunk, as in elephant trunk. But paleontologists thought it might have been the explanation for why ancient Greeks came up with stories about the terrifying one-eyed cyclops.
And what about that carp with a human-like face on the top of its head? I saw that one a week ago on the show The Proof is Out There. I thought sure Michael Primeau, the forensic video analyst on the show, would dryly dismiss it (“This video is clearly faked.”). Instead, the other experts thought it was natural. Tony summarized it as an example of the “plastic” evolution, by which I think he meant phenotypic or evolutionary plasticity. These are changes in a creature’s appearance, morphology, or physiology in response to changes in its environment. Regarding the carp, one expert opined that the face would confuse its main predator, the eel, by confusing it.
I still don’t get that one. How would the carp species even begin the evolutionary process? Does the carp just think, “Huh, I think that eel might get confused if I had a face like a human”? I get it that the changes occur at the genetic level, but how exactly does it get started?
Could you google the answer? I couldn’t find anything specific, like x plus y equals human-like face on a fish that many humans would not care to eat.
And how about writing? I wrote this blog post longhand using pen and paper, something I gave up doing years ago but which I am sort of rediscovering gradually. I had an old typewriter for a while, which gave way to something called a word processor, which was a stand-alone device made writing and editing text, and eventually I got a computer—which really messed things up.
The thing is, I can remember getting something called writer’s cramp. If you remember that, then you probably recall how painful it was. Back then, did anyone ever wonder whether that would lead to the evolution of a claw like hand?
Could evolution have consequences pertinent to people who are always looking up at the sky looking for UFOs? Some of them, for some unexplained reason, never seem to have a smartphone with them. Anyway, could their eyes migrate, carp-like, to the top of their foreheads to counter neck strain? And could this lead to the evolution of a third eye in the center of the forehead? It would prevent falling into manholes. There are other consequences from evolving into a cyclops.
We would be adept at forging thunderbolts. We would be very talented at cultivating vineyards and herding sheep and goats. But our tempers would still be pretty bad, even worse. We would abandon courts of law and ignore justice. We would be violent giants, feasting on the flesh of ordinary humans. All this because we kept searching the sky, hoping to see UFOs and see ETs, which we would eventually resemble anyway because of our preoccupation with our devices.
I have a pretty good supply of pens and paper.
See the World’s Largest Dinosaurs Exhibit at the Science Center of Iowa!
You can see the world’s largest dinosaurs exhibit at the Science Center of Iowa in Des Moines, Iowa from October 15, 2022 to April 16, 2023. It’s a traveling exhibit, so see it before it thunders off!
On the Other Hand Thoughts on HBCUs
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) are in the news lately. It reminds me of the short time I spent at Huston-Tillotson College. It was renamed Huston-Tillotson University (H-TU) in 2005. I was there in the mid-1970s.
A new President and CEO was just named this month, Dr. Melva K. Williams. And H-TU was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places last month. It has been renovated and modernized. Pictures show a well-kept campus pretty much as I remember it over 40 years ago. I didn’t graduate from H-TU, but instead transferred credits to Iowa State University where I graduated in 1985.
My favorite teacher was Dr. Jenny Lind Porter-Scott, who was white, taught English Literature. Another very influential teacher was Reverend Hector Grant who was black. He taught philosophy and religion. He was instrumental in recruiting me to matriculate at H-TU. He helped me to process my loss on the debating team when the question was whether or not the death penalty played any role in the reduction of crime.
My opponent won the debate mainly because he talked so much, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I can’t remember which side of the question I argued, but I thought I could have done better if he had just shut up for a few minutes and let me speak. Reverend Grant used the word “bombastic” in describing the approach my opponent used. On the other hand, he also gently pointed out that sometimes this can be how debates are won.
There’s this “On the other hand” tactic in debating and in reflective thought that my debating opponent managed to repeatedly deflect.
I don’t know what ever happened to Reverend Grant. We spoke on the telephone years ago. He sounded much older and a hint of frailty was in his voice.
I could find only a photo on eBay of a man who closely resembles the teacher I knew and the name on the picture is Reverend Hector Grant. The only other artifact is a funeral program for someone I never knew, which lists Reverend Hector Grant as being the pastor and some of the pallbearers were members of one of the Huston-Tillotson College fraternities.
I think it’s unusual for people to disappear like that, especially nowadays when we have the world wide web. Reverend Hector Grant was an important influence for me. He was one of the few black men of professional stature I encountered in my early life.
On the other hand, contrast that with Reverend Glen Bandel, another clergyman who was a white man and another important influence starting in my early childhood. Reverend Bandel persuaded me to be baptized at Christ’s Church in Mason City, Iowa. He radiated mercy, generosity, and kindness. He died in June of this year. I can find out more about him on the web just from his obituary than I can ever find on Reverend Grant, who apparently disappeared from the face of the earth.
Both of these men were leaders for whom skin color didn’t matter when it came to treating others with respect and civility.
My path in life was largely paved by these two clergymen. Reverend Bandel sat up with our family one night when my mother was very sick. His family took me and my little brother into their home when she was in the hospital.
On the other hand, Reverend Grant was instrumental in guiding me to an HBCU where I saw more black people in a couple of years than I ever saw in my entire life. The First Congregational Church in Mason City was instrumental in making that possible because they helped fund the drive to support H-TU (one of six small HBCUs) by the national 17/76 Achievement Fund of the United Church of Christ.
The news is replete with stories, some of them tragic, about how Greek fraternities haze their pledges. On the other hand, H-TU was pretty rough on pledges too. Upper classmen would make the pledges roll down the steep hills around the campus. They looked exhausted, wearing towels around their necks, running in place when they weren’t running somewhere in the Texas heat.
One H-TU professor said that H-TU was “small enough to know you, but big enough to grow you.” Although I can’t remember ever seeing him on campus because he was traveling most of the time, I at least knew the name of the President was John Q. Taylor (1965-1988). On the other hand, when I transferred credit to Iowa State University, I never knew the name of the President of the university.
Habari Gani is Swahili for “What’s the news?” or as it translated in the context I’m about to set, “What’s going on?” Habari Gani was the name for the annually published book of poetry by the H-TU students. Dr. Porter supported the project. I submitted a poem for the 1975 edition, which didn’t make the cut. When I transferred to Iowa State University, I left without getting a copy.
On the other hand, years later, I got a digital copy of that edition. I tracked it down to the H-TU library in 2016. The librarian was gracious.
Habari Gani has always been a reminder of the reason why I went to H-TU in the first place. I grew up in Iowa and was always the only black student in school. I grew up in mostly white neighborhoods.
On the other hand, when I finally got to H-TU, one of the students asked me, “Why do you talk so hard?” That referred to my Northern accent, which was not the only cultural factor that made social life challenging.
Once I tried to play a pickup game of basketball in the gymnasium. I’m the clumsiest person for any sport you’ll ever see. I was terrible. But the other players didn’t give me a bad time about it. They softly encouraged me. This was in stark contrast to the time I played a pickup game with all white men years before in Iowa. When I heard one of them yell, “Don’t worry about the nigger!” I just sat down on the bleachers.
On the other hand, when I was a kid and our family was hit by hardship, Reverend Bandel was the kindest person on earth to us—it didn’t matter that he was white. And my 2nd grade teacher, who was black (the only black teacher I ever had before going to H-TU), slapped me in the face so hard it made my ears ring—because I was rambunctious and accidentally bumped into her. It’s far too easy to polarize people as good or bad based on the color of their skin, especially when you’re young and impressionable.
It takes practice and experience to learn how to say and think, “On the other hand….”
Thoughts on Doctors Going On Strike
I read Dr. H. Steven Moffic’s two articles in Psychiatric Times about the strike by mental health workers at Northern California Kaiser Permanente (August 16 and 26, 2022). So far, no psychiatrists have joined the strike.
However, this piqued my interest in whether psychiatrists or general physicians have ever gone on strike. I have a distant memory of house staff voicing alarm about a plan by University of Iowa Hospital & Clinics to reduce health care insurance cost support many years ago. It led to a big meeting being called by hospital administration to discuss the issue openly with the residents. The decision was to table the issue at least temporarily.
It’s important to point out that the residents didn’t have to strike. I don’t recall that it ever came up. But I think hospital leadership was impressed by the big crowd of physician trainees asking a lot of pointed questions about why they were not involved in any of the discussions leading to the abrupt announcement that support for defraying the cost of house staff health insurance was about to end.
That’s relatively recent history. But I did find an article on MedPage Today written by Milton Packer, MD (published May 18 2022) about what was called the only successful strike by interns and residents in 1975 in New York. I don’t know if it included psychiatric residents; they weren’t specifically mentioned.
In 1957, the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR) in New York City and voted to unionize to improve appalling working conditions. They won the collective bargaining agreement, the first ever to occur in the U.S. because they went on strike, which hamstrung many of the city’s hospitals. Medical faculty had to pitch in to provide patient care.
After 4 days, the hospitals agreed to the residents’ demands. However, the very next year, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that residents were classifiable as “students,” not employees, which meant they weren’t eligible to engage in collective bargaining. This led to a reversal of the gains made by the strike.
Residents who are unionized voted to strike at three large hospitals in California in June of this year. They reached a tentative contract deal at that time. The news story didn’t mention whether there were any psychiatrists in the union.
There has never been a union of residents at The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. I was a medical student and resident and faculty member for 32 years. I saw changes in call schedules and work loads that were the norm for the exhausting schedules that led to horrors like the Libby Zion case in New York.
Even as a faculty member on our Medical-Psychiatry inpatient unit, the workload was often grueling. I co-attended the unit for years and during the months I was scheduled to work there I shared every other night call with an internist for screening admissions. I was sometimes scheduled for several months at a time because it was difficult to find other psychiatrists willing to tackle the job.
If residents had wanted to unionize and voted to strike then, my internist colleague and I probably could have filled in for them.
But I would never have considered going on strike myself. It would have been next to impossible to find any other psychiatrist to fill in for me. And if other psychiatrists had gone on strike? We might have won a better deal—but only by hurting the patients and families who needed us.
I suspect my attitude is what underlies the impressions shared in Robert G. Harmon’s article, “Intern and Resident Organizations in the United States: 1934-1977,” in the 1978 issue of the Milbank Quarterly.
The house-staff choice of unionization as a formal process has disturbed some health professional leaders. One has pointed out that for a house officer to don another hat, that of striking union member, in addition to those of student, teacher, administrator, investigator, physician, and employee, may be a regrettable complexity that will further erode public confidence in physicians (Hunter, 1976). Others have seriously questioned the ethics and morality of physician strikes (Rosner, 1975). -Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly/Health and Society, Vol. 56, No. 4, 1978.
When I graduated from medical school, I believed in the cultural view of the physician as a professional. My first allegiance was to the patient and family. I paid dearly for holding that stance. Sena reminds me of the times my head nearly dropped into my soup when I was post call. And I did struggle with burnout.
But I retired because I thought it was time to do so. I don’t think of it as a permanent strike. I hope things turn out all right.
59th Anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Speech on August 28, 1963
Sena reminded me that today is the 59th Anniversary of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. After she reminded me about it, I found this anniversary mentioned in only a few headlines on the web.
But that’s no excuse. It doesn’t matter that I was just a small child on August 28, 1963. And when I hear the speech, it still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
All About the Potato Salad
I recently got a checkup for my retinal tear surgery about 4 months ago. My surgeon was pleased with the outcome. Partly based on my good outcome, he shared that he was guiding his trainees on the wisdom of not necessarily always going with the new surgical procedures for the disorder, which happens not infrequently in those over the age of 50.
In fact, the trend seems to be to do more than just the oldest operation, which is the scleral buckle, in favor of adding vitrectomy as well—a relatively newer approach. I got the scleral buckle.
Progress is good. But just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s outmoded.
We saw the Iowa State Fair episode on old farm machinery the other night. It showed how much progress has been made in farming over many years. However, those old machines replaced a lot of hard labor, so they were definite improvements back in the day.
You can learn something new and valuable by considering what is old. We saw a short film called The Foursome. On the surface, it’s about 4 old guys who have played golf together at an annual tournament for 50 years in Waukon, Iowa. Waukon is in the Northwest part of the state, close to the Mississippi River, which borders the eastern side of the state.
The show is not really about golf, of course. But before it came on, I almost decided not to watch it because of that misconception. The description gives it away, saying that it’s about friendship, small towns, golf—and potato salad.
I think it’s also about getting older. Not everybody ages gracefully and I’m including myself as a pretty good example. I’m not so sure about my memory or my hearing these days. I can stand on one leg for 20 seconds. But one day not too long ago I cracked an egg and instead of emptying the contents into the poaching pan, I dumped them on a paper towel on the countertop. I was mortified.
Sena covered for me and brushed it off, saying it was because we had been talking about the finer points of poaching eggs and I just got distracted, and some hogwash about how she’s done that too. Maybe.
In the film, one of the Foursome was showing some of the artwork he has on the walls at his home. He stopped at one and seemed to fall into some kind of reverie. The camera operator had to sort of whisper to the guy that he needed to move on.
Let’s change the subject and talk about potato salad. They filmed the wife of one of the guys making this potato salad, the recipe for which you can get for free on the web. She used Miracle Whip instead of Mayonnaise. I pointed this out to Sena, who said nothing. Miracle Whip has been around since the 1930s and I grew up eating it on sandwiches at home. I favored it over Mayonnaise.
There has not been a jar of Miracle Whip in our house in almost 45 years—which is how long we’ve been married. I have learned to like Mayonnaise.
This reminds me of one segment on the film showing the wife of one of the other guys shopping for food (including burgers, chips, and whatnot as well as potato salad fixings) for the cookout, a part of the annual golf outing for the four guys. She said it really didn’t matter what she got because “They’ll eat anything you put in front of them.”
Some of them will eat nothing but the potato salad.
There is something poignant about the irascibility alternating with poignancy in the film. Their friendship is deep enough to move one of the four guys to tears. At least that’s what it looked like.
They have the usual flaws men have, including the tendency to be stoic in the face of oncoming frailty and the specter of death.
I don’t know if I’ll age as well as they do. But I do know I will never take up the game of golf. And I wonder if you can substitute Mayonnaise for Miracle Whip in that potato salad.
One thing I’m sure of, Sena is my best friend.
Factual or Fictional or Felgercarb
I’ve been watching a couple of shows about Alaska that are pretty much Bigfoot tales. One of them is The Alaska Triangle and the other is Alaska Killer Bigfoot.
And when I looked on the web to find out more about the TV shows, I learned a new word, “Felgercarb” (alternate spelling “felgercarb”). It means “crap” and I read that it originated from a 1978 Battlestar Galactica episode. The word was used by a reviewer of The Alaska Triangle. He called the show felgercarb and it obviously means he had a low opinion of it.
Incidentally, I never watched Battlestar Galactica.
I remember an English professor in Texas who made it clear that fact and fiction were not distinguished from each other by simply saying that fiction is anything that is not true. After all, fiction can be about the truth in various contexts, such as science (as in science fiction), and social and economic forces. And facts are mathematical and scientific data including formulas and historically verifiable events.
On the other hand, felgercarb is distinguished from facts and fiction by being notable for being non-satirical, non-parodical writing or performances—and by being unconvincing, amateurish, and—crappy.
Just to clarify, the Bigfoot show Mountain Monsters, which I think is a parody of all the Bigfoot shows, would not be classified as felgercarb, mainly because they obviously are making fun of the Bigfoot sagas.
Anyway, both of the Alaska shows have been labelled as felgercarb (whether they use that name or not) by a significant number of viewers. I acknowledge that a lot of people like them.
One reviewer of The Alaska Triangle who identified himself as living in Alaska all his life said he had never even heard of the Alaska Triangle.
Supposedly, a lot of people have disappeared in the Alaska Triangle, the borders of which connect Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow). Bigfoot is not the only cryptid people claim to see. One bus driver says he saw a dinosaur cross a road, specifically a velociraptor, that scientists say has been extinct for about 75 million years. No tourists on the bus saw it.
This prompts the question, why did the dinosaur cross the road? Because chickens didn’t exist yet.
Actually, the question is why didn’t the bus driver snap a cell phone picture of it? Because he didn’t want to get cited for distracted driving.
Another wild story on The Alaska Triangle is a circle of mutilated animals found far from any body of water. Why the connection to water? Because one of the animals was a whale. I guess the whale was in the middle of evolving and growing lungs. Sorry, actually it was accidentally dropped from a flying saucer driven by a distracted alien scrolling for barbecue blubber recipes on his cell phone.
I guess nobody’s heard of the Iowa corn mutilation phenomenon. Every year there are reports of several ears of corn completely denuded of kernels found near cornfields. Only the cobs are left. Weirdly, explorers and paranormal researchers often don’t find them in circles, but in terrifying little piles, not uncommonly surrounded by savagely ripped beef jerky wrappers and beer bottles completely drained of all liquid.
The Alaska Killer Bigfoot is even more mystifying—or stupefyingly felgercarbish. The explorers are investigating a place abandoned many decades ago because a special breed of Bigfoot monster called Nantinaq slaughtered people and knocked over the clothesline poles, making it impossible to dry overalls and flannel shirts.
The explorers on Alaska Killer Bigfoot occasionally barf for the pleasure of viewers. Maybe it’s the Nantinaq effect or spoiled beef jerky; it’s not clear which is more likely. It’ll have to await further study by various guest experts like spirit mediums and elderly Bigfoot experts.
Buoys somehow get into the tops of trees and holes mysteriously get dug where explorers find ancient coins, which they fail to clearly identify and maybe wonder if they can buy beer with them.
I wonder if Tony Harris, host of the show The Proof is Out There, will travel to Alaska and investigate Nantinaq or the inland whale circles. That show tends to retain some skepticism and usually errs on the side of saying something is unknown rather than saying thing like “Bigfoot has been proven to make infrasound” noises.
You know, so far nobody on the Alaska Killer Bigfoot took advantage of what might be a fact of infrasound, which is that it can nauseate people and possibly make them barf.
Oops, I just made a contribution to felgercarb.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 