Sena played a couple of games of cribbage solitaire today and came within 8 points of making 121! And so that makes us both fans of this variation on cribbage.
There was a little project I set for myself given that DeLynn Colvert’s book, “Play Winning Cribbage” has a section called Cribbage World Publication, which is a monthly publication you can find on the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) website. Colvert was an editor of Cribbage World and included in his book copies of events and ads of interests to ACC members. Many items are odd and comical.
One of the interesting tidbits is an announcement that is historically important for cribbage in Iowa. However, none of the items including this one are dated. So, I had to hunt it down in the archives on the ACC website. The title is “Two 29’s Within 5 Minutes!” It refers to an event called the Hawkey Classic, which used to be the name for the annual cribbage tournament held in Des Moines, Iowa. Two 29 hands were scored within 5 minutes of each other during this tournament. This is remarkable because the odds of dealt a 29 hand are 1 in 216,580!
I had to dig through many pages of Cribbage World and Artificial Intelligence (AI) was no help at all (not that I asked it because AI intrudes itself on all my searches whether I want it’s help or not). In fact, it denied the existence of the Hawkeye Classic cribbage tournament.
Anyway, I had to make a guess about what issue of Cribbage World that announcement was published. I guessed that it was in the 1990s (for no particular reason) and I found it on page 3 in the June 1990 issue after striking out in the 1991-1993 issues (although I found one item related to cribbage solitaire which involved playing five hands instead of six).
It turns out that there’s been an annual cribbage tournament for over 40 years in Iowa and that tradition did start in Des Moines. It was called the Hawkeye Classic and was ACC sanctioned. However, my guess is that it gradually became absorbed into the Iowa State Fair schedule of events. It’s usually held on the last day of the fair. This year, I found out there were 252 entrants, which I think is probably not unusual.
Another interesting note about this issue of Cribbage World I noticed is that there isn’t a Hawkeye Classic cribbage tournament announcement listed in The Tournament Trail section. However, it does list the Grand National (National Awards Banquet) on September 20, 21, 23 in 1990 at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, Des Moines, Iowa. But I did find an announcement about the Hawkeye Classic in one of the earlier issues from 1991-1993.
I just played 3 games of cribbage solitaire that I posted about in the last couple of days. I got to 4th street in 2 of them and got to 115 in one. I think getting to 121 is at least possible. You have 6 deals to get there and you need over 20 points per deal to make it. Each game takes me about 10 minutes.
I haven’t seen any rules for this cribbage solitaire variation about looking at your cards or not as you deal them. I deal the hand cards face down as well as the first two crib cards face down. I look at the six cards in my hand from which I select the other two cards to throw to the crib. I only look at all four crib cards when I’m ready to count the crib points. I don’t know if anybody else does it differently. See my YouTube video demo for how I interpret the game play.
The only rules I’ve seen for this cribbage solitaire version are in DeLynn Colvert’s book (“Play Winning Cribbage, 5th edition, published in 2015) or were cited by someone on the boardgamegeekdotcom thread which dates to 2008 and they are virtually identical. Neither source identifies the inventor of the rules. I wonder if they would be in the original edition of Colvert’s book, which was first published in 1980. You can find a 1993 edition on eBay going for $150. There’s a 1985 edition advertised for $113. I can’t find anything on the Internet Archive about it.
The Svengoolie show last night was the 1957 Hammer production “The Curse of Frankenstein” starring the 3 stooges. Actually, this film was no laughing matter and this was my first time (and last time) seeing it.
That’s not saying it’s a “bad” movie. It’s just tough to come up with anything comical to say about a gothic horror flick that was inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel, “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.”
I’ve not read Mary Shelley’s novel and I only skimmed the Encyclopedia Britannica entry. That’s good enough for an old guy pretending to be a movie reviewer.
What hooked me, though, early on the film was a short dialogue between Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) and Elizabeth Lavensa (Hazel Court). Paul describes Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) in contemptible and scary terms, to which Elizabeth reacts by saying that Victor is either “wicked or insane.” Paul answers that Victor is neither—which struck me as odd.
I would have no trouble saying Victor is evil, but what do I know? On the other hand, I ran across a couple of web articles that mentioned “psychopath” as a suitable label for someone who thinks nothing of pushing an old man like the scientific scholar Professor Bernstein (Paul Hardtmuth) over a banister to kill him in order to dig his brain out of his skull to insert into a do-it-yourself hodgepodge of spare body parts in an experiment to create a living being.
Victor, from the time he first meets Paul, presents as an insufferable, entitled brat lacking a conscience and by the time he reaches adulthood he’s the perfect example of someone with the most creepily severe case of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) imaginable.
He gets the housekeeper Justine (Valerie Gaunt) pregnant, tricks her into entering the laboratory where the monster (Christopher Lee) kills her, marries Elizabeth and then abandons her on their wedding night in order to cheat in a cribbage game with the monster.
He pretends to bury the monster in the woods after Paul kills it by shooting it in the eye with an AK-47—then sneaks back to dig it up, carry it back to the lab and reanimates the wreck. He proudly shows it off to Paul, who throws up on him. This makes no difference to Victor who is always smeared with dirt anyway because he hangs out in morgues, graveyards, and golf courses (“as he approaches this critical putt, somebody leaps out and cuts off his feet”), filching eyes, hands, Adams apples and what have you to assemble and repair the monster.
There are big differences between Shelley’s monster and Hammer’s creature—the latter doesn’t speak at all while the former is eloquent. Hammer’s creature can barely stand up or sit down on command while Shelley’s monster can do triple axels skating across the Arctic ice as Victor pursues him.
During the movie, my mind often wandered off to memories of Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”
I just found out that Leonard Tow died on August 10, 2025. In humility, I express my gratitude and respect for his creation of the Tow Foundation, a big part of that being the Humanism in Medicine Award, of which I am one of the many recipients over the years. I hope this great tradition goes on forever, a reminder to doctors, patients, and families of the great rewards and greater responsibilities in medicine.
I thank Dr. Jeanne M. Lackamp, now Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychiatrist in Chief for University Hospitals and Director of the University Hospital Behavioral Health Institute for nominating me and Dr. Jerold Woodhead, Professor Emeritus in Pediatrics at University of Iowa Health Care for placing the pin in my lapel. That was in 2007.
Leonard Tow established the Humanism in Medicine award to foster the development of humanistic doctors. They exemplify compassion and respect for others, humility and empathy.
That is how I will remember Leonard Tow.
On my lapel; in my heartLeonard Tow Humanism in Medicine lapel pinGetting the pin
I watched the Svengoolie TV show last night and saw the 1935 Universal Pictures movie “Werewolf of London.” You can watch the movie on the Internet Archive.
This film reminded me of another British movie, “Return of the Vampire” in which there was a comedy sketch between two grave diggers. In Werewolf of London there’s this hilarious scene in which the unfortunate Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Harold Hull) meets with a couple of old women named Mrs. Whack (Ethel Griffies) and Mrs. Moncaster (Zeffie Tilbury).
They were a couple of alcoholic landladies with rooms to let who competed with each other to rent a room to Dr. Glendon, who is trying to prevent his murderous tendencies when he transforms into a werewolf by moving out of his house. The scene is priceless, arguably the highlight of the movie, and begins at about 46.41 minutes into the film. Mrs. Whack and Mrs. Moncaster, even though they seem smitten with Dr. Glendon yet hesitate to offer him a drink, probably because they want most of the booze all to themselves.
Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) who is afflicted with “werewolfery” according to the other werewolf, Dr. Yogami. Warner Oland played Yogami, although he was actually Swedish and had played Charlie Chan in other films. They met briefly under violent circumstances while Glendon was in Tibet looking for the Mariphasa flower—although Glendon doesn’t recall that until later.
The thing about the Mariphasa is that drops from the flower are an antidote for lycanthropy. Or is it lycanthrophobia? Dr. Yogami mentions the latter twice and it shows up twice in print as well during the film. Lycanthrophobia is by definition the fear of turning into a werewolf. Lycanthropy is the process of turning into one—minus the fear factor, presumably. Whatever.
Dr. Glendon prowls around and slaughters a few victims when the moon is full but tries to avoid killing his wife, Lisa (Valerie Hobson) by renting a room above a tavern apparently, and crashes though the window of his room, possibly because of claustrophobia. This of course makes him a victim of multiple phobias and there is no one playing the role of psychiatrist; figure that one out.
Eventually, there’s a showdown between two cops and Glendon which takes the form of a 3-way thumb wrestling match between them, mainly because Glendon has an obvious case of dental caries in his fangs which causes some pain, especially when the vodka-swilling comedy duo of Whack and Moncaster try to get him plastered by pouring liquor down his gullet through a funnel.
You’ll want to watch this when you’re in a good mood and disinclined to watch anything that is consistently horrifying. There is no laugh track.
I found a photo of me in the Downs-Jones Library files at Huston-Tillotson University (formerly Huston-Tillotson College) today. It’s the featured image for this post. I was going down memory lane looking at old pictures of former classmates and teachers at H-TU and—there I was. It’s a photo of me in 1975, and it looks like I’m sitting in the Downs-Jones Library on campus posing for the picture. I don’t remember sitting for it. I had hair then and afros were in style.
I was a little worried about copyright issues just downloading or printing the image until I finally noticed the icons for doing both on the web page. I guess they wouldn’t be there if it were prohibited.
What’s also funny is that the caption above my picture says “James Amos—Reporter.” This meant that I was contributing to the college newspaper, The Ramshorn Journal. Funny thing is, I couldn’t remember writing anything for it.
I tried to find copies of the Ramshorn Journal for 1975, but there were only records for issues published in the early to mid-1960s. I guess I’ll never know what I wrote, if anything.
I’m surprised there would be any photos of me at all since I didn’t graduate from H-TU but transferred to Iowa State University and graduated from there in 1985.
I clipped out my photo from a few others. The group included the sponsor of the Ramshorn Journal, the editor, and the typist. That makes it looks I was a part of the staff. I’ll be darned if I remember doing anything for it. If I had written anything, I would think I’d have kept copies. But I have no documents proving it. I don’t have copies of the Ramshorn either. I’m a writer by inclination and habit so this is a mystery.
As I looked through yearbooks, I couldn’t find anyone I could ask about it either. That makes sense because it was 50 years ago. On the other hand, if there are digitized issues of the Ramshorn Journal from the 1960s, there might be some later issues kept somewhere in the library. Maybe there’s something with my byline on it.
If I get curious enough about it, I might ask somebody at the Downs-Jones Library if they could check on it.
I got off my schedule last week on listening to the Big Mo blues show, but as it turns out, he was gone last Friday. I heard last night’s blues show and heard Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Riviera Paradise.
So, of course that was not on the list of songs for the pod show today, but Big Mo did mention that Riviera Paradise and the name of the collection, which was In Step was related to Stevie Ray Vaughn’s having been successful at staying sober from substance use disorder for a year. The name In Step was evidently related to his going through a 12-step program to achieve sobriety. I learned about Stevie Ray Vaughn early in my residency (if I recall correctly) from a University of Iowa psychiatrist who is now the chair of the psychiatry department.
The name of today’s pod show was “The Yellow Butane Curse” which is about superstition. I’m not sure if this means that blues music enthusiasts are prone to being superstitious, but Big Mo did admit to believing that yellow butane lighters were unlucky for him.
This is probably going to seem like a disconnected transition but I missed last week’s pod show (“He plays what can’t be written down” see below), which was not the usual format of song talk but an interview with a successful local musician, Merrill Miller. I don’t know anything about him except what I learned in the podcast. I got a kick out of listening to a couple of musicians just more or less shooting the breeze about living the musician’s life.
Merrill mentioned playing in places like Strawberry Point, Iowa. I don’t have a musical connection to Strawberry Point, and I never went anywhere there that was connected with music like Merrill did. In fact, the only reason I was in Strawberry Point was because I was part of a survey crew staking Highway 13 between there and Elkader to straighten out some of the many curves in the road. We didn’t have much time to listen to music.
One piece of Iowa history they talked about was the issue of black musicians not being able to find a place to stay in this area because of racism. They had to find somebody they knew who would put them up while they were in town for a gig. Funny where a rambling, relaxed conversation will sometimes lead you.
I had few connections to music while I was growing up. My mother tried to teach my little brother and I how to play piano. It was an old out of tune piano. I managed to learn where the “middle C note” was—and that’s about all I recall about it. I took guitar lessons and got pretty good at making buzzing notes with it. Man, I could make that guitar buzz, although my teacher got a good laugh out of it—and couldn’t get me to break the habit. I could blow into a harmonica (what real musicians like Merrill and Big Mo call a harp), but I couldn’t kidnap any notes out of it. I tried picking notes on a banjo for a short while, had a second stab at the guitar, and got not much more than callouses on my fingers before moving on to non-music making careers.
You can be glad about that. Now about that suggestion that I have for a tee shirt design about my favorite faux sponsor created by Big Mo, Mayree of the legendary Mayree’s hand battered catfish; it’s better because it’s battered. I wonder if there’s any movement on that.
After a short break during the Thanksgiving holiday your hosts are back at it again with another episode! This week features the usual mix of blues eras you’ve come to expect along with a few Californian artists, tune in to see which ones! Songs featured in the episode: Solomon Hicks – “Further On Up The … Continue reading
While yesterday’s post on Dr. Melvin P. Sikes was mainly about my personal impressions of him as a teacher, there are a couple of web resources which gives a little more texture about him apart from my imperfect memory and limited experience.
One of them is a formal course outline and evaluations he and another teacher wrote in 1975, which was the year I first encountered him when I was a freshman at Huston-Tillotson College at that time. I know it seems like a tough read, but I was pretty impressed by what teachers said about him in the evaluation part of the document entitled “Report on Teaching in Multi-Cultural/Multi-Ethnic Schools (1974-75).”
The pdf document is 39 pages long, but I suggest focusing on the student teacher evaluations of his course. That starts on page 19. They all praise it, without exception. Many note that he didn’t really just lecture. One of the evaluators called him “supercalifragalisticexpialadoches!” Not sure if that’s spelled just right (it’s on p.33 so you can check it yourselves), but the point is well made—he was viewed as an extraordinarily gifted teacher.
Dr. Sikes’ comments start on pp.35-39 (Attachment D, entitled “Teaching in Multi-Cultural/Multi-Ethnic Schools; EDP F382 -Summer 1975l Professor Melvin Sikes) and I think that’s also worth reading. It’s short and without lofty, academic terminology.
The reading list caught my eye. I looked for Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” which had been published in 1952, but it wasn’t on the list. That book has special meaning for me personally, because when I encountered Dr. Sikes in 1975, I was a freshman at one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Huston-Tillotson College as it was then known. I was born and raised in Iowa and had never been in the southern United States. I sort of identified with the unnamed protagonist because the first section of the book deals with his experience at a southern black college.
It was a culture shock. I never saw anyone like Bledsoe. In fact, I never personally met the president of H-TC (now Huston-Tillotson University as of 2005), who was Dr. John Q. Taylor King, Sr. at the time. My main connection was Dr. Hector Grant, who recruited me while he was visiting Mason City, Iowa in connection with support from a local church. I still don’t know what happened to Dr. Grant. It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth.
Anway, I wanted to share another item I pulled off the web about Dr. Sikes. It’s a newspaper article about him published in the West Texas Times issue published May 4,1977. It’s in the collection of the Texas Tech University on line, with the link to the main front page story “Judge Orders Officials to Clean Up the Jail,” interestingly enough. It automatically downloads a pdf of the newspaper issue to your computer when you click the link. I’m just going to try to summarize it and pull some quotes.
The title of the story about Dr. Sikes is down the page, “UT’s Dr. Sikes Helps Students Know Themselves and Others.” The story begins with an anecdote about an interaction Dr. Sikes had with a teacher. It involved a black student coming to her with a complaint that a white student had hit him and he used bad language in describing it. The teacher was going to discipline the kid about his bad language, which Dr. Sikes questioned.
Sikes thought the teacher should have first gotten more information about what the student actually experienced in the encounter. The implication was that if she had listened first, she might not have jumped down his throat about his bad language.
The author of the news article writes that, according to Sikes, “I want my students to be more flexible, to understand that people are first people,” the professor likes to say. “I want them to grow out of looking at a color of a skin and making determinations, good, bad, or indifferent.” He goes on to say,
“I don’t even want them to look at blacks and say, ‘these are great people.’ I just want them to look at blacks and say ‘these are people.’
Quotes from Sikes:
“Before you can deal with another in a meaningful kind of way, you have to find some meaning and purpose in your own life—which means defining yourself….”
About teaching:
“Yes, I was lucky, I was taught by my parents, to some degree. But then I had teachers who taught this to me… And much of whatever I am… is the result of teachers and their concern—black teachers, white teachers.”
About our differences:
“If we’re all the same, we can’t make unique contributions because the contributions would be the same.”
The author of the story points out that Dr. Sikes often took student teachers to Huston-Tillotson College to see predominantly black students. The author also writes that Dr. Sikes mentions something about politics which rings a bell.
“He [Dr. Sikes] talks about the politicalization of education, and says that educating has been taken away from the educator and usurped by the politician.”
On teaching the teachers:
Dr. Sikes says: “People don’t realize how important you are and you don’t realize how important you are. You’re molding and shaping human lives, millions of lives, who will become, depending upon how you mold and help shape or help them become.”
“Now the doctor deals with his patient for a short length of time, and the patient dies and he buries his mistake, or he lives and he’s all right. But we can’t bury our mistakes. They walk around and haunt us and other people…sometimes their living is death. But people never realize that it’s teachers—we are the ones who have power.”
And finally, about Mel Sikes himself, one of his students says,
“Sikes is intense, loquacious and supremely personal. He immediately grabs you and talks on a person-to-person wavelength. He tells his students a lot about himself, his struggles as a black and as a radically caring person. He says he would die if it would help all people relate better. And he would.”
There was a lot more to Melvin Sikes than a lemon-yellow leisure suit.
Today we saw this cool Red-Tailed Hawk on the fence—sort of, in a manner of speaking. This hawk was definitely not on the fence about getting brunch though. It would fly off the fence a few times and we expected it would come up with a mouse or squirrel or something—empty claws.
The woodchucks are too big for the hawk.
The experts say you can distinguish a male from a female Red-Tailed Hawk because the female is “25% larger.” I guess that might work if you saw them together—doing something X-rated.
On the other hand, there was a Red-Tailed Hawk named Pale Male that was famous in the New York City Central Park area. He got his name because his head was white. He took several females as mates during his life. They raised several eyasses, which was a new word for me today; it means young hawks. Mary Tyler Moore (“Oh, Rob”) participated along with other neighbors in protests about anti-pigeon spikes being removed and eventually they were replaced by “cradles.”
If you don’t remember the “Oh, Rob!” quote it was Mary Tyler Moore’s (as Laura Petrie) frequent complaint about husband Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) on the Dick Van Dyke show (sitcom in the 1960s). Give yourself a gold star if you thought of the X-File episode “Arcadia” in which Agents Mulder and Scully took the names of the Petries.
Anyway, the Red-Tail Hawk is an impressive bird. It was just not a lucky day for hunting.
Well, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that I am lucky to still be independently mobile today after eating the FULL Panera Bread green goddess chicken cobb salad—as in full stomach.
I’ll admit I didn’t know what I was getting into. You know the salad is big when it comes with a ladder.
It’s supposed to be a healthy salad although there are cautions about the green goddess dressing—don’t worry, it was barely noticeable.
I got it around noon at the mall. It’s a bad time to try to get lunch because half the city is in there and they’re all hungry. You know it’s busy when potential customers are told the wait is 45 minutes. I was lucky; I think I waited around 15 minutes. Tables were hard to find. I ducked into a booth two guys were busy thumb wrestling for.
You need to bring an axe because, of course, you’ll have to slaughter the chicken—after she lays the eggs because they go on the salad. Plan on extra time to pick the tomatoes—in the back; way in the back.
This thing about the eggs in the salad probably began with the story about how the cobb salad got started. I read that it started in the 1930s after the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant closed for the night and the salad supposedly was invented by the owner, Robert Howard Eggs…no, wait, that’s Cobb.
Cobb was starved around midnight because he’d been working hard all day wondering what the difference was between a bowler hat and a derby hat and why in heck had he not picked the name the brown bowler for his restaurant because of the alliterative effect and so had not eaten all day.
So, Bob Cobb grabbed whatever leftovers were in the kitchen at the time and thought it was terrible. He texted Domino’s and while eating their famous egg pizza had a brainstorm about marketing a salad with eggs in it and naming it after Ty Cobb because he was observed once having bacon and eggs for breakfast.
Remember, this history moment was brought to you by Serutan; that’s Natures spelled backwards.
They had to carry me out of Panera’s in a wheelbarrow.
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