humor – Go Retire Psychiatrist

John Heim aka Big Mo Retiring from the Big Mo Blues Show

We were listening to the KCCK radio Big Mo Blues Show last night when John Heim aka Big Mo announced he’s retiring as of May 15, 2026. Iowa musician Ed English (Uncle Ed of the Beaker Brothers band) was also in the studio and remarked that he’ll be taking over the show sometime after that. The Beaker Brothers Band will also be retiring around the same time frame. It was a surprise to us.

I’ve been listening to the Friday night blues show off and on probably for about 18 years. And here’s a shout-out to Bobby DeForest who first started “da Blues” back in 1992 (Little Village news story). After that John Heim (aka Big Mo) came on. Bob DeForest still has a blues music show on Saturday night.

I don’t remember who was doing the Friday blues show during the times when I was listening (although Sena says it was Big Mo) which probably started back in the mid-1990s or so—but I do remember that Iowa blues star and member of the Iowa Blues Hall of Fame Kevin Burt substituted for a couple of weeks sometime between 2005 and 2011. Despite my faulty memory for some things, I’m pretty sure about that. There’s no mistaking Kevin Burt’s voice.

Ed and his band will be retiring sometime this summer. They have several gigs planned in June. Ed mentioned he might record some of the Friday night blues shows after May 15^th. By the way, I’ve got a blog post from last August about my post from April 14, 2024 entitled “KCCK Big Mo News and More.”

Ed left a comment on it: “Always available on the web and the KCCK App, too… ;0).”

The first part is clear, although the emoticon puzzled me. I looked it up but couldn’t find anything about it except that it might mean amazement. It looks like wink.

Other than the music, I like Big Mo’s sense of humor, which he often displayed in little comedy bits which are about “Sponsors de faux.” The main one is MayRee’s Hand-Battered Catfish. There are a few others like Shorty’s Adult Diapers (they’re ready when you aren’t) and Big Furry Shaving Products. There was a podcast about those. And I can’t swear to it but I think he tried to start another one about “fish psychics” back in October 2025. But I can’t swear to it and I’ve not heard it since.

I have suggested that KCCK make a tee-shirt with a MayRee’s hand-battered catfish logo on it, but apparently that’s a non-starter.

Anyway, we wish Big Mo all the luck in the world after his retirement and hope he enjoys it as much as he can. I retired from psychiatry 6 years ago and look how well I turned out! That reminds me, I always like to pretend that, during the shout-out part of his show, when he mentions “Jim the Shrink” he means me.

How Cribbage Tournaments Deal with Slow Players

Remember that cribbage game Sena and I filmed a while ago to show we could finish a cribbage game in 15 minutes if we really tried? Well, we just managed, although truth to tell, our games typically run 20 minutes or so.

Well, today I looked at the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) monthly newsletter called Cribbage World. There’s an interesting article in the My Deal column (a regular feature) on page 6 in which the writer, David Aiken (one of the board directors) describes how the ACC manages slow players in tournaments.

They actually move up the starting line to either 28 or 56. Apparently, the problem of slow cribbage players is common enough to make a rule change that makes the typical cribbage hole range shorter than 121. It’s called playing the short game.

The way they standardized this was to use cribbage expert DeLynn Colvert’s 26 Theory as described in his book “Play Winning Cribbage.” This forms the basis of what is sometimes called positional cribbage. Sena and I contacted the person at the ACC who typically answers questions about cribbage about how commonly do tournament players use positional cribbage strategy to increase their chances of winning by playing aggressively or defensively depending on board position and knowing where the “par holes” are located.

Incredibly, he says he doesn’t use it, yet he’s reached Grand Master level over the course of his career. I never use it either, but it’s because I don’t understand it well enough.

Anyway, they adjusted the par holes based on Colvert’s 26 Theory and came up with new starting holes that would compensate for the tendency for some players to play too slowly during tournaments.

Of course, that raises the question of how do tournament officials know which players need to play the short game? Do the slow players self-select? I hardly think so; many would probably resist being labeled “slow.” Would they have to play rock, paper, scissors with tournament organizers to settle it?

I don’t know how that’s done. Occasionally, I take a stab at trying to read Colvert’s chapter on his 26 Theory. Inevitably, I give up before getting to the “ah hah, Eureka!” moment. I did find a couple of other articles by Aiken about the 26 Theory which were published in the January page 6 and February page 6 2023 issues of Cribbage World. I think it’s fascinating that somebody else came up with a strategy similar to Colvert’s about a hundred years before he did.

Who is Stupider in Cribbage: AI or You?

I read this article today about how more and more students are using ChatGPT or some kind of AI to write term papers. The title gives you a clue what the author’s opinion of it: “AI Chatbots could be making you stupider.”

For about the last 3 years I’ve been writing about how AI is not the greatest thing, in fact both Sena and I say it should be “dislodged.” It won’t be, so we need to keep our brains limber. Hey, we exercise our bodies. There are ways to exercise our brains and some of them can be fun.

For example, we regularly play cribbage and there are variations of the game that make scoring more challenging.

Sena regularly says that 6 card cribbage as typically played in tournaments sponsored by the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) is too easy those who participate in them. I think that might be an overstatement, but there’s no doubt a lot of variants make you think harder about scoring, what cards to throw to the crib, and how to think your way through the pegging phase.

Take 9 card cribbage for example—please! I almost hate this game because the hand and crib scores are often too hard to count. You have to resort to using a computer scorer that, so far, you can find in only one place and it’s the Reddit site where you also can find the rules of the game. It’s not hard to play because you follow the basic rules of 6 card cribbage. It’s just mind-bendingly difficult to score most of the time.

You can check out our YouTube video of 9 card cribbage for the Cribbage Wars game if you like, which took hours (no, days) to put together because of the scoring complexity.

I still can’t get over the fact that Sena got a 29-hand playing 6 card cribbage on Cribbage Wars a while back and we never even recognized it until days later. The context of playing 6 card cribbage on a Cribbage Wars game board somehow made us oblivious to seeing the 29-hand right in front of us. Most people never see it because the odds of getting it are 1 in 216,580.

I realize playing cribbage isn’t the same as writing term papers, but it’s still good for your brain. Some think people are still better than AI at playing cribbage.

There is a computer player called Brutal on a computer version of cribbage called Cribbage Pro. I got a 28-hand playing Brutal once. Google Gemini calls this an AI player and says, while Brutal uses algorithms and statistics, it can falter when facing the psychological tactics used by humans.

Google Gemini summary and a video of a Cribbage Pro game using ChatGPT:

“AI Performance: High-level AI, such as that in the CribbagePro app, is very competitive, with top human players only beating the hardest bot 55% to 60% of the time.
Techniques Used: AI in cribbage uses a combination of techniques, including reinforcement learning and minimax algorithms, focusing on maximizing scores in both the discarding and pegging phases.
Challenges: While analyzing the best cards to discard is a “static” problem, teaching an AI to excel at the “pegging” (card play) phase is harder, as it requires anticipating opponents’ moves.
Vision Technology: Recent developments include using AI for real-time computer vision, such as apps that use machine learning to identify and score physical cards on a table.

While AI is capable of playing, it often focuses on statistical optimization rather than the psychological aspects of the game used by human players.”

Sven Squad Movie: “Parents”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

OK, so this movie, “Parents” is hosted by the Sven Squad, who did a pretty good job of covering this dark 1989 film directed by Bob Balaban, set in the 1950s California suburbia. The main cast included Randy Quaid (Nick Laemle), Mary Beth Hurt (Lily Laemle), Bryan Madorsky (Michael Laemle), and Sandy Dennis (Millie Dew). Interestingly, Madorsky never continued acting after this movie and went on to become an accountant.

This movie reminds me of that Barbara Streisand song “People Who Eat People.” No, wait, that’s not right. Sena and I both saw the movie and we’re not certain about whether this is about a mentally vulnerable 10-year-old boy who hallucinates or about something really sinister. It’s a little of both. As usual, this is not a serious movie review and there are a couple of links below to serious writers.

As a retired psychiatrist, I tend to lean toward a psychological interpretation of a fair number of scenes in which Michael sees scary things. On the other hand, while that’s plausible early in the film, it’s less tenable when the school social worker, Millie Dew, sees scary things too like severed limbs and whole corpses in the basement of the Laemle house.

We both chuckled about Toxico, the aptly named company where Nick works as a research scientist in the Human Cadaver section where he develops Agent Orange type defoliants and requests choice liver cuts for mysterious reasons and which may be ending up as entrees on the dinner table.

The Laemle kitchen has a counter with a rack full of heavy cookbooks on it, none of which contain recipes for fricasseed fingers, I’m pretty sure. They live in a conformist neighborhood, which of course implies that everyone is snacking on milk and postman kidney cutlets just before bedtime.

I keep trying to think of a reason why the name “Millie Dew” was chosen for the school social worker role. It sounds like a joke to make you think of mildew, which is a fungus. I can’t recall whether Nick was making a kind of chemical fungus which made vegetation forget to take up glucose which led to jungle defoliation or what. And what point would the joke have had?

Maybe Millie was “breaking the mold” of the conformist society in which she didn’t really fit. Or maybe Michael felt like she was “growing” on him. See what I did there?

We were both creeped out by this movie and giving it a black comedy label might fit if you think of it as black mold. It kept us on the edge of our seats, but it’s too dark. Both Sena and I give it a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

“Criminally Underrated: Parents” by Joseph Neff. April 5, 2026 (approximate), on Spectrum Culture website. https://spectrumculture.com/2026/04/01/criminally-underrated-parents/

“Why director Bob Balaban chose to film Parents (1989) from the perspective of a child” By MeTV Staff. April 15, 2026. On Yikesgeist, MeTV. https://metv.com/stories/why-director-bob-balaban-chose-to-film-parents-1989-from-the-perspective-of-a-child

Earth Day 2026!

Hey, Earth Day 2026 is on April 22, 2026! If any of you are like me (and who isn’t?), you might have trouble figuring out just what you can do that would be meaningful on Earth Day.

Well, here’s a link to Earth Day Tips which gives you 50 easy ways to participate. You could volunteer, take a quiz, go to the park, or even eat kale! Try not to stand under a tree in which a bald eagle is pooping.

You can find Earth Day events in your area at this website.

Hawks and a Bald Eagle in the Rain Today!

We saw not only the Red-tail Hawks today, but a bald eagle to boot. The hawks were making eyes at each other and the eagle was making colonic bombardments. They were getting soaked.

It’s hard to regard the bald eagle as a majestic bird when its head feathers are flattened down like it’s been styling with Brylcreem—and it lets fly with intestinal ammo. Anyway, we’re doubling down on bird videos today.

Hunkered Down Hawk!

We got this sudden string of thunderstorms come up this afternoon in eastern Iowa and it blew pretty hard briefly for a short while. We got barely pea-sized hail. It buffeted the Red-tail Hawk around so much I couldn’t really tell which end of it was up. And then it quickly calmed down. If you don’t like the weather in Iowa-just wait a bit.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “The Car”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

We’ve never seen the 1977 movie “The Car” and it’s spooky because that’s the year Sena and I got married and only a few years later we got a big 1980s vintage Chrysler New Yorker that had an Electric Voice Alert (EVA) system. Not that the car in the movie talks, it just kills people—mainly good people. And the car in the movie was a Lincoln Continental.

There aren’t many demonic car jokes so I had to come up with one that fits the movie because there’s one out there which you can overthink. I had to make the car talk and you have to imagine it has an EVA system installed. You also have to be old enough to know what those old Chrysler New Yorkers usually said. Furthermore, you have to know that a priest uses something called a sprinkler (usually called by the Latin-derived name “aspergillum”) to apply holy water.

What did the demonic car say to the Catholic priest trying to exorcise it? “Your holy water fluid level is low!” Sorry.

Anyway, the movie stars James Brolin (Wade Parent, chief deputy), Kathleen Lloyd (Lauren Humphries, Wade’s girlfriend), R.G. Armstrong (Amos Clements, the dynamite guy; oh, my name is in this movie; that’s spooky!), Ronny Cox (Deputy Luke Johnson), John Marley (Sheriff Everett Peck), Eddie Little Sky (Denson), Margaret Willey (Navajo woman), among others.

Chief Deputy Wade Parent, a divorced guy with two daughters, and Lauren Humphries are sweethearts who plan to marry. The gist of the scene following the opener in which the car runs down two bike riders is that Amos Clements, the dynamite contractor who is abusing his wife, witnesses a guy get run over by the demonic car but then can’t come up with enough specifics about how to identify the car or its driver, which really makes Sheriff Peck mad, because he knows that Clements is abusing his wife, who Peck was sweet on in high school and has wanted to rescue her from the bad marriage.

The car is very choosy about who it kills—mainly good-hearted, kind, decent people. In fact, it spares the one baddy in the town, which is Clements, and instead runs over Sheriff Peck.

The only way you know this is that the one witness to the Sheriff Peck murder is the Navajo woman, whose story is mis-translated by the deputy Denson (later corrected by the dispatcher), who leaves out the part that the car swerved to miss Clements and went straight for Sheriff Peck, and that the Navajo woman didn’t see a driver.

Nobody ever “sees” the driver until the end and this review will not have spoilers. The car’s menacing approach is always preceded by a big wind which is sort of a mini haboob, after which people are knocked off.

The only place where people are spared is in the town cemetery, which the car never enters although it knocks down part of the entrance while Lauren makes a big show of jeering at it, calling it names, and just generally insulting it, for example:

“Nyahh, your window washer fluid level is low!”

“Your stick shift is crooked!”

“You’re too fat for your seatbelt!”

“Because you have no door handles, your door is ajar!”

This movie is OK, although there are some scenes in which overacting gets a little tedious. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken rating.

A Dose of the Mother

Sena had another dietary brainstorm and bought something called apple cider vinegar.

Warning: it contains a substance called “the mother.”

I’m not sure what the mother is, exactly, but I’m concerned that it might be something that would turn up as the main creature on a Svengoolie show movie. By the way, tonight it’s the 1977 release of “The Car.”

I was not sure whether I would want to consume anything that might contain vestiges (chunks?) of somebody’s mom. Hard to believe, this stuff has been around since 1912. What did the children think?

Actually, according to the first (and only) source I looked up on the web, the vinegar part got started by the Babylonians in 5000 B.C. Leave it to the Babylonians. You can mix it with moonshine to make werewolves. Think about that.

Sena thought I was going to look up scientific research about this. However, the claims that it makes mice smarter than humans is trivial. Just about every living creature is smarter than a human. Just read the news.

It turns out the mother is a mixture of acids that can make you hallucinate extraterrestrials and Bigfoot. You could use it as an underarm deodorant, but you might get sued by the maker of Lume deodorizer products.

There are a few tried and true effects of apple cider vinegar. You can soak your feet in it—if you don’t mind the incidental result nobody mentions, which is that your feet dissolve. You can get rid of fleas with it, but you might just want to visit a vet. And anything you can use as a weed killer should you make you think twice about drinking it. The bottle directs you to shake gently before using. You wouldn’t want to throw your hip out of joint.

Thank you for your time.

Sena Finds a Red-tailed Hawk Sitting on a Nest

Sena found a Red-tailed hawk on a nest in the outlot beyond our back yard. At first, I thought it was too early for that sort of thing. Sure enough, today we went for a walk and both saw it.

This has been a common theme for us. Over 20 years ago she saw a coyote in the back yard of another house in a different neighborhood. I didn’t really believe it—until our next-door neighbor asked us if we’d seen that “coyote” out in the back yard. We never got a chance to get a picture of it.

And then there was the time she saw (actually heard it before she saw it) a pileated woodpecker in the backyard of another house we lived in about 12 years ago. I doubted it then, too. But she got a picture to prove it. It just goes to show you—I never learn.