We’re on schedule to get our new cribbage boards delivered today!
We played 9 card cribbage to 121 today and I got a 50-point hand! We both scored the complex hand, came up with 50 points, checked it with skunkeddotclub and it was correct! We played only 3 hands but the high scores led to a lot of time counting points. That’s why you’ll never see a 9-card cribbage tournament.
On the other hand, this might do something good for elder brain health.
Counting the 50 points for runs was the most difficult part. There were eight different 4 card runs and spreading them out in the offset way shown in the picture made it easier to count them (32 points worth). There was 12 points for 15 for 2s and 6 points for the pairs. Adding the points for the runs, 15s, and pairs made 50. The photos compare the wide 50 point spread between my two black pegs before and after the move.
Before pegging the 50 pointsAfter pegging the 50 points
A couple of days ago, last year’s pesky female robin came back to peck at one of the basement windows. It’s a window well and she looks like she might be bringing next materials to it. She’s also beating at the window with her wings, as though she sees her reflection—despite the window film Sena applied to it.
I’m pretty sure this is the same robin who twisted her head around backward, Exorcist style, to stare balefully at me last spring.
She does this during the day. They sleep at night, thank goodness. But at the crack of dawn, she’s out quixotically pecking and flapping at the windows like they’re windmills.
We’re also on the lookout for the house finch pair. They seem to be scouting the covered back porch fan as a likely spot for a nest.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
OK, I saw this movie The Mummy’s Hand (1940) last night and went to bed wondering if I was crazy or fell asleep briefly and had a dream during the show. I saw something incredible; it looked like Svengoolie had a cameo in the film! At about half hour or so in, the archaeologists are at the dig site looking at an old locket with photos of an old woman and a man. The old woman was Svengoolie in drag!
I checked this morning by looking at the Internet Archive version of the movie and there were two photos in the locket, one of them a man on the right and a woman on the left. Neither was Svengoolie.
I searched the web and immediately found the Svengoolie movie Facebook page in which several other people had seen that Svengoolie in drag was the picture on the left in the locket. Apparently, he pulls this kind of prank occasionally, but this was the first time I’ve seen it.
Anyway, the movie stars Dick Foran (Steve Banning), Wallace Ford (Babe Jenson), Peggy Moran (Marta Solvani), Tom Tyler (the Mummy), and Cecil Kellaway (Mr. Solvani). I didn’t expect the film to be a mix of comedy and horror, but making fun of the mummy tropes seemed to work.
I haven’t seen the first movie, “The Mummy.” I’ve seen “Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb,” (also on the Svengoolie show a couple of months ago) in which Babe was a little less funny than in “The Mummy’s Hand.”
The special Tana leaves again appear in this film, which privileged ancient Egyptians rolled up using Zig-Zag paper and smoked, which was better than the weak beer they made and could make mummies come back to life and enable them able to leap tall date palms in a single bound.
The evil Andohep (played by George Zucco), who is sweet on Marta and tries to flirt with her by enticing her with a Tana joint, controls the Mummy with a bong full of the stuff, which enables it to bound across the desert despite lacking the full use of its left leg and right arm.
The comedy duo of Banning and Babe talk Mr. Solvani (a stage magician) into bankrolling their next archaeologic expedition by causing a huge bar fight which Marta breaks up by using her karate skills although later she develops fake fainting spells which allow her to fall into Banning’s arms. Babe gets jealous because all he gets is a little dancing hula girl doll which seems a little out of place in the Egyptian desert but, whatever.
The action takes a side track when Babe tries to learn Mr. Solvani’s magic trick of seeming to swallow a fair size boulder but then makes it appear out of thin air to drop on a Bactrian camel (appeared in this film) which, while not native to Egypt, can gallop from central Asia to munch on Tana leaves, although apparently, they can be crushed by large rocks falling from Babe’s mouth, which occurs after he, seemingly choking on the rock, is saved by the Mummy who dislodges it by using the Heimlich maneuver. This brings them all together to fight for rescheduling Tana leaves to Schedule III by fooling all the DEA agents into believing they can learn to shoot like Marta, who’s a better shot than Annie Oakley.
This is a pretty good movie, mostly because of the Svengoolie cameo gag, and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 4/5.
I missed the recent notice in the last couple of days that the CDC ACIP meeting was postponed for today and tomorrow. Me and more than a couple dozen people were kept waiting for a half hour before I got suspicious and looked it up. There’s a CIDRAP story posted yesterday that explains the “delay.”
There was a federal district judge ruling two days ago “…temporarily blocks every major vaccine policy change made by President Trump’s administration over the past year. The ruling came in response to the ongoing lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and five other major medical organizations against Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
There is no message on the CDC ACIP webcast site about this and at the moment I’m writing this, there are still 41 people waiting for the YouTube webcast. I figured they were just getting coffee and bagels. There should have been an announcement by the CDC ACIP.
Sena’s been after me for weeks to play 9 card cribbage, so because it’s St. Patrick’s Day, I gave in because we might get lucky and the game might be playable.
We used a computer scorer developed by somebody who posted about 9 card cribbage (and other cribbage variants) and has a link to a program he developed to help with scoring: skunked.club. I found this on a reddit thread.
We got so involved and had so much fun, we lost track of time and couldn’t film the last hand because there wasn’t enough space on the memory card. We used the scorer to check our counts and it was helpful. Sena won!
The blizzard started yesterday evening. I put out the garbage this morning and scraped out a path to our doorstep in case we get the cribbage boards delivered today from Canada. I’m not expecting it.
It’s still blowing snow around. The stuff is freezing on the driveway and the sidewalks. I’m surprised the garbage can is still upright. It won’t be a good day for using the electric snow shovel. The blades might not stand up to the thick icy crust. I’ll make do with the shovel. The plow just went by.
Looks like Bigfoot survived it.
Bigfoot balancing actI don’t always drink beer in a blizzard, but when I do I look blurry. Stay blurry, my friends.
Nobody but me, I guess, is talking out loud about Friday the 13th today. I don’t remember anybody mentioning it last month when it occurred either. And it’s going to happen again this year in November. That’ll make 3 times Friday the 13th happens in a single year. And tomorrow’s Svengoolie movie is “Friday the 13th.”
Nobody in state legislatures or the U.S. Congress is doing anything about making Friday the 13th illegal.
There’s phobia of Friday the 13th that everybody knows exist but that everybody (including me) always forgets, mainly because the name is very long: friggatriskaidekaphobia. There’s an alternate name: paraskevidekatriaphobia. Frigga is the name of the Norse god for Friday and if you’re partial to Greek, Paraskevi is the god’s name. The rest of the name means fear of the number 13.
I don’t remember anything unlucky about February 13th last month. In fact, I didn’t even think about it until well after the day passed.
Actually, I should refer to the multiple sightings of Bigfoot as a flap. That’s proper terminology. The news story shows a video with the cryptid on it although I think it looks more like somebody smeared a chocolate bar on the camera lens.
There’s an organization called Bigfoot Society that is tracking the story. The Bigfoot Society Podcast by Jeremiah Byron of Earlham, Iowa posts weekly about Sasquatch sightings and lore. Here’s one about Iowa. There are a lot of ads periodically, so be patient.
There’s one thing I couldn’t find on the web and that’s the Iowa Bigfoot Information Center. There was a guy named Kevin Cook who was the head of it, but that was back in the late 1970s, which supposedly is when there were a lot of Bigfoot sightings. I found a really short article from September 24, 1978 published in the Des Moines Register about him.
I did a little digging and Kevin Cook partnered with another Bigfoot researcher named Clifford Labrecque to start the Iowa Bigfoot Information Center. Jeremiah Byron’s full YouTube presentation is sponsored by the Bigfoot Society Podcast and, unfortunately is available to members only. But there is a short teaser.
In the teaser, Byron interviews Kevin Cook and, although I can’t tell exactly how recent it is, I believe it was done shortly after Labrecque passed in 2021. The discussion mentions a prominent scientist, Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who has been interviewed on TV about Bigfoot. Unfortunately, he also passed in September of 2025. He was a full professor of Anatomy and Anthropology in the Dept of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University. He was a guest on some popular TV shows about Bigfoot (one of them misidentified him as being on faculty at Iowa State University). People are always getting Iowa mixed up with either Idaho or Ohio.
I’m reminded also of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), which keeps records of Bigfoot sighting around the country and they also sponsor annual Bigfoot hunts in Iowa. They had one last year, but I couldn’t find out how that went. There’s 2026 Iowa BFRO Expedition, which starts next month, April 30-May 3. Details are available below the announcement. Guns and dogs are not allowed.
Sena and I have done our own Bigfoot expeditions and one of them is below. No need to thank us; it’s our pleasure to contribute to the scientific endeavor.
The upcoming movie with the Svengoolie Sven Squad this Saturday the 14th comes a day late. It’s the very first “Friday the 13th.” I’ve never seen it, but I think I’ve seen a couple of the 35 sequels. I always have to stop and think about how to distinguish the 1978 slasher “Halloween” from the 1981 slasher “Friday the 13th,” which I think I saw.
I can’t, but that’s OK because I’ve been too busy trying to figure out why the name of the star of the first Friday the 13th film sounds familiar to me. You’ll be thrilled to know that I finally remembered it’s Betsy Palmer from the old 1960’s TV show “I’ve Got a Secret.”
I think she wanted this movie to be a secret until it started making some real money.
Anyway, the movie starts with some guy in a hockey mask slashing various people who then hire a guy in a fancier mask to slash the first guy so they can go back to having casual you-know-what-kind of relations and shoplifting candy cigarettes from K-Mart, which by the way used to be Kresge’s which I am old enough to remember although I never shoplifted anything I swear. What happens next is that Slasher 1 and Slasher 2 meet on the street at high noon and threw samurai swords at each other, often missing and breaking Kresge’s windows until this wakes up Chuck Norris who is pretty annoyed and roundhouse kicks both Slashers into Saturn’s orbit although they manage to hitch a ride on one of those newfangled UFOs which resemble orbs, the extraterrestrial pilots of which hit the warp drive and shoot through a wormhole portal sending them backwards in time to 1977 and boy does that ever mess with the gyroscopes and scorch the spark plugs making it necessary to jettison a load of poorly mixed nuclear grade molten metals into a field in Council Bluffs, Iowa which for some reason did not lead to that fine community becoming a major tourist attraction, so…well, the film probably doesn’t go exactly that way but then I’ve never seen it so it doesn’t hurt to speculate a little bit.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
Last night I thought I was going to see the movie “Son of Frankenstein” again because I saw it a year and a half ago.
In fact, while watching it I thought I either fell asleep during most of it the first time or it was a different movie. Because Svengoolie mentioned that it was a longer version of the film, I’m pretty sure it was the latter.
I didn’t write a review of it in 2024 and I also mentioned that I hadn’t read the Mary Shelley’s novel. “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.” So, today I actually read the Gutenberg Project version of it (OK, I don’t know if it’s the 1818 or the 1831 edition and this was not required reading in my college literature class), which was devilishly difficult to read because of the page setup.
Despite the archaic diction, I thought it was a great book and it confirmed my thought about one of the major themes in it—revenge.
I think one of the most interesting things about Shelley’s book is the connection to Prometheus. So, Dr. Jenny Lind Porter taught my English Literature class at Huston-Tillotson College (now H-T University) in Austin, Texas and she assigned the paperback edition of “Mythology” by Edith Hamilton back in the mid-1970s. The original copyright year was 1942, renewed in 1969.
One of the interesting stories about Prometheus is that he cooked up a fake steak dinner for Zeus by tricking it out with a lot of fat, bone, and gristle and gave fire to men so they could barbecue the best cuts so Zeus took revenge on Prometheus by tying him to a rock where a huge eagle snacked on his liver every day which regenerated making the torment a regular thing. Prometheus also cautions against the threat of unrestrained scientific progress and hubris (overweening pride).
Anyway, “Son of Frankenstein” is a 1939 Universal Films movie starring Basil Rathbone (Baron Wolf von Frankenstein), Josephine Hutchinson (Elsa von Frankenstein), Donnie Dunagan (Peter von Frankenstein), Boris Karloff (the monster), Bela Lugosi (Ygor), and Lionel Atwill (Inspector Krogh).
The theme of revenge is strong in “Son of Frankenstein.” Ygor takes revenge on the two living council members who hanged him after the elder Frankenstein first let the monster loose. Lugosi is both creepy and funny at times. I think the makeup job on his neck made him look like he has a chicken bone caught in his throat when viewed in profile.
I was pretty impressed by Frankenstein’s gradual transformation from a gentle husband and father to a high-strung, sarcastic, and extremely irritable and driven mad scientist.
The dart game between Inspector Krogh and Frankenstein are almost surreal, occurring at a time when the mood is very tense when the action going on elsewhere in the castle is dire enough to demand their attention to something else other than playing darts. I got the sense Frankenstein threw darts because it’s cheaper than therapy.
The monster’s behavior varied from being a dumb randomly violent beast to a calculating criminal methodically setting up one of his brutal murder scenes to make it look like an accident.
I think this movie is pretty good and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 4/5.
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