humor – Page 23 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Thoughts on Upping Your Game

Today’s essay by Dr. Moffic was pretty interesting about the role of video gaming in health for men and women. Computer games were emphasized but it got me thinking about hands-on games that you might thing of as being more old-fashioned—like cribbage.

I wrote a post about cribbage already today, but there’s another angle on it that’s readily adaptable to considering its role in promoting mental health for both men and women.

That reminds me that until yesterday and today, I was on a major losing streak in cribbage with Sena. Cribbage wins and losses seem to occur in streaks and I was beginning to wonder if I’d lost my touch.

There’s a cribbage connection with the electronic gaming realm in that we also play the computer video cribbage game Cribbage Pro. There are three levels, Standard, Challenging, and Brutal (the toughest opponent). We always play Brutal, and often win. There’s a way to play internet cribbage on Cribbage Pro, but we don’t. I prefer playing live. I think the popular view of cribbage is that it’s an old guy’s game. I suspect people think it’s a card game old men play on their lunch hour at the factory.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s very popular with women and kids and my guess is that no matter what your gender preference is, there’s a greater diversity of cribbage players out there than anyone realizes.

Playing cribbage promotes and maintains brain health by requiring you to practice basic arithmetic by counting your scores and pegging. You lose a little of that in Cribbage Pro although you can turn on the feature allowing manual counting of scores.

And the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) accommodates internet cribbage tournaments. It’s very popular and competitive. By the way, expanding on my other post today about how to verify your luck in getting a 29 hand in cribbage, you can easily prove it on Cribbage Pro by taking a screen shot of it!

Computer games are fine, but I like to manually shuffle the cards for cribbage. Sena likes to use the shuffling machine—which is very loud but gets the job done. I’ve not yet found a way to “accidentally” lose the shuffling machine (Can’t imagine where it went; must have grown legs and walked downtown!).

We always help each other count our scores. The one time we tried muggins rule, which involves penalizing each other for missing scores by taking them from each other, we just couldn’t seem to get it straight. And it wasn’t as much fun.

There are local cribbage clubs that you could get involved in although they might be hard to find. The nearest one to us is several hours away.

I used to play computer games years ago (although not Nintendo), but nowadays I feel more like Agent K in Men in Black II as he’s trying to quickly learn how to steer a spacecraft using what looks like a PlayStation 2 controller (I used to have one of those).

after K turns on the auto pilot during the chase…

Agent K: It is not automatic pilot.

Agent J: He doesn’t work when we’re in hyperspeed.

Agent K: I could really use a steering wheel!

Agent J: We don’t have no damn steering wheel! This is what we got! [turns off auto pilot] Didn’t your mother ever give you a Gameboy?

Agent K: What is a Gameboy?!?

Thoughts on the Elusive 29 Hand Score in Cribbage

Sena and I were talking about the elusive 29 hand score in cribbage and I wondered how you could ever verify it. Let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine anybody filming themselves playing cribbage in order to catch it on tape.

Just for the sake of completeness, here’s a video of how to count the 29 score. You can see from the comments that it is indeed possible to get the 29 hand in your lifetime—if you’re an extraterrestrial from a galaxy where the typical lifespan is several hundred years.

As noted in the video, the odds of getting a 29-score hand are 1 in 216,580. I have rarely seen news stories that highlight this happening at some hardware store in East Overshoe, name-your-state where a couple of guys are playing cribbage on their lunch break. One supposedly gets a 29 hand. He calls up the local news announcing that and a reporter hustles over to snap a photo of the guy holding up the perfect hand with a nob jack and three 5 cards next to a card deck showing the obligatory 4^th turnup 5 card.

How hard would it be to set that up?

OK, I’m not saying they’re making it up, but it’s not impossible to prank everybody by staging this as an April Fool’s joke. Would it be worth doing? No, not in my opinion.

I’ve never seen a story about anybody making a video of a cribbage game in which somebody gets the 29 hand. That would be interesting! But who would ever do that? You could make video recordings of your cribbage games every day for your whole life and never get a 29 hand. But a lot of people have a “29 hand cribbage” story. In fact, in the video above you can find a few comments about it. Is it just lore or are people telling tall tales or what?

There might another way to increase your chances of getting the 29 hand. You could become a vampire. That’s right; vampires can live for hundreds of years or even longer, provided they don’t get exposed to daylight or take a stake through the heart. Being immortal would give you more time to play cribbage. The only hitch is that you have to let a vampire bite you, making you a loathsome creature only able to get around during the night, when most people are sleeping. And somebody would probably invent cribbage pegs shaped like little crosses and there you go.

There might be another solution. One is to require the person who claims to have gotten a 29 hand to take a lie detector test. Sound good?

But lie detector tests are probably not infallible. You can even find instructions on the web claiming you can learn how to outsmart them. Believe it or not, there’s a Wikihow on “How to Fool a Polygraph Exam.” And even if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used as part of the exam, everybody knows AI lies! Besides, there’s a bigger problem with lie detector tests. They would take all the fun out of the thrill of getting the 29 hand and telling everyone the story about it!

And after all, it’s the stories about getting the 29 hand that carry the day.

Svengoolie Show “Son of Dracula”Spelling Bee Game!

I saw the Svengoolie show 1943 film, “First Cousin Twice Removed of Dracula” last night. Sorry, that’s actually “Son of Dracula.” You can watch it colorized on the Internet Archive.

It starred Lon Chaney as Count Alucard, and that name didn’t fool anybody because it’s just Dracula spelled backward. The goof everybody already knows about occurs early in the show when Dracula transforms from a bat in front of a mirror and his reflection is clearly visible.

You don’t see that much of Count Dracula and you never see his fangs. He’s well-spoken and mostly polite. He didn’t cry out “Bluh, bluh” even once, but then neither did Bela Lugosi.

Maybe I was just overthinking Dracula’s overall plan for taking over America. Was he supposed to suck the blood of hundreds of millions of people one by one or what? Even with the help of Enirehtak, the Southern belle he hypnotized into being his wife, that would be a long-term project even for the immortal vampires.

That approach is probably what killed the movie “Attack of the Vicious, Loathsome, Depraved but Suave Vampire Anteaters with Denture Fangs from Saturn!” The solution to save the planet was to ban Poligrip. Theater staff had to wake up the audience members, but only occasionally.

In spite of what you might think about the flying bat special effects, there were no strings involved—just a decrepit bat.

There were a few elderly gentlemen in the film, Dr. Brewster being one. He had a great idea about how to protect a little boy from another attack by Dracula. He drew little crosses on the kid’s neck where the fang puncture wounds were. See there? You don’t need to carry a crucifix around! Just cross your fingers at vampires.

And Dracula (no spring chicken himself) suffered a mishap while carrying his bride across the threshold after their wedding. He fell and broke his hip. Vampirism doesn’t protect men from osteoporosis. The action shots got a little shorter after that. Using a walker tends to slow chase scenes down.

On the other hand, Dracula was otherwise well preserved for being hundreds of years old. He got a little perturbed when somebody threw out his bottle of Serutan. Remember, that’s Natures spelled backwards.

Can We Calm Down?

First of all, I want to make it clear that I am not now nor have I ever been pregnant. Now that I have your attention, I’ll add some context to that weird statement by saying how puzzled I am by all the controversy about whether or not there’s actually a federal recommendation against pregnant women getting the Covid-19 vaccine.

I admit, I actually did think about the movie “Signs” in which the lead character, Graham Hess, says “Everybody in this house needs to calm down and eat some fruit or something.” I think it fits.

I found a lot of news stories claiming that HHS and the CDC don’t recommend that pregnant women get the Covid-19 vaccine. What I actually found on the HHS web site says the opposite—the agency recommends it.

That seems to agree with the paper from the FDA leadership, published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Drs. Prasad and Makary (An Evidence-Based Approach to Covid-19 Vaccination. Authors: Vinay Prasad, M.D., M.P.H., and Martin A. Makary, M.D., M.P.H. Author Info & Affiliations). Published May 20, 2025. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsb2506929.

“Moving forward, the FDA will adopt the following Covid-19 vaccination regulatory framework: On the basis of immunogenicity — proof that a vaccine can generate antibody titers in people — the FDA anticipates that it will be able to make favorable benefit–risk findings for adults over the age of 65 years and for all persons above the age of 6 months with one or more risk factors that put them at high risk for severe Covid-19 outcomes, as described by the CDC (Figure 2).”

Figure 2 is a table which lists many medical conditions that are indications for getting the Covid-19 vaccine. Pregnancy is one of them, based on the idea that it could increase the severity of Covid-19 disease.

On the other hand, when I looked at the health care provider page on the CDC website, the table showing the clinical indications for the Covid-19 vaccine sends a confusing message by showing pregnancy as a condition for which there is currently “No Guidance/Not Applicable.”

Just in case this web page gets updated, I took a screenshot of that part of the table:

But elsewhere on the CDC website are pages which clearly recommend that pregnant women get the Covid-19 vaccine.

I’m not making any political statements here. I’m just an old guy who clearly does have an indication for getting the Covid-19 vaccine and I recently did just that last month.

Avocado Self-Checkout Flap!

Sena told me about the Walmart avocado self-checkout flap that was reported in the news yesterday. He was having trouble with the self-checkout routine and the register showed he owed $1,300 dollars. I read the New York Post story about it, although the news agency actually got it from a Reddit social media web page.

According to the story, a Walmart employee reported that the customer accidentally overcharged himself for avocados at the self-checkout station. He punched in 999 avocados instead of the 9 he wanted. The customer got excited and he called the police using the 911 line, accusing Walmart of trying to rob him. Store employees and police tried to calm him down but he had to be handcuffed and taken into custody for trespassing because he refused to leave unless Walmart compensated him for his mistake.

I’m not sure how much of the story to believe based on the source, but I’ve used self-checkout a few times at Walmart and I’ve always found the employees to be very helpful when I had a minor problem. Usually, somebody has been immediately available, probably because it’s pretty obvious when I’m puzzling over something, often because I’m not sure how to ring up produce that either has to be weighed or beamed up to extraterrestrials who take charge of stuff like that.

Admittedly, I don’t grocery shop often enough to get the steps down pat, but I can always count on a store employee being available to help me out of a jam. I’ve never been overcharged or hassled. I’ve never called the cops on myself.

Actually, what I really need is more practice arranging the grocery items so that I can bag them and return them to the cart so that I don’t accidentally double scan them or leave them on the counter. I’m a terrible bagger. I use way more bags than necessary. I lost a cucumber once (and it was even bagged) and I still can’t tell how that happened.

The easy part is scanning the items, except when it comes to produce which either needs to be weighed or keyed in by searching for the kind of tomatoes I got (sliced vs deformed or whatever). I once tied up the tomatoes in a plastic bag with a knot so tight I looked silly trying to untie it so I could weigh them. I must look comically inept because somebody always comes to my rescue right away. I don’t know how they keep from laughing.

There are alternate ways of dealing with those situations which don’t entail making 911 calls. You could swear off avocados.

Svengoolie Movie A Cut Above: “Strait-Jacket”!

I saw the 1964 movie “Strait-Jacket” directed by William Castle, starring Joan Crawford for the first time last night on the Svengoolie TV show, and I have to say that it’s one of the better films I’ve seen. Movies that have a psychiatric angle also get my attention because I’m a retired psychiatrist. There won’t be any spoilers.

The quick synopsis is that Lucy Garbin (Joan Crawford) plays a woman who was committed to a psychiatric asylum for 20 years after murdering her husband and his girlfriend with an axe after she found them together in bed. Lucy’s young daughter Carol (Diane Baker), sees the whole grisly thing. Lucy is released from the asylum to the care of her brother Bill and his wife and Carol. Then, the axe murders of several people seem to implicate Lucy might be picking up old habits.

That’s when all the trouble starts, including a lot of references to sharp objects, which is joke fodder for Svengoolie. The film lends itself to that, including a shot of the Columbia film logo with the statue of liberty’s head off and lying at her feet!

Dissociation is an involuntary mental phenomenon that leads to feeling disconnected with one’s environment or one’s self. Time is distorted and flashbacks and hallucinations can occur. This is frequently portrayed by Lucy, even in front of her former psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, who visits her while on some kind of vacation of all things. During his interview with her, he decides she’s not ready to live in the outside world and must return to the asylum.

This would not have been the procedure for readmitting psychiatric patients even back then, but you have to give Dr. Anderson credit for having a sharp sense of her mental state. He had a well-honed idea of what was happening to her clinically, especially while observing her fiddling with knitting needles.

Images of and references to sharp implements abound throughout the film. You get a sense of being on the razor edge of suspense throughout the film. This is especially evident in the interaction between Lucy and the seemingly dull-witted farmhand, Leo (George Kennedy). He offers her his axe to give her a try at beheading a chicken. You find out later that Leo is smarter than he looks. Carol describes typical work on the farm to Lucy, including name-dropping certain jobs like slaughtering hogs and butchering chickens.

I can mention gaslighting without giving away too much about the film. I never saw the 1944 movie “Gaslight” but the term gaslighting means psychologically manipulating someone into believing she’s insane so as to control her sense of reality. In “Strait-Jacket” the ingenious way this is presented made me think of psychopathy as well as dissociation.

I have to mention one interesting fact about the film which came to me about 3:30 am this morning. I swear this was before I looked it up on the web (see reference below). I noticed that the forty whacks rhyme for Lucy Garbin is taken from the Lizzie Borden rhyme in reference to the axe murders of her parents she was accused of in the 1800s, which is cited on the Encyclopedia Britannica website.

“The children’s rhyme chanted in the movie, “Lucy Harbin took an ax, gave her husband forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave his girlfriend forty-one”, is based on the famous rhyme about Lizzie Andrew Borden: “Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one.” The Grindhouse Cinema Database (GCDb). Strait Jacket/Fun Facts. Retrieved June 8, 2025, from https://www.grindhousedatabase.com/index.php/Strait_Jacket/Fun_Facts

Lohnes, Kate. “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax…”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Jun. 2017, Accessed June 8, 2025 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lizzie-Borden-American-murder-suspect

I found the film entertaining and, although I had a fairly firm idea of who was doing what for which reason, a couple of times I had my doubts. I give the film 4/5 shrilling chickens rating. I had a reservation about the ending. See if you can figure out who has the biggest axe to grind by watching “Strait-Jacket” on the Internet Archive.

Big Mo Pod Show “BluesMore” Today

So, the Big Mo Pod Show was on just now and I listened to it because I heard the Big Mo Blues Show last night.

I just want to mention that I heard Big Mo do an extended version of his comedy bit on Mayree’s hand-battered catfish last night too. I never know when he’s going to do the long version of it and I nearly always regret not having some way to record it. It’s kooky and complicated with twists and turns like a long hairy dog story with punchlines scattered like land mines all over it.

Anyway, the pod show was pretty interesting. I think the Beth Hart song “Can’t Let Go” could be about more than a busted relationship, a frequent subject of a lot of blues songs. There’s a lot of baggage that we can’t let go of in life. The other notable feature of that song is Sonny Landreth cutting all the way loose with guitar licks spinning out beyond every nearby galaxy.

What was strange during last night’s blues show was I could have sworn I heard the lyrics of “Stand by Me” but it’s not on the list of songs. Songs sometimes don’t get on the list. Anyway, it reminded me of the Playing for Change version that starts with Roger Ridley and goes around the world, released 16 years ago.

Help Me Find the Origin of the Bald Eagle Joke!

Help! I’m stuck on this bald eagle joke that I heard decades ago and I wonder if anyone my age can remember who originally told it. I could write the joke here, but it’s sort of a live performance thing so I have to do a little acting. That’s why I made the short video. If anybody remembers it, just make a comment. Sorry, I don’t allow comments on my YouTube channel.

The Wild West Sandbox of AI Enhancement in Psychiatry!

I always find Dr. Moffic’s articles in Psychiatric Times thought-provoking and his latest essay, “Enhancement Psychiatry” is fascinating, especially the part about Artificial Intelligence (AI). I liked the link to the video of Dr. John Luo’s take on AI in psychiatry. That was fascinating.

I have my own concerns about AI and dabbled with “talking” to it a couple of times. I still try to avoid it when I’m searching the web but it seems to creep in no matter how hard I try. I can’t unsee it now.

I think of AI enhancing psychiatry in terms of whether it can cut down on hassles like “pajama time” like taking our work home with us to finish clinic notes and the like. When AI is packaged as a scribe only, I’m a little more comfortable with that although I would get nervous if it listened to a conversation between me and a patient.

That’s because AI gets a lot of things wrong as a scribe. In that sense, it’s a lot like other software I’ve used as an aid to creating clinic notes. I made fun of it a couple of years ago in a blog post “The Dragon Breathes Fire Again.”

I get even more nervous when I read the news stories about AI making delusions and blithely blurting misinformation. It can lie, cheat, and hustle you although a lot of it is discovered in digital experimental environments called “sandboxes” which we hope can keep the mayhem contained.

That made me very eager to learn a little more about Yoshua Bengio’s LawZero and his plan to create the AI Scientist to counter what seems to be a developing career criminal type of AI in the wild west of computer wizardry. The LawZero thing was an idea by Isaac Asimov who wrote the book, “I, Robot,” which inspired the film of the same title in 2004.

However, as I read it, I had an emotional reaction akin to suspicion. Bengio sounds almost too good to be true. A broader web search turned up a 2009 essay by a guy I’ve never heard of named Peter W. Singer. It’s titled “Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics Are Wrong.” I tried to pin down who he is by searching the web and the AI helper was noticeably absent. I couldn’t find out much about him that explained the level of energy in what he wrote.

Singer’s essay was published on the Brookings Institution website and I couldn’t really tell what political side of the fence that organization is on—not that I’m planning to take sides. His aim was to debunk the Laws of Robotics and I got about the same feeling from his essay as I got from Bengio’s.

Maybe I need a little more education about this whole AI enhancement issue. I wonder whether Bengio and Singer could hold a public debate about it? Maybe they would need a kind of sandbox for the event?

Groundhog Great House!

How much round could a groundhog grind if a groundhog could grind ground and so could you call that grind ground round?

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the woodchucks in our back yard. By the way, woodchuck and groundhog are different names for the same big rodent that can feast on whatever’s growing in your garden.

Now that it looks like our pesky robin has retired from beating on our windows for whatever reason, we’ll probably return the black window film we got to cover them.

Now we’ve got a completely different critter visiting us—a family of marmots, groundhogs, woodchucks, whistle pigs (they emit a high-pitched whistle when alarmed), giant rats munching veggies in our back yard. They remind Sena of meerkats, so I guess you could call their home Groundhog Great House.

It’s actually a little family of momma woodchuck and her two pups, who are almost as big as she is. Their den is close to the flower garden. They tend to feed in the early or latter part of the day and we caught them on film yesterday afternoon. They’re pretty skittish and tend to freeze and scamper at the drop of a leaf.

When we lived at a previous house several years ago, there was a big woodchuck that lived in back part of our yard. One evening it was standing up stock still and mesmerized by something in the sky. It looked like a statue of a woodchuck. There were big gray clouds blotting out the sun. It just so happened that a big storm was coming and not long after there was a severe storm warning.

Woodchuck staring at the cloudy sky in 2018

I snapped the picture of the woodchuck on May 2, 2018 and the National Weather Service has a record of hail reports in Iowa City on that date. I don’t know how much evidence there is for the theory that some animals can sense changes in atmospheric pressure, so it could have been a coincidence.

Anyway, the family of woodchucks in our backyard are more concerned about filling their stomachs than checking barometric pressures or looking up the weather reports on their tiny screen TVs in burrows which can run for 50 feet, by the way. They dig like crazy. For now, they munching on the wild stuff and turn up their noses at the catmint.

I suppose some think woodchucks look cute, but they can carry a variety of diseases including rabies most commonly, tularemia (rabbit fever), Lyme disease, hantavirus and others.