Category: humor

Sven Squad Movie: “Flight 7500”

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

So last night we both watched the Sven Squad movie “Flight 7500.” It’s the Sven Squad leading the way because they’re going to give Svengoolie a well-deserved break once a month. However, he did show up a couple of times. We thought the Sven Squad song “Cabin Pressure” was pretty awesome.

Flight 7500 was released in 2014 and the short story is that a lot of people on a big airplane start disappearing after a guy named Lance Morrel (Rick Kelly) nearly bites his hand off trying to remove some salted peanuts from his throat. Lance appears from time to time and even tries to costar in the seat back video presentation of the Twilight Zone TV in-flight movie, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

After Lance dies despite getting expert chest compressions from the CPR Bran Martin (Ryan Kwanten) gives him gets moved to the upper-level cabin where Lance and William Shatner have a stimulating conversation about how well gremlins and Shinigami dolls get along.  

One guy, Jake (Alex Frost) who likes to steal watches and cell phones swipes Lance’s wristwatch and becomes the first to disappear. OK, there are way too many passengers to keep track of in this film, so don’t blame me if I mix them up or even leave them out.

There are so many passengers struggling with their soap opera lives on this plane that they step on each other’s toes (just like on a real flight!) as they are competing over which one disappears next while they vie viciously for who wins The Snarkiest Award.

There’s this Goth lady Jacinta (Scout Taylor-Compton) in mom jeans who may turn out to be the most well-adjusted of the group as she and the Shinigami doll have a great time playing 7-card cribbage just before Raquel Mendoza (Christian Serratos) finds out she’s not pregnant and throws a tantrum when the tall flight attendant Liz Lewis (Nicky Whelan) fails to bring her any salted peanuts.

The rest of the passengers take turns trying to breathe with the oxygen masks which don’t work and Lance turns into a huge hand, lunging for everyone in sight if they don’t immediately obey orders and accept death when they’re supposed to.

I can’t say much more about this movie without spilling the Boston baked bean snacks, so I’ll just have to say I would give it a 4.5/5 shrilling chicken rating, mainly because Sena would give it a 5/5.

Fractured Numismatics

I saw this article on the web about certain coins (state quarters) that might be worth a lot of money. I just raided our piggy bank for pennies and other chicken feed a couple of months ago and knew we had some quartesr.

As it turns out we have a couple of the year 2000 S. Carolina quarters; one was a P and the other a D.

“2000 South Carolina quarter

The 2000 South Carolina quarter was one of the first State quarters to be released. It may have extra value if it has extra strikes during the minting process instead of one strike.

A 2000-P 25C South Carolina (Regular Strike) had an auction record of over $3,000, according to the PCGS, valued due to its MS69 grade. Very few coins in this condition exist.

Estimated worth: $500-$2,500”

I peered at them with a magnifying glass but couldn’t really tell if it was valuable. We looked for a coin shop on line to see if we could get some assistance with grading the coins. There’s a coin and gun shop right here in town. Apparently, coin shops often deal in guns as well. The neighborhood looked a little rough.

So, I checked on the internet on a couple of coin collectors web sites and found an interesting YouTube on S. Carolina state quarters alone. There was a quarter worth about $3,500.

 I saw another one on eBay that somebody was asking $2,500 for. On the other hand, I found another seller who had a quarter going for $23.

We’re not sure if one of our quarters is worth grading. Here’s a picture of it:

Paranormal Productions: The Skunk Ape

Last night, I watched what I thought was a brand-new episode of Josh Gates’ series, Expedition X. It was titled “Beast of the Everglades” and it was about the skunk ape in the Florida everglades. Turns out the show originally aired in 2024, so I’m a little behind. You might want to watch it first before reading this post, because I’m going spill the lima beans about it.

Expedition X is all about chasing cryptids and in this episode the quarry is the skunk ape in the Florida. The skunk ape is a Bigfoot which desperately needs deodorant because it stinks to high heaven. Right from the beginning of the show, I thought of Dave Barry’s book, Best State Ever. A Florida Man Defends His Homeland. It was published in 2016. I used to have nearly every nonfiction book he published up until several years ago.

The aptly named relevant chapter in Barry’s book is “The Skunk Ape.” The book and the TV show intersect in the guy who sort of invented the story of the skunk ape, Dave Shealy, because his video of the cryptid is shown on the show and is widely available on the internet. He has a bit part in the show. He and the co-star Heather Amaro talk about the skunk ape briefly and he does have a piercing gaze, just as Barry describes in his book. Barry’s photo of Shealy in the book shows him wearing a pair of high boots—and he wore the same boots on the show. He didn’t talk about using lima beans as bait to attract the skunk ape on the show but he told Dave Barry about having used the vegetable.

That reminds me of the highly evolved and fancy technology that the stars, Phil Torres and Heather Amaro used in the show. Phil used a really cool, high-tech slingshot to shoot scent balls infused with the stink of 3 different animals (skunk, wild boar, and bear) into the brush to attract the skunk ape. It’s a lot more impressive than tossing out lima beans.

They also used a very expensive looking drone with a camera and caught video of something which looked to them like it was hustling across the marshes on two legs. I thought it looked like it was on four legs, but what do I know about drone video footage?

On the show, Phil and Heather found a few stinky nests which they suspected or at least wondered whether the skunk ape built and sat in. One or two of them I think were in tree tops although the trees were not that tall. I wondered about the relatively small size of the nests, given that the large size of the skunk ape—about 7 feet tall and over 400 lbs. (so, about the size of a typical NFL lineman), if I remember correctly (if that matters). It looked like the nest was about the size of a baby’s car seat.

There were small skeletons in it and one of them Phil identified as a baby alligator gar. That’s a prehistoric-looking animal resembling an alligator. They can grow to massive size. The little one was probably a snack which the skunk ape munched on while watching reruns of My Favorite Martian on the little portable TV, which was on the fritz at the time Phil checked. There were no lima beans in the nest, which means the creature cleaned its plate, which was neatly stacked with others in the tiny dishwasher.

Primates will eat stuff like that, according to a local animal expert on the show. But he politely speculated that the animal bounding across the everglades in Shealy’s video moved more like a person than an ape.

Phil got a few hairs from the grass out in the swamp, which was tested for DNA. It came back human. But since humans and apes share more than 98% of their DNA, that means the skunk ape legend remains intact.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “Flight 7500”!

The upcoming Svengoolie movie this coming Saturday is “Flight 7500.” It reminds me of one of our vacation trips when Sena asked for an extra bag of peanuts from the attendant, who promised she would return with another bag—and never did. Sena’s never forgotten that.

I think that’s kind of how things go on airplanes. I’m not big on airline food and not keen on flying at all. I remember sitting next to an elderly guy (Har! Look who’s talking!) who was probably more nervous about flying than I was (as if that were possible).

As we were taking off, he pressed a little button on his hand or his wrist (can’t remember exactly) that was attached to a wristband. I remember thinking it might have had something to do with acupressure points. I looked this up today and it turns out that there’s a point called Union Valley and it’s in the webbing between your thumb and index finger. Or maybe it was the Inner Frontier Gate point, which is about 3 finger widths below your wrist. I know it wasn’t the Shoulder Well point because that can induce labor. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t pregnant.

Anyway, this movie looks like it could make you nervous. It was released in 2014, which is pretty unusual for Svengoolie. On the other hand, it’ll be the Sven Squad that’ll be in charge of it because Svengoolie is taking the night off. I gather he’ll be doing that once a month now. The Sven Squad members are Nostalgiaferatoo, Imp (Ignatius Malvolio Prankenstein who calls Svengoolie his uncle), and Gwengoolie. They usually do the 2nd film of a double feature—which I can’t stay awake for.

I think Nostalgiaferatoo and Imp will play rock, paper, scissors more than 30,000 times to see who does most of the talking about the movie.

Anyway, the gist of the plot is that passengers start to feel a little queasy after their in-flight meal of beef jerky and turnip pastries and start hallucinating little monsters out on the wings which they keep telling the pilot about who is a little too busy to pay much attention because he’s distracted by the half-dozen or so UFOs zipping around just outside the front window which dodge the windshield wipers so fast it reminds him of the Men in Black movie in which Nick can’t clean off the bug parts of the big dragonfly that hits his window, so he has to take a break and orders his copilot to run back into the cabin and slap some of the passengers who are playing around with a Ouija Board and dousing rods, conjuring up demons who are demanding macaroni and cheese with Pepto-Bismol sauce, cheating at dominoes, and wondering when William Shatner is going to sign up for a sequel to the Twilight Zone smash hit, “And Don’t Call Me Shirley,” featuring a dozen or so nuns who are slapping the hysterical passengers who are unable to open the restroom door because Bigfoot is having THE USUAL PROBLEM of constipation from too much beef jerky…OK, I guess that’s not exactly how the movie goes, but I’m close!

Replace Sycophantic AI with Marvin the Paranoid Android?

I found the perfect JAMA article explaining that sycophancy is programmed into Artificial Intelligence (AI) therapy chatbots.

This reminded me of Marvin the paranoid android (“Life! Don’t talk to me about life!”) in the book series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Marvin is an incredibly depressed robot who would never make a good psychotherapist.

There’s even a Facebook page listing someone posts of questions to ChatGPT about non-inspirational quotes from Marvin.

If programmers can make sycophantic AI therapists, there should be a way to make them less sycophantic. For more specific information, you can check out this relatively recent article published in Psychiatric Times by Dr. Allen Francis, MD and Justin Angel, a tech expert. I would probably substitute the term “confabulation” for “hallucinations” in most places where you read the latter.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Skull”

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

I watched the Svengoolie movie, “The Skull” last night and it was fairly interesting in that the heirs of the Marquis de Sade, (whose skull the movie was about) actually forbade his name and title be mentioned in the 1965 advertisements in the French territories because he was never involved in devil worship.  However, he was not innocent of other badness and spent much of his life in and out of prisons and insane asylums.

Despite that, various people want his skull, the first of which was Pierre, a phrenologist (Maurice Good), who ended up getting killed shortly after he stole the head of the corpse of the Marquis de Sade, boiled off the skin, and after finding a few bumps and dips indicative of the guy’s craving for kale and turnips, ended up dying in the boiling peanut oil used to clean off the skull.

I guess the Skull (played by a skull) had supernatural powers connected to four statues of demons whose names are Moe, Larry, Shemp, and Curly Joe, which are bought at auction for a heck of a lot of money by Sir Matthew Phillips (Christoper Lee) who outbid Christopher Maitland (Peter Cushing), and the latter tried to win them from him in a long game of what looked like snooker. Neither could play worth a tinker’s damn yet one of the statues (Shemp) ends up in the hands of Maitland anyway because the skull can evidently move things around if you play spooky music while pointing a camera at it.

But an unsavory guy with a sinus problem (probably from snorting Copenhagen) named Anthony Marco (Patrick Wymark) winds up with the Skull and tries to sell it to Maitland for a 1000 pounds, an asking price which he quickly reduces to 500 pounds when Maitland refuses to lay out that much cash for a skull when he could order a full skeleton from Walmart for a fraction of the price. It turns out that Marco got the Skull because Sir Matthew Phillips allowed it to be stolen from him because it seemed to stare at him no matter where he stood in his parlor, putting him off his aim whenever he tried to play snooker.

Things get progressively creepier as the Skull is capable of hypnotizing everybody, especially Maitland, who hallucinates an endless game of rock, paper, scissors with a couple of fiends and a judge who tries to settle the situation by flipping a coin transforms it into a Star Trek phaser used in a Russian Roulette thing until Spock puts the Vulcan nerve pinch on the judge.

The showdown with the Skull comes to a head (see what I did there?) when it plays the song “Bone to be Wild” on its favorite musical instrument, the xy-lo-bone, with its chin.

So, this movie’s pretty dark but they do a fair job with the only prop, which is a skull. It could have been funnier. I give it a shrilling chicken rating of 2/5.

Shrilling Chicken Rating 2/5

Confabulation in Artificial Intelligence

I saw an excellent post on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Dr. George Dawson’s post today, “The Problems With AI Are More Readily Apparent.” He mentions AI producing confabulations which are sometimes called hallucinations in AI. I distinguish hallucinations from confabulations because the former are sensory or perceptual problems while confabulations are making things up. In dementia, confabulations are often described as attempts to fill in gaps in knowledge or memory without any intention to deceive.

I sometimes read that AI is being sycophantic in its interactions with humans, which sounds a little strange to me. The definition of sycophancy is more about trying to please someone else by being obsequiously flattering. It’s puzzling but I have gotten that impression from AI, yet it’s a machine and I don’t know how anyone would program AI to be sycophantic because it’s a human trait.

On the other hand, I got a comically sycophantic reply from AI to my question inquiring about the definition of Calvinball Cribbage. It’s just a made-up term and, to be fair, I’ve also gotten bluntly frank denials from AI that there is any such thing as Calvinball Cribbage.

As a reminder, Calvinball is a term that arose from a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. In the strip, the characters invent a game called Calvinball and the only rule is making up the rules as you go along, although there is a goal of capturing your opponent’s flag. But you can’t play it the same way twice.

The most recent hilarious AI confabulation I’ve previously posted about was when Sena and I played our game of 11-card cribbage. There are cribbage players out there who make fun of such variations from standard 6-card cribbage and the name for it from one such player was “Calvinball crib.” My simple question was as usual, “What is Calvinball Cribbage?” The reply is copied below:

“Calvinball Cribbage is a humorous mashup of the chaotic, rule-free game from Calvin & Hobbes with traditional Cribbage, often involving themed boards or rule modifications, where the core idea is applying Calvinball’s fluid, make-it-up-as-you-go spirit to Cribbage’s scoring and play, adding wild, non-sensical rules like using mallets, changing hand values, or scoring points for silly actions, making each round unique and unpredictable, not a single defined game but a creative approach to Cribbage. 

What it is (The Calvinball Aspect):

  • No Fixed Rules: Just like original Calvinball, there’s no single set of rules; the players invent them as they go.
  • Rule Changes: A key rule is that rules can’t be repeated, and players constantly invent new scoring, actions, or penalties.
  • Props & Actions: You might use mallets, balls, trees, or make up actions like “scoring three points for pointing at a cloud” or “losing a turn for looking left”. 

How it Applies to Cribbage:

  • Themed Boards: You can find or make custom cribbage boards featuring Calvin & Hobbes, adding visual flair.
  • Modified Scoring: Instead of just points for pairs and runs, you might add a “Hobbes Bonus” for a specific card or penalize for “too much logic”.
  • Strategic Chaos: Players still play cribbage (cards, pegs, crib), but the gameplay is constantly disrupted by invented rules, turning strategic plays into potential jokes or absurd victories. 

Example Calvinball Cribbage “Rules”:

  • “If you play a 7, you must hop on one foot until your next turn”.
  • “The crib gets 5 points if it contains a card with a face on it” (referencing Calvin’s drawings).
  • “A ‘skunk’ is achieved by making your opponent laugh out loud”. 

In essence, Calvinball Cribbage is about injecting unpredictable fun and silliness into the structured world of cribbage, making it a game of spontaneous creativity rather than strict strategy. “

This could be an example of sycophantic confabulation because almost all of it was probably cooked up by AI from scanning my blog posts about the subject. What’s a little eerie about it is that I never published any specific rules or strategies about the fictional game of Calvinball crib. You can actually find and purchase a Calvin and Hobbes cribbage board from a shop in Canada.

While this is an example of the occasional comicality of AI, that shouldn’t lead us to deny that it can do scary things, some of which Dr. Dawson describes. My early experiences a couple of years ago with what used to be called Google Bard were somewhat alarming because it confabulated then. And it still does.

Connections Between Psychiatry, Artificiality and Blues Music?

I heard a song on the KCCK Big Mo Blues Show that I first heard in June of 2025. The song is “Artificial” by Walter Trout.

At first blush, I agree with what I think is the point of the song, which is basically a protest against artificiality which could manifest in a range of ways from superficiality and dishonesty in communications, attitudes, style of clothing, relationships, and all the way to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The other connection I make is to the artist himself. Walter Trout developed Hepatitis C (eventually leading to liver transplant) according to a Wikipedia article which connected his lifestyle to contracting the disease. In my role as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I saw many patients with Hepatitis C who were referred to psychiatry from gastroenterology.

I was the main psychiatrist who evaluated them for treatment with Interferon-alpha. At the time it was the only treatment for Hepatitis C and was frequently associated with many side effects including depression. I was also one of the psychiatrists consulted as part of liver transplant evaluations.

Trout got very sick from Hepatitis C and made a remarkable (even miraculous) recovery after his liver transplant. Interferon is no longer used to treat Hepatitis C. It has been replaced by direct-acting antiviral (DAA) agents. They’re much better-tolerated and more effective.

The other aspect relevant to Trout’s song is ironic. The newest scientific literature supports the idea that AI can be helpful for diagnosing Hepatitis C, predicting its progression and response to treatment.

That doesn’t mean I’m completely sold on AI.

Aside from that, there’s interesting research suggesting that there may be a link between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and Hepatitis C infection (which could be hiding deep in the brain’s choroid plexus lining the cerebral ventricles). In other words, some people might have mental illness because of the liver disease itself.

If you think about the dictionary definition of the word “artificial,” you can hardly dismiss this kind of research as insincere.

Snow Squalls Predicted in Iowa Today!

The National Weather Service predicts “snow squalls” for parts of eastern Iowa today in the afternoon.

I’m only using this GIF because I couldn’t find one for the State Farm commercial captain “A squall’s a’comin’!

Sena recognized the guy in the GIF above as W.C. Fields and wondered if there were any other videos of this scene with audio as well. They aren’t hard to find.