Category: humor

The Cat is a Witness?

I have watched the Men in Black movies dozens of times, and I still get a little puzzled at the scene in which Agent J ask the deputy medical examiner (Laurel) where the cat Orion is.  Orion is carrying a tiny galaxy on its collar. You’ll have to see the movie to get the context about it.

Agent J asks where Orion is but the way he asks about it is odd. He says he’s looking for the cat because it’s a witness in a murder case and he needs to ask it some questions. Laurel doesn’t bat an eyelash and just says the cat’s not around but wants Agent J to take her with him instead.

Ok, I realize there are a lot of weird things in the MIB movies including a giant, ill-tempered talking cockroach. Nonetheless, it still seems out of place (at least to me) that he tells Laurel he wants to talk to a cat. Laurel has seen the little galaxy hanging from the cat’s collar. That doesn’t mean the cat talks. In fact, all Orion ever says is “meow.”

Why doesn’t Laurel ask why Agent J wants to try to ask a cat questions? After all, Agent K has neuralyzed her a couple of times, so she doesn’t remember seeing or hearing anything weird. I’ve scanned the internet to see if anybody else wonders about it. It looks like I’m the odd man out. You really need to see the scene and the movie for context. I didn’t see any comments about questioning the cat in a YouTube clip below, but I might have missed it.

Alcohol is Bad for Old Guys

I took a quick peek at the study published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that a few news agencies are reporting on which says alcohol in moderation is bad for older persons. So much for moderation.

Actually, the full abstract is:

Ortolá R, Sotos-Prieto M, García-Esquinas E, Galán I, Rodríguez-Artalejo F. Alcohol Consumption Patterns and Mortality Among Older Adults With Health-Related or Socioeconomic Risk Factors. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(8):e2424495. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.24495

“Conclusions and Relevance: In this cohort study of older drinkers from the UK, even low-risk drinking was associated with higher mortality among older adults with health-related or socioeconomic risk factors. The attenuation of mortality observed for wine preference and drinking only during meals requires further investigation, as it may mostly reflect the effect of healthier lifestyles, slower alcohol absorption, or nonalcoholic components of beverages.”

Conclusions: “This cohort study among older drinkers from the UK did not find evidence of a beneficial association between low-risk alcohol consumption and mortality; however, we observed a detrimental association of even low-risk drinking in individuals with socioeconomic or health-related risk factors, especially for cancer deaths. The attenuation of the excess mortality associated with alcohol among individuals who preferred to drink wine or drink only during meals requires further investigation to elucidate the factors that may explain it. Finally, these results have important public health implications because they identify inequalities in the detrimental health outcomes associated with alcohol that should be addressed to reduce the high burden of disease of alcohol use.”

The news stories play a little fast and loose with the headlines, which tend to gloss over the effect of health-related and socioeconomic risk factors. But, there’s no doubt in my mind that most people could do without alcohol.

Personally, I would have a couple of 12-ounce bottles of beers while watching football games or listening to the Big Mo Blues Show on KCCK Blues and Jazz Radio station on Friday nights. I hardly drank at all in terms of the grams per day metric.

But I’ve not imbibed since we got so busy selling our old house and camping out in a hotel while waiting for our new house to be built. Not surprisingly, I don’t miss it. When I was a young guy, I drank more and even smoked cigarettes. That was a long time ago.

In fact, when I look back on those days, I remember the factors that tended to limit my use of those substances. Take cigarettes—to the landfill if you don’t mind. I was what you would call a “sometimey smoker” because after a few days I suffered a sore throat, blunted taste for food, stuffy nose, lower appetite (bad for a baseline skinny guy) and fatigue. I just couldn’t stick with smoking long enough to make it a habit.

I’m going to pick on wine a little because the article alludes to the idea that it might have some health benefit. When I was a kid, I once had a lot too much wine which led to a longstanding inability to even stand the smell of it for years. I still never drink wine.

There are many things that can be habit forming. I’m beginning to wonder if watching Men in Black movies might be one of my weaknesses. I don’t watch any other movies as often as I do the MIB trilogy films. I’ve watched them dozens of times and I don’t have a good explanation for it. I think they’re funny and I can always use a good laugh.

Agent K: After neuralyzing Officer James Edwards, he and Agent K are finishing a meal in a café while K is delivering the punchline to a joke, “Honey, this one’s eating my popcorn! Get it?” Agent K laughs uproariously.

Officer James Edwards: Looking dazed from the recent neuralyzer blast, asks “Who are you?”

Agent K: “You see, James, you are a nice young man, but you—need to lay off the sauce.”

The quote is probably not word for word. I didn’t look it up on the web. It’s just as I remember from seeing the movie so often. And that’s partly because, for the most part, I lay off the sauce.

Bird Watching Stories Are Like Fishing Tales

We finally got a couple of videos of a goldfinch! It has been years since I’ve been able to catch a brilliant male goldenrod and it happened last week on the Clear Creek Trail.

In fact, we saw a few birds with the usual idiosyncratic behavior. Goldfinch are rocket fast and hate getting caught on camera.

On the other hand, robins seem to be aware of when they’re being watched and ham it up.

Catbirds also seem to know when they’re being observed and flit away just as I’m getting the camera focused. The one I caught seemed to moon me with its rusty-feathered rump as it took off.

Cardinals also show off and can sit for several minutes preening while you get decent footage.

Birdwatching is a lot like fishing. When you tell others about the whoppers you lost at the lake, it’s a lot like birders telling you about the rarely seen, mysterious birds everyone but experts almost always never see.

And I swear I saw a blue bunting while we were out that day. It flew right in front of me. You should have been there. I haven’t seen a blue bunting in decades!

I almost got the shot.

Practicing the Reverse Cascade Juggling Pattern

I’ve been practicing the reverse cascade lately. It’s slow progress but faster than the shower pattern.

You start with the regular cascade pattern and gradually work into making every throw over the top instead of under.

I still do a lot of windmilling. I’ll get there-I think.

Excelsior!

The health benefits of climbing stairs are well known and I’ve talked about them before. However, you haven’t really seen stair climbing in action until you’ve watched Sena ascend the stairs in our hotel.

There are 4 flights of 10 steps each. Doing it just once can puff you out. The keyword for this is “excelsior” which is Latin for “ever upward.”

Have a little sympathy for the cameraman who had to walk backward up the stairs, which is no small feat.

Thoughts as Train Cars Visualization in Mindfulness Meditation

The Iowa Interstate Railroad train rumbles past our hotel a few times a day and it reminds me of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course I took 10 years ago. One of the exercises the instructor mentioned was the train visualization mindfulness exercise. I don’t know if I remember what our instructor actually said about it, probably something like what the instructor says in a mindfulness video.

One thing I do remember is that it’s OK to notice my thoughts as train cars running through my head. The other thing is the train cars can sort of hijack me and off I go on a tangent, like a hobo hopping a freight car. And, what if also I notice the spaces between the train cars? What would that be like?

The side of my nose itches.

My left eye is tearing up.

What can I do about anything?

Are we all alone in the universe?

Why is David Attenborough’s voice so calming?

Why do I joke around so much?

Even after 10 years of mindfulness practice, I still notice my thoughts jumping around. I’m still hopping from box car to box car.

Dirty Laundromania

Because we’re staying in a hotel waiting for our house to be built, we have to take a different approach with our laundry. There are laundry facilities at the hotel, but there aren’t many machines. Sena usually takes it to a place called Laundromania. The motto is “We Never Clothes.”

I went with her the other day for the first time. There are a lot of machines. As it turns out, there’s also a lot of history at Laundromania. Back in 2008, Iowa City suffered a major flood and Laundromania was under water for a while. There’s even a picture inside of the water line painted on one of the windows. We remember that time. What a mess. You can see a very dirty sign that was framed and which describes the flood.

Laundromania is a modern facility. You can put your cash into a machine which pushes out a sort of debit card-which can only be used in Laundromania. You want to be careful with that. Depending on how long you live in the neighborhood, it could be either a good or a bad thing.

Even though it’s a modern facility, Laundromania does have some quirks. The day we were there, we tried to use a dryer which turned out to have a broken door latch. We lost a little money in it. Sena put one of the Out of Service signs on it. There’s no on-site manager there but, coincidentally, shortly after she put the sign on the dryer, the service guy showed up. I guessed he fixed it.

For a short time, I tried to keep track of the dryer time using the old analog clock on the wall. Two things wrong with that: the clock doesn’t work and all the machines have digital timers on them anyway.

You can buy laundry detergent and other stuff there from a vending machine, but they’re pretty expensive.

There are a couple of old grade school desks that bring back memories. One of them is pretty dirty.

If you’re ever in Iowa City and you need to do your dirty laundry, try Laundromania.

Verbal De-escalation Education Videos

I was looking at the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (ACLP) and discovered a free online video educational series on verbal de-escalation of agitated patients. It reminded me of my own early attempts to educate trainees about this very important topic (see my post “A Little Too Exuberant”).

The Simpson et al presentation includes 5 free online videos. The first one is below.

Simpson, Scott & Sakai, Joseph & Rylander, Melanie. (2019). A Free Online Video Series Teaching Verbal De-escalation for Agitated Patients. Academic Psychiatry. 44. 10.1007/s40596-019-01155-2.

Flora and Fauna Under the Hot Iowa Sun

The other day we walked the Terry Trueblood Trail (when do we not do that?) and saw interesting sights. I finally got a video clip of a goldfinch! And a male northern cardinal either sang to us or cussed us out. It was hard to tell.

It was a scorcher out there. We started out looking for a walking trail a guy gave us directions to a week or so ago. It’s a great place for birding. We found it, but here was no parking anywhere close. He told us that we could park in a farmer’s field, but we saw the farmer out there and decided not to chance it.

While we were out doing that, we drove by a cornfield, which really impressed Sena because we could drive right up close to it. She’s never detasseled corn. I have and I don’t think she missed anything. I walked the rows with fellow detasselers and we yanked them. We were in rows right next to each other. We could hear each other collapse from time to time from exhaustion. When you pulled the tassels out, they sort of squeaked. You could hear us: Squeak, squeak, squeak, thud.

On the other hand, we had a pretty good day birding out at Trueblood. I got a better video clip of a dickcissel.  We saw a couple of geese scare a turtle off a rock in Sand Lake. We didn’t notice it at the time, but saw it on the video clip after we got home (which is still the hotel, by the way).

We saw several dickcissels. We still don’t think they sound like they’re singing “dick, dick, dick.” I think that’s a load of squeak, squeak, squeak. They are pretty birds, though.

Art in the Parks So Far 2024

We were driving by the Terry Trueblood Trail on July 28th and Sena noticed there was a new sculpture. We’ve been on the lookout for the new Art in the Parks collection since the announcement in May.

The anticipated opening date is August 7, 2024, but it looks like the artists are already getting started. Not all the new pieces we saw had title plaques yet, but there were 6 of them and they are very interesting.

We visited the parks earmarked in previous years: Terry Trueblood Recreational Area, Riverfront Crossings Park, Iowa River Corridor Trail, Mercer Park, and Scott Park.

So far, Tim Adams’s work, “Exuberance,” at Mercer Park is Sena’s favorite, although I think the sculpture of me and Herky is pretty good.

It was wicked hot, in the 90s and we saw a kid out at Mercer Park selling lemonade! Can you believe it? I peddled papers but I never sold lemonade. I figured he would charge a buck, but it was only 50 cents. He got a tip, believe me!