humor – Page 96 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

How Many Fallen Angels Can Twerk on The Point of a Pin?

Okay, so the title sounds familiar but it’s wrong. And why does it matter? For the record, the actual quote is more like “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It comes from philosophers in the Middle Ages. Before I get to the point of all this nonsense, I have to tell you I was shocked to find an actual equation formulated by a guy named Anders Sandberg that can help us find the answer—if we ask the right question. Sandberg says we can get the right answer if we reformulate the question. This would mean you can’t use the head of the pin, but should use the point.

That makes so much sense. Why didn’t I think of that?

Anyway, Sena found an article (“Humanity Will Need to Survive About 400,000 Years if We Want any Chance of Hearing from an Alien Civilization”) that says something called the Drake Equation shows that it’ll take about 400,000 years before we have contact with an alien civilization. The Drake Equation tries to estimate how many Communicating Extraterrestrial Intelligent Civilizations (CETIs) there are. The equation has been called flawed because of the unpredictability of quantifying the probability life may appear on a suitable planet. It’s a matter of conjecture. I don’t get the math, but the concept is interesting.

Now the author of this blog post (it’s actually a WordPress blog called Universe Today) cites a study from a couple of researchers that essentially ask a different question, mathematically speaking. The researchers think of this as a thought experiment and give a rather pessimistic outlook on the whole thing.

Now look back at a 2016 New York Times article, “Yes, There Have Been Aliens,” an opinion piece written by astrophysics professor Adam Frank. He is more optimistic about the Drake Equation and cautions us to “…ask the right question.”

You’ll have to subscribe to the New York Times if you can’t read Frank’s full opinion piece in one sitting. Not that I have any dispute with him, but this reminds me of Agent K in Men in Black who praised supermarket tabloids as having the “Best investigative reporting on the planet; read the New York Times if you want, they get lucky sometimes.”

Again, the math is beyond my little pinhead, but Frank was a lot more optimistic about contacting aliens. It sounds like the outlook on this depends a lot on how you set up the equation. Get the point?

Now, haven’t these guys checked the news and watched the paranormal TV shows? Are they not aware of the large population of UFO watchers out there? One source says that Canadians are spotting up to 3 UFOs a day.

Hey, aliens even stop to admire our lawns. Giorgio Tsoukalos, AKA, the hair guy, from Ancient Aliens would say the aliens contacted us a long time ago. So, why do we need the Drake Equation?

That’s why we need to ask the right question. So how many times do aliens grab their groins while rapping unintelligible lyrics on the point of a pin?

That’s right; the answer is zero—aliens don’t have groins. You’re welcome.

Featured image picture credit: Pixydotorg.

Making The Tear Drop Jim Picture

I had so much fun making the picture of me crying me, meaning what I now call Tear Drop Jim, as the featured image for my blog post, “Jim’s Only Kidding Endlessly” (which by the way contains the acronym JOKE).

The tearing and light sensitivity after the retinal detachment surgery was a nuisance. It’s gradually resolving.

I made a screen recorder video of how I created the image using PowerDirector 17.

Jim’s Only Kidding Endlessly

Title: Jim’s Only Kidding Endlessly

It has been a little over 3 weeks since my retinal detachment surgery. I got a scleral buckle and didn’t need a vitrectomy in which you get a gas or oil bubble placed and have to keep your head down which would have made it even easier for me to not see dirt.

By the way, I mostly complied with the postoperative recommendation against lifting anything over 20 pounds. However, a few days after surgery I felt like I could restart with half my usual exercise routine so I tried 30 reps each of 800-pound squats, 600-pound curls, 1200-pound bench presses, and I guess about a half hour into that routine, my scleral buckle popped out, ricocheted off a couple of walls and the ceiling, landing on the floor. Boy, I cleaned that mess up right away, but had a little trouble getting it buckled up again. It’s tricky doing that in front of a mirror.

It’s normal to have a lot of tearing after this kind of surgery. I looked like I was crying constantly out of one eye for a good two weeks after the procedure. It’s gradually slowing down. I quit taking one or two doses of acetaminophen a day for pain after two weeks.

I don’t see the shadow in the top part of my visual field anymore. I noticed that after only a few days, at least after the swelling went down enough so that I could at least open my eye. I was pretty light sensitive, but that’s eased off.

But I cried a river for a couple of weeks. I dabbed at the runoff with a lot of tissues, which I suspect contributed to the irritation. After a while I wondered whether there might be another procedure which could slow it down or at least divert the flood.

You could name the procedure Retinal Implant Diverting Irritating Cascading Unrelenting Liquid Ophthalmic Urinary System. Of course, this would divert tear flow to your bladder.

I suppose that might make you run frequently to the bathroom instead of to the tissue box.

The other option would be to divert the tear runoff to a small tank (hangs on your belt) of reverse-engineered alien ray gun chemical ammo which, as everyone knows, reacts with the acidic tears and can kill dandelions and crabgrass from about 50 yards as well as deodorize Bigfoot.

The federal government denies all of this, but the Freedom of Information act allowed me to obtain documents which, despite the heavily redacted content, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that I should be the star of my own paranormal TV show.

Thank you for your time.

Chin Technique for Sofa Table Assembly

There are a few handy man jobs Sena lets me do around the house. They tend to be chores like Knock Down Furniture assembly. The most recent job was a small sofa table. You know, usually the companies send you a cheap tool to put things like this together. This time they didn’t enclose a hex head wrench—because they didn’t use hex head screws. The sofa table came with Phillips head screws—but no Phillips head screwdriver. No problem; I have one of those.

In the video I made, I mention the chin technique to use when you’re putting stuff like this together by yourself. You just hold on to the parts with your chin pressing against your shoulder. I don’t have a patent on it yet.

CrossCribb Marathon Rookies

We finally started making a video of us playing CrossCribb. It took a while, partly because it takes more time to finish a game than we thought it would. If we’re playing it right, each hand or round takes about 8-10 minutes including scoring. We figure you’re supposed to play to 31, according to the rules. We played and filmed 6 rounds before our camera’s battery had to be recharged. We were 30-29 at that point with me leading.

Later when the battery was recharged, we played the 7^th round. I won by a nose.

I’m not sure that making an hour long CrossCribb video will win any academy awards so I might plan this as a series of videos, one per round.

Playing it is a lot of fun! No wonder it has won awards. Knowing how to count cribbage points in cards gives you a leg up on playing and scoring.

You can find the rules on the web site.

Break The Retirement News Gently to Doctors

I’ve seen several articles on Medscape about how to convince doctors to retire or even force them to retire when they’re too old to practice. The articles are titled, “How Old Is Too Old to Work as a Doctor?”; “Are Aging Physicians a Burden?”; and “When Should Psychiatrists Retire?”

The Great Resignation almost makes the debates about this moot. Doctors, including psychiatrists, are retiring or quitting in droves because of burnout, largely related to the stress of the Covid-19 pandemic in the last two years. However, a lot of physicians were quitting medicine even prior to the pandemic.

The same arguments get trotted out. Doctors often lack insight into their failing cognition and physical health as they age. How do we respectfully assess and inform them of their deficits? Are there gentle ways to move them away from active medical, surgical, and psychiatric practice and into mentoring roles to capitalize on their strengths in judgment and experience?

The decision to persuade some doctors to retire, not so much because of advancing chronological age but because of dwindling cognitive capacity and other essential skills, needs to be handled with empathy and wisdom, especially if this is going to increase the workload for the rest of the doctors holding the fort.

Like the song says, “Break it to Me Gently.”

And speaking of songs, this doctor retirement discussion reminded me of a song I heard on TV when I was a kid. I could remember just one line, “Your Love is Like Butter Gone Rancid.”

I thought I heard it on an episode of an old TV sitcom, The Real McCoys. In fact, it was from a 1968 episode of the Doris Day Show called The Songwriter. Hey, we watched what my mom wanted to watch.

The song’s awful lyrics, which Doris Day “wrote” (only as part of the show; it was actually written by Joseph Bonaduce) were tied to the melody of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”:

Your love is like butter gone rancid,

It’s no good now, it’s started to turn,

I pray that it’s just like the man said,

You can’t put it back in the churn

Can’t put

Can’t put it back in the churn

Oh, durn!

You can’t put it back…in the churn

The context here is that another character (Leroy) in the show had previously submitted the lyrics of a similarly bad song (“Weeds in the Garden of My Heart”) to a crooked music publishing company that lavishly praised the song and promised to publish it—at Leroy’s expense.

Leroy was clueless about getting cheated. He was too dumb to know how bad the song was, but his feelings would have been badly hurt if the family just flatly told him that. They had to figure out a way to break it to him gently. So, Doris wrote the equally terrible “Your Love is Like Butter Gone Rancid,” and performed it for Leroy and the rest of the family. Leroy thought Doris Day’s song was garbage but didn’t know how to tell her without hurting her feelings.

Doris then told Leroy she was also going to submit her rancid song to the crooked publishing company.

After Doris got the exact same letter the crooked company sent to Leroy—he learned his lesson and felt supported, gosh darn.

Anyway, I was moved to write a short song about the doctor retirement issue, “When Doctors Are Too Old to Practice,” sung to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” of course:

When doctors are too old to practice

And can’t tell your elbows from knees

When they sing old songs to distract us

It’s high time we tell them to leave

High time

It’s high time we tell them to leave

Oh, beans!

It’s high time we tell them…to leave

I’ve received hundreds of billions of requests for a sing-a-long version of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” because you can’t sing the parodies unless you know the original tune.

Here you go!

You’re welcome.

Featured image picture credit: Pixydotorg.

Practicing CrossCribb and Kings Cribbage

We’ve been practicing CrossCribb and Kings Cribbage. They don’t play anything like regular cribbage, but they’re both really fun.

CrossCribb plays faster than Kings Cribbage so we played it first. Although we weren’t sure what the rule meant by saying one way to win is by “15 points or less” in a game that goes only to 31 points, we still thought it made us think about our strategy—for blocking each other.

What confused us at first is which side of the board each of is supposed to play on. In the two-player version, you sort of sit kitty corner, catty corner, or kattywumpus to each other, depending on what part of the United States you’re from. This is because one person faces the columns marked with circles and the other faces the columns marked with diamonds. That’s what the instructions tell you.

Like in regular cribbage, you choose the dealer by cutting the deck and low card gets the deal. Deal 14 cards each face down and no peeking. Non-dealer cuts and dealer turns over the cut card as usual, but places it in the center of the board.

Non-dealer leads by playing a card to anywhere on the board, which is divided into 5×5 grid, which will give 5 hands to each player to score after cards are played to each rectangular spot. You alternate play but you have to remember to toss two of your cards to the dealer’s crib, which are placed under the very handsome Dealer’s Crib chip, which reminds you of Las Vegas.

The idea is to strategically place your cards to build high scoring cribbage hands while blocking your opponent from doing the same.

The center row and column will score the Nob Jack point for you if you play a card on one of those spots. Remember, the cut card is in the center and if it’s a Jack, the dealer scores two points. However, these are not scored until after all the hands are formed on the board.

You win if you get to 31 first, which is marked in a little schematic of a cribbage scoring board on the scoresheet. However, you also win if:

You win by 15 points or less (we confess we’re not sure yet how that works)

You win by 16 points or more, which is a skunk

You win by 31 points, which is a double skunk

We each won a game, if we played it right. We’ll get this sorted out before we make a video—we hope.

Kings Cribbage is a slower game. We played for what felt like almost an hour and a half. It seemed a little more difficult to get the hang of it, even though we play Scrabble, and Kings Cribbage is a marriage of Scrabble and Cribbage. You form cribbage hands instead of words.

The tiles are made of wood, with two different colors to represent two different suits so you can’t peek when you pick your five tiles. The tiles represent cards. First you each pick tiles to see who plays first. Low tile gets first play and can play two to five tiles anywhere on the board as long as they make valid cribbage hands. After that you can play from one to five tiles, replenishing after each play.

The board rotates so you can see what you’re doing. The first player gets a 10-point bonus right off the bat—which helped me. Normally, I lose about every Scrabble game we play, but I won this time, even without the bonus. You can only play cribbage hands that are at most five tiles long.

Those of you who know how to play each of these games can check our work. We’d appreciate it if you commented on any mistakes you find.

Cribbage Revival!

I ran across this article in the Portland Press Herald the other day about the renaissance of cribbage since the pandemic began a couple of years ago. It was about that time that Sena and I began again to play cribbage (in November of 2019 to be exact) after about 20 years hiatus.

We picked up the basic rules fairly quickly. It takes a while to master the game though. We are by no means masters.

In the story there is speculation that they can tell that there has been about a 20% increase in interest in cribbage because that’s about the rate at which new cribbage boards are being purchased. It’s assumed that once you have a cribbage board you don’t really want or need another one.

That’s not the case with me and Sena. We’ve purchased about a half a dozen over the last two years. To be sure, they’re not all boards. The Chicago Cribbage game variant doesn’t have a board with it but has several modifications of the rules as well as handsome cards. And we’re going to get a couple of cribbage board games, Kings Cribbage and CrossCribb.

The comments are very interesting below the story. One person claimed that his grandfather abruptly stopped teaching him cribbage when he got 29 scores in both the hand and the crib. Another commenter pointed out that this was mathematically impossible since you’d have to have more than 7 fives in the deck. Another commenter indicated that it was possible. I’m not sure what to say about the knowledge base of some cribbage players.

The story quotes David Aiken, a board member of the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) and editor of Cribbage World. He said that cribbage has been an older person’s game, for the most part. A lot of the cribbage clubs that had sponsored tournaments stopped hosting them. But that’s starting to turn around.

The story also says that cribbage takes a long time to learn and that it’s about equal parts luck and skill.

That got me to searching around on the web for other stories about cribbage and it finally led me to a story about a guy named Rollie Heath.

Rollie says the game is about 90% luck and about 15 percent skill. That’s pretty darn close to what another cribbage master said about the breakdown of luck and skill, Frank Lake. Rally mentioned the Theory of 26. This was invented by another cribbage master named DeLynn Colvert. I have Colvert’s book but have not read the chapter on the Theory of 26. Nor do I plan to, anytime soon. The gist of it is that luck controls most of the game and skill revolves around each player fighting over the 10 or so points that can actually be controlled by how you play the cards you’re dealt—I think.

Okay, okay, so I’ll read a little bit about Colvert’s 26 Theory to you. Colvert says, per hand that the non-dealer will peg on average 10.2 points. The dealer will peg 16.2 points per hand on average. Every two deals the average points add up to 26.4. Colvert goes on to say:

“The cribbage law of averages dictates that the dealer will win the game by scoring his crib hand on the 9^th deal. The non-dealer will be about five (5.2) points short after counting first on the ninth hand. And this crucial five points will, on the average, caused the non-dealer to lose 56 games of 100 (skill levels being equal, of course). These averages are the foundation of the “Twenty Six Theory.”

I could probably sound real smart here by saying that nobody plays a purely statistical average game. But I’m not going to cop out. I’m just not smart enough to use the 26 Theory. More than anything, Sena and I play cribbage just for fun. I think that’s what most of us do.

On the other hand, Rollie Heath has been inducted into the ACC Hall of Fame. Maybe we should ask Rollie whether you can have 29 scores in both your hand and your crib.

Unboxing The Lucid Mattress Topper

Remember the Zinus platform bed and mattress (bed in a box) story? The mattress was a little on the firm side for Sena, so she ordered a Lucid 3-inch gel foam topper for it.

We got it. It’s a memory foam mattress topper, with cooling gel and aloe infused with a plush cover. It was coiled up in box, and exploded like a nuclear bomb after we opened it. We’ll have to replace the bedroom wall, but otherwise it’s a pretty nice little topper.

Just kidding.

Lucid gives you a handy little knife to cut the plastic, which worked pretty slick. The memory foam has ventilation holes to release the heat that can build up, create a 4 alarm fire, burn down your house, make you homeless for a couple years, living in a refrigerator carton over a sidewalk sewer grate which on average allows one person to fall through every 20 months in case you’re wondering, leading to meeting new people occasionally who report you to the police, who arrest you for vagrancy, though most judges are lenient, resulting in a 3 day stay hotel voucher where you can pick up a few square meals and a dozen or so bedbugs, sending you the hospital ER for treatment, after which a social worker arranges for you to move into a low budget condo with a Home Owners Association with rules against platform beds with memory foam toppers, protecting you for life as long as you don’t plant creeping charley in your side yard.

The topper flattened out in about half an hour. Sena was having to sort of jump up to get on the bed before, so now she’ll need a stepladder or a jet pack.

Lucky Spring Birds Are Back!

We finally got a sunny break yesterday and headed out to the Terry Trueblood Trail for a walk. It was good to stretch our legs. The spring birds are back. The Tree Swallow nest boxes are installed, although one of them was upside down. I’m not sure how that happens. A sparrow chased one of the swallows off, probably staking a claim on one of the nest boxes. Lucky break for the sparrow. Lucky for all that the nest boxes were available; unlucky if some are upside down, though.

The great weather was a lucky break, actually. Rain is in the forecast for the next couple of days. Talk about luck. We both got lucky playing cribbage the other day. Sena got a double run of 2 through 5 counting the cut card—and so did I. We both got 12 points. I had the crib, and got 12 more. Neither of us can recall what we threw to my crib.