The snowfall this morning looked pretty gentle out in our backyard—and then the storm hit the gas. Around 7:30 a.m. the wind was barely blowing and the first snow looked slow.
A half hour later, it was blowing sideways and the plow had just plugged our driveway (Thank you so much!).
Across the street, kids came out to play while the snow was blowing. The neighborhood is still pretty new and pretty much under construction, so not much of a place to play yet.
Sena and I remember going to an outdoor skating area at East Park in Mason City when we were kids. It was really just a pond. Park staff pushed the snow away when the ice was thick enough to skate on. Lots of kids skated there and it was free.
It’s not like nowadays. The ice skating rink at the mall not far from us charges you just to fall down on the ice. I think they charge $7 admission and $3 to rent skates. Skating coaches charge $6—I don’t know if that’s an hourly rate or flat fee.
Anyway, at East Park back in the day you could fall down on the ice for free.
Sena saw a news headline about the new hands-free driving law in Iowa that’s going to be enforced in 2026 (passed in July of this year). Guilty drivers are going to get socked with a $100 fine if they’re caught messing with their cell phones with their hands off the wheel because they might think “hands-free” means you can’t touch the steering wheel.
Drivers have been getting off with a warning for now. Hundreds of people in Iowa die every year because they fool with their cell phones while driving.
You can download a variety of free materials from the Iowa Dept. of Public Safety.
And of course, this reminds me of a Men in Black 3 quote (why not?):
Agent J: Okay! You know how you’re on a airplane and the flight attendant asks you to turn your cell-phone off. And you’re like, I ain’t turning my cell-phone off, that don’t have nothing to do with no damn airplane. Well, [Showing the crowd a crashed spaceship] this is what we get, that’s what happens. It gets up there, bounces around on the satellites, then blam! Just turn your damn cell-phone off. Now you’re gonna drive off a cliff tonight because your GPS don’t work.
The thing about GPS reminds me of a Garmin Nuvi navigator we used years ago. We could plug it into the cigarette lighter power outlet. I had to update the map data from the internet although the Garmin used satellite-based GPS signals to manage the turn-by-turn route instructions.
It worked just fine except when airplane passengers used their cell phones to play Men in Black movies after the flight attendants instructed everybody to turn them off. Most people don’t know that kind of behavior also automatically releases the frozen block of blue ice (waste) from the toilet right over Area 51 (just kidding—actually the wings just fall off!).
I’ve used my old cell phone to get directions driving once or twice but not recently. I set it in the cup holder and never took my hands off the wheel—even when I drove through the front window of Pizza Hut.
So, if you happen to be driving through Iowa in the near future, remember to abide by the new law, which doesn’t mean you can get hands for free at the discount store.
We recently found out that pennies are being take out of circulation. In fact, the last day they stopped minting them was on our 48th wedding Anniversary this month, November 12, 2025! There may be a reason to save the 2025 pennies, according to some folks.
We have a piggy bank and I rolled up our saved coins last year. We had $55 worth. It feels fairly heavy now and we wondered if we had any 2025 pennies.
I wasn’t eager for the task, but there was another reason to tackle it again—we wondered if we had any pennies from 1977.
I forgot how tedious this chore was. I spent a long time peering at the pennies with a magnifying glass hunting for any minted in 2025 before I ever got busy rolling the coins into those pesky little sleeves.
I found one from 1969 which reminded me of the Men in Black 3 movie (what doesn’t remind me of MIB movies?). The scene is Agent J and Jeffrey Price on top of the Chrysler building when Agent J is about to do the time jump thing:
Jeffrey Price: Do not lose that time device or you will be stuck in 1969! It wasn’t the best time for your people. I’m just saying; it’s like a lot cooler now.
As if in confirmation, I found a few from the mid-late 20th century and beyond as well as a few marking other important historical events:
1959: Alaska becomes the 49th state; Hawaii becomes the 50th state
1960: Greensboro sit-in by 4 black college students at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, starting a nationwide civil rights movement
1964: President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act; Martin Luther King Jr. wins the Nobel Peace Prize
1975: Microsoft founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen; Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win at Wimbledon tennis championship
1976: First women inducted into the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point
2001: 9/11 attack on America
I found one from 1985 when I graduated from Iowa State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in 1985. I found another from 1988; the year I started medical school in Iowa City. I accidentally broke the arm of our cadaver in gross anatomy. I also found one from 1996, when I graduated from the psychiatry residency program at University of Iowa. Dr. George Winokur had just stepped down from being department of psychiatry chair and he encouraged me to apply for a position at Iowa.
But the best penny find was the one from 1977, when Sena and I got married. What a coincidence that the U.S. Mint stopped making pennies on November 12, 1977—the anniversary day of our wedding.
I rolled $16.50 in coins this time, but there was plenty left over (including pennies) that wouldn’t fill the sleeves.
Today is our 48th wedding anniversary! I looked through a bunch of photos last night and probably picked all the wrong ones—but I doubt it’ll matter. It has been 48 years, so I’m unlikely to learn from mistakes now.
We were married at the Little Brown Church in Nashua, Iowa. We were nervous, but got through our vows, rang the bell, and cut the wedding cake. We are thankful for friends who were there for us and shared the joy.
We’ve been to a lot of places and had a lot of fun. Times are not always easy. We get through them.
I’m happy and grateful for this funny, crazy woman who wins a lot of cribbage games with me and does more for my soul than I can ever say.
I stopped by the Storyshucker blog today and it sent me on a wave of nostalgia. You really out to stop by Stuart Perkins’ blog and get that feeling. You can read his post, “Baby Bear” in The Local Scoop Magazine. The link is on my menu, so there’s no excuse!
Stuart has his baby bear and, although I don’t have keepsakes going that far back, it sent me back. It reminded me of our last move (I hate moving!). We have this piggy bank we toss loose change into. I can’t remember when we first got it, ages ago. When we moved last year, we tried to get all the coins in it into our bank, but they wouldn’t just count them and deposit the amount—I had to learn how to roll and wrap them myself! That’s not a great memory.
I had a spark plug gap measuring tool and that was back in the day when guys adjusted stuff like that by hand when tuning up their car engines. It’s a good thing I don’t do that anymore. I accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake one time and put a dent in the garage wall. That’s not such a great memory, either.
We used to have an old vintage calculator I used when I was a student at Iowa State University. Memories linked to that are a little better.
We lose track of some things from our past and that can be a good thing occasionally. Guys like Stuart know what’s worth keeping.
Sena alerted me to an article about the 28th anniversary of when the first Men in Black movie hit the theaters in 1997. The author praises it and says it’s still pretty good.
I can’t remember the first time I saw it, but it was probably not in 1997. I was in my second year of being an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics (now called University of Iowa Health Care). I was too busy to do much of anything except run around the hospital responding to requests for psychiatry consultations from medicine and surgery. I did that a long time.
I’ve been blogging since 2010. I cancelled my first blog which was called The Practical Psychosomaticist. I then restarted blogging, calling it Go Retire Psychiatrist. One blog that pays homage to my career and to the Men in Black films is “The Last White Coat I’ll Ever Wear.”
It’s part reminiscence and part comedy in the style of Men in Black dialogue and jokes. Since I retired, I have not been back to the hospital except for scheduled appointments in the eye and dentistry clinics. I don’t know if I’ve ever reconciled myself to being retired. If someone were to tell me “We have a situation and we need your help” (think Men in Black II), I would probably say something like “There is a free mental health clinic on the corner of Lilac and East Valley.”
I saw a couple of web resources about staying healthy and fit that seem to make sense to me. One of them was actually a YouTube video by a personal trainer advising people to stop doing certain kinds of workouts that could be unhealthy. He recommended avoiding certain kinds of weight lifting exercises, especially for those over 40. I’m way over 40 and I agreed with him.
The video was posted about 2 months ago and there are so far 725,000 view and well over 2,000 comments, both for and against the trainer’s advice. Many of the older commenters disagreed with slowing down after the age of 40.
I’m 70 and I’m a minimalist when it comes to exercising. I’ve slowed down from daily exercise, but I still enjoy juggling, riding an exercise bicycle, limited use of dumbbells, body weight squats, a step platform routine, planks, stretching and wrestling grizzly bears. I occasionally go for walks when the weather permits.
I remember trying to lift really old barbells in the free weight room at the YMCA when I was a kid. I dropped them once and the director directed me out of the room. After they got a weight machine, a guy bet me and a friend a dollar that he could jump over a broom handle (in another variant of this stunt you try to jump over a dollar bill, I think) while bent over and grasping his toes. He did it but we couldn’t. We didn’t pay him any money. I still can’t do that trick. Nobody recommends doing this as a regular fitness exercise.
On the other hand, patient YMCA teachers taught me how to swim and helped me get over my severe headaches related to my initial fear of the water.
The other web source is an article that actually recommends we stop focusing on working out. In fact, the title is “Stop focusing on working out”—a professor says you should follow these five science-backed steps to improve your wellness instead.”
There are so far no comments on it. The authors have five suggestions:
Make movement fun
Be socially active
Use mindfulness as a stress buster
Be kind to yourself and others
Prioritize quality sleep
The last one usually is difficult for me. Ever since kindergarten, when the teacher wanted the class to take a nap, I’ve had trouble sleeping. The teacher never understood that. I also tend to be shy. I like playing cribbage, though my wife is my only partner. I still practice mindfulness meditation. Juggling is a fun movement activity and it’s also beneficial exercise.
I think it might be a little safer to try to jump over a dollar bill while squatting and grabbing your toes than squatting with barbells if you’re 70. You’re welcome. That’ll be one dollar, please.
I’ve been reading about artificial intelligence (AI) in general and its healthcare applications. I tried searching the web in general about it and got the message: “An AI Overview is not available for this search.”
I’m ambivalent about that message. There are a couple of web articles, one of which I read twice in its entirety, “Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?” The other, “AI, Health, and Health Care Today and Tomorrow: The JAMA Summit Report on Artificial Intelligence”was so long and diffuse I got impatient and tried to skip to the bottom line—but the article was a bottomless pit. The conflict-of-interest disclosures section was overwhelmingly massive. Was that part of the reason I felt like I had fallen down the rabbit hole?
I recently signed an addendum to my book contract for my consult psychiatry handbook (published in 2010, for heaven’s sake) which I hope will ultimately protect the work from AI plagiarism. I have no idea whether it can. I delayed signing it for months, probably because I didn’t want to have anything to do with AI at all. I couldn’t discuss the contract addendum with my co-editor Dr. Robert G. Robinson MD about the contract addendum because he died on December 25, 2024.
I found out today the book is old enough to find on the Internet Archive as of a couple of years ago. One notice about it says “Borrow Unavailable” and another notice says “Book available to patrons with print disabilities.”
All I know is that an “archivist” uploaded it. The introduction and first chapter “The consultation process” is available for free on line in pdf format. I didn’t know that until today either.
Way back in 2010 we didn’t use anything you could call AI when we wrote the chapters for the book. I didn’t even dictate my chapters because the only thing available to use would have been a voice dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It was notorious for transcribing my dictations for clinic notes and inserting so many errors in them that some clinicians added an addendum warning the reader that notes were transcribed using voice dictation software—implying the author was less than fully responsible for the contents. That was because the mistakes often appeared after we signed off on them as finished, which sent them to the patient’s medical record.
Sometimes I think that was the forerunner of the confabulations of modern-day AI, which are often called hallucinations.
Now AI is creating the clinic notes. It cuts down on the pajama time contributing to clinician burnout although it’s not always clear who’s ultimately responsible for quality control. Who’s in charge of regulatory oversight of AI? What are we talking about?
I watched the Svengoolie show movie, “Young Frankenstein” last night and the most striking thing I can say about it is that, while it was really funny, it set off a train of thought that led me to question whether or not there should be an individual category of the Mandela Effect. As everyone knows the definition of that phenomenon is when a large group of people collectively misremember an event or fact. I misremembered an event that happened when I was in the 6th grade.
Incidentally, the Mandela Effect was a feature in an X-Files episode entitled “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat.” In my case, this would just be called a false memory. You could call it confabulation, which can be a brain disorder caused by thiamine deficiency—but I eat too well for that.
On the other hand, I can say that I forgot that the Iowa Hawkeye vs Penn State football game that was scheduled for yesterday afternoon was not available on cable. It was only on a streaming service and so I didn’t have to go hunting for an Internet Archive recording of “Young Frankenstein” to avoid my presumed time conflict between the Svengoolie show and the game. By the way, Iowa won 25-24.
This is not going to be a post about “Young Frankenstein” because this movie already has enough reviews and since it was directed by Mel Brooks and released in 1974 it’s still pretty fresh in the minds of many people, including baby boomers like me.
I’m really sure I’m probably the only one who misremembers an “event” about a movie which I heard some 6th grade kid talking about, which was another Mel Brooks movie, “Blazing Saddles.” This film was also made in 1974. I was not in the 6th grade at that time.
I’m sure you caught that. No 6th grade buddy of mine in that era could have been talking about that movie and saying something like “I didn’t think it was going to be a farce!” Those were my friend’s exact words and he never said it—but I have this bogus memory of it being attached to “Blazing Saddles.”
I looked at a Wikipedia list of movies with western themes in the 1960s and I can’t pick one out that my friend in the 6th grade would have thought was a farce.
I probably can’t chalk this up to getting older because I’ve had this false memory for decades.
And I made a YouTube several months ago telling a bald eagle joke that I persist in “remembering” Jim Carrey tell many years ago during a televised stand-up routine. I asked that people contact me on my blog to let me know if they knew the origin of the joke. No takers. That event never happened either, apparently. When I google it, my video pops up near the top of the list of a very short list of links and AI is not helpful. It’s probably just another false memory.
I know this is only tangentially related to the movie “Young Frankenstein.” But I thought it was more interesting.
Hiked out to the mall today and watched the Zamboni smoothing out the ice-skating rink. It can help skaters a little.
It was pretty crowded this afternoon and there were several beginners. They’re easy to pick out because they fall a lot and tend to pull themselves along using the handrails along the sides of the rink. I think a few made the most contact with the ice not so much with their skates as with their knees and elbows.
I can’t remember if I had as much trouble turning left and right as one guy. But I’m pretty sure I fell just as hard when I first learned how to skate. He did fine in a straight line, but turning was his downfall—literally.
There was a short kid out there who was fast and nimble. He was evidently a hockey player and somebody was training him.
There are certain balance aids like stacked pylons. A little bitty girl used those twice for about 2 seconds each and figured she’d had enough.
There were more experienced skaters, but all of them were learning—and falling. They just picked themselves up and tried again. I guess that’s the main thing.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 