Go Retire Psychiatrist

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “Them!”

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

This big broadcast is about the upcoming Svengoolie show movie, “Them!” on October 11, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. One problem I have with this schedule is that the Iowa Hawkeye vs. Wisconsin Badgers football game starts at 6:00 p.m. on the same day. This happened previously with another Svengoolie movie last month, “The Bad Seed,” and I got around it by watching the movie on the Internet Archive. I may have to do that again.

Anyway, “Them!” is a 1954 classic atomic bomb testing leading to giant creatures film (in this case ants) terrorizing the desert southwest countryside. James Arness (who plays FBI agent Robert Graham although Arness starred as Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke a year later) who has run afoul with then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and heads to a New Mexico field office because he wanted to investigate the Mafia but Hoover didn’t think that gang existed, leading to Dillon’s famous quote heard around the world in many languages, “I gotta get outta Dodge!” As happens repeatedly in the 1950s, radiation-exposed insects grow to gigantic size, in this case ants who beat the living daylights out of grasshoppers running a protection racket on them for food (so much for Hoover’s dismissal of organized crime!) and in their headlong search for Insectopia, where the streets are lined with picnic baskets, trample on a tiny guy in a weird suit who is incredibly strong who charges the once oppressed lower class ants huge sums of money to defend them against the superior race of ants who have larger mandibles and shake down the lower class ants (leading agent Graham to write a letter to J. Edgar Hoover saying “That is why you fail!” which is yet another famous quote parroted by middle schoolers everywhere).

OK, so that’s not exactly how the movie goes, but I’ve never seen it so how should I know?

A Flick on Fall Flickers

Today, as usual, we had to interrupt our cribbage game so Sena could capture video of all the birds in our backyard, the fall colors, and whatnot.

She caught some shots of Northern Flickers, which she has not seen before although I can remember catching them on camera years ago. They’re really strikingly colored birds and you can easily distinguish female from male birds.

The males have a black mark next to their bills which is called a mustache, which the females don’t have. They don’t migrate and you can see them all year round.

Sena was slinging the camera around and hurrying from window to window to get the best shots. She accidentally caught me on camera. I threw a still shot of it in the video just for laughs.

We saw a bird we didn’t recognize at first mostly because it was small and preening with its back to us. It had a red breast, so it was probably a young robin. Our luck, it’ll try to attack our windows next spring, although Sena put up some window film which may prevent that—we hope.

The fall colors are relaxing. The squirrel reminded me of Dug the dog in the Disney Pixar movie Up. I would have stuck a picture of Dug in the video but it’s copyrighted.

By the way, I won the cribbage game today. It happens.

Music Credit for YouTube video:

Carefree Melody by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://www.twinmusicom.org/song/302/carefree-melody

Artist: http://www.twinmusicom.org

Svengoolie Show: “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”

Both Sena and I enjoyed the Svengoolie show movie last night, “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.”

This 1966 film directed by Alan Rifkin and starring Don Knotts as Luther Heggs, Joan Staley as Alma Parker, Liam Redmond as Kelsey, Philip Ober as Nick Simmons, and Dick Sargent as George Beckett is a horror spoof that we’ve seen before but it’s still really funny.

Luther Heggs is a typesetter for a newspaper in a little town who sort of agrees to spend the night in a haunted house where a couple of murders took place twenty years in the past which were never solved. Luther wants to be a reporter and gets his chance when Kelsey talks him into writing a filler story on the anniversary of the murders.

In fact, if not for Kelsey’s slick manipulation of the main characters including George Beckett the editor of the newspaper, a lot of the story wouldn’t take place. A big part of the action is related to bringing whoever killed the occupants of the house (who were related to Simmons) to justice.

A lot of the hilarity comes from Knott’s superb portrayal of the extremely nervous guy who does brave things despite his fears. Luther has a crush on Alma and despite his shyness, to impress her he shows her his karate moves which he has been learning entirely from a correspondence course he’s been taking for years and which has made his whole body a lethal weapon.

Luther convinces the town that he has seen supernatural events in the Simmons’ haunted mansion, which makes him a hero worthy of celebration in his honor. His bungles his acceptance speech and then gets a summons to appear in court to fight a libel charge from Nick Simmons because he doesn’t want the publicity about the haunting to interfere with his plans to demolish the house.

The trial is one of the funniest scenes in the movie, leading to a couple of witnesses inadvertently making things a bit more difficult for Luther to beat the libel charge by revealing that he has a lifelong track record of telling tall tales.

The detective part of this story involves the manipulation of Kelsey, the motive of Simmons to demolish the house, and the perseverance of Luther to confront his terror while confronting the mystery of what happened twenty years previously in the Simmons’ mansion.

I have given this very funny film the highest Shrilling Chicken Rating of 5/5.

Learning to Use the Komati Basin Water Authority (KOBWA) Egg Flipper!

I’ll deal with the silly KOBWA acronym later. Sena bought some new kitchen utensils and she got these egg flippers (one red and one black). They’re supposed to make it easier to flip fried eggs. I think a regular person who knows how get around a kitchen would do better than I did this morning to handle this tool.

On the other hand, I think I have a legitimate point to make about the egg flipper. I usually break yolks when I try to flip eggs, so they end up not looking pretty.

The egg flipper is a combination of a spatula and tongs. The tong set is above the spatula and you just squeeze the flexible handle to close them over the egg when you’re ready to flip them over.

I’m not sure how to make sure the yolk is out of the way. I hope others besides me notice that unless you position this instrument just right, you’d end up with crushed yolks. This doesn’t make much of a difference to me because I usually find a way to crush the yolks anyhow.

Sena found an interesting article about the inventor of the spatula, although I didn’t actually see that one; she just mentioned it. I think I found it later, though. The writer often doesn’t get credit for the original article but wrote another article in which he says his first one is often misquoted and leaves out his byline. His name is George Billions. For what it’s worth, the line under his name on his blog says “writes fiction and other lies.” Just sayin’.

There was one comment on Billion’s’ original article who requested a reference to support what he wrote about John Spaduala. For complicated reasons, a reference is hard to come by, and I think I’ll just add a reference to Billions’ article out of respect:

“John Spaduala: Inventor of the Spatula.” Spatula Planet. Spatula Planet, 3 Feb. 2014. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.

I don’t know why he calls himself Mike because the name of his blog is George Billions.

I don’t usually pay much attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the internet, but sometimes they are too intrusive to ignore. AI essentially says there was no such person as John Spaduala and that the story is a recurring anecdote. It’s an urban legend.

What lends weight to the AI judgment is a web article purporting to be an interview with John Spaduala himself, even though the guy lived in the 19^th century and the interview was conducted in 2017 by Jason Denness who entitled it “Fake Interview: John Spadula.” Denness thanks George Billions for being the “victim of this interview.” While Denness credits George Billions by saying “He is the creation of John Spaduala…” I suspect that’s a typo and maybe what he meant was that Billions is the “creator” of John Spaduala.

That said, the question is who invented the egg flipper? It wasn’t John Spaduala. Technically, even though I have no right to make any judgments about this, there might not be any specific person identified as the inventor of the egg flipper. As near as I can tell, a spatula can be a “turner,” (also called a flipper) but a turner isn’t necessarily a spatula.

The name or acronym applied is KOBWA, which I suspect is not the inventor’s name, but the name of the company that markets the egg flipper spatula. The only thing I found on my admittedly cursory search is the Komati Basin Water Authority, which has no connection to any kitchen utensil. You can find kitchen gadgets with the name Kobwa (or KOBWA), though. However, there are other weird trademark related names for the egg flipper as well. I don’t know why.

I’m pretty sure they weren’t invented by any descendants of John Spaduala—if he had any. You’re welcome.

Big Mo Pod Show: “High Strangeness”

As usual, I listened to the Big Mo Blues Show last night. Today, we listened to the Big Mo Pod Show, and it sure was interesting.

Big Mo Pod Show 0 78 – “High Strangeness”

First, I’d like to point out that the title “High Strangeness” doesn’t apply to all of the songs on the podcast. In fact, only the first one, “Neoprene Fedora” would sound a little strange as a blues tune, and then only the first couple of minutes or so of this guitar instrumental. We think it has 3 or 4 segments with only the first one sounding mostly like a surfing tune. Most of it did sound bluesy.

The song “Catfish Blues” by Corey Harris was fascinating mainly because it prompted Big Mo to mention MayRee’s hand-battered catfish. We heard him say that this was about MayRee. We’re not so sure. We couldn’t figure out the connection between MayRee and catfish that you could catch in a river maybe somewhere down south, (possibly Louisiana?) in a very specific place where there used to be a couple of shacks where you could get hand-battered catfish.

He had very specific names for places like “Brownsville” or someplace the name of which reminded me of a French word, “rouleaux” (which I connect with stacks of red blood cells just because I learned this is medical school). But it sounded like it was a place. AI popped right up and said there’s no such place by that name in Louisiana or Texas. Big Mo also mentioned that it was close to a “Missouri river bridge.” I think we heard him right. The Missouri runs along the western boundary of Iowa. There are bridges in that area, but I can’t tell which one is referred to.

I’m thinking this story might just be adding texture to the whole MayRee’s hand-battered catfish yarn.

Another puzzle was somebody Big Mo mentioned called Tail Dragger, to which Corey Harris had a connection. Big Mo didn’t expand on this, but I did manage to find out about somebody named Tail Dragger Jones, who was an American Chicago blues singer. He has an interesting Wikipedia entry on the web. He shot and killed a blues artist known as Boston Blackie and did prison time for it.

And we had the impression that the last song reviewed on the podcast, “Take It Easy” by Ruthie Foster, was a blues song that was readily applicable to anyone having a tough time in life. On the other hand, Big Mo thought it was about women being mistreated by men and how to bear up under this burden.

Conversely, our impression is that most blues songs done by men often have themes that remind you of the chauvinistic attitude men have for women. Just listen to any of the other songs on the podcast list and look up the lyrics (because you can’t always understand them on the recordings).

I especially like songs which have lyrics that I can clearly understand, and “Take It Easy” is one of them.

Dealing with an Adjustable Fanny Pack Strap

I’m waiting for delivery of my case, protector screen, and holster clip for my new smartphone. It’s taking a while and I need a safe way to carry my phone. So, Sena got me a fanny pack.

I’ve never had to deal with a fanny pack strap, but since it’ll be a few weeks for my stuff to be delivered, I had to cope with the adjustable strap. Believe it or not there’s a couple of YouTube videos that show how to put things into the pouch—but no videos demonstrating how to adjust the strap.

I’ve never had to cope with a fanny pack strap, but I think I figured it out. I made a video. See what you think.

The Magic of the Wave

Over three years ago, I posted about a waving man we used to see a lot of on a busy street in Iowa City (yes, we have them). He worked at the grocery store and waved at traffic whether he was walking to work or leaving. He still works there but we don’t drive that route much anymore so we don’t see him out waving.

Occasionally I’ll see news stories about men who wave at people driving by. They always look like they have a great time being friendly. I think most of us get a big kick out of it.

I saw another story today about a guy named Kent Proudfit in Urbandale, Iowa who does the same thing. After a while I wondered why I saw only stories about men do the waving thing. And then I found a story about a 74-year-old woman named Patricia Bracey who’s a waver in Chesterfield, Virginia. She says the Lord told her to do it.

So, waving at people driving by is an equal opportunity activity for cheering up others. I get the sense that it’s mostly older people who sit or stand by the side of the road and wave at folks driving by.

On the other hand, there is another phenomenon that works on the same principle of helping others feel good. It’s the Iowa Hawkeye Wave at the end of the first quarter of the football game in which the all the players, staff, and tens of thousands of fans of all ages in the stands get up at wave at the kids and their families in the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. It’s now called one of the greatest traditions in college sports. It got started in 2017, which is not such a very long time ago.

So, go ahead and wave.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”

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

This coming Saturday, Svengoolie will show the 1966 comedy horror film “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.” I think it’s pretty good and Sena likes the movie too.

I’ve seen this film before at least once and I thought one of the times was on the Svengoolie show. But you’d think I’d have blogged about it. I can’t find any posts about it, though.

The gist of it is that Luther Heggs (Don Knotts) is a typesetter for a small-town newspaper and gets into a position in which he has to solve a murder mystery. It entails spending some time in a haunted house. He’s chicken-livered but perseveres (“Attaboy, Luther!”). He has to nip it in the bud.

If you ever watched The Andy Griffith Show, then you’ll recognize the comedy antics of Barney Fife in this movie (“These hands are like steel!”).

Sena Hates Her New Smartphone!

Since we’ve gotten new smartphones, we’ve been working on getting up to speed on how to use them. More often they seem to be using us.

In fact, Sena is pretty bummed about how much fiddling around with a smartphone you have to do. She used a little flip phone for years and this is a big upgrade (she would say “downgrade”) for her.

Zuckerberg wants to replace smartphones with Artificial Intelligence (AI) glasses. Sena tells me Bill Gates has been talking about replacing them with electronic tattoos.

That reminds me of a 1997 X-Files episode I don’t remember seeing called “Never Again.” Some guy gets a tattoo on his arm of a girl with the words “Never Again” under it. It starts talking to him and making him do crazy things, like buying mobile phones priced around $1,000, which is about what they cost back in 1997. Smartphones cost about the same these days.

Is that how electronic tattoos would work? Or would they just send mind control messages telling you to buy more of the same stocks in Bill Gates’ portfolio?

There are a plethora of new ads and promotional messages that we’ve never seen before:

Buy new armpit removal tool for half-price!

Upgrade to AI-assisted fruitcake recipe idea generating protocol!

Install planet construction and combustion instructions now!

I’m thinking we’ll Never Again purchase new smartphones.

Huston-Tillotson University News!

I feel like I should put on my Huston-Tillotson College (H-TC) news reporter press tag for this brief announcement, which you can get pretty much anywhere on the web anyway. Just a reminder, I was a reporter for the Ramshead Journal back in the 1970s for H-TC (now H-T University).

The breaking news is that the Moody Foundation recently gave H-TU a large gift of $150 million. It’s the largest gift to a single Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in history. Furthermore, the philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave a $70 million gift to the United Negro College Fund recently to be divided among the 37 HBCUs. H-TU will also get a piece of that.

For more details about these donations, see the pbs story.

As an aside, the Jackson-Moody Humanities building on campus was named after the Moody Foundation, which covered the financial cost of construction. E.W. Jackson was a former trustee and donor. I took my English, Literature, and Spanish classes there.