Iowa State Map Cribbage Board Size Matters?

I wrote most of this post while waiting for our internet service to reconnect, which it finally did.  I’m pretty sure the wintry mix ice caused the outage night before last.

Despite the icy conditions yesterday, our Iowa State map cribbage board was delivered. One of the first things Sena said about it was, “I thought it would be bigger.”

This triggered a couple of memories. When we were on one of the tours around New York City in 2017, someone remarked on the size of the Ball in Times Square that drops on New Year’s Eve, saying it was smaller than she thought it would be. Apparently, this was the tour guide’s cue to deliver a few well-rehearsed jokes about size that all related to a man’s penis size—which I am not in the least sensitive about at all in any way, shape, form or size. Can we talk about the weather, please?

The other memory is the Men in Black II scene in which Agents K and J are grilling Frank the talking alien Pug about the whereabouts of The Galaxy (which is the best source of subatomic energy in the universe), which was small enough to fit inside a thumbnail-size jewel attached to the collar of a cat. While shaking Frank vigorously, Agent K demands that Frank tell him where The Galaxy is.

Anyway, the Iowa map cribbage board is smaller than our Jumbo board, but it’s a little bigger than the 29 board.

It’s made by D&D Custom Laser Designs. The name is lasered on a little cover which fits over the storage hole for the 4 wooden cribbage pegs. Below the name is “Custom Made & Designed in Randall MN, USA; In Loving Memory of Kevin Deick, Creator and Co-founder.”

I saw one review of the board on the web in which the reviewer expressed doubt that the maker knew anything about cribbage because the description indicates that it includes a pre-installed hanger so it can be used as a wall hanging. The hanger doesn’t interfere with it being used to play cribbage and the board even has small rounded feet in all four corners so you can set it on a table. And it does include pegs.

You can see the names of major and even small cities, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and major highways. It reminds me of places we’ve been and what we did in those places. We haven’t played a game on it yet, but we plan to make a video of that in the near future and post it on YouTube.

The Iowa cribbage board came wrapped in something we usually don’t see. It was a crumpled-up issue of a local newspaper in Minnesota. The board itself is made in Randall, Minnesota. The newspaper is the January 30, 2022 issue of the Morrison County Record.

I haven’t read a regular newspaper in a long time. The Morrison County Record has a lot of the features I remember from several newspapers like the Des Moines Register and the Globe Gazette (Mason City). I noticed a large column in a section titled “Religion.” I can’t remember the last time I saw a newspaper column like that. The title of the column was “In times like these we turn with trust to God,” with the caption Inspirational Message with a small drawing of a church and the byline was Tim Sumner, evidently the pastor of River of Hope Ministries, Little Falls. So, this newspaper was published in a place called Little Falls in Minnesota.

Little Falls is about 10 miles southeast of Randall.

Anyway, Pastor Sumner (I don’t know if that’s his title, but I’m hoping it’s safe to assume that) wrote what could be given as a Sunday sermon. Because this issue of the Morrison County Record was used as wrapping paper, I had to hold the ripped pieces of it together to read it. The link to the whole sermon on the web is here.

One quote from Sumner:

Today, we regularly face situations that bring us to a place of not knowing how we will get through, how we can survive. The future can look very bleak when we try to predict what will happen and we try to manipulate people and things to do what we think is best. And without trusting in the faithfulness of God to bring us through these situations, the future is bleak.

I have not thought about God in a very long time, but when I was a child, I read the Bible a lot. And I remember the pastor of our church, Reverend Glen Bandel, who was my family’s hero when he took care of mother when she was very sick, and welcomed us in their home when times were bad. Mason City’s local newspaper, the Globe Gazette ran a brief story about his life and ministry when he turned 90 years old a few years ago. You can read it once before the web site requires you to subscribe. It won’t tell you even a tenth of what I and most people feel about his kindness, courage, and wisdom. He has a heart the size of a galaxy.

The population of Randall, Minnesota is 625, and the population of Little Falls is 8,664 (as of 2019). Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re not important.

Thoughts on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

I got up at around 3:30 AM this morning, unable to get back to sleep. It was mainly because of the current crisis in Ukraine. Russia has invaded Ukraine. I wonder if many of us will remember where we were and what we were doing when we found out that Russia invaded Ukraine? For us, it was sometime around 9:30 last night. I was listening to the light classical music channel on TV in our living room when Sena came up from downstairs where she had been watching the news and told me about it.

I switched to the TV news and saw two reporters, one based in the U.S. connected as part of the broadcast with another in Kyiv reporting on the shelling of the city. The reporter in Ukraine kept looking back over her shoulder at the city. She seemed distracted and distressed. The other reporter, based in the U.S., asked irritably, “What do the bombs sound like?” as though he were unhappy with her account of what was going on. She replied, just as irritably, “They’re loud!” I think she wanted to also say (as I did in my mind), “They sound like bombs and they’re scary; what do you think bombs sound like?”

I listend to various reporters talk about the attack. One of them commented that President Biden had said there would be no American soldiers actively engaging in combat in Ukraine. If they did, it would be “World War III.”

I thought of the other post I’d written for today. It’s just about a cribbage board in the shape of the state of Iowa that we got from Minnesota the day before yesterday. It came wrapped in a newspaper, probably the whole issue published about a month ago by the Morrison County Record in a town called Little Falls.

We just thought it was unusual that the cribbage board was shipped wrapped in newspaper; usually it’s those Styrofoam packing peanuts or bubble wrap. But this was like getting something from a friend or a family member who used the only thing handy to pack a gift.

I didn’t just toss the newspaper wrapping in the garbage, mainly because I enjoy reading actual printed material including books and newspapers. I was curious about it and so I found the article “In times like these” which I also described in the other post today, which is partly about a cribbage board in the shape of the state of Iowa. The article is a sermon, written by a local clergyman, Tim Sumner.

In it he talks about how difficult things are nowadays, that people are more divisive than he has ever seen. He mentioned the pandemic as a major contributor, but it’s easy to see how it could be applied more broadly now that major world powers seem to be moving toward war to feed what seems to be a hunger for empire-building.

Sumner, in accordance with his role as a clergyman, counsels us to turn to God. In view of the talk of World War III, it’s hard to disagree. Sumner asks, “Can things get worse?” It looks like it can.

I could find a lot of cribbage boards in the shape of single states in America. I could even find one of Middle Earth, believe it or not. But I couldn’t find one in the shape of the whole United States of America. Why?

Sumner writes,

It is “our understanding” that gets in the way. The way we see things is from our perspective. We want things our way. We don’t want to have to go through difficult times. We want life to be easy.

Maybe that’s true. He says trusting God is the way to respond to this. We could do that. And while we’re waiting for God to respond to us, what else could we do?

Educating Iowa: A University of Exploration (1847-1897) Uncovering Hawkeye History Part 1

I am thrilled to post this episode of the Uncovering Hawkeye History series out of order. It’s because Sena and I missed Part 1 but noticed that the YouTube video recording of it was posted. The volume is pretty soft, so crank it like you mean it. I plan to post something tomorrow about Part 3, The Next Chapter: Blazing New Trails.

The presenters gave stunning presentations and I’m delighted to let them tell their stories in the video below.

Sara Sanders, PhD, Dean of College of Arts and Sciences. She is all about making the most out of combining both the classical and the practical aspects of a college education.

Liz Crooks, Director of the Pentacrest Museum of Natural History. She loves museums, and told a great history about a character at the museum named Rusty the Giant Sloth (no relation to the third presenter, Dr. Rusty Barcelo). Rusty is made of Styrofoam and other materials. He is a giant sloth and the web page gives you a great idea about who he is. Remember, he’s made of artificial materials, so don’t expect too much. According to her LinkedIn profile, she is:

Experienced administrator with a demonstrated history of working in museums and higher education. Skilled in Nonprofit Organizations, Archival Research, Program Evaluation, Museum Education, and Historical Research. Strong professional skills with a Master’s Degree focused in Museum Studies from Western Illinois University.

Dr. Rusty Barceló held various positions at the University of Iowa from 1975 to 1996 including Assistant Provost and Assistant Dean with the Office of the Provost. Rusty has made a ton of other achievements in many other places in the country. Rusty is named for a scholarship to assist disadvantaged students at the University of Minnesota. Rusty was once the only Chicana student at The University of Iowa, and now is one of America’s most highly respected authorities on diversity and equity in higher education.

Putting the Exley in X-Files

A couple of nights ago Sena was looking at some old X-Files episodes on the web. It was on the Dailymotion site. For some reason, we could see them without login registration. I think it’s usually required. We watched the full length, The Unnatural episode two nights in a row without ads. It was an inconsistent experience. We saw it in both HD and non-HD modes and got slammed by ads at times and other times couldn’t access the show at all unless you logged in.

The weird thing was that all the subtitles and captions, and even the scenes were shown in mirror image. It turns out this mirror issue is not uncommon. I googled it and others have noticed it on YouTube as well as Dailymotion. You can flip the video out of mirror mode—often for the price of software being peddled for that purpose. The most common reason I saw given for the videos being mirrored was to avoid copyright strikes.

OK, so other than that, a lot of the old X-Files shows were available and Sena watched a little of the brutal episode “Home.” Sena can do a hilarious mimic of part of Mrs. Peacock snarling “I can tell you don’t have no children. Maybe one day you’ll learn… the pride… the love… when you know your boy will do anything for his mother.” Sena always ad libbed “the joy” to the “the pride, the love” phrase.

We used to watch the X-Files regularly, making popcorn downstairs in the kitchen and getting upstairs to watch it in bed just in time.

Anyway, we could watch the mirror version of “The Unnatural,” comfortably despite the backwards captions. This is one of our favorite episodes. There are many obvious references to racism and identity. I looked all over for a simplified plot summary, but found a lot of them have glaring mistakes, are too long, and wouldn’t fit with my simple-minded geezer interpretation. So, I’m going to cobble together something from reading a number of them. I’m not saying it’ll be straightforward.

I have to call it a Monster-of-The-Week (MOTW) episode because that’s what a lot of writers do.  It refers to X-Files episodes that usually feature some paranormal creature or a criminal with a supernatural ability.

Here’s a tangent I can’t resist because we just watched Mountain Monsters Sunday night for the first time, and I think it was the first episode of the new season of this show which has been on for 8 seasons. It is surely a parody of several shows of the Bigfoot adventure type. It’s basically an ongoing MOTW series featuring a cast of characters who survive on sasquatch snacks and cryptid colas and stage uproarious, slapstick comedy searches for legendary creatures (some of which are apparently part of genuine local folklore) like Spear Finger, the Smoke Wolf, the Cherokee Death Cat, and a dozen others, some of which are unfortunately prone to violent attacks of diarrhea, which Wild Bill (arguably one of the funnies members of the cast) did a side-splitting impression of by hanging on to a couple of trees and sticking his butt way too far out in a stunningly hysterical pantomime of projectile Hershey squirts, all the while getting more and more bug-eyed, cursing a blue streak and brandishing a gun which looked like a kid’s toy you could find at Walmart. The camera angles are all too perfect. We laughed until we cried.

Anyway, getting back to The Unnatural, the show is basically the reminiscence of an ex-cop named Arthur Dales who was assigned to protect a black baseball player named Josh Exley from being killed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Actually, Josh is an alien who shape-shifted into a black man because he loves the game of baseball. He can also sing the old Negro Spiritual “Come and Go with Me to That Land” on the team bus so well that it was recorded on YouTube and one commenter said he’d pay $100 for a full version of it.

The episode starts with Fox Mulder finding an old newspaper clipping about a baseball game in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, the site of so many UFO crashes that the local landfill could not keep up with all the debris local ranchers were trucking in from the fields. He finds a story which shows a picture of an Alien Bounty Hunter in it. This is an executioner who also shape shifts and knocks off other aliens who misbehave by threatening to expose the alien colonization project going on at the time.

The KKK is threatening the team of black players and the head of the gang is the Alien Bounty Hunter. He’s after Exley because he threatens to expose the project simply because he loves to smack home runs and, even though Exley thinks the game of baseball is meaningless, it’s perfect because you can chew tobacco and get knocked out by wild pitches—which leads to him getting beaned and bleeding green blood on the catcher’s mitt. He wakes up speaking alien but because he remembers he’s from Macon, Georgia, everybody thinks he’s OK. The catcher’s mitt is sent to the lab guy for analysis.

Officer Dales finds out Exley is an alien after he breaks into his room and sees him in his alien form. After Dales wakes up from fainting a half dozen times, Exley tells him that he’s an alien; he’s forbidden from intermingling with humans, and he masquerades as a black baseball player because he loves the game and to escape notice. The way Exley puts it, “They don’t like for us to mingle with your people. The philosophy is we stick to ourselves; you stick to yourselves—everybody’s happy.”

Where have you heard this before? It sounds like Jim Crow to me.

The Bounty Hunter, masquerading as Exley, kills the lab guy and Exley is now fingered as the murderer.  Exley and Dales have a short talk while playing catch in the ball park in which Exley says it’s time for him to face the music and go back to his family. When Dales basically asks him why the human race can’t be his family, Exley takes either a surprisingly Green Supremacist attitude or just states the facts saying, “We may be able to look like y’all—but we ain’t y’all.”

In the end, the Alien Bounty Hunter executes Exley. But just before he kills Exley, he tells him to show his “true face” so he can die with dignity. Exley says simply, “This is my true face.”

 And while he dies in Dales’ arms, despite Exley telling him to get away because his green blood is poison to humans, Dales sees that it’s red and says “It’s just blood.”

I don’t know exactly what this means and some have called it ambiguous. I speculate that this might have been the culmination of a transformative process and it reminds me of Atticus Finch telling Scout (in To Kill a Mockingbird), “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Next in The Series: The Next Chapter: Blazing New Trails (1998-2047)

The next and final presentation in The University of Iowa Hawkeye History series is entitled The Next Chapter: Blazing New Trails (1998-2047). I believe you can still register here.

It will be a Zoom presentation from 4:30-6:00 PM tomorrow, February 22, 2022. As in the previous presentations, the guide will be university archivist, David McCartney and will feature the following presenters:

Rod Lehnertz (02MBA), senior vice president for finance and operations

Lynette Marshall, UI Center for Advancement president and CEO

Peter Matthes (00BA, 14MBA), senior advisor to the president and vice president for external relations

Interesting highlights can be previewed below:

Milestones in University of Iowa History

Starting Over

Three Leading Professors on the future of The University of Iowa

Hope you can make it!

Who Let The Puns Out?

Well, we were out for a walk around Terry Trueblood Trail yesterday and a woman stopped us and excitedly asked, “Do you want to hear a joke about Covid?”

Believe it or not, we didn’t know anybody made jokes about Covid—but we said “Yeah, go ahead.” And then she said it was about dogs, and added that dogs don’t get Covid, as if to reassure us. In fact, it turns out that the CDC says you can’t catch Covid from pets, including dogs. It went like this:

The World Health Organization, or WHO, had feared the dogs could spread Coronavirus and ordered all dogs that were exposed to the virus be held in quarantine. After review, the WHO announced that dogs cannot contract Coronavirus. Dogs previously held in quarantine can now be released.

To be clear: WHO let the dogs out.

Sena and I immediately thought of the Men in Black II scene with Frank the talking Pug, who is actually an alien—and if you don’t like it you can kiss his furry little butt! I exclaimed, sort of singing (God help everyone within earshot) “Who let the dogs out!” I forgot the barking part, but we all had fun.

Incidentally, my mondegreen for the song “Who Let the Dogs Out” used to be “Who left the dog pound?” For the record, the word “mondegreen” means:  a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song. It often totally changes the meaning of a lyric, resulting in something ludicrously comical.

I think Dave Barry wrote about mondegreens in his book, “Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs,” a book I used to own but somehow lost in one of our many moves. I’m hoping he’ll find this blog post somehow and send me a free, autographed copy of the book.

If we’d had our new Polk Signa S2 sound bar when I first heard the line, I could have used the remote control Voice Adjust dialogue level to reproduce clearer, crisper dialogue.

For the record, I’ve never heard the full song “Who Let the Dogs Out,” which was performed by a “Bahamian junkanoo” band formed in 1977 and released in 2000. I had to look up “junkanoo” and it’s a Bahamian cultural celebration, a festival of music, dance, and dog pounds.

There are conflicting opinions about what the song means. Some say that it was about men calling women filthy names and women fighting back by shouting “Who let the dogs out?” On the other hand, I also read that the song won a Grammy.

When we got home, I googled Covid jokes and found a lot of them. One of the better hits was RJ Julia Booksellers, advertising a book entitled Coronavirus Humor. The author was just called “Mad Comedy,” which means several “top comics” contributed. It was published in April 2020 by Indy Pub.

The best part? There was a statement saying “A portion of the proceeds of this book benefit the hard-working ‘essential workers’ who are sacrificing so much to help us all during the 2020 epidemic.”

Who let the wags out?

Featured Image picture credit: pixydotorg

Managing Difficult Conversations Without a Neuralyzer

I think I was the last lone ranger Chief Resident in Psychiatry, meaning doing the job solo. After that, there were always at least two senior residents managing that. One of the things I did was to give lectures on various topics that were not strictly related to how to work on the wards and clinics, but how to communicate with other professionals and with patients.

The other big task was fielding outside telephone calls from doctors in other hospitals trying to transfer patients to The University of Iowa Hospital psychiatric units. That’s right, that was a resident’s duty. I had some pretty difficult conversations. I couldn’t just accept every referral.

The hospital didn’t issue neuralyzers, so it was impossible to make difficult conversations go away.

I used a couple of books as guides: “Getting to Yes” by Fisher and Ury, and Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton, and Heen. I should seriously have reread those books during my entire career and even now. Nobody’s perfect. I encountered racism from patients, so I was no stranger to a variety of difficult conversations in many different situations.

Anyhow those two books are on the short list at the University of Iowa Conflict Management web page. There’s a ton of resources there available for learning about how to manage conflict and recognize what implicit bias is and what it is not.

Implicit bias gets a lot of press. I think it can tend to set people on edge before and during seminars on equity, diversity, and inclusion. Not everybody is a racist. But our brains are wired for implicit biases. I think we all need to get busy, and I mean everybody, including me. A good place to start is understanding implicit bias.

Wandering Thoughts on Talents and Traits in “To Kill a Mockingbird”

I’ve been reading To Kill a Mockingbird and thinking over something a character named Miss Maudie said in Chapter 10: “People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.” It seems to run counter to popular opinion. Why wouldn’t you take pride in your talents?

I got a lot of hits on my google search for this quote, by the way.

Miss Maudie’s statement was soon after Atticus shot a rabid dog with a marksman’s skill. Jem and Scout had been grousing about how they couldn’t find anything to be proud of in their old man. Atticus had never told his children about his skill as a marksman. He gave his kids guns but declined to teach them how to shoot.

I try to make sense of Miss Maudie’s comment by thinking about marksmanship as a skill, which is often distinguished from a talent, usually because the latter is thought to be a trait you’re born with. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of modesty (which is what keeps you from bragging or “taking pride”) as a talent. Some might say it’s more like a character trait.

Can you can develop a talent by practice? Can you improve your modesty by working at it and how would you do that, deadlifting your inner barbells? I tend to think you either have it or you don’t. And why does it take being in your right mind to refuse to take pride in or brag about your talent?

I often hear athletes (think Super Bowl) bragging non-stop about their talents. But I stop well short of admiring them for doing it. It’s annoying, but often preferable to the half-time show. Why do they grab their crotches?

Maybe it doesn’t make sense to brag about a talent you’re born with. I’m not sure if modesty is also something you’re born with. Babies seem very immodest, especially when they’re pooping, based on my extensive research of TV commercials and anecdotes.

On the other hand, a talent is also often said to be something which can be honed to perfection. In fact, Miss Maudie said that Atticus’s skill with a gun was a gift from God, a talent—which he perfected by practice. This might contradict the definition of talent as a thing you’re just born with. She goes on to say that Atticus thought this particular gift from God gave him an unfair advantage, so he gave it up. It would be unseemly to take pride in such a thing, and why would it even occur to someone with a talent to minimize it? The religious reference “pride goeth before a fall” is obvious, but religion doesn’t always seem to play a big role.

Maybe both talent and traits like modesty can be honed as well. What if they’re sort of like lifting just one of your eyebrows to make you look haughtily bemused? You can cultivate it, or at least some people say you can. There’s even a WikiHow for it. But it seems like you have to find your dominant eyebrow, which means there’s something inborn that makes it easier.

Can you develop modesty as though it’s a skill, assuming that it’s also a trait which is malleable? Is there a modesty cortex? Then, you could say some people have a talent for modesty. And how about those splinter talents or skills (like suddenly playing the piano like a virtuoso) which can appear abruptly after brain injuries? Can modesty be like that, a nascent itch in the body waiting to be scratched? That kind of makes you want to drop a piano on the guy at the cocktail party who brags about his golf game, doesn’t it?

I suppose some would take pride in being modest, although it sounds paradoxical—until I remember all the people I’ve seen who can feign desirable traits.

So, is there a Gold’s Gym for character traits where we can go and develop talents like modesty, patience, respect, kindness, and mercy?

Not exactly, but we can give ourselves a kick start by checking out some resources that aren’t that hard to find. Those would be different from what you can pick up from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” although it’s obvious that’s how I got steered to this topic in the first place. Remind me again, why is this book be taken off required reading lists?

Thoughts on Near-Death Experiences

There is a very interesting Medscape article on Near Death Experiences (NDEs), “Young Doctor Explores Near-Death Experiences – Medscape – Jan 13, 2022.” The story was written by Stephanie Lavaud. It was a transcript of an interview with a general practitioner from, Francois Lallier, MD, PhD, from Reims University Hospital in France. He conducted a retrospective study on NDEs for his general medicine dissertation. He discussed the results in his book, Le mystere des experiences de mort imminente (translation: The Mystery of Near-Death Experiences).

It has so far collected several interesting comments. I submitted a couple.

One of them was about a teacher and colleague of mine, Dr. Russell Noyes, Jr, MD, Professor Emeritus University of Iowa. He published several articles about NDE related to traumatic accidents, mainly in the 1970s. Lallier used the Greyson Near-Death Experience Scale for his study, and this scale was based on the work of Noyes and others.

He also participated in a Iowa Public Radio Show in 2018. Dr. Noyes collected over 200 personal accounts of NDEs but declined to publish them. I don’t recall that Dr. Noyes ever discussed his interest in this area with me.

My other comment was a correction to a mistake in my first comment, in which I said no patient I saw in my career as a consult-liaison psychiatrist ever reported a Near-Death Experience to me. I remembered one later. It occurred decades ago but I had forgotten about it. I included the patient’s NDE self-report in a grand rounds presentation, which was not mainly about NDEs.

As a consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I saw many patients with severe medical illness and I can recall only one patient who described an experience of NDE. Delirium was a common syndrome in most of the patients I saw, especially those in the intensive care units.

I think it’s possible that some of the cases of NDE might be attributable to delirium. Vivid and compelling hallucinations and delusions are common symptoms of delirium. The catatonic variant of delirium, which can be caused by severe benzodiazepine withdrawal and other psychiatric disorders can lead to the rare Cotard’s syndrome, marked by the nihilistic delusion that one is dead or even paradoxically immortal, has lost one’s body, is rotting internally or is without limbs and other body parts. The line between NDEs and neuropsychiatric disease can sometimes be thin. However, I don’t categorically dismiss NDEs as mental illness.

Dr. Noyes was very familiar with delirium. He was one of my first teachers in the practice of consultation-liaison psychiatry. He taught me and countless other trainees and early career psychiatrists about anxiety, somatoform disorders, and delirium. He knew the difference between neuropsychiatric illness and NDEs.

In the National Public Radio interview, he explained that after consulting with an attorney who cautioned about the possibility of lawsuits related to breach of confidentiality (obtaining releases of information consents after so much time had passed would have been next to impossible), he decided against publishing his collection of personal accounts of NDEs.

The Medscape article author pointed out that many doctors usually take little interest in the issue of NDEs with patients. Lallier said this is because it’s not normally a part of medical school curriculum. On the other hand, one doctor pointed out in the comment section that he had been conducting NDE research for a decade and had published a series of articles in a peer-reviewed journal. Dr. John Hagan III reported that the articles were included in a medical textbook for physicians in 2017, The Science of Near-Death Experiences, copyrighted by the Missouri State Medical Association (MSMA). Dr. Hagan added that the MSMA passed a resolution which was sent to the national US medical organizations asking that all medical school curricula include education on NDEs.

Even the titles of the books I mention in this post are interesting: The Mystery of Near-Death Experiences and The Science of Near-Death Experiences. The mystery vs the science—or the mystery and the science? They seem almost analogous to bookends, or maybe the Janus head, which is fun to speculate about.

The Janus head used to be the logo for the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (ACLP). It was replaced by some nondescript design for reasons I don’t understand. It reminds me of waves, which could lead to seasickness.

Janus was a god in Roman mythology and is typically represented as having two heads, each facing opposite directions. Janus was the god of doors, gateways, and transitions. He held a key in one hand to open gates and a staff in the other to guide travelers. He is said to represent the middle ground between the abstract and the concrete, between life and death—and perhaps between mystery and science.