Crazy Like a Fox

I finally got a picture of a fox not far from our property—but not close enough to get a good image. That said, it led me to do a little reading on the web about foxes. The most interesting item is the idea foxes might be able to locate prey under deep snow by using some kind of magnetic sense involving a protein in the retina called a cryptochrome. I’m not sure if this has been conclusively proven yet, but some scientists have said that this explains why foxes are able to find mice hiding in deep snowdrifts. They use a comical nose dive leap to catch them. It looks crazy, but it might increase their hunting success rate. Maybe that’s the origin of the expression “crazy like a fox”. Other animals, including bears, might be able to use this magnetic sense. Let’s hope not.

Bears don’t have a comical leap when they hunt. They’re anything but comical when they’re surprised. A land surveyor in Alaska surprised a brown bear recently and got badly mauled. The Associated Press news item title was “10 Seconds of Terror: Alaska man survives bear mauling.”

It’s a harrowing story although the man’s telling of it is almost eerily non-dramatic. He’s pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing. It turns out he’s lived in Alaska for 40 years. He personally knows five other people who’ve been mauled by bears in Alaska. He even sounds like it would have been all the same to him if he’d been killed rather than injured. He didn’t sound like he was depressed or even unhappy, just calmly matter-of-fact.

That’s exactly how several Alaskans talk about what sounds like an absolute traffic jam of UFOs in the skies over the state. I guess I should call them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) now that we have a government task force (The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence) assigned to investigating them. It sounds a little crazy. I sometimes wonder if this might be an attempt to draw attention away from other things happening in the country that’s getting a lot of press. That might be crazy like a fox.

I’ve watched the show Aliens in Alaska a few times. Ordinary, everyday Alaskans tell their stories about the UAP they’ve witnessed. They all describe them in the same way the guy talked about getting mauled by a bear, even the ones who say they’d been abducted by aliens. One guy was pretty frank about his UAP story, and even joked that maybe he was putting himself at risk for getting hustled off to the Alaskan Psychiatric Institute (API). Most of the time, when people are telling these stories on other TV shows, they always seem to be a little hysterical, which makes them a little less convincing. But the way Alaskans tell their stories, it’s like hearing how they got mauled by a bear, no big deal (“…oh, and did I ever tell you how I won 10 straight games of cribbage, all with at least one perfect 29 score?”).

Come to think of it (for no particular reason), I’ve never heard of any episodes of bear mutilations. There are plenty of stories about cattle mutilations, which are often attributed to aliens. How come bears don’t get the same treatment? Maybe because they’d fight back. Getting back to that mauled land surveyor, when I was a land surveyor’s assistant back in the day in Iowa, the only trouble I had with animals was with pesky cows trying to tip our tripods over out in the fields—probably as revenge for cow-tipping. I didn’t tip cows. They never put the salad fork in the right place (rim shot).

Anyway, I saw a commercial recently made by Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, talking up Alaska as a major tourism destination, also touting the state as having one of the highest vaccination rates in the country for COVID-19, although that has been fact-checked. According to the commercial, among the many exhilarating experiences you can have in Alaska is to see the bears.

He didn’t mention the aliens (which I’d rather see than bears), even though it could be one of the biggest draws to the place given the soaring interest in UAP. Crazy like a fox.

COVID-19 Long Haul: Pizza in the Pan Again?

I remember a scene in the 1979 movie The Jerk, starring Steve Martin as Navin. He was telling Marie (played by Bernadette Peters) about pizza in a cup. They were both eating pizza in a cup. At the time, this was funny because it was ludicrous to think of pizza being served in a cup. It was almost unthinkable. Now you can find recipes for pizza in a cup all over the web. Things have changed.

But what does that have to do with COVID-19 Long Haul Syndrome? As a retired consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I can tell you that it’s beginning to look like things have not changed when it comes to doctors thinking somebody has a psychiatric syndrome if he presents with symptoms that can’t be medically explained. In other words, it’s easier to invent pizza in a cup then to rethink the mind-body dualism puzzle.

That seems to be happening with COVID-19 Long Haulers. I’m beginning to see the telltale signs of somatoform-type labels eventually getting applied to patients who get mild symptoms that sound like COVID-19 early on, but which often don’t get severe enough to require hospitalization. They tend to be younger, and develop long-term symptoms, some lasting for over a year, that sound a lot like what many doctors used to page me about—medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). They have fatigue, often have breathlessness, and pain for which medical tests often turn up negative results. When doctors substitute other words for MUS that they believe are less stigmatizing, there is a predictable backlash by patients who reject the new, softer label. Pizza in a pan.

Further, I noticed a study sponsored by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center listed on Clinical Trial dot gov called Mind Body Intervention for COVID-19 Long Haul Syndrome (first posted April 22, 2021). Participants will be assessed using the Somatic Symptom Scale-8 (SSS-8) which measures somatic symptom burden and was developed in the context of evaluating the DSM-5 somatic symptom disorder diagnosis. Pizza in a pan again.

I also found a comprehensive article on line, “The Medical System Should Have Been Prepared for Long COVID” by Alan Levinovitz, which presented a thorough description of the problem many patients have with physicians telling them their symptoms are “all in their heads.” Unfortunately, this now includes the symptoms of COVID-19 Long Haul Syndrome. In all fairness, I think most physicians try not to give patients that impression. For many years, I was often consulted to assist primary care and specialist physicians in “convincing” patients to think “both/and” about symptoms which could not be medically explained. In fact, that was part of my approach because, believe it or not, some patients were stuck in an “either/or” mindset about symptoms: physical vs psychological, body vs mind, eventually reaching invalidating conclusions like real vs not real. It’s not helpful, partly because physicians tend to get stuck in that mindset as well. We can’t seem to get the pizza out of the pan and into a cup.

Levinovitz mentions that some patients with COVID-19 Long Haul Syndrome have symptoms similar to another syndrome which had been linked to somatoform illness, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). There is a great deal of information about it on the CDC website although the cause is still unknown. The CDC language treads very carefully on the issues of causation and treatment—and manage to draw a sort of dotted-line link between ME/CFS and COVID-19. It’s the same old pan.

Levinovitz also mentions Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), another poorly understood syndrome. I remember presenting a Grand Rounds about a patient with this POTS to my colleagues in the Psychiatry Department when I was an Assistant Professor. I invited the cardiologist who consulted me about the issue in one of his patients—who he suspected of having anxiety as the primary issue. Years later, I was consulted by another doctor about a different patient who definitely had abnormal test results (Tilt Table) consistent with POTS, did not suffer from anxiety, yet still thought psychiatry might have something to offer. The patient was puzzled but polite about why a psychiatrist was consulted. Pizza in the pan.

It’s very difficult for physicians to convey, in all humility, “I don’t know, but I still care.” The reasons why are complicated. The push for medical certainty, the packed medical clinic schedules, the limited time to spend with patients. It’s easy to say we must reimagine the way we practice medicine. It’s very hard to do. It’s a lot harder than reimagining the path from pizza in the traditional pan to pizza in a cup.

Unmasked Means Fully Vaccinated?

We were on our way home yesterday and drove by a couple of restaurants (Wig & Pen Pizza and Vine Tavern and Eatery) with crowded parking lots. We have not seen that since the COVID-19 pandemic hit a year ago. This seemed to coincide with the CDC announcement of the new mask guidance indicating you can ditch the mask both outdoors and indoors—if you’re fully vaccinated. The updated guideline was a little hard to find on the CDC website, I noticed. It didn’t jump right out at you like the update on the pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

I checked the websites for both restaurants. They still say you have to wear masks. Pretty soon after that CDC update, news headlines appeared which provoked a few questions. How do you tell the difference between unmasked and masked persons who say they’re fully vaccinated? One headline said something like, “Get vaccinated or keep wearing your mask.”

And I saw a new term today, “vaccine bouncers.” Nobody wants to be a vaccine bouncer. In other words, since you can’t tell by looking at somebody if they’re fully vaccinated, how are you going to confirm the vaccination status of anyone? I don’t think there’s a lot of confidence in the ability to reliably detect the Pinocchio effect. And, regrettably, vaccination cards can be faked.

Some of us are vaccine hesitant. And some of us are unmask hesitant. Even though Sena and I are fully vaccinated, we still tend to wear masks indoors for now. And to be fair, the CDC guidelines stipulate that you should abide by local rules on wearing masks if required by public transportation and stores. But those guidelines are rapidly changing, maybe a little too rapidly for those who paid attention to daily scary news about upticks in coronavirus death rates when people sing too loud.

I feel like telling us to ditch the masks might be another way of offering an incentive to get vaccinated. Most of us hate masks. They’re hot, confining, make us feel too stifled to breathe easily, and so on. On the other hand, getting infected with COVID-19 is the ultimate respiration suppressor. As a recently retired general hospital psychiatric consultant, I’ve been called to critical care units to help manage anxiety in patients bucking respirators, which means they were fighting the ventilator tube. I didn’t have a whole lot to offer.

I think incentives are better than mandates, though (don’t spend it all in one place!). The best incentive is doing something to help all of us recover from the pandemic.

Foreign Accent Syndrome and the Brain

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the news story about the Australian woman who developed an Irish accent about 10 days after she underwent surgery on her tonsils. This seems to be one of those cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), which she thinks she might have. Before I retired from my role as a general hospital psychiatric consultant, I never saw a case of FAS.

You can find the University of Texas at Dallas website on FAS, where you learn more about the condition. It’s a very rare speech disorder which usually develops suddenly, causing a native speaker to speak in a “foreign” accent. It can be caused by a brain injury, such as a stroke. The prevailing opinion of neurologists and speech therapists is that most people who have FAS don’t actually speak with a sustained, well-defined foreign accent per se. In fact, they can sound like they have different accents at different times. It’s sort of all in the ears of the beholder, so to speak (pun intended).

What makes FAS even more complicated and interesting is that it can develop in the absence of any clearly identifiable medical cause. It can be a psychogenic disorder, a term which can lead to an immediate backlash from those who have been diagnosed by neurologists and primary care physicians with something called Functional Neurological Disorder (FND)—a relatively new name. It’s intended to be less stigmatizing than other psychiatric diagnoses such as conversion disorder and somatic symptom disorder. As I mentioned above, I’d never encountered a case of FAS, but neurologists and a lot of other colleagues in medicine and surgery consulted me to evaluate their hospitalized patients for other types of FND. Most commonly they were having multiple medically unexplained symptoms including but not limited to hemiparesis or hemisensory loss or spells which mimicked seizures but which didn’t produce abnormal EEG patterns. This was always a challenge, starting from the point of introducing myself as a psychiatric consultant. The patient’s reaction was often that of annoyance because their impression was that their doctors thought they were crazy simply because they called me in on the case.

I always began the evaluation by doing a thorough review of the patient’s medical record, which was often very long and complicated, involving notes from many specialists, many medical tests including surgeries and other invasive procedures, and long medication lists. I listened to their description of their medical problems first, which often included a lot of complaints against doctors who almost invariably were described as invalidating or incompetent or both.

I usually avoided any attempt to convince them their main issues were psychiatric in nature. I ran across one web site which reminded me how counterproductive that approach can be. Occasionally I could connect with someone by simply validating the difficulties they had suffered with all aspects of the health care system. I would ask, “Has a doctor ever implied you were a hypochondriac?” and “Have you ever run into doctors who just didn’t listen?”

Depending on whether the patient and I had developed adequate rapport, I might say that I thought the problem was in their body and that the mind is a part of the body, especially since the mind is connected with the brain. I would also say that patients are entitled to excellent health care and this should be delivered safely, avoiding potentially dangerous and toxic treatments whenever possible.

Because I frequently had to enter a diagnosis of a somatoform disorder in the patient’s chart (which they would eventually see), I would talk to them about somatoform disorder, emphasizing that the root of the word is “soma” which just means body, after all. I would sometimes suggest to patients who abrupt onset of medically unexplained neurologic symptoms, especially those which appeared to be temporally linked to a stressful event (formerly conversion disorder and now FND), I would suggest that the problem would eventually resolve on its own. I couldn’t make up billing codes and I couldn’t please everybody. I discussed cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), since it was the most well-validated psychotherapy in this context at the time. Many patients were not interested in coming to our clinic for therapy, could not travel the long distance, but accepted a handout about CBT which contained a weblink for FND.

Some patients with FAS are accused of faking the speech problem, but they are not. Any psychiatric consultant who has years of experience will tell you that it’s not accurate to say there aren’t any patients who fake medical and mental illness. There are those who have a rare and controversial problem called Factitious Disorder imposed on self. They fake medical and mental illness in themselves and lie about it to health care professionals. There are others who victimize children and dependent adults by manufacturing illness in them, lie about that to health care professionals and that’s called Factitious Disorder imposed on another. The motivation for this behavior is complex and not well understood. This used to be called Munchausen’s Syndrome or Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy. Furthermore, there are those who malinger, which is feigning illness for secondary gain, such as avoiding jail or getting disability. Malingering is not a psychiatric diagnosis per se. Both Factitious Disorder and malingering are frequently associated with personality disorders.

That said, anyone exhibiting FAS should get a thorough neurologic workup including but not limited to brain imaging and neuropsychological testing. One of the most interesting early cases involved a Norwegian woman who was hit by shrapnel by German bombers during World War II. She suffered severe left hemisphere brain injury (where the speech control center is located in most people) and began to speak with a German-like accent, which led to her being ostracized in her community.

Another fascinating fact is that sometimes FAS patients can correct or at least modify the speech problem simply by singing or by thinking about what they’re going to say before saying it. In some persons, FAS might resolve spontaneously without specific intervention in weeks or months. Speech therapy is often recommended. For those who exhibit FAS in the context of a mental illness like schizophrenia or depression, exacerbations of which can sometimes be linked to FAS, focused psychiatric treatment should be offered.

You can learn more about FAS and FND at the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI) website. Registration is free and all you need is a login username and password to access many interesting and informative educational modules.

Selected References:

McWhirter L, Miller N, Campbell C, et al Understanding foreign accent syndrome. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 2019;90:1265-1269.

Keulen S, Verhoeven J, De Witte E, De Page L, Bastiaanse R, Mariën P. Foreign Accent Syndrome As a Psychogenic Disorder: A Review. Front Hum Neurosci. 2016; 10:168. Published 2016 Apr 27. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00168

Indrit Bègue, Caitlin Adams, Jon Stone, David L. Perez, Structural alterations in functional neurological disorder and related conditions: a software and hardware problem? NeuroImage: Clinical,Volume 22, 2019,101798, ISSN 2213-1582, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2019.101798. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158219301482)

Aliens Dancing on Remote Controls and Other Causes of Anxiety

I was watching a TV show about UFOs and aliens the other night when I heard my remote control make clicking noises all by itself. Nothing happened on the set; neither the volume nor the channels changed. This has been happening for months and I usually just ignore it. Maybe it was because of the program I was watching. Get this, hundreds of people witnessed UFOs one night several years ago, even called the local radio station about it—yet no one took a single picture or video.

Before you tell me to adjust the gain on my tin foil hat, let me just say I’ve never seen aliens or UFOs—or Bigfoot. But the night I heard the remote control click away by itself, I got off the couch and searched the internet. It turns out I’m not the only one who has ever experienced this. However, Sena has never heard it.

Obviously, I’m not that anxious about it, but I’m curious. I also found an article on the web about alkaline batteries that pop, hiss, whistle Dixie, etc., especially when they go bad and leak.

I checked the batteries (the remote control takes two alkaline AAs) and noticed they were a brand we’d never bought before Universal Electronics (UEI). They have a website, which didn’t look suspicious. Where did we get them and how did they get into the TV remote control? They don’t have an expiration date on them. They’re made in China, which doesn’t bother me. They looked OK, but I replaced them with Ray-O-Vac batteries yesterday and I’m going to wait and see what happens. Maybe it clicked once on its own last night, but I was napping part of the time and watching Men in Black too. In fact, the remote control is on the table next to me as I’m writing this.

But you know, I can see how this might make other people anxious. This kind of anxiety might fuel the development of conspiracy theories in one person. Somebody else might think about poltergeist activity or interference by aliens practicing interdimensional moon-walking or making you order onion rings when you really want French fries.

It got me thinking about how anxious people can be about getting the COVID-19 vaccine. About a month ago, there were news reports of people having puzzling episodes of fainting, breathlessness, sweating, and other symptoms after getting one of the vaccines. The CDC investigated it and discovered that most of those vaccinated had experienced similar reactions in the past after getting vaccination shots. The upshot of it was they were having anxiety attacks, some of which were in the context of needle phobia.

Shortly after that, I noticed there were more internet articles about needle phobia (trypanophobia) which might be part of the cause of recent vaccine hesitancy. There’s a lot of reassurance and advice out there now about the whole thing. There is even a beer commercial (“your cousin from Boston gets vaccinated”) about a guy fainting when he sees the needle.

I suppose you could try using a Neuralyzer, which was used in all the Men in Black movies. You could flash someone in line for the vaccine who is showing signs of anxiety about getting the shot. The idea is to erase his memory of being needle phobic and replace it with a new one (You love getting vaccines!). You can find a slew of DIY projects on line to make one of your own. Several include 3-D printers, which on average can set you back about $700. You have to know how to use a soldering iron (amongst other skills). I flunked soldering in grade school when I soldered my ear lobe to a tin foil hat, back when they were actually made of tin before the switch to aluminum.

There’s just one problem with Neuralyzers—they don’t actually work. And by the way, tin foil hats can backfire, making it easier for the government to keep tabs on you at certain frequencies. Making tin foil hats is a waste of Reynolds Wrap.

There is some helpful guidance for how to cope with needle phobia, which by the way occurs even in some health care professionals. We’ll get through this somehow. There has not been a peep out of my remote control the whole time I was writing this post.

Get the Pink Flamingo

Sena bought a yard ornament. No, it was not a pink flamingo. It’s a Fiery Metal Kinetic Dual Spinning Garden Stake (FMKDSGS). A name like that and right away you know it’s going to be one of those products requiring owner assembly and your skills and patience will be tested. Take my advice and get the pink flamingo.

Our skills were sorely tested, mainly because the product arrived with puzzling and missing instructions and what looked like extra parts. It’s from the Alpine Corporation, a wholesaler based in The City of Commerce, California although the box label clearly says the product was made in China. I usually have pretty good luck with products manufactured in China, but not this time.

The Owner’s Manual does not include a picture showing all the parts needed for assembly, for some reason. On page 2 there are pictures of the rear and front spinners, the stake parts, a connector, and a cap nut. However, there are no pictures for the two sets of nuts, what I think might be some kind of spacers or bearings, and covers that arrived with the product. There are no instructions for what to do with them. The post was crooked because the sections didn’t screw in straight.

I found a pdf of the Owner’s Manual on line, but it had all the same flaws as the original. I couldn’t find a YouTube video about assembly. I tried installing the nuts, bearings, and little covers where I thought they should go, but often the spinners refused to spin and the connector would come loose. It would only sort of work without wiggling apart when I put the spacer/bearing piece on the threaded top section of the pole or connector first, then slipped the cover over the spacer bearing, and twisted the nut over that.

At times, I half-expected little gray aliens would manifest from the spinners (could be some kind of vortex wormhole) and laugh at me.

The product is sold under slightly different names by on-line retailers. I could not find anything about FMKDSGS at the corporate Alpine web site. The Alpine contact form spelled one retailer’s name (Menards) wrong (“Mernards”). It’s not BBB accredited but there are a couple of complaints about customer service and work environment.

I tried different ways to connect the mystery parts to the two spinners. I got pretty frustrated, which was echoed by a couple of reviews by other Amazon customers who complained about missing instructions and being forced into trial and error problem-solving. We didn’t see those reviews before buying the product.

After a lot of trial and error, I thought I made the thing work.  I still didn’t know if it was put together right, though. Both spinners spun although the front spinner often stalled. It didn’t immediately fall apart when it was stuck in the ground and took the breeze. However, we were not confident it wouldn’t collapse in the near future—so we returned it to the store.

Pink flamingos don’t look that bad.

Catatonia: Another Reason to Get the COVID-19 Vaccine

My wife and I have been immunized against COVID-19 and we recognize that people can be hesitant about getting vaccinated. However, I’m remembering my last few months prior to my retirement a year ago working as a general hospital psychiatric consultant and I saw one or two cases of catatonia in the context of COVID-19 infections.

Catatonia is a complex, potentially lethal neuropsychiatric complication of many medical disorders including COVID-19. It can make a person mute and immobile, often making health care professionals mistake it for primary psychiatric illness (for example, catatonic schizophrenia). You can access a fascinating educational module on the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI) website about catatonia and how it can be associated with COVID-19.

Catatonia can kill people, rendering them unable to move or eat, leading to blood clots and dehydration among a host of other complications. You’ve seen the news stories about blood clots being an extremely rare but deadly side effect of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. The risk for blood clots is actually higher from COVID-19 infection itself compared with the very low risk from the vaccine.

I made a YouTube video about catatonia and other neuropsychiatric emergencies and that presentation continues to be viewed fairly often. You’ll want to crank up the volume.

I wrote a blog post about catatonia in the setting of delirium a couple of years ago and the information in it is still relevant below.

Catatonic patients may have a fever and muscular rigidity that leads to the release of an enzyme associated with muscle tissue breakdown called creatine kinase (CK). The level of CK can be elevated and detectable on a lab test.

Many patients will have a fast heart rate and fluctuating blood pressure. They may sweat profusely which can lead to a sort of greasy facial appearance. They may have a reduced eye blink rate or seem not to blink at all. They may display facial grimacing.

The patient may exhibit the “psychological pillow” (some call this the “pillow sign”). While lying in bed, the patient holds his head off the pillow with the neck flexed at what looks like an extremely uncomfortable angle. The position, like other odd, awkward postures can be held for hours.

Catatonia can be caused by both psychiatric and medical disorders. It tends to be more common in bipolar disorder than in schizophrenia even though catatonia has historically been associated with schizophrenia as a subtype. You can also see it in encephalitis, liver failure, and in some forms of epilepsy and other medical conditions—to which we can now add COVID-19 infection.

The patient may perseverate or repeat certain words no matter what questions you ask. He may simply echo what you say to him and that’s called “echolalia”.

Although catatonic stupor is what you usually see, less commonly you can see catatonic excitement, which is constant or intermittent purposeless motor activity.

The usual way to assess catatonic stupor in order to distinguish it from hypoactive delirium is to administer Lorazepam intravenously, usually 1 to 2 milligrams. A positive test for catatonic stupor is a quick and sometimes miraculous awakening as the patient returns to more normal animation. The reaction is usually not sustained and the treatment of choice is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which can be life-saving because the consequence of untreated catatonia can be death due to such causes as dehydration and pulmonary emboli.

Another less invasive test that doesn’t use medicine is the “telephone effect” described in the 1980s by a neurologist, C. Miller Fisher. It was used to temporarily reverse abulia or akinetic mutism, which in a subset of cases of stupor are probably the neurologist’s terms for catatonia. Sometimes the mute patient suffering from abulia can be tricked into talking by calling him on the telephone. It’s pretty impressive when a patient who is mute in person answers questions by simply calling him up on the telephone just outside his hospital room. 

So that, in my opinion, is yet another reason to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Hey, How About Them Nielsen Surveys?

Hey, how ‘bout them Nielsen’s surveys? I can’t remember getting any Nielsen media rating surveys before I retired and I’ve gotten two of them since then. They send you a crisp, new dollar bill in the mail to entice participation. More likely, it elicits guilt. You’d return the dollar bill but not in the mail, would you? Is this some kind of rite of passage or what?

Technically, you’re not supposed to talk about whether or not you participated in the survey, but I saw one blogger’s post about his radio diary survey. Is there a penalty for admitting you’re a part of “Nielsen Family”? Are there Nielsen Enforcers who come to your house and break your kneecaps while listening to the Godfather soundtrack through their earbuds if you don’t obey the rule?

One white commenter thought Nielsen just targets old white guys for some reason. Then a black commenter pointed out that Nielsen mails the surveys to old black guys too, so it didn’t have anything to do with skin color—and he did it with a sense of humor. He speculated that Nielsen might just target grouchy old retired guys with strong opinions because we remember what the value of a dollar bill was back in the day.

It reminded me of what I used to listen to on the radio in my younger days. Back then, the radio was what you had to use to listen to music. Well, there was a TV music show called American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark. The format was pretty much young couples dancing to the latest tunes while the camera panned over the dancers randomly. I remember watching it one day and noticing the camera was moving a lot less randomly and kept focusing on a young blonde woman in the crowd in the middle of the dance floor. That is, it did until she made a very lewd gesture which immediately led to a return to very random camera meandering—and possibly higher Nielsen ratings.

 I listened to the radio a lot when I was a kid. One of the local radio stations was KRIB, which the announcer always pronounced “K-OW-I-B because he talked so fast. Many of the songs were bad, so bad that a humorist named Dave Barry published a book about it in 1997, Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs. He’s a Miami Herald newspaper columnist who has written a lot of funny books. I had nearly all of them at one time, including the bad songs book. I have only a few now, including an autographed copy of one about getting older, Lessons from Lucy (2019).

One of the worst songs in my opinion was a 1976 tune “Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. It’s actually a cover of a song by Bruce Springsteen. I kept hearing a lyric I definitely thought was “wrapped up like a douche,” which I swear I never shared with anybody nor looked up on the web (or as Dave Barry would say, “I swear I am not making this up.”) until just today to discover I’m far from the only person to hear that. I also found out that kind of error is called a “mondegreen” (a mishearing of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning). The actual lyric was “revved up like a deuce.” That was the kind of bad song Dave Barry wrote about—although I don’t remember that specific song being in his book.

Nowadays I listen to KCCK (88.3 FM) for blues and jazz. Years ago, I used to listen to Da Friday Blues show starting at 6:00 p.m. every Friday. It was hosted by John Heim, who is still doing the show, even after a devastating accidental neck injury which left him paralyzed from the neck down a few years ago. He was hospitalized at The University of Iowa and his family and friends donated a lot of money to help him get to a rehab center in Omaha, Nebraska. John actually retired from teaching in 2004, but has been a DJ at KCCK for years because music means so much to him. He’s a brilliant example to retirees everywhere.

There’s a lot more to radio than Nielsen ratings, no disrespect to Nielsen Families everywhere—and just a reminder, I have no kneecaps worth breaking.

Busy as a Beaver

I’m probably busy as a beaver, especially now that I’ve read a short description of how a beaver builds a dam. The article is short on references; in fact, there are none to back up the unidentified author’s remarks. In fact, I suspect the article is fact-free, the only apparent purpose to create test questions for grade-school children.

The author says that, while beavers are busy when engaged in tree felling and dam building, they are disorganized, poor at planning the activities and often mess them up—even accidentally getting killed by falling timber.

By analogy then, since I retired last year, I’ve been about as busy as a beaver. When my frame of reference was working at the hospital as a consulting psychiatrist, I was extremely busy. I put on 3 to 4 miles and about 30 floors a day chasing consults all over an 800-bed hospital with 8 floors.

Now my typical day is very different. Staying physically fit is challenging. I exercise daily, but it’s hardly as demanding as when I was working. I start off with floor yoga to warm up. I hop on the stationary bike, which is not a Peloton or anything like it. There’s nobody in the display exhorting me to crush that Peloton. The digital mileage counter display doesn’t even work.

Next, I do bodyweight squats. My ankle and knee joints crackle and pop loudly, but as long as they don’t hurt, I imagine I’m fine. Next, I do curl and press exercises with a pair of 10-pound dumbbells. Then I do planks. After 3 sets of squats, etc., I get back on the bike. Following the exercises, I sit for mindfulness meditation. That whole business takes about an hour.

As far as beaver busyness, the only time I felled any timber was last summer, when I flirted with danger using a power pole saw trying to clear dead tree limbs left over from the derecho. That actually was a poorly planned activity and was certainly dangerous. I guess I was busy as a beaver then.

Is there such as a thing as being mentally busy as a beaver? Apparently not. Sena and I play cribbage now and then. Other than that, there’s always TV. I listen to music on the Music Choice Channel on TV. I like the Easy Listening and Light Classical stations. Each musical artist featured has several short biographical notes appear while the music plays. I practice doing mental subtractions when the artist’s birthdate appears. It’s the old borrowing method of subtraction you learn in grade school—unless nobody teaches that anymore. There are usually several grammatical and usage problems (worse than mine) with the information about artists and I practice recasting sentences. Sometimes they’ll mention a musician’s nickname, such as BullyboysquatlowjoocedewdliosityBrahms. Several of the classical musicians composed symphonies before they were potty-trained.

On the practical side, I watch the Weather Channel, following which are shows like Highway Thru Hell and Heavy Rescue 401. Those guys are really busy, dragging semi-trucks out of ditches in snowstorms in British Columbia. They operate 75-ton wreckers with rotating booms and winches which regularly spit their cables at anyone nearby.

I alternate the heavy wrecker shows with the Men in Black (MIB) movies, which poke fun at the UFO and alien themes (a welcome counterpoint to Ancient Aliens which takes itself too seriously). I was sure I was watching MIB movies way too much until I found all of the fans’ contributions to websites which list the many errors in the movies. Just google “MIB goofs.” You’ll see the triumphant announcement from those who somehow know what color scheme New York City streets signs had in 1969 and point out how wrong the movie is. On the other hand, I know what kinds of pies young Agent K and Agent J had in MIB 3 (apple with a “nasty piece of cheddar” and strawberry rhubarb, respectively).

I guess all this makes me busy as a beaver.