The Most Interesting Thing About the Svengoolie Movie House of Frankenstein

We saw the movie House of Frankenstein last Saturday night and, spoiler alert, everybody dies!

Anyway, the main impulse we had when listening to Boris Karloff (who played Dr. Gustav Niemann) was to think of something I’m not even sure I can say on this blog due to the strict copyright laws governing even the utterance what I’m going to call NAME. I’m using only the word NAME because I’m afraid Dr. Sues Enterprises will track me down and sue me for copyright infringement if I actually say NAME.

Yes, Dr. Sues Enterprises is intentionally spelled that way because I’m not even sure I can say their name without getting slapped with a lawsuit.

No kidding (and this is no joke by the way), I read a lot of scary stuff on line about how NAME is not in the public domain and what can happen to you if you even say it out loud.

I think I can get away with saying that Boris Karloff was 79 years old when he voiced NAME in the movie which I guess will have to remain nameless.

There are people who get away with it, though. Maybe it’s because they pay for the privilege of uttering NAME.

Here’s an interesting thing. Pixabay has a lot of pictures that are royalty-free. You want to guess what I found there? Pictures of NAME! I don’t know how they get away with it. OK, so maybe it’s because they don’t charge a fee for use.

On the other hand, there’s this guy who wrote in to some kind of ask-a-lawyer website that he sells a tee shirt that has NAME printed on it. He got a copyright infringement notice and asks why he can’t get away with it. All the lawyers who answered said he can’t sell shirts with NAME on it because Dr. Sues Enterprises has a federal trademark registration on NAME.

Anyway, that’s the most interesting part about the movie House of Frankenstein.

Submitted My Two Cents on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Proposal to Minimize the Importance of the Delirium Diagnosis Code

I found out that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is planning to reclassify the diagnosis code for delirium, making it less serious than encephalopathy. Many clinicians are challenging it and organizations of consultation-liaison psychiatrists and the like, including me, don’t understand or agree with the plan.

Even though I’m a retired C-L psychiatrist, I put my two cents in as a comment. I told them what I used to tell others who were either my colleagues or my trainees—that delirium is a medical emergency. I support classifying delirium as a major complication or comorbidity (MCC).

Since CMS asked for supporting documents, I included a pdf of Oldham’s article:

Oldham MA, Flanagan NM, Khan A, Boukrina O, Marcantonio ER. Responding to Ten Common Delirium Misconceptions With Best Evidence: An Educational Review for Clinicians. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2018 Winter;30(1):51-57. doi: 10.1176/appi.neuropsych.17030065. Epub 2017 Sep 6. PMID: 28876970.

As the authors say, “Delirium always has a physiological cause.”

Big Mo Pod Show Theme: Subverting Expectations

I want to give a shout out to the Big Mo Pod Show Subverting Expectations that aired on May 11, 2024 following the Friday Big Mo Blues Show on May 10, 2024.

What impressed me most and puzzled me a lot was the tune that Big Mo didn’t talk about on the podcast. The tune was a dazzling guitar performance called “Hot Fingers” by a duo called Lonnie Johnson and Blind Willie Dunn. Big Mo said it was recorded in the 1920s.

I looked for a video of it and could find several with the picture of what looked like a Caucasian guitarist and nobody else. I also saw one picture with the Caucasian guitarist and what looked like a cut-and-pasted photo of a black guitarist.

Because I couldn’t tell who was who, I googled their names. It turns out that Lonnie Johnson was a well-known blues guitarist. He was black. Lonnie Johnson recorded “Hot Fingers” with another famous jazz guitarist named Eddie Lang, who was white. Eddie Lang used the alias of Blind Willie Dunn in order to hide his race while performing with Lonnie Johnson. I’m not sure how Eddie Lang could pass for black, an interesting twist in the late 1920s. I’m not saying either was racist. Why would they have performed together if they were? And why would Eddie Lang have adopted the black-sounding pseudonym?

So that brings me back to the title of the Big Mo Pod Show which was Subverting Expectations. The expectation that gets subverted had to do with a tune I don’t remember hearing on Friday night. It was “That Lovin’ Thang,” by the group Tas Cru, with which I’m unfamiliar. Big Mo remarked that you could listen to the blues as played by Tas Cru with an expectation that they were going to make mistakes in their performance—which never happened, attesting to their talent.

On the other hand, it strikes me that the story behind Lonnie Johnson and Blind Willie Dunn (Eddie Lang) does create its own sort of subverted expectation, in a different sense. I know Blues music experts already knew that, but it was news to me.

FDA VRBPAC Meeting on Covid Vaccines Postponed

The May FDA VRBPAC meeting on Covid vaccines, originally scheduled for this month has been rescheduled to June 5, 2024, 8:30 AM-4:30 PM EST.

Guys and Gals Birds

The other day we went birding on the Terry Trueblood Trail. You couldn’t ask for better weather. We saw a lot of birds paired off and checking into the nest boxes or building from scratch.

I don’t know how we got so lucky. We saw male and female red-wing blackbirds, tree swallows, sparrows, and goldfinches.

The difference between the guys and gals is that the female birds tend to be drab. It’s mainly for protection. The females don’t want to attract attention from predators. The males tend to be flamboyant, as if you didn’t know that from your own experience with humans.

The red-wing blackbird male has stunning red and yellow epaulets on its wings. The female is mostly brown.

The tree swallow male is startling bright greenish-blue. The female is a bit duller.

The goldfinch male is a loud yellow while the female is kind of drab olive.

And so on.

Dirty Dozen on Common Elements of Psychotherapy in WordPress Shortcode

In observance of May being Mental Health Month, this is one of my Dirty Dozen lectures. It’s on the elements that are shared among some of the important psychotherapy methods.

It’s in WordPress shortcode. A few pointers: click in the lower right hand corner of the slide if you want to view the slides full size. Use the directional arrows on your keyboard to click through the slides. You can also just use the arrow handles on the slides if you don’t want to see them full size.

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Big Mo Pod Show 006 on KCCK Radio Iowa!

I got an update to the Big Mo Pod Show on Iowa’s only jazz and blues radio station KCCK 88.3 in Cedar Rapids (translator 106.9 in Iowa City). Last Friday on the Big Mo Blues Show, host John Heim (aka Big Mo) played a lot of tunes, which he gets quizzed about a day or so later on the Big Mo Pod Show.

He gets quizzed about the name of that tune, the artist, and why he picked that tune for the show. He got them all except for one; he said “East Coast Blues” instead of “West Coast Blues” as the song by Blind Blake. He was almost perfect.

I was listening that night, but the Seasick Steve number I missed. It’s misspelled on the KCCK website on May 5, 2024 as “Internet Coyboys,” but it’s “Internet Cowboys.” Maybe by the time you read this, it’ll be corrected. It’s all about spending too much time on the internet. We need to disconnect. I’m sort of a fan of Seasick Steve, ever since I heard him do “You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks.” It means something special to old dogs like me.

Ahm a Fan of the Svengoolie Movie The Land That Time Forgot

We watched the Svengoolie movie, The Land That Time Forgot last Saturday night. Doug McClure stars as Bowen Tyler. He and others passengers of a ship are taken prisoner by the crew of a German U-Boat (World War I era) which torpedoed the ship.  Officers of the torpedoed ship and Tyler overpower the U-Boat crew. They all end up on the island of Caprona somewhere in the South Atlantic.

The island is crawling with thunder lizards of every kind including diplodocus. The dinosaurs are evolving alongside primitive humans who evolve by migrating north on the island “…instead of by natural selection” according to Wikipedia). Various humans both primitive and modern are casually slain and eaten and the rapidly evolving primitive humans pick off the moderns at random.

Only one primitive doesn’t seem to evolve beyond being a goofy guy named Ahm, who has trouble operating a handsaw and who refers to himself in the third person:

“Ahm out of breath!”

“Ahm goin’ back down

To Kansas soon

Bring back the second cousin

Little Johnny Coocheroo

Ahm a man

Spelled M-A-N

Man

Ohoh, ah-oh…” and so Ahm and so forth.

Ahm is very loyal to the moderns, even after he supposedly evolves to the status of the Galoo, who hate the moderns and try to kill them at every opportunity. But Ahm saves Tyler from being snatched up by a pterodactyl—sacrificing his own life, yelling “Ahm a loser and Ahm not what Ahm appear to be,” waving his arms and legs helplessly in the pterodactyl’s bill as it flies off into the great blue yonder.

I couldn’t remember what actor played the evil German who ultimately was responsible for getting the U-Boat destroyed at the end during a volcanic catastrophe. But he was the same guy who was the 4th actor to play the role of Doctor Who’s major archenemy, The Master. Svengoolie revealed that the actor’s name was Anthony Ainley and he played Major Dietz in The Land That Time Forgot.

The reason I bring that up is not just because he looked vaguely familiar to me because I used to watch Doctor Who. I searched the web for his name and the first answer that appeared at the top of the page was the Artificial Intelligence, now called Gemini, (not Google Assistant as Gemini claims), the artist formerly known as Bard), which is crazy wrong: “Doug McClure, an actor known for his cowboy roles, plays one of Dr. Who’s greatest enemies in the 1974 film The Land That Time Forgot.”

This is why you should be skeptical of almost everything AI says.

How evolution is affected by migratory patterns is not well explicated in The Land That Time Forgot although it probably does play a role. When somebody invents a time machine, we could just go back and ask Darwin.

House Finches Moved On

Today was Day 17 for the house finch nest with eggs-which did not hatch. I suspect the female moved on, probably because of too many intrusions. I removed the nest and eggs.

You’d think they’d know better than to build a nest in a fake Christmas tree in the first place.

It has been said:

You cannot keep birds from flying over your head but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.

Martin Luther

But you can’t keep birds from nesting in your artificial Christmas tree on your front porch.