Go Retire Psychiatrist

Big Mo Pod Show: “Tribute”

I’m writing about the Big Mo Pod Show from Big Mo’s blues show that was aired on November 7, 2025. I’m a little late, but it doesn’t matter that much because Big Mo will be recorded tonight (Friday, November 14, 2025). He’ll be at the Beaker Street Live show instead.

Big Mo Pod Show 082 – “Tribute”

I think I might have dozed off while listening to his blues show last Friday night because I didn’t remember 3 songs from the list on the pod show:

Luther Dickinson & Datrian Johnson – “Sitting on Top of the World”

John “papa” Gros – “Crazy”

Dr. John – “Food For Thot”

Contributing to my memory loss is this: the 3 songs are not on the list of the songs played that night. So, I can’t say much about the discussion Big Mo and Noah had about the songs, based on what I don’t remember hearing. However, I can take it on faith in Big Mo’s extensive blues knowledge about his idea that the broad spectrum of American music has more blues in it than not.

On the other hand, I can say from reminiscence that I think I first heard Mississippi John Hurt’s song “Make Me a Pallet On Your Floor” many years ago when I first started listening to Friday night blues show. I tried to recall what I was doing in 1966 when Hurt died. I was just a kid.

While I can say I think I wasn’t listening to the blues, I think I can pick out popular songs from 1967 that tend to confirm Big Mo’s statement about most music having threads of the blues: “When a Man Loves a Woman” is just one example I think might fit.

I think I found a Wikipedia article about Mississippi John Hurt that might fit nicely with Big Mo saying he read the story about how Hurt was rediscovered back in the early 1960s. The detail of Avalon being his hometown is mentioned in the section “Rediscovery and death.” Just like Big Mo says, he wasn’t making it up.

This is World Kindness Day 2025!

Sena saw something on the web about World Kindness Day this morning and alerted me to it right away. World Kindness Day is an international movement which started in 1998 by the World Kindness Movement. It’s observed on November 13^th annually.

This made me look through my blog posts and I found a short announcement about the event from a couple of years ago. Wouldn’t it be great if this were more than an annual event? What if this were a way of life, a way of being?

There are many ways to observe World Kindness Day, limited only by imagination.There are many ways to observe World Kindness Day. Sena suggested we donate to one of Iowa City’s local food pantries.

So, she headed over to the grocery store and bought several bags of non-perishable items and delivered them to the CommUnity Crisis Services Food Bank.

**Iowa City Food Bank Items for World Kindness Day**

Crib Wars: The King of Calvinball Crib!

Sena asked me the other day if I had checked back on the price of a fancy Canadian cribbage board, Cribbage Rumble. I had not, so of course since that was my assignment, I looked on the Michaud Toys website and found that the high tariff price had disappeared, apparently. There were no alarming notes in red type with multiple exclamation points. And the price was $89.95.

However, as I noted yesterday, they replaced the message that U.S. orders are subject to a 35% tariff and a 25% UPS brokerage fee paid before delivery!

That is too high.

This led to a search for more information about Cribbage Rumble, which sounds a lot like Crib Wars (or Cribbage Wars, if you prefer since I think these games are all the same animal). In fact, it didn’t surprise me very much to find a Facebook post from Michaud Toys enthusiastically advertising “Cribbage Wars” 7 months ago for the low, low price of $89.95.

That’s right; they called it Cribbage Wars just 7 months ago although they call it Cribbage Rumble nowadays. Why is that? I’m glad you asked.

I began to wonder just what exactly is Crib Wars, is that different from Cribbage Wars, and why in blazes does the sight of the game board always prompt people to exclaim that it reminds them of Snakes and Ladders or Chutes and Ladders?

There’s this convoluted and confusing story about Chutes and Ladders and Snakes and Ladders. I think it’s partly because the Crib Wars board layout sort of reminds people in my age group of the layout of Chutes and Ladders. There’s this convoluted and sometimes contradictory history of the name of Snakes and Ladders being changed to Chutes and Ladders (some writers reverse them) to make it less scary for kids.

I think the story of the origin of the game has something to do with teaching morals to children in India. Some web articles say the original game from India was called Snakes and Ladders. Some people make things even worse by calling the game “Shoots and Ladders.” In modern times, the way you played the Chutes and Ladders was to spin a dial and move up a ladder or down a chute and you were supposed to try to be the first to reach the final goal. The morality theme was abandoned and—you know where that left all of us.

Milton-Bradley changed the name from Snakes and Ladders to Chutes and Ladders in 1943 because they thought snakes scared kids.

Where was I? Oh, the Crib Wars and Cribbage Wars game are probably the same, as I said earlier. When I try to search the term http://www.cribwars.com (a suggested search term), I just get an error message. When I search for “cribbage wars” I end up at a game supply store called Ebonwood and they’re located in Appleton, Wisconsin—which is a very nice place. I interviewed for a position in a private practice psychiatry clinic there years ago.

Ebonwood sells the Crib Wars game for $210. You can find the rules on their web site. The board they sell doesn’t put much in the way of markings on it, not even numbers. A reviewer on BoardGameGeek site reviews it and shows a very nice photo of the board. All of them look pretty much like that.

I think the origin of Crib Wars is fascinating. Recall that Michaud Toys in Ontario, Canada has produced and is marketing a Cribbage Rumble board (which is really just another Crib Wars board). It turns out that the two inventors of Crib Wars are from Ontario, Canada as well. One of them is Norm Ackland, an Elvis Tribute Artist, and Robert J. Prettie. They patented the game in the late 1990s.

On the other hand, you can buy a copy of the game for about $30 at Amazon or Walmart and be cursing your luck for hours over a game which many people play only once or twice. It can take hours to play.

That pretty much makes it just another Calvinball crib game, thanks to the Calvinball Cribbage Crowd (CCC). I’m on to their tricks—and they know it.

More Calvinball Cribbage Games

This just in; we found a Crib Wars game on Amazon for only $20! I’ll have a lot more to say about Crib Wars/Cribbage Wars tomorrow.

We’ve been thinking about taking this game out for a spin for a while.

Sena also ordered something called Wicked Cribbage. I don’t know anything about it except it’s a deck of special cards which gives you a chance to cheat during a regular cribbage game. It’s yet another Calvinball cribbage item similar in nature to games like Crib Wars.

This reminds me of another variant we used to have: Chicago Cribbage. We don’t have it anymore, but it’s pretty complicated and the rules are on the web. In fact, I just found out that our demonstration of it is posted on BoardGameGeek . It also comes with a special card deck which has cards that allow you to essentially penalize your opponent.

Another Calvinball crib variant we messed around with was Zombie Cribbage about 3 years ago. It comes with a rickety 61-hole folding plastic board that often got stuck closed and the pegs were plastic zombie figurines!

One of the Zombie Cribbage variants involved using jokers although the rules for using them was tough to figure out. There were two female and two male zombies. One of the guys had a big hole in his chest and was missing an arm, which is actually normal for zombies. The cards are decorated with zombies.

We also considered trying to invent a mashup of Zombie and Chicago cribbage that we could call Chicago Zombie Cribbage. If you played your reverse counting card, you could tell your opponent, “Walk like a zombie, only backwards!” That never got off the ground, or should I say out of the grave?

Our zombie cribbage game YouTube video is at the top of a google search, but only because there are no similar videos made, apparently! There are plenty of mistakes in it, but it didn’t really matter. It got over 300 views. We don’t have the game anymore.

And the other news is even more absorbing. I’m not sure how it happened, but a squirrel got in the house and took a few bites from my pumpkin spice cake. And it brought a cribbage board, but forgot a deck of cards!

And another thing! We just found out that the Michaud Toys company has again today replaced the message (missing in the last couple of days) that U.S. orders are subject to a 35% tariff and a 25% UPS brokerage fee paid before delivery!

Today is Our 48th Wedding Anniversary!

Today is our 48^th wedding anniversary! I looked through a bunch of photos last night and probably picked all the wrong ones—but I doubt it’ll matter. It has been 48 years, so I’m unlikely to learn from mistakes now.

We were married at the Little Brown Church in Nashua, Iowa. We were nervous, but got through our vows, rang the bell, and cut the wedding cake. We are thankful for friends who were there for us and shared the joy.

We’ve been to a lot of places and had a lot of fun. Times are not always easy. We get through them.

I’m happy and grateful for this funny, crazy woman who wins a lot of cribbage games with me and does more for my soul than I can ever say.

Svengoolie Show Movie: The Valley of Gwangi!

I watched the Svengoolie show 1969 movie, “The Valley of Grungi” on Saturday. Sorry, that’s Gwangi. That was a pretty good day for TV. I saw “Men in Black” on cable, which is rare. We also saw the Iowa Hawkeye vs Oregon Ducks football game. Too bad they lost, and by only 2 points.

Anyway, “The Valley of Gwangi” was released in 1969, was directed by Jim O’Connolly, and featured the stop motion wizardry of Ray Harryhausen. It starred James Franciscus as Friar Tuck (oops, different movie), I mean Tuck Kirby, Gila Golan as T.J. Breckenridge, and Laurence Naismith as paleontologist Professor Bromley. Franciscus and Bromley both won Academy awards for “Whitest Teeth on the Planet.” Sena watched the show intermittently while flipping channels but noticed the brilliant white teeth.

But really white teeth were not the only bright spots in the film. I’ll let you know if I think of any others.

The main idea of the story is that Tuck and T.J. have this dysfunctional relationship based on Tuck’s inability to settle down and stop being a jive hustler, which happens to also be T.J.’s problem, frankly. T.J. is in this decaying wild west rodeo show which barely supports a living and Tuck is chasing a dream of a ranch in Wyoming and wants T.J. to team up with him.

But they get distracted by a paleontologist, a little horse (Eohippus) from the dinosaur age millions of years ago, and a valley containing giant lizards like an Allosaurus, a Styracosaurus, and a Pteranodon.

But they left out the dinosaur the remains of which were recently found in Montana: the dreaded dome-headed dinosaur, Brontotholus harmoni, a frequent combatant in mud-wrestling contests with Fred Flintstone.

But Bromley has his eyes set on capturing the Eohippus for scientific study (hah!), scheming to raise a corral full of Eohippi (is that the plural?), apparently to sell to people like Tuck and T.J. who have a fixation on ranches and wild west shows but can’t get along with each other long enough to run a lemonade stand.

Most of the action involves cowpokes falling off their horses while attempting to rope the dinosaurs with lariats clearly not strong enough to hold a 2-ton Allosaurus. Yet they manage to subdue it and drag it back to the wild west show arena where they make it dance to the tune Putting on the Ritz, which it apparently hated.

One of the characters in the movie is a boy named Lope, who is smart enough to stay out of some trouble than the boy Juanito in the movie “The Black Scorpion” but still manages to get nabbed by the Pteranodon, from which he has to be rescued. He is also pretty much cut from the same cloth as Tuck and TJ in that he’s a clever hustler and a matchmaker as well. Later, both Juanito and Lope team up in the combination sequel to both of these movies, “Misfit Monkeyshines and the Dome-Headed Dinosaur.” More stop action magic that you should not miss!

This movie is just a bit better than fair and I give it a 3/5 shrilling chicken rating.

Renewed Interest in the Post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?”

There has been renewed attention to my now 3 year old post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, it’s the most read post in the last week or so, judging from my Top Posts list. I’m not sure why, so I’ve reopened the comments section, which I closed a while back because they all were beginning to sound about the same.

What’s new?

Where is the Hideout of the Calvinball Cribbage Crowd?

Today we went back to playing standard 6-card cribbage and it was a relief! After all of the Calvinball cribbage variations we’ve been muddling through, getting back to a standard game felt great.

I thought of a name for an imaginary group that comes up with all of the cribbage variations (whether they exist or not): the Calvinball Cribbage Crowd (CCC). The name “Calvinball crib” came from a Reddit thread contributor who replied to someone who posted an inquiry if anyone had ever played 10 card cribbage. The answer was “Yes, there have been many many posts of Calvinball crib.”

Actually, there’s another instance of the Calvinball name applied to cribbage on Reddit. It occurred on a different topic with a lot of comments about how to teach cribbage to someone else: “Cribbage is basically Calvinball.”

If you just google the term “Calvinball cribbage” you’ll find my blog posts using it in the titles in the last week.

As a reminder, the word “Calvinball” comes from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip series which ran in the papers between 1985-1995. It’s even defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word is used mainly in North America. The definition as it relates to cribbage is that it refers to the creation of a so many different rules made by different cribbage players that it ultimately leads to a sense of chaos in that there seems to be no consistent set of rules at all.

Anyway, as we played some of the cribbage variations that include increasing numbers of playing cards, I began to wonder why there isn’t a 12-card cribbage ever listed. That’s because the so-called 11 and 13 card variants are listed on the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) website, yet there’s no mention of a 12-card variant.

What gives? Is this a ploy to confuse the public about cribbage? Is the CCC a secret splinter group of the ACC? And is the CCC attempting to subvert the effort to maintain the supremacy of the classic standard 6-card game?

Let’s hope so (I’m only kidding). But this line of thought probably led to Sena asking if the United Kingdom has a national cribbage organization like the ACC in North America. I googled it for the first time today. In 2017, the United Kingdom Cribbage Association (UKCA) was formed to address the declining popularity of cribbage in the country, which actually got started there by Sir John Suckling in the 17^th century. Recall the ACC got started in 1980.

Naturally, that prompts the question of how common is Calvinball cribbage in the UKCA? You knew I was going to say that and don’t try to deny it. It’s difficult to answer. It looks like they prefer the 6-card game to 121 also although, admittedly, I didn’t investigate it thoroughly. They seem to be more conservative. So far, I don’t see any evidence (yet) for a UK chapter of the CCC. Of course this leads to the conspiracy theory (why not?) of the UK colluding with the Canadians to create the secret CCC in an effort to undermine the popularity of standard cribbage in northwestern and northeastern U.S. (where cribbage is very popular) and instead promote a collection of Calvinball crib variations to preoccupy Americans with counting endless complicated scoring combinations that prevent the completion of any games which typically last several hours and lead to starvation, exhaustion, confusion (did you say there are 40 fifteens for two or 142?), hemorrhoids from sitting too long, and the dreaded cankles.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, try to answer this question: Why is there no information whatsoever on 12-card cribbage? Don’t include AI instructions because they are confabulated.

Bigfoot and UFOs May be More Than Lore But 11 Card Cribbage is Out the Door!

Today, Sena “suggested” that we try make up our own version of the 11-card cribbage rumor. Recall that I picked up the idea from the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) web site that two of the many variations of cribbage are the 11 and 13 card games. I had e-mailed the ACC on Friday (two days ago) about the rules for them.

Based on the other oddball variants we’ve experimented on since last week (see my post, “Oddball Cribbage Variants Marathon Today and a Catatonic Squirrel!”), we dealt 11 cards, threw one card to the dealer’s crib, inspected our hands and tossed 3 more cards to the crib, making the crib 7 cards. That left 8 cards in our hands.

Predictably, pegging was not a big event, but counting the outrageously high hands and crib was. We had to use the cribbage scorer program developed by someone pitching the 9-card cribbage game on a Reddit cribbage thread.

It works sometimes but there is a hiccup with it not allowing input of face cards, which leads to problematic scoring. But for the most part, it works.

The short story is that we scored so high that we played only 3 hands before Sena won! Did that make the game faster? No, of course not. We spent over an hour trying to count our hands and cribs and that includes manual counting and giving up and resorting to the scorer program.

Sena’s 1st hand was 58 points according to the scorer: fifteens for 40 points; runs were 12; pairs were 6. Her cards are above the board (she was pone) and my 8-card hand and 7 card crib are below the board. The 2^nd and 3^rd hand were also horrendous. Sena won.

When we finished, I noticed that the ACC expert had answered my email. He had just got back from a big ACC tournament in Reno, Nevada. He asked several cribbage pros about the 11 and 13 card variants. Nobody had even heard of them, much less played them. He even asked the editor of Cribbage World magazine, his usual contact for questions like ours. He’s never heard of either one of the variants. This is despite their being mentioned on the ACC Article Library, quoted below:

“Did you know that there are at least 18 variations to the BASIC game of cribbage? There is the basic 2 or 4 handed game, and then there are the 5 card, 7 card, 11 card and 13 card cribbage games.”

I think that settles the question about the 11 and 13 card variations. They are part of the fascinating mythology of cribbage. I’m sure there’s more.