I was watching a show about the prophet Nostradamus last night. Some experts don’t believe he got any of his predictions for the future right. A few will say he got the one about Louis Pasteur correct, which is that he would invent pasteurization. But then others will deny even that. He made his predictions using cryptic quatrains.
Sena has been drinking her prune juice and I presume she’s regular. Besides that, she could be an excellent astronaut. There was a small study by scientists that seemed to show that mice who ate prunes could be protected from space radiation.
I think you’d have to eat a lot of prunes for that. Being regular is one thing, but being less susceptible to the dangers of space travel to places like Mars might mean a serious commitment to prunes beyond human endurance.
It makes me wonder how extraterrestrials tolerate it. We’re always depicting them as humanoid on TV and in movies. Maybe they already know about this. It would give abduction a whole new meaning.
The Svengoolie TV show movie next Saturday will be “Invaders from Mars” released in 1953 and it triggered some memories. One of them is when I was a little kid. I think I saw parts of it on TV while I was supposed to be down for a nap. I recall seeing these burly guys in green body suits trotting stiff-legged through tunnels. Their gait is something I can’t forget—no matter how hard I try. For a long time, I thought I had just been dreaming. But I’m pretty sure the nightmare was real because when we saw the movie last year on the Svengoolie show, those Martians looked familiar.
The other memory is of a TV public service announcement (PSA) commercial in the early 1970s. I managed to find a YouTube of it that reminded me of the leader of the Martians. He was in a clear globe and the green guys carried him around. He was just a head with tentacles. He was the leader and was very much ahead of his assistants in an evolutionary sense. At least I think that was the idea. He was basically the brains of the extraterrestrial population. He did all the thinking and planning—but he was stuck in this globe.
Anyway, the commercial is from 1971 and it’s a PSA from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. The commercial shows how we’d be by the year 2000 if we didn’t shape up, literally. Richard Nixon was President; during his presidency Apollo 11 landed on the moon—and he resigned from office because of the Watergate scandal. Anyway, food for thought for the upcoming film, “Invaders from Mars,” which probably has a message about leadership.
We watched the Svengoolie show movie, “Return of the Vampire.” I should say Sena watched about 10 minutes of it on the Internet Archive and said it was pretty good. The film was directed by Lew Landers. The writers were Randall Faye, Kurt Neumann (The Fly 1958), and Griffin Jay (Cry of the Werewolf 1944).
The movie was produced by Columbia and released in 1943. Bela Lugosi stars as the vampire Armand Tesla (no relation to Nikola Tesla) and never once says “Bluh, bluh!” This distinguishes him from Dracula, which you can’t even whisper by mistake without being ensnared in a net by lawyers who wouldn’t bat an eyelash at bleeding you dry of all your assets, so wear a garlic necklace.
He couldn’t be called Dracula in this production by Columbia because Universal had already made a few dollars on the Dracula name in their production and threatened Columbia to a thumb-wrestling match between top executives if they plagiarized the name Dracula. Soreheads!
You can’t miss Lugosi’s clawlike hands and the cobra-like sinuosity of his fingers as he mesmerizes his victims. If I tried to imitate that, I’d get cramps. Armand Tesla has all the customary power of vampires, and at least in this film, the producers get it right when we see he casts no reflection in a mirror. But he needs a valet named Andreas who is always bringing him a parcel, presumably with fresh capes from the dry cleaners.
The story spans two world wars; in WWI, Tesla gets bumped off with a spike; in WWII, he gets a new lease on undead life from the Nazi bombing and bungling civil servants (see below), regaining control over Andreas which he lost in WWI when he got spiked. Tesla’s new goal is to recruit a fresh vampire and try the new Wendy’s Frosty flavor, the Bloody Nicki.
Matt Willis plays Andreas Obry, the vampire’s hairy butler, a talking werewolf whose diction doesn’t fumble over his fangs. He’s pretty sharp in a suit but why he doesn’t complete the ensemble with a smart pair of oxfords is puzzling. He prowls barefoot across the graveyards, gardens, and sidewalk cafes (he ignores the signs “No shirt, no shoes, no service”). Watch for his pro wrestling moves in an alley with a couple of hapless detectives who can barely lay a glove on him.
Comedy bits are spaced at tolerable intervals, like the two civil servants in the graveyard who fumble about and do something with the spike that, without their scene, would make the film pretty short. That’s “spike,” not “stake.” They’re in England, after all.
Probably the peak moment in the film is when Andreas unexpectedly makes a different kind of transformation.
The little quarrels between Lady Jane Ainsley and Scotland Yard detective Sir Frederick Fleet (no relation to enemas) highlight the dumb male and smart female dynamic, a thread which runs throughout the movie.
Lady Ainsley: Sir Frederick, I declare I can’t abide it any longer; mud tracked all over the carpet, wolf hair on the toothbrush, and dust on the crucifix!
Sir Frederick: My dear Lady Ainsley, there is no such thing as dirt!
And how is all that fog getting into the house? You can barely see the walls—except for the fourth one.
We have an update on the tree bags. Believe it or not, the tree bags have been constipated! We had to hire out an archery team to shoot a few arrows into them to get them to drain. Otherwise, the trees would get moldy—I guess.
There’s something to consider, though. If the tree bags worked the way they should, you’d have a lot more work to do, filling them up every so often. That would get old in a hurry.
Archers don’t come cheap. They have their own union. And if they occasionally miss, they have to make return trips, which runs up the charges.
If you’re feeling lucky, you can contact them on the internet: Tree Bag Archery: Purging is Our Point!
“Calling all stations, clear the air lines, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!” (Svengoolie show intro).
Tonight’s Svengoolie movie is “Return of the Vampire.” I’m debating on whether to watch it because I’ve heard there’s a talking werewolf. Is that even legal?
Just like a few days ago, yesterday evening while we were playing cribbage, Sena spied a slim indigo bunting. This one flew right up to our window! It was probably not the same one we first saw. That guy was buff, likely because he’d been branch pressing in the gym.
This character was slim and trim and looked like a lot of other birds we saw charging at their reflections in our windows last month. He really wanted to tell that other bunting where to fly off. I think he should work out more if he’s going to strut like that.
If we’d been sitting by the window all day long with camera at the ready, we’d have been unlikely to ever catch Slim Indigo peering and posing like he was on the bird walk.
It’s a random surprise when lucky breaks like that happen. It can take your breath away. I’m not sure why we’ve been lucky enough to catch a look at Slim, especially after over 20 years since seeing the last one. One answer to that might be here. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. By the way, that reminds me; Sena won the cribbage game—this time.
The one thing I couldn’t get by shooting video through a window is Slim’s voice. Clearly, you can see he was chirping at one point. So, here’s a link for that.
I wish we’d filmed the cribbage match we just played because it was marked by the weird combination of luck and strategy so typical of every cribbage game. On the other hand, I know if we’d tried to film it, we’d have been too flustered to make anything useful of it.
So, I’m going to point out generalities that might be interesting and useful to anyone who wants to know about how to play cribbage.
One skill I’ve picked up from playing the computer game Cribbage Pro is how to figure out which two cards I should throw to either my crib or Sena’s. In general, you can learn from any cribbage player you should throw “bad” cards to your opponent and “good” cards to yourself. It’s just about keeping the most points for yourself and as few as possible to your opponent. Cribbage Pro rates your throws. You want to keep cards that you can make points on when you’re the dealer and you want to throw cards to your opponent which will be least likely to make points for them.
It’s easy to get hypnotized into thinking that the crib tosses are the main way to win—but it’s a false hope. I’ve gotten perfect ratings on my crib throws and been skunked by Brutal, the Cribbage Pro game’s toughest opponent.
Luck is an important part of cribbage and counting on just one of the aspects that you have some modicum of control over is a mistake. In fact, one of the reasons I get dinged by the computer is my tendency to ignore the 3-point run in my hand, which when counted with a two card 15 combo can make me 5 points. I usually get mesmerized by the common double 15 with two 10 cards and a five card, which are worth 4 points and break up the 3-point run. I can’t figure out why I do that so often.
The other thing I miss is the flush in my hand, which often would net me more points, especially when I don’t see what I usually get stuck on—the 15s!
But there’s always a big luck factor along with simple inattention to careful counting that does me in. And focusing too much on the throw to the crib can distract you from learning pegging skills, which is governed by some basic understanding of probability (nothing esoteric here, please, because I barely got through biostatistics in medical school!) and whether or not you’re playing with someone you know pretty well and able to anticipate their usual moves (she always drops the 9 spot on the 6 lead!).
That reminds me of somebody who was one of the top cribbage players in the world, DeLynn Colvert. He won several national cribbage championships in his career and wrote a book about the statistical aspects of the game, including something he called the Twenty-Six Theory. I have the book and I’ve never really even tried to read that chapter. You can get a sense of what kind of cribbage expert he was by reading Part 1 of his Twenty-Six Theory on the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) web site.
Paraphrasing Master Yoda: “That is why I fail.”
Cribbage YodasDeLynn Colvert cribbage book
Another thing that sometimes prevents us from getting points is the uncertainty about seeing the run during the pegging phase. It’s common for players to place their cards on their sides of the table with the cribbage board between them. Here again, Cribbage Pro can sometimes interfere with learning an important skill. It does all the work because all the cards from both players are automatically placed in the center of the screen, where runs are clearly discernible.
I think in most games nobody has the luxury of seeing how runs actually look in the usual table setup. Maybe others have no trouble spotting what are called interrupter cards in sequences, but we do—although we’re getting better.
What that can lead to is avoiding playing into runs because both players have to sort of conspire to make them. You can actually see them coming and “run” away because you don’t want to get embarrassed by puzzling over what counts as a run or not. We know the cards don’t have to be in order but they do need to be resolvable into a consecutive sequence on close inspection.
That’s harder to do if the players’ cards are on opposite sides of the cribbage board. You also have to pay attention who leads after a go because it’s relatively easy to tell where a run starts at the beginning of a game since pone always leads.
It’s really hard to talk about cribbage. It would be better to make a video of it, but I’m not sure we could do it. Cribbage has been called a “finicky” game by Barry Rigal, who co-edited the book “Card Games for Dummies” and it’s tough to argue that point.
On the other hand, if you stick to it, you can get drawn into all that finickiness.
We’ve lived in the Iowa City area for over 37 years and never heard of the Brain Rock until today. I don’t know how we ever missed it. It’s a work of art called Ridge and Furrow created by artist Peter Randall-Page, a world-famous artist from the United Kingdom.
It’s been called the Brain Rock for obvious reasons because the stone has what you might call gyri and sulci all over its surface. It has recently been relocated from the T. Anne Cleary walkway outside the Pomerantz Career Center to the Medical Education and Research Facility (MERF).
As Randall-Page says, if you trace the line from one side of the sculpture you can follow it to its end on the—far side of the rock, I guess you’d call it.
The other interesting thing about the Brain Rock is that a couple of intoxicated college students urinated on it back in November of 2021. No mention of whether they were trying to trace the furrow. Maybe they’d heard of the urinating sculpture and fountain called Piss in Prague.
So, this movie ‘Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster” is high in cheese content and don’t expect to see the Frankenstein made famous by Boris Karloff. It was released in 1965 and directed by Soupy Sales, no wait, it was Robert Gaffney. Marilyn Hanold played the big female lead, Marcuzan, the amazonian leader who looks nothing like the male Martians, one of whom, Dr. Nadir (played by Lou Cotell), reminds me of Yoda.
Seriously this Nadir to take we are? Fits him the name because at the lowest level his quality is! Hmmmm?
In fact, all the male Martians sort of remind me of Yoda. Marcuzan doesn’t resemble any of them. Other cast members include Jim Karen as Dr. Adam Steele, Nancy Marshall as Karen Grant, David Kerman as General Bowers, and Robert Reilly as Col. Frank Saunders, the android astronaut. You can watch the movie on the Internet Archive, but you’ll miss Svengoolie’s cornball jokes and commentary.
The gist of the story is that the Martians (who are never identified as such, by the way) lost an atomic war and somehow all the females on the planet got wiped out. So Marcuzan and Nadir and a bunch of Martians take off for earth to round up new females to repopulate Mars.
At the same time, scientists on earth have built an android named Frank who is test-driving a brand-spanking new NASA space capsule. Nadir boy and the gang shoot it down over Puerto Rico. Frank gets shot in the brain and goes off his nut, which can’t be screwed back on because none of the Martian repairmen know how to use the metric system in order to select the right size socket wrench.
Marcuzan and Nadir and the gang and Frank all cause mayhem in Puerto Rico. It’s kind of like parallel play until the Martians hustle out their hairy monster champion, called Mull, to thumb wrestle Frank and settle the matter. Guess which one is Frankenstein? That’s right—Marcuzan!
Anyway, if you’re looking for production value, you’re barking up the wrong tree. This is about extreme campiness, which is exaggeration and purposeful emphasis on bad taste. Even though the producers wanted a serious science fiction/horror film, according to Svengoolie and one of the original screenwriters who is still teaching at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virgina, the goal was to make a wild parody of the genre. While the producers insisted on the straight version, somehow the screenwriters obviously prevailed.
That explains the obviously botched makeup jobs, the stock footage making up 65% of the scenes, and the comical and jarringly timed soundtrack. One song called “That’s the Way It’s Got to Be,” done by The Poets seems like a sort of anthem for the movie’s real aim. In other words, don’t complain about the lack of production value because it’s a parody, hence (all together now), that’s the way it’s got to be.
The Martians used a weapon that was a popular toy for a short time, the Wham-O Air Blaster. It could shoot air 40 feet and was banned after the blast ruptured a kid’s eardrum.
Early on in the movie, right after Frank the android gets bunged up after being shot down by the Martians, he ends up looking like he’s got a couple of tubes hanging and bouncing around off his chest for the rest of the movie, so I couldn’t help thinking of him by the nickname “Tubular Teats.”
And for some reason this gets connected to the scenes of the bikini-clad women being rounded up for a weird technical assessment (reminiscent of a sliding cat scan table) of their suitability for repopulating the female population back on Mars. The women obligingly assist the Martians who lift them onto the table. This is bizarre considering the fate for some of them.
Anyway, I have to rate “Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster” using a different standard from that which was used by some to rate it as pretty high up on the list of the 50 Worst Movies Ever Made. That’s because I think it’s a parody and therefore not comparable to a serious science fiction/horror flick—because that’s the way it’s got to be!
Go Retire Psychiatrist 