A couple of days ago I saw one of the many news items about the 17 year (and 13 year) cicadas invading Eastern Iowa this summer.
But I haven’t seen any mention of the sex-crazed, fungus-infected zombie cicadas announced in April.
So, you can relax. Try noise-cancelling headphones.
It’s that time of the year again; everybody’s moving whether relocating across the country or just moving across town.
One thing is key: you need quality, top of the line appliances. Say you’re having family and friends over for dinner and you need freezer space for roadkill squirrel. Why, a General Electric fridge with the perfect size little freezer designed to accommodate flattened rodents is just what you need.
But wait; you’ll need a stove to cook them! Look no further than your own Magic Chef. Emeril Lagasse would be proud to own this little gem, which might even have smell-o-vision as he would call it! That is, if you like the smell of smoked salmon (see what I did there?). Just whack your food against the grill to knock off any residual char. Or spray them down with the complimentary Copper Bullet Hose and watch that smoke just disappear!
Better hurry to order. These items are selling so fast there is a strict order of only two to a customer!
Pay no attention to that thing which resembles an antique hash pipe in the oven.
Note on Photos: Courtesy of Slager Appliances in Iowa City, I took these photos of vintage appliances on display in their showroom.
We got the Triple Berry Frosty at Wendy’s and we got a surprise answer at the order station when we asked what berries are in it:
“Uh, I don’t actually know.”
Fair enough. We tried to guess. Sena thought one of them was strawberry and another was blueberry (to account for the slightly bluish color). I couldn’t tell what was in it-but it was good.
I had to look on the web to find out the berries are strawberry, blackberry, and raspberry.
The Wendy’s Blog says that the Triple Berry Frosty is one way to take a break: “We all have moments when we could use a bit of an escape from our busy lives.”
That fits right now.
Bank tellers who hand you sleeves to roll your coins laugh in their sleeves (so to speak) because they don’t count coins anymore and they like to see the customers wince.
I complained about this in a previous post. I tried it. It’s doable. I used the Wikihow method. Using a cloth to put the coins on helps because they just slide around on a smooth tabletop.
Lining them up in your palm and sliding them into the sleeve just right so they don’t jam is the hard part. Once you get the hang of it—it’s still incredibly slow.
Maybe the Coinstar machine?
UPDATE: I got $55 dollars rolled up in coins. All told, I probably put in about 2 hours on the project. I also want to point out that you’ll have different numbers of piles of 10 coins depending on what denomination is marked on the sleeves.
Getting the new laptop reminds me of my pocket protector nerd days. That’s because the modern laptop is a sharp contrast to the big heavy desktops. I worked for consulting engineers back in the stone age and I wore a pocket protector. Some people might not know what that is. It’s a little plastic pen holder that fits in your shirt pocket. It protects your shirt from ink spots, but makes you look like a nerd. I would also keep notes on a little pocket flip cover paper notebook.
It was mandatory that you carry six or seven pens and mechanical pencils in the pocket holder, which typically would be emblazoned with some kind of engineering advertising label: Nerdy Engineers Are Us or The Silos of Tomorrow.
When I graduated to a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) complete with stylus, I thought that was a major upgrade. It was a mobile handheld device on which I took notes using a stylus. It was a little on the big side for my shirt pocket, so it displaced the paper notebook and the pocket protector.
You can see the PDA in action by watching the Men in Black II movie in which a couple of junior level men in black are using them to take notes. This is the scene at Ben’s Pizza Parlor in which Frank the talking pug says the deflated body of Ben has “zero percent body fat” and the two men in black laugh at the joke.
Also on the nerdy side, I used to wear bow ties. They were kind of fun to tie. I had many. One of them was plaid, which I realize raises the nerd level up a notch. My nerd fashion attire also included (you might want to sit down for this)—clip on suspenders. I later graduated to the suspenders you button on the inside of your pants beltline.
I think you can still release your inner nerd by getting a pocket protector. And remember, you didn’t hear it from me.
I’ve got a couple of things to get off my chest about Artificial Intelligence (AI). By now, everyone knows about AI telling people to put hot glue on pizza and whatnot. Sena and I talked to a guy at an electronics store who had nothing but good things to say about AI. I mentioned the hot glue thing and pizza and it didn’t faze him.
I noticed the Psychiatric Times article, “AI in Psychiatry: Things Are Moving Fast.” They mention the tendency for AI to hallucinate and expressed appropriate reservations about its limitations.
And then I found something very interesting about AI and Cribbage. How much does AI know about the game? Turns out not much. Any questions? Don’t expect AI to answer them accurately.
I was thinking of one of the Johnson County judicial mental health referees I often worked with years ago. L. Jay Stein died in 2014. I looked up his obituary the other day and was a little surprised to find I had written a remembrance for him. I’d forgotten it.
“I will always remember my first encounters with Judge Stein. I was a first-year resident in psychiatry at The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. He often presided at mental health commitment hearings at which I was often the nervous trainee providing “expert testimony” as the treating physician. Jay taught me and countless other psychiatry residents about the importance of procedure. His knowledge was prodigious. But it was his compassion, his fairness, and his inimitable sense of humor I will always treasure.”
Judge Stein’s vocabulary was impressive. Even his recorded telephone automatic replies sounded amusingly erudite. Occasionally, when I had a question about legal procedures in mental health I would call him but get his answering machine. These out of office replies were entertaining and sounded very much like the way he did during commitment hearings. I can’t remember all of it, but it began with something like, “Once again, your request has been denied…” It made me think of what I might hear at a parole hearing—not mine of course.
L. Jay Stein was wise and funny.
We saw the 1959 movie “The Tingler” starring Vincent Price on the Svengoolie show last Saturday. Price plays a prison pathologist, Dr. Warren Chapin, who’s trying to scientifically study a parasitic creature called the tingler (tingles up and down your spine means you’re scared right out of your mind!).
It sits on your spine and feeds on fear by clamping down on it, eventually breaking it unless you scream. Then it’ll just let go. However, if you’re mute, scared speechless, or it grabs you by the throat—you’re done. So, the tingler lives on fear, although if you express fear vocally by screaming, you escape it.
OK, so I’m going to spoil the opening scene, which shows a prisoner being dragged to the electric chair, screaming all the way until the executioner throws the switch. When Dr. Chapin does an autopsy, he finds the prisoner’s spine is cracked. He says it wasn’t caused by the electrocution, but by the tingler.
Huh? But the prisoner screamed bloody murder (murder was why he got the death penalty by the way) hardly stopping to take a breath. Shouldn’t that have weakened or killed the tingler? You can find examples of inconsistencies like this in any cheesy movie, but where’s the fun in that?
One web article says the tingler creature was modeled after the velvet worm, which looks pretty creepy. In reality, the velvet worm is harmless to humans, but is a predator of many invertebrates. Just keep telling yourself, “I’m a vertebrate.”
You can watch the full movie on the Internet Archive. The most interesting part of it for me was the use of what was called “acid,” (meaning the hallucinogen LSD) by Dr. Chapin. He wanted to experience and record the actual experience of being scared by the tingler, just to see what it’s like apparently. He mainlines himself with a fairly stiff dose of LSD although I can’t remember how much.
Incidentally, an article in JAMA notes, “Doses of 20μg/kg of body weight are known to have been taken without a lethal outcome.” (Materson BJ, Barrett-Connor E. LSD “Mainlining”: A New Hazard to Health. JAMA. 1967;200(12):1126–1127. doi:10.1001/jama.1967.03120250160025). I don’t know how much Dr. Chapin weighs.
This was about the same time as a lot of people in the U.S. were experimenting with the hallucinogen in various ways, including mainlining it. There are web references to psychiatrists using LSD recreationally (this was when it was legal). Bad trips were and still are common, although there is a growing body of clinical studies that involve using the psychedelics as adjuncts in psychotherapy. It’s not for everybody, although tinglers might have a different opinion.
Anyway, Dr. Chapin has a bad trip, gets really scared of hallucinations and screams. Web articles say that killed his tingler, but I didn’t see it flop out of his mouth.
There you have it. Another really cheesy and fun Svengoolie movie. I’m a vertebrate.
I just saw the latest headline about the United States Postal Service (USPS) new recommendation that we all get a nice, big mailbox. Huh?
I gather one reason for the suggestion is to cut down on mail theft. I don’t think I’m allowed to put a lock on a mailbox, no matter how big it is.
In fact, the only way I’ve seen to reduce (notice I said reduce, not eliminate) mail theft are those big mailbox clusters you see everywhere in neighborhoods nowadays. Those are the neighborhoods with Homeowners Associations (HOAs), which require you to paint your window trim with beige (not taupe, read my lips!) or face lawsuits.
You know about those clusters, they’re a block away from your house. And you know how small your mailbox is there, yet the postal service is also big on recommending that you use them, probably because it makes their job easier. Which is it? Big mailbox with no lock or big locked mailbox cluster with small boxes?
Is the postal service in charge of maintenance on those mail cluster boxes? Of course not. We’re responsible for clearing away the ice and snow. And is theft not a problem with the cluster boxes? Scan the web for stories about armed bandits who hold up the letter carrier for the key. It happens.
Bigger mailboxes are not the answer to the postal service problems. They can attract the Halloween pranksters showing off their Hank Aaron batting skills (look him up!) and sadistic city snowplow drivers who like dragging your mailbox into the next county after plugging your driveway.
I can remember when the letter carrier walked the delivery route pushing a cart filled with mail. He stopped at every house in the neighborhood to put your mail in the mailbox, which was attached to the front of your house, or to drop it in the mail slot in your front door.
I’m not saying mail theft was not a problem in those days, but I don’t recall hearing about it on the news broadcasts or reading about it in the newspaper—which I hand delivered, sometimes risking injury from big dogs. The only theft I recall was by customers who avoided paying when I tried to collect:
“Do you have change for a hundred-dollar bill, sonny?”
“I’m a paperboy, not a banker!”
“Come back next week.”
Here’s an idea. What if some scientist invented a mailbox which contained a device which would trip only after your mail was delivered? This device would spray concentrated poison ivy resin all over the inside of the mailbox, teaching thieves a lesson. Of course you would have to wear gloves to collect your mail.
Another idea is to make your own mailbox, which would be big enough for a Ninja warrior to hide inside. That would surprise the crooks! I think you can get a Ninja for a fair price on eBay.
I heard the Big Mo Pod Show, which relates to the quiz about 5 songs he played on the Big Mo Blues Show last Friday night. He got all the artists right, just missed 3 song titles!
I had a couple of thoughts about the song lineup related to the theme “Music Changes Context.” Actually, the point was that one of the songs had what might have made some people mad. It was “Funky B***h.” The idea was that some words might be offensive if you say them, but when words are sung, that might make them not offensive, in a way. It’s a matter of opinion.
How that happens is not clear. Big Mo’s example of it was in a historical context related to slavery. Slaves could not say certain words while they were working in the fields. But the overseer would let them get away with if they used the words in a song.
I heard one song that was not part of the Big Mo Pod show that might put a different spin on the idea of how music changes context. It’s about brotherly love, in a manner of speaking—or in a manner of singing, I should say.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 