The other day, Sena suggested we have a soup and sandwich dinner. We both had a Braunschweiger sandwich on toasted bread, with onions—and Miracle Whip! Sena suggested the adding the onions and toasting the bread. She also decided to try the Miracle Whip spread. I chose the soup, which was so spicy we needed a drink of lemonade with every bite.
Usually, she prefers mayonnaise to Miracle Whip, so I was floored. In fact, adding onions on toasted bread with the sandwich was delicious! We both liked it.
Braunschweiger is also very nutritious. According to one web article, a single serving has 14 grams of protein, important for muscle growth, repair, and health overall. It also has heart healthy monosaturated fats (good for you), it’s high in Vitamin A which is great for eye health, and has many essential vitamins and minerals.
And is Miracle Whip good or bad for you? It turns out it has half the calories and fat of mayo, so it’s a healthy choice.
Sena actually liked the Braunschweiger with Miracle Whip sandwich. She made sure I put onions on the sandwiches and she liked the way I diced them. In fact, onions are also good for you. They’re low in calories and nutrient rich.
Try to pair it with a soup that it isn’t nuclear grade spicy and doesn’t require a gallon of lemonade to put out the fire.
Older adults can learn more about healthy eating and exercise at the Move Your Way link. Try it. You might like it.
A couple of nights ago, I watched a few TV shows on the Travel Channel about UFOs, extraterrestrial abductions, implants, and whatnot. I think there was some sort of marathon given that it was the Independence Day weekend.
Anyway, I was surprised to see Marc D’Antonio on a show called Alien Invasion: Hudson Valley. The story is about a community of people there who report many encounters with extraterrestrials. I’m used to watching The Proof Is Out There on the History Channel, hosted by congenial and humorously skeptical Tony Harris. On that show, D’Antonio is one of the “analysts” who appraise photos submitted as evidence for the paranormal. He’s always pretty skeptical and presents a scientific demeanor.
However, D’Antonio is also a MUFON investigator (which I found out later) and on the Hudson Valley show, he gave a detailed account of having been visited by an extraterrestrial, lost time, and woke up later in his bed, covered in his own blood, later seeing a doctor who removed some big foreign object from his nose, which he reported had probably been implanted there by the extraterrestrial. He told the anecdote matter-of-factly and I was struck by his non-scientific attitude.
I guess he and many others like him are actors in this flood of UFO TV shows which are very entertaining and give the appearance of being investigative in their purpose. D’Antonio appeared to be an actor, which led me to doubt the authenticity of his role on The Proof Is Out There.
They kicked around the idea that extraterrestrials were implanting objects in people to track the ones who are Rh negative blood type. They suggested that extraterrestrials need to use humans as some kind of blood bank. That reminds me of a line from Men in Black II:
Newton: Gentlemen, before I start the tape, one more thing—what’s up with anal probing? I mean, do aliens really travel billions of light years just to…
On the other hand, the Hudson Valley thing was a confusing mix of ghost hunters and alien hunters. They used a device that I think they called an electromagnetic field (EMF) meter, which you can purchase on Amazon along with many other ghost hunting gadgets. The women actors shrieked predictably as they reported feeling invisible hands stroke their hair.
I thought the show was supposed to be about extraterrestrials, not ghosts. They tried to cover the bases by tossing out terms like interdimensional beings, ghosts, and extraterrestrials. Most IMDb reviewers generally panned the show as being unbelievably bad, which is right.
A program previous to that was about some podiatric surgeon named Roger Leir who removed a lot of foreign objects out of somebody’s foot and then claimed they were implanted by aliens. Leir sent the objects to a lab, which identified them as being made of common elements. Somehow, he got the idea they were from outer space.
But they didn’t mention that in the show. They brought in some other expert who claimed they were parts of alien nanotechnology. The only thing I could find out about that was on, oddly enough, an Ohio State University web page article about Leir that seemed out of place on the OSU website. The article was seemingly supportive of his claim that the objects were alien implants.
I think the shows should be more clearly identified as being entertainment in nature, not investigative. If they want to get more viewers, they might try adopting the Mountain Monsters approach, which is to make a parody about the subject. At least the humor would valuable.
I saw the HHS Move Your Way campaign regarding the new strategy on encouraging older people to exercise, namely the Midcourse Report: Implementation Strategies for Older Adults.
There are many ways to get and stay fit. We could all do better, including me. I exercise pretty much daily for about 30 minutes. Following that, I usually sit in mindfulness meditation for 30 minutes.
The report says we should do moderate intensity aerobic activity for at least 150 minutes a week and muscle strengthening activity for at least 2 days a week.
I do a combination of stationary bicycle exercise, weight exercises with dumbbells, planks, body weight squats. I also do one leg stand, one minute each leg.
And juggling is great aerobic exercise. I struggle a bit with advanced thumb wrestling.
I was not sure what exactly I saw this between 6:30 and 7:00 this morning shaking the mulberry tree branches in our backyard. It seemed too big to be a squirrel and I dismissed the thought, telling myself that it was most likely the usual squirrel getting its mulberry breakfast.
Just prior to this incident, I had seen and heard what I thought was a blue jay in the mulberry tree. It gave a series of short whistles while bobbing up and down on the branch. I had never heard a blue jay make whistle notes, just the usual screeches. I doubted what I saw and heard. I checked my bird book, “Birds of Iowa: Field Guide” by Stan Tekiela. It didn’t mention anything about blue jays making short whistling notes and bobbing up and down as they did so. I didn’t bother to get up and try to get a video of it. It would have been through the window of our sun room and the jay didn’t sit for more than a few seconds.
So, I looked it up on the web. It turns out blue jays make a variety of noises besides the jeer. They bob up and down as a part of a courtship ritual. They make what is termed a “pump handle call” and I found a video which duplicates what I saw and heard.
Anyhow, getting back to the critter in the mulberry tree, it turned out to be a large raccoon. It was eating mulberries and I tried to take video of it as it was climbing down the tree. This reminded me of an essay by E.B. White entitled “Coon Tree.” If you’ve ever read essays by E.B. White, you probably know already that this one is about a lot more than raccoons.
It’s basically about the conflict between nature and technology. The main essay was published in 1956 and a post script was added in 1962. The coon represents nature which White idealizes and contrasts with references to new inventions, including nuclear devices which represent the destructive side of technology.
I guess we can forget for the moment that raccoons can carry diseases like rabies and roundworm. I’m also reminded of an old TV commercial in the 1970s about margarine (an alternative to butter) in which an actor says angrily, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” The idea was that margarine (which was a new invention in the late 19th century) was healthier than the natural spread, butter—although the trans fat in it makes the comparison a bit more complicated.
White also says something interesting about unsanitary homes, claiming that children who live in them become more resistant to certain diseases like polio than the kids who grow up in clean homes. The polio scourge raised its ugly head recently in New York, which renewed the recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control recently that people who didn’t get vaccinated against polio should get vaccinated—regardless of how dirty your home was.
And then there is the artificial intelligence (AI) technology. I wonder what E.B. White would say about that? AI can improve detection of some diseases and assist in medical research. On the other hand, AI can still make mistakes and it needs human surveillance.
I read you can sometimes use loud noises to keep raccoons out of your yard. For example, you could try recordings of blue jays.
Dr. George Dawson’s post “The Freak Show” reminded me of how coarse and cruel we can be to each other, even when we’re not aware of it. Maybe I should say especially when we’re not aware of it. Dr. Dawson emphasizes the importance of the empathic approach. In the same way, Dr. Moffic in the articles in his column, “Psychiatric Views on the News” draws attention to the need for a socially responsible way for us to relate to one another. The Goodenough Psychiatrist blog expresses poignantly the emotional and courageously humanistic ways we can (or could) relate to each other. Dr. Ronald Pies has highlighted the importance of how human interaction with artificial intelligence must help us find a way to treat each other with respect, and teach that to AI because AI learns from humans.
This reminds me of a character in the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. The character is named Gag Halfrunt who is the personal brain specialist for a couple of other characters. In fact, he’s a psychiatrist who orders the destruction of planet Earth, which is a sort of computer program designed to give us the ultimate question to the ultimate answer for life, the universe, and everything. The reason Gag Halfrunt wants to destroy Earth is, if the ultimate question is revealed, it would put psychiatrists out of work because then everyone would be happy.
Just as a personal comment, I’m pretty unhappy with the author’s position on psychiatrists in general, which tends to overemphasize our importance. And I’m pretty sure psychiatrists are not that important, having been employed as one for many years and seeing how much impact of any kind we have. We can’t make people more or less happy at all.
In fact, Adams also takes a shot at philosophers, who are also upset at being thrown out of work should the ultimate question to the ultimate answer be revealed (the ultimate answer, by the way, is 42 if you’re interested).
Giving psychiatrists and philosophers and anyone else who might have a stake in taking credit for making people happy is nonsense. We all bear responsibility for ourselves. You can argue about whether or not we have any responsibility for each other.
Rather than arguing about it, we could give something else a try. We could try a mindfulness approach like the Lovingkindness Meditation. I’m not an authority or expert on this, but you can check it out on the Palouse Mindfulness website, the link to which is in the menu on my blog. You can find the link to the Lovingkindness Meditation there.
There is no guarantee the Lovingkindness Meditation will make you or anyone else happy. But it doesn’t hurt anything to try it and, as far as I know, Gag Halfrunt is not opposed to it.
Sena gave me a haircut the other day. She’s been cutting my hair almost 30 years. She bought a new barber cape recently which has snaps instead of Velcro to hold it around my neck. I still have Velcro tennis shoes, though.
The first time Sena cut my hair she left a bald patch on the back of my head. The only way I found out about it was when somebody noticed it in the psychiatry department administration office where I hung out when I was chief resident.
Since then, she’s done an excellent job of cutting my hair. And she does a great job cutting her own hair too.
After the haircut, I had to trim my beard again because I looked a little lopsided.
I wish I could have made the title of this post “Why It’s So Hard to Be a Human.” But that would mean I know why it’s so hard to be a human.
The reason this comes up is because of a song I heard last Friday night on the Big Mo Blues Show on KCCK radio in Iowa. The title is “Hard To Be A Human.” I’ve never heard of the vocalist, Bettye LaVette, who has been around a long time. A musician named Randall Bramblett wrote the song and he’s been around forever too, although I just learned of him as well.
I’m going to connect this song with the paranormal show I usually watch on Friday nights, “The Proof is Out There,” which I watch after I listen to the Friday Night Blues with Big Mo.
The show lives on videos from people who report seeing and hearing things like UFOs and Bigfoot or whatever that’s paranormal. There are a lot of fakes and conventional explanations uncovered on “The Proof is Out There,” including UFO videos sent in by contributors.
The reason I’m connecting the song “Hard To Be A Human,” to the paranormal is the letter “A” in the title. There’s another song with a similar title, but without the “A.” In my mind, leaving out the article “A” makes it clear that song is about humans for humans.
By contrast, the song with the article “A” makes me think of extraterrestrials. “A human” could imply that there might be some other life form aside from humans. Of course, there’s no such song as “Hard To Be An Extraterrestrial” (or, if you’ve read Douglas Adams’ book, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” maybe “Hard To Be A Vogon”). Insert “Martian” if that makes thinking about this any easier, which it probably won’t.
There is a song entitled “Hard To Be Human,” which I think is really about how difficult it is to be human, without considering whether there could be any other beings besides the human ones.
Just adding the specific article “A” in front of the word “human” led me to wonder if you could interpret the song in a galactic sense. Now, I have no problem admitting that all this is probably just because of the temporal juxtaposition of the song and the paranormal TV show.
On the other hand, I have this thought. While I couldn’t find the full lyrics to “Hard To Be A Human,” I could understand some of them. I could discern underlying themes suggestive of Christianity. There are definite references to the Bible, such as walking in the garden “apple in my hand”, the lyric “I’m just another life form,” and “First He made the mountains, then He filled up the sea; but He lost his concentration when he started working on you and me.”
I’m willing to concede that the “just another life form” phrase might have been restricted to just the life forms on planet Earth. However, might it suggest that God made beings (and mistakes) on other planets and their inhabitants?
I hope these references are familiar to at least some readers, because I think the point of the song might go beyond the everyday struggle of being human. I think there might be an attempt to raise the notion of trying to compare the sense of being a human with that of some other kind of being not from this planet.
The older I get, the less sure I am that a human is the only kind of being in the universe. It’s a big universe. If we’re not the only life form in the universe, could life be harder for other life forms?
Probably the answer is no. I don’t see extraterrestrials in millions of flying saucers blotting out the sun in a desperate attempt to move here. Inflation is outrageous. And, after all, it’s pretty hard to be a human.
I just found out that last week was National Dog Bite Awareness Week. It was from June 6-10 but we didn’t get a notice about it until a few days ago. This is the first time we were made aware of this.
It turns out that letter carriers can stop delivering to a house or an entire neighborhood if he or she is a victim of a dog attack. They can also sue.
Some letter carriers will mark mailboxes with a special sticker that looks like a dog’s paw if there’s a dog on the property.
I wondered if cluster mailboxes (like you see in a lot of HOA neighborhoods) are safer by cutting down on dog attacks. My internet search revealed no information about that, but I did see that armed thieves stealing from cluster mailboxes can assault and rob letter carriers. So, I guess there should also be a National Criminal Awareness Week for letter carriers and postal customers.
Sena and I grew up in an era when most letter carriers walked their delivery routes. That’s less common nowadays, but some still do it. I used to deliver newspapers when I was a kid. I was pretty scared of most dogs on my route. I never got bit, but a few of them acted like they would as they charged full tilt at me. I also had to deliver to a guy who for some reason liked to grow flowers which attracted the biggest yellow jacket bees from hell. They were all around his front door.
What if we all just paid a fee and picked up our mail at the post office? We might not get the wrong mail as often because you could just drop it front of a postal employee and say on the way out, “Here you go, you put this in the wrong box–again.” Wouldn’t that feel good? I bet you’d get some other person’s mail a lot less often. On the other hand, postal employees might go on strike because of the extra work.
I watched one of the new episodes of The Secret of skinwalker Ranch the other night. The use of special imaging techniques led to finding what looked like little tunnels running underground in one area of the property.
That led to trotting out the little excavator and digging up the ground. They found some light-colored veins of dirt, which they analyzed. They contained elements, things like sodium, potassium and whatnot. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t compare that to the surrounding normal-looking dirt, because I think dirt everywhere has those elements in it.
I think one of the scientists/actors, Dr. Travis Taylor, mentioned that this kind of dirt might be able to transmit electricity. That got me thinking about Nikola Tesla and his fascinating experiments with electricity. I’m probably all mixed up about his theories but I think he tried to send electricity through the earth in an effort to show it could be transmitted without wires.
In fact, that led me on my usual wild goose chasing through the internet. I didn’t know Tesla almost died from cholera when he was much younger. I also found out he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). That led me to a paper that was published in a neuroscience journal in 1999 showing that an intracellular form of cholera toxin was associated with OCD-like behaviors in mice.
Tesla also became friends with Mark Twain, one of my favorite humorists. Tesla used his “earthquake machine” to cure Twain’s constipation—by causing diarrhea.
You can learn a lot about science by watching the skinwalker ranch show. On the History Channel website, it’s subtitled as “science fiction.”
Campbell KM, de Lecea L, Severynse DM, Caron MG, McGrath MJ, Sparber SB, Sun LY, Burton FH. OCD-Like behaviors caused by a neuropotentiating transgene targeted to cortical and limbic D1+ neurons. J Neurosci. 1999 Jun 15;19(12):5044-53. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.19-12-05044.1999. PMID: 10366637; PMCID: PMC6782675.
We took the picture of the Nikola Tesla sculpture at Niagara Falls in 2015.
I finally trimmed my beard the other day. I can’t just let it go forever, even if I don’t have much. I was starting to look like an old prospector.
I looked at a YouTube video of a guy who had a huge beard and he used a hair clipper without a guard and a tiny, gold-plated razor. He demonstrated a 4-step procedure starting with trimming the flyaways from the sides of his beard, which he called the “walls.”
That’s for guys with walls. I have something more like café curtains.
I used a regular beard trimmer with guards, a pair of scissors—and trepidation. I trimmed with downstrokes, not up which would lop the length I need to help hide the potholes. Sena told me to trim it some more after I thought I did an OK job. She offered to trim it for me. I ran away.
After I came back, I trimmed a lot more. Sena said it looked “100%” better. I think that depends heavily on the room lighting and how I hold my head. I exposed my turkey neck, which I forgot about because it was hidden. Oh well, it grows back.
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