humor – Page 4 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Starlings and More!

Sena got a video of a large flock of birds flying around in the outlot beyond our backyard. We thought they were all starlings, but I couldn’t focus enough on individual birds to tell for sure if there were other species mixed in with them. I couldn’t even confidently identify a starling although I’m pretty sure that’s what many of them were.

I think it’s not unusual for other small nondescript blackbirds to mingle with starlings. While we can’t make a case for the smallish flock being a murmuration, there was an impressive number of them. Trying to identify specific species by repeated attempts to focus and magnify using video editing software mostly led to my murmuring under my breath—mainly curses.

Starlings are often called pests and web sources say they are among several species of birds that spread disease. The Iowa State University Extension calls them “nuisance birds.”

My usual resource, Birds of Iowa Field Guide (2023 edition) by Stan Tekiela is a little more generous in the description of the European Starling, calling it a songbird which can mimic the songs of up to 20 species and can even imitate the sound of the human voice. Other web resources compare them to mockingbirds. Large flocks of starlings commonly mix with other blackbirds in the fall. Starlings were introduced to New York City in 1890-91 from Europe.

See if you can pick out the starlings in our video and other birds. I got mostly eyestrain from the effort.

Bigfoot Snow Removal Service!

We got about 9 inches of snow over the weekend and we’re set to get a few more inches today. People have to work pretty hard to get the snow off their sidewalks because Iowa City has some pretty strict rules about it. If you don’t get that snow removed from your sidewalk “down to the concrete” the city will do it for you—for a stiff price.

You got 24 hours’ notice for your first violation. If you don’t get it done in 24 hours, the city will fine you a penalty of however much it costs to remove the snow plus a $100 administrative fee.

You’ll be glad to know there’s a way to prevent this from happening to you. All you need to do is contact Bigfoot Snow Removal Service. They don’t have a phone number because they don’t technically exist, but that’s only what the city will tell you.

Bigfoot Snow Removal does not have a telephone connection nor a website but there’s a way to get around that. All you need to do is find a big stick and knock really hard on a nearby tree. You have to knock 3 times just like Tony Orlando and Dawn sang the song and do it like you mean it.

Then grab a big bucket and fill it up with a lot of meat. Beef jerky is good but if you don’t have it, use anything you got on hand, even Wagyu beef. I can’t help it if you paid a lot of money for it, just be glad you can get it in America. Even though 10 pounds of it can set you back over $1000, just keep thinking about how much the city will charge you to clear your sidewalk.

Set the bucket of Wagyu or whatever out in your front yard. You can set up a critter cam if you want to make sure it’s Bigfoot fetching it and not your neighbor. However, it’s only fair to warn you that because Bigfoot is an interdimensional creature (that’s why nobody’s ever found fossils or seen baby Bigfoots) you’ll never capture any footage of Bigfoot. Oh, people pass off amateur videos claiming Bigfoot posed for them and you’ll see them on TV shows, but that’s just a government plot to distract you from the price of Wagyu beef.

The nice thing about Bigfoot Snow Removal is that they bring their own snow shovels. None of them have snow blowers because they would have to go to the hardware store and buy them. That would just cause a panic because people would faint and have to go to the emergency room and then Bigfoot hunters would start setting traps, looking for tracks and making plaster casts of them which invariably turn out to be bear or collecting animal poop that is always from raccoons, playing practical jokes and whatnot.

Just shovel your walks.

Thanksgiving Day 2025 Tabloid News!

Today is the day for the 2025 Thanksgiving Day Tabloid News and you better believe this paper’s got issues. Eat turkey, watch football, take a nap from all that turkey.

This post’s title was inspired by (what else?) lines from the first Men in Black movie:

Agent K: [at newsstand] We’ll check the hot sheets.

Agent J: *These* are the hot sheets?

Agent K: Best investigative reporting on the planet. Read the New York Times if you want, they get lucky sometimes.

Agent J: I cannot believe you’re looking for tips in the supermarket tabloids.

Agent K: [front-age article about farmer’s stolen skin] Not looking for. Found.

Anyway, today is a special day because we’re waiting for some new items: a premium Cribbage Wars board from Ebonwood with resin inlays. We’re also waiting for extra pegs. These acrylic and brass pegs just shipped from the United Kingdom, which doesn’t charge tariffs. Michaud Toys makes a game board they call Cribbage Rumble (actually the same game as Cribbage Wars), but they’re currently not shipping to the U.S. because of the tariff situation.

We’re still playing Cribbage Wars on our economical little board with tiny peg holes. We’re finding out we like it so much we’d prefer a larger board so we can at least see what we’re pegging without a magnifying glass.

Sena still wins most of the games. I’m working on my strategy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Breaking News: Hands-Free Driving Law in Iowa!

Sena saw a news headline about the new hands-free driving law in Iowa that’s going to be enforced in 2026 (passed in July of this year). Guilty drivers are going to get socked with a $100 fine if they’re caught messing with their cell phones with their hands off the wheel because they might think “hands-free” means you can’t touch the steering wheel.

Drivers have been getting off with a warning for now. Hundreds of people in Iowa die every year because they fool with their cell phones while driving.

You can download a variety of free materials from the Iowa Dept. of Public Safety.

And of course, this reminds me of a Men in Black 3 quote (why not?):

Agent J: Okay! You know how you’re on a airplane and the flight attendant asks you to turn your cell-phone off. And you’re like, I ain’t turning my cell-phone off, that don’t have nothing to do with no damn airplane. Well, [Showing the crowd a crashed spaceship] this is what we get, that’s what happens. It gets up there, bounces around on the satellites, then blam! Just turn your damn cell-phone off. Now you’re gonna drive off a cliff tonight because your GPS don’t work.

The thing about GPS reminds me of a Garmin Nuvi navigator we used years ago. We could plug it into the cigarette lighter power outlet. I had to update the map data from the internet although the Garmin used satellite-based GPS signals to manage the turn-by-turn route instructions.

It worked just fine except when airplane passengers used their cell phones to play Men in Black movies after the flight attendants instructed everybody to turn them off. Most people don’t know that kind of behavior also automatically releases the frozen block of blue ice (waste) from the toilet right over Area 51 (just kidding—actually the wings just fall off!).

I’ve used my old cell phone to get directions driving once or twice but not recently. I set it in the cup holder and never took my hands off the wheel—even when I drove through the front window of Pizza Hut.

So, if you happen to be driving through Iowa in the near future, remember to abide by the new law, which doesn’t mean you can get hands for free at the discount store.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “Curse of the Undead”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

I watched the Svengoolie show “Curse of the Undead” last night. Sena watched some of it. I guess I had more stamina. This is a 1959 vampire cowboy flick directed by Edward Dein and starred Eric Fleming as Preacher Dan (if you’re old enough you might remember him as Gil Favor in Rawhide in the 1960s) and Michael Pate as the vampire Drake Robey who could withstand full daylight without turning to mush. Kathleen Crowley plays Dolores Carter, the woman who owns the ranch where Robey does a lot of the biting.

My favorite line from the movie was Drake Robey’s comment about the dead When Dolores Carter asks him if living near a cemetery would bother him: “The dead don’t bother me; it’s the living who give me trouble.”

Once I got past the idea of the vampire not immediately bursting into flames in the daytime, I was pretty much OK with Robey, a man in black gun for hire whose attire reminded me of Johnny Cash. I half expected him to whip out a guitar and start singing “The Ring of Fire, “only Robey didn’t sing because this movie was not a musical.

The action starts in a small western town where everyone smokes cheroots, so popular in Spaghetti Westerns where all the cowpokes eat Italian cuisine lightly seasoned with cigar ash. Young females are dying off from anemia and nobody notices the two small puncture wounds in their necks except Preacher Dan, who wears a lapel pin festooned with a tiny cross made of the wood from the original cross. Something really special happens to this little cross.

One of the major conflicts in the film involves a guy named Buffer (played by Bruce Gordon) who is giving the Carter family a hard time by squatting on hundreds of acres of their land and planting marijuana on it, which his henchmen (yes, the stooges of the boss evil guy are always called henchmen) steal to stuff their bongs, homemade from cattle horns and then try to play poker but can’t win even a single hand because they forget how to play and get the munchies just looking at the chips (“Wow, man, I didn’t know they made potato chips different colors!). Buffer eventually kills two members of the Carter family.

After that, Dolores makes a bunch of help wanted signs advertising her need for a hired killer in order to get revenge on Buffer. The Sheriff (played by Edward Binns) just tears up all the signs citing her for spelling errors and tries to team up with Preacher Dan to strong arm Buffer into a scheme to make a new headache medicine they promised would be named after him if he would just cool his jets.

About this time, the man in black, Drake Robey, arrives in an exquisitely tailored outfit of slim fitting jeans with matching leather vest who evidently has no aversion to sunlight but takes exception to Preacher Dan’s assertion that suicide is a sin punishable by God, which you’ll have to figure out by watching the movie. Obviously, there’s more to Robey than meets the eye because he’s a killer for hire who always seems to win every gunfight even though his opponents always swear they shot first and hit him—just before they die.

Robey’s lack of sensitivity to light can also be inferred from one of the first scenes in which he appears. He “sleeps” during the daytime but with the coffin lid open. Claustrophobia comes to mind.

The big battle between Preacher Dan and Robey begins with a preliminary 2 out 3 fall hybrid chess boxing match in which Preacher Dan gets knocked out despite winning the chess match. The final struggle takes place in the street and you’ll just have to watch the movie because there are no spoilers here on that. However, several members of the cast had roles on episodes of a popular TV show, which is a longstanding joke on the Svengoolie show.

I think this movie is OK and I give it a 3/5 shrilling chicken rating.

Pennies from Heaven to Coin Rolls

We recently found out that pennies are being take out of circulation. In fact, the last day they stopped minting them was on our 48th wedding Anniversary this month, November 12, 2025! There may be a reason to save the 2025 pennies, according to some folks.

We have a piggy bank and I rolled up our saved coins last year. We had $55 worth. It feels fairly heavy now and we wondered if we had any 2025 pennies.

I wasn’t eager for the task, but there was another reason to tackle it again—we wondered if we had any pennies from 1977.

I forgot how tedious this chore was. I spent a long time peering at the pennies with a magnifying glass hunting for any minted in 2025 before I ever got busy rolling the coins into those pesky little sleeves.

I found one from 1969 which reminded me of the Men in Black 3 movie (what doesn’t remind me of MIB movies?). The scene is Agent J and Jeffrey Price on top of the Chrysler building when Agent J is about to do the time jump thing:

Jeffrey Price: Do not lose that time device or you will be stuck in 1969! It wasn’t the best time for your people. I’m just saying; it’s like a lot cooler now.

As if in confirmation, I found a few from the mid-late 20^th century and beyond as well as a few marking other important historical events:

Source: Historydotcom; A Year in History series

1959: Alaska becomes the 49^th state; Hawaii becomes the 50^th state

1960: Greensboro sit-in by 4 black college students at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, starting a nationwide civil rights movement

1964: President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act; Martin Luther King Jr. wins the Nobel Peace Prize

1975: Microsoft founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen; Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win at Wimbledon tennis championship

1976: First women inducted into the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point

2001: 9/11 attack on America

I found one from 1985 when I graduated from Iowa State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in 1985. I found another from 1988; the year I started medical school in Iowa City. I accidentally broke the arm of our cadaver in gross anatomy. I also found one from 1996, when I graduated from the psychiatry residency program at University of Iowa. Dr. George Winokur had just stepped down from being department of psychiatry chair and he encouraged me to apply for a position at Iowa.

But the best penny find was the one from 1977, when Sena and I got married. What a coincidence that the U.S. Mint stopped making pennies on November 12, 1977—the anniversary day of our wedding.

I rolled $16.50 in coins this time, but there was plenty left over (including pennies) that wouldn’t fill the sleeves.

Penny for your thoughts?

Jim Finally Wins a Cribbage Game!

The Wicked Cribbage Lugger card gave us the idea of trying a hybrid game of 10-card cribbage and Crib Wars today. I can’t contain myself; I finally won!

The rules for 10-card cribbage are on the Lugger card from the Wicked Cribbage game although we’ve played it before. We finished the game in 1 hour and 15 minutes. This is despite the confusion from having 3 piles of cards in front of you when you’re the dealer (your regular 4-card hand, the other 4-card hand, and your crib).

It actually plays pretty well, and the scores are easier to count than the 9-card variant because there are only 4 cards to count at a time. I managed to skip all the Red Skip Zones, all the Blue Time Traps, and all the Blue Penalty Zones, but also missed out on the Green Advance Zones. Sena cycled through one of the Blue Time Traps three times.

Sena relies on strategy in card play for Crib Wars and it doesn’t always work. I think luck is the biggest factor, but that doesn’t mean I relax. Sorting through my cards to pick out the best two 4-card hands was tough. We both agree that picking out the two cards to throw to the dealer’s crib was the easy part. Counting holes on the board was a chore because they’re very small. The number of holes in a group can vary a lot. Standard cribbage board holes are always 5 in a group.

I’m still leery of trying to film us playing a game of Crib Wars. The time to play is still way too long for that, mostly because of all the water hazards and sand traps. By the way, why do I not see comparisons of Crib Wars to golf (which I don’t play)?

Some people say that Crib Wars reminds them of Chutes and Ladders. I had to look this up on the web (despite having played this as a kid), but in Chutes and Ladders, chutes slow you down and ladders speed you up. So, it isn’t just the board layout alone of Crib Wars that reminds people of Chutes and Ladders.

Sena and I talked about what cribbage game variant we like best so far as a hybrid with Crib Wars. She kind of likes 9-card but settled on 7-card. I tend to agree with her because, while I think 6-card cribbage might tend to make the game seem too slow after a while, the 7-card might better rather than trying to manage too many cards, even though you can get some pretty high scores in 7-card.

Overall, we both like Crib Wars. It’s fun and absorbing and we’ll probably keep playing. At between $25-30, the price is right.

What About Wicked Cribbage?

We’ve played Wicked Cribbage twice so far—and yes, Sena won both games, but here’s the thing: it’s fun to play. I think this is called a cribbage overlay in that you need to know how to play standard cribbage and already have the equipment for that.

Then Wicked Cribbage adds special cards with wonky and eyebrow-raising instructions that makes cribbage a weird experience.

There are two decks of cards with special instructions: one called Twinklers and you draw one card immediately each time you peg 15 or 31 and do what it says; another is called Luggers, and you draw one of those and play it later during the show when you land on a hole which is a multiple of 5 (5, 15, 20, 25, etc.).

One of the Lugger cards has you switch to, wait for it—10-card cribbage! We already know how to play that, but if you didn’t the card gives you the rules.

I wonder how 10-card cribbage would work with Crib Wars? Something tells me I don’t want to know.

You want to be careful how much you reveal what’s on any card to your opponent. If you say, “point to any face-up card,” you probably don’t want to say why right away. Sometimes, timing is everything.

One of the Twinkler cards tells you to play rock, paper, scissors to see which player draws an extra card to add a fifth card to the hand.

That reminds me of a scene from the Svengoolie TV show comedy spots, which are little breaks from the schlocky horror movies—which I often watch. This often features a group of three goofy monsters called the Sven Squad and two of them, Nostalgiaferatoo and Ignatius Malvolio Prankenstein (IMP for short) are playing rock, paper, scissors. The third one, Gwengoolie, happens to catch them on maybe the 30,000^th try!

That would make for a wickedly long cribbage game.

Sena Wins Hybrid 9 Card Cribbage and Crib Wars Today!

Here we go again! Hybrid competitions are the rule around here lately and the news flash today is that Sena won the hybrid 9 card cribbage and crib wars game today, which took an hour and a half to play.

9 card cribbage & Crib Wars and Sena wins again!

Just as an aside, I used the word “hybrid” because yesterday I just found out about the hybrid Chess Boxing sport in which opponents box for 3 minutes alternating with 3 minutes of blitz chess (fast paced chess game you have to finish in 10 minutes). Figure that one out; I would think that repeated blows to the head would do something not so good for your chess playing skills, but whatever.

So, the assumption here with hybrid 9-card cribbage and crib wars is that the higher than usual cribbage hand and crib scores you get help speed you past the crib wars obstacles like the Blue Time Traps and the Blue Penalty Boxes. However, by the same token you’d probably miss out on the Green Advance zones too—but would that even matter?

Briefly, the rules of 9 card cribbage are that each player is dealt 9 cards, both toss 3 cards to the dealer’s crib, and then you sweat the scoring of both. We tried scoring by hand first, and if we got stuck, we used the scoring program I found on a Reddit thread. We didn’t do too badly and sometimes we didn’t need the scorer. We got scores as high as 38, 28, and 26. If nothing else, the 9-card cribbage variant helps your ability to hand count your scores, something I think computer cribbage apps might not be helpful for.

Anyway, I thought the 9-card game might take even longer than the 3-hour game we had yesterday with the 7-card cribbage and crib wars game. But for some reason it didn’t, even with the running back and forth to run the scoring program. I suspect that’s largely from practice effect although we’ve played crib wars only 3 times (played 6-card, 7-card, and now 9-card variants).

While we did speed past the crib wars board hazards, we also missed the reward zones (Green Advance) as well. It felt more like a long regular cribbage game. And it could turn out the opposite way although you’d probably get out of the hazard zones more quickly. But I think that would tend to make crib wars less fun, because it’s a hybrid game. It’s both a board game and a cribbage game. Some people classify cribbage itself as a board game, but that’s a misnomer because the board is just for keeping score.

You have to use a different strategy in crib wars than you’d use in a straight-up cribbage game. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I’ve lost all 3 crib wars games so far. Nah, Sena is just good.

Sena Wins Our First Crib Wars Game Today!

Hey, we played our first Crib Wars game today and, wouldn’t you know it, Sena won! We played six card cribbage. We ignored Muggers Alley.

I spent a fair amount of time in two of the Blue Time Traps. She got caught in a couple of cycles around the last Blue Time Trap, but scored big coming out of it. I had red pegs and she had the green. I think we spent about 2 hours playing.

Playing the low cards usually was the big reason why we got caught in the time traps. And despite Sena landing in the Blue Penalty Box at the beginning, she ended up winning! The Red Skip areas helped us both make better progress than we would have otherwise. The Green Advance zone helped Sena. I had to take the main track route and ended up in the Blue Time Trap in the left lower quadrant.

Maybe next time we’ll see if 7-card cribbage makes the game go faster.