Sven Squad Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
So last night we both watched the Sven Squad movie “Flight 7500.” It’s the Sven Squad leading the way because they’re going to give Svengoolie a well-deserved break once a month. However, he did show up a couple of times. We thought the Sven Squad song “Cabin Pressure” was pretty awesome.
Flight 7500 was released in 2014 and the short story is that a lot of people on a big airplane start disappearing after a guy named Lance Morrel (Rick Kelly) nearly bites his hand off trying to remove some salted peanuts from his throat. Lance appears from time to time and even tries to costar in the seat back video presentation of the Twilight Zone TV in-flight movie, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”
After Lance dies despite getting expert chest compressions from the CPR Bran Martin (Ryan Kwanten) gives him gets moved to the upper-level cabin where Lance and William Shatner have a stimulating conversation about how well gremlins and Shinigami dolls get along.
One guy, Jake (Alex Frost) who likes to steal watches and cell phones swipes Lance’s wristwatch and becomes the first to disappear. OK, there are way too many passengers to keep track of in this film, so don’t blame me if I mix them up or even leave them out.
There are so many passengers struggling with their soap opera lives on this plane that they step on each other’s toes (just like on a real flight!) as they are competing over which one disappears next while they vie viciously for who wins The Snarkiest Award.
There’s this Goth lady Jacinta (Scout Taylor-Compton) in mom jeans who may turn out to be the most well-adjusted of the group as she and the Shinigami doll have a great time playing 7-card cribbage just before Raquel Mendoza (Christian Serratos) finds out she’s not pregnant and throws a tantrum when the tall flight attendant Liz Lewis (Nicky Whelan) fails to bring her any salted peanuts.
The rest of the passengers take turns trying to breathe with the oxygen masks which don’t work and Lance turns into a huge hand, lunging for everyone in sight if they don’t immediately obey orders and accept death when they’re supposed to.
I can’t say much more about this movie without spilling the Boston baked bean snacks, so I’ll just have to say I would give it a 4.5/5 shrilling chicken rating, mainly because Sena would give it a 5/5.
I saw this article on the web about certain coins (state quarters) that might be worth a lot of money. I just raided our piggy bank for pennies and other chicken feed a couple of months ago and knew we had some quartesr.
As it turns out we have a couple of the year 2000 S. Carolina quarters; one was a P and the other a D.
“2000 South Carolina quarter
The 2000 South Carolina quarter was one of the first State quarters to be released. It may have extra value if it has extra strikes during the minting process instead of one strike.
A 2000-P 25C South Carolina (Regular Strike) had an auction record of over $3,000, according to the PCGS, valued due to its MS69 grade. Very few coins in this condition exist.
Estimated worth: $500-$2,500”
I peered at them with a magnifying glass but couldn’t really tell if it was valuable. We looked for a coin shop on line to see if we could get some assistance with grading the coins. There’s a coin and gun shop right here in town. Apparently, coin shops often deal in guns as well. The neighborhood looked a little rough.
So, I checked on the internet on a couple of coin collectors web sites and found an interesting YouTube on S. Carolina state quarters alone. There was a quarter worth about $3,500.
I saw another one on eBay that somebody was asking $2,500 for. On the other hand, I found another seller who had a quarter going for $23.
We’re not sure if one of our quarters is worth grading. Here’s a picture of it:
The upcoming Svengoolie movie this coming Saturday is “Flight 7500.” It reminds me of one of our vacation trips when Sena asked for an extra bag of peanuts from the attendant, who promised she would return with another bag—and never did. Sena’s never forgotten that.
I think that’s kind of how things go on airplanes. I’m not big on airline food and not keen on flying at all. I remember sitting next to an elderly guy (Har! Look who’s talking!) who was probably more nervous about flying than I was (as if that were possible).
As we were taking off, he pressed a little button on his hand or his wrist (can’t remember exactly) that was attached to a wristband. I remember thinking it might have had something to do with acupressure points. I looked this up today and it turns out that there’s a point called Union Valley and it’s in the webbing between your thumb and index finger. Or maybe it was the Inner Frontier Gate point, which is about 3 finger widths below your wrist. I know it wasn’t the Shoulder Well point because that can induce labor. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t pregnant.
Anyway, this movie looks like it could make you nervous. It was released in 2014, which is pretty unusual for Svengoolie. On the other hand, it’ll be the Sven Squad that’ll be in charge of it because Svengoolie is taking the night off. I gather he’ll be doing that once a month now. The Sven Squad members are Nostalgiaferatoo, Imp (Ignatius Malvolio Prankenstein who calls Svengoolie his uncle), and Gwengoolie. They usually do the 2nd film of a double feature—which I can’t stay awake for.
I think Nostalgiaferatoo and Imp will play rock, paper, scissors more than 30,000 times to see who does most of the talking about the movie.
Anyway, the gist of the plot is that passengers start to feel a little queasy after their in-flight meal of beef jerky and turnip pastries and start hallucinating little monsters out on the wings which they keep telling the pilot about who is a little too busy to pay much attention because he’s distracted by the half-dozen or so UFOs zipping around just outside the front window which dodge the windshield wipers so fast it reminds him of the Men in Black movie in which Nick can’t clean off the bug parts of the big dragonfly that hits his window, so he has to take a break and orders his copilot to run back into the cabin and slap some of the passengers who are playing around with a Ouija Board and dousing rods, conjuring up demons who are demanding macaroni and cheese with Pepto-Bismol sauce, cheating at dominoes, and wondering when William Shatner is going to sign up for a sequel to the Twilight Zone smash hit, “And Don’t Call Me Shirley,” featuring a dozen or so nuns who are slapping the hysterical passengers who are unable to open the restroom door because Bigfoot is having THE USUAL PROBLEM of constipation from too much beef jerky…OK, I guess that’s not exactly how the movie goes, but I’m close!
I found the perfect JAMA article explaining that sycophancy is programmed into Artificial Intelligence (AI) therapy chatbots.
This reminded me of Marvin the paranoid android (“Life! Don’t talk to me about life!”) in the book series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Marvin is an incredibly depressed robot who would never make a good psychotherapist.
There’s even a Facebook page listing someone posts of questions to ChatGPT about non-inspirational quotes from Marvin.
If programmers can make sycophantic AI therapists, there should be a way to make them less sycophantic. For more specific information, you can check out this relatively recent article published in Psychiatric Times by Dr. Allen Francis, MD and Justin Angel, a tech expert. I would probably substitute the term “confabulation” for “hallucinations” in most places where you read the latter.
The National Weather Service predicts “snow squalls” for parts of eastern Iowa today in the afternoon.
I’m only using this GIF because I couldn’t find one for the State Farm commercial captain “A squall’s a’comin’!
Sena recognized the guy in the GIF above as W.C. Fields and wondered if there were any other videos of this scene with audio as well. They aren’t hard to find.
There’s a reason for why I so often tell Dad jokes. In keeping with my post from yesterday about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s biographies:
I glued myself to my autobiography. You may not believe it, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
We’ve ordered a couple of biographies about Dr. King. One of them is his autobiography and the other is Jonathan Eig’s book, “King: A Life.”
I’m getting to be too old to write my own autobiography—guess it’ll have to be done by autopen. Sorry about that one (no I’m not).
I’m a psychiatrist so I know when I’m using humor as a defense mechanism. A lot of good that does.
I’ve never seriously considered writing my autobiography. I could have it tattooed on my back—it would be my backstory.
Seriously—no, I guess that’s impossible. On the other hand, every year about MLK Day, I think about the blog I wrote that the Iowa City Press Citizen published in 2015 on January 19th. It’s becoming almost something like a tradition. I think I need to repost it annually around this time. The title is “Remembering our calling: MLK Day 2015.”
“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
That quote is interesting because Jonathan Eig’s biography of MLK can be said to reveal more of the staircase, so to speak, at least from the standpoint of his flaws as well as his strengths. But I stray from the tradition:
As the 2015 Martin Luther King Jr. Day approached, I wondered: What’s the best way for the average person to contribute to lifting this nation to a higher destiny? What’s my role and how do I respond to that call?
I find myself reflecting more about my role as a teacher to our residents and medical students. I wonder every day how I can improve as a role model and, at the same time, let trainees practice both what I preach and listen to their own inner calling. After all, they are the next generation of doctors.
But for now, they are under my tutelage. What do I hope for them?
I hope medicine doesn’t destroy itself with empty and dishonest calls for “competence” and “quality,” when excellence is called for.
I hope that when they are on call, they’ll mindfully acknowledge their fatigue and frustration…and sit down when they go and listen to the patient.
I hope they listen inwardly as well, and learn to know the difference between a call for action, and a cautionary whisper to wait and see.
I hope they won’t be paralyzed by doubt when their patients are not able to speak for themselves, and that they’ll call the families who have a stake in whatever doctors do for their loved ones.
And most of all I hope leaders in medicine and psychiatry remember that we chose medicine because we thought it was a calling. Let’s try to keep it that way.
You know, I’m on call at the hospital today and I tried to give my trainees the day off. They came in anyway.
I used to joke that they would erect a playdoh statue of me in the Quad (Quadrangle Hall was there) on the University of Iowa campus someday. Unfortunately, the Quad was demolished in 2016, so I guess I can’t put that in my autobiography.
Since I retired in 2020, I keep meaning to write my memoirs, but I never get around to it. I guess that makes it my oughta biography.
I want to give a shout-out to Dr. George Dawson on his post today, “Enthusiasm is a plus…” It’s right on the mark.
Having a zest for medicine is the reason why many physicians undertook the rigorous training in medical school, residency, and beyond. A sense of humor is evident in George’s essay—and he doesn’t need to be comedian.
His essay reminded me of the many trainees who took their rotation through the psychiatry consultation service when I was running it (or tried to, anyway!). Many deserve a shout out as well for not only working hard on the service but teaching as well. I prevailed on them to make a short presentation during the rotation. I called it the Dirty Dozen.
They picked a topic often about an interesting consultation case we had seen and put together a talk with a dozen slides. They gave a Dirty Dozen called: “Neurology and Psychiatry: Divided or United?” It included some of Dr. Ron Pies ideas on a subtopic of whether psychiatry and neurology can ever be combined as a discipline (three diagrams of his are in the slides). You can also see a sense of humor, especially in the first slide.
Note: Because I couldn’t locate all of the trainees to get their permission to leave their names on the title slide, I chose to identify them as “Trainees.” I’m still very proud of all of them.
Slides from trainees on Neurology and Psychiatry: Divided or United? from UIHC Psychiatry Consultation Service, 2017. Figures included from Dr. Pies’ article in Psychiatric Times (see below):
Citations:
Arzy, S. Danziger, S. (2014).. “The Science of Neuropsychiatry: Past, Present, and Future.” The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences 26.4 2014): 392-395.
Daly, R. Pies, R. (2010). Should Psychiatry and Neurology Merge as a Single Discipline? Psychiatric Times.
Fitzgerald, M. (2015). Do psychiatry and neurology need a close partnership or a merger? BJPsych Bulletin, 39(3), 105–107.
Pies, R. (2005). Why psychiatry and neurology cannot simply merge. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci; 17: 304-309.
Schildkrout, B., Frankel, M. (2016). Neuropsychiatry: Toward Solving the Mysteries That Animate Psychiatry. Psychiatric Times.
Price, BH., Adams RD., Coyle, JT. (2000). Neurology and psychiatry, closing the great divide. Neurology January 11, 2000 vol. 54 no. 18
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
So, you can give me credit for watching the Svengoolie movie “Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb” last night instead of the Seattle Seahawks vs San Francisco 49ers football game. Sena watched a little of it and probably not enough to rate it. You need to know there is such a thing as scalp psoriasis to get the joke in the featured image.
Before I get into this Hammer horror flick, I need to have a little fun at Svengoolie’s expense about his Too Drawn Out picture. You have to know that this is a puzzle game. Svengoolie draws a few cartoons, gives some hints about what the pictures suggest, and puts them together to make a word that is connected to the movie. Some fans give him a hard time about them because, frankly, the clues occasionally reach a little too far.
His first picture in this bit would be familiar to people mainly in my generation or older. Although it’s a bit unfair to kids, you have to give him credit as an artist. The figure actually did resemble a character in a popular (to some of us) TV sitcom years ago. I guessed this one right because we watched The Honeymooners. It was Ed Norton climbing out of (or into?) a sewer because that was his occupation. Art Carney played Norton. Jackie Gleason played the “bus driver” that Svengoolie gives as another clue. The main goal is to name the common underground drainage feature in cities, which was “sewer.”
The next drawing is of a guy either sneezing or coughing and Svengoolie makes it clear that it’s not the former. The clue was “cough.”
The drawing after that was of an ugly old crone, which was a bit difficult to get but turns out to be “hag.”
The last drawing was of some guy with a speech balloon with the cartoon symbols often used to indicate foul language or swearing. This clue was “cuss.”
The final answer? It’s “sarcophagus.” Sewer-Cough-Hag-Cuss. OK, almost there. I’ve done my own version of these in the past and I thought of this one for “sarcophagus.” The word “sewer” is a stretch, especially if you’re not from my generation, given the hints. I use different clues with different hints:
Sir: the drawing is that of a soldier saluting. What do soldiers often say when they salute? “Sir!”
Cuff: the drawing is a shirt cuff with a cufflink. What is this part of a man’s shirt called?
Hog: the drawing is that of a big sow. A large pig, either sow or boar, is often called a hog. What is this large farm animal?
Gust: the drawing is of gusts of wind blowing a flag. What is making the flag fly and flap? A “gust” of wind.
It ends up as Sir-Cuff-Hog-Gust. You’re supposed to say these fairly fast, running the words together to solve the puzzle. If you sound this out right, you get…that’s right, Art Carney!
Sarcophagus
Moving right along, we need to discuss this 1971 Hammer production movie which doesn’t really have a mummy in it. The gist of the story is that a group of archeologist explorers go digging around somewhere in Egypt and find this tomb with the beautiful but blurred Queen Tera (Valerie Leon) who is more mammarized than mummified, which accounts for the blurring of her chest area. In fact, even the ancient drawings of women on the tomb walls blur their boobs.
The film makers go to a lot of trouble hiding parts of Queen Tera’s anatomy, yet could not come up with a way to prevent Ms. Leon from flinching when one of the priests shoves what looks like a nasal irrigation device up her nose. I mean he really jammed it in there and she reacted by nearly jumping off the table, sneezing blood repeatedly and cussing like a stevedore! In general, this is not the way dead people behave…unless they’re in a Hammer film.
Anyway, after the nasal sinus irrigation leads to the flushing of about a pint of blood and a fairly large mosquito from her nose, the priests proceed to cutting off her right hand, along with a ring with a huge ruby (although not nearly as big as other parts which I will not mention and which are massively blurred in any case). The ruby contains a replica of a constellation of 7 stars which do not include Art Carney.
Actually, the seven stars thing is adapted from Bram Stoker’s novel “The Jewel of Seven Stars,” although, technically, only seven stars would not count as a galaxy, according to Zed from the well-known documentary film, “Men in Black” who had to school Agent J that the galaxy was not on Orion’s Belt, as anybody knows.
The group of explorers take Queen Tera and a lot of artifacts from the tomb, which turn out to be very bad for their health, including the daughter, Margaret (also played by Valerie Leon) of one of them named Fuchs (Andrew Keir). Margaret apparently has a partial exemption from the blurring clause.
Margaret seems to have no fear of the groping chopped off hand (played by Thing from the Addams Family, if you’re curious) of Queen Tera. But the explorers get their throats torn out either by Thing or the Pharoah Hound (also lifted from Bram Stoker), which has an annoying tendency to bark along to “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.
I’m not going to reveal the ending although I can tell you that it involves the only scene which reveals anything that even remotely looks like a mummy.
I think the movie is OK, but a bit blurry in places. I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.
I was just musing on Philip Rivers. You know about him. I blogged recently about his coming out of retirement to play quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts. I guess you already know this, but he retired again.
Unlike Philip Rivers, I’ve not even considered coming out of retirement since I left my position at The University of Iowa Health Care (UIHC) over 5 years ago. I never looked back.
But that doesn’t mean I never think about looking back. I look back a lot and that’s mostly because I’m an old guy. I was a consulting psychiatrist in the general hospital.
Anyway, occasionally I search my name on the web and laugh at what comes up. I never went to Baylor College of Medicine, much less graduated from there.
I did a few things when I was a doctor. Not all of them were about work, but most of them were.
Those who know me know that I always hated Maintenance of Certification (MOC). I checked the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology website and my MOC contribution to continuing education is still there. It’s a clinical module on Delirium, which a lot of doctors and other health care practitioners see every day in the hospital. Dr. Emily Morse worked on it as well. She’s still working at UIHC.
I co-edited a book about consultation-liaison psychiatry with my former chair of the Psychiatry Dept, Dr. Robert G. Robinson, may he rest in peace. It’s “Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry.” You can buy it on Amazon—please.
I wrote a case report on catatonia caused by withdrawal from lorazepam (a benzodiazepine), and it’s still available. It was first published in Annals of Psychiatry.
But one of the things I’m proudest of doing was writing a short article for the University of Iowa Library for Open Access Week.
In it, I tell a short anecdote about my lofty (OK, a better word is “greedy”) thoughts about how much money I could make shoveling snow. I was just a kid and I never made it outside to shovel anybody’s walk because I was too busy calculating my income. I wrote that way back when I had another blog, The Practical Psychosomaticist. The photo of me shows my Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine pin fixed to my lapel—another thing I’m proud of. By the way “Tow” rhymes with “Wow.”
Libraries have always been my one of my favorite places to hang out. Anyway, I’ve got more time to do things like hang out in general. I think Philip Rivers will adjust.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 