humor – Page 6 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

13 Card Cribbage to Ring in the New Year 2026!

Well, we played the 13-card cribbage game today and we survived it! I got to tell you; I don’t know how anyone would invent such a hairy cribbage variant. I got so mixed-up Sena had to bail me out on counting a complicated run.

We did use a special cribbage scorer that I picked up from a Reddit cribbage thread.

What is ironic, if I had not had a problem with one of the counts, the game would have lasted about 20 minutes, give or take—just like the last few Calvinball Crib variants we’ve played. We’ve been through 6-card through 13-card versions and those are just the ones we’ve heard about.

It still makes me wonder whether there should be a new organization, the Calvinball Cribbage Congress (CCC), analogous to the American Cribbage Congress (ACC). The CCC could have their big annual tournament in Reno, Nevada (I think it’s at the J Resort (Casino/Sands). And we’d have to have special tee shirts with a distinctive logo.

Certain requirements would have to change, like the amount of time you have to finish a cribbage game at the CCC. In the time it takes to play 13-card cribbage, Santa Claus could shave his beard and grow it back. Of course, as you know, you have to be able to play a 6-card cribbage game in 15 minutes.

We’d need a special cribbage board and the likely candidate would be the Calvinball Cribbage board made in Canada.

Based on the currency exchange rate, the board would cost a little over $100 in U.S. dollars. The board is on the small side (11in x14in), so it would be easy to provide them for the thousands who would flock to Reno for the big CCC tournament—as long as you charge for them. The going rate for a tournament board the size and brand (CreativeCrafthouse, made in the good old USA) of the one we use is about $75.

You should write to the CCC President about it—except there isn’t one yet.

11 Card Cribbage Now!

Hey, it’s New Year’s Eve and it’s time for 11-card cribbage! Recall, the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) website has a cribbage variations page in which the unknown author reports there being many cribbage variants, including 11 and 13 card cribbage.

So, yesterday we played 12-card cribbage and we decided to address the 11-card variant today. We intend to tackle the 13-card variant “next year.”

We did OK, although I had a miscount (counted 31 in the play instead of 30 near the end of the game). Again, it took us about 20 minutes to play it.

Scores can be difficult to count so you might want to check on this link for the calculator.

We made up the rules because, of course, there are no rules. This puts any of these game variants into the Calvinball Crib category. This is because there are no established rules and the name just has a little fun with that name because of the definition of the name Calvinball:

“Activity reminiscent of the imaginary game of Calvinball (see etymology), in not following any 1994- discernible rules, or in which individuals act in a self-servingly inconsistent manner. Also (and in earliest use) as a modifier.”

Did you know there’s a place in Canada that makes a Calvinball Cribbage board? It’ll set you back $140. We can’t tell if there’s a tariff on it.

Did you know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has confabulated a description of Calvinball Cribbage? I copied it for you:

“Calvinball Cribbage is a humorous mashup of the chaotic, rule-free game from Calvin & Hobbes with traditional Cribbage, often involving themed boards or rule modifications, where the core idea is applying Calvinball’s fluid, make-it-up-as-you-go spirit to Cribbage’s scoring and play, adding wild, non-sensical rules like using mallets, changing hand values, or scoring points for silly actions, making each round unique and unpredictable, not a single defined game but a creative approach to Cribbage.

What it is (The Calvinball Aspect):

No Fixed Rules: Just like original Calvinball, there’s no single set of rules; the players invent them as they go.
Rule Changes: A key rule is that rules can’t be repeated, and players constantly invent new scoring, actions, or penalties.
Props & Actions: You might use mallets, balls, trees, or make up actions like “scoring three points for pointing at a cloud” or “losing a turn for looking left”.

How it Applies to Cribbage:

Themed Boards: You can find or make custom cribbage boards featuring Calvin & Hobbes, adding visual flair.
Modified Scoring: Instead of just points for pairs and runs, you might add a “Hobbes Bonus” for a specific card or penalize for “too much logic”.
Strategic Chaos: Players still play cribbage (cards, pegs, crib), but the gameplay is constantly disrupted by invented rules, turning strategic plays into potential jokes or absurd victories.

Example Calvinball Cribbage “Rules”:

“If you play a 7, you must hop on one foot until your next turn”.
“The crib gets 5 points if it contains a card with a face on it” (referencing Calvin’s drawings).
“A ‘skunk’ is achieved by making your opponent laugh out loud”.

In essence, Calvinball Cribbage is about injecting unpredictable fun and silliness into the structured world of cribbage, making it a game of spontaneous creativity rather than strict strategy. “

How do you feel about AI now? You know, I wonder why somebody hasn’t yet come up with a new club: Calvinball Cribbage Congress (CCC). Somebody could make a cool tee shirt for the club.

We wish everyone a Happy New Year in 2026!

Twelve Card Cribbage on the Tournament Board!

As promised, we played a game of 12-card cribbage on the tournament board today. What an adventure! We both missed pairs in counting high scores on one round (that we noticed after viewing the video)—but we got through it.

I don’t know of anyone else who’s made a video of this wacky variant, but let me know if you do. You know, it’s remarkable, we practiced it all morning and kerfuffles were the rule when it came to counting hands. You’ll see them. Yet we still finished the game in about 20 minutes because the scores were so high!

This is Calvinball Crib for sure. We don’t know where this tangent will go next.

Anyone for 12-Card Cribbage?

You know the winter is getting long when Sena and I talk about trying to play 12-card cribbage. We’ve come up with a way to manage the deal and the crib and we’ll try to play it tomorrow.

Sena’s been bugging me for a while now to try playing both 11-card and 12-card cribbage—despite the fact that no rules exist for them. There is the mystery of the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) having a section in their cribbage history which clearly claims that:

“Did you know that there are at least 18 variations to the BASIC game of cribbage? There is the basic 2 or 4 handed game, and then there are the 5 card, 7 card, 11 card and 13 card cribbage games. “

Notice that the author (who doesn’t have a byline) says there are both 11-card and 13-card variations. On the other hand, I’ve spoken with someone else at the ACC who knows everything there is to know about tournament cribbage and he and everyone else he asked at a recent tournament never heard of these variants. And you can’t find them anywhere on the web.

This whole Calvinball Crib thing comes from our having tried 7-card, 8-card, 9-card, and 10-card cribbage. Sena wore me down. So, we cobbled together some rules for 12-card cribbage. We’ll let you know what happens. If anybody out there has suggestions and comments, let us know!

The Missing 29 Cribbage Board and a Little History

We’ve been searching around for our 29 Cribbage Board. It’s in the shape of 29 which is the highest score you can get in cribbage. The hand is typically shown with three 5’s and the nob Jack and the cut card is the other 5. This is usually a diamond 5, but the heart or the spade 5 is also shown on some boards. The odds of getting this hand are 1 in 216,580.

Sena didn’t find it after a thorough search top to bottom of our house, so it must have gotten lost in the move last year. One of the reasons why this suddenly became an issue of national importance is that I read another one of those long historic articles on the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) website—which never lists the bylines of the persons writing them.

It turns out that a guy named Edward M. Hirst in Canada who first designed and started making the 29 board by himself back in the early 1950s. Customers would wait months for them. They weren’t mass-produced until two years after he died. Crisloid, Inc. (based in Rhode Island) made them for a while and this name is familiar to me because I shopped for a giant cribbage board from them a few years ago. They had stopped making the 29 board long before then. Interestingly, they made one of those very complicated continuous 3 track cribbage boards with complicated scoring for things like “Legs” and other features that eventually were more of a hallmark with another famous cribbage board maker–Drueke Co. And then Drueke Co. started making the 29 boards.

Eventually manufacturing of the 29 boards moved to Taiwan because they could be made more cheaply there. Nowadays, America’s role in sales has moved to vendors, such as Hoyle, Bicycle, Walmart, etc. There’s a reddit thread which shows a picture of a 29 board which contains a short history of the board.

Anyway, by way of personal history, we started playing cribbage again in 2019 after a 20-year hiatus. I have a dim memory of us experimenting with several card games back then, including cribbage. And then we dropped card games for a long time. And about 5 or 6 years ago we got a 29 board, because it was interesting and cheap.

I made a YouTube video of the game. It got about 1,800 views. It had some of the features discussed in the ACC history, which we think is really interesting. The nob Jack and 5 cut card were diamonds. There was a 121 hole (which some boards don’t have, believe it or not!).

And there’s also a Cribbage Board Collector’s Society (CBCS). The interesting thing they point out is that no one has ever reported to them about finding a 29 board with the Jack and the 5 cut card in the club suit. I couldn’t find one on the web, even on Ebay.

We immediately shopped for another 29 board but the one we want is sold out. Until then, we can reminisce.

Merry Wicked Cribbage Christmas!

We hope you all had as nice a Christmas as we did. We played Wicked Cribbage! It’s an overlay variation of 6-card cribbage. This turned out to be more fun than we every imagined. Short story—I got skunked! We made a video of the hilarity. Happy holidays!

And here’s a great Christmas card from Sena!

See Me at the Neckademy Awards About This Neck Massager

Sena bought some device for neck and shoulder massage called the Shiatsu cordless heat massager today. She tried it and then wanted me to try it. I’m not up for massagers of any kind, especially after seeing the extraterrestrial massage torturer I posted about early this month, “So, Is This Anything?”

She didn’t want it for various reasons. It doesn’t get warm enough, it’s difficult to hold on to it, and has this general weirdness that’s difficult to describe. That’s why I made a little video about it. Sena made me do it.

Thoughts on Comebacks

I watched the first half of the Colts vs 49ers game last night and I thought Philip Rivers didn’t look half bad for a 44-year-old guy who’s been out of the game for five years. Did you know he has 10 kids? OK, now that I’ve got that out of my system and that would be, what—the 44^th time you’ve heard that since he took the field?

So what the Colts lost? His big family was up in the stands going crazy, cheering him on.

I read an article this morning which had Steve Young saying he could make a comeback at his age—which is 64. I couldn’t believe it. The same story mentions that George Blanda played for the Oakland Raiders when he was 48 back in 1975.

It got me wondering whether I could make a comeback as a general hospital consulting psychiatrist. Could I gallop up 6-8 floors of University of Iowa Health Care? You bet your bottom dollar—I couldn’t.

It’s hard to retire. Every once in a while, I miss hiking up and down the hospital with my camp stool, deftly swinging it around and sitting with the patients and families, telling medical students and residents all kinds of lies (I mean “wise old adages and pearls of clinical wisdom”).

I get a kick out of just wondering what it would be like. I get a vision of myself with a big, golden glowing aura of greatness around my head—until I come to my senses. Hey, nobody’s going to pay me a quarter million dollars to run the consult service for the few months I’d be able to limp around the hospital, falling off my camp stool when my legs go numb or the chair breaks.

It’s not like I can just throw a football like it’s nothing after 5 years. I’d have to prove I still have enough clinical smarts to figure out how to introduce myself (Hi! I’m Philip Rivers and you need to go long!”).

The Maintenance of Certification Circus is still a thing and it’s worse. I’m not saying doctors don’t undertake the arduous task of essentially retraining to be what they once were—because that’s not good enough anymore.

Last night, the camera caught Phil more than once being just as hard on himself as he was with other members of the team who weren’t in the right spot at the right time. Most physicians are perfectionists and if you’ve been out of the game for a while and you try to squeeze back in, you could wind up mumbling to yourself, “They don’t make footballs like they used to!”

I didn’t stay up for the second half of football game. It wasn’t because of anything Philip did or didn’t do on the field.

I just can’t stay up that late nowadays.

Profound Thoughts on Topological Brain Changes

I ran across this article in the news about topological changes that happen in our brains as we age. You can try to read the original open access paper published by the author Alexa Mousley.

The topological changes in the brain that occur in the brain are linked to the structural connections that are made or not in human development and roughly correspond to the main epochs of brain structure in our lives: childhood (transition to adolescence around 9 years old), adolescence lasts until around 32 years old when we finally reach adulthood, then at age 66 we reach the early ageing stage and that finally changes into late ageing or old farthood around age 83. It’s a good thing I retired 5 years ago.

What this says, of course, is that nobody should be getting married or driving until they hit age 32. There are buses, you know, although we do have self-driving cars which explode on impact so thank goodness we don’t need to worry about that.

Also, it implies that you shouldn’t be drafted into military service until you’re presumably old enough to know that war doesn’t solve any problems.

Furthermore, this could lead to earlier retirements, reducing the need for awkward discussions with tenured professors who are apparently unaware they often arrive at the office with their pants on backwards. Just boot them out the door!

Why didn’t we think of this topology thing a long time ago?

For an interesting topology discussion, see the Wikipedia article, which has an interesting photo of something called homeomorphic topology, an amusing example of which is the picture of continuous transformation of a coffee mug into a donut, or as many Iowa City people would prefer, a bagel (something that looks like a doughnut but is so tasteless you have to slather it with a pound of cream cheese).

If you have any questions, call the author of the study. You’re welcome!

Mousley, A., Bethlehem, R.A.I., Yeh, FC. et al. Topological turning points across the human lifespan. Nat Commun 16, 10055 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-65974-8

Swearing as a Performance Improvement Method?

I read this article about swearing being a good thing to do to increase your workout performance or whatever. There’s a link to the study that a researcher says supports that conclusion. I mean this story is talking about really bad words being good for you. It reminds me of a time when I was a pre-teen kid and broke my wrist falling out of a barn loft. I don’t remember exactly how I got to the emergency room. We didn’t have a car so our next-door neighbor must have driven me with my crooked arm and my hysterical mom to the hospital.

My mom was in the emergency room with me. When I cut loose with a torrent of really bad words, nurses had to practically carry her out because she fainted. This was right after I asked the doctor if it was OK if I swore and he said “Go ahead,” injected anesthetic—and immediately started to manhandle my wrist. I don’t think I ever swore in front of my mom before that.

I don’t remember if the swearing helped me withstand the pain or not. I don’t think so.

There was my other trip to a hospital for chest surgery when I was in my early teens. I had a chest tube after the operation. My roommate had undergone some kind of abdominal surgery. We had a lot of stitches and were in a lot of pain, which was bearable if we didn’t move at all. It even hurt to breathe. But the other factor was the TV in our room. It was way across the room and there was some kind of comedy show on. It was really funny—which made us feel really terrible. We could barely move and even had to talk quietly, yet this funny show made us laugh, which expanded our chest and abdomen areas, stretching the sutures. It was excruciating.

Even swearing would have hurt, not to mention laughing out loud. We really couldn’t stand to laugh and it’s too bad I can’t describe the sound of two guys trying not to even chuckle. If you ever watched Loony Tunes cartoons and remember how Elmer Fudd sounded when he laughed—that was how we sounded because we were trying to suppress laughing. It was funny but pitiful. My roomie finally made this desperate slow motion move out of bed, crept to the TV and shut it off. I was so grateful. Neither one of us ever swore.

The other thing this swearing for power reminds me of is the movie Signs, which starred Mel Gibson as Graham Hess. It was about an alien invasion and in one scene, some people/aliens (they don’t yet know what) are running around the house and Graham’s brother Merril (Joaquin Phoenix) are getting set to chase them. Merril tells Graham to yell and curse, although because Graham is a former Episcopal priest, swearing is beyond him:

All right, listen, we both go outside, move around the house in opposite directions. We act crazy, insane with anger, make them crap in their pants, force them around till we meet up on the other side.
Graham Hess: Explain “act crazy”.
Merrill: You know, curse and stuff.
Graham Hess: You want me to curse?
Merrill: You don’t mean it. It’s just for show. What?
Graham Hess: Well, it won’t be convincing. It doesn’t sound natural when I curse.
Merrill: Just make noises, then.
Graham Hess: Explain “noises”.
Merrill: Are you gonna do this or what?
Graham Hess: No, I’m not.
Merrill: All right, you want them stealing something in the house next time?
[outside light comes on]
Merrill: On the count of three. One…
Graham Hess: All right.
Merrill: two… three!
Graham Hess: Ahh! I’m insane with anger!
Merrill: We’re gonna beat your ass bitch! We’re gonna tear your head off!
Graham Hess: I’m losing my mind! It’s time for an ass-whupping!
[Merrill and Graham meet each other]
Graham Hess: I cursed.
Merrill: I heard.

Anyway, I think we have to make a distinction between cursing about something or cursing at someone before we start claiming, like the author of the study says:

“Swearing is literally a calorie-neutral, drug-free, low-cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance.”—psychology researcher Richard Stephens of Keele University in the UK.