About the Turkey

The Battle for The Landfill Trophy

Posted on November 10, 2025 Written by The Nittany Turkey Leave a Comment

Penn State (3-6, 0-6 Big Ten) vs. Michigan State (3-6, 0-6 Big Ten), Saturday, 3:30 PM ET (CBS)

For All the Marbles (But No Room Left on the Trophy)

Saturday brings us the almost annual contrived rivalry meeting between Penn State and Michigan State — two proud land-grant institutions, now reduced to clawing at each other like raccoons over a dumpster buffet, fighting for a trophy that looks like it was assembled during an eighth-grade shop class gone horribly wrong.

Yes, the Land-Grant Trophy — the late George Perles’s magnum opus of mahogany mediocrity. A lopsided shrine to bad carpentry, adorned with tourist postcards, dime-store figurines, and topped with the same plastic football player that came on the participation trophies handed out at Pee Wee banquets in 1967. The only thing missing is the bag of marbles this game is allegedly played for, but apparently there wasn’t room between the Nittany Lion bookend and the bust of Sparty that looks like it was rescued from a garage sale.

What if some enterprising, latter-day Nittany Lion or Spartan masochist were to take on the task of updating the trophy to include a drawer for all the marbles? Boy, then we’d really have a trophy worth playing for! Have we lost our marbles? You betcha! Dayummm!

The Combatants (Dumb and Dumber)

Both teams come into this titanic struggle with identical records of 3-6 and both are at 0–6 in Big Ten play, tied for last place with hapless Purdue and fighting to avoid the ceremonial basement broom. Penn State’s offense sputters like a ‘72 Vega, while Moo U’s defense couldn’t stop a cold front. If you’re looking for elite football, try watching Antiques Roadshow — the appraisals are faster-paced.

Vegas, in its infinite optimism, opened the line with Penn State favored by 7.5 points. This feels generous, considering neither team has demonstrated the will to live, much less to score. The over/under is 48.5, which would require both teams to find the end zone more than twice — doable, but subject to more variables than the Econometric Model of the United States.

To add to its offensive woes, Moo U. has a quarterback problem. Starter Aidan Chiles was benched for the Minnesota game due to declining performance in the wake of a hard hit he suffered against UCLA. The unpronounceable but proud Croatian (I’m guessing) redshirt freshman Alessio Milivojevic (mi-li-vo-YEV-ich, maybe) started against Minnesota. Moo U. head coach Jonathan Smith hasn’t commented on whether Milivojevich will be the #1 guy or whether he’ll employ a QB rotation. “They both have skill sets,” Smith muttered.

Nittany Turkey Keys to the Game

1. Don’t Win.
Possession of the Land-Grant Trophy comes with the solemn responsibility of finding somewhere to store the damned thing. Facilities directors have nightmares about it. Michigan State once stashed it behind a water heater for two years before anyone noticed.

2. Don’t Turn the Ball Over — Unless You’re Handing It to the Referee to End the Game.
Punting early and often might be the best strategy. Whoever ends up with the fewest offensive snaps might also end up with their dignity intact.

3. Keep the Trophy Hidden.
If Penn State wins, Terry Smith should accidently on purpose forget to put it on the plane back to University. If the baggage handlers ignore his orders, the equipment manager should drop it off at the Penn State University Composting Facility on the way back to campus from the airport.

Da Wedda

Surprisingly, after the weekend snow, the weather is forecast to be relatively mild for the game. Partly cloudy, with a high of 54 and some showers late in the day that might impact both incompetent offenses.

Da Bottom Lion

Here is where we end the sarcasm and get serious. Or not. Yea, verily, we have reached the part where the summary sentence will be delivered. Indeed, ’tis time for the Official Turkey Poop Prediction, which is worth its weight in electrons perturbed during its creation.

Regardless of the winner, the Land-Grant Trophy will once again find itself wedged awkwardly in a storage closet between the blocking sled and a box of broken chin straps — exactly where it belongs. All will be right with the world. So yes, the game matters, technically. But as Chico Harlan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette once put it, the trophy looks like “an oversized Rubik’s Cube after five minutes in the mouth of a rottweiler.” That’s the spirit of the thing right there.

Enough with the Trophy, Let’s Get to the Michigan State Game, Already!

The opening spread favored Penn State by 7.5 in the Battle for the Bottom with an over/under of 48.5. ESPN’s Peter Meter gives Penn State a 79.3% chance of winning. That’s a lot of undue respect from the gambling and sports media communities.

Let’s do some sports psycho-babble analysis involving who will wind up with no conference wins. Each team would need to run the table to get to a 6-6 record, and neither will. They don’t get to draw positions for draft choices like the NFL (yet), so not good reason to tank games either. Moo U will definitely lose to Iowa, and PSU will lose to Nebraska. That leaves beatable Maryland for Moo U and beatable Rutgers for Penn State. Thus, Saturday’s game is the proverbial rubber match. It determines who might share the Big Ten cellar with god-awful Purdue. The Boilermakers are at 0-7 with potential losses to Washington and Indiana remaining.

And so…

The Lions will probably stumble their way to an ugly 20–16 win, helped by Moo U’s legendary ability to self-destruct in the fourth quarter. However, the true loser will be whichever poor Penn State equipment manager has to haul the cubic monstrosity back to State College. I’m inclined to take the under.

Sidebar: The Academia of Awfulness

If you ever needed proof that design by committee is a crime against aesthetics, look no further than the Land-Grant Trophy — that walnut-and-glue shrine to indecision that could only have been birthed within the walls of academia.

You can practically hear the meeting:

“Let’s symbolize both schools’ proud traditions!”
“Good idea — add some postcards.”
“And maybe a miniature Nittany Lion!”
“Don’t forget Sparty!”
“We’ll need a plastic football player on top!”
“And shelves — for gravitas!”

Six hours and three pots of coffee later, someone nodded and said, “Perfect!” And thus was born this monument to mediocrity — a Frankenstein of mahogany and sentimentality that looks like it was rejected from a middle school shop fair for “structural instability.”

The Land-Grant Trophy is what happens when higher education’s bureaucratic instinct meets its aesthetic blindness — a physical manifestation of committee culture, where everyone has input and no one has taste. It’s less a trophy than a dissertation defense on the futility of consensus.

As the late political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre once observed — in a line later popularized by Kissinger and still tattooed on the soul of every frustrated academic —

“In academia, the battles are so bitter because the stakes are so small.”

And nowhere are those stakes smaller than here, where two universities with billion-dollar endowments fight over a trophy that looks like a condemned credenza.

Come Saturday, one of them will “win” this relic — and the other will win peace of mind, unburdened by the obligation to display it.

Which means, once again, academia triumphs in the worst way possible.

I’ll be back after the game with something interesting to say, or maybe I’ll be asleep.

Peptide Purgatory: Physician, Heal Thy Gun!

Posted on November 10, 2025 Written by The Nittany Turkey Leave a Comment

Life on Mounjaro and other medical topics

Welcome to my blog. Approaching the end of my eighth decade on the planet with a collection of old guy ailments, my aim here is to share my travails working through the medical morass. I also spew opinions on the current state of healthcare, which we all agree is in a sad state, at least in the good old US of A.

This week’s issue of Peptide Purgatory casts a cynical eye toward a JAMA initiative to protect us from our guns, or so they think. Later on, if you need some more bullshit, our even more cynical weekly Bullshit Corner makes light of Big Pharma wanting to monetize every aspect of our lives by classifying everything in the human experience as a treatable disease. It’s not a stretch to consider treating natural aging and death similarly. Aging as a chronic, relapsing disease? Who knew? (Well, I’m scratching my head over the “relapsing” part, but still…)

My Mounjaro Weekly Update discusses some new research into chronic kidney disease, a frequent companion of diabetes. We look at two lab methods for measuring kidney function and the implications of disparities between the two. Anyone who has been diagnosed with CKD Stage 3 or higher should familiarize themselves with the testing methodology.

Let us now turn to our establishment doctor friends, who believe it is their responsibility to re-engineer society. For years, I’ve read in publications like JAMA and Healio how doctors should pry into gun ownership by their patients. They tell docs how to bring up the sensitive subject and “counsel” their patients. What we’ll look at below is the healthcare industry’s more comprehensive plan (in the central planning sense) to address the subject of gun violence.

How the healers of humanity keep trying to rewrite the Constitution in the name of “safety.”

The New Hippocratic Hypocrisy

I spent a bored half-hour reading JAMA’s latest special communication, “Toward a Safer World 2040.” It opens like scripture and closes like a five-year plan. The same profession that cheerfully prescribes weight-loss peptides, antidepressants, and statins by the bucket now declares it must also regulate our relationship with metal objects that go bang. When your prescription pad becomes a policy platform, you’re no longer practicing medicine — you’re practicing behavioral economics. Somehow, the AMA has taken it upon itself to re-engineer society, because doctors are omniscient, unassailable, and not to be questioned.

If I didn’t make this the feature article this week, it would fully qualify for inclusion in Bullshit Corner.

The Gospel According to Public Health

Modern “public-health language” has acquired its own liturgy: sin, compliance, and redemption through regulation. The JAMA authors promise to “change the narrative” and “re-engineer social norms.” Translation: we’ll fix society the way we fix cholesterol.

They describe “primordial prevention,” which apparently means fixing everything before it starts — housing, jobs, emotions, perhaps the cosmic alignment of the moon — so nobody ever has a bad thought that could lead to violence. It’s social work by decree, a wellness plan for the human condition.

Big Pharma’s Glass House

You’d think, before lecturing us on “commercial determinants of health,” medicine might look in its own mirrored medicine cabinet. Every night, prime-time TV hums with pharma ads promising liberation from everything from heartburn to despair — just ask your doctor about side effects including blindness, renal failure, and spontaneous bankruptcy. Yet these same white coats now clutch their pearls over an industry that sells firearms to willing adults. If hypocrisy were billable, the health-care sector could pay off the national debt.

Coming Soon: Thorazine for All — and for Gun Ownership, a Diagnosis

Public-health utopians never let a new initiative go to waste; it’s a marketing opportunity with peer-reviewed footnotes. Expect Big Pharma’s creative wing to pivot immediately:

Ask your doctor if Thorazine Preventive™ is right for you — because anyone could become agitated at any time.

They’ll sell it like a cholesterol pill for the conscience: take one daily to keep your darker impulses within CDC limits.

Gun ownership itself will get a new entry in the diagnostic manual — Chronic Relapsing Ballistic Disorder (CRBD) — treatable with a lifetime subscription to the latest mood-modulating injectable. The military, naturally, will be exempt; can’t have the Marines dozing through boot camp. But for the rest of us, a mandatory micro-dose might “flatten the emotional curve.” Think of it as herd sedation.

Soon there’ll be friendly reminder ads:
“If you see something, medicate something.”

And some enterprising venture fund will roll out TheraSafe™ kiosks at the pharmacy, where your insurance card unlocks both your blood-pressure cuff and your moral-restraint meter.

The Smart Gun and the Smarter Bureaucrat

The summit swooned over “biometrically authorized firearms,” “AI-driven weapon detection,” and “non-lethal home-defense robots.”

I can hardly wait for my pistol to sync with my smartwatch and refuse to fire because my heart rate is above CDC guidelines. Maybe Alexa will phone 911 if I look angry over a dumbass play in the football game I’m watching.

Techno-utopianism always sounds noble until you realize it comes with firmware updates, auto-renewals, and government terms of service. “Your freedom license has expired; please renew to continue defending yourself. You want to cancel? Helen Waite is our Customer Service manager in the Maldives. To cancel, go to Helen Waite!”

The Pathologizing of Freedom

Somewhere along the line, the medical mind stopped at “risk reduction” and kept driving until it hit “risk elimination.” Everything risky — drinking, driving, eating butter, owning tools — is now a health condition. Freedom itself, viewed through this lens, becomes a chronic disorder requiring managed care. I remember when “risk factors” meant cholesterol, not ideology. These days, owning a lawn mower and a spine of your own can get you diagnosed with Non-Compliant Personality Syndrome.

The Mental Health Mirage

Buried deep in the report is a line or two about “behavioral supports.” Translation: more seminars, fewer psychiatrists. They’ll light up vacant lots and hold community workshops while the genuinely unstable wander untreated through the system. Why build mental-health infrastructure when you can install LED streetlights and call it “primordial prevention”?

Reading Between the Lines of ‘Conclusions and Relevance’

A safer world will require investing in the discovery, implementation, and scaling of solutions that reduce firearm harms and center on the people and communities most affected.

Lovely prose. But tucked between those commas is an entire bureaucracy.
“Investing” means tax-funded research centers staffed by the already-converted.
“Implementation” means new regulations.
“Scaling” means permanent funding lines.
And “centering communities” means forming advisory panels that look diverse, think uniform, and never invite anyone who actually enjoys target shooting.

It’s the mission statement of every well-meaning technocracy: spend money, expand authority, and declare victory over human nature.

The 2040 Utopia — Terms and Conditions Apply

Picture their promised land:
Smart guns that check your mood, drones that sniff for “unauthorized powder residue,” and AI counselors that text you affirmations when your KFRE risk score looks agitated.

Every home will be “violence-informed.”
Every citizen will be “empowered to feel safe.”
Every dissenting opinion will be politely referred for counseling.

Safety, we are told, is priceless — until you get the bill in autonomy.

A Little Perspective from the Waiting Room

I’m not blind to real tragedy. Violence, suicide, and despair are heartbreakingly real. But the cure isn’t to deputize medicine as moral guardian of the republic. Doctors already have a full docket: obesity, addiction, Alzheimer’s, COVID after-effects, billing software and CPT codes. How about we fix the mental-health pipeline before redesigning the social contract?

Prescription for Sanity

So here’s my counter-treatment plan:

Less sermon, more science. Spare us the manifestos; show us data that survive contact with reality.
Treat people, not probabilities. Heal minds instead of modeling behaviors.
Respect informed risk. Freedom carries side effects — call it the natural price of adulthood.

Aging isn’t a disease, owning property isn’t pathology, and exercising rights isn’t a “modifiable determinant of health.”

Doctor, heal thy gun—or better yet, heal thy hubris.

My Week on Mounjaro

Boring week, so I shaved my head. This is a look that I’ve been wanting to play with for a while. I believe it was two birthdays ago when my wife bought me a head shaver, but until last weekend, I left it in the box while I buzzed my hair shorter and shorter, sneaking up on baldness gradually. I finally bit the bullet, and I now sport a shiny, new (dubiously) chrome dome. (see photo)

The numbers this week were pretty stable, so I won’t bore you with them. Instead, I’ll give you a little insight into my geriatric kidneys, always a source of amusement in a mixed crowd. Our doctor friends at JAMA published a paper recently that caught my eye, about disparities in the two current means of measuring kidney function and their implications about kidney patients’ longevity.

While you might have gotten the idea from our lead article that JAMA has aspirations to rival The New Republic, that vaunted journal actually still does publish legitimate medical research between the social engineering bullshit and progressive opinions. But I digress.

I’ll use my labs as example — fortunately, the conclusion in my case is that something else might kill me before my kidneys do.

When the Numbers Don’t Agree, Believe the Smarter One

On October 1, my labs staged me as G2–G3/A1: creatinine 1.22 mg/dL, eGFR 61.
The same day, my cystatin C came back 1.19 mg/L—mathematically equivalent to about 66 mL/min/1.73 m².

According to the new JAMA meta-analysis by Estrella et al., that tiny five-point bump puts me on the “lower-risk” side of the curve. They found that roughly one in ten outpatients had a cystatin C number at least 30 percent worse than their creatinine value—and those folks aged faster and died younger. My slightly better reading means I’m not one of them.

In other words, my kidneys might not be auditioning for a transplant list anytime soon. They’re just 79 years old and a little tired of the paperwork.

The real lesson? Creatinine alone is like judging horsepower by tailpipe smoke. Cystatin C measures what’s actually coming off the assembly line. If you’re north of 70 and the doc only runs creatinine, ask for the smarter test—it can tell whether you’re losing kidney function or just muscle tone.

Reconciling the Two: eGFR_cr-cys

When you plug both numbers into the 2021 CKD-EPI combined equation, the values average out around 63–64 mL/min/1.73 m²—a statistical peace treaty between creatinine’s pessimism and cystatin C’s optimism.

That’s the figure clinicians increasingly prefer, because it smooths out the extremes: if muscle mass drags creatinine up or inflammation drags cystatin C down, the combo keeps your staging honest. In practice, my GFR looks exactly where it should for an active late-septuagenarian who deadlifts and hikes instead of shuffling to bingo.

The Estrella paper’s takeaway fits me to a tee: if your cystatin C-based eGFR is similar to or better than your creatinine-based one, you’re probably doing fine—especially if you’re busy defying your birth certificate.

And now, for a little closing bullshit, we enter the Bullshit Corner. Today’s subject is natural aging as a treatable disease, or so the marketing fiends of Big Pharma might think.

Bullshit Corner — Big Pharma vs. Death: The Final Battle

There was a time when aging was simply called “getting older.” Now it’s being recast as a chronic, relapsing disease—one that, conveniently, can only be “managed” with perpetual prescriptions and quarterly labs. Welcome to the next frontier of medical marketing: the war on mortality itself.

From metabolism to monetization

Big Pharma’s campaign to redefine obesity as a “chronic metabolic disease” was just the pilot episode. It worked spectacularly: GLP-1 drugs like Mounjaro became the Netflix of modern medicine—subscribe forever, lose a few pounds, and pray the side effects don’t outlast the co-pay. With that proof of concept, the marketing people have now turned their sights on a more universal affliction: being alive long enough to get old.

The pathology of existence

The new narrative goes something like this: aging is “a systemic, progressive disorder of cellular senescence and mitochondrial dysfunction.” Translation: it’s a normal biological process in need of a billing code. Once you call it a disease, you can measure it, treat it, and—best of all—bill for it. Expect forthcoming miracles like “AgeStat RX,” “Senolyze Plus,” and “YouthReboot Pro,” each promising to slow the ticking clock by about half a headline per quarter.

Consensus by committee (and underwriter)

White papers will follow. “Consensus panels” funded by “unrestricted educational grants” will declare that an 80-year-old with an eGFR of 61, blood pressure of 116/67, and a pulse should be considered “Stage 1 Age-Related Functional Decline.” KDIGO and the AHA will update the guidelines to ensure you can’t die without a prior authorization.

The perpetual patient economy

It’s a business model only entropy could love: convert the inevitable into the treatable. If every person is a patient, there are no healthy people—just undiagnosed opportunities. The stock analysts will call it “total addressable lifespan.”

But here’s the catch

They can regulate, legislate, and medicate, but they can’t repeal thermodynamics. No matter how many “cellular rejuvenators” they hawk, we’re all marching toward the same actuarial conclusion. Aging isn’t a disease—it’s the invoice for staying alive this long. The rest is marketing copy with a co-pay.

So when the next glossy ad tells you to “fight the signs of chronic aging,” smile, lift your glass, and toast to the only cure Big Pharma will never patent: acceptance. Death and taxes remain undefeated—but at least the IRS doesn’t claim to prevent mortality for $799 a month.

Peptide Purgatory chronicles one man’s ongoing experiment with Mounjaro, metabolism, and medical modernity. Side effects may include sarcasm, elevated skepticism, and mild tachycardia while reading policy papers.

We’re Even!

Posted on November 9, 2025 Written by The Nittany Turkey 6 Comments

Indiana 27, Penn State 24

A View from the Past

Back in 1994, that legendary collection of Nittany Lions with Kerry Collins at the helm were cruising toward the mythical national championship when they almost hit a roadblock in the most improbable of venues: Bloomington, Indiana. Undefeated #2 Penn State would face the Hoosiers of yore, Bill Mallory’s 5-4 football team that provided a diversion for a few dozen sports starved fans while waiting for basketball season. The Lions jumped out to a 35-14 lead, which Joe Paterno thought was a good time to clear out the bench. But there was no quit back home in Indiana, where the home team whittled the shocked visitors’ lead down to six points in the fourth quarter. Penn State hung on to win, but came close to blowing their season on the field that day.

Thirty-one years later, the tables were turned. Raucous Beaver Stadium is the site where Curt Cignetti’s undefeated #2 Indiana would take on hapless Penn State, sporting a 3-5 record after five straight losses and going nowhere. This time, it was the Nittany Lions who, with nothing to lose, would scare the Hoosier fan base shitless. In a hotly contested game that would come down to the final play, Indiana took the lead with less than a minute left on the clock. Penn State had enough time left to score a field goal, but couldn’t make the comeback. Final score: Indiana 27, Penn State 24.

Indiana had heretofore been winless in Beaver Stadium and Penn State had dominated the all-time series. But it’s a new dawn, a new day, and a new life. And we ain’t feelin’ good. [Thanks for the fair use, Ira Gershwin].

What Goes Around, Comes Around

So, we’re even. Penn State covered the spread, which closed at 13.5 points, and the over/under was right on the money. And the Nittany Lions played their best game of the year on both sides of the ball. On offense, Ethan Grunkemeyer was finally allowed to throw downfield. Nick Singleton awoke from his slumber to produce 71 yards and two touchdowns. The offensive line appeared to be almost competent. On defense, we finally saw some production out of Dani Dennis-Sutton, who along with his colleagues, kept decent pressure on Fernando Mendoza, recording three sacks.

The Nittany Lions finally woke up in the losing effort, albeit too late in the season to salvage anything meaningful. They will need to beat Moo U., Nebraska, and Rutgers to flirt with bowl eligibility, and even if they manage to do so, the bowl game will be nothing to write home about. Sarcastically, the Sani-Flush Toilet Bowl in Kohler, WI, that winter wonderland in early December, would be the likely venue.

Speaking of “even”, the stats were pretty even. Total yards: Penn State 336, Indiana 326. Indiana had 20 first downs to Penn State’s 17. Grunkemeyer threw for 219 yards; Mendoza, 218. Turnovers’ll killya, though, and although both QBs had one interception, Penn State lost the Franklinesque “turnover battle”. A particularly disastrous Grunkemeyer interception led to a Hoosier score that would eventually provide the winning margin.

While I’m not believing the hype about Fernando Mendoza being the best quarterback in the sport formerly known as college football, I will give credit where due. Mendoza and his talented receivers are a premier bunch. Mendoza’s pinpoint throws in the face of the suddenly resurgent Penn State pass rush were only eclipsed by almost super-human circus catches.

The Nittany Lions had a shot at tying the game in the waning seconds, but clock management bit them in the ass. Instead of spiking the ball to stop the clock, they wasted a time-out, limiting their options as they neared field goal range with the score 27-24. Predictably, time ran out on them.

Now What?

As Penn State football fans cast their collective fate to the wind, what does the future hold? Did the Nittany Lions shoot their proverbial wad in this game? Will the team psyche once again take the elevator to the bargain basement due to post-loss depression and the cumulative mental fatigue of six straight losses?

I hesitate to speculate. I was certainly wrong about them folding their tent after the Ohio State loss. While some of my readers will write this game off as an anomaly or will trivialize the accomplishment because Indiana sucks or has a weak schedule, just about everyone out there was predicting a massacre. It didn’t happen. Indiana came to play, and so did the Nittany Lions.

The current bullshit sentiment that “you ain’t shit less’n you make de playoffs” will dampen acknowledgment of Penn State’s performance. After all, the suckas lost, didn’t they? James Franklin is gone and they still can’t win the big games. Blame it on Franklin.

If fans and Pat Kraft hold this team to such a ridiculously high standard, they’ll always be disappointed and they’ll always be seeking instant fixes. Sorry, people, but life ain’t that easy. If fans could have it their way, every year would be 12-0 and a trip to the playoffs. They’ll never be happy with anything less than perfection, and barring the Second Coming, any coach hired to fix the Lions will be less than perfect. [I got this idea from South Park].

Are the Nittany Lions finally shaking off the shock of James Franklin’s summary dismissal? Is Terry Smith a superior motivator? Or did the notion that laying down on the job would impair NFL prospects finally sink in? I’d say time will tell, but time is running out on this season. Circling the drain with heads held high is the best we fans can expect.

Nothing will salvage this season, but I’ll be happy if they stay competitive, win or lose.

I’ll be back mid-week with a preview of the battle for all the marbles. Yes, folks, that’s right! The Mighty Land Grant Trophy is on the line. It now sports a bag of marbles along with its collection of various and sundry Dollar Store baubles. The Nittany Lions travel to East Lansing to face 3-6 Moo U. Who will come home with the gigantic monstrosity of a booby prize?