Dear Friends,
The Hard Taco song for June, "Humphrey," is the theme song for Field Cut, a new neurology-themed board game that I am about to release. For a preview, visit the Neurdgames website.
In this game, there's a little guy in a yellow hat named Humphrey, and players take turns moving him around a map of the brain and trying to outsmart each other.
We gave him that name in reference to the Humphrey Visual Field test, an automated diagnostic tool used by eye doctors to assess a patient's visual fields.
I tried to learn more about the namesake of the test, Robert H.S. Humphrey, but he doesn't have much of an internet presence. All I could find was this weirdly cropped picture of a man that very well could be him.
Since uploading that picture, I learned that the Humphrey Visual Field device was invented in the 1980s. So I guess this picture is not accurate... he should be wearing shoulder pads and a Hypercolor T-Shirt.
According to the few public records of his life, Robert H.S. Humphrey was not the inventor of the device that bears his name; he merely popularized it. This would not be the first or last time we named something after an influencer. Oprah Winfrey did not invent the book club, and Gabriel Fahrenheit merely popularized things having a temperature.
But there isn't enough known about Humphrey to write a song about him, so I'm giving him an origin story that will tie the whole concept together. In this song, Humphrey is a grizzled, saddle-weary Old West sheriff with homonymous hemianopsia, a neurologic problem that prevents him from seeing anything in the right half of either eye. Humphrey is a rugged quick draw who brings his brand of frontier justice to any outlaw, as long as they are committing their crooked deeds in the left half of his vision.
With warmest regards,
Zach
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