Page 210–211: Name-Calling: Who are Larry Talbot and Holmes & Rahe?

Destiny Jones shows off her geek-fu when she refers to Nicholas Young as “Larry Talbot” (page 210). Lawrence Stuart Talbot was the title character in the 1941 monster movie The Wolf Man…along with subsequent sequels such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). He was portrayed in all these films by the great Lon Chaney Jr. This reference is Destiny’s way of connecting Nicholas to her college paper about classic movie monsters.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) in Wolf Man form, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, Universal International Pictures; Archive.org identifies it as being public domain.)

The Holmes & Rahe Stress Scale (page 211) is a colloquial term for the Social Readjustment Rating Scale developed by psychologists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe in 1967 based on the idea that stress predisposes one to illness. The measure consists of 43 stressful life events such as job loss, moving, death of a loved one, etc. Each of these is assigned a predetermined number of “life change units”; in this scale, even positive events like marriage are considered to be stressors. A respondent’s score is based on the number of these events which have occurred in the past year, and the total number of life change units associated with them.