Watching Your Mouth

I’m feeling pretty good about myself today.  I didn’t swear at all, all day.  I don’t think I did yesterday either.  I don’t know that for sure.  


But I’m still pretty good according to the August, 2010 issue of Psychology Today.  It reports that the average English speaker utters 85 swears per day.  I never come close.  I bet I don’t touch that in 85 days.  Maybe, but I doubt it.  

It also seems that women have raised their percentages among the outbursts of public swearing from 33 percent in 1996 to 45% in 2006.  It’s risen to almost half of public cursing!  (But then, how do they document this?  Who really checks the facts and figures?  Where do the folks with the clipboards stand and is there really a fair cross-section of society represented?  Just wondering, Psychology Today.)

Unfortunately, the “F”-Bomb tops the top ten list of preferred swears with “sucks” rounding out at #10.  I prefer not to list 2 through 9 but I am glad I don’t live in the society that enjoys using these words in this order.  The folks I generally know are those who kinda hang onto “suck”s as first with the “H” and “D” word occasionally thrown in.  I'm lucky that way, I guess.

I’m almost always sorry when I swear. I think when when I do it, it probably offends more people than I think, even when it’s just Carl, who rarely if ever swears himself.  

I am trying to stop, even under my breath in traffic.  Especially in front of Carl.

A final note that is kinda funny from the PT article is in reference to a deaf boy who has Tourette’s.  Some unfortunate people with Tourette’s Syndrome often curse involuntarily without the ability to control themselves as you probably know, and this poor lad signs his profanities!!  It hardly seems fair, though those offended would be reasonably rare.

Whattaya Know? We Liked It

Today Carl and I went to see Scott Pilgrim vs The World because it was rated sky-high by Rotten Tomatoes, because I like Michael Cera and because I was in the mood for a movie.  Julia had planned to g.o to Despicable Me, but she had wearied of spending, having bought carpeting for her downstairs, so I was left in the lurch.  Carl had no idea of what he was in for.  

And we liked it.  It was funny, pretty clever and quite entertaining though Carl said it was “good but a little silly” for his taste.

I found upon my return that it was based on a “graphic novel” which I presume is a smarty-pants word for a comic book but that’s okay.  Comic books are for kids, graphic novels are for geeks probably.  

We were easily the oldest people in the theatre but that’s okay.  If anyone has a problem with that, they can stuff it.  And if anyone there thinks that popular culture stuff was beyond us, it really wasn’t all that arcane.  Pretty easy to figure out, actually.  Sorry.  

I Do Love Coincidences

Don't forget to scroll down to see the first one.  

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/564z2F/listverse.com/2007/11/12/top-15-amazing-coincidences/

Chicago -- City of Never-Ending Surprises

Well, then, I still really love Chicago, in spite of ever unfolding truths.  

To the left is Edgewater Hospital, the site where my beloved sons, Ben and Brad, each first saw the light of day. which is situated, obviously, on the shores of the beautiful Lake Michigan, address, 5700 No. Ashland Avenue in Chicago.  It truly was at the time a distinguished and reputable spot, one which anyone would have been proud to call their birthspot.  Dr. Eli Bernick was indeed the finest of obstetricians, competent, patriarchal, and indeed very Jewish.

Recommending it further is that Hillary Rodham Clinton was also born there.  Perhaps less thrilling is that John Wayne Gacy was born there, but I’ll not go into that.  He certainly wasn’t a mass-murderer as a newborn.  You’ll have to Google for more details.  I’ll not stoop to those here.

But here's something I didn't know until just the other day when Carl notified me of something he'd discovered.

Edgewater fell on hard times in the late 1990’s.  Ugly doings shut the place down, in fact.  Programs funded by the State of Illinois and the Feds were stopped due to some of Edgewater’s cheesy dealings.  Unnecessary operations and amputations on homeless guys they picked up from the methadone clinics around seemed to irritate the powers-that-be and without their money, Edgewater, the former Grande Dame on the Lake, had to close her doors.  Sounds like a really bad Law and Order episode.  

Now when Chicago looks down its nose on you, that really is the last straw I guess.  

But let me tell you, I love that city still.  It’s got something.  I think it’s because it’s brassy.  And I like brassy.  Wonder why?

The Sixties Liberal Stumbles Onto the Stage Again

An incredible story came out of Iraq stating that on Sunday nine American mothers received comfort from dozens of Iraqi mothers who had lost their sons during the Saddam Hussein era which ended in 2003. 

"When I hugged an American woman we couldn't express ourselves in words, but what helped us to express our feelings and understand each other were our tears. We found them as a true expression to our grief and suffering," said a 55-year-old Kurdish woman who had lost most of her own close family during the scorched-earth campaign against the Kurdish rebellion.  

The American women expressed how they had been angry before their visit to the country in which their sons had died, and yet had found peace and comfort as they visited the land where their children lived their last moments and spent time with people who inhabited that country and felt their same pain.  "I'll have visited the land where a piece of my heart will remain forever," said Amy Galvez, who is from Salt Lake, and whose son, Cpl Adam Galvez was also from Salt Lake City.   

The meeting of the two groups of women was organized by a group called “Families United Toward Universal Respect’ from the state of Virginia and officials from the local f Kurdish government and our State Department.

Yet while these women were meeting together in the northern part of Iraq, which is a mostly peaceable area currently, other parts of the country were experiencing  ongoing bombings and death.  

Doesn’t it seem silly to fight and kill?  The people who are doing the fighting are hardly able to sit down and discuss the points and minutiae, doctrines and principles they are fighting for.  If people have differences, it’s ridiculous not to work them out with discussion, arbitration, judges.  

But using innocent people as battering rams, target practice and ammunition?  Mothers can see how stupid that is.  Why can’t supposedly intelligent old men?  Old men who are too old too fight themselves?


Source:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39369062/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Hope for the Brain

Brain problems have been mixing around in my life since forever.  

I had a fiance who had an aneurysm while we were alone together in his car on a Sunday afternoon.  He never recovered.  

My father had a stroke when he was my age, never recovering his speech or his ability to use his arms, legs, or any kind of useful movement in his body aside from the ability to turn his head in a direction he chose.  This lasted almost a year until he died eleven months later.

My mother suffered from serious dementia and had so for too long a time. 

My brother’s sons suffered from serious, debilitating OCD.  

I have a great-nephew who potentially has Asberger’s Syndrome.  

ADD and ADHD seems to have its way with about everyone in my family.  

As a result, The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., really intrigued me, but it’s cutting edge ideas and hope really won my heart. It deals with all these difficulties and more.  

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to adapt, and is the topic of the book.  


It was earlier thought that areas of the brain were set from infancy and damage to various areas caused permanent damage to different skills and functions.  But this book shows that other parts of the brain can take over where failure in a specific area takes place.  Dozens of examples are given.

The first story is of a man, a professor in higher education in the 1960’s who suffered a stroke.  His son worked with the man well beyond the time, two-plus years, when recovery is expected by health-care professionals to be worthless.  His son had him crawl like a baby, pick up marbles, worked with his speech, until finally the man was able to return to teaching.  After the man died a few years later in his seventies, an autopsy was performed and it revealed he had indeed suffered a massive, debilitating stroke.  But his brain had rerouted its innerworkings to where it could re-command his functions

I wish we’d known this.  The professionals had given up on my father well after the time of this man.  His stroke was in 1988.  

The book spoke of a man who had had a stroke while in-utero during the second trimester.  Yet at an age about in his mid-forties was able to recover substantially through working with the principles of changing his brain in a clinic designed with this hope in mind though he had never been able to function well in his life to this point.

OCD, it would seem, can be worked with by some of these ideas as can autism.  

The same principles, however, can work in a negative way.  Addiction to pornography can recircuit the brain in the same way to a terrible result.  Hope for recovery from this, however, is in the same vein.

This book is really is quite readable as well. It won the 2008 U.S. National Alliance on Mental Illness Ken Book Award, it was a New York Times bestseller and a Scientific American Main Selection.  

If the brain interests you and hope for brain health appeals to you, it’s worth a read.  

Gotta Love The New Hole In The Head

Remember when losing your teeth was cool?  Here's Sophia, at the height of the fresh corn season enjoying the lack of her front teeth.  She doesn't even seem to mind.  Second Grade is all the better for the missing toothage.