Frailty, dementia, and the loss of laughter

An attempt at humor
about something
few find funny

By James T. Carney

Motivated by the Yale News article, “Frailty, dementia raise mortality risk for older Americans after surgery,” about a study by Yale researchers that found striking differences in the mortality rate of older Americans within a year of their having major surgery, I have been reading a book on aging written by a medical doctor.

The ages of man

They form a palindrome

Today’s palindromic wisdom was recently discovered in the lost manuscripts of the author of “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”....

The reason snakes frighten us (a poem)

Inspired by Ralph Earle’s
“The Way the Rain Works”

By Moristotle





I’m not the only one digging in the earth this morning
My trowel unearths other diggers digging there
They wriggle, woken up or frightened
by the earth’s sudden movement.

By way of apology to the wild birds in our neighborhood

Written towards the end of May, just in case

By Moristotle

Besides missing Siegfried, who will be kenneled for the month of June, a sadness of being away from home, mostly in Paris, is the knowledge that our neighborhood’s wild birds will find no seeds in our back yard all that time. They won’t even find their favorite feeders. I took the favorite feeders down this morning to stage the photograph shown above. Though it may look inviting enough to you, I who delight in seeing & hearing birds there, find it a desolate spectacle.

Remembering April 4, 2014

It started with “More about creativity”

By Moristotle

Thanks to Sharon Stoner for reminding us today, by commenting, of a “Fish for Friday” column published exactly three years ago today (when April 4 was a Friday). She made this comment:

I’ve often wondered if when I die will there be anyone left who knew me. Without friends all that is left is, alone!

Don't look grumpy

But, then, how does grumpy look?

Click to enlarge so you can read
some of the book titles

    Anyway, I did this self-portrait yesterday, with our new, digiscoping-ready Nikon Coolpix P100 camera. All we need now, to hook it up to the field scope, is a wide eyepiece, something I failed to order with the camera and the adapter.

Actually, the expression we should be seeing in the self-portrait is relief. I started out the day fasting for an upper endoscopy scheduled for about 9:30. And, though only vaguely aware of it at the time, I was in a shitty mood.
    But as soon as I was come to again from the procedure (which had involved light sedation to render me sleepy and amnesiac), I felt quite chipper—even before I'd had anything to break my fast, even including the two cups of cranberry-grape juice and two packets of graham crackers I was given a little while later. The sunny feeling made me realize that I had been fairly worried about the procedure, with its potential for finding that I, too, along with Christopher Hitchens, might be expected to die fairly soon of esophageal cancer.
    Not anytime soon, at any rate.
    So let's admire our relieved look.
_______________

Dwarf Grumpy

Here's how Walt Disney & Co. thought grumpy looked:

"Other possibilities beyond the brute either/or...."

Another edifying passage from Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of:

In one of my novels I had a character imagine that there must be other possibilities beyond the brute either/or, the ultimate would-you-rather, of 1. God exists, or 2. God doesn't exist. So there were various alluring heresies, like: 3. God used to exist, but doesn't anymore; 4. God does exist, but has abandoned us; 8. God did exist, and will exist again, but doesn't exist at the moment—He is merely taking a divine sabbatical (which would explain a lot); and so on. My character got up to number 15 (there is no God, but there is eternal life) by the time he, and I, reached the end of our imagining powers.
    One possibility we didn't consider was that God is the ultimate ironist. Just as scientists set up laboratory experiments with rats, mazes, and pieces of cheese placed behind the correct door, so God might have set up His own experiment, with us playing rat. Our task is to locate the door behind which eternal life is hidden. Near one possible exit we hear distant ethereal music, near another smell a whiff of incense; golden light gleams around a third. We press against all these doors, yet none of them yields. With increasing urgency—for we know that the cunning box we find ourselves in is called mortality—we try to escape. But what we don't understand is that our non-escaping is the whole point of the experiment. There are many fake doors, but no real one, because there is no eternal life. The game thought up by God the ironist is this: to plant immortal longings in an undeserving creature and then observe the consequences. To watch these humans, freighted with consciousness and intelligence, rushing around like frantic rats. To see how one group of them instructs everyone else that their door (which even they can't open) is the only correct one, and then perhaps starts killing anyone who puts money on a different door. Wouldn't that be fun? [p. 187]