More Delights and Disdains . . .

of a diminutive nature of late . . . Number 24

Disdains:

Watching from the passenger seat of my son’s car as a lady in an SUV cut the corner clipping his left front fender as we waited at a stop sign. No one was hurt and it was not his fault but that’s the second car damaged this year.

Filing a claim with the other driver’s insurance company. I am a suspicious person when it comes to insurance adjustors and this claim process is going a little too smoothly . . .

Shaking my head in disbelief at the over-enthusiastic cops who arrested a mother in Georgia for child endangerment after allowing her 10 year old son to walk to town less than a mile by himself and at the prosecutor who offered to drop the case if the mother would agree to put a tracker on her son’s phone. She refused. Fannin County is in the rural North Georgia mountains just five counties away from me. Close enough that I hope that the cop’s lack of common sense is not contagious.

Reading about Bluesky (is it pronounced blueskee or is it Blue Sky? I would prefer that it rhymed with brewski). Apparently, they are another Twitter-esque social media service gaining popularity with progressives in the wake of the past election. The original Twitter was perfect. With only 140 characters available per Tweet, the poster had to be concise thereby reducing the volume of written lunacy if not the content. And the 6 second Vine video add-on was just long enough. But all of that is past history. Now Twitter, Bluesky, Truth Social, and a half-dozen wannabes are all just sewer lines filling in the same swamp. I will stick with Substack.

Learning that researchers are anesthetizing octopuses with ethanol to study the color of their skin and porpoises are giving young manatees a beatdown for no good reason. Talk about an eight legged staggering drunk . . .

“We put them in ethanol and then raised the ethanol level until we essentially got them so drunk they passed out,” says Onthank. “It didn’t seem to bother them too much after we woke them up,” he adds. 

Delights:

Reading The Disordered Mind by the eminent neurologist Eric R. Kandel. I bought this book just before my DBS surgery in 2019 and promptly forgot about it. I rediscovered it over the weekend and was delighted to read his chapter entitled “Our Innate Creativity: Brain Disorders and Art” where he explores the biology of creativity, the art of people with schizophrenia, and psychotic art. He also delves into art created by people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s isn’t mentioned in this chapter but it should have been as we learned in this post.

Helping my son replace the stock brake and clutch levers on his motorcycle with adjustable levers to better fit his hands. Over the years I introduced him to various pastimes that I enjoyed doing as most fathers do, though I have not tried to live vicariously through him. It was fine by me if he wasn’t interested in tennis, golf, or soccer - sports that I half-played primarily for the social aspect - or corralling these dachshunds who infiltrated my life. He showed more enthusiasm for archery and shooting, but nothing has stirred his interest like motorcycling. As he pointed out, it is hard to be miserable on a bike.