Well This Explains It

Just saw this from the UK Daily Mail online. Now it all makes sense! It's not aging that seems to be making me dumber and affected my memory, it's all those years of being down in the dumps. (Seriously, this is interesting...)

    By Daily Mail Reporter:  Severe depression and chronic stress can shrink the brain by blocking the formation of new nerve connections, a study has shown.

     The effect disrupts circuits associated with mental functioning and emotion.

     It could explain why people with major depressive disorder (MDD) suffer from concentration and memory loss, as well as blunted emotional responses.

     Several genes involved in building synapses, the connection points between brain cells, were suppressed in people with MDD, scientists found.

     This was thought to contribute to shrinkage of the brain's prefrontal cortex, which is known to occur in MDD sufferers.

     Researchers in the US analysed brain tissue from patients who had died after being diagnosed with MDD. They found molecular signs of reduced activity in genes necessary for the function and structure of brain synapses.Evidence pointed to the involvement of a single genetic "switch", or transcription factor - a protein called GATA1.Turning on GATA1 reduced activity of the genes and triggered the loss of brain connections.

     Study leader Professor Ronald Duman, from Yale University, said: 'We wanted to test the idea that stress causes a loss of brain synapses in humans.

     'We show that circuits normally involved in emotion, as well as cognition, are disrupted when this single transcription factor is activated.'

     The research is published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Medicine. Further studies on rats showed that when GATA1 was switched on, the rodents showed signs of depression. This suggests that loss of brain synapses may be linked to depressive symptoms as well as mental impairment.

     'We hope that by enhancing synaptic connections, either with novel medications or behavioural therapy, we can develop more effective antidepressant therapies,' Prof Duman added.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2187592/How-stress-depression-shrink-brain.html#ixzz23YJERC6B

Ginger Rogers: Love Will Keep Us...Oh, my God!

Sorry I've been idle for almost a month, but ready to try and get back to it. So I thought I'd share the following:

Am I one of the few who haven't seen this? Don't know what show it's from, and it looks to have been videotaped from the TV screen -- and then copied about a dozen times. But you'll agree, it's just...mind-boggling. The choreography! The dancers! The costumes! And of course... Ginger! Doing Sonny & Cher.

You won't be able to look away...

I Speak German!

Who knew? Just check out the following clip from my international blockbuster (well, except for the US and, I don't know, China) "Marching Out of Time". Apparently it's something of a cult hit in Germany.

Marching Out of Time (dubbed)


Trailer (in English) is here: "Marching" Trailer


And bear in mind: this was 20 years ago... yikes!

PC Nuttiness Across the Pond

 An entry from blogger Daniel J. Mitchell. There's nothing more to add...

My jaw is gaping with amazement once more at the hare-brained political correctness that is infecting (or should I say infesting?) the United Kingdom. A story in the Daily Mail states that a recruitment agency was told not to advertise for “reliable” and “hard-working” people since that discriminated against…well, people that aren’t reliable and hard working. The silver lining to this dark cloud is that the the bureaucracy in charge of such matters backed down to avoid public ridicule, but the mere fact that this happened says a lot about what’s happening across the pond – and what’s beginning to happen in America:

"When it comes to hiring staff, there are plenty of legal pitfalls employers need to watch out for these days. So recruitment agency boss Nicole Mamo was especially careful to ensure her advert for hospital workers did not offend on grounds of race, age or sexual orientation. However, she hadn’t reckoned on discriminating against a wholly different section of the community – the completely useless. When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn’t ask for ‘reliable’ and ‘hard-working’ applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people. ‘In my 15 years in recruitment I haven’t heard anything so ridiculous,’ Mrs Mamo said yesterday. ‘If the matter wasn’t so serious I would be laughing out loud. ‘Unfortunately it’s extremely alarming. I need people who are hardworking and reliable – and I am pleased to discriminate in that way. If they’re not then I really can’t use them. The reputation of my business is on the line. ‘Even the woman at the jobcentre agreed it was ridiculous but explained it was policy because they could get sued for being discriminatory against unreliable people. …She filed the advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner at a hospital in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, through the Jobcentre Plus online service last Thursday. However, when she rang the nearest branch in Thetford, Norfolk, to make sure details would be available to jobseekers who turned up in person, she was transferred to a woman who said the wording was unacceptable."

Susan Tyrell, R.I.P.

On Turner Movie Channel tonight they were running John Huston's 1972 film "Fat City", with Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges. And Susan Tyrell, a cult favorite (or "thesp" as Variety calls her). I high-tailed it to the computer to look her up and discovered, among the Bing search results, that she has a web site (http://susantyrrell.com/) which I looked up and discovered, to my shock, that she had died. I mean just died, on June 16.

She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in "Fat City" and made a lot of movies thereafter, not many that could even remotely be called mainstream (e.g. "Forbidden Zone" in which she played Queen Doris of the Sixth Dimension). She was like some force of nature -- there's a scene in "Fat City" that takes place in a bar. Stacy Keach is telling a story to two other people at their table, and Susan just sits there, smoking, drinking, listening. She's not deliberately pulling focus or upstaging anyone. But even when she's just sitting there, looking off into the middle distance at God knows what, she's riveting. You can't take your eyes off her. (Pauline Kael called her "an entire school of acting", which was not intended as a compliment.)

Years ago in some magazine there was a photograph of her in a white hat and a 40's style dress with palm trees all over it, that I ripped out and copied in water color. Years later, when I was living in LA, my then-partner and I went to a little theater in Hollywood to see her one-woman show "My Rotten Life" which took a finely-honed meat cleaver to all those one-person shows about the triumph of the human spirit over whatever and what a swell person I am, even I can hardly believe it, the ups and downs of this business we call Show... She had none of it. In her version, she was telling the story of her life from Hell where she figured she'd probably wind up. I took the water color with me and gave it to her after the show, and she was genuinely touched.

"The last thing my mother said to me was, 'SuSu, your life is a celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry'," she recalled to the author of a 2000 profile in the LA Weekly. "I've always liked that, and I've always tried to live up to it."

Even she probably didn't know just how rotten her life would become: in late April of 2000 she was diagnosed with an extremely rare blood disorder, "essential thrombocythemia. Only one case in 100,000 is diagnosed each year. Four days later she had both legs amputated below the knee. (For the full LA Weekly article, click the link in the Entertainment Weekly obit: http://news-briefs.ew.com/2012/06/18/susan-tyrrell-dies/). The story of how she wound up sleeping with John Huston and its ultimate effect on her is clear-eyed and chilling and sad.

Yet she kept working and, apparently, maintained her spirit. The warped, sweet, fuck-you attitude that led her to love and identify with and "collect" life's misfits and cast-offs.

She wasn't someone whose career I followed or who, God knows, was very famous. But in a world where people like the Kardashians are considered role models... it just made me sad.

R.I.P. Susu.

The Best Thing I Ever Heard from a Genius

Stephen Hawking, close to the sun.

"Stephen Hawking is a British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, a renowned professor at Cambridge for 30 years. His contributions in cosmology and quantum gravity catapulted him to fame in the global scientific community. He predicted that black holes emit radiation. But he became controversial when he crossed the deep chasm between science and religion, and claimed that the Universe came from nothing and had no Creator." --Sister Raquel's Blog - http://www.sisterraquel.com

Not surprisingly many people violently disagree with his theories. (Just check out the YouTube videos with titles like "Stephen Hawking is an Idiot".) Nevertheless, it's undeniable that he's survived and thrived in spite of apparently insuperable odds, the kind of circumstances that lead parents to say to whiny children, "You think you have it bad? Look at ________! He's got something to cry about!"

The other night I tuned in to an episode of "Stephen Hawking's Grand Design", a TV series on Discovery Channel based on Hawking's book. It's fascinating, for sure, although from time to time I got more than a little confused as he tried to make the inexplicable clear to a numbskull like me, but only served to further cloud the waters.

But one thing did strike me. At the beginning of each episode, Hawking introduces himself the same way:

"Hello, my name is Stephen Hawking: physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind...I am free."

I've been trying to start and end each day with a little prayer and meditation, with limited success. But the minute I heard those words I connected, I understood. I felt a sense of peace. So I think I'm going to try starting out with a variation on Hawking's intro. I'll just substitute "physicist" and "cosmologist" with "academic co-ordinator" and "artist". And say "Although I have to work five days a week and have (fill in the malady), and have to (fill in the complaint du jour)...in my mind, I am free."

How beautiful is that?

"Call Me Gay-be"

So I was about to put together a new post about meditation and wakefulness and being alive vs. living in the past. Or living in the past vs. living in the Now... blah, blah, blah...

Then, while searching YouTube for something I saw on the news , I landed on this. I don't know if these guys are gay (I'm guessing not) but it's so cute and cheerful and, frankly, a little hot, that I thought "Screw enlightenment! Let's see some cute hetero guys shakin' their booties and (almost) making out with each other!"

 Click here: Call Me Gaybe ... love it!