“Dementia is greater risk for single people in later life, study finds”, Guardian, 2/4. As if I don’t have enough to worry about! I am unlikely to get married (and am not particularly interested in doing so), so I’ll have to hope that some of the other preventative activities there (exercise and thinking/daydreaming for me) are enough. I do believe that people who isolate themselves to an extreme are not mentally healthy – or that doing this can damage one’s mental health, as humans have evolved to be social creatures. (I like to be alone sometimes, but not to be lonely.)
Last week’s Australian Story – “The Highway Man” – on ABC TV featured such a man, John Cadoret, who had taken off 30 years ago and spent all that time wandering the roads, losing contact with his family (which upset them very much, understandably). He was a promising student at school, but became dissatisfied with his prospects and rejected a conventional life. He says he is content being a wanderer, but I tend to side with his mother in that he wasted his talents:
You’re not angry, you’re pleased that at long last you’ve found him. You’ve no idea what we go through. You do not know what we go through. You bring this child into the world and hope for the best for them, and they hurt you. They hurt you. He hurt me. He hurt me, I must admit. He did do well at school, very well at school. Grant got a scholarship, and he chose not to take it up. He could’ve gone on to anything. Instead, I mean, he chose the life of a swagman. You can’t fathom it. I’m a bit ashamed. I mean, you see him with his pack on his back and you wonder, is he going to be like that all the time?
Physically, he looked ill, with teeth missing and a gaunt body stooped under the weight of his backpack and possessions. He often scavenged for his food (eating what he could find on the roadside).
He’s not gonna be able to do it for much longer, I wouldn’t think, before his body gives out. If he gets sick, or is, gets hurt in any way, we won’t know. All of a sudden he’ll be in the middle of nowhere, so…and we’ll never hear of him again if he really gets hurt. And that’s it. And that’s difficult to think about.
“Woman, 85, lay dead in her flat for FIVE YEARS before anyone noticed”, Daily Mail, 3/7. This was in Edinburgh; there have been several cases like this in Australia, including one in a suburb near where I live in 2003 (“Shut away and forgotten, Elsie Brown died alone”). I sometimes feel that I will end up like this! In modern Western societies, with their emphasis on individualism, it is all too easy to.
“The curious incident of the straight-A student”, Guardian, 4/7. A profile of teenager Alex Goodenough, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He is bright (I’d like to read his sci-fi stories!), but has trouble fitting in socially. I have traits of that myself, but have never been diagnosed. (A psychologist diagnosed me as schizoid in 1988 – there is some overlap in the two conditions.)
My lower back is still bothering me; it has been so since January – it suddenly became so sore then for a few days that I could barely move, then settled down (it has done so on occasion over the years; seems to be a problem area). I think my first operation last December aggravated it somehow, and the second one in May made it worse! It is sore when lying down in bed, and getting up, but not when standing and moving around. It is, however, not a priority now.
More information – and an image – for the Avatar movie at the Marketsaw blog. The face on the banner is of a Na’vi-human hybrid (Jake Sully).
UPDATE – July 2, 2009: Further info about differences between Na’vi and Avatars! Jim here again. Here is what my source has to say: “There is major difference between the Na’vi and the avatars. It was visible in the footage shown at Amsterdam, but the viewers were so stunned they didn’t notice. The Na’vi have four fingers and toes; the avatars have five. In addition to the eyes, the avatar’s nose is also slightly smaller than the Na’vi’s.”
ANOTHER SAME DAY UPDATE: Exclusive insider info on the Na’vi image in the poster – this is from a trusted source: “Since one of the viewers of the Amsterdam presentation already mentioned it, the avatars do look somewhat like their human counterparts. This means the Na’vi look less human. Larger eyes for one. (Jim: Actually heard Neytiri has a striking resemblance to Zoe Saldana).
