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US | December 08, 2009 Sidebar: The Turducken Approach to Privacy Law By ADAM LIPTAK After an appeals court dissent's colorful metaphor for a tangled area of law, the Supreme Court may intervene.

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Aging: Moderate Drinking May Help the Brain [via Vincent Atchity]

People over 60 who consume moderate amounts of alcohol have a reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, according to a large review of studies.

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The analysis, which appeared in the July issue of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, reviewed 15 studies that together followed more than 28,000 subjects for at least two years. All the studies controlled for age, sex, smoking and other factors. The studies variously defined light to moderate drinking as 1 to 28 drinks per week.

Compared with abstainers, male drinkers reduced their risk for dementia by 45 percent, and women by 27 percent.

The researchers acknowledge that studying the effects of alcohol on dementia is complicated by issues like beverage type, standards of quantity and individual behavior that may interact with alcohol to affect mental acuity. But there is ample evidence from other studies that moderate alcohol consumption can increase HDL, or “good cholesterol,” improve blood flow to the brain and decrease blood coagulation. All three factors may reduce the risk for dementia.

Still, the authors warn against drawing premature conclusions. “The overall safety ofalcohol use in later life,” they write, “needs to be evaluated in relation to all of the available evidence” about its health effects.

From Vincent Atchity's doctordogbrother

thunder crash and lightning

Posted: 18 Jun 2009 06:22 AM PDT

“Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin: so ’tis to thee;
But where the greater malady is fix’d,
The lesser is scarce felt. Thou’ldst shun a bear;
But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea,
Thou’ldst meet the bear i’ the mouth. When the
mind’s free,
The body’s delicate: the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there.”
–Shakespeare, King Lear, III.iv.

While untroubled souls seek refuge from the storm, Lear seeks refuge right out in the open heart of it: “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” When we awake to the flash of lightning and crash of nearby thunder, perhaps in an unfamiliar room far from home, we may experience a peculiarly heightened sense of comfort. However distracted, dislocated, or out of sorts, our perspective with regard to our internal state is shifted by the fury of the heavens. If nothing else, in our upset state we may feel, for once, that we are at least matched by the cosmic clamor: shudder for shudder, it’s as if we and the heavens were each other’s mirror. There is a companionship in this, a sense of tangible reciprocity. Calm weather, by comparison, is cold and existentially heartless from the perspective of a soul in any kind of turmoil: it stands as a reminder that the heavens are indifferent to us, that there is no correspondence, no relation.

If we are calm ourselves, the raging weather outside only heightens our snug sense of comfort. We certainly feel no obligation to accompany the heavens in their fury–but we are possessed not by indifference, but by gratitude: our recognition of the modest comforts of this unfamiliar room far from home is heightened, the lightning’s white flashes etch humble details in memory.

Memory links to memory: this morning’s Georgetown storm carries me back to storms in other faraway places, even to storms of childhood. I can still smell the summer rain coming across the dry plains of Castilla, can still remember showering naked in the night beneath the falling sky of Vieques, hunkering in a dry spot beneath a boulder in the Laguna Salada wilderness.

The heavens do not mirror the mind’s tossings and tempests with anything like sufficient frequency. Our flight, we may feel, does lie “toward the raging sea”–that’s the anxiety of our mortality–and more often than not we have no bear to turn to face instead, but only the plodding calm of indifferent days, uncounted and unremembered. We do well, then, perhaps, to take a lesson from these cosmic proportions and trust that the raging sea ahead is more likely an expanse of unremarkable calm into which all of our own tempests will subside. Embrace, then, every bit of the tossing–inside or out–it is the thunder crash and lightning of our brief vitality.

doctordogbrother

private vocabularies Posted: 04 Jun 2009 08:56 AM PDT Next on the top shelf: The Poetical Works of Chaucer, edited by F.W. Robinson and published by the Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston in 1933. My father gave this volume to me when I was in college, though it’s not the book I used there. My memory retains the first several lines of the General Prologue, and my mouth still forms the sounds of this Middle English (as rendered on the tapes I studied in my college Chaucer class). Foreign and familiar: Chaucer’s stories and language are traces of a lost world. I remember, particularly, the “verray, parfit gentil knyght” who “wered a gypon al bismotered with his habergeon.” Bismotered is the word, of all of Chaucer, that has stuck with me…along with its subversive tainting of this image of chivalric perfection. Bismotered. I say it to myself with fair regularity…it’s become part of my private lexicon, the language that I speak in my head and that no other understands completely. An important aspect of wholeness is the dream of perfect understanding: we may yearn for some recognition of our every lilt and nuance of personal significance. We may dream of one who will make us whole, who will get us completely, and not be deaf or uncomprehending in the face of our private vocabularies, the words we repeat to ourselves, mantra-like, as we shape our days. Chaucer’s pilgrims, all pilgrims, travel in pursuit of this wholeness. In this yearning for completion, for comprehension, we find that we are already one. All languages, ancient and emergent, are the tentacles of our feeling for completion.

Aubade By Vincent Atchity

Youth was my sprightly joy,
all that I could and would be,
my kingdom on its way.

At forty-three, while cashiers
still require proof before
selling me their ten dollar wines,
I find myself in the
quickened interstices,
letting go of could and would.

Here is our companionable
morning coffee, later I'll pause
for a sight of the bridge at the
rim of the mountain-held bay.
I'll ride my bike alongside bobbing
coots and mirror-winged crows
edges flashing white with light.
The bulk of the day will be a service
to humility, absorbed in a crotchety
machinery of function. All this inner
music silenced to a hum.

Five o'clock will whistle me back to you.
I'll fly downhill into the setting sun
toward the shoreline. The light on the water
will be an orange silver shimmering,
a defiance of representation, an evocation
of the painters who've taken the best measure of time
and tried to keep it.

We'll have our wine and we'll toast the antioxidant properties.
We'll inhabit the evening as fully as moons
before our faces ever wane.
You'll push up against me on the sofa.
I'll feel your warmth here
in my kingdom come.