Lisa > Recent Status Updates

Finished reading; RTC.

Despite the fact that dementia is a complex disease with many factors, we've been training our sights on the neuropathology of the disease. . . .

Even though they are widely prevalent, the presence of plaques and tangles sometimes has no effect on cognition. In fact, a full 30% of people over age 65 have enough plaques and tangles to meet the criteria for Alzheimer's, yet only 10% experience experience impairment.

I am so confused! Is that a good thing? Only further reading will tell.

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

Finished reading; RTC.

A butcher-bird has a lot of songs, Andy. It's got its territorial song, and its mating call, its distress call, its warning cry. And sometimes, it just sings to itself, because it wants to; because it can. . . Just because you've heard one song, doesn't mean you know the whole bird. . . Good rule of thumb for life in general. No one's just one thing.

Finished reading; RTC.

If the thing you remember is called a memory, what's the work for a thing you've forgotten?

I don't actually thing there is a specific word for a thing you've forgotten.

Is that because you don't remember what you've forgotten?
I reckon there should be a word. 'Forgetment," say. A 'forgetment' is the opposite of memory. Everything turns into a forgetment eventually.

There is a time when anything is possible: a time when we could be whoever we dream of being. Then life gets in the way, and our existence shrinks to a single moment. . . .

There are some events you can't come back from. . . A single moment in your past denies you a future: condemning you a death in life.

Maybe we're all just stories in the end . . . My family's version of my story isn't much like mine.

We think we know who we are: that each day, we'll wake up more or less the same person. Bu just as rocks are weathered, we are perpetually formed and changed by time and experience until we leave this world with not a single cell we came in with. . . . Sometimes, instead of a gradual metamorphosis, a single event changes a life completely, and when it does, it changes everyone who has ever loved them.

Above all, you keep them [the sheep station diaries] because, a day at a time, they help you make sense of the world; add shape and meaning to a life as subject to chance as any roll of the dice.

It's funny . . . You feed them the same. You love them the same. But every child's its own country.

Finished reading; RTC

[After 8 years, on 12/3/1844 the gag rule was finally defeated.]

In its earliest incarnations, the gag rule had to be reintroduced with the beginning of each session of Congress. This loophole, if you will, made the hours before the rules of the House were introduced and voted on an opportunity to let a few anti-slavery petitions slip by. . . . In 1840, the gag rule became a standing rule of the House.

Adams trial offered the nation a 360-degree view of American history. It looked back at the principles of the nation's founding as much as it foreshadowed the coming destruction.

after two weeks of trial, Marshall moved to table the censure resolution [against Adams], never to be taken up again. . . .

[1-24-1842}
Adams presented a petition from a man named Benjamin Emerson and 45 other 'citizens of Haverhill, in the State of Massachusetts, praying Congress immediately to adopt measures peaceably to dissolve the Union of these States' because 'no union can be . . . permanent which does not present . . . reciprocal benefits. . . .'

Set in motion purposefully, Adams dare his opponents to expel him.

[1841 and Adams is still working around the gag rule as best he can.]

Adams believed it would be more effective to attack the slavocracy not on the issue of slavery itself, but on First Amendment freedom of speech grounds as he had done since 1836. He even came up with his own pet name for the Select Committee on Slavery: the 'Committee of Friends of the Right of Petition.'