It's not?

 

Coffee achievers!

Last month the Journal of the American Medical Association, also known as JAMA LAMA BING BONG BOO, ran an excellent study entitled "Coffee and Tea Intake, Dementia Risk, and Cognitive Function." Why is this so important? Because: 

Greater consumption of caffeinated coffee and tea was associated with lower risk of dementia and modestly better cognitive function, with the most pronounced association at moderate intake levels.

There it is! Just what I've been saying all along. Coffee makes your brain work better, and keep at it longer! 

health food

"But, Fred," you say, "surely you just agree with this because you like coffee and becase you are hopelessly addicted to caffeine." 

To which I counter: Ha! And: Maybe! But don't just take my word for it. Take the word of me looking back at my younger days. 

In my house, you started drinking coffee as soon as you could stand it, usually a drop of coffee in a cup of milk. By the time I was in my early teens, I was drinking it with Mom and Dad as is. Did it make me smarter? Well, probably not, but it got me out the door in time for school.

Since then I have relied heavily on caffeine, but except in small Pepsi Zero type doses or the occasional black tea, I rely on coffee to get my moving. No No-Doz or Red Bull. (I'll bet that Red Bull stuff actually causes more dementia, just going by the ads.) 

How do I know that these so-called scentists aren't just in the pocket of Big Coffee? Well, for one thing the names include Zhang, Liu, Li, Gu, Kang, Wang, and Hu. They all are affiliated with American institutions, but if they were on the take you'd think Big Tea would have been a more natural cultural connection. So I think they are 100% trustworthy on this important issue.  

So drink that coffee! Fight that dementia! And don't worry about the "moderate intake levels" stuff. I mean, it just stands to reason that two pots of coffee are twice as good as one pot of coffee. It's science! 

Flaming deer.

One of the curious things that happened while this blog was on hiatus was the bear invasion. A black bear was seen multiple times, and his explosive assaults on garbage cans were also seen multiple times. 

Have not seen him in a bit, but it's March. He may still be around in the neighborhood, sleeping it off. 

I avoided him by putting my garbage out after sunrise, but my neighbors did not always follow this strategy. 

Racoons will make a huge mess, tipping over the can and scattering food debris, but for a real trash-saster you need a bear. Because when they get to the bag they want, they drag the ripped bag hither and yon, spreading joy where'er they go. 

Which brings up the deer. 

At one point the bear grabbed a trash bag from across the street and dragged it along my nextdoor neighbor's yard. There's no fence, so bits got on my side, but the bulk stayed over yonder. However, I was out there with the dog that day and came face to face with a large deer. 

Normally deer might bound away, or freeze, hoping to be invisible. But not this deer. He was licking the wrapper of some product and was so intent that he didn't budge when we were within five feet. He was obsessed. I mentioned to him that he should remove himself, but he did not care. He was going to town on this wrapper and did not care who knew it. So we let him be. 

I was very surprised later when I found out what the food was that had him so entranced: 

Spicy hot hispanic snack food?

Sabritias, which makes Turbos, is a Mexican snack company owned by Pepsi. I've never tried any of their products, but if this is sold in Mexico and claims to be hot, I believe them. And yet the deer just thought it was the bee's knees. The bee's flamas knees. 

Critters need salt too, which is why mineral licks are used, so I could see the attraction of the deer to the saltiness of the snack. But the hot pepper is what surprises me. It's taken me a while to get my Scoville tolerance up, and that's after a lifetime of exposure; this deer took to the Turbos like a duck to water. I expected to see cartoon smoke coming out his ears. 

Who knows. Deer are nutty. 

This ends today's episodes of Animals Are Weirder Than We Think. I'm sure we'll have some more fun and games if the bear shows up in spring, so stay tuned.  

Thrilling adventure!

(With apologies to the late great Mike Maltese.)
 

Memory full.

No matter how advanced computers get, we still find ways to fill them up with so much running crap that they wind up lagging and lollygagging. Then we have to get new computers that can run that crap properly, until we fill them up again. 

Unfortunately this is not an option with my brain, which resists all upgrades. 

During the stressful period in which I am slogging, I have found my dreams to be unreasonably detailed. Not clever or smart, but loaded with data. I might be traveling down a quiet road and find myself without warning in a rural neighborhood; the neighborhood is fully populated with people and their dogs, and I'm invited to have a look at someone's vast library (of course I can read none of the titles but the books are in all kinds of colors and conditions). Or I am trying to ride the subway along with enough people to make up the cast of Ghandi, and every grotty detail is visible but not the stations or where we're going. 

All this leaves me as tired when I wake up as when I went to sleep. I'm running new software on my old hardware, you see, and something has to slow down somewhere. 

Why do we go through all these mental gymnastics anyway, when all we want is rest? These days most scientists from which I've heard think that the purpose of dreaming has to do with learning and memory, a way of sorting out the data. It's possible, but my dreams seldom deal with anything in my life at present. I dream about commuting more that you'd think possible, and I haven't had to do that in years. Still, who really knows? 

Compounding the riddle of dreaming is that we smarty-pants humans are not the only ones who do it. We know for certain that dogs dream, always running with li'l paws or boofing out barks in their sleep. It's really cute. Less cute is that, according to a piece in the Smithsonian, lots of animals are dreaming: 

Young jumping spiders dangle by a thread through the night, in a box, in a lab. Every so often, their legs curl and their spinnerets twitch—and the retinas of their eyes, visible through their translucent exoskeletons, shift back and forth.

“What these spiders are doing seems to be resembling—very closely—REM sleep,” says Daniela Rößler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. 

I feel worse for knowing that spiders dream. ABOUT WHAT? 

The article does note that we still don't know dreaming is about, whether we're man, dog, bug, or eucalyptus plant. (NB: Nothing about dreaming vegetables in that article.) It's mysterious, and it wears me out.  

I'm with the late great Mitch Hedberg on this topic: 

Dreaming is work, you know - there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.

Right on, sleepy brother. 

The rock.

I've been watching some of the Winter Olympics this year. My wife had them on, and we like to see some of the amazing things people can do. I swear, freestyle ski jumps, skeleton sledding, speed skating, and so on -- if you'd never seen anything like it until you were an adult, you wouldn't believe the human body could perform such actions. 

Of course, cheating -- anyone above the age of three could believe that. 

 

It's tempting to pile on Canada because of the apparent dishonor their men's curling team has brought to the nation. Once thou hast let go of thy rock, thou cans't touch it no longer! The Eleventh Commandment, at least in the Olympics. 

One commenter said that in practical play, curling is like golf, in which honor is expected and demonstrated in friendly matches. I play neither sport, but I have always heard that golfers are notoriously untrustworthy. There's more to a lie in golf than the spot of the ball.

For some, the real scandal of curling is that it is an Olympic sport at all. To them, it is like having darts or bowling at the Olympics. 

I don't know. Archery has been a regular Olympic sport since 1972, and what is darts but fun-size archery? Bowling requires more effort than darts, but bowling does not allow sweepers as in curling -- and those sweepers are always out there working like the boss's boss just walked in. In any event, golf has been back in the Olympics since 2016 (after a 112-year absence), so you tell me what counts as a sport.

I still like the pancake test, heard a few years back on a Wall Street Journal podcast: If you can eat a stack of pancakes and go out and not have it affect your play, you are playing a game, not a sport. Golfers, curlers, bowlers, and so on may ask themselves that deep question. 

As for me, a stack of pancakes would make me want to nap, so it would even affect me playing Clue or some Pop-O-Matic game. I guess in the shape I'm in, everything is a sport. 

Cellar dweller.

It's been very cold for several weeks now -- really, since winter began. Usually we get a few warm spells in the winter here in the Hudson Valley. We'll have a couple of wind-blasted days of misery, ice and snow, the usual, but then a few days in the forties to kind of reset, melt some of the snirt, and wash off some salt with a little rain, before it's back to the cooler. Not this winter. One below-freezing day after another. Regularly colder here than in Anchorage. 

So my basement, which I never finished nor cared to, remains chilly. 

Unfortunately I have a lot to do down there. 

Artist's depiction of my cellar

As the Great Lileks is doing, we are aiming to get the house ready to show. This has meant a number of steps, all challenging, like:

• Paint the porch -- a frantic job done in late October before winter hit
• Spray wash the siding -- reluctantly accepted this recommendation, but it made the house look like new
• Dumpster rental -- frantic tossing of decades of old stuff
• Large item removal -- old fridge in cellar, book shelves
• New carpeting -- another great idea, painfully expensive, and made for one exceptionally stressful day for us and the dog
• Professional deep clean -- this also was nice, but I'm not used to strangers cleaning up after me
• Prepare for real estate photographer -- frantic removal of all personal effects and making rooms look like hotel rooms

And now:

YOU ARE HERE →🞋←

And here means getting ready for showtime. 

The problem is that all those other steps resulted in box after box of things going into the cellar, with no time to arrange them. That was okay to this point, as the photographer wasn't going to bother with pictures of the basement or garage. But NOW, we have to make the clutter neat. And this is where I am today. 

It's all for the good, but man, I am tired, and I am cold down in the cellar. I hear it's warmer down south, and they don't bother putting cellars in houses. I think that's where we'll go. Any suggestions?