THIS AND THAT

A while back I commented on the fact that Noam Chomsky now has a beard and I wondered why he had grown it. A reader sent me the following information: some while back Noam got sick and for one month or so did not shave. He discovered that he liked the beard that grew, because when he was five years old, he played Moses in a preschool play and liked the way he looked with the false beard so he decided to let it grow. I love that story.

I continue to mend, slowly. One reader cautions me to be more careful.  Alas, I am very careful, but as they say about terrorist attacks, the terrorist only has to be successful once and the police have to be successful all the time.

It is actually interesting why Parkinson's makes one freeze and stumble. Apparently, or so I have been told (I could of course be wrong), the brain sends messages to the muscles and at the interface between the nerve and the muscle messages are transmitted with the aid of a substance called dopamine. People with Parkinson's have a lack of dopamine which makes the message short-circuit. It seems that when one is walking smoothly and steadily on a perfectly flat surface, the messages go through all right, but as soon as one gets to a doorway or to rug on the floor that looks different or when one enters a bathroom or kitchen and has to turn this way and that, the messages get screwed up.  The neurologists who treat Parkinson's cannot in fact do much of anything for the patients except to tell them little tricks for overcoming this failure of the interface between nerve and muscle.  For example, they suggest using a laser light to point where one wants to put one's foot as a way of helping the message to get through. I have discovered, on my own, that when I am walking with a roller and come to a doorway, if I pull the roller back and then step forward with it I move smoothly. Otherwise, I may freeze as my foot flutters and I am unable to move at all. If it were not for the fact that this is my life, I would find all this quite interesting.

Meanwhile, like everyone else in America, I obsess over each detail of the progress of the various cases in which Trump is enmeshed. I am eagerly awaiting Friday, when the judge in the January 4 case will respond to Trump's proposal that his trial be put off for 2 1/2 years.