Made coffee and toasted a bagel and decided it was going to be a day of wearing my longjohns again. I do have new boots now so if I opt to go out and shovel the porch, I can do it with dry feet. Not much on my agenda outside of working on my book. I've edited it and am going back again to reread for typos or things I need to delete or switch around. Then, I'll start the picture insertions, study up on how to prepare the disk in pdf and send off to the printer, and start the marketing process. Going to write a blog on the Leader for my Town Kid column and will probably put an ad in the PTHS alumni newsletter. That's the readers who would probably be the most interested anyhow.
Found two interesting articles on the MSN website this morning. One about the Oscars (which I really enjoyed). That Jimmy Kimmel is so good. The article said (in part):
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway presented the award for
Best Picture, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bonnie and Clyde. Beatty
was confused by what he saw on the card, Kimmel explained, “so he let her read
the winner. In other words, Clyde threw Bonnie under the bus. Which, I have to
be honest, is one of the slickest moves I’ve ever seen.”Hours before Kimmel’s
late show broadcast, the accountants for the awards competition accepted
responsibility for having handed Beatty the wrong envelope, and apologized. And
what of his co-presenter, Faye Dunaway, who had actually read the name of the
wrong movie?“She made quite a getaway,” Kimmel joked. “She read the wrong name
and split. She got the hell out of
there.”
But this was not the only problem to plague this year’s
Academy Awards, Kimmel revealed. During rehearsal on Sunday, a huge part of the
set collapsed. “I was on stage – I stepped of stage – and about a minute later,
they both came crashing down. It scared
the crap out of everybody. A lot of people thought a bomb went off. My wife
shoved our daughter under a table to protect her. Somehow – even though we
had five cameras going – no one got this
on video.”“Someone could easily have been crushed. Not me – I have reflexes like Spider Man,”
Kimmel continued. “But, if there was a regular human on that stage, he would
have been dead. So the envelope thing
was a distant second in the disaster category,” Kimmel said putting things in
perspective. He “could have been the first person in history to both host and
appear in the In Memoriam montage in the same show.”
And, speaking of the In Memoriam montage, Kimmel
acknowledged there had been a snafu there too. “That woman there, who passed
away – Janet Patterson? That’s not Janet Patterson. That’s a picture of a
another producer named Jan Chapman, who is very much alive. They put a picture
of a live person in the In Memoriam.”“Technically, according to Academy Rules,
we now have to kill her,” he joked. Watch the full monologue above.
The other article had to do with dementia -- a subject that interests me more the longer I live:
Excessive sleeping on a regular basis may predict the
onset of dementia.
Both too little sleep and too much sleep are linked to
dementia. Missing out on deep non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep may allow
proteins linked to dementia to have easier access to the brain. Beta-amyloid, a
protein suspected of triggering Alzheimer's, aggregates in higher
concentrations in the brains of those who chronically suffer from poor sleep.
As beta-amyloid accumulates, the protein further inhibits the ability to sleep,
which feeds into a terrible cycle linked to dementia.
Researchers have also found education levels can affect
the likelihood of developing dementia. Studies on dementia have consistently
showed the more time spent in education, the lower the risk of developing the
neurodegenerative disease. It seems people with more education are better able
to compensate for the effects of dementia. Education in early life appears to
help people cope with a lot of changes in their brain before showing dementia
symptoms.
The findings revealed elderly people who consistently
slept more than nine hours a night had double the dementia risk over a decade
of follow-up. Excessive sleepers had smaller brain volumes and exhibited poor
executive function. Moreover, participants without high school degrees who
slept more than nine hours a night, had six times the risk of developing
dementia, compared to those who slept less than nine hours a night.
The World Health Organization notes 47.5 million people
have dementia and there are 7.7 million new cases every year. Alzheimer's
disease, the most common type of dementia, may contribute 60 to 70 percent of
cases.In addition to prolonged sleep, there are two other
surprising things linked to the onset of dementia that we should monitor
carefully.
Loneliness
Spending too much time by yourself may trigger the onset
of dementia. A 2013 study in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery &
Psychiatry found feelings of loneliness in older adults led to a 1.63 greater
risk of developing dementia during the three years of the study. Although it's
still unclear what drives this association, it seems like staying connected
with loved ones can aid brain health.
Air Pollution
Living near a highway or a highly populated urban area
can increase the likelihood of developing dementia for older women. A recent
study in Translational Psychiatry found fine particulate matter, which consists
of small particles that can be inhaled, triggers the odds of developing
dementia by 92 percent, compared to women who lived in cleaner-air climates.
Women who had the APOE4 gene, a genetic variant linked to risk for Alzheimer's
disease, and exposed to high levels of population, were more vulnerable to
dementia.
I like to catch some sports games now and then and I like some of the shows on History, Discovery, Animal Planet, and PBS but I think I can keep myself amused without them. There's always radio -- and those books I have been intending to read. There's always that!
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