Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom. Snowdrops arrive in Massachusetts. I haven’t posted photos for a while, and now I’m realizing that today’s selection goes way back to early January, when Erik’s mother was still visiting from Sweden. She showed me a garden-like cemetery in Providence where she loves to run — and where we were […]
Photos from Winter
This post is from Jamie. I’m not sure how we “met”, but we’re been exchanging comments and tweets for a while now. I feel like we’re on pretty much the same wavelength and his blog is an excellent source of giggles, book reviews and lovely poems. Plus he has an actual, real book! The Fathers, […]
Lessons in Loss 15: Losing Touch
Some days expand your heart, mind and horizons; yesterday was that kind of day. And I want to share what I found out with you, so that your heart, mind and horizons can also grow larger.
I was privileged to be invited to a roundtable meeting by the Dementia Pioneers. This is a group of people living with dementia, who are researchers. They played a central role in a project that ran for the last five years and is just coming to an end, the Dementia Enquirers. The project developed a new approach to research that was led and controlled by people with dementia themselves.
If you work in research, particularly health or care research, you have probably heard of ‘PPI’ – public and patient involvement. PPI is increasingly a core requirement of health research funding bodies, and what it entails can vary enormously –…
View original post 1,990 more words
“I think we – I mean people, humans – always think things can’t get any weirder. In 2019 I started working on DoxBox Trustbot, my show about the unhealthy, asymmetrical strangeness of the deals we do with technology companies. DoxBox is an animated artificial intelligence who lives in a pink and gold box and loves J-Pop. It will ask you questions about your phone and the apps you use, then give you advice about how you could be safer and happier….”
Read on to find out more…
Camden People’s Theatre: https://cptheatre.co.uk/artist_blogs/putting-the-go-in-algorithmic-oppression
Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom. The beautiful pedestrian bridge over the Providence River in Rhode Island. This is a city that values free public space. On Twitter and Mastodon, I follow a guy (@FortPointer) who is a voice in the wilderness for free public amenities in Boston. He himself may be able to afford the […]
Hooray for Footbridges!
In a way, I would like to apologize for this post – with so much of great importance going on in the world, why take time for this? No defense except, well, people are watching it, I was interested, and it’s a much more manageable topic than actually important things. So there. And I’m interested […]
The Queen’s Gambit
Most of the best dialogue is taken directly from the book, and is very smart. There’s a lot of intelligent dialogue in this series, sometimes with an amusing arch formality that’s very true to the period. I laughed out loud when Beth accuses her adoptive mother, “You’ve been reading Alan Watts again.”
“What to do with old books is a quandary that collectors, no matter what age, eventually face — or leave to their heirs who, truly, do not want the bulk of them. Old volumes are a problem for older Americans downsizing or facing mortality, with their reading life coming to a close.”
By Karen Heller, The Washington Post, December 19, 2022
On a recent weekday afternoon, Bruce Albright arrives in the Wonder Book parking lot,pops the trunk of his Camry and unloads two boxes of well-worn books. “It’s sad. Some of these I’ve read numerous times,” he says.
Albright, 70, has been at this for six months, shedding 750 books at his local library and at this Frederick, Md., store. The rub: More than 1,700 volumes remain shelved in the retired government lawyer’s nearby home, his collection lovingly amassed over a half-century.
But Albright is on a mission. “I cleaned out my parents’ home,” he says. “I don’t want to do to my kids what my parents did to me.”
He’s far from alone. Books…
View original post 1,782 more words
“Marc looked at everything through the eyes of the disabled body, and he believed if he solved the issues for a disabled person, he would have solved the issues for everyone”
Half a century ago, Marc Harrison built a prototype for a home that would accommodate people of all ages and abilities. Now his daughter has restored it.
By Penelope Green, January 29, 2023, The New York Times
In the early 1970s, when the house was built, it must have seemed like something from another planet. With its rounded, porthole-style windows and doors and its bubble skylights, it would have looked less like a home than a spaceship that had landed in the woods of northwestern Rhode Island, in a small town called Foster.
And in some ways, the structure was equally futuristic. A collaboration between Marc Harrison, an industrial designer, and his students at the Rhode Island School of Design, it was a showcase for what is now known as universal design — a place where people of all ages and abilities could be…
View original post 2,029 more words
Photo: Dan Cook/Unsplash. Ha ha ha ha ha. Back in the 1990s, I had a stint as the editor of a publication called Minnesota Physician, where I interviewed a local physician who referred to himself as “the laugh doctor.” He convinced me that even forcing yourself to laugh can create endorphins in your body that […]
Rx: Laughter
“Laughter’s positive psychological and physiological responses include lessening depression and anxiety symptoms, increasing feelings of relaxation, improving cardiovascular health, releasing endorphins that boost mood and even increasing tolerance for pain.”
Humans are a social species and the deficit in social relationships may increase the risks of morbidity and mortality – either objective or perceived. This clearly shows the importance of social connections to our health and well-being. It’s not surprising that isolation and loneliness have been linked to high blood pressure, or increased risks of […]
Sleep & Loneliness
Cpeanose 