Forgetting It All

I keep hearing ads for these brain training programs that are designed to 'increase mental acuity by calculating baseline scores' as they put it, but in my world a baseline score is what your doctor uses to measure the relative swiftness of your decline.And yet, and yet:  If I don't do these mental calisthenics, will I start losing it? Forget how to flush, or make change? Inadvertently turn into the funniest person standing in line... at the wake? I look at what's out there and then I look at my life. I don't do Lumosity. Or Sudoku. Or Words With Friends, which is basically just Scrabble over the Internet.  But the way I look at it, people old enough to worry about getting sharper are already less sharp. Just look up the statistics on how fast your synapses are firing now compared to how they fired when you were 12. You're slower than you were and that’s a fact, so now you want to start measuring how much slower? You might as well make little marks on your kitchen wall the way people do with their growing children - only you’d be doing it so you could watch yourself shrink.But back to mental acuity: When I was young, I could memorize anything, historical dates from the 1500s, the license plate numbers on my friends’ parents’ cars, the poems our teachers used to make us stand beside our desks to stammer out. Now all I have stored here in this head is a single credit card number, and even then I have to get a running start with, the way you do with the 23rd Psalm, say.As for poetry, every time I try to recite those bits of verse from my schooldays sonnets, they all mysteriously become, three lines, in, “Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know," but seriously: What are you gonna do?  Mark Twain famously wrote that when he was younger, he could remember anything, whether it happened or not.’ But as his faculties began decaying, as he put its, he got so he could only remember the latter. He could only remember what didn’t happen in other words.  If I get like this, I won’t be any kind of authority on the facts but hey, stick around anyway: It’s a good bet my stories will become a lot more entertaining. And now, this great clip from Men in Black, where the memory-erasing Neuralyzer is put to use... which leads me wonder: Have Agents J and K been around HERE lately?[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqlFiTOi6QQ[/embed]

Oscars Post-Mortems

We didn't have a red carpet in this house last night but we did have fun, celebrating three family birthdays. My son, who I wrote about yesterday was here too, and this morning in the archives I found this picture of him, taken just six months after March of 1998 when we took that three-movies-in-24-hours Pre-Oscars-Night road trip.The fact that he's sleeping in the picture shows what time of life he was in. Adolescents need sleep, all right. They say school shouldn't even start until 9am for kids older than 12; they're just not awake until then. In fact come to think of it, one of the three people celebrating a birthday here last night just turned 9 and he showed up in his pjs. ("Pick your battles," his parents probably decided.)The fun went on well past when the Oscars actually began, but about 45 minutes in I got a Facebook message from Old Dave's dashing-looking older brother Toby. "Compared to Tommy Lee Jones, David looks like a viable Oscar Host," he wrote. Typical big brother remark huh? Even David, you might think he was implying. Even my dismissible kid brother, though David was never dismissible and of course Toby knows that.Tommy Lee's face is collapsing into some amazing swags and wrinkles now but what a face it is! It's a beautiful ruin and God bless him for never getting 'work' done on it. Look how cute he was when he was a high school senior in Texas. This is the picture that appears in the Freshman 'Face Book' the year he entered Harvard.I know because he and David were classmates there at Harvard and played freshman football together. I'm looking at that old book as I write this.'Course my man was pretty cute too, as you can see in this photo I took when he was an usher in a wedding but maybe it's the tuxedo that carries the day in these cases.....Hmmmm, food for thought. Anyway, ya gotta love Oscar Night, eh? The morning after and I can hardly wait for NEXT year.:-)