My friend Carl Young has been having a lot of fun with his camera lately. He has over 200 varieties of Dahlias and about half are in bloom right now. The rest are late bloomers for a variety of reasons. One has been the erratic weather. Photos by Young.
The proposed revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have spurred debate over what illnesses to include in the essential psychiatric handbook. Everything from gender identity disorder to childhood mood swings has come under fire, and it's not the first time. The history of psychiatry is littered with impassioned fights over controversial diagnoses.
#10. Hysteria -
In the Victorian era, hysteria was a catch-all diagnosis for women in distress. The symptoms were vague (discontentment, weakness, outbursts of emotion, nerves) and the history sexist (Plato blamed the wanderings of an "unfruitful" uterus).
The treatment for hysteria? "Hysterical paroxysm," also known as orgasm. Physicians would massage their patients' genitals either manually or with a vibrator, a task they found tedious but surprisingly uncontroversial. More contentious was the practice of putting "hysterical" women on bed rest or demanding that they not work or socialize, a treatment that often worsened anxiety or depression.
According to a 2002 editorial in the journal Spinal Cord, the diagnosis of hysteria gradually petered out throughout the 20th century. By 1980, hysteria disappeared from the DSM in favor of newer diagnoses like conversion and dissociative disorders.
GO HERE TO READ THE OTHER NINE
By Dave Stancliff
Posted: 08/22/2010 01:26:50 AM PDT
Summer, 1985 -- People were frying eggs on the sidewalk outside the newspaper office. It was a blatant attempt to get me to photograph them.
As the editor of The Desert Trail, a weekly newspaper in Twentynine Palms, Calif., I'd seen my share of filler photos showing how hot it was.
Frying eggs on sidewalks was a passé photographic experience. I wasn't eager to go outside in that 115-degree furnace, either, but I knew it was going to be a big newspaper that week (we had lots of advertising) and I needed extra stories and photos to fill the additional editorial pages that would be available.
About the time I gathered my camera, notebook, keys, and briefcase, a man walked into the office. He was tall, string-bean thin, had long wild looking hair popping out of his skull at all angles and a deep tan laced with road-weary wrinkles.
As he talked with Nell, the secretary at the front desk, I studied him. He showed her a tiny rocking chair and was explaining how he made it out of tin cans when inspiration struck, and I saw an interesting feature story. I enjoyed interviewing people. I'd met a lot of local desert rats who could entertain you for hours with their stories.
I let him finish his spiel to Nell and spoke up. “Excuse me. Would you like to go to lunch and tell me a little more about yourself? I'd like to do a story on you.”
He looked startled for a moment, and then smiled and said, “Sure. My name is John.”
We went to a local Mexican eatery and over lunch he told me his life story. He started by telling me a few childhood experiences. I figured he was about my age, mid-to-late thirties. I asked him if he ever lived in a house after leaving home?
He considered my question between bites of taco. “A few times, for short periods ...” I wondered how he had made a living during his adult years and finally asked, “Those things you make from tin cans are really nice, but surely this hasn't been your only means of supporting yourself?”
He grinned happily and said, “No. I've made lots of things for money and worked in all kinds of jobs.”
When he didn't elaborate I prodded, “Such as?”
He pushed his empty plate aside, took a drink of his sun ice tea, and rattled off his resume: “I mowed estate lawns in Hollywood and weeded them too. I worked as a pump jockey in gas stations from New Mexico to Vermont. I dug holes and hauled rocks in some rural towns in Tennessee with names I couldn't pronounce. I gave blood at blood banks in Florida. I worked as a store greeter, and once as Santa Claus in Ohio. I washed idling car windows in the streets of New York and cut wood in Washington for nearly three years.”
I watched his face light up with memories and it struck me he was a happy man, despite his poor circumstances. He had a knapsack of World War II vintage to hold the sum total of his wealth.
As we walked outside into the blinding light, he mentioned that he would really like to see his sister in Arizona.
I mulled that over and said, “If you can wait until Thursday, when the newspaper comes out, I'll ask readers if anyone is interested in giving you a ride. It couldn't hurt. There's some churches in town that would probably put you up until then.”
He considered my request and replied, “I'll try my thumb, thank you, but if that fails, I'll come by your office on Friday.”
When the newspaper came out, a local resident called and offered to give John a ride. I looked at his photo on the front page, holding that little rocking chair, and wondered if John was already gone? About 10 a.m. Friday, to my surprise, he showed up at the office.
I hooked him up with the kind reader/caller and felt kinda good about the results. Life however, is more complicated than that. The good Samaritan who took John to Arizona showed up the following Monday to tell me John didn't have a sister in Arizona.
As It Stands, I learned a lesson from less-than-honest John, but I don't regret having met him and having the opportunity to listen to his stories.
Photo source
Really? It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of European/British pilots being put on alert over one escaped Ruppell’s Vulture.
Maybe it’s just me. I don’t listen to the BBC enough. Seems strange though don’t you think?
Pilots on alert for high-flying vulture
Britain's air traffic controllers put pilots on alert this week after a vulture which can soar as high as 30,000 feet escaped from her handlers during a display.
Gandalf, a seven-year-old Ruppell's Vulture with a three-meter wingspan, has not been seen since she caught a warm thermal during a show at the World of Wings center in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, on Tuesday.
Just look at Paladini’s idea. The first step in rounding up the people and containing them. Can you say Fascism out loud? Real Loud? Now someone please tell him to take that flag down (behind him) – retire it in respect to it’s place in history – and to hold up his real flag (hint – it has a Swastika on it).
NY candidate: Prison dorms for welfare recipients
Excerpt:
“Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."
Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many tea party activists, isn't saying the state should jail poor people: The program would be voluntary.”
Police recovered a painting (“Poppy Flowers”) by Vincent van Gogh at Cairo airport Saturday, hours after it was stolen from a museum in the Egyptian capital, the country's culture minister said.
Farouk Hosni said security officers at the airport confiscated the painting from an Italian couple as they were trying to leave the country. The work of art, which Hosni said was valued at $50 million, was stolen earlier Saturday from Cairo's Mahmoud Khalil Museum.
No further details were immediately available on how the artwork by the Dutch-born postimpressionist was stolen or recovered.
Image source - “Poppy Flowers”
It’s common knowledge that many birds migrate – some halfway around the world, others not very far at all – but a few species of duck travel amazing distances as part of their regular travels, and at phenomenal speeds. The black brant is one such record holder, making the trip from the cold climes of Alaska to the much-warmer lands of Baja, California. No need to do the math: that’s more than 3,000 miles. A distance, by the way, covered in less than 72 hours.
The ill-respected duck is also a record holder for not just distance and time but also altitude. Although they commonly aren’t high flyers, preferring to stay relatively close to the ground, ducks have been recorded soaring to close nearly 20,000 feet (that's more than 6 kilometers).
That most definitely is a ‘wow’ thing but what’s an even bigger – more like a real big WOW – is that a duck skeleton was found at 16,000 feet … in the form of a skeleton on Mount Everest. (this scientific paper discusses how ducks can actually breath and keep their body warmth at these altitudes)
For altitude, ducks are amazing, no denying that, but if you want to get really, really high you have to look at the extremely ugly Rüppell's Vulture. That might not be fair to the bird, but ugly or not this vulture wears a handsome medal for going where no bird, or even a lot of airplanes, have gone. Ducks, sure, deserve applause for 20,000 feet but the Rüppell's Vulture goes more than just one better, attaining a remarkable 38,000 feet (almost 12 kilometers). Alas, the record was set when the poor bird got sucked into a jet engine at that height but you still have to admit that it was quite an accomplishment.
Go here to read about more fantastic animals.
A maternal ancestor to all living humans called mitochondrial Eve likely lived about 200,000 years ago, at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans are believed to have emerged, a new review study confirms.
The results are based on analyses of mitochondrial DNA. Found in the energy-producing centers of cells, mitochondrial DNA is only passed down the maternal line, and can be traced back to one woman.
Back in 1985, I was the editor of The Desert Trail newspaper (See banner above). One day, while looking for a feature story, I had the good luck to have the story come to me in the form of a traveling man who stopped by the office.
He came out of the searing sun and into the newspaper’s air-conditioned office to sell trinkets made from aluminum cans. As I watched him talk with Nell, our secretary, I saw news potential in that sunburned scarecrow of a man.
See “As It Stands’ in this Sunday’s Times-Standard.
Image source
One Way to Get Popular with Ladies: Set out to Walk Around The World in an Iron Mask
“Harry was, to put it mildly, a bit of a rogue, a rascal, a rake, a rapscallion. Born around 1877, Harry soon proved to as wily with his businesses and investments as he'd was with the ladies, the bottle, and the cards – creating for himself a self-indulgently lavish and totally outlandish lifestyle.
But, alas – or so some stories go – Harry's luck deserted him one day and he lost it all on a foolish wager. Facing absolute ruin, Harry had few options – until, that is, the intervention of John Pierpont Morgan and Hugh Cecil Lowther (the 5th Earl of Lonsdale).
What Morgan and Lowther did was offer poor Harry an opportunity to regain his fortune. All Harry had to do was accept another, very possibly, foolish wager.
Harry, you see, had to take a stroll. But not a few dozen, or even hundred, miles... not just across England, or even down and through Europe, or into the Middle East and then China. No, ladies and gentlemen, Harry had to walk all the way around the entire Earth.
I can still hear that 1965 United Airlines slogan, " Fly the friendly skies" with a touch of nostalgia. Since then , it's bee...
