A compendium of stuff that defies conventional logic…

• Toby Keith is a friggin’ Democrat. I guess I owe him an apology.
• I love Ice Road Truckers. There’s something compelling about hauling a stupid amount of equipment over winter ice just south of the Arctic Circle. I’ve only watched a few episodes but I already know Hugh is a dick. He’s like the landlord who always blames you for the plumbing problems. And I have to say that the diamond industry has to be the most wasteful enterprise in our global economy.
• Hoarding: “…A natural and adaptive instinct gone amok.” Ever since I cleaned apartments for a living (some 10 years ago), I’ve been fascinated by the pathology of hoarding. At the time, one of my clients had such a serious hoarding problem that it was impossible to clean her apartment. I could dust the tins and boxes and piles of newspapers and vacuum small patches of carpeting, but I was forbidden to move anything. I finally quit when I could no longer get into one of her rooms because it was so filled with merchandise—purses, dolls, more tins, books, games. She worked at a department store. Recently, I stumbled across this 2004 article that postulates that hoarding is instinctive, natural, part of our evolutionary DNA—only gone horribly wrong. The theory is that our brain naturally wants to hoard stuff to make ourselves attractive to potential mates. Another study found that “thirteen patients had never shown a tendency to hoard until they suffered lesions in the mesial frontal region—which encompasses the anterior cingulate gyrus—at which point they fell victim to what the scientists described as a ‘massive and disruptive accumulation of useless objects.'” Which leads me to understand, possibly, what is wrong with my brother, who has been high-functioning but mentally retarded for most of his life. He is a hoarder too—collecting newspapers, junk mail (he loves junk mail), TV Guides, travel brochures.

OK. This was a really short compendium. More later…

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