The singer Susan Boyle, 52, always a little strange, has been diagnosed with Asperger’s.

"Now I have a clearer understanding of what’s wrong and I feel relieved and a bit more relaxed about myself," she says. "I have always known that I have had an unfair label put upon me."

"I would say I have relationship difficulties, communicative difficulties, which lead to a lot of frustration. If people were a bit more patient, that would help... Asperger’s doesn’t define me. It’s a condition that I have to live with and work through, but I feel more relaxed about myself. People will have a much greater understanding of who I am and why I do the things I do."...

Boyle hasn’t had a boyfriend since her 20s, but hasn’t given up on one day meeting someone. "There’s plenty of time,” she said. Asked what kind of person she’d like to meet, she said:  "I’d look for someone young. Someone creative. Someone who would make me laugh. Someone I’d get along well with, who’d take my music further, perhaps. Someone gentle. Someone accepting."

CORRECTION: Oh! It's Asperger's, not Alzheimer's. And here I thought she was dying. Asperger's... I thought that was abolished.

"I understand the man who shot him is real upset, and I think he should be... He shot an innocent man."

"He should have stayed in the house like a normal person would."

Wandering 72-year-old man with Alzheimer’s gets shot to death. At the top of the NYT article the scene is described almost poetically:

No one is sure how, in the frigid hours before dawn last Wednesday in this small north Georgia community near the Tennessee border, Mr. Westbrook ended up nearly three miles from home with a handful of other people’s mail, jiggling Joe Hendrix’s doorknob.

Mr. Hendrix, 34, stepped onto his porch with a Glock pistol in his hand and his fiancée inside on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. He fired four shots. One hit Mr. Westbrook in the chest.

On a cold and damp day Tuesday, Mrs. Westbrook buried her husband of 51 years...

Further down, there are more details about how it looked from Hendrix's point of view. It was "Just before 4 a.m." and:

At least twice, Mr. Westbrook climbed onto the small porch, tried to open the door and rang the doorbell....

“When you listen to the 911 calls, it’s evident to me that there was fear displayed at least by the female who lived there,” [the sheriff] said.

Note the plural: "calls."

As Mr. Westbrook came around a corner of the house, Mr. Hendrix took his gun and repeatedly called for him to identify himself, he told the police. Then he fired the shots. Mr. Hendrix told investigators that Mr. Westbrook continued to approach him, so he fired the shot into his chest.

So it wasn't just a man jiggling the doorknob at a strange hour and then waiting for an answer only to be met by a man who steps right out and fires 4 shots. There was activity around the house and beyond the porch area, in the middle of the night. The couple inside were scared and enough time passed to make more than one call to the police. Hendrix went outside to investigate, tried to interact with the intruder, and only shot when the man kept approaching.

“When we sat down and told him the age of the victim and the diagnosis, he broke down and became emotional,” Sheriff Wilson said.

Most of the article is about whether to prosecute Hendrix (and the usual material about Stand Your Ground law). Commenters over there are quick to blame guns, but I think homeowners have a right to defend themselves against someone trying to break into their house at night. Hendrix tried to talk to the man and couldn't see that he was old and didn't know that his mind had deteriorated.

Mrs. Westbrook says she's not sure whether Hendrix should be charged. The article begins with the line "Deanne Westbrook had tried everything to keep her husband, Ronald, in the house." No one wants to say anything unkind to a woman who lost her husband and who tried to treat him well, but if we're going to ask whether Hendrix was reasonable, shouldn't we also ask if Mrs. Westbrook was reasonable?

What more could she have done? Didn't she know that her husband went out and behaved in a way that would scare people at night and that he would not be able to explain himself when people asked him what he was doing or to stop when he was told he'd better stop? He needed supervision and constraint.

"He should have stayed in the house like a normal person would." That was the wife's quote. I see ambiguity in it now.

By the way, you don't need to look far in the NYT archive to find articles about people with Alzheimer's where the suggestion is that others ought to show them the exit from this life. They're all jiggling at the doorknob.

Teaching kids to be neuroscientists... or psychokillers... you decide.

At Metafilter:

After a TED Talk demonstration and a successful Kickstarter, Backyard Brains plans to release a kit instructing kids to strap a miniature backpack to cockroaches and insert electrodes into its brain, allowing the cockroach to be controlled by a smartphone app. Some scientists are less than pleased with the ethics of the project.

At the "less than pleased" link, BBC quotes a Backyard Brains spokeswoman, who says they're trying to get kids interested in the "woefully under-taught" subject of neuroscience, which is "crucially important... especially... when diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer's take a heavier toll within society."

That "heavier toll" presumably refers to the aging Baby Boomers, who are going to be hard to handle as our brains fail, and wouldn't it be nice if insect-trained youngsters one day implant devices into our brain that can be used to keep us moving about — going to the bathroom, bathing, dressing, getting in and out of chairs and beds — on the force of whatever is left of our own atrophying muscles instead of needing to do the physical work themselves?

Everyone will be a winner, as we feel independent despite senility, and the younger folks can avoid having to touch us and listen to our nonsense. They can be in another room, feeling like they're playing a video game. And so what if they prank us? We'll imagine that we are sprightly, enlivened by impish silliness. Oh, I don't know what just got into me!

And of course, there's the old philosophical problem: How do you know that isn't already what life is, with some devil moving you this way and that, putting ideas into your head?

"And I never touched a living body cold as the Rube there in Philly... I decided to lop him off if it meant a smother party."

"(This is a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents. A family so afflicted throws a 'smother party' where the guests pile mattresses on the old liability, climb up on top of the mattresses and lush themselves out.) The Rube is a drag on the industry and should be 'led out' into the skid rows of the world. (This is an African practice. Official known as the 'Leader Out' has the function of taking old characters out into the jungle and leaving them there.)"

Something William S. Burroughs wrote in "Naked Lunch," which I was reading this morning in my iPhone after running across this in today's NYT:

In 1965, Mr. de Grazia went to Boston to appeal a court ban of William S. Burroughs’s sexually explicit novel “The Naked Lunch.” He summoned literary lions like Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg to testify about the book’s artistic worth and won his argument, that genius should never be curbed because of differences over taste or morality.

The book, published in 1959, was the last work of fiction to be censored by the Postal Service, the Customs Service and state governments.

Edward de Grazia — who also fought in the Supreme Court for our right to read Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and to see "I Am Curious (Yellow)" — has died at the age of 86.

Here's his book: "Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius."
It's only by chance that my random entry into my "Naked Lunch" ebook took me to something about death. I'm certainly not saying that de Grazia was like Rube, but I was intrigued by the "Naked Lunch" take on death panels, and it's only a random fact that de Grazia died of Alzheimer's disease.

***

Climb up on top of the mattresses and lush themselves out... What are you picturing there? Drinking? Sex? Relaxing and luxuriating? The (unlinkable) OED defines "lush" (the intransitive verb) to mean "To drink, indulge in drink."

1811   Lexicon Balatronicum,   Lush, to drink.
1825   C. M. Westmacott Eng. Spy II. 252   Smoke, take snuff, lush.
1835   P. Hawker Diary (1893) II. 90   The captain and his mate having..‘lushed it’ ashore all night.
1851   H. Mayhew London Labour I. 179/2,   I was out of work two or three weeks, and I certainly lushed too much.

There's no entry for "lush out," but there is "lush up." It means "To get drunk." I search my "Naked Lunch" ebook for other uses of "lush," which always everywhere else meant "drunk," so those smother partiers must have been drinking. The search tool also finds the word when it's inside another word, and I'm charmed by the false positives:

"So they drive to this plush jump joint, and the father say, 'All right, son. You're on your own. So ring the bell and when the woman come give her the twenty dollars and tell her you want a piece of ass.'"...

There was the time me and the anesthetist drank up all the ether and the patient came up on us, and I was accused of cutting the cocaine with Saniflush.... "Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this Rx on the double!"

Hey, this is what I was going to do...

... if I got Alzheimer's.

New symptom of Alzheimer's disease that also may speed its progress.

Restless sleeping.

"It is remarkable that it is so common for cells from one individual to integrate into the tissues of another distinct person."

"We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as singular autonomous individuals, and these foreign cells seem to belie that notion, and suggest that most people carry remnants of other individuals. As remarkable as this may be, stunning results from a new study show that cells from other individuals are also found in the brain. In this study, male cells were found in the brains of women and had been living there, in some cases, for several decades. What impact they may have had is now only a guess, but this study revealed that these cells were less common in the brains of women who had Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting they may be related to the health of the brain."

The coming scourge of Baby Boomers with Alzheimer's disease.

Get ready. We're being softened up. Pay attention... while you still can.