https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html

PEOPLE WITH A nervous temperament don’t usually get off so easily, Kagan and his colleagues have found. There exists a kind of sub-rosa anxiety, a secret stash of worries that continue to plague a subset of high-reactive people no matter how well they function outwardly. They cannot quite outrun their own natures: consciously or unconsciously, they remain the same uneasy people they were when they were little.

Most of the high-reactive kids in Kagan’s study did well in adolescence, getting good grades, going to parties, making friends. Scratch the surface, though, and many of them — probably most of them — were buckets of nerves. “It’s only the high-reactives who say, ‘I’m tense in school,’ ‘I vomit before examinations,’ ‘If we’re going on a class trip to D.C., I can’t sleep the night before,’ ” Kagan told me. “They don’t like it, but they’ve accepted the fact that they’re just tense people.” Invoking Jungian terminology, he called it the difference between persona (the outer-directed personality) and anima (the inner-directed thoughts and feelings). The persona can be controlled, but the anima often cannot.

Nathan Fox of the University of Maryland says that when the anima erupts in high-risk children, it often takes the form of excessive vigilance and misdirected attention. In the first of his two longitudinal studies of temperament, begun in 1989, he followed 180 children from the age of 4 months and gave them a set of neuropsychological tests when they were between 13 and 15. One test, called the spatial-cuing task, measures vigilance and the ability to disengage attention from a perceived threat. It shows two faces briefly on a computer screen, one on each side — the same face looking threatening on one side and pleasant on the other. The faces fade away, and an arrow appears on one side of the screen, sometimes on the side the threatening face had been on,

https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/make-the-mouse-pointer-easier-to-see-in-chrome-os

Choose your email address with as few dots as possible. We will always need.com or .co.uk etc

On Gmail it doesn’t matter whether you put the dots in or not because they ignore them but some people don’t

ghwood@gmail.com

Easier to type in than g.h.wood@gmail.com

Each of these will be treated the same by Google but I have learn that WordPress will treat them as two different people so you could have 2 distinct blogs

Make your email address short and simple

Before you begin to use any new device have a good look at the keyboard. They have subtle differences in where they put the comma and the full stop. It’s less frustrating to find out before you start than caught by surprise. Samsung keyboards different from other Android devices. ⁰

me@live.com

alfred@lost.com

If you’re vision is very good and it won’t matter.

Touch screen laptops are easier for people with poor vision people with diabetic related eye problems and so on ll

I have found that HP will often have a reduced one in 0 their sale.

You can buy sticky labels with visible letters and numbers on? Sex,

But if you can afford it get a backlit keyboard.

There’s nothing like getting accustomed to a device start off with a few emails or looking at your blog until you feel you know where the main keys are..

Using the microphone to dictate your emails saves you looking on the keyboard to find the letters and numbers and although it may come out badly at the beginning once it gets used to your vocabulary it will improve but what it’s ok for using a friends who loves you but may be not for people different type you don’t know about your eyes and they may judge you harshly for any typing errors

On the other hand it may be very funny as my sister discovered when I wrote to her she said she had not laughed so much for ages.

I’ve been using devices for 12 years and I’m still learning. Further hints from my readers are most welcome.

Find my device app it’s very useful and I recommend that we should try it before we lose any device to reduce the adrenaline in our bodies as it is not a matter of life or death

https://www.mindbeacon.com/strongerminds/music-art-and-you-how-being-creative-can-improve-your-mental-health

https://relaxifyapp.com/how-to-stop-an-anxiety-attack/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw–2aBhD5ARIsALiRlwDiblijMVsaaIpHQBP4qHmLp6AAKxcuPGv8s4e1AUdkedq_wsTC-6waAhseEALw_wcB

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/nov/03/on-the-origins-of-art-exhibition-tasmania-why-did-humans-start-making-art-comment

Yet for me, the first true art is cave painting. Even if we concede that handaxes have sculptural qualities, the leap forward when homo sapiens started painting and drawing animals on the walls of caves in Spain and France during the ice age is astounding, and it is difficult to see how cave art could be sexual display. The sublime charcoal portraits of bisons that I recently saw in Niaux cave in the Pyrenees are located far underground in a vast natural vault: it is hard to picture a cave artist leading a girlfriend or boyfriend this deep underground by the light of a flickering torch in order to have sex in the cold and damp. “Come and see my etchings. They’re a mile underground.”

On the contrary. The deliberate mystery and estranging subterranean location of cave paintings suggests that the origins of art have much more to do with religion than sex.

The sexual display theory is advanced in the Mona exhibition by one of its four curators, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller. The other scientist-curators suggest similarly audacious explanations for the existence of art. Steven Pinker, author of books such as The Blank Slate, shares a hard-headed Darwinian perspective. He suggests that art evolved as a byproduct of other human skills and needs, including conspicuous consumption, and that aesthetic pleasure originates in our practical appreciation of “cues to understandable, safe, productive, nutritious or fertile things in the world”. Brian Boyd, like Miller, thinks art has grown out of the signalling systems that all animals use in mating and the avoidance of danger, while Mark Changizi suggests it reflects our capacity to mimic nature.

It’s fascinating stuff, but such theorising needs to be set against a firm history of how and when art actually did evolve. This story is becoming ever clearer. Some of its milestones can be seen, far from Tasmania, in the British Museum’s South Africa show. It is dangerous to confuse decorative instincts, or even the sense of beauty, which handaxes suggest evolved very early in the human story, with the higher, more complex activity that is art as we know it. The art in ice age caves such as those in Niaux has the same qualities as the art of Rembrandt, Da Vinci and Picasso, and is as hard to reduce to a simple biological urge or obvious evolutionary need. At its point of origin in dark caves deep in the Earth, art is enigmatic, poetic, profound and dreamlike. It is born sublime. You can’t explain it until you can also explain Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals.

Darwin had Raphael prints in his bedroom, but I doubt if he thought they were as susceptible to logic as the honeycombs in his beehives.

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ContinueRemind me in December

Topics

• Art and design
• Jonathan Jones on art

• Art
• Painting
• Heritage
• Evolution
• Biology
• Mona
• comment

https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-be-creative

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/nov/03/on-the-origins-of-art-exhibition-tasmania-why-did-humans-start-making-art-comment

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/nyregion/art-review-a-spectrum-of-watercolor-technique.html

Because Mr. Straight does not come from the traditional ranks of the watercolor world and paints canvases of geometric designs, expectations were considerably raised. However, the show has no major surprises. It reflects a broad range of techniques, but subject matter is rather traditional. Most of the works are very attractive outdoor scenes, like Gwen Kovach’s ”Grand Canal, Souchou, China,” with its exquisitely rendered reflections, or the well-saturated patches of color in ”Clearing” by Deborah Fowler Greenwood of Moorestown.

”Sunday Morning in Riverton,” by Rosemary Hutchins of Cinnaminson, who was one of the 10 winners of the juror’s award, captures bright sunlight as it shines on the wood-framed houses and the laundry blowing on the clothesline. The subject suggests a bygone era, and its classic application of transparent layers of color on white paper even brings to mind the late-19th-century American masters of the medium.

https://secondwindmovement.com/how-to-be-creative/

https://brightlightfineart.com/advice-for-starting-painting-later-in-life/

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-5-simple-watercolor-techniques-beginners

”Sunday Morning in Riverton,” by Rosemary Hutchins of Cinnaminson, who was one of the 10 winners of the juror’s award, captures bright sunlight as it

Mary was looking at the carpet in the hall.

Look at this carpet,she said to Emile

I can see your paw

marks all over it

Yes I trod in some red paint that someone has spilled on the pavement.

I think I will have to get you some shoes said Mary but you can take them off when you go in the back garden.

Do you mean we’ll have to go to the shops to buy me some shoes said Emile hopefully

I don’t know. If I went to a toy shop they might have some dolls wearing plastic shoes.

I don’t want plastic shoes the cat responded angrily.

My feet need to be able to breathe

So you would like leather shoes will you Emile?

The only alternative seem to be Wellington boots.

But do they make Wellington boots small enough for cats?

I don’t know the cat said wisely

Well if you would only learn to read you could look on the computer yourself.

It goes against my wilder nature to learn to read.

Well Mary said do you believe that I have no wilder nature ?

I believe you did at one time but I haven’t seen much evidence of it recently

That’s because Stan is dead, she shouted.

That would not bother a cat,

Well you may not have noticed but I am not a cat. And if you’re so pretty and wild, love me love me do

Don’t be so ridiculous. I am too small to make love to you.

You could run up and down my spine with Algipan on your feet

I’d rather wear perfume on my feet and run up your bosom.

Naughty cat, bestiality is not allowed in Britain.

Well don’t tell anybody about it. It’s not real bestiality just running up your body with perfume on my feet.

Well it’s something that no human being could do without seriously injuring me.

So you see there could be an advantage to marrying the cat

Yes my love I do love you very much Emile but I would really like a man as well as you and maybe you could find a lady cat that you could marry then we can all live in this house together then you and your wife could have some kittens

I’ll have to see who the man is before I agree to that. He might not like cats.

Is that case I should tell him you are a dog.

And so say all of us.

This is a photograph by Mike Flemming of the recent partial eclipse of the sun. It is very beautiful and just awe inspiring. I’ve never seen a photograph that was such a work of art. It reminds me of some of the paintings that Turner did which I believe we’re in Kent looking at the wonderful sea and sky views. It reminds me also of The Fighting Temeraire.

https://www.britainexpress.com/counties/glouces/castles/sudeley-church.htm

in fields of lushest buttercups we ‘d lie
We’d watch the clouds as gently they blew by.
Love was born we thought would never die.
But you are gone, and so I sadly sigh

That love itself remains without your form
Yet tears of loss enfold me like a storm.
I knew you’d never hurt or do me harm.
I felt your smile’s embrace, so wide, so warm.

How is the world,now emptied of your being?
No sound, no touch, no smell, no sight, no seeing.
How is the world when you have gone ahead
Yet I must linger in this empty bed?

Yet those who’ve loved are grateful for this gift
Our sorrow is that life itself’s t,oo swift

The leaves have not yet fallen from this tree

It makes my room so dark I cannot see.

Winter clocks will change and lengthen nights.

The sun will scarcely rise nor give much light.

The angle of the sun brings danger near

It blinds the eyes and fills us with great fear.

in Sudeley Castle chapel the stained glass

Concentrates the light and let’s it pass

The world is different every day and hour

it is the same for little winter flowers

Look a[ modern life we are too rushed

The artist in us all is daily crushed.

When we struggle fearing we are lost

The spirit we all share will pay the cost.

It doesn’t save that you have great wealth

As long as there are poor you have no health.

t

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/elin-cullhed/euphoria.htm

This is a novel based on the last 6 months of the life of Sylvia Plath the great poet.

I have only read a bit of it but it’s beautiful written although it is very sad.

Do people sometimes take risks which are too great?

Marrying someone you met 3 months ago in a country a long way from your own country then moving to a remote

village but who are we to judge?

Her death what a great loss to literature and also a personal lost to her friends and family

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/27/where-to-start-with-sylvia-plath?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/27/cost-of-living-crisis-stop-the-squeeze-calls-for-wealthiest-to-pay-proper-share-of-tax?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-the-stress-of-work-is-killing-you-and-what-to-do-about-it-wbxzdqbzl

That there’s an upside to pushing ourselves to the limit in our professional life is a fallacy, says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. “Pressure is good for you. Pressure is stimulating and motivating, but when it exceeds your ability to cope, we’re in the stress arena.”

He says that 20 years ago the leading cause of absence at work was backache — now it’s stress, anxiety and depression, according to the Health and Safety Executive’s report the year before the pandemic. “It was 57 per cent of all long-term sickness absence. During the pandemic it rose to 63 per cent, but it’s not just the pandemic — we have a problem.”

That problem, says Dr Mithu Storoni, a neuroscience researcher and the author of Stress Proof, the Scientific Solution to Protect Your Brain and Body — and Be More Resilient Every Day, is that the way we work creates “an environment almost curated to trigger stress, but most importantly to not recover once that acute stress happens”.

63 per cent of long-term sickness absences during the pandemic were the result of stress, anxiety and depression

GETTY IMAGES

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/bar-tailed-godwit-sets-world-record-with-13560km-continuous-flight-from-alaska-to-southern-australia?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

D

https://www.everlywell.com/blog/sleep-and-stress/how-to-reduce-stress-hormones/

https://poetryarchive.org/interviews/interview-wendy-cope/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/11/writers-rooms-justin-cartwright

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html

Harriet mcbryde Johnson I was born with muscular dystrophy but she lived much longer than was expected. This is about a conversation with the philosopher Peter Singer he believes that parents should have the right to euthanize a baby born with such conditions

I strongly recommend you to read this article which is beautifully written and very enlightening about what it is like to be disabled. And that a disabled person is just as likely to be happy as someone without disabilities. You have to admire someone who will take on Peter Singer although he is a very good person but he has his own particular reasons for believing that parents of disabled babies should be able to end the life of their child. In a society which allows abortion till quite a late date if it’s hard to know where to draw the line but birth is one place where you could draw it

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/24/all-black-mp-shortlists?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other