The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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Proud of ya girl, yes I am!
You've got Aspie obliviousness workin' for ya!
(and a tough core).

A hard head works in my case!
(plus stupidity).

I've gots to turn in - I've been up since midnight, and my eyeballs are crossing. (Not that that makes a difference in my clouded thinking, but I don't want to spend another night asleep on the keyboard.)

I'm just glad to see you again! I'll see about visiting you tomorrow. Anyhoo, I suspect that you are about to be visited by 3 spirits. Heed well their words, Lauri! Heed well their words......

Horror Films.... sigh... I just went down to the mailbox and got the week's mail (ok, so I forget to go get it. Often.) Horror film of my own. I'm summoned for Federal Jury Duty. Not the local county stuff, no, this has to be FEDERAL. Ick. That's like racketeering and the Felix Bros and their ilk. Like OMG (as the kid says). The LAST thing on this planet I want is to be a juror on one of those trials - where they have to snag you away to a hotel for a month so nobody can get to you before the verdict is in!

I think the least painful trials are probably like Income Tax Evasion. Oh, Joy. That'll be fun listening to the testimony for! The last time they tried to tap me I got out of it because I actually was away at school in another state (which tells you how long ago it was) and "didn't get the notice." (It went to a friend's house who was notorious for just letting anything that came for me stack up until I saw them at Christmas break.)

Interesting excerpts I just read in an old article:

"If we could eliminate the genes for things like autism, I think it would be disastrous," says Wilhelmsen. "The healthiest state for a gene pool is maximum diversity of things that might be good."

One of the first people to intuit the significance of this was Asperger himself - weaving his continuum like a protective blanket over the young patients in his clinic as the Nazis shipped so-called mental defectives to the camps. "It seems that for success in science and art," he wrote, "a dash of autism is essential."

For all we know, the first tools on earth might have been developed by a loner sitting at the back of the cave, chipping at thousands of rocks to find the one that made the sharpest spear, while the neurotypicals chattered away in the firelight. Perhaps certain arcane systems of logic, mathematics, music, and stories - particularly remote and fantastic ones - have been passed down from phenotype to phenotype, in parallel with the DNA that helped shape minds which would know exactly what to do with these strange and elegant creations."


"Though no one has tried to convince the Valley's best and brightest to sign up for batteries of tests, the culture of the area has subtly evolved to meet the social needs of adults in high-functioning regions of the spectrum. In the geek warrens of engineering and R&D, social graces are beside the point. You can be as off-the-wall as you want to be, but if your code is bulletproof, no one's going to point out that you've been wearing the same shirt for two weeks. Autistic people have a hard time multitasking - particularly when one of the channels is face-to-face communication. Replacing the hubbub of the traditional office with a screen and an email address inserts a controllable interface between a programmer and the chaos of everyday life. Flattened workplace hierarchies are more comfortable for those who find it hard to read social cues. A WYSIWYG world, where respect and rewards are based strictly on merit, is an Asperger's dream.

Obviously, this kind of accommodation is not unique to the Valley. The halls of academe have long been a forgiving environment for absentminded professors. Temple Grandin - the inspiring and accomplished autistic woman profiled in Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars - calls NASA the largest sheltered workshop in the world.

A recurring theme in case histories of autism, going all the way back to Kanner's and Asperger's original monographs, is an attraction to highly organized systems and complex machines. There's even a perennial cast of hackers: early adopters with a subversive streak. In 1944, Asperger wrote of a boy "chemist [who] uses all his money for experiments which often horrify his family and even steals to fund them." Another boy proved a mathematical error in Isaac Newton's calculations while he was still a freshman in college. A third escaped neighborhood bullies by taking lessons from an old watchmaker. And a fourth, wrote Asperger, "came to be preoccupied with fantastic inventions, such as spaceships and the like." Here he added, "one observes how remote from reality autistic interests really are" - a comment he qualified years later, when spaceships were no longer remote or fantastic, by joking that the inventors of spaceships might themselves be autistic."

Re The Sandman: Just looking at that kid climbing all those stairs made my knees ache. Cripes, how many storeys high was that house, anyway

My latest creation. Still quite inedible, alas.