Health Tips

[I]t is Cumberbatch’s mesmerising performance as a speed-talking brainiac, so lacking in human empathy he appears to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, that has been the key focus of all the attention. [...]

Post-Sherlock, he has metamorphosed into something bigger and odder – a pin-up. Odder, that is, because Cumberbatch, with his long face, blanched skin and very pale blue eyes, is not a conventional heart-throb. You can see why he was as much at ease playing the monster as his creator in the National’s recent adaptation of Frankenstein. And yet the swooning web interest in Cumberbatch is legion, from the “Cumberbitches” – a Twitter collective devoted to his daily appreciation – to endless blogs and forums. [...]

War Horse debuts on January 13, by which time Cumberbatch will be preparing for an even bigger role. He’s off to New Zealand to voice and “physicalise” the dragon in The Hobbit, in which Sherlock’s Martin Freeman stars as Bilbo Baggins, and Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf.

McKellen said Cumberbatch’s Smaug screen-test was amazing, I tell him. Cumberbatch splutters. “Has… has he seen it?” Actually, McKellen’s words were “electrifying – vocally and facially”. He looks ecstatic. “Wow! I’m very flattered.” He seems entirely sincere when he says this. He comes across, in general, as earnest – with a searching intelligence.

So how did Cumberbatch do the audition? “I went a little reptile on it,” he says, enigmatically. With filming approaching, he is now “starting to look at animations, and Komodo dragons at London Zoo. They have some amazing ones. Snakes, too. So I’ve been going there to see how the skeleton moves differently, what the head movements are like.” He says it’s all in the posture, and he crouches forward, swivelling his eyes snakily, to demonstrate.

Cumberbatch’s initial reference point for Smaug, interestingly, was his father, the actor Timothy Carlton. “The Hobbit was the first book I remember reading at bedtime, and he characterised the whole thing,” he explains. “It was the first imaginary landscape I had in my head, so it’s very close to me.”

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BrothersjuddBlog/~3/ey8mfYxJSNg/more_autistic_than_basil_rathb.html

In one of the more memorable scenes from Monty Python And The Holy Grail, King Arthur and the Black Knight attack each other with swords.  The fight apparently comes to a swift conclusion when Arthur lops off one of the Knight’s arms. “‘Tis but a scratch,” the Knight insists as blood spurts like a geyser. So Arthur lops off the other arm. “Come on, then!” the Knight taunts as he commences kicking. “Look, you stupid bastard,” Arthur protests, “you’ve got no arms left!” The Knight scoffs: “Yes I have! It’s just a flesh wound.”

So Arthur lops off both of the Knight’s legs. “All right,” the limbless torso concedes, “we’ll call it a draw.”

So it was on Friday afternoon as wounded Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann–her Iowa juggernaut losing limbs of its own, notably her political director and state chairman (a treacherous defector to Ron Paul)–parked her campaign bus beside a coffee house here and glad-handed voters like a champion.

from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BrothersjuddBlog/~3/wz1izIQPAGg/dead_candidacy_smiling.html

After working in the area for decades, our Chicago nursing home abuse lawyers know that the problems of Illinois nursing home neglect and abuse remain hidden from much of the public. Community members are aware that some mistreatment occurs at these facilities, but very few truly appreciate the true scope of the problem. Perhaps the single biggest reason why the problem remains hidden is that many of the victims simply never seek out any accountability and their suffering dies with them. Only a fraction of the abuse that actually occurs ever results in legal actions begin taken against the wrongdoers.

Researchers have long been trying to get a better understanding of the actual extent of the problem. Recently, one expert in the area released new information about the scope of at least one form of senior mistreatment: elder financial exploitation. If his numbers prove correct, financial abuse of the elderly is probably the single most common form of elder abuse and represents a national crisis that needs to receive much more attention that it currently does.

As explained in a story in yesterday South Coast Today, one of the nation’s leading geriatricians and social scientists explained that theft and fraud targeting the elderly is an epidemic. He made the claims in combination with the release of new findings which are being considered the first credible scientific report on the extent of this mistreatment. He summarized by declaring, “There are millions and millions of people who are affected, and it is enormous in its scope…If it were a disease, we would probably say it is an epidemic.”

According to his findings, at a bare minimum at least 4.2% of the entire national senior population has been taken advantage of financially. That amounts to over 2.5 million victims. Yet, the team is quick to admit that their number should be considered a baseline, because it likely underreports the problem significantly. Many seniors remain embarrassed to admit that they have been taken advantage of, and so they will hide their situation at all costs—including when asked by researchers. In addition, those seniors who were suffering from cognitive impairments, like dementia and Alzheimer’s, are the most likely to be exploited, but they were not included in this latest survey. Any way you slice it, this problem is widespread. It occurs in nursing homes, assisted-living rooms, conference rooms, and dining room tables. All of us must do our part to identify when a senior might be taken advantage of financially and step-up when the time is right.

The researcher involved in this latest effort is quite experienced in these issues, having worked in similar studies for years. In 1998 he and his team released the groundbreaking finding that seniors who have been neglected or abused have higher mortality rates that those who had not. The increased mortality rates were independent of the consequences of neglect itself. In other words, abused seniors were likely to suffer a wide range of other complications (outside of those directly attributable to the abuse) as a result of their mistreatment. It was yet another strong piece of evidence highlighting the need to devote more time to ensure the proper treatment of our seniors in all contexts, including the stamping out of nursing home abuse and neglect.

See Our Related Blog Posts:

New Way to Support Nursing Home Laws

Pilot Program Seeks to Improve Troubled Nursing Homes in Illinois

from: http://rss.justia.com/~r/IllinoisNursingHomeAbuseBlogCom/~3/1P6POXbyWW8/elder_financial_abuse_reaching.html