It's too early for any color on the redbuds of Madison, Wisconsin.

Red trees.

Not my red bud trees (mentioned in the previous post). Just some very red flowering trees I saw at the UW Arboretum on Sunday. Sorry I didn't read the label.

The older brain, disparaged for forgetting, may be functioning at a higher level, with widening attention.

A new study shows.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

In my personal experience, it seems — if I'm remembering properly! — that the way the brain works changes over time.

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

Isn't the whole point of reading to get to something that makes you stop and think (or write)? I mean, that's the way I read. It really slows me down like mad.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

I smell patronizing self-esteem boosting in "they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers." But it's good to know that there are different kinds of minds, different approaches to learning and thinking (and writing), and that we can respect these differences (and not fear them as they loom in the future).

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

Oh, the harsh winter killed 3/4 of one my red bud trees — which are nevertheless quite prettily blooming right now as I look out the window and think about my brain and poor Teddy Kennedy's brain — riddled, we now know, with cancer.

ADDED: Byrd weeps for Teddy.

Slow start.

It's a rainy day here in Madison. The rain is knocking the petals off the red bud trees I've been enjoying just outside my dining room window for the last couple weeks. I'm getting a late start blogging (and everything else) today, because I lost about three hours of sleep in the middle of the night after someone dialing a wrong number woke me up at 2 a.m. People, when you're making phone calls in the middle of the night, be especially careful about the right number!

Now, I'm seeing that, during the night, my Site Meter clicked up over 1.5 million. That's pretty cool. It just hit 1 million around the 31st of January, a year and a half month after it began. Anyway, this traffic milestone -- and thanks for reading! -- is making me sorry I don't have some solid blogginess for you yet today.

So, I need to do some paper-reading and I want to do a little blogging. I've got an exam to write and an exam to grade and I'm working on a presentation for the local Bar Association about the Supreme Court's constitutional cases this term. Unfortunately, the cases I'm most interested in will not come out in time for my talk (next Tuesday). Thinking back over the term so far, I'm not coming up with much constitutional law of significance, especially outside of the criminal law area. There is the death penalty case (about those who commit their crimes at an early age), but what else?

UPDATE: That's "cases" not "case" I'm most interested in. What are they? The medical marijuana case (Raich) and the case about the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (Cutter). There's also the negative commerce clause case about wine importation (Granholm).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ambivablog writes about blogging guilt (and links here).

Late afternoon, redbud reflected in the glass table.

Redbud.

What redbud looks like today in Madison.

A slow blog day.

It's been a long, hard day, beginning with the lack of bloggish inspiration with what was for me the excessively Pope-focused news. But there was a lot to do at the law school, including teaching one of the last Constitutional Law classes of the semester. Later, it seemed like a good idea to spend $50+ getting my toenails painted "Pompeii Purple," to have my chiropractor pop my vertabrae into a more appropriate position, and to pick up a shredded beef burrito at Chipotle. I arrive home and walk up the front path, under the arch formed by my two redbud trees, which are in bloom now. All I really want to do is to pour a glass of wine, unwrap my burrito, and turn on the television. A nice, quiet evening at home. Maybe I'll find something bloggable -- there's always the "American Idol" results show -- and I'll be back to replenish the blog.

Nervous Norvus, "Transfusion."

I've listened to a lot of old novelty songs over the years, but I had never heard of Nervous Norvus until today. This morning, there was a fresh coat of icy snow on the street, and I was thinking back to my recent car crash, as I backed Silvio out of the driveway to go to work, and the satellite radio was tuned to the "Decades" channel where it's always the 1950s, and here was this crazy song "Transfusion," by Nervous Norvus. It's all about a drunk-driving car wreck, with much talk of getting a blood transfusion, with a bit of a beatnik twist to it (as in: "Hey, Daddy-o, Make that Type O"). Here's a sampling:

Tooling down the hightway doing 79

I'm a twin pipe papa and I'm feelin fine

Hey man dig that was that a red stop sign-

(scrreeech-BANG!!tinkle)

Transfusion transfusion

I'm just a solid mess of contusions

Never never never gonna speed again

Slip the blood to me Bud

Every verse ends with a line like that:

Shoot the juice to me Bruce...



Pass the crimson to me Jimson...



Pass the claret to me Barrett...



Pump the fluid in me Louie...



Put a gallon in me Alan...

Yikes! But maybe there should be a satellite channel that just constantly reminds you to drive carefully. I had been thinking the other day that there should be a channel with an authoritative voice saying things like, "Pay attention! A small child might dart out at any moment! You must always be aware! Remember the person in the next car might be talking on a cell phone..." But maybe there should just be a Careful Driver music channel playing things like "Transfusion" and "Dead Man's Curve" ("the last thing I remember, Doc, I started to swerve/and then I saw the Jag slide into the curve"), and "Tell Laura I Love Her" ("but as they pulled him from the twisted wreck"). (Email me with other play list suggestions.)



Sidenote: Ray Peterson, who had the hit single of "Tell Laura I Love Her" back in 1960, died recently.

UPDATE: I don't know why "Tell Laura I Love Her" didn't automatically make me write "Last Kiss." In "Laura," the guy dies and the girl prays for him in a chapel. In "Last Kiss," the girl dies and the guy determines to live a virtuous life to be reunited with her in Heaven. Note that in both songs, it's the guy with the soul that needs looking out for. The goodness of the girl is never in doubt. (Sorry the lyrics link for "Last Kiss" does not have the full set of words found in the original hit single. I'm thinking the Pearl Jam version of the song left out the part where the girl goes back to the car to get the ring. Maybe it's sadder when you're not distracted by thinking about how dumb it was to go back for the ring.) EMERGENCY ADDITION TO THE UPDATE: As a reader points out, I'm mixing up "Last Kiss" with "Teen Angel"! And so, "Teen Angel" will be added to the Drive Safe playlist.



ANOTHER UPDATE: This Bob Dylan song is stunningly good at striking caution into the mind of the driver.



YET MORE: Another reader offers Roy Acuff's "Wreck on the Highway":

There was whiskey and blood all together

Mixed with glass where they lay

Death played her hand in destruction

But I didn't hear nobody pray.

The singer is very disturbed by the lack of prayer at a terrible car wreck. I'm thinking the message here is not only to be careful not to have a car wreck, but to be careful to pray and keep your soul in proper condition for death, which may come suddenly, such as in this car wreck. I like these very simple, old cowboy songs. This reminds me to stop at the "Hank's Place" channel on the satellite radio some of the time.



AND MORE: A reader suggests "Hot Rod Lincoln," which I'm afraid encourages reckless driving (even though he gets stopped by the cops in the end). Also --"Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!" -- "Leader of the Pack."



AND YET MORE: This song, "Beep Beep," is totally inappropriate for my Drive Safe playlist, but writing this post made me think about it. It was a very popular novelty song in 1958, when I was a kid. I especially liked it because it featured a Nash Rambler outpacing a Cadillac, and our family car was a Nash Rambler.



AND: Several emailers have mentioned Bruce Springsteen's "Wreck on the Highway," which is different from the Roy Acuff song, dispute the nearly identical title.

Household minutiae.

It's a gray day here in Madison, but the temperature is 46 degrees. At this time of year, it would not be surprising for it to be 50 degrees colder. I drove home after my morning office hours to meet the plumber who should be showing up at any minute to fix a shower that's been dripping for a long time. Shower dripping is especially noisy because of the long distance of the drop. I hear the splat all the way downstairs in the dining room, my favorite place to work. I don't like to call in the plumber to fix just one thing. (Cf. this post, explaining how I don't like to buy only one item.) But yesterday the shower drip rate crossed the line where waiting for some other plumbing problem to occur no longer made sense, so today is plumbing day. It's also the day to get my Civil Procedure exam written, I think, as I get out of the car and walk toward the house. But I get a little distracted and stop to photograph three things on the way from the car to my front door.

Here's a bird's nest, revealed when the leaves fell from my redbud tree. I'm going to guess it's a cardinal's nest, because I often saw a cardinal couple fooling around in the tree and because it seems fitting for red birds to go for redbuds.



And here's a second newly revealed bird's nest. It's in my neighbor's hedge:



Next to the hedge on the other side of my front yard is this pumpkin belonging to my other neighbors. My guess is that the pumpkin does not represent a failure to put out the trash, but a beneficent gesture toward the squirrels and raccoons. Eat your vegetable! Have some vitamin A! Note the gnaw marks.



UPDATE: The plumber had to do a makeshift repair. The shower handle is 80 years old, and you can't buy replacement parts. To replace the handle altogether would entail an elaborate reconfiguration of the pipe work, which would be better done when I undertake the much-needed restoration of the bathroom. Having just survived the carpentry work shoring up the back of my house and the receipt of the $15,000 bill for that work, I'm not ready to do the bathroom just yet. I wonder if the plumber found the ancient fixture interesting to figure out. I've had electricians work on my house and comment on how unusual some old switch or outlet is. I like to think they find it relatively amusing to deal with these "This Old House" problems.

Redbud.

Redbud trees with boy.



Redbud trees without boy.