The other night, GF and I watched Grand Torino with Clint Eastwood. I joked with Joisey Ken that Clint's character was like a meaner version of my dad on Red Bull. :-) It was a surpisingly good movie, despite Clint's overacting and comical facial expressions.
Joisey Ken and his new baby, Stella, are doing well!! We were able to speak finally the other day. The kid is sleeping 6-7 hours fairly often I guess. Pretty sweet for Ken and Dawn. Dawn got the flu or something only a week after they came home from the hospital, so Ken's been taking care of everyone. It was good to talk to my boy Ken!
Thursday I'm going to see the Blackhawks playoff game with Bill the Bear and Aussie Rick and his wife. Should be a hoot!! Drinking starts at 5!!
And congratulations to Dog Brian on surviving another tax season!!!
On an unrelated manner, the other day I started thinking about death. Not my death, or anyone's in particular, but causes of death in general. A hundred thousand years ago, "people" died just by virtue of being born. Both the mother and baby died all the time. Then those that survived got eaten by wild animals quite often. Death from infection due to cuts or bites or whatever, killed a bunch more people. Did people die from cancer? Probably not. They didn't live long enough to develop it I bet.
But then we did start living longer, but only a bit longer. More people survived the traumatic birthing process, but they still could get infections pretty easily. Not all infections are death sentences, but if you're too weak to hunt, or get food in some way or contribute, or help in the fields, I'm guessing you weren't around for too long. Then the wars started.
Wars were a big killer for the longest time. And there were periodic epidemics and even pandemics. But hardly anyone died of old age until recently in our history. People didn't get lung cancer, except rarely. People didn't get Alzheimers. People didn't get breast cancer.
As a function of living longer and surviving the basics, we opened ourselves up to other causes of death. So I was wondering: what are we NOT dieing from now, that we WILL be dieing from in the future? It's a fairly rhetorical question, but interesting to think about.
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4 comments:
Thanks for the shout out! I'M ALIVE!! Have fun at the game. Go Mighty Blackhawks!!
I'm sure people died of cancer. They were certainly smoking. You don't think they had lung cancer?
The reason you didn't hear about it, I suspect, is that it wasn't diagnosed. I'm sure people died all the time for reasons that were unknown -- strokes, heart attacks, embolisms, etc. I;m sure the same is true for other cancers.
Furthermore, people certainly did get Alzheimers -- they just called it senility.
I suspect that with medical advances in the future that at least in Chicago the primary causes of death will be suicide over the Cubs now going 250 years without a World Series appearance or win.
I think people, in the time I was talking about, died of things other than lung cancer, if they were smoking. l think senility and Alzheimers were more modern diseases in the grand scheme of civilization.
ESDNM, you're just mean.
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