I decided that I would pause the recent rant-fest to slow myself down and just share some links with you nice people tonight.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still uptight and angry and ranty feeling, but I am saving it up for therapy tomorrow and so tonight, I will do my best to go back to being my usual affable and harmless self for the duration of one friendly link sharing blog entry and then, presumably, it will be Grumpy Time again.

Or who knows, maybe after I vent to my therapist tomorrow, I will be all smoothed out and mellow once again.

Either way, I am at least glad that I am getting in touch with the deep anger and experiencing it, because that is the only way to make it go away for good.

Anyhow, on with the lynx links.

First up, we have an interesting bit about a fellow who suffered a stroke and woke up speaking Welsh.

A fellow named Alun Morgan is the center of our tale. 81 years old, he grew up in England and had only spent a few months of his life in Wales, and that, during World War II.

But when he was struck down by a stroke, he came back up speaking fluent Welsh, a language he had never consciously learned except for a few words to get by in his short stay in Wales seventy years ago.

He was, however, exposed to the language, both when he was in Wales as a boy, and possibly when he has heard his wife speaking it. So it is not quite a miracle.

But it does show how the human brain is an amazing machine. Clearly, his absorbed the Welsh language in the same way a child absorbs its native language, without conscious comprehension, and stored it away, ready to suddenly be brought online as an emergency backup language when Alan’s primary language of English was temporarily offline.

He reports that he woke up not only speaking Welsh, but having no idea that he was speaking anything but English. Clearly, it was functioning as his primary language at the time. Fascinating.

Next up, a little soothing eye candy from the world of reverse entropy.

Fireworks in reverse is strangely beautiful. I would not have guessed that. I would have assumed that each firework is such a brief and ephemeral thing that it would look around the same backwards and forwards.

And maybe that would be true in the era before digital video. But with the clarity and frame rate of digital video, we can see that fireworks played backwards is quite pretty, actually, in that eerie “suspended from reality” way that all backwards video is pretty.

I remember being spellbound (and enormously entertained) when a teacher, to fill time after showing us a health and nutrition film, played it again, backwards.

Let me tell you, watching people eat backwards is top rate entertainment when you are eight years old. The redheaded boy eating spaghetti backwards was a particularly big hit.

And speaking of freaky visual experiences, you might want to take a gander at this.

It is an anti “Bath Salts” PSA done by the US Navy, and the first couple of minutes are a rather gripping reenactment of what a “Bath Salts” trip might just be like.

Feel free to stop watching after the “waking up screaming on a gurney” part. The dude talking in the quiet monotone about just what nasty shit “Bath Salts” are is nowhere near as entertaining as the lovely trip through a psychotic state at the beginning.

It combines two of my favorite things, first person film-making and totally fucked up head trips.

To imagine that people are willingly taking a drug that stands a good chance of making them (hopefully) temporarily psychotic (or if you prefer, schizophrenic) really bakes my own personal noodle. I can only assume that the people still taking this drug are either tragically uninformed in general, or young and stupid and therefore sure that something like that can’t happen to them.

Or, well, extreme escapists who are willing to do anything to escape their current mental state, period. I can relate to that, as foolish as it might be.

Sometimes, it is hard to imagine anything being worse than how you feel right now.

But things can always get worse. Remember that, kids.

And speaking of kids, here is the story of one poor girl named Courtni Webb who got suspended from school for daring to write a poem claiming she understood why people like Adam Lanza go nuts and kills people.

She was even threatened with expulsion, and shamed in front of her entire community, making it look like she was some sort of ticking time bomb that brave administrators had defused in the nick of time.

This is the price you pay for daring to empathize with those society hates. The girl was not saying the Sandy Hook shooter’s actions were justified, she was just saying she understood. And don’t we want to understand why these people do these things?

In order to prevent such tragedies, some of us will have to be willing to go to the dark places of the human mind and try to understand what makes people like Adam Lanza tick.

But no, some hysterical teacher had to punish an innocent student for daring to express her opinion because, after all, someone has to do something.

I particularly identify with this story, because that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that I would have written if I was in school during this age of mass shootings.

Maybe I should go back to writing poetry some day. Sure, there’s no money in it, but what the hell.

Although to be honest, I am glad the meme of school shootings was not around when I was a depressed teen.

There are a few bullies I might have taken down with my Dad’s .22 rifle before they stopped me.