Isn’t it always the way? You wait over a year for a Stroke Digest post, then two come along at once. Last week’s Apoplexy Tiny Letter – accompanying the post Muppets – featured Loretta Lynn performing her 1971 #1 Country hit One’s on the Way with the Henson crew. And that’s how we find ourselves at Digesta Plaga #10…
Loretta Lynn was due to release a new album next month, at the age of 85. Wouldn’t It Be Great is a mixture of new and previously recorded songs. Unfortunately, the album was pushed back to 2018 last week, because of the stroke she suffered in May.
Loretta’s an interesting character – and who wouldn’t be, after 85 years’ worth of history? Three of her songs in particular were banned from radio airplay. Rated ‘X’ was about the double standards divorced women face, Wings Upon Your Horns was about the loss of teenage virginity, and The Pill was about a wife and mother becoming liberated by the birth-control pill.
Nevertheless, Loretta has said, I’m not a big fan of Women’s Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they’re due. And she’s definitely a trailblazer, and the only female Artist of the Decade at the Academy of Country Music.
At the end of June, Loretta’s brother revealed that although her left side was initially paralysed, she was at getting around by herself with the aid of a walker, and her speech was good.
What’s more, music had been therapeutic for her, and she was determined to get back to performing. Well, this right-brain stroke surviver can vouch for music’s therapeutic effects and wishes Loretta Lynn all the best in her recovery.
Coffee and TV
Maybe Loretta Lynn’s great recovery strides are because she can get free refills at Loretta Lynn’s Kitchen in Tennessee?
A study released earlier this month suggested that coffee drinkers may have a lower risk of dying from heart disease, stroke and liver disease. Sounds pretty awesome, right?
Well, maybe. The scientists who undertook the research couch their language in cautiously scientific language. On the one hand, It is plausible that there is something else behind this that is causing this relationship. On the other, We found that coffee drinkers had a reduced risk of death from heart disease, from cancer, from stroke, respiratory disease, diabetes and kidney disease.
At the time of writing, apoplectic.me cannot confirm that watching TV rolls back the effects of costiveness or coryza.
Say Cheese
Similarly conclusive news erupted into the headlines in May, concerning cheese.
Wallace, are you sure that’s a perfectly impartial source? Let’s check in The Grauniad, shall we?
The research was part-funded by the three pro-dairy groups – Global Dairy Platform, Dairy Research Institute and Dairy Australia – but they had no influence over it, the paper said.
By the time the sentence above had been copied and pasted by The Independent, it read slightly differently:
The new research was part-funded by three pro-dairy groups, but they had no influence over the contents of the paper, according to The Guardian.
Nothing Lasts for Ever
I was tooling around Edinburgh last Wednesday, when Grandaddy came on the radio. I became a fan of the space rockers when The Crystal Lake made it into John Peel’s 2000 Festive Fifty. It was quite nice to hear them droning along in the same old style in 2017, with Evermore. Y’know, if you’re good at something and you enjoy it…
No that Vanguard Online would agree. They wrote, Grandaddy Are Back And They’re Making Me Feel Sick.
In 2017 Evermore suggests a band frozen in the past so as to be transfixed and terrified by some awful distant future, ‘Grief like a freeway trip’, sings [frontman and primary recording artist Jason] Lyttle [sic], defeated.
Dude. It’s a divorce album. (Also, Jason Lytle talks rather interesting about the composing and recording process here.)
Unfortunately, worse was to come for Grandaddy. At the beginning of May, the newly-reformed band’s bassist, Kevin Garcia, passed away from “the effects of a massive stroke.”
At only 41, too. From all the responses, it seems like Kevin was a lovely fella. In his memory, let’s stop the blog here with a sense of drone-y, repeating cycle, and listen to some new Grandaddy. Till next week…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX34Qhmto0Y
I always look forward to your comments, Ricky. Simply as a writer, your work is better all the time. Thanks.
Thank *you*, Andy. Funnily enough, I was looking at some of my stroke-related writing from a couple/few years ago yesterday, and it’s interesting (Well, to me!) to see how much my style has changed. I think sharing my work with a wider public more has changed the style a lot, even if that might be less apparent on apoplectic.me. It’s driven home the extent to which, for me, the act of writing stems from a desire to share the experience of being human. A pleasure I always receive from reading your thoughts.