Body language: Putin vs. Obama

Blue Christmas: Joni Mitchell, "River"

If you're like many autistic-spectrum people, and introverted people generally, people think you hate people/are anti-social but that's not true; we love them in limited doses or we get overwhelmed (sensory overload). The social demands of Christmas can be draining. Sounds like Joni Mitchell can relate. Let this post and song be your river you can skate away on, just for a moment.

Joni's famously quirky, "difficult"; she seems to have turned her back on commercial success since Court and Spark ("Free Man in Paris") and that was 40 years ago! Maybe she's one of us, like many of us undiagnosed. More proof that, like with the diagnosed Steven Spielberg and Dan Aykroyd (his special interest: he is a would-be cop!), Asperger's doesn't have to keep you from success, especially if you know about it.

If anybody still reads this, have a blessed Christmas or Hanukkah and a smashing new year.

10 ways to beat shyness

By Jade, a cute English woman who apparently teaches English as a second language.

A doctor debunks a much raved-about autism memoir

Projection and romanticizing the autistic, as The Reason I Jump does, is as much a disservice as pathologizing and persecuting them. Supposedly by a 13-year-old Japanese autistic boy, it’s more likely ghostwritten by an English novelist having trouble coming to terms with his autistic son.

Four things movies always get wrong about awkward people

Here, from the masters at Cracked.

10 steps to become independent

Here.

I like this; no homo

Thai nightclub: bathroom attendant masseurs.


Lots of things about body language and personal space are universal but not all. This wouldn't fly in most of America but in Thailand it's fine. (Sure, it's probably a gay nightclub.) Why not have a clean/legit (non-sexual) massage while on a bathroom break? Sounds like part of a great vacation.

More common: Third World barbershop massage.