Spergs in the news: The North Pond Hermit

Some of us crave friendship but can't get it. The North Pond Hermit, scavenging (stealing) in the Maine woods for nearly 30 years, didn't want it. Normal people were just too confusing. Kudos to the kind people who, after he got caught, said they'd accommodate him. Obviously mentally ill so he got a very light sentence but even that seemed too much. Humility or inverted pride? With a really crazy person, maybe that doesn't apply.

Autism in TV fiction? The "Night Gallery" episode "Brenda"

A very weird tale of a lonely girl and the monster she befriends one summer in the Night Gallery segment “Brenda.” The show seems hokey now. It was an attempt to cash in on Rod Serling's popularity; he only hosted this anthology horror series. This episode isn't particularly scary but an interesting "social story" with maybe heavy-handed psychological content. I'm sure at least some of us were or still are weird Brenda. A lot of us grew up in this horrific situation: people (such as parents) noticed what we now know is autism but didn't know how to handle it, so they handled it badly.

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.