"Luke looks normal and has a wicked command of the English language ... BUT ... his brain does not work in the same way as yours and mine ..."

There is an EXCELLENT article running on the UK Daily Mail about a young man named Luke who apparently developed Asperger's as the result of a nasty case of encephalitis as a baby.

It's pretty amazing how many of of this young man's traits are like my Old Man's.

"A scratch or graze will have him screaming in panic, yet something like a broken arm has the opposite effect and he will appear not to feel it."

The Old Man of course will have a fit if he gets a bug bite, but when he had an actual heart attack he handled that quite well.

Luke's mother, Jan Greenman, puts a name to a phenomenon I have noticed with The Old Man - she calls it "blueprinting" - for instance if he tastes something for the first time that create's a "blueprint" in Luke's mind and he demands that anything like that taste in the future has to be exactly the same brand, the same cooking method, etc.

Similarly, once you start doing the WORSH and the PROVISIONING for The Old Man because he just had g*dd*mn quadruple bypass surgery, it doesn't matter that he long ago recovered from the heart attack, you have to keep doing those chores for him for the rest of his days.

Fortunately The Old Man seems to have been spared most of the aggressive tendencies Jan Greenman describes about her son Luke. Although, I do have to tell you, particularly when he was younger, The Old Man had one hell of a temper.

Ah, yes, the many, many joys of daily life in and around The Spectrum ...