Mark Hoppus from Blink 182 tweeted: I hope that in heaven Gary Coleman finds the peace that eluded him on Earth, and finally discovers what Willis was talking about.

A fascinating article: The 4 Stages of Fear, Attacked-by-a-Mountain-Lion Edition

In the throes of intense fear, we suddenly find ourselves operating in a different and unexpected way. The psychological tools that we normally use to navigate the world—reasoning and planning before we act—get progressively shut down. In the grip of the brain’s subconscious fear centers, we behave in ways that to our rational mind seem nonsensical or worse. We might respond automatically, with preprogrammed motor routines, or simply melt down. We lose control.

In this unfamiliar realm, it can seem like we’re in the grip of utter chaos. But although the preconscious fear centers of the brain are not capable of deliberation and reason, they do have their own logic, a simplified suite of responses keyed to the nature of the threat at hand. There is a structure to panic.

When the danger is far away, or at least not immediately imminent, the instinct is to freeze. When danger is approaching, the impulse is to run away. When escape is impossible, the response is to fight back. And when struggling is futile, the animal will become immobilized in the grip of fright. Although it doesn’t slide quite as smoothly off the tongue, a more accurate description than “fight or flight” would be “fight, freeze, flight, or fright”—or, for short, “the four fs.”

The article is somewhat longish, detailing the woman's reaction and eventual escape from the mountain lion. Here's part of her first reaction:

Just then she heard a rustling and looked up. At the top of the bank, not 30 feet away, stood a mountain lion. Tawny against the brown leaves of the riverbank brush, the animal was almost perfectly camouflaged. It stared down at her, motionless.

She stood stock-still.

Yellowtail had entered the first instinctual fear-response state, the condition of freezing known as attentive immobility. Even before she was aware of danger, subconscious regions of her brain were assessing the threat. Cued to the presence of a novel stimulus, the brain deployed the orienting reflex, a cousin of the startle reflex. Within milliseconds Yellowtail’s heart rate and breathing slowed. A brain region called the superior colliculus turned her head and slewed her eyes so that the densest part of the retina, the fovea, formed a detailed image of the cat. The visual information then flowed via the thalamus to the visual cortex and the amygdala, the key brain center for evaluating threat. Her pattern-recognition system found a match in the flow of sensory information. It recognized a pair of eyes, then the outline of a feline head. In less than half a second, before her cortex even had time to complete the match and recognize what she was seeing, her emotional circuitry had already assessed the situation: It was bad. Subconsciously, her brain also determined that the threat was not immediately pressing, and so a region called the ventral column of the periaqueductal gray (PAG) triggered attentive immobility. This is generally considered the first stage of the fear response, because it tends to occur when the threat is far away or not yet aware of the subject’s presence. The goal is to keep it that way.

I shouldn't have a "usual hospital" in the same terms as "usual restaurant," though we're there nearly as often.

Heh. I totally go to my hospital more often than I go to any single restaurant.

The 4 Stages of Fear, Attacked-by-a-Mountain-Lion Edition

The mountain lion incident was one of the hardest things to read about in The Survivors Club. Well, that and the woman who tripped while carrying her knitting needles. The main lesson of that book for me was that, if you get caught in any sort of bizarre accident/survival situation, you want to be taken to the Stanford Medical Center's trauma unit.

Unspeakably adorable video of a chicken keeping some teeny weeny kittens warm by sitting on them like chicks.

Okay, I'm going to opine that Ice T's wife is totally NSFW. Just on principle. When you call someone over to your desk to look at a picture of her, ain't nothing polite going on there.

Ugh. A guy came in to change out the trash in my office. He was here for maybe two minutes, and now everything in the room smells like smoke.

I just got hit with a huge case of Doanwanna. I need to get dressed and meet people this afternoon. One is a friend who has been out of town and we haven't gotten to catch up, and the other is my friend and his fiancee who I promised a champagne toast when she moved here for good. Tomorrow Jon wants to paint the front room because he's been trying to be a total adult aparment having person with nice looking stuff. Sunday I have 2 barbeques; one is at a friends house who I haven't seen in a long time, and he always comes down to my neck of the woods to hang out. The other Jon is working. I have housework as well.

But, it's warm and rainy and my puppy is snuggled with me, and I'm felling...not pretty. So, I just doanwanna. Any of it.

I have to be at my parents' at 10 tomorrow morning, which time I am somewhat @@ about, but I'm not doing anything else this afternoon or tonight, so I should be ready by then....

For those who want distraction, help me decide about jewelry!

I really like this necklace. But I have cleverly figured out that there are places I can buy blank silver decanter labels and have them engraved! So should I have one engraved with "absinthe", "whimsy", or "vampire"? (I have a vague plan to eventually get multiple silver decanter labels so I can have all of those words, but am being good about my budget right now. Therefore, I have to pick only one.)