On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:35:47 -0800, Michael Sylvester wrote:
>Happy Thanksgiving! And do not forget that you can get anything 
>you want at Alice's restaurant.

Excepting Alice.

Explanatory Notes/Commentary:

(1)  Prof. Sylvester is making a reference to a song by Arlo Guthrie
titled "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" which appeared on his premiere
record album "Alice's Restaurnat" and which served as the basis for
the movie "Alice's Restaurant".  Wikipedia (yadda-yadda) has several
entries on Guthrie and his family.  For the song/album/movie, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Restaurant_Massacree

(2)  Arlo is the son of the great American folk singer Woody Guthrie.
For more details about Arlo Guthrie and his Jewish, Brooklyn-borne
type of folkiness, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlo_guthrie
NOTE:  Arlo received religious training for his bar mitzvah from Rabbi
Meir Kahane who would form the militant "Jewish Defense League".
Quoting from the Wikipedia article:
|"Rabbi Kahane was a really nice, patient teacher," Guthrie later 
|recalled, "but shortly after he started giving me my lessons, he 
|started going haywire. Maybe I was responsible."
For more information about Woody Guthrie (songwriter and performer,
perhaps best known for "This Land is Your Land"), see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie

(3)  Of potential relevance to psychology, Woody Guthrie succumbed
to the genetic disorder Huntington's chorea, a neurodegenerative disease.
Arlo has not developed HD but other children by Woody have (Woody
was married several times and one of his wives apparently was a carrier).
Woody's wife Majorie would go on to create the Huntington's Disease
Society of America after Woody's death.  For more on HD, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington%27s_disease
Research on HD has flourished in recent decades and it is now known
that HD can have different times of onset.  Historically and in Woody's
case, onset of the disease was usually late in life but subsequent research
has shown that it can have a very early onset. For cross-cultural dudes 
and dudettes, Venezuela has the greatest number of HD cases in the world
and research on the nature of HD there helped to develop methods
that would be used in the Human Genome Project; see:
http://www.hdfoundation.org/html/venezuela_huntington.php

-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]




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