Posted on

It’s on: Mike Madness resumes after 2-year COVID hiatus

The 3-on-3 basketball tournament known as Mike Madness will be held at UAB Recreation Center on Aug. 20, 2022, starting at 9 a.m.

Applications to play, rules, and other useful stuff can be found at the Madness website www.mikemadness.org.

This marks the fourth tournament since 2017. Due to COVID it was put on hold in 2020 and 2021.

The tournaments have raised more than $30,000 for Lewy Body Dementia Association and on UAB medical research of this deadly disease.

I was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia in 2016. Lewy body dementia is a degenerative brain disease with no cure. It eventually kills you by killing your brain cells.

Friends, family and fellow Saturday morning hoopsters tossed around a fund-raising event, and it has gone from there. I feel due to the efforts such as this one, there is a growing understanding of the disease in the community. The degenerative brain disease, which resembles a combination of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, has been misdiagnosed because of the similarities in symptoms. Notably, comedian Robin Williams’ wife, Susan Schneider Williams, blames a lack of a correct diagnosis for her husband’s death by suicide.

All are invited to a post-tournament celebration at Cahaba Brewing Co. and Taproom, 4500 5th Ave. South, Building C. There will be live music from the extraordinary Alabama rock band Les Nuby.

To find out about my story and learn more about the disease, please see my website: www.myvinylcountdown.com.

Posted on

Oiling up the old machinery

Let’s see. I type one letter at a time as I am now doing. So far so good.

I have not been writing much lately. I am working on some other things. Certainly, I have not been typing like I did over the past five years, writing 678 reviews of each of my vinyl records, plus an uncounted number of non-musical reviews, features, Lewy body news, and basketball observations. My theory was that typing, or writing was the perfect exercise to address both the physical and mental aspects of the disease. I think it’s working.

I believe the physical muscle coordination of fingers and keyboard addresses the Parkinsonian aspect of Lewy body dementia. While the focus to make sense and remember what I’m writing — and have a point –exercises the cognitive diminishment portion of this debilitating disease..

I figure even if I am deluding myself on the typing’s effect on Lewy body dementia, it’s still worth doing. Typing, that is. I didn’t take that 11th grade typing class for nothing , working my way up to the 50 words per minute level.

I have to tell you a secret, though. Not many journalists know how to type.

They just develop a speedy hunt and peck system. They lean over the keyboards, like a praying mantis. Usually their face is nearly touching the keyboard because they have to see where the letters are.

I derive this from 40 years in newsrooms across the country watching people hunt and peck, hunt and peck, hunt some more and peck some more.

Now classically trained typists, such as myself, can make the untrained feel inadequate with our flurry of tap tap taps, and ding dong dings. Our fingers tell us where the words are. And yes typewriters used to ding , most notably when you hit the end of the sentence. (Not sure if they actually donged; I’ll just call poetic license on that.)

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

That’s a typing warm-up; the sentence has every letter of the alphabet. Now I have to confess, numbers on a typewriter which appear on one of the upper rows, slow me down as do the shifts for dollar signs, asterisks and hyphens. But it’s just a few milliseconds.

Back to typing, er, writing.