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I'm reading "April Stevens Dies at 93; Her ‘Deep Purple’ Became a Surprise Hit/Her unusual version of the standard, which she recorded with her brother, Nino Tempo, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart in 1963 and won a Grammy" (NYT). 

Here's the song — with the distinctive spoken-word section that begins at 1:11: 

“Deep Purple” was recorded in 14 minutes, with Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who told them his partners "think it’s the worst record you’ve ever made." The siblings threatened to leave Atlantic and sign with Phil Spector, so it was released. 

It hit #1 on the Billboard chart on November 16, 1963 and was #1 for only one week. The last day of that week John Kennedy was shot.

It's a song about memory — "In the mist of my memory, you wander on back to me" — and Nino Tempo couldn't remember the words. April Stevens had to remind him, her whispering vocal made the song memorable, and it is woven in our memory of the unforgettable tragedy.

In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you've gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover, we'll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams

Said Darren Roberts, quoted in "How Can Tainted Spinach Cause Hallucinations? A food recall from Australia sheds light on an unusual aspect of brain chemistry" (NYT).

The belief is that there's some other plant in there with the spinach and that it's "'anticholinergic syndrome,' a type of poisoning mainly caused by plants in the Solanaceae family, which includes nightshade, jimson weed and mandrake root."

Anticholinergic plants and drugs inhibit the production of a brain chemical called acetylcholine, which is linked to memory, thinking and the visual system, according to Dominic ffytche, a professor of visual psychiatry at King’s College London....

Acetylcholine can also be lost naturally and is linked to Alzheimer’s.... Hallucinations caused by a suppression or loss of acetylcholine tend to be “formed,” Professor ffytche said, that is concrete and recognizable, usually taking the form of people, objects and landscapes.

This is distinct from “unformed” hallucinations, when people might see shapes, patterns and colors. Furthermore, hallucinations caused by a lack of acetylcholine are linked to the memory system, so they tend to involve people the sufferer knows or recognizes, he said. “It could be deceased relatives, or people that are vaguely familiar to them in some way.”...

 “When you lose an understanding that they are hallucinations, they tend to become distressing,” he added. “You become sucked into the story where something bad is going on and people are trying to hurt you or harm you in some way.”

Very disturbing! You assume the leaves in the bag are the leaves of the plant that is named on the label. Interesting to see the distinction between "formed" and "unformed" hallucinations. I'd known the difference, but not the words for it. Formed hallucinations with an inability to understand that they are hallucinations — quite a predicament.

Also interesting is that strange old phenomenon, British surnames that begin with "ff" — with no uppercase. Grammarphobia discussed this a few years ago. Excerpt:

We haven’t found any recent scholarship on “ff” surnames, but 19th-century paleographers (scholars of ancient handwriting) traced the usage to legal scribes in the Middle Ages. In “The Capital Letter F In Early Chirography,” a note in the April 1893 issue of the scholarly journal Notes and Queries, Sir Edward Maunde Thompson writes that “legal handwriting of the middle ages has no capital F.” Thompson, a paleographer as well as the chief librarian and first director of the British Museum, says, “A double f (ff) was used to represent the capital letter.”

A note in the January 1893 issue of Notes and Queries, by the philologist, paleographer, and Anglican canon Isaac Taylor, says the “ff” in Middle English legal writing of the 14th century evolved over two centuries from the Latin capital “F.” He writes that a vertical tick on the upper horizontal bar of the Latin “F” gradually lengthened in legal writing, making it appear that there was a double “f.” Taylor, author of The Alphabet: An Account of the Origin and Development of Letters (1883), says, “It is this elongated tick which has been mistaken for a second /f/. People who spell their names with /ff/ are merely using obsolete law hand.” ...

Much more at the link, but I'll just include this:

In the 1965 second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Sir Ernest Gowers notes that the “ff” in surnames evolved from a scribal symbol to a symbol of distinction. He cites Cranford, an 1853 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, in which Mr. ffoulkes is described as someone who “looked down upon capital letters and said they belonged to lately invented families.” It was feared that he would die a bachelor, Mrs. Gaskell writes, until he met a Mrs. ffaringdon and married her, “and it was all owing to her two little ffs.”

I think I've blogged this before. That sounds familiar! Ah, yes, here. Anyway, I'll persist:

We’ll end with a passage from “A Slice of Life,” a 1926 short story by P. G. Wodehouse:

“Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?” said Wilfred.

“ffinch-ffarrowmere,” corrected the visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capitals.

"My brain was getting on with rebooting. They’d ask what I wanted for lunch, it’d arrive and I’d be staggered and say ‘How did you know?’ and I’d read the same copy of the newspaper several times a day — Mindy took it away in the end as it was too painful for her — but it was all new to me.... A dear friend’s mother is becoming very confused and I always say, ‘Is she happy?’ You can be confused and happy."

Says Richard Hammond, about his experience right after waking up from a coma, in "Deep in a coma I dreamt I was dying. Then my wife woke me up/Unconscious after his crash, in his mind the TV star was walking in the Lake District. Now he no longer fears death" (London Times). 

As far as what it was like inside the coma — and approaching death — maybe you have already seen the fantastic (and viral) video he made: 

"... everyone has one and they are desperately waiting to tell you about it."

Tweeted Andrew Nadeau, last year.

Why did I remember that? Probably because it has a cool balance of generality and specificity. (Really, why do you remember things?!) 

But it sprang to mind when I saw a photograph — "A dugong, which is a notoriously elusive marine mammal, photographed in the Red Sea, near the Egyptian resort town of Marsa Alam" — submerged deep in the NYT Style magazine article "The 25 Travel Experiences You Must Have/A pair of internationally minded writers, a chef, an architect and a landscape photographer made a list of the most extraordinary adventures a person should seek out. Here are the results." 

To experience them [the dugongs], you must fly into the nearest international airport, in the town of Vilankulo, and then organize a helicopter or dhow ride to one of the archipelago’s many resorts and lodges....

No, I am not going to do that, so I don't know what will happen to me, given that you say I "must" have this experience. I'm going to bet that I need not do this. And I was out even before I read "organize a helicopter or dhow ride." I'm not organizing anything.

Found in the shallow coastal waters of as many as 40 countries, the large and placid dugong (imagine a manatee with a wider, shorter snout) is intensely shy, and its population is considered “vulnerable”....

Well, then maybe what we "must" do is leave the creatures alone. Maybe just talk about them, as we try to make friends with those other intensely shy, vulnerable animals, the human beings.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Note the "of"s: bonds of affection... chords of memory... chorus of the Union... better angels of our nature.

Hear the music: chords... chorus... angels. The angels will touch the chords and the chorus will swell. 

Given the prominence of the phrase "mystic chords of memory," you probably don't want to write "mystical cord." You've added an "-al" to "mystic" for no discernible reason, and you've changed the musical "chord" to some sort of ligature. I think of the tangle behind the computer, then of an umbilical cord. Unless you're playing with the shift from "chord" to "cord," perhaps using Lincoln's "bonds of affection" — "bonds" and "cords" are things that connect — you don't want to get that close to a famous phrase. It can't look accidental.

And this almost surely was accidental — a "tow the line" for "toe the line" type of misunderstanding. The word "cord" only appears in the headline. "Mystical," however, appears in the article:

[T]hrough no fault of his own, [Charles] simply cannot provide the semi-mystical link to the past that his mother came to represent to the whole world.

Oh! Elizabeth was only semi-mystical! (Is that anything like "semi-fascist"?)

But we see "link" and that suggests the other word of connection "cord," but the headline-writer almost surely changed "link" to "cord" because he had a feeling that "cord" sounds better after "mystical," and he had that feeling because of Lincoln's "mystic chords." Writers, please, you need to be conscious of why you have the feeling that words go together and notice when something is off.

Some chords of memory are mystic, and some are dissonant.

On a table or desk, arrange ten items in any configuration.... For this I recommend you include several familiar or even prized objects.... Study the items carefully for three minutes. Now close your eyes and practice picturing them in their specific arrangement. Can you do that? If not, start with five objects. The key is to see them as unique, easily distinguishable from one another, and yet placed in a specific arrangement. When you can do that, study them in depth, one at a time. In this exercise I selected a pen, which I helped design with the Italian luxury company Montegrappa.... Now the pen stands out in enhanced clarity compared to the other objects.... When you perform this exercise, you will notice that you use a kind of high-power mental lens to visualize the details by zooming in and out.... The clearer you can see the object in your mind’s eye, the easier it is to remember.... [C]larity and detail in mental imagery is directly related to the quality of your memory....

Here's the Wikipedia article on hyperphantasia. It sounds enjoyable and useful, but I'm not going to feel bad about not having it, because I see that it is "correlated to several mood disorders, particularly anxiety, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder, and having hyperphantasia may exacerbate symptoms of such disorders by subserving ruminating thoughts as well as acting as an 'emotional amplifier.' For example, vivid ‘flash forwards’ to suicidal acts may increase occurrences of suicide." It may also aggravate PTSD, schizophrenia, and Parkinson's disease. 

1. The vacation on TikTok vs. Reality.

2. The price of an overnight stay — with breakfast and a beautiful view — in Kyrgystan.

3. What country is longest, north to south?

4. The lines of "It's Corn" — ranked.

5. Spend $80,000 on a truck....

6. Sometimes a m-f talks nice to your face...

7. The phrase "we love that for you."

8. She believes she is still 70.

9. Ricky Gourmet reads the letter his 12-year-old self wrote him.

10. Trying to read.