I spent a melancholy evening watching ‘Iris’, a movie about the last years of the writer, Iris Murdoch, as she slowly perished of Alzheimer’s disease.

The last time I got all weepy about the brevity of life I was watching, ‘Longtime Companion’, a movie about the epidemic that was taking a bite out of my generation. Life gets you coming and going.

There’s been some good news lately in the fight against HIV, and it’s not just about pills. Today’s NYT says that a miracle cure may be on the horizon that will save untold suffering in laboratory mice prone to Alzheimer’s. Maybe it will eventually help people, or we can train the mice to remind us where we left our glasses.

Keep cool, friends.