CHAT: OT CHAT: Asperger's syndrome

The NY Times Magazine, Sunday 6/18, had an article entitled "The Little
Professor Syndrome.....They talk like adults and often have sky-high IQs,
but their social skills are nonexistent..."  (The cover blurb was "Brilliant
little boys with an awful syndrome".)  The official definition, according to
the Learning Disabilities Assn. of America: "a severe developmental disorder
characterized by major difficulties in social interaction and restricted and
unusual patterns of interest and behavior".  ..."the syndrome was only  made
official among psychologists by entry into the ...Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders in 1994."

Well, God bless the medico/psychologico/educational establishment.  It must
be terrible for a teacher to be corrected by a 10-yr. old.  (BTW we're not
talking idiots savants or "Rainman" type disorders.)

Other highlights:  "Scholars have retroactively applied the Asperger's label
to oddball intellectuals ranging from Glenn Gould to Vladimir Nabokov."
 Who needs them, anyway? ]  OR:  "Asperger's kids often memorize everything
there is to know about the oddest things:  deep-fat friers, telephone cable
insulating companies, exotic species of cicadas."  Deep-fat friers, that IS
weird; perhaps we could substitute "languages both real and artificial"?

Apparently the good people in pharmacology are looking for a remedy.  Just
what this poor world needs, a pill to suppress intelligence.

Good grief.  Read it and weep.  I say, poppycock!