Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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Scandal-plagued Donald Sterling is fighting his wife Shelly's attempt to sell the NBA Clippers, and her claim — based on two medical exams — that he has Alzheimer's.
In L.A. Superior Court yesterday, Sterling ridiculed the doctors and his wife's attorney.
One paragraph stood out in James Rainey's coverage of yesterday's proceedings in the L.A. Times (emphasis added):
Dr. Meril Platzer and Dr. James Spar first reviewed scans of Sterling's brain, then interviewed him and conducted a battery of tests. They reported that he had trouble spelling the word "world" backward and counting backward, by sevens, from 100. (As in 100, 93, 86, 79, etc.) His mental deterioration made it impossible for Sterling to continue as a trustee of the family trust that controls the Clippers, they concluded.
My guess is that most readers tried that little test themselves, trying to spell out D-L-R-O-W and then counting backwards from 100, by 7s. (Those are just two steps in the Mini-Mental State Evaluation, a standard for testing mental impairment.)
RELATED: The entire Mini-Mental State Evaluation
Admit it, you just tried, too! It's not easy, as we found out when Off-Ramp intern Alana Rinicella asked KPCC staffers to take the same test. Listen to the story to hear what happened.