I was walking near the Guthrie yesterday and noticed an attractive, middle-aged woman with auburn hair and sunglasses heading in the opposite direction. My nurse said to me, “You know who that was? Melissa Gilbert.” Gilbert played Laura Ingalls in the TV series Little House on the Prairie and she’s currently playing Ma Ingalls in the Guthrie’s musical adaptation of the same. I would never have recognized her if my nurse hadn’t said anything. It was the absence of pigtails and a bonnet that threw me off.

I’m taking this opportunity to plug my friend Kelsey Neumann’s newly hatched blog. Kelsey is a delegate to this year’s Democratic National Convention and she’ll be blogging on her experiences throughout the week. Kelsey also has spinal muscular atrophy, which means that she’s sure to snag plenty of photo ops with party bigwigs and accumulate all kinds of interesting stories. Keep checking in with Kelsey for her coverage of the events.

Kelsey, you better bring me back a button or something.

I stumbled across this list enumerating the qualities of good blogs. A couple highlights:

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot.
Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity
about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about
it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this
person’s obsessions take them?

When I first started this blog, I wanted to make it all about fishnet stockings. But then I realized that there’s only so much you can say about fishnets (i.e. “those look HOT!”) before you start repeating yourself. So I decided that I needed to branch out in other directions. But even when I’m blogging about disability issues or Battlestar Galactica, I usually have fishnets on the brain.

Another tidbit:

Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that
creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a
little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating
the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is
written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses
more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.

So that’s my problem. I might be compelled to try harder if I wasn’t always so damn distracted by persistent thoughts of women in fishnets.

The BBC reports that the forthcoming Beijing Paralympics might contribute to more enlightened attitudes about disability amongst the Chinese. The article emphasizes that Chinese with disabilities still face long odds of achieving any meaningful integration with mainstream society, but there are at least a few emerging social programs that offer job training. It’s not much, but it’s an improvement.

The Paralympics may change some attitudes, but it’s really the forces of globalization that will usher in a different perspective on disability. As more Chinese with disabilities become aware that their Western counterparts have more opportunities to work and live independently, they may put growing pressure on their own government to do more. And if living standards continue to improve, the government–and society as a whole–may be more inclined to oblige. Of course, the West has a long ways to go to achieve full integration and acceptance of people with disabilities, but it’s probably fair to say we’re a few steps further down the road.

I continue to be a big fan of Gmail (and if you’re using Firefox, you can make Gmail look real purty with the Better Gmail extension). It’s a cinch to find old messages and accessible from anywhere. But news from the past week contains reminders that the on-line computing “cloud” upon which we are increasingly reliant can sometimes send a lightning bolt down on our heads. One on-line storage service lost most of its customers’ files and couldn’t do much more than issue an apology.

While Gmail has served me reliably, other users have not been so lucky. That’s why I recently backed up all my Gmail messages to my hard drive. The loss of my e-mail archive would be devastating to me and it’s worth the extra hassle. Someday, cloud computing may be sufficiently reliable that such precautionary measures may not be necessary, but that day hasn’t arrived yet.