Traffic around the Twin Cities seemed relatively light today. I didn’t experience any major delays traveling between Minneapolis and St. Paul, although officials from the Department of Transportation remarked that the real test of post-collapse traffic will come on Monday. Estimates on the time it will take to rebuild the bridge range from one to three years. One thing about the news coverage is bugging me: the 35W bridge does not connect Minneapolis and St. Paul. 35W is a north-south highway that runs through Minneapolis and several western suburbs. While the Mississippi does serve as a demarcation between Minneapolis and our fair twin city to the east, the river takes a turn north and runs through the center of Minneapolis. This happens near the spot where yesterday’s tragedy occurred. It’s a small but significant detail and it seems to have escaped much of the national media.

Some commentators are already using the bridge collapse as a touchstone for the larger issue of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. This discussion is long overdue. but it’s deeply unfortunate that it took a tragedy like this to prompt it.

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to an on-line art exhibit featuring side-by-side pictures of real-life individuals and their on-line game avatars. I made particular mention of this picture of a gamer with a disability. His name is Jason Rowe and he’s interviewed in this NPR story on people and their gaming personas.

Rowe wears a ventilator mask that reporter Ketzel Levine describes as “ominous”. Ominous? Really? These are things I find ominous: Jabba the Hutt’s laugh, Dick Cheney’s petrified scowl, anything by Nine Inch Nails, the rattling sound my van just started making. A ventilator mask? Not so much.

Sorry for the lack of posting yesterday. There seemed to be some sort of clog at my end of the internet tubes. Hopefully, the Drano that I poured into my cable line solved the problem. You can recall the search teams. More soon.

It’s Friday night, so why not slip into something more comfortable and check out the latest Disability Blog Carnival on the topic of sexuality. I thought about contributing a post, but I thought it better to spare my regular readers another anecdote about my innumerable erotic adventures. I mean, I can only tell the one about sharing a rooftop Jacuzzi with triplet exotic dancers in Miami before it starts to get stale. And the only reason I’m sitting here at my computer on a Friday night is because I’m saving up my energy for a marathon session of debauchery tomorrow evening with a couple of Brazilian nursing students.

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Listen, this little exercise in self-delusion isn’t going to work if you’re just going to sit there and smirk. I thought you were my friend. Not cool, man. Not cool.

Here’s a music video about two star-crossed lovers: a beautiful blonde woman and a young man with Down’s Syndrome. The video strikes just the right tone: bittersweet but not maudlin. I particularly liked the treatment of the woman’s standoffish best friend. Thanks to BoingBoing for the tip (and mad propz to the BB team for being so clued into the disability scene).

And I just e-mailed the Current DJ to correct him on a poetry reference he made. Despite my best intentions over the years, I can never seem to completely suppress my know-it-all tendencies.