Busy day today. I’ll try posting again later tonight.
May 192006
May 182006
The mainstream media isn’t touching this story, but a few progressive blogs are reporting that Karl Rove may be indicted Friday. Could be true, could be a lot of smoke. An indictment might be enough to sink the President’s poll numbers into the high 20s. Not that this President needs much help in becoming ever more unpopular. The story about phone companies collaborating with the NSA’s secret effort to construct a massive database of Americans’ calling records isn’t likely to go away soon, particularly in light of the federal lawsuit filed against some of the participating telecoms (kudos, by the way, to my regional Bell, Qwest, for telling the NSA to screw off). Iraq is still a complete mess. Gas prices are still high.
If there’s any good news to be had, it’s that Americans seem to be growing weary of this Administration. These two maps compare Bush’s current approval ratings with those of a year ago. I’m still not confident that we can capture either the House or the Senate in the fall, but watching this country come to its senses gives me a total case of the warm fuzzies.
May 172006
The Star Tribune did another disability-themed story yesterday about Rollie Berg, a St. Paul man living with multiple sclerosis. The article describes how Berg uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking, an off-the-shelf speech recognition software package, to operate his computer. I continue to be dismayed that speech recognition technology hasn’t made more significant advances in the couple decades since its introduction. A colleague of mine uses this method to access her computer and I’ve watched her struggle with the software’s penchant for erroneously transcribing her words. I can’t imagine cranking out the amount of writing I do each day using an interface that seems more than a little unreliable.
That, and I think I’d get a little self-conscious about my nurses overhearing my end of my sundry and torrid e-mail correspondences.
May 162006
I’m writing this entry much later than usual because I was co-teaching a Civics class and then went out for drinks with some of the students afterwards. I don’t think I’ve written much about my involvement with Civics Connection. We’re a small organization that promotes “active citizenship”–building a person’s capacity to be an effective leader in the places where they are invested (work, community, etc.). We offer a ten-week educational seminar in the fall and spring to young professionals in their 20s and 30s. I was a student last year and then I ended up on the Board of Directors. A few weeks ago, I was elected Board Chair. Now I can check off Step #3(b) in my plan to achieve total world domination.
May 152006
If somebody out there can hook me up with 2-3 tickets for the musical Wicked on July 22nd or 23rd, I’ll be your bestest friend for life. I’ll write your kid’s college term papers and I’ll even throw in a few years’ worth of free computer tech support. My younger sister is desperate to see this show and I wouldn’t mind making it a birthday present for myself. I can usually get accessible tickets to big events, but no such luck this time.
By the way, don’t forget to mark yourself on the Frappr map if you haven’t already done so.
May 142006
The US Army is the target of much media flak for recruiting 18-year-old Jared Guinther, who has autism. The Army released Jared from his contract, but I’m a little troubled by the way the press is portaying people with autism. Autism is shorthand for describing a whole spectrum of capabilities. Asperger’s Syndrome, sometimes referred to as the Geek Syndrome, is thought to be a mild form of autism. People who fall on the more significant end of the autism spectrum are not necessarily any less intelligent than the rest of us. Autism generally describes how a person perceives and interacts with the world; it doesn’t say much about one’s cognitive functioning.
If I was the parent of this kid, I would certainly not want him shipped off to Iraq. But I’m willing to bet thousands of people with autism have served in the military over the decades, many of them quite capably. We should not assume that people with disabilities should be automatically excluded from any facet of public life in America, including service in our armed forces.
May 132006
The other day, I e-mailed a young woman whose profile I came across on Match. She seemed bright, self-aware, and most definitely cute. I wrote her a quick message introducing myself. The following day, I checked my e-mail and saw a reply from her. I started reading it.
It was from her mom. Apparently, Mom had set up the profile in an effort to get her daughter to meet some nice young men. Mom screened the responses that were sent to her daughter but, as Mom went on to inform me, her daughter was having none of it and wasn’t interested in pursuing any of the candidates presented to her. In my various forays into on-line dating, I don’t think I’ve ever received a response from someone’s mother, so this was a new experience for me. Mom did seem to like what I wrote and said that she would put in the good word for me with her daughter. Of course, I’m unlikely to meet either one of them, but at least I wasn’t dismissed as “not good enough.” But what mom wouldn’t want her daughter dating a brilliant young attorney with an undeniably winsome personality?
This concludes my daily self-affirmation exercise.
May 122006
During the question and answer portion of Wednesday’s forum on disability, policy, and opera, some dude raised his hand and proceeded to make the following observation:
My dog plays with the neighbor’s three-legged dog and they seem to get along fine. The four-legged dog treats the three-legged dog like anyone else and the three-legged dog doesn’t seem to notice that anything’s wrong with it. It seems that dogs have all this stuff figured out already. We could learn a lot from them.
I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. So I guess the solution to disability discrimination and marginalization in all its pervasive forms is for every household to have a three-legged dog that can serve as a model of behavior and a source of inspiration for all us humans (especially the denser ones among us). Ideally, the three-legged dog should have a four-legged companion, just to emphasize the point, but the four-legged dog could probably be optional. Dogs are so cool. Not only do they have highly developed codes of ethical behavior, but they also get to run around naked and lick themselves in public. We could learn a lot from them.
May 112006
The new Apple ad campaign is clever and I admit that I identify more with the laid-back Mac persona than the suit-and-tie Windows PC. I’m still on the fence as to whether my next computer will be a Macintosh. I might wait to see how Leopard compares to Microsoft Vista, assuming Vista is eventually released. If anyone from Apple is reading this, how about lending me one of your upcoming PowerMac desktops and letting me blog about Mac accessibility vs. Windows accessibility? The first computer that I could use with my HeadMaster was an old Mac. Convince me to rejoin the fold.
May 102006
I’m trying to make my place a little more inviting by adding some plants and I need your suggestions. I have a jade plant that’s been with me for a decade and a friend gave me some kind of ivy a few months ago that seems to be doing nicely, but a couple of pansies just died on me. I’m not always great at remembering to water my plants (and then I compensate by overwatering them), so I’d like to find something that won’t punish my occasional inattention by shriveling up immediately. I suppose I could get a cactus, but having a cactus seems to be an open admission that I’m incapable of taking care of something that is even the slightest bit demanding. I’m not sure that’s the message I want to convey to visitors, especially the cute ones.