I just made my first deal with a Craigslist ticket…er…purveyor. Of course, I got taken for a ride, but I did manage to talk the seller down a bit from the original asking price. I’m only paying 100% markup instead of 150%, so yay me and my semi-competent negotiating skills. But I’ll soon have tickets to the sold-out Passion Pit concert at First Avenue (assuming I didn’t get totally ripped off). Now, how badly do I want to go the sold-out Yeasayer show?
Frederik Pohl is one of the few surviving members of science fiction’s Golden Age elite and the only one to maintain a blog. I spent some time perusing it today and it’s filled with wonderful stories about his friendship with Isaac Asimov, the rapid rise of the science fiction publishing scene, and his own career as a writer and futurist. Pohl is 90 years old and still writes with clarity and verve. Some SF writers are cranks and misanthropes, but Pohl’s blogging has the same compassion and wit that made Gateway one of my favorite books. I hope he continues posting for a good long while.
The tea leaves are foretelling a final vote on the health care bill in the House of Representatives by the end of next week. Guess who will be glued to C-SPAN late on Friday or Saturday night when the vote finally occurs? For extra uber-nerd points, I might even liveblog the floor debate. Because you know the House members do one thing extremely well: say batshit crazy things on live television without any sense of shame or irony. And the vote itself is likely to be extremely close. To borrow a phrase from the kids, this is going to be epic.
I’m posting early today because I’ll probably be away from my computer for much of the evening. I’m training in a new nurse and I’m trying to come up with a plan for covering everything she needs to know. It will probably look something like this:
– Mark’s Hair: Care & Maintenance
– Mark’s Ventilator: What The Hell Are All These Dials For?
– Mark’s Hair: Advanced Care & Maintenance
– Mark’s Remote Control: Unraveling Its Secrets
– Mark’s Wheelchair: Taming Its Inner Beast
– OMG, Mark’s Turning Blue!: Keeping Cool in an Emergency
Dennis Kucinich, allegedly liberal congressman and confirmed weirdo, is planning on voting against the health care bill because it lacks a public option plan. He represents a noisy but fringe element who believes that anything short of a single-payer system is selling out to insurance companies. Never mind that the Senate bill would give millions of people access to Medicaid, a public health care program. Never mind that the vast majority of MoveOn members (hardly a bastion of moderate centrism) support the bill’s passage.
Kucinich is free to vote his conscience, but most of us progressives are interested in, you know, making some actual progress on the issue. Thumbing one’s nose at a sensible solution for the sake of making a dubious ideological point is the worst kind of egotism. I found it repulsive when Lieberman did it and I’m not any more sympathetic to Kucinich.
You know what my wheelchair is missing? A vodka-cranberry juice dispenser. And a smokestack. And brass control levers. And sound effects. In other words, pretty much everything found on this steampunk-themed wheelchair. The guy who designed this chair doesn’t say whether he does work for hire, but I wonder if my savings are sufficient to pay for a similar custom job. I’ll pay extra if he can come up with copper ventilator tubing that coordinates well with my ascot and goggles.
Thanks to William for the link.
Disney just released another trailer for Tron: Legacy. It’s not quite as eye-poppingly cool as the first one featuring the racing lightcycles, but I approve of the updated look. Namely, the several very attractive women inhabiting the world of Tron are no longer forced to wear those ridiculous head-to-toe costumes. Apparently, the Master Control Program developed a sense of style that didn’t exist online or offline in the early 80s.
It had to happen sooner or later. The first commercially available brain-computer interface has just hit the market. The Intendix (a horribly bland name for such a cool technology) comes with a skullcap and a little netbook computer that displays a grid of letters. Users type by focusing when the desired letter is highlighted on the screen. And it can be yours for the low price of $12,250.
This kind of exorbitant pricing is de rigeur in the world of assistive technology, so I’m not particularly surprised or even outraged. But this technology is different; it’s not inherently limited to people with disabilities. Sure, we’ll be the early adopters out of necessity, but these interfaces should gradually improve. People without disabilities will eventually want brain-controlled computers and that should foster competition and lower prices. At least, that’s my hope.
As a blogger who frequently blogs about pop culture, I’m legally obligated to make some sort of completely uninformed Oscar predictions. So here’s one: Avatar will snag Best Picture (because the Academy wants to demonstrate that it “gets” the movie-going public that made this movie such a juggernaut) while Kathryn Bigelow will take the Best Director award (because the Academy recognizes that The Hurt Locker is a better film and it wants the Monday morning news to be about how that particular David-Goliath match-up ended in a draw). And here’s another: Christoph Waltz will win Best Supporting Actor for his menacing yet alluring portrayal of Colonel Hans Landa or there is no justice in this world.
Darcy Pohland, a local television reporter for WCCO who also had quadriplegia, died unexpectedly yesterday. I don’t watch the local news much anymore, but I remember seeing Pohland on TV when I first moved to Minnesota and being genuinely surprised at seeing a person with such a significant and visible disability making regular appearances in front of a camera. I hesitate to use the term “role model” when describing anyone with a disability, but Pohland’s regular presence in the local media landscape probably shaped some of her viewers’ attitudes on disability for the better.
Pohland was 48.