Susannah Breslin, a writer and blogger who did much to bring attention to The 19th Floor back when I was still a fresh-faced n00b in the blogosphere, has a great interview up on BoingBoing with Sarah Scott, who blogs about life with a spinal cord injury. Here’s a snip from the interview:

SB: Why do you blog?

SS: I started blogging for a few reasons. I was desperately lonely and going through all these sort of insane experiences that no one could understand, and I was desperate to be able to explain them in such a way that people would be able to understand without reverting to all the chair stereotypes that I was just a bitter, mean, crazy person now. There were a lot of people in my life that didn’t make the transition to be able to see me first and the chair second, and it was heartbreaking. I thought online I could control things in such a way that people would see me again. In the beginning, it was very much about control.

As things have evolved, I started to ease up on that obsessive level of control and start showing the darkness too. It turned out to be hugely therapeutic for me, and I hope that it humanized me for a lot of people as well. More than anything, I want people to see me as a person and not as an object of pity or otherwise. My story is really about grief and catastrophic change, and I think most people at one time or another in their lives can relate to that.

Sarah’s blog, mayday productions, contains some lovely examples of her photography as well as some sharp and honest writing about coping with the clueless and the cruel. I’ve added Sarah’s blog to my feed list and I look forward to reading her on a regular basis. And big kudos to Susannah for continuing efforts to bring attention to the work of bloggers with disabilities.

About ten years ago, I contemplated a move to California. I had a possible job lead and I liked the idea of never experiencing subzero windchills ever again. But now that California has revealed itself to be a political and economic basket case, I’m kind of glad I stayed away. The state’s budget woes are hitting people with disabilities hard, prompting protests and sit-ins. I’m no fan of my governor, but at least he’s not suggesting that my nurses and I get fingerprinted as a fraud mitigation measure.

California doesn’t have a fraud problem. It has a structural deficit problem. Minnesota is in a similar boat and is only one more anti-tax governor away from having to issue its own I.O.U.s.

Thanks to Scott for the tip.

My e-mail management technique over the years has left a lot to be desired. Ever since I completely switched over to Gmail, my inbox has gradually swollen in size because I was too lazy to do anything with all those e-mails that, for one reason or another, I wanted to preserve. My inbox’s clutter finally started to annoy me, so I spent a couple hours sorting and archiving 1,000+ messages. My inbox is now completely empty; a null void of nothingness. It’s actually a little unnerving.

As I was going through all those e-mails, I noticed that I had failed to respond to a few people. If you’re still waiting for a reply to that e-mail you sent me in 2006, you might want to send it again. My response time should significantly decrease, at least until my inbox starts filling up again.

You wouldn’t know it today, but St. Paul used to be a hotbed of criminal activity during the Depression. Ma Barker spent some time hiding out in St. Paul, as did Machine Gun Kelly. And John Dillinger, the infamous bank robber and subject of Michael Mann’s latest film Public Enemies, also made St. Paul his home for a brief while. The movie makes no mention of Dillinger’s sojourn in Minnesota, but it does follow his trail of mayhem through Indiana, Chicago, and Wisconsin. Mann has always been fascinated with dangerous men and their dangerous business; Public Enemies is no different. Johnny Depp inhabits Dillinger’s character with a retro mixture of charm and malice that hearkens back to the early days of Hollywood. The movie even draws a sly comparison between Depp and past leading men in a scene set inside a darkened cinema.

This being a Michael Mann movie, there’s gunplay. Lots of gunplay. The shoot-out scenes here are carefully orchestrated and stretch on for several tense minutes, surpassing that climactic gunfight in Heat. The whole notion of bad guys in trench coats and fedoras wielding tommy guns and making their getaways in lumbering Fords is cliched, but Mann makes it work. Christian Bale is great as the G-man determined to catch Dillinger while French actress Marion Cotillard play’s Dillinger’s resilient moll. Mann knows that we’ve seen this all before, but it’s still compelling stuff.

This is what you get when you fuse narcissism with technology:

It won’t be long before I’m producing and starring in a whole series of avant garde amateur videos featuring women in fishnet stockings reciting Victorian poetry while giving me hot-oil massages.