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. 

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. 

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.

I encountered this story a while ago and it pissed me off then.  It still pisses me off.  The FDA is close to approving a vaccine for the human papillova virus, which causes cervical cancer in women.  The vaccine will likely save thousands of lives.  Most people would struggle to see the controversy in such a thing.  But leave it to the paranoid, sex-obsessed religious right to crank up the histrionics and proclaim this medical advance a threat to public morality.  The vaccine is most effective when administered to girls between ten and twelve years old.  Social conservatives make an argument so absurd and ignorant that it’s completely horrifying: administering this vaccine to girls will instantly transform them into wanton hedonists. 

 

Religious conservatives love to depict themselves as defenders of family values, but I often wonder to what degree their worldview is influenced by a deep-seated, almost pathological fear and mistrust of female sexuality. 

 

Thanks to Digby for reminding me how much this story annoyed me. 

One thing that really pissed me off about my server outage last week was that I missed out on participating in Blogging against Disablism Day on May 1.  The event was organized by Goldfish of Diary of a Goldfish and she did a magnificent job of spreading the meme; the list of participating blogs is long and varied.  I’ve spent some time looking at the various posts and I’m encouraged to know that there are some quite talented bloggers with disabilities out there in the ether.  Great work, Goldfish.  I look forward to participating next year.