Spent much of today painting my condo. And I must say, it’s looking good. Tomorrow, we do the bedroom and that should be a wrap. Pictures forthcoming.

I’m taking bets on when we’ll hear the first reports of someone getting fired because they were caught in their cubicle watching porn on their video iPod. While watching movies on a tiny screen doesn’t interest me much, the ability to download television episodes for a small fee is likely to be far more groundbreaking in the long run. It will be interesting to see how many content producers get on board with this concept and license their stuff to Apple. Could Apple risk becoming a monopoly in its own right as the dominant purveyor of digital entertainment? Such a scenario would be deliciously ironic.
Speaking of irony, my brother is due to get a now-outdated audio-only iPod as a belated birthday gift. I wonder if he’ll be pissed.

I listen to the Nightline podcast from time to time and they recently did a show on adults with autism. I give Nightline credit for doing a story on adults with any kind of disability. Every local news station in the country probably has an entire shelf in their archive labeled “Cute Handicapped Kid Stories.” But adults with disabilities aren’t as cuddly, at least not according to the media. (I happen to be very cuddly, but that’s another entry.) The story discussed the enormously important role that parents play in the lives of their grown children with autism, and how the transition to adult services can be quite jarring for these families. School is the bedrock in the lives of a lot of kids with disabilities. School gets them out of the house and is often their only forum for making friends and building social skills. When that familiar setting is gone (and a lot of people with developmental disabilities crave routine), it takes a lot of effort to replace it with something else that gets them out into the community.
And where the hell are the disability podcasts? I just did a quick Google search and the results were disappointing. There are podcasts out there featuring people talking about, I shit you not, their bowel movements and we can’t come up with a disability-themed podcast? Don’t make me do it myself. The disability community must have a bunch of better-sounding people than me who could do a weekly podcast. So where are you?

The reports of 20,000 dead in Central and South Asia put our own hand-wringing about Katrina into some perspective, don’t you think? I certainly am not implying that one tragedy is inherently worse than the other. But we Americans have a curious reaction to large-scale disasters. I think we’re accustomed to reading about disasters in faraway places as we sip our morning coffee. But when the shit hits the fan here on the home turf, we act all shocked and surprised, like we’re the first people anywhere in the history of the planet who had to go through this. Because we’re Americans, goddamnit. If it doesn’t happen here in the States, then it hasn’t really happened yet. We’re such a media-saturated culture that we can’t place disaster outside the fictional realm of television and movies. When the media interviews the poor schlubs who are coping with the aftermath of a disaster, at least one of them will say, “Man, it was just like what you see in a movie.” Maybe that’s a consequence of both our geography and technological sophistication. When the Big Bad, whether natural or man-made, does slam into our reality, we don’t have any context for it other than a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
For some reason, my keyboard died (the physical one, not the on-screen version). So I’m off to hunt a replacement down.

I was just checking out Salon’s new page design. I used to read Salon all the time before it went subscription-based. It was one of the first websites that I visited on a regular basis. In fact, it played a major role in introducing me to a lot of music and books that I probably never would sampled otherwise. Now I read that, holy fuck, Salon is celebrating its 10th anniversary next month. When the hell did that happen? Too bad Suck isn’t still around. Suck had some brilliantly funny writers. But I digress. I like the redesign well enough that I think I’ll finally purchase a subscription. And maybe if I write enough kiss-ass letters to the editor, they’ll let me do some guest-blogging.