Enjoy the weekend. I’m off to New Tristram to exercise my clicking thumb and perhaps give myself a cramp.
Jun 012012
May 312012
The Sundance Channel is premiering a new reality/documentary series entitled Push Girls, which focuses on four Los Angeles women who have varying degrees of paralysis and use wheelchairs. The first episode is available on the website and I plan on watching it when I have the time. It’s great to have any representation of disability on television and I’m glad these women are getting a moment to shine in the public eye.
But based on the trailers for the show and interviews like this one from Ellen, Push Girls seems a bit too narrowly focused for my taste. All of the women are astonishingly beautiful and seem to require little personal assistance. They also acquired their disabilities later in life. I’m sure they encounter plenty of discrimination and clueless people, but their experiences are bound to be vastly different than those of most people with physical disabilities. The show could be so much more interesting if it included stories of women with other disabilities who may not be as attractive as these four, but who still have interesting stories to share.
It may sound like I’m hating on the show because it features women who are gorgeous and nobody who looks like, well, me. That’s not my intent. Plenty of people with disabilities are physically attractive and their experience of gimpness is just as real as mine. I’m just not sure that Hollywood can grasp any notion of disability that goes beyond an attractive person in a sitting position. I can’t remember the last time I watched a TV show or movie featuring a person in a wheelchair who didn’t look like an actor sitting in a wheelchair. Push Girls is a step above that, certainly, but I just wish that the show’s producers had shown more of an interest in showing the audience a more complete picture of disability.
May 302012
If you’re planning on seeking admittance to the New York bar in 2013 or later, you’ll need to put in 50 hours of pro bono work first. While I certainly support instilling an ethic of volunteerism in new lawyers, I’m not sure this is the best way to do it. Not everyone is suited to doing pro bono work; making it a requirement will only compel some people to resort to deception to satisfy the bar. And then there’s the questionable wisdom of foisting hordes of unlicensed law students on low-income people with real legal problems. Proper supervision and oversight from experienced attorneys would allay my concerns, but I’m skeptical that will happen.
What do my fellow attorneys think?
May 292012
I meant to post this last week, but here’s a short documentary entitled “Waiting for Health Care” that ran in The Times. It captures moments in what is a likely a typical day at an emergency room in Oakland, California:
The events depicted here are probably similar to those of any other major urban medical center, but the video does highlight how difficult it is for most uninsured people to access preventive care . Many of these folks could be treated more efficiently and inexpensively at an outpatient clinic, but that’s simply not an option for the uninsured. The ER is the de facto primary care clinic for millions of people, which strains hospital resources to the breaking point and deprives patients of quality care.
And if the Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act, ER waiting rooms will continue to serve as the triage nurse for the nation’s dysfunctional health care system.
May 282012
I had no idea that The New Yorker was doing a science fiction issue until I received my weekly subscriber update in my inbox this morning, but I’m excited to check it out. It features fiction by Jennifer Egan (whose A Visit from the Goon Squad is well worth your time) and Jonathan Lethem, as well longform pieces on Doctor Who and aliens in movies. Even the cover–an alien, a robot, and a ray-gun wielding human crashing a New York dinner party–is a clever homage to the genre and something I would consider framing. Either editor-in-chief David Remnick is a huge geek or the geeks on his staff browbeated him into greenlighting this issue. Either way, it’s further proof of how thoroughly geek culture has influenced mainstream taste.
A video promo of the issue can be found here.
May 252012
Congratulations to the SpaceX team, whose Dragon capsule became the first privately owned vehicle to dock with the International Space Station. The day when “space trucker” is a viable career option can’t be too far in the future. Perhaps SpaceX can be persuaded to become one of the first official corporate sponsors of the oft-postponed zero-g deathmatch between me and Stephen Hawking. We thought we had a commitment from Google, but then Hawking had to go and make a snide tweet comparing Google+ to the emptiness of space. So much for British cordiality.
May 242012
While mind-controlled robotic arms are undeniably cool (and just a teensy bit ominous), some of us gimps may not want to go through the trouble of getting our skulls cracked just so we can re-enact scenes from Over the Top. But we still want to be able to feed ourselves the occasional snack while catching up on Game of Thrones. Luckily, there’s a robotic arm that does just that without requiring the installation of any internal hardware. A team of Northeastern University engineering students have developed the iCRAFT, or eye Controlled Robotic Arm Feeding Technology. The user simply gazes at a particular food choices on a screen and a robotic arm scoops up a mouthful of the desired selection and delivers it to the user’s mouth. Here’s a video of the arm in action:
The iCRAFT’s serving sizes are a bit much for someone like me, but perhaps it could be programmed to feed me individual Junior Mints.
May 232012
So some Scottish kid started a blog cataloging the sheer awfulness of her school lunches. And now the site is racking up millions of hits worldwide and making local bureaucrats nervous. Clearly, I don’t get this whole Internet thing anymore. Perhaps I should redesign my banner graphic or start posting pictures of puppies. Granted, the kid’s website has a clean design and the content is pretty clever.
Puppies it is, then.
May 222012
NPR reports the sad news that disability rights activist Katie Beckett died last Friday from health complications. I’ve written previously about Katie and how, as a child with a complex medical condition facing permanent institutionalization because Medicaid wouldn’t pay for home care services, she earned the attention of the Reagan administration and won the right for her and countless other children with disabilities to remain at home while receiving the care they require. She made a profound difference in the lives of kids like me who might have otherwise spent our childhoods in medical facilities apart from our families. My life is immeasurably better because of what Katie accomplished and her friends and family should be deeply proud of her legacy.
May 212012
I learned today that former Community showrunner Dan Harmon identifies as someone with an autism spectrum disorder. It may be that his atypical brain wiring contributed to his recent firing, which would be a shame. Harmon and his fellow writers have done a superb job of making Abed a deeply nuanced character coping with a similarly configured brain; I hope that doesn’t change in Harmon’s absence. Lesser writers could be tempted to turn Abed into a caricature of himself, making him a source of cheap laughs. The rest of the show’s writers and cast probably won’t let that happen, but I’m still going to miss Harmon’s influence on what has become one of the most adventurous scripted shows on television.