There's no doubt that Whitey Bulger is the scariest big white thing since Moby Dick. Whitey is way scarier than that big white spider in Robert Frost's poem. Heck, he's even scarier than Kate Smith when you get right down to it.
One day, playing a cerebral game with a pal, I said that you could reduce Melville's signautre novel to one line: "Always remember what's under the boat." The FBI might have done well with that proviso?
S.K.
Nira, ever loyal, looks out the door of my new office in the Renee Crown Honors Program at Syracuse University.
The story of young Matthew James who has recently received a high tech prosthetic hand is a reminder that the human body's natural place as the determinant of "normality" is changing in our time. As a guy with two fake lenses in his eyes I can admire this story with visual magnification and report that this is one cool hand!
"What do you do if you want to upgrade your pathetic meatsack of a body and become a cyborg? If you're Matthew James, a 14-year-old from Britain's Berkshire, you write a letter and end up with a bionic hand.
Born without a left hand, James became enamored of the i-Limb Pulse from Scotland's Touch Bionics, but his family couldn't afford the roughly $48,000 price tag.
After the head of Formula One racing team Mercedes GP Petronas visited his school, James got up the chutzpah to write a letter to the organization's Ross Brawn asking for help in getting an i-Limb Pulse. He suggested the team sponsor what would be a cybernetic part of his body.
Brawn agreed to help, but struck a technology-sharing deal with Touch Bionics in which most of the fee would be waived. Now James has a new hand."
See Full Story:
Here is guide dog Nira checking out her four season room in her new house in Syracuse, NY.
There is always time for a bone!
Not long ago I was trying out some of the new hand writing applications for the IPad. There are several to choose from and while they all seem to have some promise, most of them tend to reduce one's writing to a kind of scrawl–just the way those supermarket credit card machines can ruin your signature. I was joking about this with a friend the other day and I said: "Well, there goes the Palmer Method!" We're both mid fifties-ish guys who can remember being drilled in cursive writing way back in the first grade. So technology will probably finish off anything that resembles hand writing but now there's news that today's young celebrities can't write at all.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/08/10/handwriting.horror/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn
S.K.
I have been following this story closely. My dismay at the foot dragging by the law board examiners and ACT regarding the provision of assistive technology for a blind law student is now moderately relived. Shame on ACT.
S.K.
Law Student Wins Federal Case Against Testing Examiners
(Forbes)
August 9, 2011
BURLINGTON, VERMONT– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Deanna Jones, a third-year law student who's legally blind and learning disabled, has won her first big court case: her own.
Jones sued the National Conference of Bar Examiners in July, accusing it of violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by refusing to let her take a key legal ethics exam using a computer with screen access software that she has used to read in college and in law school.
Armed with a federal judge's order, she was able to take the test Friday, closely watched by a proctor, test supervisor and someone from the ACT, Inc. testing company, she said.
Jones, who attends Vermont Law School with hopes of practicing disability law, needs the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam to practice in Vermont. The NCBE fought her request and plans to appeal, saying the security of its pencil-and-paper test could be jeopardized if taken electronically. The organization had offered instead to have someone read the test to Jones, to let her take the test in Braille, in enlarged print, and use an audio CD.
But a judge ruled Tuesday that the examiners had to provide her a laptop equipped with the special software.
Entire article:
Legally blind Vt. law student wins 1st big case
http://tinyurl.com/4yxhcet
Related:
Law student takes home a win in her own federal case (WCAX)
http://tinyurl.com/3owgd6n
Dock spiders the size of your medulla; bumble bee circling as I type; wild turkeys walking, heads thrust forward, looking like velocoraptors–which they are; no boats on the big lake, too early even for the fishermen–Monday, iffy weather report, Thunderstorms likely. Storms are thrilling on this island. The whole lake is surrounded by mountains. There are no rattlesnakes left out here, the locals ate them long ago.
S.K.
Dreamt I was in a coracle out on the Irish sea;
Dreamt I was singing sympatico with my circular boat;
Or did the boat dream me?
S.K.
No one wants to hear your shit—but remember that day in Helsinki when the kid (still a teenager) thought you were personally responsible for Viet Nam? (You told him you were.)
Or remember thinking there’d be a day for standing up straight with your head clear, liberated at last?
Look! I am pushing a large, black wool ball down a dark corridor!
This is a dance for the poets in my country. (The poets with their green suspenders, cartoon flash lights and customized angels…)
Your head clear, liberated at last…
Poetry is not being renewed. I hate to sound like Kenneth Rexroth but have you noticed they’re killing all the young people?
My lines limp rather much the way the blues always do.
Remember thinking you’d live to achieve a double minded smile?
SK
Planet of the Blind 