Category: Uncategorized

 

Headlines are everywhere. The airlines are furious with Vice President Biden for his remarks urging people to avoid air travel and crowded spaces. 

 

Me? I’m so beyond Joe. I think people should avoid the airlines in the United States because they stink.

 

The seats smell. The air filters are never replaced. They don’t have running water in the restrooms. They don’t clean the shit off the flors between flights. They stink. They stink. They stink and they stink and they stink.

I’d ratehr travel by donkey cart sitting in moldy hay than fly on most of the regional airlines in this country. You think I’m kidding? Don’t kid me. I’ve seen it all. Diapers in the magazine racks; half a sandwich on the floor under my seat. (My dog found it.) Who knows how many snots and boogers there are on the arm rests?

 

Joe Biden was right. People should avoid flying. If not for the swine flu let’s just say in the service of general health.

 

I won’t talk about the rudeness of airline employees who routinely treat people with disabilities like simpletons or burdens or worse.

 

I’ll just stick with the smell.

 

They stink.

 

S.K.

 

They stink.

 

Graz, Austria

 

Tourists are fighting at a near table

In this cafe close by the mountain,

Something about losing the map or the tickets

My French isn’t what it used to be.

Borges I remember your witty comment on the Falklands war,

Britain and Argentina

“two bald men fighting over a comb”.

It was worse than that of course:

Thousands of children dead for an ink stain.

Still I like these mornings out of the library

Taking the lottery of blind streets wherever the numbers fall.

NO one should confuse aestheticism with sightlessness

Or imperial ambitions with the washroom.

I hold close to strange paths in every city.

In general, meeting people there

Is the antidote to showing off one’s clothes.

 

 

S.K. 

Yes, the iris gleams upon the burnished dove as Bertie Wooster would say. T’is the season when a lad wants to dance upon the freshet and lassies long to be saved from trained assassins for verily that’s what spring is for?

From The Inimitable Jeeves:

After breakfast I lit a cigarette and went to the open window to inspect the day. It certainly was one of the best and brightest.

Jeeves,’ I said.

‘Sir?’ said Jeeves. He had been clearing away the breakfast things, but at the sound of the young master’s voice cheesed it courteously.

‘You were absolutely right about the weather. It is a juicy morning.’

‘Decidedly, sir.’ ‘Spring and all that.’ ‘Yes, sir.’

‘In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.’

‘So I have been informed, sir.’

‘Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest gloves, and the old green Homburg. I’m going into the Park to do pastoral dances.’

I don’t know if you know that sort of feeling you get on these days round about the end of April and the beginning of May, when the sky’s a light blue, with cotton-wool clouds, and there’s a bit of a breeze blowing from the west? Kind of uplifted feeling. Romantic, if you know what I mean. I’m not much of a ladies’ man, but on this particular morning it seemed to me that what I really wanted was some charming girl to buzz up and ask me to save her from assassins or something. So that it was a bit of an anti-climax when I merely ran into young Bingo Little, looking perfectly foul in a crimson satin tie decorated with horseshoes.

 

S.K.

Steve won't post this, but I will…
 
~ Connie

A special thank you to Nicole Riehl for writing and submitting this article and to Tim Schoon, photographer.

Through his teaching, writing, and outreach, a faculty member
strives to create an academic culture that celebrates and explores the
experience of disability.

P.S. There are plenty of other remarkable people with much to celebrate.  You'll find their stories there too.

 

I’m in the mood for a fractured fairy tale.

Tell me again the story of how your business or college can’t modify bathrooms for people with wheelchairs or put assistive devices in the hands of students or staff. Tell me over again how this minor and utterly legistlated matter is just too hard for you, even as you spend money on non-essential things like computerized security cameras or a new fleet of trucks or fancy copiers or expensive coffee or, well you get the drift.

People complain that the ADA is an “unfunded mandate” as though Democracy requires a hand out. But the ADA says that when you’re doing the daily business of your business you will make modifications to help people with disabilities even as you modify the rest of your programs and services. In short, all the ADA requires is good budget planning when management is performing the routine task of doing business.

Someone told me not long ago that the ADA was “a burden” and they explained how replacing a broken elevator in a parking garage was a horrible expense.

I suggested that if you didn’t replace the elevator you might as well tear down the garage since people will stop using it.

Its not always fair to blame the ADA because the real life pressure of doing grown up business is hard.

But people still do it.

Tell me again how you can’t do your jobs and how the people who need elevators or ramps are just killing you.

Its estimated that people with disabilities and their families have half a billion in disposable income here in these United States.

The ADA is just good business. Unless of course you don’t like your job.

 

S.K.

 

The article below comes to us from The Inclusion Daily Express. 

Police Arrest Disability Rights Activists At White House Fence
(ABC News)
April 27, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt] Police have started to arrest some of the disabled protestors picketing outside the White House right now. Almost all of the 400 demonstrators are in wheelchairs.

“Shame on you, Obama is a liar! Shame on you, Obama is a liar!” some are chanting.

They’re here from all over the country — Texas, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania — to protest what they see as President Obama not sufficiently supporting the Community Choice Act, a bill that would amend the Social Security Act to provide those with disabilities and older Americans the ability to use federal funding for community-based attendant services instead of just for nursing homes.

ADAPT wants the Community Choice Act to be included as part of the overall health care reform package. The White House says that President Obama supports CCA, but whether or not it’s part of the overall health reform effort hasn’t been decided.

Entire article:
Police Arresting Angry Members of the Disabled Community Who Are Picketing White House
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/police-arrestin.html
Related:President Obama fails to lead on Community Choice Act (ADAPT)
http://www.dimenet.com/hotnews/archive.php?mode=A&id=7106;&sort=D

91 Arrested When ADAPT Told Obama Administration Won’t Support Inclusion of Long Term Services in Health Care Reform (ADAPT)
http://www.dimenet.com/hotnews/archive.php?mode=A&id=7107;&sort=D

Well I don’t know about you but in my Finno-Ugrian culture we celebrate the concept of International Workers Day with a vast party–one that by an American analogy would be the combo of St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve. The Finns (who threw out the Communists not just once but three times) are not disposed to waxing nostalgic about the Bolsheviks and the Menshiviks but they are very certain that the rights of workers really matter in the life of a free state and by God they work hard and they go out and celebrate like, well, like Finns. Lock up the delicate china and watch out for your feet: there will be wildfire revelry in honor of all who work like hell. I wish I could be in Helsinki by the end of the week.

 

S.K. 

 

Dear Senator Arlen Specter:

 

As  a life long Democrat who grew up in a life long Democratic household where we sang the praises of F.D.R. and we knew all the words to “Happy Days Are Here Again” and wherein we knew the difference between the National Industrial Recovery Act and the W.P.A. all I can say is God Spead Arlen Specter!”

You see being a Democrat in the years after L.B.J. means having to say you’re endlessly sorry about every position that you have stated publicly and then changeing your mind at least a hundred times before finally comprimising whatever it was you were thinking in the first place and then in a final rhetorical collapse you say that you didn’t say what you said you said, you just said (insert incomprehensible tautological assertion here).

So being a Democrat will be a challenge for you. IN the G.O.P. no one ever says they’re sorry. There’s no crying in baseball and certainly there are no tears in the Republican Party.

You will have to figure out how to say things that you mean and then un-mean them before meaning them while suggesting it all might have been otherwise. This isn’t a prevailing skill in your old party but its the lingua franca among the Dems.

Maybe you can toughen the old donkey up a bit? She used to be tough. She really did. 

In the meantime don’t get me wrong. We’re proud to have you. You’ve stood on the side of fairness for children and for the ill and you are a sagacious and reasoned pollitician in an age when these qualifications have all too often been routinely overlooked by demagogues and spinners.

 

We are rooting for you sir.

 

S.K.

Dear M. Proust,

First, an apology. When I tried to read excerpts of your tome In Search of Lost Time as an undergraduate French major—well, let’s just say I wasn’t your biggest fan. Your sentences are often very long, and as a student of French, it seemed impossible to keep track of the subject and predicate of each sentence, let alone come to any deeper understanding of your meaning. I complained a lot, and am pretty sure I read some Cliff’s Notes in the bookstore on more than one occasion, although in my defense, I never bought them.

Fast forward ten years. Several months ago, I saw that a local independent bookstore, Skylight Books, is hosting a Proust reading group that over the course of the next year is dedicating itself to working through all six volumes of In Search of Lost Time. I signed up immediately, thinking that if I’m ever going to get through all six books, I will need a support group. Plus, the book group is reading you in translation instead of in your original French, which is a definite bonus.

Tonight, I’m headed off to the third book group meeting and I can only describe my feelings for your work this way: I am in love. Granted, I’m only a couple hundred pages into Volume II, Within a Budding Grove, which technically means we’re still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, but so far, I’m in love. I’ve actually said in the course of an ordinary conversation with other people, “This reminds me of something I was just reading in Proust.” And in describing your work, I think I have actually used the phrase, “my Bible,” which probably made you throw-up in your mouth a little. I know this means I’ve entered some strange new circle of the elitist world of literary snobbery with which I already run, but I can’t help it. I’m in love. And here’s the thing: I thought I would be the youngest person in the book group, that it would be me and a gaggle of octogenarian women (my interests—and sometimes my clothing—tend towards the 80-something crowd), but I was totally wrong. I’m not even closest to the youngest person in the group, which apparently has had record community interest.

And in this world of Twitter communication and overly busy people answering email while waiting in line for their coffee, isn’t it wonderful to spend seven pages reading a description of a woman’s dress? Isn’t it wonderful to make the time to relish four pages of description of one flower in a vast garden of flowers? One phrase in a musical composition? You write with such wit about social interactions that I’ve actually laughed out loud while reading your words, and your writing about love is nothing short of amazing. In just the first two volumes, you’ve already touched on classism, homosexuality and even disability, subjects I didn’t expect to discover in a work written almost one hundred years ago.

I’ve said it already: I am in love. And I want to thank you for your keen eye on the intricacies of the world, how we interact with and honor and hurt other people, how memory works, how we fall in love and grieve and rally ourselves beyond unbearable pain. I feel transported every time I open your work and while I’m eager to get to the end—to find out how Swann and Odette actually ended up married, what happens with Gilberte, how young Marcel finds his way in the world as an adult—I also feel so grateful for the journey. This time, there won’t be any Cliff’s Notes—I’ll take every page you wrote.

Most Sincerely,

Andrea

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB

 

You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

I’ve been a Boston Red Sox fan since I was a mere babe. There’s actually a family photo of me in myBoston Red Sox  “one-sie” taken circa  1956 around the time I was 1.

I’ve listened to a million hours worth of ball games on the radio and though blind, I’ve followed an equal number of hours watching games on TV. And never in my roughly 48 years of baseball consciousness have I seen someone steal home. And so the sight of Boston’s Jacoby Ellsbury diving over the plate last night against the New York Yankees was extrasweet.

Mr. Ellsbury is the fastest man in baseball and he has a very good eye.

Check it out: http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=bos

Of course as a blind person who navigates in traffic with my cane or my dog I like to think about plunging headlong into the unknown. I love all such stories whether they’re about sailing or leaping over the parapets. I like what Mr. Ellsbury had to say about how he spotted the Yankees’ pitcher Andy Pettit looking inattentive and then deciding to go:

“Once he rocks back into his windup, he has to go home with it,” Ellsbury said. “From that point, it’s a footrace.”

“The biggest thing is getting the courage to go, I guess. … In a situation like that, you’ve got to make it. It could be one of the worst baserunning mistakes. When I saw Andy go in his windup the previous pitch, I thought, ‘I can make it.’

“It’s just a matter of going at that point. It’s bases loaded and a 2-1 ballgame. The last thing you want to do is get thrown out at the plate.”

I know just what he means.

S.K.