The Seated View

How’s that for a click-bait title? As I was having my breakfast this morning, I read an article in the Toronto Star called Moving from Religious Accommodation to Religious Acceptance . The topic itself is something that interests me, and I thought there might also be some good points that I could use for a post about moving from disability accommodation to acceptance. And then steam started coming out my ears. The article is about anti-Muslim paranoia and its prevalence in Canadian society. The writer makes the point that in order to move past the fear and negative stereotypes that exists in connection to Islam and Muslims, we must “rehabilitate people who probably do not have many personal relationships with Muslims” and engage in “ongoing dialogic work directly with racists, bigots and Islamophobes.” All right, so I’ll give them that. I don’t think the point is made very well that they are talking exclusively about people who have an irrational fear of Islam ...

Back in the day, people were so squicked out by disability that governments felt compelled to make ordinances preventing citizens who had disabilities from being in public places. They were called "ugly laws," not referring to the laws themselves, but to the state of appearance which they were intended to curtail: " No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, or shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under a penalty of not less than one dollar nor more than fifty dollars for each offense." - Chicago Municipal Code , sec. 36034, repealed 1974   I've written about the freak label before and at that time, it was in connection to a story about how a BBC children's show host with a disability prompted a number of formal complaints from the public. Today's post is ...

The news matters. This is the central tenet that runs throughout Dan Rather's Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News . Woven through stories of 60 years working in the news, Rather has written a passionate argument for keeping the news independent and unbiased. And then he tells you why this is an important topic, but does so in such an interesting and entertaining way that you don't notice you're learning something crucial. The book starts with his version of the events that led to him leaving CBS news. Namely, the reporting about Abu Ghraib and his report about George W. Bush's time serving — or, more to the point, not serving — in the Air National Guard. These are the stories that put corporate interests right up against reporting the truth and the truth lost. Rather offers up his side of the story and even if you subtract some of it to account for personal bias, it's a doozy. If you assume that just half of it is true — allowing for an exaggerated am...

Thanks to everyone who left a comment in last week's contest , three quarters of you voting for Wish Upon. Thank you also for giving me this moment of publicly telling a certain someone that I told you so. Which is not to say that I don’t like Christmas Come Again, I do – I like its intense Christmasness – but I figured the other would be more versatile. I have obediently changed the packs around in the shop . And speaking of winners… I messed around with a random number generator and the winners of the calendars are comments #3 and 12. Congratulations kallajer and deb bennett! Contact me at landers5ATgmailDOTcom with your full names and addresses and I'll get the calendars to you right away. The other day, I saw a bit advertising an upcoming story on one of the local news shows. Called Everyday Hero - which leads me to believe it's a bit of a series - this particular episode was a portrait of a woman with MS. The woman is a wheelchair user and her MS has affected her eno...

This one started building in early December. Christmas shopping was in the air, it was cold enough that you could see your breath as you walked down the street and Tiger Woods had been caught with his pants down. Well, more specifically, with his car plowed into a tree, which led to a much more salacious situation of which we have all heard more than enough. I mostly ignored the thing about Tiger until the day I clicked by the Toronto Star to see a bright yellow banner, with a "Breaking News" red line at top. Had a world leader been assassinated? Had there been a natural disaster? Nope. I was so mad, I saved a copy to my hard drive, thinking I would rant about it later: WTF? Tiger Woods making a statement about his personal life now qualifies for this level of media response? Are you kidding me?? How on earth is this news, never mind urgent, breaking news? Anyway, I rented to a few friends, the moment passed and although the irritation remained, muttering in the backgro...

I've gone on before about the madonna/whore dichotomy of disability portrayal in miscellaneous forms of entertainment, such as TV series, movies, books, etc. And disability means either long-suffering saintliness or it's an outward manifestation of inner evil, leaving realistic portrayal of disability as just another facet of a person's life to… well, CSI . However, I've seen a couple of things lately that have been a welcome break from that. L uke on The Amazing Race . Let's face it, in the first episode, nobody expected the deaf kid and his mother would be part of the final three. That they are in the finale is in large part due to Margie (the mother) rocking the challenges so thoroughly she could probably win this race all on her own, but also on Luke's competitiveness and fearless use of features of the race that people are normally too nice to use. It was his idea to U-turn another team very early on (for the uninitiated, that means they have to do an extr...