Pop Culture Thursday

Today I'm catching up with one of my favorite TV shows: House, MD. I missed a lot of episodes last year, due to a scheduling conflict so my loss has turned into DisabilityNation's gain, hopefully.

I can already hear Rush Limbaugh foaming at the mouth about this one. He'd probably call it another in a series of liberal-spawned "frivolous lawsuits", given that the defendant is a tourist hotel and host to baseball camps. Critics of the ADA rarely think our amusement is worth getting worked up about, especially when the State of New York orders a business to pay it back $20,000 for its access-violation investigation.

To our critics, we are seldom more than a noise to be silenced.

I read this article about the new community housing options offered in Illinois, as a response to the younger disability community, and there's a certain irony in it.

As a single woman in an urban center with a disability,I find myself searching for many things. But I face one search that Carrie Bradshaw never had to stick in her MacBook: the search for the perfect wheelchair.

You'd think the dizzying array of choices available since the Everest & Jennings dominated eighties
.(weren't those colors awful? I had most of them, too: that sickening greenish-brown, the lackluster blue, the not-really red) the lighter materials, and the zippier styles would make Wheelchair Purchase angst a thing of the past

When I was a kid I had a very complicated wheelchair with many tiny movable parts. So on our vacation to Disneyland, being that we would be riding in a friend's car, my parents decided to leave the marvel of engineering at home in favor of renting one of the Mouse's more standard models. Mom still gets emotional about what came next. Another tourist, lame Hawaiian shirt and all, mixed my party in with two little boys who were goofing off in the rental chairs.

As we draw nearer to the close of the Summer Olympics and the wall-to-wall coverage of the various events, stories of the toll these games have taken on the Chinese people continue to leak out, despite incredible efforts by the government of that nation to hide the reality of life in China. Now we read of two women in their late 70's and how they have been sentenced to a year in a labor camp as part of what the chinese government refers to as a re-education program. While you pause and wonder what threat two little old ladies could pose to China, know also that one of them is blind and has other disabilities.

In June DN brought you coverage of the investigation in to the death of Esmin Green, a patient at a mental health facility in New York. Unfortunately, another case with somewhat similar circumstances has turned up in Goldsboro North Carolina. This incident took place in April of this year, about a month prior to Green's death.

Nurses at North Carolina's mental hospital in Goldsboro walked past a patient sitting in a chair for more than 22 hours without giving him food or helping him to the bathroom before he died, according to an investigative report released Monday.

History has shown us that housing people with disabilities in institutions has resulted in abuse, neglect and reinforcing stereotypical attitudes held by many in society. Countless examples of this can be found with little effort and research. For many years the disability community has advocated for the closure of institutions and a move toward community based living. Yet, as the final institutions across the country close I'm left wondering about those who aren't getting the level of care they truly need.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the way we die in America.

It seems that too many people die alone and in pain after losing all their resources to the Broken Health Care System.(TM) So, in theory at least, I could support a more humane solution to end-of-life concerns.

Unlike many in Disability Nation, I'm not completely opposed to assisted suicide, but I never envisioned it as a cost-saving measure.

Good Morning Yahoo is a daily Internet video program that takes a light-hearted approach to news and current events. Earlier this week the program explored people with disabilities participating in action extreme sports. Check out these athletes in action.

Ok, so I was raised with this whole thing we guard our politics like our secret shame(and given that I was raised as the pinkest pinko in Pinkonia in a state famous for bursting Goldwater love, maybe it was), but I've loved this statement of Obama's on disability since I saw it on Livejournal.

The link includes an editorial written by Barak Obama published on July 26th, the 18th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Obama recounts the experience of his wife's father who had MS, the challenges it posed to the family and his determination to continue working and providing for his family.

Tropic Thunder hasn't even hit the big screen yet but is causing a lot of controversy, especially among organizations representing people with intellectual disabilities. The film, which premiers on Wednesday, August 13, features a cast of well known Hollywood celebrities including Matthew McConaughey, Steve Coogan, Nick Nolte, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr. and Ben Stiller.

Maybe we'd all have remembered Danieal Kelly if she'd managed to compete in a few beauty pageants like Jon-Benet.

Jean- Dominque Bauby had everything, an exciting job as a fashion-magazine editor, children, a wife and mistress, before he had a stroke out in the French countryside and developed "locked-in syndrome" in which a person can sense and understand what goes on around him, but can only move very limited parts of his body. In Bauby's case, he dictated his whole autobiography using a system connected to blinks of his left eyelid.