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My schedule had the period between July 10 and August 6 reserved to go to Southeastern Guide Dog School just across the Skyway Bridge in Manatee County.  Instead, early in June, I received a phone call from Rita, the Southeastern person in charge of student affairs, in which she asked if I could arrive the following day.  A couple of hours later I returned her call and said I would arrive the following afternoon.  Thus, I fell into a near total anxiety attack, took a couple of colonapine and worried myself to sleep.

The next day, Wednesday June 7, sedated by various prescription psychiatric medications, I hopped into the Toyota and my lovely wife Susan drove me to the guide dog school.  There, a young woman approached me, handed me a leather strap and a harness and said, “Let’s pretend I am your dog.”

While I thought she a bit aggressive, I couldn’t turn down this kind of kink so I grabbed hold and played along.  After we walked around some concrete paths, she asked me to yank hard on the leash.  I complied.  Then, she gave me the leather strap and told me that I had become the proud owner of a new guide dog leash.  I wondered what sort of weird fetish this person dug but agreed to follow along.

A whirlwind of very nice and highly competent staff people helped Susan and I bring my things to my room and, after an hour or so, I settled in and Sue returned home to St. Petersburg.  Having nothing to do, I sat in my room and started to worry.  Another sedative helped my neurotic self calm down a bit.

A loud knock at my door followed by the statement, “Hey Chris, its Rick,”” jarred me out of my semi-nap.  I yelled “come in” and Rick, the Southeastern Director of Training, accompanied by a yellow lab entered my room.  He introduced the dog as “Xcellerator” (pronounced ex cellerator) and told me that he (the dog) and I would become a team.  He suggested I try to bond with the animal and left us in the room together.

At home, we have a 20 pound Corgi/Yorki mix.  Xcellerator weighs just over 75 pounds and seemed to feel as much anxiety as I did.  “Great,” I thought, “I’m locked in a small room with a neurotic dog and can’t find a way to calm myself.”

I played a bit with the dog until Rick returned and brought me to an office where he would show me how to put a harness on the animal.  We practiced this a bit and I returned to my room and put the harness away.

I got to meet the other students at the 3:00 pm feeding time.  They had only had their dogs for a day longer than me but it seemed an enormous advantage at the time.  They also generally seemed to know each others’ names and the names of the staff.  I did my best to introduce myself while trying to heed the requests of the trainers to keep my dog under control.  This didn’t turn out to be a simple task but got better over time.

My next encounter with the other students came at the 5:00 pm human feeding time.  Someone told me to tell my dog to “go down and under.”  Having no idea what this meant, I asked the woman to my right who would be my table mate for the rest of the month.  She, a three time guide dog user, told me what to do.  The explanation came simply; the action did not.  Finally a trainer told me how to keep the X-Dog under control and I was able to free up my right hand to eat as much of the dinner as I could.

The entire meal, as would be the case for all meals while I was there, had a high volume narration from a loud mouth redneck who felt it incumbent upon himself to speak constantly at the highest volume his voice could support.  The loud mouth redneck (LMR) would provide a continuous level of annoyance for the rest of the students for most of the month.  The mere presence of the LMR, however, caused the rest of our highly diverse group to bond more tightly than we might otherwise have as we shared a common irritation.

After dinner, we brought the dogs out to do their business (the X-Dog negotiated a very complex intellectual property contract with a goldador named Shatzi) and we students returned to the day room to watch television.

The combination of assigned seats during meals, following a strict schedule of training and lectures and sitting around a day room with the others made the place feel a bit like a cross between a detox/psychiatric facility and Riker’s Island.  

As most of our regular readers know, I am a highly neurotic sort.  I, therefore, felt extreme anxiety, fear, doubt and insecurity upon arriving which took some time to fade.  I have trouble trusting people so finding myself thrust into a group of unfamiliar blinks supervised by a team of unfamiliar sighties scared the poop out of me.  I do not have the vocabulary to express my gratitude strongly enough to the Southeastern staff and most of the other students for helping me climb down off of the ceiling, relax a bit and calm myself enough to learn to work with a guide dog and make a lot of new friends.  I know, this paragraph is borderline melodrama but I truly feel a tremendous level of thanks to the people at SGD and my fellow classmates.

My generally neurotic self led me, at the beginning, to behave in my totally pompous, self important manner for quite some time before I felt I could grow comfortable with the others, even a little.  Thus, I found that I had talked my way into becoming the assistive technology technical support guy, a role which, at first, helped boost my ego but, soon, caused a high level of discomfort as the LMR would pound on my door asking questions about which JAWS keystrokes do what.  I finally got to the point where I would only respond by saying, “Read the f**king help file!”

Of course, the role I fell into came as the result of my own know-it-all behavior.  Mike Calvo came for a visit the following week and I did my best to hand off the LMR to him as I felt the redneck would do better using FB than JAWS and, although Mike is a good friend, I would have to sacrifice a couple of hours of his sanity to protect my own.  Mike did a great job convincing the blinks new to computing that FB would work far better for them than JAWS and I think he probably made about a half dozen sales out of a population of 11 students.

My introduction to the guide dog school caused me to rethink quite a number of things.  I had never, in my entire life, lived in such a structured environment (even detox and county jail had fewer restrictions).  I learned that not all blinks care about JAWS or other AT products and some would prefer to avoid computers altogether.  I learned, once again, that I can, when afraid, turn into a pompous asshole.  Finally, I learned just how hard the people at such schools work and wondered why I get paid such big bucks to sit around in a comfortable, air conditioned environment, thinking up cool ideas and writing them down  while these truly heroic individuals toil in the Florida heat, put up with highly diverse groups of whining blinks, deal with the health care of dogs and humans alike, clean up poop, vomit and doggie phlegm, work 25 hour shifts and manage to do so smiling and with an enthusiasm I don’t think I’ve ever felt in the corporate world.  My work, as it tends toward the theoretical, may never see the light of day; the trainers and staff of SGD send people home with a guide dog and, if the blink works the animal properly, they will have a tool that they can employ to greatly improve their independence as well as a loving friend.  Maybe we should declare a guide dog school employee appreciation day or some other way to acknowledge all of these hard working people who toil away in relative anonymity.

— End

By Gonz Blinko

Shortly after we got the note from BC, one of the local bikers overheard a conversation in a blues bar that suggested that our mission had been found out.  We had to go into deep cover which, of course, meant I couldn’t write anything for Blind Confidential and we had to move out of the luxury hotels and into tents along the Manatee river, tool sheds and other rat and mosquito infested hell holes.

Sam and I sat with El Negro, a friendly retired Navy Seal and our friend Snake from the Hell’s Angels.  Sam had thought to bring tactile maps so I could follow along as we planned further spy missions.

Snake, who had gathered a ton of intelligence from bikers friendly to our cause and I, who had done about a billion google searches on the names and addresses we thought were likely prisons for blinks, had narrowed the list down to two.

“I don’t think that the guide dog school would be holding a prominent blink as a prisoner.  The publicity would kill them and their contributors would flee like rats from a sinking ship,” I stated when Snake suggested that BC might be held at Southeastern.

“But the other place has a huge sign that reads, ‘NFB’ with a subtitle on its gate that says, “Work will set us Free.’”

“Sam and I have spent a lot of time in Florida and we’ve never heard of an NFB facility in Manatee County.  What’s its address?”

Snake read me the address and I launched the Manatee County Department of the Registrar database which I had hacked my way into a few days earlier.  The property was indeed owned by an organization called NFB but not the National Federation of the Blind.  This NFB, listed as a non-profit corporation, actually was named “Not For Blinks.”  A little further research on the State of Florida State Department web site showed us that Not For Blinks was a real 501©3 non-profit with the right to raise funds both nationally and in Florida.  Furthermore, the organization had a president named, Sydney T. Greenbacks.

“Bingo!”  I shouted as I read the information to the others.  Sam, El Negro and the Seal, who didn’t want us to even use a nickname to describe him (he seemed pretty paranoid) had been planning assaults on both locations and, now, we focused all of our attention on the NFB reprogramming camp.

***

The camp had four guard towers, on each at the north, south east and west corners of the compound.  We could approach the north corner via the Manatee River, the east and south seemed to be covered by fairly dense forest and the west faced the Gulf.  The Seal asked for one of the helicopters and said he’d take control of the landing from the Gulf side, El Negro and a handful of Angels joined him and started working on a combined Arial and sea assault.

“I’ll work with the north team as we can approach via kayak on the river and, when the guardsmen think we are a happy bunch of tourists out for a picnic, we’ll fire away.”

“I’ll take the front gate,” said Snake, “A bunch of us Angels can blow the doors off and roll right in.”  The front gate was the only area that had access to a road so we felt the bikers should handle this one.

Sam and BC’s wife flipped a coin over the remaining corners and each took control of a helicopter.

***

We spent the rest of the night readying our weapons and working with our teams.  I had a handful of BPP guys with me and we used kayaks lent to us by PPO.  The stress thickened as dawn approached and we jammed ourselves up with espresso.

The kayak team left camp first.  The boats felt a bit tippy loaded down with all of the military hardware but the Manatee River at low tide is shallow enough for us to walk in if we had to.  Kropotkin had never paddled before so we put him on a tandem with a sightie and loaded them down with assault rifles.  We all had mosquito suits on and had covered ourselves from head to toe with Deet.  We had a few fishing Rods, supplied by friends of BC at Discount Tackle in Bradenton to serve as camouflage.  We paddled quietly but shouted to each other like a bunch of beer swilling fishermen.

When we reached our landing point, about 100 yards off of the north corner of the compound; we put lures on our lines and tossed them into the river hoping that a bass or gar would ignore them so as to avoid any distractions.  We waited for our signal from El Negro and the Seal.

***

At exactly 5:45 in the morning, before the sun had risen more than a crack, we heard the explosions out of the west.  Soon, a fire ball bright enough for me to see lit up the Gulf side of the facility.  The kayak team grabbed our weapons and slowly made our way in through the forest, using the GPS and talking compass on our MSP enabled iPAQ devices.  

Kropotkin took his group to one side of the corner and I moved to the other.  “Listen for explosions to the south or wait ten minutes in case BC’s wife gets caught before firing,” I commanded.

“plug in the GPS coordinates into the RPG,” whispered Kropotkin to those holding the rocket propelled grenades.  “Those of you with rifles, fire at the sound of the nearest explosions and flames if you can see them.”

“Once the tower falls, retreat to the river and head west to the Gulf,” I added, reinforcing the plan we had repeated all night.

***

My radio bleeped, “Gonz,” I whispered.

“It’s Sam,” said the familiar accented voice.  “The western tower dropped, the chopper is approaching to the south, the Angels are ready to charge in right after you guys start firing and we’ll be right after you.”

“Sam?”  I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied.

“Good luck, I love you,” I said in a peculiarly sentimental moment.  “Hell,” I thought, “If we might get our asses killed for an annoying paranoid boss, we might as well say our good bye with honesty.”

“Shut up,” whispered Sam, also in an especially sentimental voice.

We heard the south tower explode.

“Showtime!”

***

I lifted my RPG and squeezed the trigger; Kropotkin must have launched his a half second before me as I could hear it screaming toward the tower as mine shot off of its handle.  A couple more went toward the north tower and the explosions were spectacular.  I don’t have much experience with serious military type assault tactics and found myself standing still, petrified with fear.  A BPP guy whacked me on the back of the head and yelled, “Get your ass down, DOWN, DOWN!!!”

I hit the ground as if by instinct and heard bullets whizzing over my head.

I pulled out my AKM and started firing in the direction of the tower.  My BPP buddy did the same and yelled assurances to keep the others calm.  I would later learn that he lost most of his vision in Viet Nam and this situation wasn’t at all new to him.

***

From our vantage point on the north corner of the compound, we could hear more explosions, see a few more fireballs, and hear the yells of humans and barks of dogs as we retreated to our kayaks.  I had unloaded 4 32 round clips and had five more.  We left everything but the assault rifles behind when we reached the kayaks.

As we paddled toward the Gulf, we continued to hear lots of gunfire, explosion and shouting.  An occasional voice from a team member would shout something on the scrambled digital radio but none of it pertained to our team on the river.  We followed the plan, paddled as swiftly as we could and tried to reach the river mouth, El Negro and the Seal.

The NFB guys obviously knew that they had been hit from the north but stopped firing in our direction.  I guessed this meant that their perimeter had fallen and that the Angels were inside.  We paddled as quickly as possible and did our best to follow the plan instead of thinking of what the others might be doing.

**

My radio blipped again and I heard Sam’s voice, “We got him!”

We hadn’t even reached our meeting point for the next stage of the operation but Sam was already loading BC and “11 other blinks and some dogs with whom they’ve grown fond onto the Segorski.”

The “Not For Blinks” team folded quickly but the heat seeking missiles aimed at Sy T. Greenback’s helicopter missed as he took off toward St. Petersburg and, presumably, his friends at Freeman Scientology.  Five of the NFB guys would be found charred and cold by the time the Manatee County Fire department reached the scene.  About a dozen others would need hospitalization.

***
  
“An unexplained series of explosions and fires knocked Manatee County residents out of bed last night when a secret, illegal prison reprogramming camp was attacked by unknown forces dedicated to the liberation of blind people held captive there,” said the local news reporter.  Chet is on the scene with this report:”

“As you can see behind me, Manatee County fire fighters have stopped the flames and the police and arson teams are seeking any survivors.  It seems that all of the blind captives and many dogs were freed in this suspicious attack.  I have Officer Joe Bolton with me for a comment,” said Chet, “Officer Joe, what do you think happened here?”

“Early this morning, we received a fax from a group located somewhere near Austin, Texas that claimed responsibility for the attack.  They call themselves the Blind Panther Party and said that they would ‘use any tactics necessary’ to further the civil rights of blind people around the world.

“The message claimed that this compound was being run by the owner of an assistive technology company who, ‘would take any steps, legal or otherwise, to prevent blind people, in the US and abroad, from making disparaging remarks about his company, its business strategies or overpriced products.  The fax also said that Mr. Greenbacks would take any anti-competitive actions possible to prohibit blind people from finding ways to build and distribute lower cost assistive technology products.”

Chet asked, “Did Mr. Greenbacks, owner of one of the competing television stations in this market and a large amount of real estate have any comment for the police?”

“As this is an ongoing investigation, I cannot comment on that.”

“Have you any leads on finding the members of this Panther Party?”

“I still can’t comment.”

“Back to you Ed, from the smoldering remains of the Not For Blinks’ headquarters in Palmetto, Florida.”

“Our next story involves a 12 year old boy who has crossed Tampa Bay riding on the back of a friendly Manatee…”

We shut off the television and toasted our team.  BC got up on the bar in the blues and biker club and thanked everyone involved.  With tears in his eyes, BC embraced his wife and his new canine friend Axel, named for the Guns and Roses singer.  He thanked the Angels for their help, the BPP and told me to get down to writing this story hoping there might be a movie deal in the making.

Sam gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and slid quietly out the back door.  When the party dwindled, I hopped on the back of Snake’s Harley, waved good bye to the remaining partiers and sang “Born to be Wild” until we got to the airport.

–End

Afterward

For those of you who didn’t guess already, I was actually at Southeastern Guide Dog School in Palmetto, Florida.  I am back home and Blind Confidential will resume regular programming.  

While at Southeastern, I received my first ever guide dog.  His name is Xcellerator (pronounced ex cellerator) and he is a 76 pound yellow Labrador.  The X-Dog and I get along amazingly well and, to my great delight, he and our twenty pound, corgi/yorki pet dog act like they’ve been friends forever.

I promise I will not turn Blind Confidential into a sappy journal about my guide dog and me nor will I write endlessly about the amusing behaviors he demonstrates.  I love the animal but hate reading sappy essays about the bond between man and beast.

I will, however, start writing a series that I will call “the guide dog school chronicles” from notes I took while captive.  I will write little about the dogs but, instead, the focus will be on the 10 strange blinks I shared living quarters with for most of the past month.  I will also write about the outstanding staff at Southeastern as they worked like hell to teach us the skills necessary to work a guide dog and somehow accomplished the task without suicides, homicides or severe maiming.

My experience in Palmetto was terrific and, if you are interested in getting a dog, I recommend you look into Southeastern while you are shopping for a school that meets your needs.  I recommend, however, trying to get a winter class as Florida can be unbearably hot this time of year.

I’m happy to be back and am looking forward to starting the second six months of Blind Confidential posts.

By Gonz Blinko

I called Uncle Sonny and he sent a couple of the Austin Chapter Angels out to check up on the Chairman.  He also provided us with a ton of Florida guys to help in our rescue mission.  Maybe the paranoia got to me after flying around the globe, going through a hurricane and spending time in Florida, – the epicenter of bizarre.  George W. Bush has his axis of evil but Tampa, Orlando, Miami is definitely the axis of weird.

The Angels from Austin reported back that Chairman Mal and the BPP clearly have nothing to do with BC’s disappearance.  I heard they decided Mal seemed like a decent sort and brought him and a few of the other BPP guys out for a night of serious beer, booze, blues and babes.  I have always trusted those guys as, no matter what the media says, no Hell’s Angel ever did anything to hurt Gonz Blinko and many have helped out with favors and such.  Now, we have a virtual battalion of very hip guys on Harleys helping out down in Florida too.

The Arial recon showed us that Manatee and Sarasota Counties have very little to show for themselves.  It also seems to show that BC is being held either by neo-nazi nutcases or some kind of bizarre Deliverance cult.  For his sake, I hope it’s the former.

Sam showed up at my door with the first report.

“It looks like we have five or six likely compounds where he might be and a few more possibilities that we need to check out.”

“El Negro and the bikers, have they started gathering data on the ground?”

“Yeah, they’re taking a look at all of the spots, the high probables and the others too.  The terrain here kind of sucks.  It’s either the Gulf of Mexico, ugly million dollar condos, trailer parks or the woods.  It seems like these towns have no zoning boards as the layout feels pretty random.”

Just then, Samhara’s mobile phone rang.

“Sam,” she answered.

Then, she switched to French.  I recognized some words and phrases.  Mostly gushy, lovey stuff.  I had never heard Sam go so soft so quick and the kissy, kissy at the end of the call made me wonder if she had been kidnapped by aliens and replace with some kind of replicant.

“Who was that,” I inquired.

“Moes’ former maid.”

“She’s really French?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve gone all mushy on me?”

“Well, Moes and Tristessa fired her after the attack by the guys from Freeman Scientology when they decided to go into hiding.  I’ve heard they’re leaving the country.”

“Getting back to BC,” I tried to bring the conversation back to the topic at hand.

“Oh, yeah, we have some big news.”

“Go on.”
“He managed to kite a message out to his wife.”

“What did it say?”

Samhara reached into her Gore-Tex holster and pulled out a slip of paper.  It is very short and only says, “I’m out of my hed, please hurry for I may be dead, they mustn’t carry out their evil deed.”

To be continued…

By Gonz Blinko

The west coast of Florida extends from the Panhandle all of the way to the Everglades.  Hurricanes tend to behave irrationally so the meteorologists can’t predict where the storm might make landfall.  As a result, while El Negro and I shot at Pigeons and guzzled coffee, Tampa got a fair amount of rain and some somewhat heavy winds but nothing like a real hurricane.  Alfredo went right passed us and on up the coast to make landfall somewhere north.

The phone rang in my suite, waking me up this morning.  “Gonz,” I answered.

“It’s Sam, it looks like we have clear enough skies to send up a skeleton crew in one of the choppers to do some preliminary recon.  I’m going to go with BC’s wife, El Negro and that whacko who volunteered from Freeman Scientology.”

“Should I join you?”

“Not unless you’ve taken up photography.”

“I got some news.”

“What’s that?”

“Chairman Mal contacted me and said that neither he nor the BPP is involved in BC’s disappearance.”

“Could be a decoy.”

“My thoughts exactly.  Do we have any people who can follow him around Austin?”

“We’ll get on it.”

I hung up the phone and turned on my laptop, I thought I should rally up some guns in Texas just in case.”

To be continued…

By Gonz Blinko

Samhara worked with BC’s wife to round up quite a posse from former Freeman Scientology employees and a few Viet Nam Vets that BC hangs with.  We got a rather impressive collection of hardware, most with help from the locals.  I grabbed a Glock 9 with a banana clip, a Mossberg with short barrel, a Ruger .22 with silencer and enough ammo to avoid running out for quite some time.

BC’s wife, a very resourceful woman, I must say, found us two Huey and one Segorski helicopters all rigged with 50 mm machine guns which increased my confidence quite a bit.  Mickey Calvo brought excellent body armor over from Orlando, I don’t think it would help if hit by one of those 50 mm rounds but the claim to hold up to a 545 from an AK.

The phone rang in my suite; I thought it meant we could start some of the recon effort.  “Gonz,” I answered.

“It’s Sam.  We have a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Hurricane Alfredo, the first of the year and it’s heading straight for us.”

“What does that mean for the mission?”

“It means that we hang out with the posse until the bitch blows out of town.”

I’m not the most sociable sort but this seemed like a decent group of folks and they all seemed way into weapons so we’d have something to talk about.  After a couple of hours, surrounded by a heavily armed bunch of BC’s buddies, though, I thought I would lose my mind.

I excused myself and hopped in a cab.  I told the driver to bring me to the nearest Starbucks and he said they had closed for the storm.  I went back into the hotel and headed for the elevator.  One of BC’s friends who calls himself El Negro saw me and jumped into the elevator as I headed up to my suite.  We’ve been sitting here, guzzling coffee and, with silencers on, shooting at pigeons off of the deck.

I don’t know how long this storm will last.  We don’t know if they’ll move BC.  Hell, we don’t even know who’s holding him.

To be continued…

By Gonz Blinko

Samhara and I flew from LaGuardia into Tampa.  New York to Tampa takes just around three hours.  Samhara didn’t know how much Valium to feed me for a trip of this length.  She settled on a 25 mg tablet, just to ensure it would last the entire flight.  The benzo did its job a little too well and, upon arriving at Tampa International Airport, she had to practically carry me off of the plane.  This felt strange, I often fly with Samhara but, when deplaning in those situations, the random traveler can see that I’m blind and that the tall black woman is assisting me; this time, they thought I must just be another drunken tourist on his way down to add to the destruction of Florida’s environment.  Incredible as it may seem, people treat drunks as more “normal” than they do blinks.  I should probably do some investigation on this matter in the future.

Picking up the car and racing out to the Tampa Hyatt remains a blur in my memory.  I remember waking up the next morning to the sound of a phone ringing.

“Gonz.”

“It’s Sam, how you doing?”

“Let’s start with where am I?”

“Tampa.”

“Florida?”

“Is there another?”

“Why?”

“We’re here to rescue BC from whoever is holding him.”

I started to remember the phone message which, for a brief moment I thought might just have came out in some bizarre drug induced sleep.  BC yelled something about highly trained dogs, forced marches and maybe something else too.  

I blabbered all of that to Samhara and she confirmed that it indeed I remembered a real phone message and that we came to Florida to rescue BC from some kind of concentration camp filled with blinks.  We had no additional information.  It might still be the Blind Panther Party or some bizarre neo-nazi group.  In Florida, anything could happen.

Samhara said she wanted to go to a gun show and buy a little hardware sans serial number in the parking lot.  I wished her well but chose to remain in my suite and order some food.  I couldn’t remember my last meal.  Did I eat in Seattle?  Did the sandwich in the Milanese cop shop constitute a meal?

***

I enjoyed a huge American style breakfast and turned on my laptop to see what I might find about a group who may want to kidnap and hold BC.  His stories about Florida really seem to understate the situation.  Every whacko nutcase group, left, right or center has a chapter in the Tampa area.  I fired up Skype to talk to an Asian hottie friend of mine when I noticed that BC’s entry in my contacts folder said, “Online.”

I immediately called him, hoping he might have escaped his captors.  His wife answered.  

“Hello…”

“Gonz.”

“Huh?”

“It’s Gonz Blinko is BC around?”

“No Gonz, I’m really worried.  No ransom note, no nothing.”  She said rather frantically.

“Well Samhara and I have arrived in Tampa and we’re planning on hooking up with Mickey Bald to try to bust him out.”

“Do you know where is?”

“No we’re trying to figure that out.”

“I think it’s somewhere in Manatee County.  I have some recon photos that I’ve taken since he got snatched.”  She said more calmly.

“Can you upload them so I can take a look?”

She said of course she could and then asked what may actually be the most poignant question so far, “How are a blind Doctor of Journalism, an Amazon African attorney and a software entrepreneur going to bust a guy out of a highly guarded camp somewhere in a Florida backwater?”

“I wish I knew,” I told her with little confidence in my voice.

To be continued…

By Gonz Blinko

“Mr. Blinko, you nasty, nasty boy,” giggled Maria as she tossed a handful of soap suds at me.

I laughed as Isabella splashed me with hot soapy water from the other side as she repeated, “You’re a bad, bad man!”

We all laughed and splashed and had a great time in the hot tub in my suite at the Grande Hotel in Bellagio.  I had met Isabella, Maria and Teresa earlier that night, at the bar beside the casino in this terrific resort.  “I love Italy!”  I pronounced as I splashed my new friends and started wrestling with Teresa who bit me softly on the shoulder.

Bam… Bam… Bam…  Someone knocked at the door.  “Shit!” I pronounced as Maria slid out of the tub, grabbed a towel and, in her broken English, said, “Ila take a car of it…”

The rumble of the Jacuzzi jets drowned out the sounds of footsteps so I couldn’t tell how many people had entered.  Maria didn’t get back into the tub and Teresa and Isabella got very quiet.  “Gonz,” asked a familiar voice.

“Sam?”  I asked incredulously, “You knew I had plans…  Can’t whatever this is wait until morning?”

“We have guests,” she responded curtly.

“Tell them to get naked and hop in the tub,” I replied.

“Not those kind of guests,” replied Samhara in a very serious tone.

“Allow me to splain,” boomed an accented male voice, “I am from Polizia Milano and I must bring you to city.”

“I’ve seen Milan, many times,” I replied, “Let’s go tomorrow.”

As I felt the officer’s large hairy hands reach into my armpits my legs untangled from Teresa’s soft smooth ones.  I rose quickly and was placed on my feet on the marble floor and Samhara handed me a towel.  “As your attorney, I advise you to follow this gorilla’s instructions.  Dry off and put on some clothes.  I’ll take care of the girls.”

“I’m sure you will,” I grumbled as I walked toward the bedroom.  I lifted a cup of cold espresso and kicked it back as if it was a shot of whiskey and started groping around for something decent to put on.  “Exactly what does one wear for a police rousting in a foreign country?  The Fodor’s guide book didn’t cover this topic,” I wondered aloud.

***

Samhara hugged me close to her formidable body as Officer Aldo Enzo Ferragamo raced through the Italian Alps toward the nation’s center of opera and fashion.  The siren screamed out in the way one hears them in foreign films.  Aldo must have thought he drove a sports car as we took every hairpin turn at a stunning velocity, tossing Sam and I from side to side in the backseat of the police vehicle.  “Arghhh…  We’re going to die!” I shouted at as I felt a particularly jarring turn toss us against the door on my side of the car.  Aldo laughed, “I ma ina hurry but I always drive fast, we’re Italian, it’s the way we drive.”

I did remember that all Italians drove like Mario Andretti and especially enjoyed terrorizing us tourists.  So, I just whimpered and slouched into Samhara’s lap.

Even at 3 am, Milan bustles so our entrance to the city, accompanied by a far more reasonable speed became obvious to me.  Horns blew, people shouted and it generally felt like an Alpine version of New York.  “Where are you taking us?” asked Samhara.

Aldo just laughed.  “But we just passed the police headquarters,” Samhara insisted.

“We’re going somewhere else,” he laughed again.

“Nothing like a guido with a gun,” I mumbled, “Even worse, a guido with a gun and a badge.”

Samhara didn’t find my comment funny.  She stiffened as the car slowed and Aldo parked at an odd angle.  “We’re at church of Santa Maria delle Grazie,” she said.

“Are we on a forced tour of great masterworks of the Italian renaissance?” I asked as everyone with even half an education knows this is where Leonardo painted “The Last Supper.”

***

As we entered the church’s refectory, I could hear the sound of leather soles striking the stone floor approaching us.  “Dr. Blinko,” said a friendly voice, “It’s a delight to meet you.  I’m a big fan.”

“So you rousted me from my bath in the middle of the night to ask for an autograph?” I responded somewhat annoyed.

“Actually,” continued the Italian official, “we have some police business to discuss.  Aldo, wait outside.  You two follow me.”  He said as he led us further into the famous room.

“I’m Captain Cavelli of the Milan Police Force, Homicide Department.”

“Nice to meet you,” said my attorney, “I am Samhara Akuba, Dr. Blinko’s attorney.”  She handed him a card.

“I guess we all know who I am so let’s get down to business, I have company waiting back in the hotel.”  I urged.

Someone clicked a loud switch and the room became so bright that even I could detect the light.  Samhara gasped and blurted, “That’s Father De Rosa, the art expert, it looks like he’s dead.”

“Very observant Senora Attorney,” stated El Capitan.

“Ok, we have a dead priest on the floor of a church in Milan, what does this have to do with us?”  I asked.

Samhara composed herself and continued, “He wrote a bunch of stuff with his own blood on the floor.”

“And…?”  I asked both disgusted and annoyed.

“One of the phrases says, in English, ‘Find Gonz Blinko!’ and the rest all looks like a bunch of numbers and letters.”

“He has also contorted himself into a silhouette with an elbow on his knee and his bloody fist under his chin.”

“The Thinker,” I remarked.

“What?” asked both Sam and the officer.

“The Thinker,” I responded with some surprise, “The sculpture by Rodin.”

“Rodin?” Asked Samhara, “The Ninja Turtle?”

“No, Rodin, the French artist.”

***

Samhara typed the string of letters and numbers into my PAC Mate so I could read them in Braille as the Captain described various items that seemed out of place in this legendary place of worship.  “Did you know the good father?”  He asked.

“Yes, we used to…” I stopped myself.  “He and I met in Amsterdam…” I stopped myself again.  “You might say that we spent some time together before he became a priest, during our college years.”

“Did you murder him?”

“Officer, he and this church were about as far from my mind as possible this evening,” I said longingly contemplating my hot bath and my Italian guests.

“Why then did he write your name in his own blood while dying?”

“Perhaps he wanted to leave me his art collection?” I suggested.

“He took a vow of poverty,” said the police officer, “he didn’t own any of the art, he just curated it.”

I knew that but found myself at a loss for words and would say just about anything to get back to my hotel.  With little useful to add I called to Samhara, “How is it going with getting all of that gibberish entered into the PM?”

“Just finished,” she said, having somehow snuck up on me.  I took the PAC Mate from her hands and started reading.

“It looks like hexadecimal,” I said. “In fact, it seems to be all ASCII characters.  De Rosa always liked codes.”

***

“What’s it say?” Asked my always curious attorney.

“Mona Lisa Overdrive.”  Are the first three words followed by, “damn, this really hurts and this floor is really cold.”

“What do you think it means?” Asked Cavelli.

“Let’s observe the juxtaposition of his body, the words, the reference to Rodin and the two Leonardo references.  Let’s remember that ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive’ is a science fiction book by Bill Gibson.”

Cavelli and Samhara seemed dumbstruck.

I continued, “Everything in Leonardo’s work came from the triangle, the trinity the sacred vessel of the holy femininity.  There are two references to Leonardo in his message, the position of his body before the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa reference in the title of the Gibson book.”

“So?”  Asked a puzzled Cavelli.

“So, De Rosa left us a hint by only including two, rather than three Leonardo references.  We need to find the third.”

“Where should we look,” asked the officer, who seemed not to believe my explanation.

“Ah, that’s in the other two references he makes in the symbols he left behind.”

“Which means what?”  Asked Cavelli.

“It’s in the triangles, the Gibson book, “Mona Lisa Overdrive,’ cancels out the first two words if divided by ‘Last Supper,’ slow me down if I’m talking too fast, I’m a doctor of journalism after all and decoding obscure artistic symbology has always come easy to me.”

“No, go on,” said the officer.

“Thus, we’re left with the word ‘Overdrive’ which obviously refers to the legendary Canadian rock and roll band, Bachman Turner Over Drive.”

“Gonz, are you sure this is obvious?”  Asked Samhara.  Then, whispering, she asked, “Did you remember to take your meds?”

“Of course it’s obvious,” I pronounced.  “BTO’s biggest hit was ‘Taking Care of Business’ so Father De Rosa wants to point us to a businessman.”

“Milan is filled with wealthy businessmen, should I get Giorgio Armani and Aldo Gucci out of bed too?”  Asked the very skeptical Captain.

“Of course not, he’s telling us which businessman in the references and symbols he left on the floor.”

“Go on,” said the officer, now near laughter.

“Rodin’s second most famous sculpture, after The Thinker is called Gates of Hell.”  I continued, “Thus, the book by Bill Gibson and the statue called Gates says that we should look for the third point in the triangle somewhere in Seattle, with, of course, Bill Gates.”

***

Captain Cavelli didn’t buy my logic.  I thought it seemed obvious but maybe his art history doesn’t come up to my level.  Then again, maybe Sam’s right, I could be sliding into another manic, paranoid episode.  The sickness often hits me when I get pulled suddenly from doing something I really love.  Nonetheless, Cavelli brought us downtown to the Milano Cop Shop.

Samhara and I sat in a drab room drinking excellent coffee.  The Italians really do understand the value of good taste and, even in a lock-up, they serve good coffee.  Cavelli entered our little cell and sat down.  An art historian named Dan Brown accompanied him and introduced himself as he entered.

“The great Gonz Blinko,” said Brown, “It’s an honor.”

“Do you want an autograph too?”  I asked wondering why this nosey American had entered my Italian adventure.

“Mr. Brown called his Harvard buddy Langley and talked about your strange collection of connections.”

“And?”  I asked as Samhara tried to shut me up.

“Excuse me,” she said, “Are you going to arrest us?  Are you going to arrest my client?  I read the EU civil rights manual and…”

“Please, Senora Attorney,” insisted Cavelli, “Let Dan continue with his story.”

“Langley knows Gonz,” continued the American egghead, “He understood his decoding of the murder scene and believes you have figure out where to go.”

“Then we can leave?”  Asked Samhara.

“I do have one request Senora,” added Cavelli.

“Which is?”

“A kiss good bye?”

Samhara punched the Captain in the gut and we headed for the exit.

***

I don’t know exactly why but I always seem to wake up just before the pilot says, “We are beginning our gradual descent into…”  I rubbed my eyes and removed my BOSE noise reduction headphones which still played Glenn Gould’s versions of Schoenberg’s Lieder.  I heard Samhara chatting with a flight attendant and released I had no idea where we had flown to.  One minute, I had been gambling in Bellagio, partying quite actively and now I’m in the first class cabin of a jet going somewhere.  I remain groggy from all of the Valium that Sam fed me when we got aboard in Italy.  I felt my tactile watch and it said 8:30.  Of course, I had no idea whether that was am, pm or what time zone it referred to.

“Sam?”  I asked weakly.

“Gonz?”  She replied.

“Where are we?”

“We are about to land in Seattle.”

“Why?”

“Because you made the connection between Leonardo, Rodin, William Gibson and Bachman Turner Overdrive and we now must meet Bill Gates to solve the mystery.”

“What mystery?”

“The death of Father De Rosa and the connection between Macrohard and the Knights Templar.”

“Where did the Knights Templar enter the story?”  I asked, slowly remembering the events in Bellagio and Milan.

“Every good conspiracy has a connection to the Knights Templar and this one is no different.”

“How do you know?”

“Italian Airways, the airline we’re on, gives us Internet connections so, as you slept, I did some research.”

“And?”

“As you probably know, the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene made its way to France in the form of their daughter Sarah.  She had children who married into the French royal family.  After a while they changed their name to St. Clair and, when the King, on a Friday the 13th in the 13th century, suggested that the Templars be killed, some snuck away to Scotland where they started using the anglicized version of their name, Sinclair.”

“Have you taken your meds?”  I asked Samhara.

“Of course and you should listen to all of this, there’s lots of connections.”

***

Samhara drove our rented Cadillac toward Redmond.  Along the way she filled me in with the strangest part of the conspiracy.  Apparently, Bill Gates spent $30 million to purchase one of Leonardo’s notebooks and, it is believed that he discovered some code in it.

We pulled into the Microsoft campus and drove to the building where our meeting would take place.  “Who are we meeting with?”  I asked Samhara as we walked toward the office tower.

“Here’s where things get really strange.”

“Huh?”  I wondered.

“The guy is in charge of disability stuff and knows you.  Not only that, he’s a Sinclair.”

“Are you suggesting that we are about to meet a descendent of Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene and possibly one of the last members of the Knights Templar?”

“Bingo!”  She proclaimed, “He’s the person who fills in the final side of the triangle.”

“I thought that the Leonardo notebook that Bill Gates bought was the third leg of the triangle.”

“Well, it sort of is…” she continued as Rob Sinclair entered the lobby to bring us into the holy inner sanctum of the Microsoft campus.

“So, Gonz, after all of these years, you’ve found me out,” asked Rob with a smile in his voice.

“Uh, Rob, I’m not exactly sure what I’ve found out?”

“I discussed it with Samhara when she called from the plane,” he continued.

“Who’s paying for that call?”  I inquired.

“BC is paying for all of this, he things there is a blockbuster book and film that he can published on Blind Confidential in this story.”

“It’s all tru,” said Rob, “I am a Sinclair and I’m in possession of the Holy Braille.”

“The Holy what?” I asked.

“The Holy Braille, it’s what we Templars have been saving secretly for centuries.”

“What about Father De Rosa?”

“He got whacked for not paying protection money for his sideline private tours of the great works of Milan business.”

“Then why all of the clues?  Why did he get us involved?”

“He knew you were in town and thought sending you on a wild chase around half of the globe would be funny.  He told me he’d do something like that if he ever took a few from a Beretta.”

“So, all of this was a hoax?”

“Not exactly, he did know that you would be interested in hearing about the Holy Braille.”

“What does it say?”  I asked, my curiosity rising as I contemplated how to get revenge on a dead priest.

“It’s rather complex.  After Bill brought the notebook to Seattle, all of the artsy fartsy people ogled it for a couple of years until I could convince him to let me alone with it for a few hours.”

“What did you find?”

“As I said the remaining part of the Holy Braille.”

“And…”

“Bill and I copied it character for character into an old copy of Symdeb and typed ‘r’ and it executed the Da Vinci Source Code.”

“What does Leonardo’s source code do?”

“As you are not under NDA, I can’t comment on it but we expect it will be included in the Braille services feature of Vista if we can integrate it before the train leaves the station.”

“Can we go back to Bellagio?”  I asked Samhara.

“No, vacation is over, it’s back east for both of us, you have to write this article and I need to check up on Moes’ maid.”

Rob escorted us to the exit.  We thanked him and Samhara gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.  As we walked to the car, I asked, “What was that about?”

“I’ll kiss any relative of Mary Magdeline’s, she was hot.”

–End

By Gonz Blinko

Just as I got passed my security systems, locks, elevator, card key and thumb scanner, I entered my apartment, back from Italy by way of Seattle and I still hadn’t had a shower.  I walked into my living room and slammed my shin into a coffee table that arrived while I traveled around the world trying to solve the Da Vinci Source Code.  Through a torrent of profanity, I realized that my decorators must have come and left and that my apartment might actually be presentable again.  I really need to watch out for that hydro, it causes some behaviors that I later find vvery difficult to explain away.

I sat in one of my nice new Leather sofas and picked up my phone to check for messages.  The synthesized voice said I had six.  I listened on and found that the first five came from various political and charitable causes the previous owner of this number had contributed to.  The sixth, though, would mean a rapid change in plans.

The voice said, “Message six, 3:46 am, from 7 2 7 5 5 5 1 6 3 6,” that paranoid BC, I thought, he always has to call before I can even settle in.  But, before I could delete the message out of hand, I heard his panicked voice yell, “Gonz?  Sam?  I need your help!  There taking me away!  It’s just like Hitler, the Senate is bashing the gays and the thugs are rounding up people with disabilities.  I need help!  They’re taking me to some kind of camp!  This is all very scary!  I’m told that I’ll be living with ‘lot’s of other nice blind people’ and, when I said I wasn’t very nice and probably wouldn’t fit in, they said I had to come anyway.  Help me!  This camp is somewhere near Sarasota and, word among other inmates says that we’ll be surrounded by well trained dogs and forced to march in the hot Florida heat every day!  Weren’t the Japanese charged for war crimes for this?  Help me, help me! Help…” and then a click.

As I placed the phone back in its cradle, it rang immediately.  “Gonz,” I answered.

“Sam,” said my African Amazon Attorney.

“I guess you heard from BlindChristian?” I said, fairly certain why she had called me rather than Moes’ maid.

“No, Mickey Bald called me to tell me about it,” she said, “Apparently he’s in some kind of concentration/retraining facility for wise guy blinks.”

“Who runs the place?”

“Unknown,” she sighed, “I would guess it’s either the Blind Panthers and some kind of leftist reprogramming run by Chairman Mal or it’s Sy T. Greenbacks doing everything he can to avoid even the slightest amount of disparagement from prominent blinks.”

“Any idea which is more likely?”

“At this point it’s a toss up.”

“What should we do?”

“This can probably win us the Pulitzer if we uncover the conspiracy.  The Da Vinci story turned out to be a flop but a reprogramming concentration camp for blinks, that sounds like big bucks to me.”

“Do I have time to pack?”

“No, we’ll buy new at the Tommy Bahama shop in Sarasota.”

“Can I shower?”

“Please, I had to smell you all the way from Seattle but make it quick and meet me at the Delta counter at LaGuardia in an hour.”

“What about weapons?”

“We’re going to Florida, we’ll hit a gun show as soon as we arrive.”

“Car.”

“I’ll work it out while waiting for you at the airport, we have little time, the clock is ticking and BC is in deep trouble and, if I need to remind you once again, as your attorney, I think it is a pretty good idea to keep your primary source of income alive and breathing and signing checks so we can afford our lifestyles.”

“That’s a solid point, see you at LaGuardia.  Make sure you bring enough Valium.”

“Wouldn’t think of flying with you without it.”

To be continued…

The Project Paddle Odyssey (link above) programmers (including me) have made a lot of progress in the past few weeks.  Thanks to the generous support from AI^2, we had the money to buy more hardware so additional programmers could join the team.  

I had never written a significant program in C# before and, once I got past the vocabulary barrier, I have found that it goes very quickly.  Microsoft includes a very nice GPS API in the Windows Mobile 5 SDK which makes some fairly difficult tasks very simple.  Combined with some cheap, no-name GPS units we bought on ebay, this project is really starting to fall into place.

We expect the first true wet tests to happen on or near July 1 and, once we’ve tweaked the software a bit after its first alpha paddle, we’ll release version 0.01.xx to the web site, and, as promised, with source code, the GPL and Copyleft from Project GNU.  If you enjoy hacking, and would have fun working on an aquatic GPS program, I invite you to join the PPO team and help us get this project done.

We’re using Visual Studio 2005 which works pretty well with JAWS 7.1.  The JAWS scripts don’t seem to access the object model in the form layout features the way they once did so we are seeking some sighted person to help us with dialogues and such.  If someone out there in the world of blind hackerdom has a better set of scripts, please send them to me to help speed up the project.  

Programming in C# causes me to have frequent, “kids these days…” moments.  I feel like one of those real old timers with a “Back in my day…” attitude.  I first started writing computer programs the summer in which I turned 11 years old (1971).  Then, I wrote my little hacks in PDP 8 assembly language.  When I first turned professional, May 1979, I had to learn and program in a strange language called Neat/3, a sort of hybrid between an assembly language and COBOL that ran on NCR Criterion mainframes.  When I moved to Boston and started hacking on desktops, I wrote almost everything in x86 assembly language.  Back in those days, we thought that C was far too high level a language to be efficient, let alone something like C++ or C#.  

When C++ hit the streets in a big way, we old timers would hang around the Cambridge Brewing Company (an excellent micro-brewery near the MIT campus) and, like typical old farts, say things like, “Back in my day, we only had assembly language.”  

This, of course, would be followed with, “You had an assembler?  We had to type hex sequences into a debugger…”

“You had a debugger?  I had to manually write the hex codes to memory!”

“You had hex?  We only had zeroes and ones and we had to use a hand held magnet to get the code into the machine!”

“You had ones?  We only had zeroes!”

“You had zeroes?  We only had capital O and lower case l!”

And so would go another typical evening at the CBC.

Programming in C# seems so weird to me because I have to trust that all of this framework stuff which actually work.  Back in my assembly hacking days, the first thing my programs would typically do would rewrite the interrupt table so DOS couldn’t get in my way.  Now, I’m expected to trust a library that sits atop a framework that sits atop a windowing interface that sits atop an operating system.  As I have trouble trusting an operating system, you can only guess at the paranoia that all of these other layers cause me.

On the flipside, I have never developed programs so quickly before.  My first C# program used Direct X and, all in audio only, built a cube with the focal point of the sound at its center.  A ball bounces around inside the cube and the user, with a Logitech force feedback joystick, tries to avoid being hit by the ball.  My purpose in writing this program was to evaluate some of my theoretical work in how focal and peripheral attention can be used to detect objects; it was not intended to be a game and it isn’t really much fun after a few minutes of playing around with it.  I plan on releasing the program, source code included, fairly soon.

What I did learn from the experiment, though, was just how quickly one can make a pretty cool little program using all of these API and SDK layers that I don’t actually trust.  It also demonstrated just how cool Direct X is.  Kudos to the Direct Sound people up at Microsoft for making such difficult tasks so simple.

Of course, the vocabulary of .Net programming drives me crazy.  When did the word “assembly” change from meaning a low level language in which one programs using mnemonics and macros to the target of a build process?  Weren’t targets called “targets” or “executables” or “binaries” or whatever one might expect to be building?  I got all warm and fuzzy when I read some documentation that said I had to change the attributes of an assembly.  I thought that I had returned to my element but, alas, Dylan Thomas, while writing at the White Horse Tavern, correctly asserted that even we geeks can never go home again.

Afterward

Someone posted a comment anonymously asking for the JAWS rap MP3.  If you write to me directly, I can email it to you.  I don’t know of any download locations for it.

Like many other blinks, I enjoy listening to a lot of different audio content.  I haven’t learned to use more advanced audio editing tools but will soon need to so I can expand my capabilities for creating different audio scenarios for experimental purposes.  Thus, I use the more pedestrian audio and media players like Real, Windows Media and WinAmp but have never done more than play around with Sonar, Gigastudio, SoundForge and other such tools.

I use a Linksys Wireless G Music Bridge to play audio content from my PC through my Bose stereo.  The Linksys hardware works pretty nicely for a blink in that it has no user interface, aside from three LEDs that tell one if the device has power and if it can find a signal through either Ethernet or WiFi.  All of the rest happens on the PC through miserably inaccessible software.  One definitely needs sighted assistance to run the installation program as both JAWS, using the JAWS Cursor, and Window-Eyes, using its mouse cursor, cannot “see” some of the information presented to you.  Then, the little application one needs to turn the thing on and off, to revert to the PC speaker for sounds and to adjust settings and such has similar accessibility problems.  With the help of my sighted wife, I wrote some very primitive scripts for the application that work pretty well but would cause problems for people who use a magnifier as I move the JAWS cursor around (which might look like an earthquake has started if viewed with MAGic or ZoomText) and the points to which I move do not seem to work on different computers.  So, if you write to me, I’ll send you my scripts but you must keep in mind that you may have to ask a sightie to place the cursor on the different spots that need to be clicked, ask JAWS to tell you the x,y coordinates, open the script manager, replace those that work on my computer with the values that work on yours, recompile the scripts and you’ll be just fine.  As this task is about one of the easiest scripting that one may endeavor to do, do not think you need to have any real programming skills to get it done.

I’d like to toss in a plug for the DancingDots guys as, although I can’t claim to know how to use Sonar, their scripts and other add-in software makes a very difficult program work very well with JAWS.  So, hats off to Bill McCann, David Pinto and Gordon Kent (and anyone else involved) for an outstanding product.  On the closing night of a CSUN conference a few years back, we got to see the great Ray Charles take the stage at a DancingDots party and demonstrate, along with David Pinto, the real power of their product.  Ray entertained, teased Pinto and showed us just why he chose JAWS as his screen reader.

I have a question about the different audio players: why does every bit of audio software on my computer have its own volume setting?  Real, WindowsMedia, WinAmp, Linksys and, of course, Windows itself all let me set the volume separately.  Thus, if I can’t figure out why something sounds too loud or too soft, I need to look in at least four places: the Linksys Bridge software, the media player, the Windows volume setting and my stereo.  I understand why my stereo and computer would have different volume settings but why does every application need its own way to set volume?

Does anyone know what the “SW Synthesizer” entry in the Windows volume dialogue does?  Using JAWS, with Eloquence, Window-Eyes, with its default synthesizer and every other program I own that uses software speech, I can’t seem to get this control to change anything.  I think it might have something to do with SAPI speech but still haven’t found a way to make it do anything.  

Does anyone other than me find it incredibly annoying that every time one installs a different media player (I only know about Windows Media, Real, WinAmp, QuickTime) that it seems to hose their other media players?  I can install both Eudora and Outlook, Excel and Quatro, IE and Firefox, Word and WordPerfect and seemingly any two programs from any other class of application and they peacefully coexist.  The media players all assume that they should take the lead role in delivering my content to me and, therefore, screw the others up.  WinAmp and WindowsMedia seem to offend the worst but Real and QT don’t fall too far behind.  At least WM 11 Beta tells you that it has seized control of your computer and reminds you to check your other media players for problems it may have caused.  Installing WinAmp seems to have changed so much stuff (using the default installation settings) that it took me a few days to get Real and WM working again.  I have not and will not install iTunes, even if Brian’s scripts make Apple’s superfluously inaccessible but “very cool” interface sing and dance with JAWS – I’m boycotting Apple these days.

If you collect MP3 files and enjoy music, I recommend you go to emusic.com, they have an offer running that gives anyone who signs up for an account fifty free MP3 files.  If you kill your account within 14 days, you don’t get charged anything so you might as well go there, get your fifty free songs and pay nothing.  If you do choose to subscribe, I think their rates look fair ($10 per month for 40 songs) and the site works pretty well with screen readers as long as you’ve can use the Quick Keys in JAWS or whatever Window-Eyes calls their version of the feature.  Unfortunately, the link that brings you to the place where you can sign up for your fifty free downloads doesn’t have a proper label so, as you tab through some nasty sounding links, listen for the gibberish that contains the words “fifty free.”  I suppose I could make a .jgf file for this page if people would want me too.  

I have found emusic.com to have one of the most extensive libraries of MP3 songs out on the web.  I could find really obscure Brooklyn based rappers on very obscure independent labels very easily as well as what seemed to me like the entire Glenn Gould (my favorite classical pianist) collection, something URGE (the MTV owned music download store) had about a third of.  I wish they had full length samples rather than clips as, on many occasions, the intro portion of a song lasts longer than the sample (especially on live albums) so it makes figuring out if you like a song or not kind of difficult.

As I allude to above, I recently installed the Windows Media Player version 11 beta.  Compared to most other media players, it works pretty well out-of-box with JAWS 7.0, I haven’t tried it with the JAWS 7.1 beta or any other screen reader yet.  If you can use the JAWS cursor and tab keys pretty well, you should find it pretty nice to use.  Before I explored the program a bit, I made the assumption that I would be better off with the classic menus, this does make using the player a bit easier but one can use all of its features using the stock UI with JAWS.  As media players go, WMP11 seems to integrate nicely with a number of sites where you can purchase digital content.  MS offers URGE as the default but the beta works with a laundry list of other stores and promises to work with even more in the future.  Unlike the iTunes service which sells music in the iTunes format which only works with Apple software and only lets you purchase music from Apple, MS, once again, takes the populist approach and provides a wide array of choices for its users.  Go ahead, start throwing your rotten Apples at me, I can take it.

As for blinks who create audio content, if you haven’t heard the MP3 getting passed around of JAWS doing some serious gangstah rap you really should find a copy.  I heard that a high school kid somewhere in Arkansas made it.  Me thinks the legendary Patrick Purdue might have some competition from the deeper south.  One BC reader suggested we do a parody song contest.  I think this sounds like a good idea but are there enough people out there with this hobby or the associated skills to have enough entries to really make it a contest?  The last competition we announced here, the BC programming and software design championship, has, thus far, received zero entries which makes me glad I didn’t try to hustle up any prizes as I would have no one to give them to.

Other than the awesome JAWS Jam, I’ve found a lot of new music that I like a lot lately.  First comes Willy Nelson’s latest album,
“You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker,” which may just come as close to a perfect album recorded by a country music performer.  Even if you don’t typically like country or Willy, you should give this record a listen.

Next comes the latest by Bruce Springsteen, on which he assembles a folk act (none of the E Street band on this album) and does songs previously recorded by the great Pete Seeger.  Especially in these times of war and American crisis, these songs stand out in an anthemic manner.  Bruce’s voice lends itself very well to these songs and the folk act smokes.

Otherwise, I’ve found a lot of the politically and poetry charged Brooklyn rap scene to have delivered some truly kicking and thought provoking stuff lately.  If you like creative language and serious ghetto politics, check out guys like Wordsworth, Pumpkinhead and others from that scene.  If you want to hear about blunts, guns and forties, stick to the LA scene and you won’t be disappointed.

Afterward

Maybe I need a music critic alter-ego to go with the gonzo writer, the evil capitalist, the former punk rock singer, the English professor and the rest.

Finally, a recent article that I read on Blind News about the WAI standards not going far enough to bring real accessibility to we blinks made me feel a bit uncomfortable.  I agree that one can follow the WAI standards to the letter and still create a hopelessly inaccessible or, more likely, extremely inconvenient web site for screen reader users but I also feel that any web developer worth the title, if they follow the standards and do not have a severe mental deficiency, can do a decent job without a whole lot of extra effort.

I found the blink who demonstrated how a site could follow the guidelines but produce a page that wastes a lot of the user’s time very annoying.  In the first example he showed his audience, he had to hit the TAB key something like 90 times before he found the link he likes to use most often.  

Is this 1996 or 2006?  What screen reader or web access utility is this nimrod using?  If it’s JAWS, Window-Eyes, HPR, HAL or any other that I’ve looked at the web with in the past few years, this guy needs to learn to use his screen reader.  Every one of these has a way to pop up a list of links and, very conveniently, find the link they want and go to it.  If anyone still thinks they need to hit TAB 99 times, they should find some simpler way to spend their day.  If this guy uses a screen reader or access utility that does not provide this functionality, he should call his vendor and complain about being ripped off.  Finally, if this example comes from some ancient GNU/Linux based, text-only Internet access utility that does not provide a lot of the navigation conveniences available in the proprietary, Windows based, screen readers, then he has the source code, he can add them.  If he can’t program, he can ask a friend to add them.

Standards should not focus on the lowest common denominator but, rather, should address the state of the art as that provides the only motivation for people who develop access software, free, open source or proprietary to take real steps forward.  GW Micro didn’t make a version of Window-Eyes for the NT platforms until Microsoft announced it would no longer ship the Windows 95/98/ME series any longer.  I think this was true for AI^2 and ZoomText as well.  If standards bodies working on disability issues aim to include decade old technologies, we, as consumers, will have to live with decade old support.

The AT industry has enough money and the open source/free software side of things have enough volunteers to take on the challenge of keeping the software we depend upon up to date.