Category: Uncategorized

I usually have at least an hour free to write the daily entry for Blind Confidential.  I value this hour as it is the part of the day that I can just be Chris and simply improvise on a topic.  I hardly edit most BC posts and just let the stream of consciousness flow.  I do run the Word Spell Checker, read through my articles and fix any really broken sentences.  I always double check any references I make to materials I’ve quoted from other sources to make sure I’ve credited them to the proper author so as not to cause any confusion.  I know the blogosphere tends to have pretty low standards for referencing sources and such but I like to keep my writing chops solid and don’t want anyone crying foul over an incorrectly attributed statement.  

I will, however, steal jokes from anyone and use them as if they came from my own mind.  Few thoughts are truly original and even fewer jokes wander far from the same structure that probably followed the invention of language well before history started so everyone who tells jokes is, at some level, stealing from a cave man who first told it around the campfire while cooking some wooly mammoth for dinner.

Today, however, I don’t have my requisite hour available to construct a full entry for Blind Confidential so, like any gonzo journalist in a hurry; I’ll cheat and copy in a press release verbatim.  This item comes from the Accessible Image mailing list hosted on freelists.org where it was posted by Jennifer Justice.  The press release is about an art show called “Humans Being” that opens in Chicago on April 1.  As many of you know, I have a passion for the fine arts and this show of works by people with disabilities sounds terrific.  It is an International show that will run until June and I hope I can get to Chicago to check it out before it ends.

Humans BEING: DISABILITY IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Ground-Breaking Exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center
April 1—June 4, 2006
Highlight of the City-Wide Bodies of Work Festival

This spring, the Chicago Cultural Center will host one of the first American surveys that will take an in depth look at the issues of art and disability.

Humans Being: Disability in Contemporary Art is a ground-breaking exhibition that will be a cornerstone of Bodies of Work: The Chicago Festival of Disability Arts and Culture, the city’s first-ever multi-venue festival showcasing work by professional artists with disabilities.

Humans Being: Disability in Contemporary Art will come to the Chicago Cultural Center’s Michigan Avenue Galleries, located at 78 E. Washington St. (accessible entrance located at 77 E. Randolph St.), from April 1 through June 4, 2006.  The show aims to be a complex
And serious conversation about how disability is both understood and misunderstood by the culture at large.

It will include paintings, sculpture, photography, installation and samples of graphic novels by more than 20 artists—both disabled and non-disabled—and will explore issues of illness, impairment, discrimination, alienation, sexuality, community,
Identity and the political aspects of disability.

The exhibition is organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and co-curated by Illinois artist Riva Lehrer and Sofia Zutautas, Assistant Curator at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.  Humans Being: Disability in Contemporary Art has been underwritten by Maria Magnus and is made possible through generous gifts from Beatrice C. Mayer, Michael Louis Minns, Mary McFadden, Good’s of Evanston and The Compounder Pharmacy.  Admission to the exhibition and related programming is free.  

Humans Being: Disability in Contemporary Art will include work by local, national and international professional artists including David B. (Beauchard), Madison Clell, Katie Dallam, Susan Dupor, Laura
Ferguson, Tabata Hideoshi, Jennifer Justice, Terry Karpowicz, Leonard Lehrer, Riva Lehrer, Tim Lowly, William Newman, Harriet Sanderson, Katherine Sherwood, Hollis Sigler, Sunaura Taylor, Frances Turner, Richard Yohnka and Jonathan Wos, among others.

“This exhibition challenges the way disability has stayed beneath the radar on the art world’s screen,” said Sofia Zutautas, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

  “It also gives this artists’ community its well deserved exposure while bringing to light a subject matter that is rarely addressed.”

The public is invited to learn more about the exhibition by taking part in a number of programs at the Chicago Cultural Center.  A list of programs include:

Public Discussion:  “The Geography of Art &
Disability”
Saturday, April 1, 2 p.m., First Floor Garland Room
Katherine Sherwood, participating artist and professor of Art at UC Berkeley, discusses the history of art and disability.  

Bodies of Work: A Public Forum  
“Disability Culture in the U.S.: Revolutionizing Art
From the Inside Out”
Friday, April 21, 6 p.m., First Floor Garland Room
Moderated by Carrie Sandahl, disability rights activist, cultural critic, historian and theatre artist, and Associate Professor at Florida State University’s School of Theatre.

Audio Described Tours
Saturday, April 22, 12-2 p.m., Michigan Avenue
Galleries
Thursday, April 27, 12-2 p.m., Michigan Avenue
Galleries
Audio described tours will be available for the visually impaired.

Gallery Talk
Thursday, April 27, 12:15 p.m., Michigan Avenue Galleries
Co-curators Riva Lerher and Sofia Zutautas discuss the exhibition.

Public Discussion:  “Imagining and Imaging the Disabled Self”
Saturday, April 29, 2:30 p.m., First Floor Garland Room
Moderated by Alice Dreger, PhD., of the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern University, and including a panel of artists whose works are included in the exhibition.

Expanded hours for summer at the Chicago Cultural Center begin on April 1 and run through October 31.

Viewing hours for Humans Being: Disability in Contemporary Art at the Chicago Cultural Center are Mondays through Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Fridays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and
Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.  The Chicago Cultural Center is closed on holidays.

This program is presented as part of Bodies of Work:
The Chicago Festival of Disability Arts and Culture, held in venues across the city from April 20-30, 2006.
Bodies of Work features artwork and performances that address disability issues and highlights the work of artists with disabilities in a variety of disciplines including the visual and literary arts, dance, film and theater. Lectures, tours and workshops are also featured.  

The Michigan Avenue Galleries are supported by Chase.  Exhibitions and related educational programming presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs at the Chicago Cultural Center are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.  

Also on view in the Chicago Cultural Center from April 1 through May 14 is the exhibition, “Thinking Out Loud: Studio Programs for Artists with Disabilities,” which features the work of artists with developmental, cognitive, and mental disabilities.  A part of the
Bodies of Work festival, “Thinking Out Loud” includes work by artists who participate in studio programs operated by community-based organizations in Chicago, including Project Onward, Esperanza Community
Services, and Thresholds South.

For more information about Humans Being: Disability in Contemporary Art, call 312.744.6630 (TTY: 312.744.2947) or visit http://www.chicagoculturalcenter.org.

For more information about “Thinking Out Loud,” visit projectonward.org;

about Bodies of Work: The Chicago Festival of Disability Arts and Culture, call 312.744.6630 (TTY: 312.744.2947) or visit http://www.bodiesofwork.orgwww.bodiesofwork.org.

Afterward

Our local neo-nazi murderers continue to impress the community with their intellectual prowess.  WMNF, our local community radio station, reported last night that Plott and his gang weren’t even certain who they wanted to kill.  They agreed that they definitely killed the wrong guy but could not come to agreement as to whether they were after Wells’ black boyfriend or her gay son, neither of whom were injured in the attack.  Plott, the individual “too mean” to be a member of the Iron Coffins biker gang also proved that he wasn’t too mean for the Pasco County lock up as he, while watching television in the common room, got beaten so badly by the other residents that he had to be brought to a hospital outside of the local jail.  I guess nice guys like Plott just can’t hack it in a tough county cooler.

“How much should government agencies pay to ensure full accessibility to people with disabilities?”  Is a question with a financial nature that any governmental body must ask when working on budgets.  “What determines the value, in dollars, of providing people with disabilities a manner to vote independently, one of the most sacred rights in American culture?”  Is a question with a more qualitative nature as it asks just how much equality people like us deserve in the land of the free.  Finally, “Are county government officials too stupid to figure out if a bid for accessible voting machines includes so much padding as to be ridiculously expensive?” Or, “Do President Bush’s friends at Diebold and the other voting machine manufacturers realize that county officials around the US have fairly minimal intellectual capabilities and, therefore, should have the tax payer’s money taken as quickly as possible from them lest they spend it on something foolish like a homeless shelter or art for the local museum?”

These questions came to mind when I read two articles that came to my inbox via Blind News in the past 24 hours.  One, an editorial, which I will include in its entirety below, came from the Illinois based Belleville News-Democrat a paper that includes the word “democrat” on its masthead but seems to question voting rights for people with disabilities and the other, a news report from an Illinois television program on WQAD TV
Titled, “Henry County spends $260,000 for one voter.”  Both items jump directly to the issue of the financial burden of providing accessible voting machines to people who require them during the recent Illinois primary election.

I cannot add much to the editorial so I will quote it entirely, verbatim, as it appeared in the Belleville News-Democrat:

    Posted on Fri, Mar. 24, 2006

Editorial

    Too high a price at the polls

    Liberals love to say that if a government program benefits even one
Person, it is worth the cost. But in St. Clair County, even that low bar is too high to justify the new federally mandated voting machines for the disabled.

    Not one person in St. Clair County used the machines in the primary
Election Tuesday. Cost to the taxpayers, $921,000; benefits, zero.

    Madison County and East St. Louis had some voters use their special
Machines, although they didn’t have a count of how many. But no doubt the costs were phenomenally out of balance with the benefits achieved.

    Federal tax dollars covered most of the expense. Nationwide, the
Government spent about $2.8 billion to update voting equipment, $600
Million of that for equipment to accommodate people with hearing and visual impairments.

    This is what occurs when lawmakers try to pander to every
Special-interest group. Yes, it’s unfortunate that people with
Disabilities have a difficult time voting; yes, it would be nice if they could vote independently at their assigned polling place.

    But we also expect our elected leaders to be responsible with our
Money. Couldn’t we have one special voting machine at the county
courthouse rather than at each precinct? That would have saved millions, or at least freed up money for programs that would benefit more people, and not just on a couple days a year.

    The truth is, the government can’t afford to enact every good idea.
But politicians continue to try, which is why our taxes are sky-high.

End of Editorial

I’m not sure how many precincts St. Clair County, Illinois has but $921,000 seems an incredible amount to pay to put a single accessible voting machine in each polling place.  Thus, I return to a rephrased version of a question I posed above, “Were the government officials aware, in any way shape or form, of the typical cost for a piece of assistive technology or did Diebold and other automated voting machine manufacturers, all close friends of the administration, bilk the tax payers for a windfall profit that they could claim necessary to meet the ADA?”

The reactionary editorial blaming government spending on liberals and pointing out the population of people with disabilities as the culprit special interest in this case, obviously forgot that Bill Clinton left the Federal budget with a surplus but that’s all history.  Conservative Arizona Senator, John McCane, points to the Alaskan “bridge to nowhere” as the greatest boondoggle in history by demonstrating that it would cost less to purchase a private jet for everyone living on the island to which this bridge would go than it would be to build the bridge itself.  Conservative Alaska senators disagree and insist that this engineering wonder start construction in their state as soon as possible.  So much for conservatives keeping an eye on our money.

The editorial doesn’t provide enough numbers to do any arithmetic but spending over $900,000 to install voting machines accessible to people with hearing and vision impairments seems to me, a former assistive technology executive, a huge handout to the provider of said machines.  The editorial doesn’t state anything about the vetting process, the cost analysis or even if any AT companies, expert in delivering such solutions were consulted.

The WQAD television story, covered as an article on its web site which includes a link to a streaming video of the piece, about the cost of voting machines in Henry County, Illinois, does provide us with a few numbers with which we can play around.  “    Like every county throughout the United States, Henry County had to
Install special voting machines to meet the federal Americans with
Disabilities Act. 49 voting machines were purchased costing $260,000. But on Tuesday, only one person apparently used them,” says the web version of the article.

Before jumping into the arithmetic, I must say that the Henry County officials seem a bit less dense than those in St. Clair as they spent less than a third of the dollars to provide accessibility.  Bringing up my Windows calculator, up, though, shows that the Henry County bargain hunters paid a measly $5306 plus change for each accessible voting machine.  I’m sure if I called Sharon Spenser, executive VP of Sales at Freedom Scientific, with a request for a proposal on 50 PAC Mate QX 420 devices with “a little extra software to interface with voting machines,” we could come up with a deal costing (in my guestimation) under $4000 per unit.  If we didn’t care about the deaf/blind voters, we could do this with a speech only PAC Mate for under $2500 per unit.  Would Henry County pay me the difference or even half the difference if I proposed such a cost cutting solution?  Of course not, neither I nor Freedom Scientific has enough clout or cash to grease the wheels of the body politic and come out with a sweetheart deal in the end.

The article continues, “Rock Island County spent $750,000 on 60 machines for the disabled.  By my calculations, this comes to a whopping $12500 per unit.  At this price, it would have cost much less to send a limousine to each voter who required such accommodations, put them up in a luxury hotel for a few days, pay for all of their meals and give them each their own PAC Mate QX 440 with special voting software added that had much better security than the Diebold machines that hackers nationwide have proven to have holes in their protection against tampering.

I’m also highly confident that if any of the AT CEOs received a phone call from any of these counties that they would accommodate them at a lower price, with better devices and a greater level of accuracy.  I know most of these CEOs personally and can state that Lee or Doug or Ben or Mike or Eduard or anyone I’m leaving out would jump for such a gig.  I’m confident they would do so at a municipal, county, state or Federal basis and come in with a cost far lower than our President’s good buddies up in Ohio.

The television story, apparently trying to show they have some level of sensitivity to the cause of people with disabilities, ends with, “    In fact, a survey shows one in ten polling places nationwide aren’t
even wheelchair accessible. And 80-percent of people with vision problems need help filling out their ballots.”  These statistics, although provided without a source, probably come close to accuracy.  

The problem, totally ignored by both of these articles, though, has nothing to do with the cost of accessibility and everything to do with sweetheart government contracts.  Look at the no bid deals that the Vice President’s former employer has taken out of Iraq.  Let’s not forget how KBR also got no bid contracts to help clean up the flood damage in New Orleans, why not assume that a reasonable public accommodation to provide people like me with access to my right as a patriotic American citizen to exercise my right to vote wouldn’t find its way into the money grubbing financial feeding trough that has become our Federal budget?

Blaming the blind people for the deficit is almost funny.  This administration has cut way back on enforcement of Section 508, to “save the taxpayers’ money,” their AG has taken the side of the defendant in every ADA case in which the administration has participated and who can even remember Section 255 being discussed, let alone enforced?

I suppose we should expect this.  If we scour the president’s statements on discrimination, you will find that he has expressed outrage exactly once – when the victim of the discrimination was a multi-billion dollar corporation from the UAE vying to purchase some US port businesses.  There, in the White House rose garden, President W. stood with a teardrop dangling from his eye, sniffling at the purely overt injustice that cripples billionaire multi-national corporations.  As Bill Clinton would have said, “I feel their pain.”

Afterward

In an update on the neo-nazi story I ran yesterday, it turns out that the gang killed the wrong guy.  It seems that Shawn A. Plott, the fellow whom you might remember as having been thrown out of a biker gang called the “Iron Coffins” for being too mean, had intended to kill Patricia Wells’ African American boyfriend.  Instead, these candidates for Rhodes Scholarships stabbed 17 year old Kristofer King to death for sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Someone asked me if I feared reprisals from white supremacist groups over the articles I publish here.  Given the fact that many such people live in Florida, I might concern myself with my safety as these people don’t seem to take criticism very well.  On the other hand, though, I don’t think I need to hurry out to buy my shotgun too soon as these Cro-Magnons, while violent, don’t seem capable of hitting the target.  Thus, if one came for me, I’d probably be safer than any of my neighbors or even my 20 pound dog as the neo-fascists seem so intensely incompetent.

In the realm of life meets art meets Sunshine State weird fiction, a tragic event occurred in New Port Richey, Florida last week that could have come directly from Carl Hiaasen’s “Lucky You.”  I include issues regarding neo-nazi groups in this blog because their doctrine would have all of those of us born with birth defects, regardless of race, creed, color or national origin exterminated.  As I’ve mentioned in a previous item, I wouldn’t go so far as to kill the skinheads, I’m a pacifist after all, but I do feel strongly that they are the pee in the gene pool and should be rendered incapable of reproduction.

Hiaasen’s story takes place somewhere in Central Florida and involves a group of bungling neo-fascists who kidnap a black woman who holds a winning lottery ticket.  The real life story takes place in New Port Richey, Florida, nearer the beach than the town in Hiaasen’s story but, as if taken straight from “Lucky You,” it also involves drunk and stoned white supremacists, an African American, inept law enforcement and, tragically, a number of comical statements that appear in the St. Petersburg Times coverage on the crime page of the paper.

The article titled, “Nazi describes ordeal as one of betrayal” includes a description of a woman who received multiple stab wounds and her son’s friend who died from repeated stabbings at the hand of the neo-nazi group who’s headquartered itself in the mobile home next to her in a Pasco County trailer park.  Two members of the white’s only men’s club, 33 year old Shawn A. Plott,, the groups leader and 20 year old John Ditullio currently sit in the county lock up on charges related to the attack.  Ditullio made himself available to the press and gave what I believe the most bizarre description of a horrible crime that I ever heard.

“I felt like I loved them, that they really had my back,” started DeTulio, an obvious poor judge of character.  The article continues, “He became a recruit for the white-men-only American Nazis only a couple of weeks ago. He was proud of his race, he said, and joining the group seemed like the right thing to do.”

Hell, I’m proud of growing up in New Jersey but I’m not willing to become militant about it.  If we Jersey refugees all took on people who malign our home state, we’d have no one but ourselves to talk to and we don’t really like each other that much anyway.

The group “gave him a red recruit T-shirt. It said ‘Blood, honor, loyalty.’ They hung out in a mobile home on Teak Street in New Port Richey. Four Nazi flags
flew outside,” continues the description in our local paper of record.

DeTulio claims, “We weren’t a violent group, just into name calling.  But, name calling with the next-door neighbor, Patricia Wells, heated up last week.”  Heated name calling, in the opinion of Blind Confidential remains a form of speech.  It may be stupid, childish and hateful speech but, in my mind, does not involve knives.  These nazi kids, though, broke into Wells’ home early Thursday morning and stabbed her in the face and hands.  They also attacked Kristofer King, a friend of Wells’ teenaged son, who later died from his injuries at Bayfront Hospital in downtown St. Petersburg.

DeTulio held a press conference on Friday in which it appeared as if the police investigation focused on, “Ditullio’s boss and fellow neo-Nazi, Shawn A. Plott.”

The article continues, “’I’ve taken care of them forever,’ Ditullio recalled Plott saying,” early on Thursday morning.

At this point, the story switches from a heinous crime into one that even Carl Hiaasen’s incredible grasp of the weird that only happens in Florida or, sometimes, Germany, takes over.  Prepare to enter the sunshine zone…

“Wednesday night was supposed to be one of celebration. The Nazis’ club president was returning from a trip, and his fellow members were drinking in honor
Of his return,” says the Times.  Demonstrating the true friendship and camaraderie among the group, someone spiked Ditullio’s whiskey with Xanax, a strong sedative, a practice he said, “Was a typical practical joke played on recruits.”

The Times article, demonstrating its grasp of the obvious,  reports that, “He grew groggy.”  Other than death on some occasions, sleepiness usually follows mixing Xanax with booze.  In his stupor, DeTulio cannot remember Plott leaving the trailer but seems to have a vague memory of his return as Plott rattled the front gate and, “was acting all strange.”

“Something’s going down, man,” the vice president of the nazi group said, according to Ditullio, “who didn’t know how to spell the vice president’s name.”  The VP, showing the acumen of any great executive, gave DeTulio three guns and left him alone in the trailer with the orders, to hold down the fort,” and “to shoot at the cops (if they came).”  DeTulio, still whacked by the mickey, promptly fell asleep.

When he woke up on Thursday morning, he looked at the home security monitors and saw,” deputies, then members of
The special weapons and tactics team, their guns trained on the clubhouse.”  An example of Florida’s finest in action.

DeTulio, somewhat stressed out by all of the cops and the SWAT team,  did, doing what any highly trained member of a domestic terrorist group would do under such circumstances, “took four more Xanax tablets, then smoked marijuana. After about 45 minutes, he passed out.”

Meanwhile, outside the highly fortified and well protected Nazi compound, the SWAT team, “stayed outside for what appeared to be a standoff.”

Finally, “At 1:45 p.m., the SWAT team stormed the mobile home. Ditullio said he didn’t wake up until the officers were in his face, yelling at him to put his hands
Behind his head.”

The Times article quotes a grinning DeTulio as saying, “It was funny … You’ve got all these cops out for little old me. I didn’t do nothing, man.”  

DeTulio continued to say that he didn’t want law enforcement to catch Plott because he respected Plott for “Doing what he believed in.”  Obviously, what Plott believed in included leaving DeTulio behind as the patsy.  The thought hadn’t yet entered DeTulio’s pea brain that this part of the belief system landed his butt in jail.

Plott, as further described by DeTulio, had once been an officer of a biker gang called the “Iron Coffins.”  Plott was “kicked out for being too mean.”  Too mean for a group of motorheads who call themselves the Iron Coffins?  

Throughout my life, I have had the opportunity to meet and spend time with people from all walks of life.  This human menagerie includes the criminal element.  I’ve known guys with names like Evil and Blowfish.  I’ve known Hell’s Angels, Italian mobsters, ugly skinheads and at least one true sociopath who will spend the rest of his life in Attica, an incarceration that definitely benefits society.  I’ve known drug dealers, gun nuts, whacked out Viet Nam vets who live in the woods but, including all of these and a few others who I cannot think of at the moment, none rose to the level of “too mean” for an organization called the Iron Coffins.  This Plott must be someone truly special to be that mean and maintain the loyalty of his friend DeTulio, who he left to take the murder rap for him.

DeTulio completed the interview by describing how he had been beaten up in the jailhouse after his story hit the news and then, as if nothing had happened, he, “popped open his blue jumpsuit to reveal a swastika tattooed on his chest. He said talking to a reporter would get him killed. I don’t care,” he said. “I still believe in my race.”

These people want to exterminate us blinks.  Hopefully, their obvious stupidity will keep them from succeeding.  Plott, the leader, demonstrated some common sense by trying to stick DeTulio with the rap but he got caught anyway.  DeTulio seems so stupid that, after taking a jailhouse beating, he tempts fate by showing off his swastika tattoo.

As this event happened so close to my home and because this particular group, a spin-off of the Arian Nation, has numerous members in Florida, my shopping list now definitely includes that Mossberg M9 with the halogen blinding light affixed atop it.  If the Nazi who comes after me is loaded on whiskey, Xanax and pot, I think my chances of taking him out increase dramatically.  Sorry skinheads, I’m still willing to shoot it out anytime you care to come for me, one of my blink brothers or sisters or any other person you dislike.  If I have a weapon, I’ll go down just to take some of you guys out of the breeding pool.

(I will not attack any white supremacist who simply delivers his hate literature in a peaceful manner.  I hold that as free speech and accept that all ideas deserve the right to dissemination.  I do not think my using a shotgun against these lunkheads is incongruent with my pacifist beliefs.  I will only take action in self defense or to defend the life of a neighbor threatened by one of these truly evil people.  If they just hang out in their clubhouses, swear allegiance to their race and get drunk and high, so be it.  It makes these evil bastards look a bit like Bevis and Butthead but, intellectually, they don’t reach even the level of a pair of heavy metal cartoon dudes.)

Afterward

I’m still looking for ideas for a smart house for blinks, please send in your concepts and, hopefully, we can make them a reality.

As for the question as to whether our proposal will be published.  The answer is yes because it is a proposal for a Federal grant and sunshine laws require that all such proposals be open for public viewing, it will show up that way.  Because the vision component is a small component of a very large proposal, though, I will probably do an article either for Blind Confidential or a more reputable publication about the concepts we’re proposing which will likely be of greater interest to a blind audience as it will leave out the pan-disability stuff as well as all of the language which is required in a grant proposal but reads like the phone book but even less interesting.

I will not be writing a full article for today’s Blind Confidential as, by the time you read this, I will be out on the water competing in the annual Osprey Bay, Merrill “Canoeman” Chandler Memorial No Motor Fishing Tournament.  Hopefully, I’ll bring in the biggest slam (the combined length of my biggest spotted sea trout, snook and redfish) and come home with the top prize, get my picture in the local papers, raise awareness of PPO and having bragging rights among my buddies for the next year.  Likely, as we got hit by a cold front yesterday, the fish will not be too interested in eating soft plastic lures and we’ll spend our day in the canoe cold, wet and hopeful that the next hole we hit will have them stacked up in it.  For no reason apparent to me, the Osprey tournament always seems to fall on a cold windy day.

I have a request for my readers.  In my professional life, I’m working on a description of the ideal smart house in which a blind person might live.  My outline includes a general category and then a room by room (kitchen, bedroom, living room, etc.) description of the house.  I would appreciate it if any of you out in the Blind Confidential world could send me your fantasy ideas for automating a home to make it the ideal place for one of us blinks to live.  Do not reserve your ideas to current inventions, current standards or current ideas but, rather, send in the ideas you find to be the coolest you can imagine.  

Please do not, however, include sexbots and other hard core fantasy technologies that would not fit into an academic project.  Save those ideas for when I start a technology company and I’ll share the profits with you.

As regular readers of Blind Confidential as well as personal friends know, I enjoy “reading” audio books.  My taste in literature runs from the high art of authors who won the nobel prize for literature, Toni Morrison, Hemmingway, Faulkner, Naipaul to non-fiction texts about almost any kind of science to the great story tellers of crime fiction, Walter Mosley, Chandler, Hammett to histories and biographies by David McCullough and the late Stephen Ambrose to the difficult to categorize greats of 20th century writing, Vonnegut, Thompson, Didion, Sontag, Capote, Vidal, Mailer, Pynchon, Dom DeLillo and so many others.  I’m quite happy that I can find a lot of things to read in audio form or in an accessible e-book format.  So, I thought I might write today’s entry about the books I’ve enjoyed during the first quarter of 2006.

First and foremost, if you enjoy good literature, a subscription to Choice Magazine Listening (CML) an anthology of excellent articles selected from the top English language publications, read by professionals and distributed on 4-track cassette tapes is a must have.  CML comes in the mail every two months and contains about 8 hours of very well written fiction, non-fiction and poetry gathered from publications like “The New Yorker,” “Atlantic Monthly,” “National Geographic,” “Poetry,” “Oxford Review,” “Granta,” “New York Review of Books” and other excellent periodicals.  The CML editorial staff chooses some of the very best writing from these publications and has excellent readers, many of whom you will recognize from recordings available on audible.com, Books on Tape, Inc. and other commercially published recorded readings.  

I eagerly look forward to receiving each edition in the mail and CML is the only reason I still use a four track player with any frequency.  You can subscribe to CML through their web site or just by calling them on the phone.  I recommend that any blink with a love of literature subscribe immediately, if not sooner, and promise you will not be disappointed.  I’ve had a subscription for a number of years now, keep all of my back issues together and have enjoyed almost every article in each volume.

The rest of the items I’ll discuss this morning all came from audible.com which, as regular readers might remember, causes me regular headaches but has a terrific catalogue.

I started the year by reading Truman Capote’s classic non-fiction novel, “In Cold Blood.”  I had read it when a teacher assigned it in a high school literature class 30 years ago and, with the success of the play “Tru” and the film “Capote” I wanted to dive back into his work to develop a current opinion of his writing with which I could contrast the recent biographical material.  “In Cold Blood” didn’t receive the critical acclaim written about it when it first hit the bookstores and the continued critical success it gets today for nothing.  From opening page to the end, Capote brings both the slaughtered family and the pair of cold blooded criminals to life.  Every character in the book receives a fully three dimensional treatment, the family, the towns people, the killers and the beauty and horrors involved in their stories come from the pages to real life.

Capote would likely have received greater awards and even greater acclaim had the disease of substance abuse disorder not first crippled his brilliant mind and, later, caused his premature death.  In his final interview, on the local New York, Stanley Segal show, the host asked Capote, “Truman, what do you think will happen if you keep living like this?”  The brilliant author slurred his response, “I’ll probably kill myself without wanting to.”  Three days later, Capote was found dead in his bed in his United Nations Plaza apartment.

In addition to the terrific play, “tru” and movie, “Capote,” I can also recommend George Plimpton’s oral biography of Capote in which many of Truman’s friends, colleagues, critics, admirers and detractors tell stories about him which Plimpton edits into an excellent biography.

Next, I decided to remain in the deeply disturbing modality and, also for the first time since a teacher assigned it to me in high school; I reread the George Orwell dystopian view of the future, “1984.”  Regular readers of Blind Confidential will remember my parody sequel to the novel which I called “1986” and published here last month.  If you haven’t read “1984,” you should.  The novel sits in the pantheon of 20th Century literature and causes one to think very critically about historical figures like Stalin, Mao and others who erased history and cultural artifacts that disagreed with their philosophy.  

The novel also feels very current as we, in the land of the free, have elected leaders who feel that changing language a bit can cover their pitfalls.  George W. Bush never uses the ugly term prisoner but, rather, says, “Detainee” which kind of sounds like one needs to wait a little longer for a flight than live in an eight by eight cell without charge or defense.  The phrase “terrorist surveillance program” to replace “warrantless wiretaps of American citizens” makes anything that Madison Avenue has sold us look like child’s play.  Of course, Bill Clinton’s linguistic gymnastics did not demonstrate any sort of superiority in the honesty arena.  None of us will forget quotes like, “It depends upon your definition of what is is?”  Both parties play games with legislation by naming them directly opposite of what they actually mean, “The Blue Skies Act,” for instance, permits coal burning power plants to emit more pollutants through their smokestacks.  Yes, propaganda propagates here in the US and no one from either party seems to care.  Rereading “1984” in a 2006 context really opens ones eyes.

I needed to move onto something a lot less depressing so I selected a book called, “E=mc2” by David Bodanis.  The author takes a different approach to the world’s most famous equation by writing a biography of the formula itself.  Bodanis starts by telling us the history of “E” and Faraday’s discovery of the law of conservation of energy.  He then tells us the history of “=” and how the symbol we use to represent it came into our language.  He continues with “M” and how Voltaire, the enlightenment philosopher/author, spread the word of his wife’s proof of the law of conservation of mass.  He tells us about Roma’s discovery of the speed of light to describe “C” and, finally, why it needs to be squared.  Once we’ve learned the history, the author then brings us through how Einstein discovered it and how its application would lead to atomic weapons and nuclear power.  His description of the spy versus spy adventures that kept the bomb from Hitler’s hands keeps one turning the pages like they would in a novel by Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum.  The book does not delve too deeply into hardcore physics or mathematics so I recommend it to anyone who might find the topic interesting as it doesn’t require a pile of prerequisite reading or a an ability to work difficult mathematical problems as one reads.

Next, I returned to my old friend Kurt Vonnegut and his most recent publication, “A Man without a Country.”  This short book contains many hilarious observations of current affairs as described by one of America’s greatest minds.  When Kurt published his last novel a number of years ago, he claimed that he had retired and wouldn’t write anymore.  This collection of essays, to my delight, proves that he lied to us.  In “A Man Without a Country” he admits that he has a new novel underway but also suggests that he might sue Brown and Williamson who produce the Pall Mall cigarettes he has chain smoked since he turned sixteen for, “printing on the package that these things will kill a person and, at age 76, I’m still alive.  We’ll call it the first ever wrongful life litigation.”

Upon completing the short collection by Vonnegut, I jumped into, “The Rum Diary” by another of my literary heroes, Hunter S. Thompson.  While I had read virtual all of Thompson’s major works and literally hundreds of his articles, I had never gone back to read his really early stuff.  “The Rum Diaries,” published long after Thompson wrote it in the 1950s, shows clear signs of his future brilliance.  It has a certain off-the-wall gonzo twist, sex, violence, boozing and a stunning description of the literary life in the Caribbean during that period.  Unfortunately, the version on audible.com is abridged, although the web site claims it is unabridged and it lacks the thorough treatment Thompson gives the subjects of his later books.  The customer service people at audible.com did give me a free book credit for reporting the error on their web site so I didn’t get too angry.  I do recommend, though, trying to find a complete, unabridged version of the audio book or scan and read the print edition with OpenBook or your favorite scan and read program.

Looking for something less bizarre after Vonnegut and Thompson, I found “The First Three Minutes,” by the Nobel price winning Harvard physics Professor Stephen Weinberg on audible.com and bought it with my free credit.  Weinberg claims that he wrote this text for mainstream readers, he promises that one’s math skills need not go beyond arithmetic and that the reader has no prior knowledge of physics.  Weinberg lied.  My science background exceeds that of most lay people and I have excellent mathematics skills.  I read a lot of books about physics as well as other sciences that require a knowledge of the physical sciences and that use some pretty intricate math to describe natural concepts.  I have read most books by Hawking, all of the famous Fineman lectures and lots of other books by lesser known writers about physics ranging from Newtonian mechanics to quantum theory, the uncertainty principle and string and m-theory.  Sometimes, when reading these other books, I need to stop to look up a word in a dictionary or to let my brain catch up with the math.  

Weinberg’s book, ostensibly about the first three minutes after the big bang, caused me to feel completely outclassed and undereducated.  This book should not be recommended to non-professionals in the physical sciences or mathematical arts.  To wit, Weinberg, in the first chapter, introduces the red shift concept of bodies moving away from the point of observation and dives directly into the increasing amplitude of wave forms as they grow more distant.  This goes well beyond basic arithmetic as the increasing wave lengths require a differential equation to describe and an understanding of optical physics to recognize why the wave shifts toward blue rather than red yellow or any other color.  I forced myself through this book and cannot claim to have understood more than half of it.  Hawking, Fineman, Kaku can all write great books for lay readers about very complex physics problems, Weinberg fails in his attempt to do the same.

Needing to clear my head of having attempted to perform both integral and differential calculus during the Weinberg read, I downloaded, “The Life and Works of Beethoven.”  This audio production written and read by Jeremy Siepmann combines biography and music history in a terrific piece that includes both spoken word and musical examples from the great works of the wonderful composer.  The audible.com web site has a number of other “Life and Works” recordings about other composers and I plan on trying some others in the future.

Staying in the Beethoven path, I next picked up, “Conductor’s Guide to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 & Piano Concerto No. 4” by Gerard Schwarz.  This recording requires far less musical theory than one would think based upon its title and provides a detailed analysis of two of Beethoven’s most important and beloved compositions.  If you have an interest in learning how a professor describes composed music in an analytical manner, give this one a try.  If you have ever taken a music appreciation course or listened to any classical music these two compositions will undoubtedly sound familiar to you.  I found reading it to be a lot of fun but, then again, I accept the title “uber-geek” when discussing things intellectual.

Moving back from music into the history of technology, I read, “Longitude” by Dava Sobel.  This book describes the life and works of John Harrison, the man who designed, developed and built the first sea going chronometer.  This may sound dull but, prior to its invention, ships at sea could determine latitude by the position of the stars so could know fairly well how far north or south they might have traveled.  But, in the 18th century, before GPS and Harrison’s chronometer, they could barely tell how far east or west they might have traveled.  Many ships carrying very valuable treasurers, foods, spices and other necessities of daily life went down when they crashed against an unexpected pile of rocks.  The book details the debate between an astronomical method of determining latitude and a mechanical approach using a chronometer (a fancy word for clock).  The astronomers and the clock makers came to a virtual tie, Harrison had produced a chronometer which the legendary Captain Cook would refuse to sail without and praised repeatedly in his ship’s logs and the astronomers would invent the octant and a manner of finding longitude based upon a number of mathematical formulae and books filled with tables.  Both systems it turned out could provide an accurate enough reading but the chronometer rapidly became the more popular as it didn’t require clear skies or difficult calculations.

That’s it for the books I’ve read in the first quarter of this year.  I’ve also read quite a few articles in CML, Scientific American, The New Yorker and other of my favorite magazines and enjoyed listening to a lot of music.  

I hope people have enjoyed my critical romp through my recent readings and hope that some of you might enjoy something I recommended as well.

“Reading is the food of the writer.” – earnest Hemmingway.

On July Forth of this year, I will turn 46 years old.  This means that the activities at the grapefruit league baseball parks in nearly every town or city near our home in St. Petersburg will be the 46th Spring Training through which I have lived.  Obviously, I can’t remember the first few but somewhere around 1965 or ’66, I started paying attention to the game as if baseball had, indeed, more importance than any subject in school or hobby at home.

Back in those days, my friends and I hardly knew the rules of the game, the infield fly rule, for instance, made no difference to a six year old.  Having a Bob Gibson, Willy Mays, Hank Aaron or Tommy Agee baseball card, on the other hand, could make or break a kid’s summer.  Not to mention the value of the Mickey Mantle, always one of the high numbers released late in the season that caused me to buy so many packs of Topps bubble gum cards that I’ve paid off a few boats for dentists since then.

Playing baseball, the primary summer activity in Westfield, NJ for kids like me started just around the spring thaw.  The ground felt hard or muddy.  The grass remained patchy from the football season and grueling winter.  We could still see our breath on those cold mornings and the bat stung our hands when it connected with a ball.  Grasping, throwing, pitching had major accuracy problems in those March days but we, like the guys in the big leagues, could blame our errors on the long off-season and the rustiness that developed during those dark months when the television and radio stations didn’t broadcast baseball games.

As spring grew to summer, school let out and the pick up games moved from weekends to daily, from dawn until dusk.  We’d ride our bicycles to Roosevelt Junior High which had three or four great fields for playing ball.  The grass remained wet from dew which in turn would soak my Keds and socks as I walked about the field waiting for the other boys to arrive.  The smell of wet grass, the smell of morning, the thrill of the grass, the smell of the leather and oil from my Felipe Alou signature baseball glove, the smells, the thrills of summer, the feeling of baseball.  These constant mornings and hot, humid afternoons seemed like they would last forever.

People who understand the language of baseball can communicate without words.  You can take a white kid from Columbus, a kid from the Dominican Republic, a kid from Mexico, a Japanese kid, a Korean kid, a Chinese kid and a Jamaican kid, put them together on a field with some balls, bats, gloves, caps and they will soon start a game.  They can choose sides (picking me last), decide who represents the home team and start pitching, hitting catching without verbalizing more than a grunt or two accompanied by a gesture.  Kids and baseball go together almost as if the rules came in their DNA.  A kid alone might toss a ball up in the air, swing his bat at it and chase the ball down wherever it landed, two kids will start “having a catch” or playing one on one wiffle ball, three kids might start a game of running bases and all of the kids, no matter how many, will do so with their heads filled with dreams of their heroes.  In my childhood, these included those mentioned in the must have card list plus some others mostly forgotten to history.  Georgie, the half Mexican, half Greek kid from up the street loved the Yankees second baseman Horace Clark, “Hondo Hoss!”  He would yell as he stole a base.  Michael, his older brother, supported Mel Stottlemeyer, still a player back then and tried to pitch with Mel’s signature wind up.  Billy Walsh, their next door neighbor, went all the way for Cleon Jones and tried his best at basket catches.  

Outwardly, I showed my Ron Swoboda, Bobby Murcer or Joe Pepitone persona but, inwardly having never had much talent for the sport, I wanted to grow up into the broadcast booth and loved Bill White, Phil Rizzuto, Ralph Kiner and the other voices that filled the New York area nights.  Still, I would attempt a miraculous diving catch like Swoboda, an over the head Bobby Murcer style grab while running for the monuments in center field (I find it hard to believe that an entire generation has grown up since the monuments were moved off the field and behind the wall, next to the bullpen in Yankee Stadium) or jumping as high as I could to bring down a ball tossed over my head just like “Joey Pep.”

As the sandlot years of my childhood faded into the occasional softball game, which had more to do with drinking beer than hitting home runs, of my high school days, I remained a hardcore fan.  My glove didn’t come out as often but the dice for Strat-o-Matic or APBA baseball were never far away and my buddies and I would have a game on the television, a cooler filled with Molson and a dice game or two on the table.  We didn’t go much for Dungeons and Dragons (that just seemed too nerdy) but fantasy baseball somehow still felt kind of cool.

College started my drift from the game.  I would, on occasion, catch the A train, switch to the D up to 162nd Street to take in a Yankees game (the bleachers will still only a buck and a half back then) but Shea Stadium might have relocated to another planet, the subway ride to Flushing seemed so long.  I didn’t follow the game as avidly though.  I rarely examined a box score or the tables of the batting, pitching and fielding leaders.  I had more important things to do, like sing in a punk rock band at CBGB or take a walk to cop from my man.

In October of 1983, I moved to Boston to live with a girlfriend originally from Philly.  Together, we watched the Phillies, during that great Pete Rose and Mike Schmidt season, win their first ever World Series and, by Spring, a curiosity for baseball and quaint old Fenway Park turned into a love affair that continues to this day.  The girlfriend is happily married to a history professor in Philadelphia and I’m in Florida during spring training.

In Beantown only two sports really count – baseball and hockey.  The Patriot fans live in the suburbs or Rhode Island and Celtics rooters live in the affluent Back Bay or stuffy, old money Beacon Hill.  Everywhere else, the bar room conversations, no matter the time of year, dissect, debate, celebrate and mourn the fates of the Bruins and Red Sox.  In most of these places, the “big three” never meant Larry, Parrish and McHale but had something to do with auto manufacturers in Detroit.  Mention Teddy Ballgame, Tony C., Yaz, Bill Lee, Bernie Carbo, Jim Lonborg, Dewey, Rice, Wade, Roger and, more recently, Pedro, Troy or Manny and you’ve got a conversation on your hands.

The first game I attended at Fenway Park was opening day 1984.  Bobby Ojeda, a journeyman lefty, was the starting pitcher.  Billy Bucks at first, Marty Barrett at second, Wade Boggs at third, Joaquin Fernandez at short and the tremendously powerful outfield populated by Jim Rice, Tony Armas and the great Dwight Evans.  Ralph Houk, who I remembered as Yankees manager from my youth, was the skipper.  The Sox played the Orioles and lost by a significant margin if I remember correctly.

What I remember clearly, though, included paying $3 for a bleacher ticket, and entering the park hours before the first pitch.  I remember wandering about Fenway, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of 70 year old beer spills and overflowing urinals.  Up top, in the seats, though, I saw the most beautiful structure in all of baseball.  The green grass running to the green monster, the manual scoreboard, the coziness of the 35,000 seat facility, the quiet before the park filled up, the over priced flat beer and the nasty hot dogs that, unlike Yankee Stadium, were definitely not kosher.

I became a regular at the park and, in 1987, after the Sox had yanked defeat from the claws of victory the season before, my wife and I started sharing a pair of season tickets with a few friends.  If you were to draw an imaginary line from second base to first, continue it above the visitor’s dugout to the ninth row, you would bisect our seats.  I couldn’t imagine a better location to watch the young Wade Boggs and Roger Clemmens, the aging but still powerful Jim Rice and Dwight Evans, the swooping curves thrown by Bruce Hurst and the antics of Oil Can Boyd.  From those seats, I watched Roger set the record for strikeouts in a game, I witnessed Eddie Murray’s 2000th hit, Mike Greenwell hitting for the cycle (a feat more rare than a no hitter), Marty Barrett pulling off the hidden ball trick and, in 1988, in one of the strangest games I’ve ever attended, we saw Bill Buckner, after his return to the team, hobble around the bases for an inside the park home run.  In the same 1988 game, Bob Boone, the 75 year old catcher for the Kansas City Royals stole third base as our Rich Gedman, probably unable to believe what he saw, threw the ball into left field.

As my vision faded, so did my attendance at Fenway Park.  I preferred listing to Joe Castiglioni on the radio in the comfort of my home or listen to the television guys call the play by play at my local watering hole.  I haven’t picked up a glove in years and hadn’t thought much about participating in the sport in a very long time.  I thrilled and cheered at the Red Sox championship and still listen to games over the Internet.

Recently, though, Stephen Guerra, a Blind Confidential reader sent me a few pointers to web sites and a pod cast devoted to beep baseball.  I had heard of blind people playing the game once before, when I saw an exhibit about it at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  Over the years, I’ve heard a lot about blind cricket but this was the first mention of baseball that I had heard in a long time.

Stephen, in his “Beep Baseball Guy” persona, runs the beep baseball Podcast web site which contains a number of very cool audio bits about beep baseball and links to other resources about the sport.  When I get a chance to look more closely, maybe I’ll find a bunch of guys in Florida so I can give this game a try.  It certainly sounds like fun and Stephen’s enthusiasm for the game is certainly contagious.

[Author’s Note:  Today’s article is dedicated to the memory of the late great Hunter S. Thompson who died at his own hand in 2005.  Whether you know him for his articles in Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, , The New Yorker or elsewhere, his many books, his outstandingly bizarre lectures or as the Doonesbury character “Uncle Duke” you probably enjoyed some of his weird and wonderful, purely American genius.  His writings invented the concept of gonzo journalism, which would later be called the “New Journalism” by more mainstream authors like Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe as well as others who, like Thompson, through objectivity to the wind, inserted themselves in their narrative and never let facts get in the way of a good story.  Any American who writes creatively today has, consciously or otherwise, been influenced by Dr. Gonzo and his Samoan attorney Laslow Toth.

I did my best to write in a style as close to Hunter’s as I could.  I don’t have his tremendous command of the language nor his ability to make the grotesque sound beautiful but I hope I succeeded in bringing our readers on a short literary adventure into the gonzo world that Hunter helped us all visit when we needed to.]

Fear and Loathing at CSUN 2006
By Gonz Blinko
Freelance Reporter for Blind Confidential

“Coming into Los Angelees, Carrying a couple of keys, Don’t look in my luggage please, Mister customs man,” I sang while walking up the jet way at L A X.

“Do they play Arlo Guthrie in your country?”  I asked the airport employee sent to help me up the jet way, while wondering why I needed a guide in a structure that has only one way in and one way out.

The five foot tall man struggling with my carry on bags grunted something in a foreign language and, remembering my location, I asked the question again in Spanish.  He sounded more confused and his second response contained enough words that I could tell he didn’t speak Spanish either.  I asked, “Where are you from?”  

He paused to catch his breath and responded with a couple of syllables that I couldn’t parse.  We exited the jet way and he handed me over to an airline employee.  I pulled a $20 bill from my pocket and stuffed into his hand as he patted me good bye.  “Thank you!”  He exclaimed in a heavily accented but exuberant English.  As the person from Delta started gathering my carry on bags, I could only think my jet way guide had probably sat in some rat infested refugee camp a few months ago and now, here he was, grasping the American Dream in the form of a twenty dollar bill handed to him by a blind journalist stuck on old folks songs from the hippy days.  “Where do you want to go?”  Asked the large man from Delta.

“My attorney has a gate pass, she will meet me here momentarily,” I said, “I called her from the plane.”

“Can she see you?” asked the Delta person.

“I’m blind, not invisible,” I retorted.

“Is she visually challenged too?”  Asked the airline employee as I grew increasingly impatient.

“The word is blind.  B L I N D. You freaking dolt!”  I couldn’t help myself, this moron had my arm in a vice grip as if I could possibly fall off of the floor.  Pulling rational thought back into the forefront of my mind, “No, she’s not blind, she can see me, she can see you and she can see herself if there is a mirror available.”

“Would you like a wheelchair?”  This guy just wouldn’t stop so I whacked him with my cane.

“Does it look like I have something wrong with my damned feet?”  I hollered.

“I’m only trying to be helpful, uh, uh, Mr. Blinko, uh, uh…”

“Then let me sit down and leave me alone.  I have important work to do.  Don’t you realize I’m a doctor?  A doctor of journalism and I’m in this god forsaken city to cover a very very important event.  I need to concentrate.  Get me a coffee.”

The man from Delta finally let me sit and, rather meekly, said, “We don’t have coffee up here.”

I didn’t give him any money but wished my refugee would come back so I could learn about whatever horrible dictatorship he had escaped from.  It seems that a lot of refugees from truly horrific places work in airports.  I pulled out my PAC Mate and started typing a new document about the use of refugees as slave labor in US airports.  I had no evidence that these people suffer the humiliation and bondage of slavery but it makes a better story and I’m more likely to find a buyer than with some heartwarming tale about a nice immigrant helping a blink.

***
As I waited for my attorney, she often ran late, my cell phone rang.  It played the tone that I assigned to that annoying Blind Confidential editor.  MSP screamed out his name from my PDA phone.  “Crap,” I thought and hit the call button, “Blinko.”

“Did you arrive safely,” the jerk asked.

“I’m talking to you,” I mumbled, wishing the idiot from Delta could go over to the Starbuck’s I could smell from my seat and get me a triple shot vente late.  I needed the caffeine to overcome the handful of valiums I took so I could sleep on the flight.

“Sounds like you’re still in the airport,” the editor stated inanely.

“An overstatement of the obvious on which you have such a terrific grasp.”

“Who’s paying the bills?”  Asked the irritated editor who is always certain he is the smartest guy in the room.

“Who’s writing the article?  Who flew out to the city of car exhaust and poisoned oceans?”  I asked in response as I felt a hand land heavily on my shoulder.  My attorney had arrived.  “Samhara just got here, I got to run, talk to you in a few days…”  I could still hear the rat turd of an editor yelling as I hit the button to hang up and put the phone back in its belt clip.

“What kind of car did you get us?” I asked my tall African attorney.

She replied, with her soft accent and British educated tone, “I couldn’t get a caddy, Eric MacDamery got the last one.”

“The Scottish golfer,” I asked.

“One in the same, he says he’s in town for the fight too.”

“So, what did we get?”

“I had to shop around a bit,” said Samhara, “I found us a Porsche 911 Turbo from some exotic rental place out in the valley.  That’s why I arrived late.”

“Will BC pay for such a thing?”

“As your attorney, I made certain that the expense portion of the contract would permit a few extravagances.”

“But they’re so cheap; they made me pay for my own PDA on that other story.”

“That’s what you get for negotiating without your lawyer.  Face it Gonz, you need a lot of legal advice and I’m the last attorney in the US willing to represent you.”

She always told the truth, brutal as it may be, I did find myself in a lot of legal troubles, and I’m always saying or doing the wrong thing without even knowing so.  “What about weapons, we’ll need lot’s of weapons?”  I asked, “This job has a high potential for danger, it has violence at its core, rooms filled with highly trained dogs and the usual conflicts that arise when a Cuban gets into the ring with an American.”

“I’ve got a Glock 9, a Ruger .22, your Mossberg M9, an AK and a few other goodies, all adapted for your needs.”  Samhara responded coolly.

“Ammo?”

“Enough to take out most armies.”

“Let’s get some coffee.”

***

Our Porsche screeched out of the airport parking lot and I spilled a bit of my second triple shot vente laté onto my chin, “Damn that’s hot.”  I mumbled.

Samhara quipped, “You didn’t ask for ice coffee,” as she barreled forward, taking speed bumps at 75 and turns far too quickly for my stomach’s taste.  She hit a button on the dashboard and some kind of reggae inspired hip hop blasted out claiming that someone should shoot the sheriff and that they planned hurting on some guy named Ice quite badly.  I think the song was titled, “I Hope You Got a Good Doctor ‘Cause I Got a Great Lawyer.”  I could identify.

***

We arrived at the LAX Marriott within seconds.  The airport is actually very close to the airport so we didn’t terrorize too many people with Samhara’s driving.  The valet, upon seeing the cache of weapons in our trunk stuttered a bit so I gave him a hundred dollar bill from the tip roll I keep in my pocket while traveling.  “Gracious!” he exclaimed, “My name es Ricardo, you want anything dis week, you aks for Ricardo.”

“Bueno,” I mumbled as I walked into the hotel and headed for the lobby Starbuck’s to seek old companions from previous CSUN and other nightmares.  I guess I’ve been coming here for long enough that the girl behind the counter, upon seeing my face, said, “Triple shot vente laté, right?”  The espresso machine whined as she steamed my milk and I handed her a twenty and said “keep the change.”  I figured in a convention filled with blinks that her tips would probably hit a low for the year and she has kids to support.

I wandered into a crowd of people idly chatting and acted like I’d been there all night.  I folded up my cane and stuck it into my pocket.  The big fight, the World Blind Boxing Association (WBBA) championship would be won the following day and everyone had an opinion.  I recognized the voice of old bookmaker friend, Harry the Hat and said, “Put two grand on Garbanzo for me.  What’s the over/under?”

“Pedestrian in four,” he replied.

“What can I get on Garbanzo in five or less?”

“Eight to one.”

“Put two grand on that for me two.”

A delightful petite blind chick then spoke up, “Any of you tired of the booze and gossip and want to venture into the sex and drugs should follow me up to the party in my suite.”

Samhara had joined me and said that she want to go to the party.  “I want to stay fresh, got to keep my eyes open for this fight article.”

***

After interviewing a few other sports fans, I tapped my way to the elevator and pushed the button for my floor.  Upon arrival, I had no idea which way to turn.  The LAX Marriot has its elevator bank arranged with three on each side facing each other.  The floors with rooms are arranged in a giant figure eight, I had no idea which way to turn.  So, I guessed and embarked on my annual walk through the corridors of an airport hotel.

I noticed the sweet smell of hashish smoke as I walked through a cloud outside the door of the party that the young and cute blind woman had invited us to.  I could overhear lots of happy sounding voices, blasting punk rock and an occasional farm animal bleat; I didn’t want to get involved.  I heard the voice of Mike Pedestrian yelling something about Velcro and lime Jell-O and knew for sure I didn’t want to go in there.

Upon reaching my suite, I noticed that Ricardo had brought everything up, hung up my clothes and arranged the weapons in order of caliber.  “Nice work,” I thought and made a note in my iPAQ to tip him again.

Thus situated safely in my room, I took my Glock, made sure its clip was full, and sat down to go over the notes for my assignment.  “A boxing match,” I thought.  “This will feel a lot different from most of my stories.”

On the plane I had read up on the fighters.  One Andres “The Giant” Garbanzo would duke it out with the heavily favored, Mike “The Streetwalker” Pedestrian.  The odds makers gave Andres, a political refugee who had escaped Castro alone, quite a feat for a blind person going it solo, little chance because of his age, higher than Pedestrian’s and his reach, a bit shorter than his opponents.  Pedestrian, who never escaped from Fidel but spent a lot of time in the Castro, did stand taller and had a longer reach but I didn’t think he had the killer extinct that Garbanzo brought with him on his inner tube ride across the Florida Straights.

The regulation 12 round championship bout would only accommodate for the blindness of the fighters by putting bells on their boxing shoes.  Otherwise, the fighters had to feel and hear their way around the ring.  “This could be quite a spectacle,” I thought.

The fight’s object, to determine which would rule supreme, PDF, (Proprietary Document Format) represented by Andres, an employee of Mud Hut Systems or ODF (Obfuscated Document Format) represented by Pedestrian.  Far more than the championship was on the line, the future of documents read by Massachusetts State employees could go either way.

I read a few more statistics about the fighters and their sponsor companies.  Mud Hut Systems seemed to have a strong lead so Garbanzo has history on his side, ODF, sponsored by Moon Macrosystems, had Jolting Joe Lazarro, a guy every blind boxer wants in his corner, working with Mike.  Don King, representing Seattle’s Macrohard Corporation, said he didn’t have a dog in this race and that he wants to see who might emerge as the winner.

***

I must have nodded off in my chair as the sun, one of the few things I could still see, glared in through the window as I felt around for my Ray Ban sunglasses.  I could smell coffee and then heard, “Ha Ha Ha,” as samhara’s deep laugh filled the room.

“Triple shot vente laté for the doctor,” she said as she handed me a piping hot paper cup.  “You’ve been sleeping for twelve hours and missed the new seeing eye bottlenose dolphin at the beach.”

I sipped my hot beverage and asked, “What else?”

“A few dozen quarter sized low vision people took over the lobby for a while,” she added nonchalantly.

“Huh?”

“It seems that the AI^3 people never tested ShrinkText with more than two people in the room.  Their demo left a bunch of people shrunken and little nano-bits flying all over the place.  It definitely stole the show.”

“Anything else?”  I asked hesitantly.

“The BC people called about three dozen times…”

“Paranoid freaks,” I exclaimed and shot off a few rounds from my Glock into the ceiling.  The LAX Marriot knows to put me on the top floor because of this little habit of mine.

“I calmed them down,” said samhara as she handed me a second laté”  “As your attorney, I advise you to stop shooting and get dressed so we can go to the fight.”

“She has a point,” I thought as I stood up and walked to the bathroom.  “How did the party go?”  I asked as I started heating the water for my shower.

“Pretty good,” said my lawyer, “I brought home a lovely woman who sells bootleg screen readers in Iraq.  We had a great time.”

“How’s her business going with the invasion and all that?” I asked as I pulled items from my toiletry case.

“Excellent, she says war does great things for the blindness business.”

“You are a very sick lesbian, really, you are very sick.”

Samhara replied, “What other sort would accept you as a legal client you foul mouthed, loose cannon blink?”

I had to agree with her assessment and hopped in the shower.

***

After a hair raising race across town from the hotel to The Los Angeles Forum (or whatever corporate sponsor forum it’s called now), we tossed the keys to the valet, showed our press credentials to the large, imposing Mexican watching the VIP door and headed up to the press box to watch the fight.  A lard butt blabbering about some kind of electronic kayak project got in my way so I stuck him in the ribs with the .22.  “As your attorney,” Samhara started again, “I recommend you don’t pull the trigger.”  The fat boy got out of my way and we started toward the buffet.  

An overly drunk reporter for the Florida Blind Citizens Daily World puked onto the floor and a handful of guide dogs fought to lick it up.  “Jeez,” I blurted, barely holding down my breakfast.  “I thought that Moroccan jail you got me out of was pretty nasty but this crowd…”

Samhara slapped me, “Just don’t take out any guns.  Let’s go downstairs to the press table.  I bet Nicholson will be there and you can talk about your paranoid conspiracy plots with him and Sharpton.”

I agreed that this idea had many benefits over shooting up a room filled with assistive technology and blindness journalists and we headed down.  Samhara, as usual was correct, Jack and Al had already taken their spots in their ringside seats and I, coffee in hand sat beside them.  Al addressed me first, “Gonz, you can’t believe this punk, he really believes that Bill Clinton is from Araganola a planet in the sixth dimension when everyone knows he is a bot built by Ross Perot to keep America entertained while the corporate elites really run everything.”

“Jack,” I said, “I gotta go with Al on this one, Clinton’s definitely a bot.  Dole, on the other hand might be an alien.”

Our conversation continued like this until the place was filled.  Michael buffer, the legendary fight announcer, climbed into the ring and, speaking into the microphone suspended from the ceiling, yelled, “Now for our main event!”  The crowd cheered and then fell nearly silent.  “We have in the blue corner, coming in at 185 pounds at 5 feet six inches tall, from Havana, Cuba, with a record of 45 and oh Andres “The Giant” Garbanzo.  Garbanzo handed his prosthetic eyes to a beautiful girl at ringside and I whispered to Jack, “They don’t call him the Spanish fly for nothing.”  As Garbanzo danced about the ring.

Buffer returned to his microphone, “And in the red corner, coming in at five feet ten inches and weighing 175 and one half pounds, fighting out of San Francisco, California, Mike “The Streetwalker” Pedestrian!”  The California crowd went wild for their home state hero.

“They’ll be disappointed,” I said to Al.

“I’m sure,” said the right reverend, “it’s ludicrous to even think that a white boy can take out a guy as tough as Garbanzo.  If he does, I want to get out of LA quick as this might be worse than the Rodney King debacle.”

Buffer yelled, “Are you ready to rumble?”  The crowd went into near hysteria as the referee told the fighters some rules which we couldn’t even hear from ringside.  The fighters returned to their corners and we heard a loud Ding!

The fighters started toward each other, slowly at first and then faster.  Pedestrian grabbed on and the referee separated them.  Garbanzo led with two left jabs, Pedestrian took a step back, Andres pursued, and jab, jab, jab and a right cross to Mike’s jaw that caused blood to spurt from his mouth.  “How do you like that?”  Asked Nicholson as he started to dab at the blood on his tuxedo shirt.  “I always get the fluids on me.”

Pedestrian took a standing eight count and Garbanzo returned to the attack.  Jab, Jab, jab, Andres could hit The Streetwalker at will.  Finally, with a right uppercut, Pedestrian went down.  The referee counted to ten and it was all over.

“He might hang out in the Castro,” exclaimed an exuberant Garbanzo, “but I fought Fidel and came out on top!”

The stunned crowd shuffled out and Samhara and I headed for the valet to get our rental.  We screamed back to the hotel with the same rap CD playing, I gave Ricardo another hundred and we sat for coffee.  When our bags reached the front and Ricardo pulled the car around, we hopped in and headed back toward the airport.  “I think we’re early enough for the last flight out,” she said.

“Flight to where?”  I asked.

“Do you really care?”

–End

I never thought much about the Paralympics. In fact, I thought they had some kind of relationship to the Special Olympics, the heartwarming event held periodically in which mentally challenged athletes participate and “everyone goes home a winner.” Then, a few years ago, in a conversation I had with Matt King, IBM Special Needs Advocate and competitive tandem bicyclist, I learned that the two events had nothing to do with each other and, in the Paralympics, the competition gets fierce and the athletes play to win. At that time, Matt trained daily for the Melbourne Paralympics in which he would compete in the cycling events.

Matt, who lost his vision to RP, has a blind brother, Jim King, who also enjoys outdoor sports and, if memory serves me, Jim, a PPO board member and all around terrific guy, became the first blind musher to run the length of the Iditarod course behind a dog sled. Needless to say, the King Brothers don’t need to feel like winners just for showing up but, rather, their competitive drive brings them to sports and, when participating, they play to win.

Having learned about the real nature of the Paralympics from Matt, I found myself interested in the recently concluded winter events in Turin, Italy. Paralympics means, “Parallel Olympics and does not refer to paraplegics specifically although some do compete. I will focus on blind athletes and the sports in which they participated and let those who write about other disabilities cover them for their readers.

I must say, as I collected background articles for this piece (thanks again to the Blind News guys), that I found it surprising that very few of the pieces mentioning blind athletes came from the US. Except for a single piece from MSN news, all sources for this item came from outside our country. It amazes me that the networks will spend hours covering a hissy fit between two male speed skaters but not give blind athletes a single mention.

The March 10 MSN News ran an article titled, “Winter Paralympics opens in Turin: cauldron lit by blind 11-year-old Italian girl,” and described some of the major points of the games. Demonstrating the importance of these events to the athletes with various disabilities, the article states, “Random anti-doping tests will be performed, while the medalists in each event will be also tested.” These competitors take this very seriously and these events don’t celebrate one for just showing up. Even though most of the press had left Turin, the Paralympic games would award 58 medals during its nine days of
Competition.

Due to a lack of sponsorship dollars and an unproven audience base, the Winter Paralympics did not receive television coverage, but fans could, “check out the webcast of all the events at the International Paralympic Committee’s site. It features a searchable archive, program guide and highlights section,” says an article in Toronto Now.

“In many ways, these Games make for more interesting viewing, because the athletes aren’t carbon copies of one another. Each has individualized harnesses and prosthetics specially designed for his or her participation in events. The truly visionary technology used by athletes is often a test run for designs that help thousands of people with disabilities,” continues the Toronto Now article. This demonstrates another similarity between technologies for the mainstream and those for people with disabilities as many medical procedures, automotive and other technologies get their first tests in the world of competition and later get applied for non-athletic purposes.

In the skiing events, people with vision impairments can use a guide, “who describes the intricacies of the course from the sidelines with a megaphone.” The Toronto Now article continues by explaining that, “the very best skiers just need to hear their sighted guide ski on the course ahead of them to know which path to take.” I know quite a few blind skiers and this item makes the first reference to following a guide just by the sound of their skis on the slopes. I guess that’s why these guys compete internationally and, when I find myself in a snowy environment, I either sit by a fireplace indoors or, if I feel especially energetic, use cross country skis in preformed paths over short and mostly flat courses. Even the thought of careening down the side of a snow covered mountain listening to someone yell directions at me through a loudspeaker frightens me. These blind skiers should challenge the Olympic medal winners to a lights off competition on a random slope after dark. I doubt any will accept this challenge.

Regular Blind Confidential readers will know that I often include firearms in my lists of items I would like to have made more accessible and, as recently as last week, I challenged any KKK member to a shoot out if I could use a specially rigged Mossberg shotgun. The blind Paralympians already have accessible weapons described in the Toronto Now article, “For the biathlon, visually impaired skiers follow their guide to the shooting range and are directed to the targets by sound. Their rifles shoot a beam of light and sound at the target that gets bounced back to the shooter’s headset. The pitch increases the closer they get to the target, allowing them to refine their aim.” I’m a member of the Night Shooting Club in Clearwater, Florida. I go there with a friend once a year or so and he gives me verbal clues to aim my weapon and shoot at paper targets. Last time out, of the fifty shots I took with a competition target pistol, I got 46 hits and about fifteen bulls.

I plan on researching this technology further to see what I need to buy to attach to a rifle and handgun to improve my shooting skills. One of the fellows who work at the Night gun club is a former member of the Israeli secret service, he has told me, “If I can teach sighted people to shoot in the dark, I can teach you to shoot too.” With this technology, I’ll probably take him up on his offer. If anyone in my readership knows who builds these attachments for the guns, please send me an email or post a comment as I really do want to learn more. As I have a little experience cross country skiing, I wonder if there is a senior circuit for blind biathletes.

Proving that the Paralympic games also maintain the drama of controversy, The Star Phoenix, another Canadian publication reported, “Chris Williamson of Markham, Ont., was awarded a bronze medal at the Paralympics Tuesday by enforcing a rule he never agreed with.”

Williamson originally thought he had finished fourth in the vision impaired Super G slalom event when he learned the rules committee had awarded him the bronze medal, “after German gold medalist Gerd Gradwohl was disqualified because he became separated by more than one directional turn from his guide Karl Heinz Vachenauer during the race,” says the Star Phoenix article.

Gradwohl, who had thought he won Sunday’s downhill race, was furious over the disqualification and quoted in the same article as saying, “It is disgraceful. It always is when you lose a medal, especially a gold, because of a rule. Sometimes it’s not good to make decisions because of rules. It is not sporting.”

Williamson, the benefactor of the disqualification also showed anger at the decision, “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “If you can’t see your guide, I don’t see how that is a benefit. I think the basic theory of the rule is incorrect.”

Demonstrating the worldwide appeal of scandal, the Chinese Peoples Daily online covered the story in an article entitled, “Italian seizes first gold medal from blind skiing at Paralympics.” The article states, “Dal Maistro seized the gold medal in the Super G, blind category at the Sestriere field. As a matter of fact, Dal Maistro finished second behind German skier Gerd Gradwohl, who was then disqualified because the distance between him and his guide was not within regulations, and third was Slovakian Radomir Dudas.”

So, with controversy, intense competition and blind people with firearms, I can’t understand why the Paralympic games do not get more coverage in the United States. Perhaps, it has something to do with the fact that very few Americans participated and all of the medals were won by people from Canada or Europe with Russia leading the pack. We Americans like to ignore what we can’t win and the Paralympics don’t even have figure skating to please those who enjoy leering at teenaged girls in skimpy outfits.

Afterward

A quick apology to Matt Bailey who, in my last two BC posts, got renamed Matt Daly. This is part of the fun with listening to speech synthesizers all of the time.

Since starting Blind Confidential back in January, we have found ourselves quoted and referenced on a number of other blogs and in blindness related mailing lists.  Other than an occasional acknowledgement, Blind Confidential has not reciprocated by mentioning any of the other blogs I have found interesting.  We do keep an ever growing collection of links to other blogs of interest but rarely say anything about them in my nearly daily articles.  Because my wrists hurt from typing a bit too much, I felt that I should lay off the keyboard as much as possible and only do a short entry today.  Thus, a blog about blogs I find interesting.

The first link under our heading “Blog Related Links” is “Subscribe to Blind Confidential RSS Feed.”  This brings you to a page where you can subscribe to Blind Confidential and, rather than coming to the web site each time you want to read a story, you will automatically receive all new material when you launch your RSS reader.  If you come here often, this will make reading BC more convenient.

The other links in this section all point to other blogs.  We keep this list in alphabetic order so as not to show any sort of bias.  We keep the links in the “Businesses and Organizations” alphabetized for the same reason.

Blind Access Journal, written by Darrell and Karen Chandro “is all about the blind and our quest for the greatest possible access to all the information available in the world around us.”  BAJ has new material almost every day and I find it quite informative.

The Desert Skies Podcast talks about, “technology with a twist toward accessibility.”  It is run by old friend Jeff Bishop and he updates it frequently.  Jeff keeps well informed about issues regarding technology and blindness and brings a nice mixture of the technical and personal to the blogosphere.

The Fred’s Head Companion, a blog run by American Printing House for the blind and managed by Michael McCarty has rerun Blind Confidential posts and, on a very frequent basis, discusses issues of interest to people with vision impairments.  I like this blog especially because Michael often writes about topics that get far less coverage than the AT debates and technology issues.

Probably the most frequented blog in the blindness world, The Mosen Explosion, may also publish the most eclectic content in the blindness corner of the blogosphere.  Jonathon Mosen, who rose to fame as the original host of the popular ACB radio program, “Main Menu” and who now works as a product manager for Humanware brings a lot of insightful commentary about nearly every subject from technology to dishwashing.  Jonathon updates his blog numerous times per day and shows great courage by discussing very personal matters that I couldn’t imagine revealing about myself in a public forum.  Jonathon, as he always did before, brings us a lot to think about, a lot to read and a lot to listen to.

Peter Korn’s Weblog contains, “The collected occasional commentary by Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc.”  If you don’t know Peter, he brings a frenetically genius view to the world of accessibility.  Peter doesn’t update his blog too often but his opinions, whether I agree with them or not, always seem to be well considered and come from a long career in the access technology biz.

The most recent addition to our list of interesting blogs, Web Site Accessibility Blog, written by Matt Daly, a great guy who also enjoys salt water fishing, intends to increase “the awareness of Web Site Accessibility and Marketing.”  Matt works as a web access and marketing consultant and writes about this important subject as well as other issues related to disability.

The blindness community probably has lots more blogs going and BC would love to add a link to your blog in exchange for one to us.  We find our ever growing readership, with quite a lot of hits to the page, a solid number of RSS subscriptions and the republishing and emailing of our content very exciting.  We’ve received a lot of fan mail lately which makes us happy and I hope to continue to write articles that amuse, challenge and inform.  So, please either write to me directly or post a comment if you would like us to add a pointer to your blog.

 

[Today, I will try to reconstruct the item I wrote yesterday about driving while blind.  It will likely be less funny as it will be less fresh but that’s life.  Leon Gilbert, the man behind Blind News (one of my greatest sources for blog ideas) posted a comment yesterday that made reference to some serious blind driving projects.  I am aware of these and will, when in a serious mood, write something about them.  Today’s item will, however, be pretty silly and in the semi gonzo form I’ve been taking lately.

Some material in today’s article might not be suitable for young readers.  There is nothing sexual but there are comments about the use of various intoxicants during a period in my personal history.  I do not advocate drug use, alcohol abuseinsanity, , promiscuity or violence but, as the late great Hunter S. Thompson once said, “It worked for me for a long time.”  Today, I don’t use any illicit drugs or drink alcohol as I think for a living and such substances do little for the clarity of mind I need to do my jobs.  I rarely get involved in violence anymore as I am old, weak and pathetic.  Promiscuity ended when the women started saying, “no,”.  I keep enough insanity around to make up for the others though.]

Back in 1977, the State of New Jersey in its infinite wisdom found it appropriate to issue me, one Christian David Hofstader, a license to operate an automobile.  They seemed to miss the fact that I spent most of my leisure time swilling beer, smoking pot and ingesting nearly any other intoxicant available in freakdom – a fact the local juvenile justice system knew quite well.  They also neglected to notice that I had nearly no remaining peripheral vision, a fact I kept well hidden.

“It doesn’t matter what’s beside you,” said the driver’s education teacher and my wrestling coach at Union Catholic High School (I won’t include his name to protect the guilty); “just drive straight ahead and you’ll do fine.”  While taking advice from a gym teacher who would, on occasion, purchase some very potent Hawaiian herbal remedies from my little cottage business might  lead to a poor outcome, my testosterone driven seventeen year old self wanted to drive as much as did my Molson swilling, bong water stained buddies.  

As Bruce described the Jersey suburban landscape of the time, “Baby this town rips the bones from your back, it’s a death trap, a suicide rap, we gotta get out while we’re young!”  Driving meant freedom to us suburbanites.  So, license in wallet, I hit the road.  I slammed the gas pedal to the metal on my 1972 Toyota Corolla and raced up to a blazing 45 miles per hour, at least double the speed I could reach on my bicycle and, as the rust fell off the once yellow body and Blue Oyster Cult blared from the 8 track, I had achieved Nirvana – Jersey style.

Fortunately for me and the occasional daredevil willing to ride as a passenger when I drove, the six accidents in which I was involved during my legal driving career resulted in nothing more than the occasional ding and an increase in my dad’s insurance rates.

Ultimately, a judge forced me to turn in my license during a trial resulting from a bit of nastiness involving the Union County Police, beer, marijuana, ice skating, a friend suffering a head injury (unrelated to anything automotive), a whole lot of shouting and those sticks cops carry striking my head a few times.  My attorney used my poor vision and the brutality of the police as the basis of my defense.  Somehow, the judge couldn’t reconcile my legal blindness with my legally driving so he forced me to surrender my license, pay $100 in court fees and let me go on my way.

A little detour in our story:  A few months after my adjudication, the arresting officer in my case (a name I will leave out to protect the innocent, his family and such) attended a party with a whole lot of other police officers.  After consuming large amounts of alcohol and who knows what else, some of New Jersey’s Finest started to play a game called “cop.”  I don’t know the rules of this game but I suppose someone does.  The boy in blue who arrested me on that winter night, with a blood alcohol level approaching flammable, shocked his fellow officers by firing a real bullet directly between the eyes of his partner, killing him instantly.  In the same courthouse where I gave up my right to drive, he received a life sentence and had his life handed over to the care of Rahway State Prison in Woodbridge, New Jersey.  I hear the other residents of such places treat former cops pretty poorly; I don’t know, I’ve never lived in a state prison.

The last time I drove a car happened during COMDEX 1994.  My business partners and I sat for a long time in the Caesar’s Palace tequila bar, the only drinking establishment 3000 miles from home where the bartenders knew our names and served us our drinks for free.  We drank beer and tequila shots until we couldn’t stand those damned talking statues outside of the place.  We picked ourselves up from our stools, not a simple feat at that point and staggered across Las Vegas Blvd. to Bally’s to drink in their tequila bar.  After a few hours there, the idea of my driving the rental seemed like a brilliant diversion so we yelled, “To the Lincoln!”  And set back across the street to retrieve our car from the Caesar’s valet.

When the kid brought our car around, Steve, our CFO and designated drunk driver, hopped behind the wheel and headed east, toward the desert.  When we passed Henderson, well on our way to Boulder City, Steve pulled off onto a deserted patch of sand hills, dirt, cactus and total darkness.  He hopped out of the car, ran to the passenger’s seat as I slid behind the wheel, we all buckled up and Eric, our lead software engineer, a MIT graduate and now executive at a very successful Silicon Beach technology company, yelled, “Let’s do it!”

I put the vehicle into drive, slammed down on the gas and listened as my boys shouted directions to turn right, left, stop, reverse.  We flew off sand dunes, catching air in a Lincoln Town Car, we slid, we spun, we whooped and hollered and, when we grew tired, Steve drove us back to the MGM Grand.  In the parking lot, a couple of guys asked, “What happened to your car?”  We explained and it turned out they wrote for PC magazine and mentioned us in a COMDEX highlights article in the next edition.

Before returning the car to Avis, we removed a chunk of chaparral from the grill and used Super Glue to repair it.  With strapping wire, we put the muffler back near its original position and, with only my Leatherman toolkit, we got the rear bumper back to where it belonged.  We ran the vehicle through a car wash to get rid of the cactus juice, sand and other crud and brought the car back looking pretty nice.  I often wonder what happened to the next people who rented that particular Town Car.

I found it interesting when I read an article that came through Blind News from the Illinois based, Belleville News Democrat that described how Chicago public schools require students with vision impairments to pass the written portion of the driver’s education test in order to graduate from high school.  The article quotes a blind 16 year old, Mayra Ramirez, as saying, “In other classes, you don’t really feel different because you can do the work other people do.  But in driver’s ed, it does give us the feeling we’re different. In a way, it brought me down, because it reminds me of something I can’t do.”

Clearly, young Ms Ramirez hasn’t predicted the beer bashes, hydroponic bong hits, electric Kool-Aid parties, grain alcohol, Jell-O shots and other hazards to which she will undoubtedly receive invitations when she reaches college.  After any of these events, she could drive as skillfully as any frat boy, sorority babe or chemistry geek who cooks up the freakiest intoxicants in the basement of the science building.

The article continues, “It defies logic to require blind students to take this course … and waste their academic time,” said Meta Minton, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Board of Education.  I’ll quote Paul Simon here, “When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school,” things like history lessons that described the white supremacist genocide of American Indians with the lovely euphemism, “manifest destiny” as if God himself endowed those of European ancestry the right to kill, torture, steal and maim in order to be blessed from sea to shining sea, I actually think the driver’s education classes I took probably provided me with far more useful information.  Put in the light of how issues like slavery and the use of atomic weapons against human targets were taught, I’m certain that traffic laws came in handy far more often than the bleached out, Disnified past that never happened but was forced upon us did.

The article adds, Brent Johnston, a teacher at a suburban high school and chairman of the Illinois High School/College Driver’s Education Association, told the Chicago Tribune that the classes aren’t a waste of time for blind students.
“I don’t think you can ever get enough traffic safety,” Johnston said.  I’m just glad this guy doesn’t teach knife throwing or gun safety as that might encourage him to take truly dangerous actions.

In all seriousness, though, blind people have entered automobile rallies and others have driven around portions of the UK and Canada to raise awareness of various causes involving people with vision impairments.  Carnegie Melon University has a robotic automobile that drives based on GPS, cyber-vision and all kinds of other artificial intelligence which may take over the personal transportation world in a few decades.  Independently operating some kind of vehicle is probably the Holy Grail of blindness technology and I, for one, look forward to experiencing it someday.  Just don’t ask me to be a beta tester…

Afterward

Thanks to Jonathon Mosen and Matt Daly for featuring Blind Confidential in their blogs yesterday.  We’ve added links to their blogs in the list of blindness related blogs up at the top of this page.

An unfortunate act by an idiot spammer or, more likely, a bot released by an idiot spammer, has forced Blind Confidential to change its policy of open comments to a moderated status.  So, if you post a comment, you’ll have to wait until I get to my email so I can approve it before it will show up here.  I promise to approve anything that pertains to the topics discussed herein, positive, negative or death threats.

In today’s piece, I take certain attitudes held by white supremacists to task.  If you happen to follow this doctrine, you probably want to kill me just because I have a birth defect.  This behavior advocated by the slow minded members of the KKK, National Front, Arian Nation and other organizations populated by lunkheaded skinheads amuses me as they don’t believe in evolution so what difference does it make if I swim in the gene pool or not?  I, on the other hand, do believe in evolution and believe someone should add a little chlorine to the gene pool in order to get rid of these neo-Nazi types.  I’m not advocating killing these people, castration will do nicely.

If you consider yourself a “conservative” or “neo-con” who feels badly about my statements about the overt racism in the history books I grew up with, consider this, the real Nazi Party, the one back in the bad old days of Germany, first started their genocide by executing homosexuals.  Next, people like me, people with birth defects, became the subjects of horrific experiments.  Nazi rhetoric always singled out Jews and other foreigners who, shortly after we blinks hit the laboratories, found themselves in extermination camps.  Recently retired Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, who voted with the majority in Bush v. Gore to put W. into office, in a speech earlier this week, probably became the most prominent American ever to suggest that our nation may be heading toward dictatorship.

So, when I see the governments of various states and the president of the United States openly making discriminatory statements about gays and lesbians and passing mob rules legislation about people from foreign nations, I start thinking about buying that Mossberg M9, twelve gauge, pump action shotgun with halogen blinding light affixed atop it.  I’ll have nine rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, you’ll be as blind as me, so come on you crazy Kluckers, let’s rumble.