I’m looking for suggestions. Been working on a new piece for NPR about media images of disability–specifically, the way certain soft-news and reality TV programs portray people with disabilities as scientific oddities or “amazing but true” objects of medical curiosity–and I could really use your help.

You see, the examples I originally came up with were all from the Discovery Health channel, which ceased broadcasting at the end of the year. So I need new examples.

If you encounter any, please e-mail me pronto. The best way to reach me is at bmattlin@earthlink.net.

Full article

Up today, ‘Inside the life of a person with disabilities,’ a feature that recently ran at an Ohio ABC affiliate. This article and the accompanying video read like the journalist closely read haddayr?s ‘Plucky Cripples Don?t Let Lack of Bingo Card Stop Them‘ and my guide to talking about disability in the media, took careful notes, and then deliberately tried to hit every possible offensive trope. Really, my hat is off to Susan Ross Wells, the reporter who prepared this piece. It takes remarkable talent to be able to fit all of this into one short local interest piece. This a journalist who will be Going Places, I can sense it.

Full article:
Today In Journalism: Do You Feel Special? Well? Do You?!

One memorable year (football fans will probably remember which year it was, I don’t), we strolled down the middle of Route 123 in downtown McLean, Virginia with not a car in sight.

But it has its downside. Last year, we went out to dinner, only to find that the restaurant decided to close on the spur of the moment due to lack of customers.

Last night we wanted pizza, and we discovered that there was a new sit-down pizza place nearby. I called them. Yes, they were open. Yes, they did have a couple of small televisions, but the sound would be off (the last thing your Superbowl-avoider wants is to wind up in a sports bar with a gazillion large screen TVs going at full blast).

As promised, there were two small televisions, but the volume was on. On one of them, the volume was up to the point where my husband and I couldn’t comfortably carry on a conversation. There were no other customers. I asked the server if she would turn down the TV. Her face twisted. She hesitated. “Normally we have them on mute,” she said, “but with the big game, the staff want to be able to…”

“Maybe the staff need their own TV,” I suggested.

“Oh, no, then they wouldn’t get any work done!”

She agreed to turn it down, but I could tell it pained her. We ate and paid as fast as possible, and went across the street to Baskin-Robbins for dessert, as I’m sure they wanted me out of their Superbowl as fast as possible.

Q: I’m a wheelchair user and athlete and am looking to buy a used car that will have enough space to transport our sports equipment (racing wheelchair, hand cycle, regular bicycle and everyday wheelchair) and is lower to the ground (to make it easier for me to get in and out of it). Is there a sports wagon that has enough cargo space, or do you think we need to look to a sport-utility vehicle or minivan?
?Minda Dentler, New York

A: A minivan would be the easiest option for your needs, since they generally ride low like cars and have the most usable cargo space. They are especially well-suited to carrying bikes and other wheeled sports equipment that can be too bulky to fit easily in smaller vehicles without extensive disassembly. There are a lot of used models available, so the range of choices should be broad.

Still, I understand the wish to stay with a sport wagon. You might try the Volvo V70, Saab 9-5 or Dodge Magnum. The caveat: Wagons tend to fill up more quickly than you might expect.

On Labor Day that year Clark’s sister was able to talk her through an attack, which was brought on by the stress of planning to go away for the weekend. After that, she was able to stop several other attacks by relaxing during stressful times.

“Talk her through an attack”? Maybe it’s a variation of “it’s all in your head”.

The disabled include main characters, secondary recurring characters, one off characters, villians, heroes, and just ordinary people. They have both physical and mental disabilities. The lead character, Inspector Ian Rutledge, suffers from PTSD (shell shock, in the parlance of the day) and auditory hallucinations. There are characters with amputations, multiple personality disorder, impending vision loss, shell shock, traumatic muteness, long-term blindness, paralysis, more shell shock – you get the idea.

The Rutledge novels never let you forget that England’s people have suffered tremendously, and that the aftermath of the Great War is to be seen everywhere.

The Todds do not succumb to the usual disability in fiction stereotypes. Disability is not used as an outward and visible sign of inward evil. Todd’s disabled characters rarely die and they’re never cured. They are not Christ figures, super-crips or vehicles for pity. Some of them (like some of the able-bodied people in the books) show evidence of actual sex lives.

The Todds show some understanding of the continuum of disability. A blind woman is shown to have at least light perception, possibly more. A woman who uses a wheelchair after an accident is able to stand and take several steps.

While on the one hand, the Todds do not transplant early 21st century disability thinking into the immediate post-war years, on the other hand, disability doesn’t seem to inconvenience especially the main characters very much. Rutledge’s shell shock is certainly the bedrock of his characterization, but it doesn’t seem to impair his day to day relationships with others or his ability to do his job. The wheelchair user in A Cold Treachery helps run a boarding house in a remote Scottish village that doesn’t even belong to her, and there’s scarcely a word of explanation as to how she even manages to get in and out of the building.

These are minor quibbles, though – the books are fascinating reading, and it’s a novelty to encounter such matter of fact portrayals of disabled characters.

Here’s my list (31 of the top 106):

1. Life of Pi: a novel (one of my kids gave this to me for Christmas a couple of years ago)
2. The Name of the Rose (got this after I had exhausted all the Cadfael books)
3. Don Quixote (read this in college – Spanish literature class)
4. Moby Dick (read this in high school – AP English)
5. The Odyssey (read it with my husband a couple of years ago – he’s chewing through a tremendous stack of Greek and Roman classics)
6. Jane Eyre (read this when I was a teenager)
7. The Brothers Karamazov (went through a big Dostoevsky phase in my youth – actually a Russian/Soviet phase, I read a lot of Solzhenitsyn, too)
8. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (read this after the adaption was aired on PBS – it got really repetitive after a while)
9. The Time Traveler’s Wife (sometime in the last 5 years)
10. Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (my daughter is a huge fan, so I read it, too)
11. The Canterbury Tales (college)
12. Brave New World (this fell into my heavy science fiction period)
13. The Count of Monte Cristo (love, love, love this book – read the whole thing, not an abridged version)
14. The Once and Future King (read this as a kid)
15. The Poisonwood Bible: a novel (someone gave this too me because I also lived in Africa as a child)
16. 1984 (see Brave New World)
17. The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (college)
18. Mansfield Park (just read this after seeing the PBS adaption)
19. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (high school – AP English)
20. Gulliver’s Travels (high school – for fun)
21. Dune (the original – accept no substitutes)
22. The Sound and the Fury (high school)
23. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
24. Slaughterhouse-five (it’s Vonnegut! I’ve read it all)
25. Eats, Shoots & Leaves (it’s grammar)
26. The Mists of Avalon (it’s feminist fantasy)
27. Northanger Abbey (see Mansfield Park)
28. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (high school – it was lying around the house)
29. Watership Down (this somehow fell into the SF phase)
30. The Hobbit (it’s Tolkein!)
31. The Three Musketeers (see Count of Monte Cristo)

I own very few books that I have not read – I buy them, read them, then put them on the shelf. I hardly ever buy a book with idea of reading it someday in the future.

In the last 10 years or so, though, I’ve become a big library user and really haven’t bought that many books at all.

I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the festival. I’m told that paparazzi will take unflattering pictures, people will be unkind, etc.
…
I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what?

I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers.

Read the whole thing at I ain’t a pretty boy no more.

Times-Call article (since they don’t archive at all):

3-2-1 contact
Ball cheers Deep Impact’s successful collision with Tempel 1
By Victoria A.F. Camron
The Daily Times-Call
BOULDER—Ball Aerospace employees cheered wildly Sunday night when they saw pictures of the Deep Impact spacecraft collide with Comet Tempel 1 about 83 million miles away from the Sommers-Bausch Observatory at the University of Colorado.

While dozens of employees crowded into a small room at the observatory, hundreds of interested visitors stood nearby in the Fiske Planetarium to watch a NASA TV telecast of the event, the first time humans have contacted a comet. The goal is to learn about the elements hidden inside comets—the same elements that may have been the beginning of life on earth.

In the observatory, a nearly silent crowd watched the impactor, as the spacecraft was called, take its last photos of the comet before it crashed.

“The spacecraft is doing remarkably well for something that’s about to vaporize,” a commentator told the crowd. “Our brave little spacecraft is in a very hostile environment.”

The collision occurred just before midnight, with the comet and the impactor craft closing in on each other at a speed of 23,000 mph. The size of the resulting crater depended on the make-up of the comet, but was expected to be the size of a football field and, perhaps, 140 feet deep, officials said.

The Ball crowd was briefly frustrated as they watched the crew at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory react to the pictures of the impact, before they could see those pictures themselves.
When the photograph of the impact — with its bright glow in a cloud of dust — finally appeared on the screen, the cheers and applause were even louder than they had been a few minutes earlier.

“That image says it all. We hit it exactly where we wanted to,” the commentator said.

Engineers from Ball Aerospace developed all the hardware, except the launch vehicle, for the mission.

With the University of Maryland and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the engineers designed a two-vehicle system: an 830-pound, 39-inch wide copper impactor that could navigate on its own to crash into the proper place on the comet; and a flyby machine that could record the impact and gather data from the comet afterward.

Alice Phinney, the lead mechanical engineer on the impactor, was overwhelmed after observing the impact.

“I can’t believe we hit this,” Phinney said. “It was absolutely sheer … stupendous, happy, elated, every single emotion.”

For two years, ending in March 2002, Phinney worked on the impactor. The most challenging aspect was minimizing the non-copper components, so a true sample of the elements in the comet could be determined, she said.

Phinney’s husband, Charlie Schira, was in California for the collision. Also an engineer, Schira’s job was to ensure any trajectory changes made would help the impactor hit the comet, Phinney said.

Comet Tempel 1 is named for its founder, Wilhelm Tempel, who discovered it in 1867. The comet circles the sun about every 51/2 years,

The $330 million Deep Impact mission began about five years ago, and the system launched about six months ago. The two parts of the spacecraft traveled together until 24 hours before impact, when the impactor separated and headed toward the comet.

The flyby craft remained behind, staying about 300 miles away to monitor the crash. The impactor was expected to vaporize during the crash.

The flyby spacecraft includes three telescopes, three cameras and a spectrometer for analyzing the interior of the comet that were designed and made at Ball.

“The last 24 hours of the impactor’s life should provide the most spectacular data in the history of cometary science,” Dr. Michael A’Hearn of the University of Maryland said in a news release. A’Hearn is the project’s principal investigator.

“With the information we receive after the impact, it will be a whole new ballgame. We know so little about the structure of cometary nuclei that almost every moment we expect to learn something new.”