Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

A bulleted list:

A couple weeks ago (or so), heard about a study (Via BBC Radio) of people who are born Deaf: that their sense of touch is much more sensitive than that of people born hearing -- to such the extent that variations in vibrations influence how they interpret what they see. Apparently, the parts of the temporal lobe that process sound for Hearing folks, switch over to interpreting touch, instead.

My take-away: 1) Makes sense (unintentional pun is unintentional), especially since the auditory center is already built for interpreting vibrations [through the air], the shift to interpreting touch would be tiny. 2) On Planet Eyeth, a "hearing" child would be considered "touch impaired," since it would be much harder for them to sense people trying to get their attention by stamping on the floor, etc., because the section of the brain best designed for that is distracted by noises, instead of the vibrations that have cultural meaning and purpose for communication.

Once again, I watched a Nova ScienceNow program titled "What makes us human?" And once again, there was special focus on spoken language (see above), and walking upright on two legs... (sigh). And there was another episode I am making a point not to watch, about "What the future holds" because a centerpiece segment is all about fancy robot legs that let paralyzed people walk with crutches, and thus, appear more normal... And that's the really important thing, isn't it, above all else?

Grr. in my grumpiness around the inherent ableism in all aspects of this perennial question, my answer is this: "What makes us 'human' is the human genome." Humans are no more unique on this planet than dolphins are unique, or squid, or maple trees, or ... And really: "What makes us human?" is euphemistic-- the unspoken (honest) question is: "What gives us the right to claim ownership of everything (animate or otherwise) we can touch?" The honest answer is, perhaps, "Nothing." But we (as a species) secretly, and unironically, believe that "Might makes Right," and so keep searching for that one secret ingredient in the formula that gives us the right to have the might: perhaps it's speech, or walking upright, or tool-making, or question-asking, or government bureaucracies, or religion, or morality... and so, when we look closer, and see those attributes in other species (or even in those species of humans besides us that have died out), a tone of panic and rationalization enters the narrative.

Speaking of which, I am growing sick and tired of the meme (in the non-Internet sense) that Homo Sapiens must be somehow superior to the Neanderthal, because we're still here and they've died out... Um, yeah. The Neanderthals lived successfully in Europe for roughly 300,000 years before "dying out." So far, modern humans have only colonized Europe for about 30,000 years. I'd say it's still a bit early yet for us to go around boasting that we're doing so much better. Come back to me with that argument in 200,000 years.

On the "Pet Health" episode of a local radio talk show today, the subject was Wolf-dogs, and why it's such a bad idea to try and breed them and keep them as pets. And the point was made that dogs are not wolves -- that "domestication" has created a very different beast, not only with different temperaments, but different digestive systems, and different brain wiring.

The most common "domestication narrative" goes something like this:

1) Wolves have a range of temperaments from fearful, to aggressive, to curious and calm...

2) Wolves who had fearful or aggressive temperaments ran away from human settlements. But the the curious and calm wolves hung around human settlements, picking out food from our garbage heaps, thus increasing their chances to survive and breed.

3) Over successive generations, this divergence in populations gave rise to a different and brand new animal -- the "dog," that wants to be our best friend...

My answer to that is:

A) Well, humans come with a range of temperaments, too, from fearful to aggressive, to curious and calm.

B) Humans who are fearful or aggressive would have either run away or thrown rocks when wolves approached, looking for scraps. But the calm, curious humans might have held out their hands to be sniffed, and even ventured to offer an ear-scritch or belly rub. Thus having the wolves around to bark a warning when strangers or predators approached, and also to help sniff out prey when we go hunting, thus increasing human chances to survive and breed.

C) Over successive generations, this divergence in populations gave rise to a different and brand new kind of Homo Sapiens -- the mensch, that wants to live in close proximity with large numbers of family and neighbors, and to settle down and start farming and building cities; our current phenotype hasn't changed as much as the wolf's to Labrador has, but I bet our brain wiring has.

In other words, humans and dogs domesticated each other...

And here's the outlier (but maybe even it's not entirely an outlier):

A bit ago (sometime between the New Year and now), I stumbled across this video from the Vlogbrothers Channel, wherein Hank Green discusses the cultural phenomenon of superhero creation: Superhero Creation Myths. His thesis is that each generation creates supernatural beings out of the things we fear and are fascinated by: sex, violence, disease {he didn't mention, but I will: demons/angels/Fey}, etc.

And that got me thinking about the abortive attempt I made, in 2010, to create my own comic book hero. I, too, gave "Gabriel" an origin rooted in my own fear, fascination, and disgust. This particular plot bunny was "mothered" by Christopher Reeve's address to the 1996 Democratic Convention (where the only option presented to improve the quality of life for disabled people is to cure all disabilities, ever, forever), and it was "fathered" by my desire to see a superhero universe where the disabled superhero was a member of an active and interconnected disabled community (instead of being the only disabled person to ever appear on the pages [hello Oracle and Daredevil]). And it also, for plot-driving reasons had a healthy dose of gene-splicing and worldwide Space conflicts over energy resources, and issues of poverty and privilege, and yeah...

But anyway, the kick-off for my story was a meteorite crashing to Earth, and from that crash, discoveries of new metal alloys that spark a boom in non-petroleum based fuels (and the advances in science in that arena lead to advances in science in the "cure 'all' disabilities" arena -- only really just 'cure all the disabilities we know about, now'), which leads to fighting over resources in the asteroid belt the way we now fight and go to war over oil.

So-- all the meteoroid news this last couple of weeks got me thinking about my story again, and maybe it would be more plausible to have the asteroid-hunting element part of the plot come in the nearer future than I'd set it in my original idea...

( transcript of video below the cut )

There's a meme going around where people try to describe their work/job using only the thousand (ten hundred) most used words in English. I don't have a job, so instead, I wrote:

My rant on the broader, medical meme: "Having Cerebral Palsy means you have mental retardation":

(Begin Quote)
The part of my brain that thinks works well, but it has trouble talking to the part of my brain that moves my legs and arms and knows when I am standing straight. So even though I am a full grown person, I can't walk by myself, and use a chair that rolls instead.

People sometimes stare at me when I am out in my rolling chair, because they think that all full grown people should walk all the time. Sometimes, they act like they think I just don't want to walk. Sometimes, they talk to me like they think I am a child. Sometimes, I think this is funny. Many times, this makes me angry.

Many people in the world have brains with different parts that don't talk to each other well (almost four in ten hundred people around the world). If the reason the brain has trouble starts before a person is four years old, and it's just because the way the brain is, and it won't change, doctors call it "Not-move-well-because-brain," even if the ways people's brains have trouble are all different.

In places with lots of money and hospitals, "Not-move-well-because-brain" often starts on the first day of life. But in places with little money or doctors "not-move-well-because-brain" can start because the child gets sick, or falls and hurts their head.

It is most hard for people if the part of their brain that moves the mouth has trouble, so the person talks slow, or with a strange sound, because even if the part of the brain that thinks can do its job, teachers in school won't believe the child understands, and so won't try to help them learn, because it is too hard. So many of these children don't go to school, but learn at home, instead. But sometimes, the child's mother and father believe the teacher and their doctor that the child can't understand, and so these people never get the chance to learn. So no one really knows how much they can understand or learn.

Two well-known people in the world (one man who started life four-twenty years ago, and a woman woman who started life three-ten-and-two years ago) each had "not-move-well-because-brain" so bad that they each could only move one foot, and could not talk at all. But they learned how to read and write by themselves and wrote true stories about their lives. The man's story was made into a movie, and two years ago, the woman was called the best worker-with-words in the place that she lived, even though her mother and father beat her for trying to write when she was a child, because they thought the way she wrote, with her foot, on the ground, would make bad things happen.

This is why I don't believe the doctors and teachers who think that most people with "not-move-well-because-brain" can't learn or understand anything, and even if some of these people do have trouble with thinking, it is wrong to begin helping them learn by starting with that idea.
(End Quote).

Links:
Up-Goer-Five text editor

BBC News article about the woman who was awarded Nepal's top prize for her writing

My Left Foot on Amazon.com

A link to Dave Hingsburger's post in honor of today: International Day of Persons with Disabilities: Three Stairs

(Begin Quote)
Later, much later. I stepped into a 'special school' for kids with physical disabilities. There was noise, noise, noise, kids laughing, kids fighting, kids racing pell mell down hallways. The noise was so distracting that it was hard to notice as you walked through the school, even from the old part into the new part that there weren't three steps. The school was accessible to itself, but closed off from the world up three steps.

No one ever asked me to consider.

Where they were.

Why they weren't there.

Who decided that they could be disposed of in other towns, other places.
(End Quote)

Here's the reply I left on that post:

Thank you, Dave. I will post this on my personal journals to signal-boost within my circle.

But I find myself asking:

"Why didn't I know this date was coming up (or that it even existed)?"

If I had, I would have planned, in advance, for ways to spread the word, and celebrate.

But I guess, in many ways, we are still not considered.

Okay, so I'm writing up a post about cerebral palsy -- a sort of addendum to the story of how the doctors decided to snip my Achilles tendons.

These things take forever to write, because, apparently, it's impossible for me to post anything without wandering down the primrose path of Google Searches. So that's how I found this: Living With C.P from the Ontario Federation for Cerebral Palsy. For the most part, it's pretty straight forward, with minimal scare statistics.

But just when you get lulled into a sense of security that the "Service Professionals" who wrote the guide (how much you want to bet they mostly all have Able-Bodied Privilege?) actually get it, you come upon a gem paragraph like this:

(quote)
It can be frustrating for adults to deal with a health care system that appears to have little knowledge or interest regarding the changing needs of aging with a disability. A positive attitude makes a big difference, and developing relaxation techniques and coping skills can have a beneficial effect on mental and physical health.
(unquote)

My reaction to the first half: "No Sh--, Sherlock! Did you come up with that all by yourself? You must be so proud!"

My reaction to the second half: "You did not just come to that conclusion after that opening statement. ... No, wait, you did. I hate you, and your entire tribe. May all the cookies turn to ashes and hair in your mouth, and may all your underwear become infested with centipedes."

There! Now I feel better!

So, I've been on the Instructables.com mailing list for a few years, now, which means I get a newsletter in my email every Thursday with links to specific projects that they're promoting that week. Today, I opened the email and saw this lovely offering first on the list.


( *Pschyo Scooter Scramble -- The blindfolded Wheelchair Game )

Required equipment includes two (2) fully functioning motorized wheelchairs for the hacker to fiddle with their electronic control systems.

I spent a good bit of time debating whether or not to leave a snarky comment, like:

"So -- have you asked people who actually need to use motorized wheelchairs every day to play this game with you, or are they just big toys, as far as you're concerned?"

But in the end, I decided that that audience is one that just would not hear me, and it wasn't worth the spoons required. So I'm cranking here, instead.

---
*The thing is: I need more than instructions. I need a proper work space, and someone with the dexterity and ability that I don't have to carry out the instructions, neither of which are available. So, after this, I'm seriously considering unsubscribing.

Just a word or two on word choices (because it's something I've been thinking about, these past few weeks, and that's what these journal thingies are for, right?):

There are those (many, most, nearly all, maybe I'm the odd one out...) who see words like "crippled" and "lame" to refer to people with physical (especially mobility-related) disabilities as unequivocally derogatory, like the N# word, or the R# word.

A year and a bit ago, when I started collecting folktales and other pre-modern literature featuring disabilities, I knew I was going to come across these two particular words a lot. And I had a decision to make: do I reproduce these words faithfully, as they appear in the original (or translations of the original)? Or should I bowlderize them, and replace the offending words with "Mobility impaired," "couldn't/can't walk," etc.

Now, as an English Major, and lover of the Humanities, I can't abide bowlderization. ...after all, the words are part of the history, and the history is part of the understanding, and understanding is crucial to finding justice.

So I made a conscious decision to keep those words in each story as I find them.

And after that, I found I was no longer offended by the words themselves, but only as they've ended up being used in the generations through which I've lived (yes, by now, I've lived through multiple generations -- I'm surprised by this, too).

Used as a simple descriptive word for human being who crawls more easily than s/he/ou walks upright, "crippled" (from the same root as "creep," and "crawl") is no more derogatory than "Wheelchair-" or "Crutch-User") --

Except this same word has been used extensively (or even mostly) to refer to things that aren't even human -- an example:

"The wide-spread power outage on the East Coast today crippled Internet trading, and the Stock Market fell seventy points."

So, then, the word, which once was used as a simple descriptor (even self-descriptor) in literature of the past, has become "Dehumanizing" because it's been used to describe every thing that's ever been broken. And people are not things, and people don't break (in the same way cars do).

So -- in light of that, I've decided to refer to myself as "crippled" and/or "lame," because, by their first meanings, that's what I am. I will, however, take a ten-mile word detour (if I have to) to avoid applying either of these words to any abstract thing (like the stock market, or Government) or inanimate object.

Does this make any sense?

On Tuesday, I posted this:

From the end of the second verse [eta: of Mystery Song]:

Reporting live from the frontline
We carry the torch for the ones who're scared to shine

The last verse:

One thing I know is for definite
Soul, body and mind, you got the same benefit
If you trust your heart, there ain't no way of losing it
Keep doing your thing, against all etiquette.
10, 9, 8, start the countdown
7, 6, 5, about to go down
4, 3, 2, 1, sing along now.


ETA #2: At first, I thought I'd just leave it there, and not burden you guys with me gushing on about a language I love but don't live in.

But thanks to trouble, I learned about a video (reported on by Huffington Post) by a couple of ignoramuses claiming to be covering a song in ASL -- but really, all they're doing is flailing their hands about in a stereotypical, audist, hateful way. And then, they're removing and blocking all comments by actual Deaf, Native ASL Signers who are calling them out on it. So I thought I'd put dedicate some of my space to real True-biz Sign Rapping, to thumb my nose at those fools.

( The Answer to the riddle I posed (With video of the whole song) is below this cut )

As my mother would have phrased it: "If I could write like that (in a third language, no less), I wouldn't talk to anybody!"

So, in this comment thread, spiralsheep and I happened to come up with a writing "duel," where we would each write a poem (or story) in a Cycle. This is poem that came to me today, to fulfill the first part of the Cycle.

[And for those of you readers at home, who are following along with your Isidore of Seville's Monster Classification Scorecard, the Monster in this poem (the poem's narrator) would most likely be classified as Category 6 (Mixture of human and animal parts [or natures]) or Category 9 (Born with Disturbed Growth)]

Part One of the Cycle: The Monster Challenges the Boundaries

You stand there, with my file in your hand:
A long white coat beneath fluorescent light.
So proud a savior! Hero for the land!
You've come to banish monsters -- like some knight.
With scientific words, you speak your part;
Your gaze reveals a superstitious heart.

As if I were not sitting in the room
(Close enough to catch stale coffee breath),
You lay out, for my mother, all the doom
Of raising such a daughter, so bereft.
For I will never walk in human ways:
Upon two legs, and tall, across the Earth.
With crutch tips as my hooves, I'll spend my days
In canter-trot, because of star-crossed birth.
With practiced stroke and swiftly moving pen
(Just as you've done with other children's lives),
You mark me down as something less than "Man."
To fit me to a list that you've contrived.
You circumscribe my life in dark blue ink.
My mind and heart are mapped (or so you think).

So -- it boils down to this: the central thesis of Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream (if a blog can be said to have a thesis) is that modern society's attitudes and official policies toward the disabled classes are rooted in ancient superstitions and fear of evil, which advanced science has done nothing to overturn. That:

A) Those with unexplained differences (especially physical, visible, differences) were believed to be omens sent by the gods, rather than actual people in their own right.

B) That ostracizing people so marked became standard policy, in a vain attempt to fool the gods and averting punishment for sins.

C) That over the last several millennia, scientific knowledge has gradually, through a series of minute steps, replaced the Divine explanations of disabilities with tangible, empirically understood causes, but that there has been no parallel refutation of the assumptions that were originally based on those primitive explanations. So society is still working with the policy that "Ostracizing the Disabled Classes is the best way to protect general society from evil."

BTW, this doesn't come up in the blog itself, but I firmly believe that it's the Medical-Industrial complex that is still the greatest promoter of this philosophy (Did you know that the Rx symbol for prescriptions was originally a written prayer to the Roman god Jupiter -- Rex Deii?)

Anyway, with the Disabled being marked by society as living omens, I've become intrigued by those hints about the disabled acting in the role of storyteller -- i.e. someone with a direct, eerie, connection between the Supernatural and Humanity. According to (some) legends, "Mother Goose" was a tenth century queen who either: a) had one human foot, and one goose foot, or b) gave birth to a human son with a goose's head -- these are the legends that don't try to make her a mortal woman who lived in New England in (relatively) modern times, around when the first book of nursery rhymes were published.

And that's where my asking for advice comes in. I'd love to write up a post for "Plato's Nightmare" about these legends about M. Goose. But all my Googling leads me to websites where the paragraphs about Queen Bertha Broadfoot have all the exact same wording, and they all lead back to the same Wikipedia Article, which is both a stub, and lacking in references.

So I posted the question as a thread on Mudcat. And I got a few responses, but the first few of them just repeated the tidbits of info I'd already found... until November, when an anonymous poster gave me a new version of the "Goose-footed" legend, with details I'd not come across before, and it was juicy and actually had the structure of a story. But the story was also brief, and, since the poster was anonymous, I could not engage a in private correspondence asking for more detail. And a never came back. So I left that tantalizing bit as another dead end.

And then, today, another anonymous poster chimed in with one line, claiming to be the queen's direct descendant. So here's my question: should I just post the thread, itself, as a blog entry, with notes and comments, even if I can't cite textual source? Or, maybe just selected messages from the thread?

So, anyway, to help you decide, here is ( The nine-message thread in its entirety, dating from June 23, 2011 to March 28, 2011 )

[ETA 1: Changed the subject line]


So (as I may have mentioned here before) I've stopped using a mouse with my computer, and use what's called "MouseKeys" (at least, in Windows), where you can make the number pad on your keyboard work as a substitute cursor-control.

I suspect Macs probably have something similar, but I don't know what Apple has named it, or how you turn it on. But on a Windows Machine, at any rate, you turn on your MouseKeys by pressing CRTL+Shift+NumLock at the same time (and after you have it set as your default, you just toggle it on/off by clicking NumLock).

I use this because, no matter how cheap mouses are now, when they fall on the floor they are almost un-retrievable -- they're very hard to pick up with one of those reacher-grabber-things. And at even just $10 a pop, that gets expensive with every one I run over in my wheelchair, between dropping and retrieving...

Anyway -- onto the "Dimmer Switch Moment"

The thing is: MouseKeys are a lot, lot, slower than conventional mouses; they move across the screen one pixel at a time, and even at their fastest setting, it can take them several seconds to go from one corner of the screen diagonally to the other. You can speed up the acceleration, but you lose some control in the trade. Also, you have to click the different keys in combination in order to get your cursor to specific points on the screen. And every time you stop and change direction, your cursor slows down a bit before getting back up to whatever top speed you're comfortable with.

[ETA 2: I just timed it by counting "One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee...," starting the mouse in the upper left corner of my wide screen monitor to the bottom edge, then changing direction to get to the bottom right corner. I have my mouse keys set up at top speed and slow-medium acceleration. It took fifteen 'Chimpanzees' to get from one corner to another]

My realization?

Use MouseKeys and an online Flash puzzle or skill game as a point of "Sensitivity training" about why kids with "Severe" C.P. are so often labeled as "intellectually Disabled," and how unfair, inaccurate and frustrating that is simply because they have trouble responding to questions as quickly as their mobility-normative peers.

Don't even try this experiment on those timed puzzle games where the game ends when the timer runs out, 'cause you will never get out of Level One. But here are a couple of games that I actually enjoy playing, even though, because of my technology, my highest scores are far below average -- I won't give you links, 'cause the pages are full of ads. But if you put these names in a search engine of your choice, you'll get lots of hits:

"Magic Towers Solitaire" (very pretty to look at, and the sound effects are pleasing, too), which, if it were classified as and I.Q. testing game, would be a number logic / number pattern recognition test; and "Magic Words" (Again, with the pretty visuals and music), which is a scrambled-word vocabulary test. ... If you decide to do this sensitivity-test for yourself with this latter game, be sure to do it in "puzzle mode."

The fact that these games continue even after the clock runs down is analogous to the "Special Accommodations" that educators and psychologists insist they give "Special Needs Students" to be (air quotes) completely fair. But both of these games award bonus points that are time sensitive -- and that you will never get awarded without a normal-speed mouse.

Okay, yes. I am daring you to try this. See what it feels like when you know the answer ten times faster than you can tell the "game master" that you know the answer. Then imagine that the computer is a human being, who's already prejudiced against you, and is demanding proof of your intelligence before she or he lets you into a mainstreamed kindergarten class.

You may get an idea why the statistic "Between 30% and 50% of all children with cerebral palsy have some level of mental retardation." makes my blood ... simmer, and at the very least, sets off my ORLY?!! alarms.

Also, as a side note: see how removing the ability to play these games quickly changes their feel, psychologically.

...Just a thought.