ninme

18 Responses to “Judge Rules Blindness Unfair to Blind; Orders Medical Profession to Fix It”

1. RC2 Says:
   November 28th, 2006 at 5:01 pm

   Did you notice the guy from National Federation for the Blind opposes the decision and the gal who’s for it is named Day Al-Mohamed and wants our currency to be like Saudi Arabia’s? I say if we change our money, the terrorists will have won.

2. Brett_McS Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 12:45 am

   That’s the thing about these self-appointed spokesmen for handicapped people - they aren’t all that interested in removing their client base, so they often aren’t that interested in cures. For example, the desire to maintain “Deaf Culture” is seeing parents advised against having cochlear implants fitted to their deaf babies. Some of the deaf would rather maintain their own culture and make everyone else adjust. (A lot of that going around lately).

   My former boss got, er, caught out by the evil greenback. We went to a strip bar in Elmira (of all places). Not well lit of course - one is probably legally blind in terms of searching through the wallet for a dollar bill or two…. Anyway, we got back to the hotel and he checked his wallet and - holy hell, I had a 100 dollar bill in here! Some lucky girl that night - curtesy of us dumb furiners and bills with well-nigh indistinguishable denominations (in low light).

3. Rueful Red Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 3:40 am

   Like Lefties have a vested interest in keeping their clients poor.

   What an interesting evening to have spent in Elmira. I take it the symphony orchestra was on a night off?

4. Brett_McS Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 4:25 am

   You may scoff, but Elmira used to be a great town (it’s a bit of dump now, though) when the steam boats chuffed along the canal, and it is the final resting place of Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain. (Which I think I have mentioned before). And I did go and see the grave… but that doesn’t hold ones attention for too long.

5. HalfEmpty Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 4:32 am

   It’s no wonder Australians are so welcome in those fine establishments.

6. Rueful Red Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 4:42 am

   Really?! Mark Twain wrote my second favourite novel. That’d be the Erie canal? The Waterway that won the (mid) West?

   Should have taken Warney with you!

7. ninme Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 9:34 am

   Elmira! My mom’s distant cousins live in Elmira! Wait, I slept badly, have we had this conversation?

   Deary me, Brett, Red’s quoting Melville and you’re disclosing seedy stripper experiences. If you hadn’t tied it into Twain (Welcome to ninme, Where it’s Great American Novelist Day!) we would have been in real trouble.

   I don’t think I’ve ever seen Aussie money. I like how your drivers’ licenses have your birth year printed in large, friendly letters, all over the back though.

8. RC2 Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 10:59 am

   I’ll bite. Red, what’s your first favorite novel? And which Twain is your second? Or has that been covered in a comment before my time?

9. Brett_McS Says:
   November 29th, 2006 at 12:31 pm

   Aussie folding money is quite colourful, and plastic. I think we had the first plastic notes. A big benefit (that I have made use of a couple of times) is that it can be put through the washing machine with no ill effects.

   That big DOB on the license must be a Victorian thing, because NSW only has a little date in the corner on the front.

10. ninme Says:
    November 29th, 2006 at 12:59 pm

    You can wash our money! It has enough linen in it, and comes out nice and soft.

    Oh, yeah, I guess they all were Victoria licenses. Didn’t think of that. But, and I thought I had a hard time getting carded.

    Man squinting at driver’s license

    “…”

    Man still squinting at driver’s license

    “… [to friends] I know! They never see it first thing!”

    Still squinting, but checks the back, to no avail

    “Um…”

    Looks doubtfully at me, obviously deciding it’s a fake license

    “It’s those numbers, right there, in red, actually… Yeah, right there, the bright red ones. Red. See? Red? Bright red?” [muttering] “if i was gonna fake a license, you think i’d fake a california one with a magnetic strip on the back?”

    But with them, it was all of that, but with these BIG FRIENDLY NUMBERS all over the back, and they still couldn’t see it.

11. Rueful Red Says:
    November 30th, 2006 at 4:27 am

    So you go in for money laundering?

    Favourite novel is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, much the best novel to have come out of the Second World War. It has some of the funniest scenes in English, but is best read as an extended meditation on how one faces up to a growing realisation of the fact of God’s love.

    My favourite Mark Twain is Huckleberry Finn. I didn’t read it until just a few years ago, so there I was crammed full of all sorts of stuff about technique and diction acquired over the years. Went just dandy for the first couple pages, then I started reading the book for the plot, and caring about the characters, just wanting to know what would happen next, completely lost to the book. When I put the light out I lay there in the dark, just worried stiff about what happened next, and not a thought to authorial technique. Hadn’t had so much fun in years. Sheer delight.

    It strikes me that the Waugh book is a trilogy and I might be accused of cheating. If so, Huck Finn shares top billing with Kingsley Amis’s “The Green Man” which is about a publican with a complex personal life who’s on two bottles of whisky a day and starts seeing ghosts. Or thinks he does. It contains a wonderful scene where Our Lord comes to the pub give him some friendly advice about how to handle things. He also points out that, contrary to modern liberal thought, He can come down pretty bloody hard on people who misbehave. It also has a lovely early-Seventies version of a trendy vicar, which may or may not have been based on Simon Schama.

    Here endeth the book club.

12. Rueful Red Says:
    November 30th, 2006 at 5:55 am

    Just looked Elmira up on the map. It’s near Ithaca! And my American-Italian niece went to school in Geneva. Fancy them having strip bars in upstate New York!

13. ninme Says:
    November 30th, 2006 at 9:07 am

    Red and I have been through this before elsewhere, but I wasn’t in love with Huck Finn. I liked it and all, just not the sort of thing I’d buy and read again. American novels usually bore me (I like a little more escapism in my reading and that means at a minimum escaping this country) unless there’s something historical going on, in which case I don’t really go in for swampy people feuding. I’d much rather be in a city, or if it has to be fronteirish (except for the Little House books), on my way to California, crossing the Sierras after the Nevada desert and coming down into the Central Valley all green and California-ey.

    None of the others I’ve read.

14. Rueful Red Says:
    November 30th, 2006 at 9:12 am

    Ah, “The Donner Pass Party Cookbook”?

15. ninme Says:
    November 30th, 2006 at 9:55 am

    Yeah and what would you know about it, you European!

    “Ooh, the highest mountain in Britain is 4400 feet!”

    Mount Whitney (compare THAT to your precious Ben Nevis, all soft and round and cuddly) in the Sierra Nevada (the highest point in the continental US) is 14,505 feet! And Donner Pass is 7,000 feet!

    So thbbbpt!

16. Rueful Red Says:
    December 1st, 2006 at 5:50 am

    European!!!! That’s fighting talk!! I’m British!

    OK so Mt Whitney’s ever so photogenic at the moment, but just wait a couple of million years or so and see what it looks like then!

    Though looking at Ben Nevis I do rather take your point. At a guess I’d say everywhere in Denver’s higher than Loch Ness.

17. Rueful Red Says:
    December 1st, 2006 at 8:00 am

    Sorry, meant to say Ben Nevis.

18. ninme Says:
    December 1st, 2006 at 9:09 am

    You spelled Ben Nevis Loch Ness? You need to get into the Highlands more…

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