Warning! This Blog Contains Words!

Wow. I had to shake my head after reading this article.

Police in Hertfordshire, who are obviously not Scotland Yard material, decided that a fine way to decrease crime in their area would be to post signs everywhere telling people not to commit crime. They also posted signs at gas stations saying that all fuel must be paid for. But they say they’re not going to put signs at the banks telling people not to rob them. At this point, they might as well.

I join the plain English campaign spokespeople in saying, “duh!” Anyone who would actually read those signs and be dissuaded by them wouldn’t commit crimes. As for the ones still committing the crimes, they aren’t going to care. So the signs just make the police look desperate and laughable.

I love this article. The plain English campaign spokespeople, as well as some others, do a fine job of mentioning all the wacky warning labels we’ve talked about here, and here, and wrap up in a nice little package what we’ve been saying! For! Years! Maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for a few of us.

The Service Dog Debate Rages ON

I saw this in the comments under my post about the no longer guide dogs still guiding, and felt it needed answering up here, because it makes some good points, and I think they need to be heard. I’m going to throw my comments within her comment.

Hi Carin

In response to the issues about people lying about their dogs being service dogs…

My disability is not obvious. In fact, I occasionally have days when my dog doesn’t have much to do. That does not mean that she isn’t a service dog. Yet I’ve been challenged by people ever since those articles started coming out.

That sucks. But I figure as long as you can generally say what she does, without resorting to, “she’s a service dog and I’ll sue ya if you ask one more time!” and she’s not chewing on passers-by, you’re fine.

If a person has a seizure once every three months, does that mean their seizure alert dog is not a service dog and should not accompany them into stores?

Hell no. All it takes is one seizure and they’ve done their job.

Also, my dog is self-trained. I could not afford the price of a service dog and I used to be a dog trainer. I also didn’t want to wait 2 years on a waiting list to be charged $15,000 US dollars for a dog.

And I think that’s awesome. So we have to figure out some kind of compromise where you can have some kind of ID that proves that your dog has the right to be by your side. I’m not mad at the sentiment that the law doesn’t allow people to ask what your dog does. I’m mad at what that leaves wide open for the selfish among us to take advantage of. I’m mad that the law becomes unenforceable.

You got your guide dog for beans compared to that.

I absolutely agree, and I think it isn’t fair that so many have to pay so much for their dogs. I feel lucky, and then sad when I see families of Autistic children struggling to get the money together to get a dog to help with their kid, or people with all different kinds of disabilities having to wait so long and pay so much. It isn’t fair, and I don’t understand it.

The people pushing for national certification of service dogs are the same people who run the service dog schools that have been popping up all over the place since the veterans of Iraq have been incurring such drastic injuries.

Who will they promote to certify the dogs? Themselves, of course. What chance do I have that they will certify my self-trained dog?

and that isn’t fair either. We need to find a third party body made up of representatives from the schools as well as private trainers that the schools have to answer to. That’s the only way this can work at all.

I trained my dog for my specific needs. I don’t need a dog that helps me balance or that can pull a wheelchair. Why wait for one of those? Why pay for one of those?

Again, I think that is awesome. I admire you for having the skills to do that. That takes one hell of a lot of patience and persistence, and I take my hat off to you.

Who will decide what disabilities NEED to be mitigated by a service dog. The schools that charge an arm and a leg (pun intended) for the dogs they’ve trained, of course.

That’s why we need a system overseeing all of this so the schools don’t hold all the power.

I don’t understand why guide dogs for the blind can be procured for less than $500. when other service dogs cost more than $15,000. Guide dogs for the
blind are literally life savers. They don’t serve like other types of service dogs; they lead. They practice intelligent disobedience. All that for $500?
And you have to pay $15,000 for a dog that simply follows commands?

I don’t understand it either. Like I said, sometimes I feel guilty when I hear how much other service dogs cost. The whole system makes no sense.

Anyway, the purpose of my rant is to question the motives of these people who want to regulate the business of training and certifying service dogs.

Maybe when they are also charging a minimal fee for the placement of their dogs, I will trust their motives.

In the meantime, people are people. They will lie and cheat as often as they can. I remember seeing sighted people wearing sunglasses on the buses in New York city in the 1980s so they could get their dogs onto the buses.

And that’s where I get mad. Some of these dogs have been known to attack legitimate service dogs and fellow passengers! Is that safe for anyone? I wish this law had some teeth, so I didn’t have to fear the teeth of other supposed service animals who are riding the bus with me. I don’t want to stipulate who should have them. I just don’t want Roofis the doberman getting on the bus because someone wants to bring him with him to show him off. If Roofis isn’t trained to be social and behave in a civil manner on the bus, he shouldn’t get on, and there should be laws that people aren’t afraid to use to get him off. But if someone needs Roofis and he’s a fine dog, then there should be proof that they can show from a third party, not a school, that says he’s registered as a service dog. We shouldn’t be afraid to ask for proof, and there should be standardized proof, not the kind you can buy from a random store.

My dog is as much a service dog as any that have been “professionally” trained.

absolutely. I would never stand here and question that. I know of privately-trained service dogs. They’re still service dogs.

I’m tired of people threatening to take her away.

That would be exhausting. Some days I’m exhausted and all I get is the standard “can I pet your dog? …How does she do that? … Is that a new dog?” I would be completely worn down if I had to confront people all the time everywhere I went. Part of me is afraid we’ll all be in that place if we don’t strengthen this law somehow. If we can figure out a solution, I think it would benefit all of us. There is so much ambiguity in this whole dog thing. If we actually have to involve the police, they deal with this so rarely that they don’t know what to do and would rather shift us to the backburner.

Thanks for the platform!

Jill

No problem. Thanks for writing so eloquently and bringing some of these thorny points to light. I’ve noticed that this subject is something that will raise the hackles of dog-users everywhere, and so it should. I just wish we could work out a system where all service dogs could prove their right to have their place and people who tried to squiggle through loopholes could be caught and dealt with.

Should I Send Them A Dime?

I got the strangest piece of junk mail the other day. It had two windows in it, one of which was around something hard and round. I showed it to Steve and we both wondered why someone was sending us coins in the mail. We opened the envelope, and the note inside, which was a solicitation for donations to the MS society, said “This nickel can help end MS.” Then why are you, the ones trying to bring an end to MS, sending the nickel to me? Shouldn’t you keep it? Wouldn’t it be better spent in your hands?

Then I wondered how many end-to-MS-bringing nickels were sent out through the mail. Did they send a million? That means $50000 and that’s just the nickels! Then there are the notes, and someone has to put those notes in the mail! I know you have to spend money to make money, but….nickels in the mail when you’re asking for money back? I don’t even get the significance of the symbolism. Was their symbolism? What exactly was the message? Maybe it was that before people donate, they should look into the MS society’s level of administrative costs. I think they’re heading down Madd Canada way.

What A Shitty Beginning

When I heard about the guy who, uh, left a donation in one of the toilets at the Toilet Museum, so many questions came to mind. My first reaction was, what the hell was he thinking? Would you go into a war museum and test fire a gun on display? If you were a pilot, would you try to fly a plane out of the aviation museum? I don’t think so! But then again, maybe he thought it was one of those interactive deals like Science North where you get to walk over the bendy bridge, pet the flying squirrels, lie on the bed of nails and find out your blood type. Somehow, I think not. Taking a crap doesn’t seem like something you’d want to make into a public and interactive occurrence. Then I wondered which exhibit he chose to use. Was he feeling adventurous and left the log in one of the holes in the ground representing the early history of the toilet? Or maybe he was hoping it wouldn’t be found, so he left it in one of the exhibits representing the toilets of the future.

But the biggest question I had revolves around something he said when he apologized to the staff. He said that they told him that visitors were expected to use the public washrooms on the street. Street? So, in a museum dedicated to using the john, there were no actual facilities to use? Isn’t that, well, an oversight? Wouldn’t it be smart to think that maybe someone might have the urge to visit the little boys’ or little girls’ room after looking at so many implements of said room?

Now the staff at the museum have put “not for use” signs on all the exhibits. The museum has only been open for a week. I’m waiting for the next person who uses one of the johns to say he couldn’t read the signs. Then they’ll really have to consider putting public washrooms in the building.

It’s a Dangerous School, But Not In The Way You’d Think

Wow. You know your school sucks when this shit starts happening.

Apparently, Jamaica High School has such a bad record, being called a dangerous school, that staff were sent a memmo instructing them not to call 911. It stated that only the principal or assistant principal were allowed to do this. Fifteen days later, fourteen-year-old Mariya Fatima took a stroke and no help was called for 94 minutes!

Nope, your brain isn’t having a meltdown. That is the correct number. Everybody knows that if someone is having a stroke, you don’t screw around. hell, if someone passes out for no apparent reason, you don’t screw around. You get them help, policies be damned.

Now she has no use of one hand and one leg, had to relearn how to speak, has to receive home instruction, and is reading at a fifth-grade level. The genius who wrote the memmo, as well as his higher up have since transferred schools, no shit. Great job, fellas. Instead of having to worry about high crime stats, you can leave the school to worry about lawsuits, and it sounds like one is coming.

Add New Hardware Now!

This audio-playing vibrator is way too fancy. Let’s count all the accessories.

  • full-function silicone vibrator with interchangeable shafts

    • interchangeable? Ok then.

  • 64 megabytes of Ram with built-in USB port

    • ram? I don’t wanna talk about ram with vibrators. And ports? Oh dear.

  • built-in microphone for voice and sound recording

    • What in the blue christ are they wanting girls to record? And…where is this microphone? I hope it’s nowhere near the, um, essential parts.

  • two pre-recorded audio fantasies

    • Oh boy. This is getting weird. What am I saying? It got weird when they started talking about ram and ports.

  • PC and Mac compatibility

    • I didn’t know there were PC and Mac vaginas.

  • headphones and USB cable

That is way too much technology for a little fun. And it’s way too much money. $99.95? You could probably buy a few pornos for a lot less, and they won’t ever give you the blue screen of death.

Asalt with a Deadly Burger

Before our good friend Joe Clark gets all up in arms about my misspelling in the title, I did do it on purpose. I figured I should mention it since he tends to pipe up when homosexuality is discussed, and it’s a stretch, but this story does involve meat between two buns.

This definitely smacks of abuse of power, and what an abuse it was. A McDonalds employee spilled some salt on some hamburger meat. She let her supervisor know, and she and some others tried to get it off. She even ate a salty burger, and it wasn’t that bad. All probably would have been fine until a police officer, Wendell Adams, decided he wanted a burger and got one of the salty ones. Instead of doing the sensible thing of coming back, saying the burger didn’t taste right, and getting another one, he chose to throw the salt-spilling employee in jail for the night on charges of misdemeanor reckless conduct because he says the burger made him sick. He even sent samples of the salty meat away to the state crime lab for testing.

What? So our streets are so safe and we have so little to worry about that we can waste everyone’s time and the state’s valuable resources fussing over a salty burger. If somebody jacked off on the burger, that would be a different thing. But it was a fucking accident! Not a fucking accident…you know what I mean. It was a mistake! And now this poor girl may have a criminal record. I hope to hell not, but if people can go to jail for having prescription drugs that they’ve legally obtained, anything is possible.

EekCard

Wow! The people behind the fake ECards are getting smart. Really really smart. They sent me one that I thought someone who was smarter than your average virus-infested bear might click on. It actually looked halfway convincing. Halfway? More like three-quarters of the way convincing.

It was an html email, right down to the link that says “click here to pick up your card” instead of the link that was just a string of numbers that led to an IP of certain doom. It looked exactly like a Hallmark page. It had their privacy policy, or at least something that said it was a link to the privacy policy. It had slogans of theirs. It had navbars. It was the hallmarkiest fake card that you ever would see. Their only mistake was misspelling receive. But hell, legitimate businesses can’t tell the difference between then and than these days, so that’s not even a horrible mistake.

I figured this was a fake because it didn’t say who sent me this glorious joy-filled, or more like virus-filled ECard, so I copied the shortcut that said “click here” to notepad. sure enough, it was not a card. It linked to an exe file, and instead of being hosted on some obscure Russian server somewhere like I was expecting, it’s being hosted on the Air Jamaica Jazz and Blues website. What the? I’d go there and let them know they’ve been hacked and are being used to spread viruses, but…I don’t know how much of their site is taken over, and I don’t want to find out. I know I have protection, but why put it to the ultimate test and find out what parts fail? That’s for the professional supergeeks with test machines to do. I just wanted to let others know about this devious new twist so they don’t unwittingly turn their computer into a test machine.

Attention all ECaard companies. You’re screwed. Face it. You’re done. Thanks to this stupid virus, nobody with any sense will ever open one of these cards ever again. Oh yeah. Most people don’t have sense. I guess you can carry on.

A Long-Overdue Trixie Post

Man it’s been a long time since I wrote anything about the Trixter. Let me look back and see when I last wrote about her. Oh god! I mentioned her in passing last week, but it’s been almost a month since she got a full post! Good lord! The sad thing is some of these things have been in my head since that time and I just hadn’t written them down. So off we go.

You’ll be happy to know that Trixie’s tail is all better, and got better pretty quickly. Within a couple of days, she had a moderate wag, and within a week, she was bak to her morning flop and snort routine. In those first few days, it was sad to watch her try and wag, and figure out exactly how much she could wag without pain. She would get going really furiously, and then you could tell she overdid it, and all waggling would stop. Poor thing.

I also learned that Trixie went to the Babs school of pill-spitting. For a while, because of a small skin infection she developed, she had to take antibiotics. for the first couple of days, she would swallow the pill pretty quickly and that would be that. But after a while, she decided that she didn’t want these pills after all, and she was going to refuse to take them. She wouldn’t take them if I hid them in her food, she wouldn’t take them with a treat, nothing was going to work. She would even wait a few seconds, long enough for the pill to start dissolving, I would walk away, and then I would hear a familiar tui! And there would be the pill on the floor, the little rat. but the Trixter didn’t know that I also learned a lot about this little trick, so I didn’t go far, picked up the pill again, and oh boy did I stay long the next time! I won’t be stupid and find pills under tables days later, like in the Babs days. It especially sucked when I found pills after they had taken Babs back. All I could think was, well I guess she missed a few doses then. I felt so negligent, but what could I do?

She has a good memory for people I know. I love it. She’ll let me know if someone I know is nearby. One day, the rental agent for the building was in the parking lot. After we’d done what we wanted and were coming back in, she started walking the direction we always do, and then stopped beside the rental agent as if to say, “Did you want to speak to her?” She also remembers cars we’ve ridden in, and I think she’s starting to recognize the colours of the cabs we always take when we have to take cabs. Plus, here’s something fluky. I think she’s figured out which numbers on the caller ID mean someone is buzzing us! I could be full of crap, but every time that number comes over the talking caller ID, she starts pacing and pointing her head at the door, even if I don’t make any definite movements towards it. I know that seems weird, but it happens, so what amI supposed to think?

Trixie is hillarious. Hmmm, have I ever said that before? Every time I pull something out of my bag, or my drawer, or my cupboard, or anywhere, she thinks it’s a toy for her! She is especially fond of my bank card, or my credit card, or things coming out of shipping boxes, or anything small and electronic. No amount of convincing seems to work to tell her no matter how much she sniffs my memory stick, it still won’t become hers.

She’s had her first bath. Now that was an interesting experience! Getting her into the tub was a challenge. She stared at it as if to say, “Nope! You can forget it! You want me to go in there? No no no no! You can stuff that idea right quick….unless…treats! Mmm!” and then she was in. How easy it is to bribe the Trixter. She was pretty good in there, but I got very wet trying to get her washed. Of course, at the end, she played her good old attack the towel game for a long time as I tried to dry her off. I was so happy she didn’t sprain her tail again! I must have done something right, she smells much better again! So there’s another milestone I never got with Babs. Trixie got her first bath.

Also, the toy I bought a month ago is still very much alive. There are marks, but it isn’t caving in yet. A few bones have died, but we still have some left.

Trixie’s even gotten me un-lost a couple of times. Once, I was out playing with her on the big lawn, and don’t ask me how, but I ended up out at a sidewalk. I put the harness on her, and told her to find home. She didn’t find home exactly, I think because home was behind us, but she made a couple of turns and got us back out on the main sidewalk so I knew where I was. Now that’s cool!

I notice more and more that I like taking her on brand new adventures. I’ll go somewhere I’ve never been with someone, and it doesn’t stress me out that I’m just following their directions to go where we’re going. I know Trixie will work like a little trooper. She’ll have her moments, of course, but every day, she gets more and more awesome!

I’m such a loser. I still count the weeks I’ve had her home. We’re up to 21 of ’em now. It won’t be long until I’ve had her for half a year! Can anyone believe that? I sure can’t.

More ADA Guide Dog Goodness!

Oh boy. First I was mad because regular folk could pretend their pets were service animals, and now I find out we’re getting screwed over by blind people too!

Are you confused? I was at first. This is how it went. A couple got guide dogs from Leader dogs, another guide dog school. They were reported to have been abusing the dogs. The school sent someone out, and yanked the dogs’ certifications to be guide dogs. They felt they weren’t good as guide dogs anymore. They took the harnesses and ID cards, but let them keep the dogs! Why? If the dogs were being abused, wouldn’t you take the dogs?

Now, the couple want to exploit the hole in the ADA that I mentioned before to use their dogs as guides anyway! Hello, imbeciles, are you trying to get yourselves killed? These dogs don’t come cheap, so if the school revoked their certifications, there must be a reason for it. I know a cane doesn’t feel the same as a dog, but you can suffer through having a cane until you get trained with a dog who *is* fit to guide. Just remember, after you get hit by a car because your dog didn’t know what to do, that a mangled body certainly doesn’t work the same way as a perfectly good one either.