All posts by lauredhel

About lauredhel

Lauredhel is an Australian woman with a disability.

Question Time: Eating for PWD

Question Time

The question today is: How do you eat?

You might have an energy-stealing condition, chronic pain, atypical concentration or motor function, or something else that means frequent shopping and hours over a hot stove doesn’t work for you.

What are your go-to meals and recipes? Do you have a few three- or four-ingredient meals you bung in the crockpot? (I adore my crockpot!) Do you have meals you can prep and freeze, then throw in the oven when needed? Go-to recipes prepped in ten minutes or less from ingredients you keep in stock? What assistive devices, aids, and appliances help you in the kitchen?

Or do you have a favourite pre-prepared frozen meal, or takeaway meal? Does your local pizza place know you by heart?

Share your notes and recipes here for nourishing your body when your spoons are low.

(No diet or health judgement of others in this thread, please. Food is food. Nutritious food is food that is eaten. End of story.)

“Cast Offs” – A Warning for Rape-threat Content

media and pop culture, violence

Cast Offs is a new British TV show. This scripted fake-reality show aims to spoof Survivor-type shows by placing six people with different disabilities (all physical or sensory) on an island. All are played by actors with a disability. The show also shows a series of flashbacks, with each episode focusing on one of the characters’ lives.

This isn’t a full review of the pilot, except to say that I’m not all that convinced that having PWD sledging each other for having a disability, Crips Behaving Badly-style, is all that much of an improvement over having temporarily-abled people sledging PWD. Self-deprecating and collaborative humour I’m all about; pitting PWDs against each other in snide and nasty ways, not so much. As usual, the show claims that it’s terribly adventurous and new, and that it’s all about “satire” and “the last taboo”. Who is being “satirised” and why here?

The point of this post is mainly to warn you about a scene near the beginning, if you are thinking of watching, but you’re triggered by sexual violence and threats of rape. The scene occurs without any warning or inkling of the turn the content is about to take.

Description and clip below the cut. **Trigger warnings apply.**

Continue reading “Cast Offs” – A Warning for Rape-threat Content →

Chatterday! Open Thread. And planned outage on Monday.

chatterday

A baby giraffe, half back-lit, looks at the camera with dark, liquid eyesThis is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world? Feel free to add your own images. (Anna insists that these should only be of ponies, but I insist that very small primates, camelids, critters from the weasel family, smooching giraffes, and cupcakes are also acceptable.) Just whack in a bare link to a webpage, please – admin needs to deal with the HTML code side of things.

Today’s chatterday backcloth comes via The Daily Squee.

~~~

NOTE: There will be a planned FWD/Forward maintenance outage on Monday. Details:

Date: Monday, November 30, 2009 (11/30/2009)

Downtime window:
Start Time: 00:00 CST (06:00 UTC)
End Time: 03:00 CST (09:00 UTC)

Question Time: Fantasy Assistive Devices

accessibility, Question Time

OK, so we’ve had the “what assistive devices I use” thread. Now it’s time for…

In My Dreams: Assistive Devices I WANT!

Stealing from meloukhia a little, I’d like a self-powered mobile bed-platform-thingo that contains all of my needs at easy reach: my laptop and all peripherals, assortment of pillows, my teetering bookpile, meds, water bottle, glasses and cleaning cloth, TENS, lip balm, moisturiser, and all the other necessities of life. And I want it to be able to move around corridors, and get outside, and up steps, so I can change scenery whenever I want. And fold down to fit in the car boot. And I want it to be socially acceptable to take it with me and lounge around wherever I go. Oh, and it should fly.

Dream away. Brainstorm. Fantasise. Invent. The sky’s the limit.

[Additional note: Devices, please, commenters. Not servants or slaves or “wives”. Devices.]

Chatterday – Open Thread.

chatterday

mini graham cracker cheesecakes with fresh raspberries on top and scattered around, with a mint garnishThis is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world? Feel free to add your own images, too. (Anna insists that these should only be of ponies, but I insist that very small primates, camelids, critters from the weasel family, smooching giraffes, and cupcakes are also acceptable.)

Today’s chatterday backcloth comes from What’s Gaby Cooking?, via foodgawker. It’s nearly fresh-raspberry season here, so raspberries are catching my eye – and these minicheesecakes look absolutely scrumptious.

Chatterday! Open Thread.

chatterday

pygmyrabbit
This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world?

Today’s chatterday backcloth comes via Zooborns, and it’s the world’s smallest rabbit. This rare Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbits lives at the Oregon Zoo, where they’re breeding them like… well, yes.

Feel free to add your own images. (Anna insists that these should only be of ponies, but I insist that very small primates, camelids, critters from the weasel family, and smooching giraffes are also acceptable.) Just whack in a bare link to a webpage, please – admin needs to deal with the HTML code side of things.

Keiko Fukuda: Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful

biography, feminism, history

Olde-tyme Hoydenizens may remember that I wrote about Keiko Fukuda back in 2007, in the Friday Hoyden feature. Fukuda is probably the most knowledgeable and accomplished judoka alive, the last living student of Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo.

Geekfeminism has an update on Fukuda Sensei, with a snippet of film from documentary “Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful“. Ju-do means, very roughly translated, “gentle way”; judo’s key principle is to use minimal movements to turn the attacker’s strength back against her. The film’s name derives from an attempt to explain the essence of “ju” – “soft, gentle, flexible, adaptable”. Filmmakers Flying Carp are currently fundraising to complete the film.

In this excerpt, Fukuda talks about how she was ‘frozen’ at fifth dan (fifth degree black belt), for no other reason than that she was a woman. She was finally promoted to ninth dan at the age of 8893. She talks, emotionally, about having had to choose between marriage and judo. Fukuda still teaches judo in San Francisco at the age of 96, clearly much loved and much respected, and there is rather delightful film of her dispensing wisdom and rising from her wheelchair to demonstrate an armlock on a much larger student.

Transcript/description to follow now available, courtesy of Quixotess!

Continue reading Keiko Fukuda: Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful →

The Retrospectoscope: Pinel, On Insanity

history, retrospectoscope

I’m hoping The Retrospectoscope will be a series, if readers are interested. Here I hope to pull little bits out of a whole lot of historical medical and health texts. Feel free to discuss as you like.

The bias will be toward Western books from the 17th to 19th century, as that’s what’s in my collection. If you have other scans that you’d like to drop into the suggestion box, please drop me an email: lauredhel at disabledfeminists.com.

Today’s snippet is from Philippe Pinel’s A Treatise On Insanity. 1806. Pinel, who was a physician at Bicêtre Hospital in France, is widely considered the “father of modern psychiatry”.

Excerpt from Pinel

Description: A scan of part of page 251 of On Insanity. It reads:

THE PRACTICE OF BLEEDING IN MANIACAL DISORDERS AND THE LIMITS BY WHICH IT OUGHT TO BE RESTRAINED

–==–

108. THE blood of maniacs is sometimes so lavishly spilled, and with so little discernment, as to render it doubtful whether the patient or his physician has the best claim to the appellation of a madman. This reflection naturally suggests itself upon seeing many a victim of medical presumption, reduced by the depleteing system of treatment to a state of extreme debility or absolute ideotism.

Made You Look! Magazine from Don’t DIS my ABILITY

recommended reading

The New South Wales “Don’t DIS my ABILITY” campaign has just released the latest edition of Made You Look magazine, and it’s a great read.

As far as I can tell, it’s only available in PDF, or in hardcopy if you’re in NSW. Here are the PDF downloads.

Made You Look magazine – Part 1 (PDF, 2MB)

Made You Look magazine – Part 2 (PDF, 2MB)

My article on playground accessibility for parents and carers with disabilities is at the beginning of Part 2.

If there’s anything I can do to improve accessibility for anyone, please let me know – emailing you plain text of an article, for example? Here’s the table of contents, with my comments:

Continue reading Made You Look! Magazine from Don’t DIS my ABILITY →

Chatterday! Open Thread.

chatterday

This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy. About the only content-related rule is to keep this thread for things not covered in other threads over the past few weeks.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world?

Today’s chatterday backcloth, a teeny marmoset, comes via The Daily Squee.

teeny baby marmoset clinging to a finger