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Disabled people aren't political enough.
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Agree
(65.1%) -
Disagree
(34.9%)
Total votes: 725
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batsgirl (U4263247)
Listed below are comments made by batsgirl (U4263247) between Tuesday, 16th September 2008 and Wednesday, 16th December 2009
You can also view a list of batsgirl's posts.
Strobes but no seizure
What has Involuntary Dances achieved? Well, it's achieved an increase in Rita Marcalo's bank balance. It's also been "controversial" enough to get her at least two articles on the BBC website and any amount of exposure in the blogosphere. Exposure and money, isn't that what every artist wants?
Disability Bitch hates ice
I wonder how much of that money will be spent on an awareness campaign telling elderly people that they should walk in the road rather than on the pavement or footpath, because all this money is being spent for them, for their safety while walking, not because it'll make the roads safer for drivers.
Disability Bitch hates food fascists
Don't forget the ones who try and assert that home-grown food is morally superior too. Or worse still, the ones who are convinced that if you'd only walk to the allotments and do some digging for a couple of hours a day, it would cure every symptom of your illness...
A couple of years back I blogged about a chef called Tom Norrington-Davies who had some *very* strange ideas about what it was possible to cook while feeling "under the weather"...
Disabled or just weak?
I'm not going to say you're not disabled (as you say, the authorities agree you are) and I'm not going to say you shouldn't be using your free travel pass (since you have it, and are entitled to it, you'd be a fool to not use it).
But I will say, that I think that the "free travel for elderly and disabled people" is very strangely weighted. There's something strange about the idea that I could travel all over the place for free... if only my impairment was such that I could cheerfully toddle to the bus stop. Since I can't, and my local authority doesn't see fit to provide an alternative service for disabled people like me, I'm on full-price taxis or nothing. So much for "free" transport for "all" disabled people. Same goes for those people who would be at risk of getting lost between bus-stop and destination, or who can't read/understand a timetable, or who would melt-down on a bus full of strangers.
Disability Bitch in benefits shocker!
The bit that tickled me was the admission that the £260m doesn't even include all the people who are entitled to claim DLA, but take one look at the form (or the appeals process) and go "actually, I don't need the money *that* much."
Disability Bitch hates sport
I would follow you on Twitter but not hell nor high water will get me to join facebook.
Google touchscreen phone goes 'eyes-free'
The other lovely access aspect of the G1 (I have one) is that the screen slides up to reveal the keyboard, which has a standard QWERTY keyboard with actual separate keys that you can feel, and raised bumps on the F and the J, and better still, they *click* when you press them - not a computer generated beep, but the actual buttons, you feel and hear them press.
Disability Bitch vs clever internet stuff
I do read online comments and reviews and find them very useful in helping me come to a decision - for things where I have a wide open choice, such as which mobile phone to buy. But for things like council services, where you're not choosing a provider and in many cases don't even have a choice about whether to use the service or not, what would be the point? Am I going to be able to decide not to pay my council tax because another user says they found the staff at the payments department "unhelpful"?
On the frontline with disabled job hunters
"He discovers how the agency matches disabled people's skills with the needs of employers"?
Wow. My Remploy experience was somewhat different. Asking them for help sustaining employment was also fruitless.
Pancake Day: flip and hope?
Evilstevie's my boyfriend, not a PA. I don't think a PA would put up with my batter-wrath, much less eat the results of my cooking attempts. :)
The Mascara Massacre
Okay...
Eyebrow tweezing: skip it, unless you've got a major monobrow in which case yes, invest in permanent hair removal with a professional. Even if you succeed in tweezing properly, you have to keep messing about with the regrowth and you have to be super-careful about exfoliation so that the pore where the root of the hair was doesn't get infected (which is an even worse look than the monobrow).
Foundation: Buy a tinted moisturiser instead. Squirt some on your hands, rub your hands together, then rub them over your face until your face feels moisturised. It's not a precision job, just try and touch every part of your face at least once, including just under the jawline so you don't have an obvious line on your face where the makeup stops. Then wash the remainder off your hands (this is important. Beige handprints don't look good on a party dress).
Next get a big brush, as big as you can get, and some powder. Also, tuck some tissues into your collar. Load the brush up with powder, close your eyes, and dust it all over your face. Finally, get a clean dry tissue and lightly wipe all over your face, so you're not scrubbing the makeup off, but you're removing any excess and any clumps. Give an extra wipe around your hairline and jawline. Done.
Mascara: Find a windowsill and a reasonable-size mirror (about the size of an A4 piece of paper is ideal). Prop the mirror against the window so your face will be lit, and sit or stand or kneel facing it, with your elbows on the windowsill. Hold the top of the mascara brush like a pen in your fingers. Put the thumb-side of your hand against the hinge of your jaw. This gets the brush in about the right place and at about the right angle. Now, breathing gently, move your face (not your hand!) towards the brush and then breathe out as you close your eyes. Hopefully the eyelashes wipe against the brush as you do so. Move the brush away, open your eyes, and check.
Eyeliner: this is not the 80s. But if you really feel the need, point the pencil towards the bit of your nose where glasses rest, and use very short strokes. Warm the pencil first.
Finally: in the process of putting makeup on, you've been examining your face in great detail, so you can see every blob and blotch as you examine yourself in a mirror two inches from your nose. However no one else is paying that much attention and if they're *that* close they have other things on their mind.
The hair, on the other hand, I share your sympathy and bafflement.
'I've never joined Facebook because...'
I've never joined facebook because of the pathetic bunch of social inadequates who take it so *seriously*...
"I've got 500 friends!" No, no you haven't, 499 of them wouldn't notice if you died and stopped posting updates tomorrow, and the other one's your mum - and you probably still live with her, don't you?
I'm sure there are some intelligent and worthwhile people who use the site, but as with so many other things, they're not the ones who get evangelical about it.
The third name on the Christmas card
At first, I thought of my family: mum, stepdad, younger (but chronologically adult) sister. When my sister is dating someone long-term, I write two cards - one to mum and stepdad, one to sister and boyfriend. When she's single, I write one card - to mum, stepdad and sister.
But then I found the clue to what's more likely in your case. 150 cards. That's some serious organisation. To me that says that the recipients have an entry in their Christmas Card Book that says "Carr: Pat, Peter and Elizabeth" and only a funeral will warrant an edit.
Double cheeseburger and disability awareness to go, please
That's one amazing skill you have there, Liv. To be able to tell just by looking whether a person using a mobility scooter and an oxygen mask "is only disabled by their own weight", as opposed to having one or more other conditions which make their weight the least of their worries - you should totally hire yourself out to hospitals and save them a fortune in diagnostic equipment.
Speaking only for myself: if I was on oxygen, swollen up like a balloon due to medication, and had only six months to live, I would eat as many cheeseburgers as I wished, with a second course of fried chicken and probably 100 cigarettes as well.
It reassures me that you would find that "beautiful".
There's no such thing as a free haircut
I think I'm still reeling that you've found an *accessible* barbershop/hairdressers.
You could always make up the difference (and make the point that you are not in need of charity) with a massive tip?
Clicking down to Christmas
Keeping your child's presents in your own house is asking for trouble. Find a neighbour or friend without small children who is prepared to stash stuff at their place. I used to do this for a friend of mine in my pre-dis days - on Christmas Eve, about an hour after the kid's normal bedtime, I'd head round with the pressies, and help with the wrapping marathon.
My grandparents went a step further when we stayed with them for Christmas. Their flat was small and we'd have found presents in minutes - so they were stashed at my great-grandmother's house. On Christmas Eve (this was in Germany where you get presents that evening) we would spend the day helping decorate the tree and then go, with my parents, to "collect" my great-grandmother and bring her to my grandparents' place. My parents would take the long way around, giving my uncle a ten-minute window to take the quick route to her house and grab the presents before we arrived. Then she would stall us at her place for about half an hour - oh, you must have a drink, oh, I can't find my hat - to give the rest of the family a chance to set up a Perfect Christmas Scene complete with more presents than could *possibly* have been concealed at my grandparents' flat. It was magic :)
Flash Game: Falling with style
when the top row of my keyboard reads "ertyui" I am blaming you entirely.
Disability Bitch vs visible disabilities
Now you see this depends, because if I go out, then I can have a MASSIVE cup of hot chocolate with cream and crumbled chocolate on top, and I don't have to make it OR wash up afterwards, and I am sure you will agree this is not something to be given up lightly. If that'll be available in the crip-hide, then I'm in.
Incapacitated on Radio 4
"Ben discovers that, after being on incapacity benefit for more than two years, you are statistically more likely to die or retire than ever find work again."
Would this not be the major difference between the type of long-term incapacitating illness or injury from which people recover gradually, over the course of, say, a year's therapy and rehab... and the type of long-term incapacitating illness or injury from which there IS no recovery?
Parking boss in parking scandal!
"Why (...) does it always seem to be the people who should know better who break this particular rule?"
Because everybody does it, but those people are newsworthy for doing it.
Otherwise the local rag would be full of nothing more than:
Joe Bloggs, a father of two and head of sales at a local firm, was today given a ticket for parking in a disabled parking bay without a badge. Mr Bloggs, 47, said "I was only going to the cashpoint, and besides, I don't see any people in wheelchairs here, do you?"
In related news, Mrs Jane Doe was also asked to move her car after wrongly parking in a disabled space. "It's just not fair," she told our reporter, "if I hadn't used that space I would have had to park in the next car park which is a *whole* hundred yards away and around the corner - disabled people aren't the only ones with rights!"
A rethink about Kerry?
I think that going on the show and slurring her words and then defending the issue in the press has got her a lot more headlines and column inches than the 'responsible' course of cancelling the interview would have done.
And while I wholeheartedly agree that no one deserves to be mocked for their condition or for the side effects of their medication... the cynic in me has a tough time believing that her management couldn't see how positively this would play out for her image.
Even those who would sneer at the, um, highlights of her, um, career, are rallying to her defence. More people now know who Kerry Katona is. Mission accomplished.
Disability Bitch vs blue badge reforms
OldIronBaz - when I go shopping I frequently send my able-bodied assistant running, yes, running, back to the car to stash my fifty tons of shopping while I continue to browse around the town centre. This is because there is a limit to how many bags can be hung off my wheelchair before it interferes with the wheels.
I use the in-store mobility scooters at the supermarket, too, and my able-bodied assistant often carries the shopping to the car while I am queueing at Customer Services to return the key.
There is often more to a circumstance than meets the eye. Challenging people in car parks just because they don't have "DISABLED" tattooed across their forehead is quite possibly not the best way forwards.
Missing memory amnesty
I'll be amazed if there's any reader here who hasn't ever left a bag on a bus/train/taxi, or put something down and forgotten to pick it up, or at the very least had something small fall out of or get lifted from their pockets.
The problem is the geniuses who think it's some sort of good idea to copy three filing-cabinets-worth of sensitive data on to one small and easily lost/mislaid/pickpocketed USB stick. It's the same level of bright-idea as writing your address on your keyring - you KNOW it's going to get lost at some point, so don't do it!
Oh, and to answer the question, I've never lost anyone else's data, but I lost mine in style once - my bag containing my work ID, my purse and cards, my work keys, a few photos, and the multicoloured bag of condoms I'd just collected from the family planning clinic. Going to pick that up was not an experience I'm keen to repeat...
Crap News: Disabled boy gets to swim with Dolphins
I do apologise. That came out about three and a half times angrier than it was meant to.
Crap News: Disabled boy gets to swim with Dolphins
BettyHur - WHAT?!
Yes, dolphins are intelligent gentle etc. Good for them.
I'm disabled and, without wishing to toot my own trumpet, indications are that I'm reasonably intelligent.
What in the name of sweet shuddering Ceiling Cat's son do these two things have to do with each other?!?
My best 'achievement' memories are of getting a job, partying with friends, that sort of thing. Flipper is not my business.
PS - on this site, disabled people are not "them".