The past few nights, I’ve been working some rather late hours. Between some freelance work, blog posting, and other tasks, I’ve been getting to bed at midnight or later. Wednesday night, I decided to take a night off and go to sleep early. To have some fun, I played Lego Star Wars on the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, I got so wrapped up in the game that I didn’t get to bed until 12:30am. So much for getting to bed early. Add in JSL waking up at 3am and NHL’s usual 6am wake-up call and you can understand why I’m feeling exhausted. I’ve really got to start getting to bed earlier, even if I don’t feel tired at the time.
My Aloha Friday question for today is: What time do you usually go to sleep?
P.S. If you haven’t already, try out my Twitter applications: FollowerHQ and Rout.
Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.
The tragedy that unfolded in the Aurora movie theater was beyond imagination. Why someone would do something like that baffles the sane mind because sane minds don’t see "Go into a movie theater and shoot people" as a rational response to anything. One person has a theory, though. A theory that has upset a lot of people (for good reason). That person is Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough, without having any psychological degree or examination of the man behind the shooting, believes that the "why" explanation could be answered by Autism. Yes, Scarborough seems to think that being autistic is just a short hop, skip, and a jump away from being a mass murderer.
Here’s what he said specifically:
“You have these people that are somewhere, I believe, probably on the autism scale, I don’t know if that’s the case here, but it happens more often than not, people that can walk around in society, that can function on college campuses, can even excel in college campuses, but are socially disconnected. I have a son who has Asperger’s who is loved by everyone in his family and who is wonderful, but it is for those that may not have a loving family and a support group and may be a bit further along on the autism spectrum, an extraordinarily frustrating, terrible challenge day in and day out. and so, I do think, again, I don’t know the specifics about this young man, but we see too many shooters in these type of tragedies bearing the same characteristics mentally.”
His reasoning seems to go thusly: Autistic kids are detached from society. Sometimes, people who are detached from society go on killing sprees. Therefore autism is responsible for killing sprees. The big hole in his reasoning, though, is that many things could cause detachment from society. He might as well argue that, since school buses are yellow and the sun is yellow, that school buses bathe our planet in light and warmth. I doubt that anyone will lay down next to a parked school bus in hopes of it giving them a tan, though.
As might be expected, there were many calls for Scarborough to apologize. As I write this, one petition has over 8,500 signatures. You would think that he would realize that his foot was wedged firmly in his mouth. You would think he would issue a retraction. Instead, he gave this clarification:
"The growing Autism epidemic is a tremendous burden for children, parents and loved ones to endure. My call for increased funding and awareness for Autism and other mental health conditions was meant to support the efforts of those who work every day to improve the lives of Americans impacted. Those suggesting that I was linking all violent behavior to Autism missed my larger point and overlooked the fact that I have a wonderful, loving son with Aspergers. Perhaps I could have made my point more eloquently."
Now, I can’t argue with the first part of his clarification, if taken on its own. Autism needs increased funding and awareness. I also agree he could have made his point a lot more eloquently. Then why am I still upset? Listen to the video of the program where he made his original statement.
Did you catch the statement that was made just before Joe made his "diagnosis"? Here it is, in case you missed it.
"It’s so interesting, Joe. When you look at these pieces. The mental health aspects of it. You could list issues with this young man that clearly should be warning signs, but they always seem so clear in retrospect."
Yes, the setup talked about mental health and warning signs. To me, that might seem to lead into a discussion of schizophrenia or other mental disorders which, if left untreated, can result in violent behavior. Autism is not one of those disorders, though.
Instead, Joe decided to talk about Autism. If he wanted to make a point about needing more resources for Autism, this wasn’t the time. He could have made this point at any of a dozen other times without implicating it in a horrific mass murder.
The worst part of all of this is that Joe’s son has been diagnosed with Asperger’s. Does he really think that his son being on the Autism Spectrum means that the boy is somewhat likely to kill people? I call on Joe to issue a stronger retraction of his statements. He should admit that he was wrong to bring it up then. He should acknowledge that his statements unfairly linked autism to violent actions and, no matter how valid his claimed attempted point about Autism funding, it was the wrong time to try to make it.
Disclaimer: We paid for our own trip to Disney World to attend the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration. Though we were given an incredible deal from Disney, they never asked us to blog about this event. All opinions expressed above are my own.
Note: To see all of my posts on DisneySMMoms 2012, go here.
Over the weekend, I took NHL and JSL to the park. As I pushed them in the swing, I looked down on my and and saw a tiny creature longing on my knuckle. Yes, a ladybug was using me as a rest stop during a long trip in the air.
I didn’t have my DSLR with me (when will I learn not to leave it at home?), so I tried to get some photos of it with my Droid. While pushing my boys. But not while using the hand that the ladybug was lounging on. Somehow, I made this work.
Eventually, though, my boys got interested in what I had on my hand. NHL wanted nothing to do with it, stereotyping it as a "bug." I explained how ladybugs were "good bugs" and ate the bad bugs that would otherwise destroy plants.
JSL, meanwhile, wanted the ladybug on his hand. We carefully moved his finger nearby. After it tried running from his approaching finger, it finally went on his nail. He was so happy (and this let me take an even better photo of it).
Sadly, the ladybug soon fell off of his finger as he walked across the park. It recovered quickly and flew away, leaving JSL sad and missing his little friend. Thankfully, we’ll always have a photo of his park encounter to remember the tiny visitor by. (Yes, I might just have to print out a photo of that last photo for JSL. He’s taken to loving putting together photo books to remember occasions.)
How would your kids react if a ladybug landed on your hand?
I recently read a review that Phil Plait, aka Bad Astronomer, posted about Year Zero by Rob Reid. (If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he founded Listen.com which created the Rhapsody music service. If it doesn’t sound familiar, then never mind.) In it, there are countless alien civilizations in the Universe. Most tend to self-destruct, but a few don’t. These precious few (well, "few" percentage-wise is still many, many civilizations numbers-wise) get to join the Refined League. By doing so, they gain access to the technological and, more importantly, the art that all of the other civilizations have.
For the longest time, Earth seemed to be a nothing world. We were primitive nobodies, barely even worthy to be paid attention to. Until, that is, Welcome Back Kotter aired. Even this, however, was laughable to the aliens until the closing credits theme song played.
There’s this funny thing about aliens. They are leaps and bounds ahead of us in every area known to man… er, sentient species, except for one: Music. Here, we soar beyond any of their wildest aspirations. In fact, our music is more than just "good" to them. It has a certain drug-like effect on them. Human music is like LSD on crack to aliens. They shuffle wildly, approximating dancing – aliens stink at rhythm, and can even go into a trance-like state where they are aware of nothing but the wondrous sensation of the heavenly tones coming from those otherwise hopelessly backwards Homo Sapiens.
Now, like many music fans, they decided they needed to have copies of the songs. Since landing in flying saucers en masse was out of the question (for one, they don’t interfere in non-Refined civilizations and secondly they don’t travel in flying saucers), they took the route that many human music fans take: they "downloaded" the music. Every alien has a copy of every song released since about 1978.
Unfortunately, the aliens are also sticklers for the rules. They have a law that they need to follow the laws of whatever planet the art form comes from. And Earth (specifically, the United States) has this pesky copyright law. When you add up the fines that would result from every alien pirating every song released since 1978, you get more money than the entire Universe. Yes, thanks to copyright law, the entire Earth (except for North Korea) is now fabulously wealthy and the Universe is bankrupt. And that’s a problem. Especially since some aliens would like to see the debt wiped out by any means necessary. Even if it means humanity is wiped out. (Hard to collect on your debt when you’re kaput.)
Rob Reid takes this setup and runs with it in a way that alternates between hilarious and insightful. (Often being both at once.) His characters struggle against impossible odds to find a way out of this situation. Their travels take them from New York City to the other side of the Universe and back again.
I found this book as addictive as the aliens in it found humanity’s music. I couldn’t put it down for more than a few minutes. When I did, I found myself finding excuses to sneak off with the book just to read a few more pages. A few times, I thought I had figured out how they would solve the problem. I was even close once, but not close enough. The actual resolution makes perfect sense and is one of those "why didn’t *I* think of that" situations.
The entire book is told from the main character’s point of view and, just to add to the fun of the book, there are footnotes scattered here where he adds background to sections, terms, or statements that characters make. I was drawn into this world and it would not let go until I finished the very last page. (Yes, I read all 357 pages in 2 days!) The story was just too engrossing not to keep reading. And even when you think everything is tied up in a nice little package, the author tosses a new wrinkle (albeit one he mentions earlier in the book but then gets conveniently "forgotten" about until the end) that not only adds an interesting twist, but also possibly sets up a sequel.
However, whether there is a sequel or not, Year Zero is a very interesting read and I would recommend it to any music or science fiction fan. I would doubly recommend it to people who are fans of both music *and* science fiction.
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