Monday, November 16, 2009

One Man's Annoying/Aggravating/Interesting Access Picture of the Week

A good friend of mine sent me the picture below. It's from a website that I was already familiar with called Fail Blog, which essentially posts interesting pictures and videos where people, products, etc. have "failed." From what I've seen on the site so far, I would say that "failing" to get a clue would probably describe things the most accurately. The picture below is a great representation of that notion. As you can see, it shows that the Wheelchair Foundation building is at the top of a set of stairs. Of course it's likely that there are ramps just outside the view of this picture, but if you take it for face value the prospect of stair only access to a building that presumably caters to people in wheelchairs is pretty intriguing. An "epic fail" according to the site's parlance.

6 comments:

  1. Nice. You probably don't watch the show Glee, but last week's episode dealt with wheelchairs. There's a kid in the glee club in a wheelchair and the school won't pay for the bus to transport him to the competition. When the teacher asks the club to hold a bake sale so they can raise the money for the bus the students just say that the wheelchair kid's dad can take him. So the teacher has them all spend 3 hours a day in a wheelchair and then the whole club does a wheelchair number for their show. Maybe you'd find it interesting, maybe not. It's on hulu if you want to check it out.

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  2. Well how wrong you are ma'am, I've been on board the Glee ship since the pilot hit last spring. Never been a show choir, chorus, American Idol kinda dude, but something about that show tickled my fancy.

    The episode you mentioned I have yet to see, but it is safely secured in my DVR. Interesting thing about that episode: it was intended to raise disability awareness but it got a ton of blowback from the disability community because the actor who plays Artie the paraplegic is able-bodied. The premise of their argument is that people in wheelchairs should be playing the part of movie/TV characters in wheelchairs. It's a pretty common occurence in Hollywood to hire able-bodied actors to play people with disabilities. For example, here's one article about that: 'Glee' wheelchair episode hits bump with disabled http://bit.ly/1TjKYy A slightly more sympathetic take is found here: For "Glee," a wheelchair misstep? http://ow.ly/CL7l

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  3. Oh glad you watch the show too :) Interesting controversy. What's your take on the issue?

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  4. Well to no surprise I come down on the side that the more people with actual disabilities playing characters with the applicable disability the better. But I also realize and understand that finding the perfect actor candidate with a disability to play the specific part can be a challenge. Nine times out of ten I can spot which wheelchair actors have actual disabilities and which ones don't.

    For the record, I thought that the guy that played Jason Street on FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS did a nice job portraying a quadriplegic. That character's level of injury mirrored mine so I watched with a sharp eye. Ditto for the guy that played his quad buddy on the show. I saw the latter on an episode of BIONIC WOMAN and was like "Whoa, that dude's not a quad?"

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