World Autism Awareness Day 2009

Woot. It's time to celebrate, again. Oh, wait a minute...

We first visited WAAD last year, and what a post that was. What's changed? Not a lot, except that Bam-Bam's food choices are a little narrower these days than they were a year ago.

Idiots still abound. The science blogs to your right have done their usual fine job of covering the idiocy. CNN continues to let Larry King invite Queen Idiot Jenny McCarthy onto his show to allow her to spread misinformation that furthers her goal of killing people. Minions commemorates Jenny's this with a new sidebar link to the Jenny McCarthy Body Count, which tracks the number of U.S. deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Way to go, Jenny. Every single one of them is on your head. Time chose today to help CNN out with its Jennyrobics, in an appalling interview in which Jenny tells us that children with disabilities are called "shadows" and that she'd cheerfully sign her kid up for the measles, a potentially fatal disease. All of this is in aid of her latest premeditated and willful attempt to kill people with preventable diseases.

By the way, Jenny hates "toxins" in vaccines but is an avid supporter of Botox.

Meh. Enough of that. I'll look forward to CNN's and Time's coverage of holocaust denial, Flat Earthism, and the Easter Bunny (hippitus hoppitus!)

Bam-Bam remains who he is. There's been no breakthrough in his development since the last time we discussed this, and maybe there will be one someday, or maybe there won't. We do what we can. He does what he can, giggling most of the way. This morning, Bam-Bam and I will get up, and he'll snuggle into my lap for 5 minutes (possibly grabbing my hands and placing them on his butt, indicate that he wants me to drum lightly there for a few beats, or maybe we're past that now), and eat his Wild Berry Poptarts and his Krispix, and ask me for a video (it will be a Sesame Workshop production, his current video obsession) before he gets on the bus to go to school, and turn around and throw his head back so he can look at me upside down, and bounce on his trampoline after he throws me out of his playroom so that he can have some time to be Bam-Bam before the world starts making demands of him.

I'm okay with all of that, because there's no other rational choice.

Give a thought to Bam-Bam and the rest of the spectrum, and vaccinate your fucking kids. That is all.

Briefly

WE got new underpants for Bam-Bam. The previous ones were too small. Ilse didn't understand that briefs could be too small. She thought we menfolk like our boys snug. While this probably explains a great many things about Ilse, I'm not sure exactly what they are.

IF you are sporting a bumper sticker advertising a political concept, philosophy, or sporting team with which I sympathize, please do not drive like a dick.

Say Hi to Sid

THE Washington Capitals fucking rock, and the word "douche" is too nice, and far too tasteful, for Sidney Crosby.

Note the Sid-friendly spin on the title of the video. Lessee...play is stopped, and Sid hooks Ovie, shoves him over the boards, whining the whole time, and then has a high vagina sprain when Ovie pays him back. Niiiiiice. That's definitely Ovie roughing Sid up.

I've discoursed before on my abject, most unpretty hatred of every Eastern Conference NHL team that isn't the Caps, and on my grievous distaste for much of the Western Conference as well. When it comes to hockey, I am, in fact, a black hole of hatin'. I can hate other hockey teams with the best of them. I got the PhD in Hatin'. There is no hell fiery enough to punish me for the degree and volume of my hockey hate. This may sound a little Brer Rabbity to some of my closer friends, but really, I am a bad, bad person when it comes to hockey fandom/hatedom, and in an eternal, philosophical sense, I almost certainly deserve some form of retribution for this stain on my karma.

Even so, Sid Crosby is such a hateful, whinging, bleeding pussy that it detracts from my enjoyment of how much I hate the Rangers, Flyers, Devils, Bruins, Islanders, and Canadiens. I mean, seriously, the Pens are fucking-A despicable, and it's a long, hard hate, born of far more spite than is healthy to have experienced in one short lifetime, a hatin' awesome enough to match my 40-year hate on the fucking Habs, which dates back to Ken Motherfucking Dryden (yeah, yeah, you kids get off my lawn).

So fuck you, Sid Crosby, you fucking viral cockblight, for fucking up my joy in hatin', for monopolizing my black soul's dark places so thoroughly (at least until tomorrow night, when the Caps take on the Flyers) that I couldn't even properly hate on Sergei Gonchar and Brooks Orpik and NBC's coverage of yesterday's game total monster ass-whupping. While you, Sid Crosby, are in fact a douche, your douchedom is of a character far too grotesque, too pestilential, too infected, too seedy, too odiferous, to be articulated in this hallowed space. Just fuck you, Sid, and with the dick of someone I don't like.

All this is a little funny, because Thursday, I'm taking this guy and Planet, the Best Kid Ever, to a Caps game (her first, I believe; I'm not sure about him) against the Thrashers, who aren't really worth the energy to hate. I hope they're not disappointed.

Okay, that wasn't brief. I got rolling. Totally my bad.

FINALLY, I can't find an online cite to the story, but I heard on my local all-news, all Badenful all morning, all scary all panicky traffic guy all afternoon, radio station that the president of my local locality's county council is a douche. Now, this is a douchedom less spectacularly pustulent than the aforementioned pestilential douchedom of Cindy Crysby. But it's still pretty doucheriffic, because this guy loves trees almost as much as he hates teachers. The man belongs on the Left Coast, which hasn't stopped him from getting elected and hanging in long enough to take his turn as head of the council (it rotates, I think annually). But now, the aforementioned radio station tells me (without backing it up on the station's Web site) that Council President Duckfucker is tearing into the county Board of Education for its $13-million (chump change) contract to buy Promethean Boards, claiming it violated state law for the Board to scatter a few pennies to install these things in every classroom in the county without first sucking Council President Duckfucker's tiny shrivelled classic liberal pussy dick.

Ilse, Goth (blog deceased), and this wise and wonderful uberwoman, will tell you that Promethean Boards are a life-altering event for teachers. I've seen them in action, and as a total layperson, I agree totally. That Council President Duckfucker wants to interpose his tree-loving self into the educational spending process in this, a top-ten U.S. school system, is just diamond shitting of the worst sort. That this jerk has actually caused me to abstain from voting in a council election makes it even worse. Suck it, Phil Andrews.

Bad Science

I've rearranged the furniture some, adding some links under a heading I've chosen to label "Science." The truth is that the links are to blogs that post, at least sometimes, about autism. You can find a bunch of other links over at my friend Kimmah's place, if you don't like my links.

Most of those who read this blog know that my wife Ilse's son Bam-Bam is autistic. I've done some reading about autism, but not much, and I haven't troubled myself with any intimate familiarity with controversies related to autism, although I've been aware of them.

Here's my view: I accept Bam-Bam for himself. He is a happy kid who lights up when he sees me, who wants me to play with him and hug him and wrestle with him and bathe him and put him to bed and give him pizza or chips or cheeseburger and wake him up in the morning (when he doesn't do that on his own at 4 AM) and put him on the bus. This kid loves me and I love him. He is a sweet and stunningly smart kid who happens to be different, and who happens to have some trouble communicating. And by different, I don't mean "sick" or "disordered" or "damaged." I mean different. Bam-Bam views things through his own lens, and who the hell doesn't? His lens just isn't shaped the same way as mine.

Whose is?

There are people like us. There are people whose children are far more severely challenged than Bam-Bam. Some of them are like us; they accept that their children are what they are. They help as best they can, as we do. Some of them are horribly burdened by their childrens' needs. We're lucky; Bam-Bam needs a little help in the shower and in the bathroom, and we and the kid need to work a little when he's trying to communicate with us. He needs to be watched or gated in, but he respects baby gates and stays where he's supposed to; in fact, sometimes he thinks he's gating us out, and that's the way he sometimes likes it.

There isn't a cure for Bam-Bam. We can treat symptoms and change behaviors. That's what we do. That's what science--and experience (we'll come back to this)--tell us to do. We can work with him to help him develop independent skills. We can work with him to find his place in this wrong society that is not well-suited to allowing him a place. That's what responsibility and decency tell us to do. He is what he is, and some of that can change as he grows and ages, and some of it can't. What we can give him is a context and some tools to adapt as well as he can. We don't mope about this. It is what it is.

There are other people. Some of them have children who are less severely challenged than Bam-Bam, or far, far more so. These people cannot accept. They believe their children are damaged, disordered, sick. They believe there is an identifiable cause. They believe there is a cure, a magic bullet that will suddenly erase their children's symptoms and undesirable behaviors and leave them with theoretically normal children. Most of them believe that there is an identifiable cause, and namely their childrens' childhood immunizations. They advocate not immunizing children. They believe that there is a giant conspiracy between Big Pharma and the government to cover up a causal connection. They seek compensation from pharmaceutical companies and the government. They chelate (chemically cleanse) their children to remove mercury, the agent that they believe responsible for their childrens' conditions. Unfortunately, a common side effect of chelation is fatality. I am neither joking nor exaggerating.

Of course, it's very difficult to prove a negative, but all efforts--numerous efforts--to scientifically link autism-spectrum diagnoses to childhood immunization have failed. Utterly. There is no demonstrable connection between vaccines and autism. None. The links under the "Science" heading can lead you to a host of technical data on this, if you're interested, but the bottom line is this: there is precisely as much evidence that stuffed animals cause autism as there is that vaccines cause autism. The theory that there is a causal connection between vaccines and autism is as valid as the theory that copulating with a virgin cures syphilis. I am neither joking nor exaggerating.

Such organizations as Autism Speaks and Cure Autism Now, along with a host of others, to whom I will never link, are proponents of this vaccine nonsense. Beware of them. Please, please, please do not give them your money.

The short of the furniture rearrangement is this: I tripped over some anti-vaccine propaganda on, of all places, the Huffington Post, and did some more reading, and discovered that HuffPo is a notorious hotbed for these insane persons, apparently because Ariana Huffington is pals with Bill Maher, who is an anti-vaccination nutbar. I'm done with HuffPo (I was done with Maher a long time ago). That got me reading. That got me linking.

Sorry to inflict a completely humorless post upon you, my gentle and loyal and loving readers, but I had a little story to tell here. End of story.

Moving the Furniture

I've completed reworking the links. I don't care if you like them, because they're my navigation tool, and as Kimmah admits in the comments in the post immediately below, she loves it when I talk about my navigation tool. And don't think Ilse doesn't know about it.

I would like you to click on some of the links, because that's an affirmation that you care about the things I care about. But if not, no problem, I'll still love many of you unconditionally anyway, and pretend to love the rest.

Hello to: too many to count. Lots of futbol and politics, futbol especially because, as I descend toward unemployment and unshaved depression and drinking and a long death spiral, I'm looking for things to do other than look for a job. Futbol fits the bill nicely. Expect more blogging, too.

Goodbye to: Oh, let's not embarrass them. I know that being cut from the blogroll at Minions is destructive to peoples' self-esteem. Especially people whose blogs are actually read.

Variants on Nothing

Mmkay, so Ilse got a long-term substitute job at one of the best schools in the county. She is officially an English teacher. Of course, at the moment, she's an exploited temporary worker allowing The Man to tread on her back for His benefit (she'll be doing actual teacher work, as an actual teacher, for about 60 percent of the salary), but it's an in, and it's a fabulous opportunity. So good on her.

I inadvertently wronged a beloved friend with my original post when I tagged Goth as the greatest English teacher on the planet. Actually, I probably wronged a bunch of people, but the point here is that I wronged another one of my minions, and I really hate myself a lot when I do that. Take a bow, Kimmah. Sorry about that whole ass-fucking thing, babe. I'll try to give you some warning and an anesthetic next time.

There will be more--much more--about important things like laughing my ass off at Bears fans Goth and Ilse over the next week. But for now, I'll leave you with yet another reminder of how and why DOOK SUCKS.



Fuck the fucking fuck out of Dook.

But speaking of which, one of my two Dookie friends on this planet is getting married. If'n you can't keep getting the milk for free, Sparkles, well, then good on you, love. Congrats and good luck. But Dook still sucks.

Why God Hates Your Team

1. You are not Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. As is by now well-documented, God is BFFs with both Fuckface and Dreamboat. Neither minds being two-timed. I mean, c'mon, God is your BFF, what do you care about who else She hangs with?

2. You are the Seattle Seahawks, who God allowed into the playoffs for the sole purpose of exposing Tony Romo as the useless earflap he is.

3. You are Marty Schottenheimer. Do I really need to explain this?

4. You are the Philadelphia Eagles, and you have been struck down by Her Mighty Righteousness as a demonstration of all which is just and correct.

5. You are the Baltimore Ravens, and you are a felon dressed as a beatnik, coached by an ego carefully sculpted from feces.

6. While you are Rex Grossman and you are a douchebag, you were necessary for one more week because somebody had to do in the Seahawks.

7. You are Clemson, and the injustice of you remaining undefeated in basketball in January was so glaring that your ass had to be whipped by something as pathetic as the Maryland Terrapins to demonstrate to you the error of your ways.

8. You are the Maryland Terrapins, and that was one of your five conference victories this season, all of which will come unexpectedly, while you hork bile on your shoes against nonentities. At home.

9. You have chosen to closely align your personal being with one of the above examples of justice in the universe.

10. You have chosen to align your personal being against Fuckface or Dreamboat. Again. It's just not worthwhile to fuck with God's BFFs.

A Bim

What an awful day for the most recent protracted topic of this blog. I'm still shaking a bit from the proximity of it all; the bus explosion near Russell Square occurred in a block I've walked many times, one which Ilse and I visited twice during our trip to London last week.

The City has occupied my thoughts at some level for the entire day. I was panicked, badly, when I first heard the news, and settled a bit when all of my London friends had checked in safe within about an hour of my arrival at the office. A beloved friend of mine, and of many of yours, is visiting there now for an extended stay, and of course my good friend Doctor Death, now beloved of you all, lives there.

Those who would tell me that wondering why people plant bombs is the equivalent of offering terrorists therapy are not welcome on my planet. It is apparent to anyone with a brain and a heart that no one perpetrates this sort of organized aggression without some provocation. It is a fool who does not wonder how his actions cause or affect the actions of others. And actions like blowing up a thousand presumptively more-or-less innocent persons--one of whom could easily have been a good friend or more, given only slight variations in chaos--it seems obvious to me that it is one's duty to wonder what motivates that.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't shoot a terrorist, given a gun and a clean shot. I mean a real terrorist, one who detonated a bomb without blowing up himself/herself. I just can't honestly say that I wouldn't. I'm disturbed by that. But I can only seek comfort in knowing that elevates me above Karl Rove. I wish I could imagine that counts for something beyond soul food.