short notes: will brady's ruminations

A blog adjunct to rondak.org [click on the globe] | Perspectives on: human rights; environmental concerns; life as a visual artist; 21st century feudalism; progressive politics; aboriginal culture; new urbanism; permaculture; sustainable technology; non-traditional families; achievable utopias

2005-03-26

PHOTO ARTS

Jim O'Connell is one talented photo manipulator | This image, put up on his mmdc FLIKr photoblog is modestly captioned "This is tougher than it looks" | He's made me a fan just on this single image | I'll be watching what else he comes up with in the future |

HE CREDITS some discussion on Waxy.org as inspiration |

Posted by: Will Brady / 10:10 (0) comments

TYPOGRAPHY

Short Notes Logo created by Typogenerator | I especially like that the program pulled up the image of my own "Personal Credo" Essay |

THANKS TO Mandarin Design for the link to the logo design program |

Posted by: Will Brady / 06:18 (0) comments

TYPOGRAPHY

My name generated by Spell with Flickr |

THANKS TO Mike Power for bringing the Flickr site to my attention |

Posted by: Will Brady / 06:10 (0) comments

POLITICS

GOP Strategist Dead from Cocaine and OxyContin | I suppose this fits into the "sure he's a slime ball, but he's our slimeball" category |
Okay, it's old news | Happened during the Gay SuperBowl known as the Oscars | Still... it's not like it got much coverage in the national media | Although I thought the Washington Times wouldn't gore one of its own | Tittilation I suppose | That's what happens with the tabloidization of news coverage |
What am I talking about? | Republican media adviser R. Gregory Stevens, who was found dead in the Beverly Hills, Calif., home of actress Carrie Fisher on Feb. 26, died of an overdose of cocaine and the painkiller OxyContin, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office | A spokeswoman at the coroner's office said when asked by phone what was the cause of death, "Cocaine and OxyContin," | When asked specifically whether there was a drug overdose, she said "yes." | Read the whole story |

Posted by: Will Brady / 04:01 (0) comments

2005-03-24

LONELINESS

There is nothing like it | It's presence can be a glare in one's vision ...consuming, blinding, exhausting | Not at all akin to the quiet comfort of being alone, loneliness can grab you by the throat and cause you choke ~ metaphorically, if not in actual physical sense | One can be consumed with loneliness while surrounded with people |
     These things said, it never ceases to amaze me that mental health professionals constantly fail to recognize the impact and effect of loneliness on their clients | Making matters worse, not only do they fail to recognize this, there are times, after clients try to talk about loneliness, or of difficulty even being able to talk with someone else [not even getting to the point of developing relationships] the clinican diagnoses as "symptomatic" of a person's illness |
     Making things still worse is the long unwritten, but long standing practice of mental health clinicians discouraing family and friends [already often in fragile, endangered relationships with the clients] from sticking around to show support to those suffering |
     Equally appaling is the practice of subjecting clients to "groups" day-in day-out in both hospital and outpatient clinical settings, constantly urging clients to talk about themselves, then for the clinicans to later complain that their clients seem "...awfully self-absorbed"
     Now, how is that, exactly?
     Years back, when I was working at an Client Rights Advocacy organization which was struggling to meet financial ends' meet all the time, staff at the agency were dismayed, disturbed amd disgusted when an already high-paid, emotionally distant bureaucrat was awarded $3 million dollars [over a three year period] to oversee a research program whose sole purpose was to determine if people who had been long hospitalized with "mental illness" did better if they had friends |
     Cripes! those of us working at the almost always financially strapped agency could answer that question FOR FREE!
     Of COURSE, people do better when they have friends, even rented ones [something the well-funded program planned to hook people up with late in the first year of the project]
     But so much money is devoted to hiring staff who can micro-manage whether or not people are taking their meds, or making certain that professional "boundaries" remain intact between clients and staff | Little or none is attached to efforts that might actually help make people's lives easier | By linking people to their families and friends, or to help someone identify the very real barriers that troubled people often have when trying to cope with day-o-day difficulties |
     It isn't asking for much | And in helping someone effectively deal with loneliness, it brings them much closer, and much quicker, to succesfully integrating back into the chaos that is the "Real World" for the rest of us, by learning how o establish friendships |
     Come on clinical careerists | Wake up and recognize for your clients what you take for granted in your own lives | Namely, it's perfectly normal for folks to have trouble starting acquaintenceships but, once begun, become foundation stones for more integrated lives |

Posted by: Will Brady / 22:25 (0) comments

2005-03-23

WEBPAGE DESIGN

mental feasts

I'm playing around with new code sets found on Mandarin Design | I also like the color code chart on the right of their front page |

Posted by: Will Brady / 23:58 (0) comments

2005-03-20

LOCAL SCENE

Posted by: Will Brady / 17:51 (0) comments

NEWS BLIPS

Crime Pays | John Boy Rowland, the lynchpin

politician personally responsible for Connecticut's executive branch of government participating in biggest and most blatent state treasury-looting years in Connecticut history [including a $220 million dollar handout to corporate welfare cheat Kenneth Lay and ENRON] goes to jail free for a year and a day starting on April Fool's Day | So, who's the joke played on now? | You decide [I'm still waiting for the Feds to finger Mark Ryan, or do the architects of these travesties get off scott free?] FROM Connecticut Post

Congress to legalize Ursury at least if you are poor | The rich who go bankrupt can, with planning, still hide their assets | FROM Newsday and the Washington Post |

Fag-hating homos run the GOP | No wonder the rabid pillow-biters know what gay rock to upend | Their leadership is full of queers~ | So says the slick style magazine GQ, in their latest issue | FROM RAW STORY

Congress enraged about feeder tubes | It's strange and sad that Terri Schiavo's case lands in the federal arena | The issues raised in this run tha gamut from how long should someone remain in a "vegetative state" [whatever that means] to managed care end-of-life issues to the fact that Congress and the President himself are doing what they can to cut heath care funds currently available for the poor not to mention NOTHING for the 43 million without any coverage at all| Those issues don't get dealt with while Congress pretends to care about one person's right to life | They care a lot unless, it's some poor black woman's baby we're talking about | "By their Deeds shall ye know them" | FROM Topix and the Houston Chroncile |

Posted by: Will Brady / 08:57 (0) comments

POP QUIZ | UPDATED 24 march 05

Who are these people?
At one point or another, in the past year and 3 months, pictures of these people have appeared on my weblog | They are all people in the public eye, or once were | Can you tell who they are? | Enter your guesses in the comments option |

1- john fitzgerald kennedy 2- bette davis 3- chuck norris
4- john ashcroft 5- lee marvin 6- martin luther king
7- shirley chisholm 8- patrick stewart 9- susan sontag

INSPIRATION FROM: Buzzstuff, who has discontinued blogging [as of 1/3/05], but you can still access his archived entries |

Posted by: Will Brady / 08:12 (0) comments

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