Autism Awareness: A Special Needs App to Consider

Dexteria from www.A4CWSN.com on Vimeo.

Fine motor skills are lagging in my Autistic son. When holding a pencil or crayon most of his concentration and effort is spent taming the instrument. We made an end run around this temporary physical limitation (he is gaining skills daily) by purchasing an iPad to facilitate his use of our preschool and Kindergarten curriculum.

Since he is a few years behind in dexterity but a smart little cookie in so many other ways, we thought it best to invest in a "pencil and paper" that he could use now. He continues working with the pens, pencils, crayons and paintbrushes, of course, but in order to learn new skills we ease the struggle so he can wrestle with his academics instead of his own body.

Here's a company I think you should be aware of if you have or are working with special needs.

The Pope and Condoms: A response

I got an e-mail from a friend wondering what in the world was going on in the Catholic Church. According to the media, the Church had changed it's teaching. Impossible. It simply can't. The media got it wrong. Again and as usual.

The response:

Sent: Mon, Nov 22, 2010 01:29 PM


It looks like people are listening to the media again, P***, who reported that the Pope said the exact opposite of what he actually said. Also, this was an interview and not him sitting down with pen and paper to clearly articulate each and every word. I've been interviewed once, and everything I wanted to say wasn't said and what I did say looked very different in the article itself. It really was odd.

The whole of the comment, which I've read, makes clear that what the pope is saying is that you can use the fact that the man is using a condom to explain to him that there are limits to his behavior. To show him that even he is aware that he can't just do whatever he wants, which is the stated belief of the culture. The pope does go on to say that condoms are NOT the answer, that the church is NOT changing it's stance, and that condoms spread disease and are a part of the problem. It's like evangelizing a bank robber, "See? You don't shoot the teller because it's wrong to kill, agreed? Now, about that bank robbing..."

The media wants the church to change its mind so it can continue to beat the drum that salvation is through Latex Alone. It'll do anything it can to make it look that way. One of the main problems with communicating with the media is that the Church, the Pope, and the Lord refuse to communicate in sound bytes. You have to get the whole of the communication and not the itty bitty parts. Even then, the world wants its sin justified and will take anything and twist it to that end.

If you're not being persecuted, misunderstood, and misquoted, you're not doing it right. Right?

Here's some other links you might want to look at:http://lisagraas.com/2010/11/20/some-big-change-from-the-pope-on-condom-use/
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/253679
http://lisagraas.com/2010/11/20/this-may-be-the-most-irresponsible-article-ever-written-at-huffpo/

Girl with a slight taste in art...



The movie "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is coming out. They couldn't have picked a better actress to play the role, and wow, this poster representation of the painting is a work of art in its own right. Simply amazing.

So that's about as positive as I'm going to get in preparation of the movie because I really, really like the painting and I've seen the previews. It looks to be another one of those (boring and overdone) anachronistic movies where Hollywood hyper-sexualizes a culture to better match our current post-Kinseyan and post-oral contraception mores of today. I hope I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I am not going to make any wagers.

 

Directors and screenwriters feel they need to dumb down sexual cultural differences in order to help moviegoers access the characters. No need to risk making the effort to actually be interesting. You'd never know it through watching a movie, but there is a major difference in women's sexuality now versus (any other) then: women today are obliged to have sex or face censure; women of the past were obliged not to. Hollywood applauds the former and scorns the latter, even when portraying a time period that clearly honored chastity as the ideal.

 

Cultural differences in Hollywood, at least when it comes to desire and restraint, only show up in matters of negotiating the laces of those painfully accurate corsets. Steamy sex scenes have been so overdone as to be...*yawn*...formulaic. Ironically, of all entertainment institutions, Hollywood should know that it is the chase scenes that titillate more than the catch.  

"Dude, you have no Quran"

Yes, some "pastor" in Amarillo caught a Fire Bug from that Floridian fame-hound. "Look at all the news vans!" thought he, "Maybe if I lit a match, I could get my picture tooken, too!"

Things didn't quite work out as planned for the Amarillo "pastor." No one is taking his picture this week (poor guy). Instead, they are taking pictures of this skateboarder.



Steven Spillman, a sensible dude

Spillman heard about the planned burning of the Quran and took care of business in a typical Texan manner (with a Californian twist). While the "pastor" gathered a crowd in a local park, put the Quran on a grill and drew out the moment dramatically, Spillman skated up and swiped the book. What makes this story even better, he skated over to the local Islamic Center and handed it over.

Here's the full story...

Proof positive that God has a sense of humor.