Ode to Sitemeter

Okay, not so much an ode as a list of things it has led me to today:

1) This little ad from the Official Sponsor of the Brazilian Paralympic Committee. The link to it reads "This ad shows the real limitation of paralympic athletes." That's pathetic as an introduction, for a number of reasons, but the little ad is clever in a web-tech-ish way. Steering a manual chair isn't nearly that hard though, even for the wimpy-armed, like me.

2) Under the category of Things That Totally Flippin' Freak Me The Hell Out.

3) Someone's Google search for "prosthetic legs for formal situations" led here, which I am certain proved unhelpful. But some other hits for the search are truly fascinating.

Vivian Sobchack writes about "Real Phantoms/Phantom Realities: On the Phenomenology of Bodily Imagination." It's incredibly dense prose, but interesting:

In the summer of 1993, as the result of a recurrent soft-tissue cancer in my thigh, my left leg—after three operations, literally as well as metaphorically, "a drag"—was amputated high above the knee. Here, taking a phenomenological approach, I want to attend to the extraordinary and radical expansion (not merely the presumed reduction) of my lived body's articulations of itself during the post-operative period when I was supposedly "missing" a leg and the subsequent period in which I learned to use and then "incorporate" my prosthetic leg. Indeed, during this time (as well as in the retrospective period in which I prepared this presentation), my body became for me an intimate "laboratory" in which I could examine, test, and reflect upon the experience and dynamics not only of so-called "phantom" sensations, but also of the relations between my body image and my bodily imagination, my body and language, and between the visible and invisible aspects of an irreducibly subjective and objective experience.

And an article on amputees and prostethic limbs written in 1999 for the New Statesman:

The September issue of Dazed and Confused magazine, guest-edited by the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, featured the model Aimee Mullins, whose legs were amputated below the knee in infancy because she was born without fibulas. She had not one pair of prosthetic legs, but several. On cervine carbon-fibre pins, she is a paralympic runner. She has pairs for swimming, windsurfing and parachuting, the last with shock absorbers. Although the designs of Mullins's various prostheses are striking, their paradoxical effect is to ensure that her disability is not the first thing people notice about her. Making further mockery of her disability, her "social" legs are a couple of inches longer than her real ones would have been. "Differently abled" is not a happy euphemism even by the low standards of the politically correct phrase book, but in innovations like these the term gains real meaning.

4) Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson by Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner is finally available for pre-order. The book isn't out until this fall, but I'm looking forward to it since I wrote about Wilson last October. Eventually, I plan to review it.