I love it when the algorithms that seem to drive most of the internet get things weirdly wrong. For example, when Facebook thought I wanted to hear about how Colorado’s governor was wimping out of an execution or when my Google search for a Moroccan restaurant returned California Pizza Kitchen and another California Pizza Kitchen.
Today I was searching on advice in formatting an Excel spreadsheet and found this helpful answer on about.com . . . along with a sort of unlikely ad:
Here are things that are reasonable to include in an email signature block:
Things that are not OK and just end up making any email chain a total pain in the ass to scroll through:
The grumpy old woman email goddess has spoken. Any questions?
I’m in LA for the Disability Rights Legal Center’s Disability Rights Summit. Great event. Saw lots of old friends and put lots of faces to internet names. Presented on fair housing with Fernando Gaytan, a wonderful attorney from the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.
Couple of photos:
Had dinner at Hama Sushi, where they really really really only serve sushi.
And it was magnificent!!!
There are 4 time zones. If you’re from the East Coast, they go -1, -2, and -3. If you’re from the West Coast, they go +1, +2, and +3. It’s as if east coasters say, “I can subtract 1 and I can subtract 3, but subtracting 2 just baffles me!” And the equivalent for west coasters.
A woman stopped me in the Denver airport yesterday and asked the time. I told her. She reacted with great skepticism and confusion because the answer I gave (“4:15,” for the record) did not fall into one of the time zones of which she was aware. So she demanded an explanation of how this bizarre Land of the Mountains related to other, better known, time zones. Seriously, we had to have that discussion, while I justified the existence of our little chronological slice of the country.
And don’t get me started on the networks that tell you the show is at 9:00, 8:00 Central, and 6:00 Pacific. Um, guys? Hellooooo?
If you can successfully count to 4 without missing any numbers, you can figure out Mountain Time.
Beautiful as our mountains are, I think we need a better name. No one, but no one, will ever loose track of Craft Beer Time.
This evening we went back to the completely gutted and remodeled Izakaya Den restaurant and found that they installed a raised sushi bar with no ramp. Here’s a photo from Westword with my added mark-up.
Sigh.
Just that, by itself, is deeply frustrating. As we’ve discussed in connection with our lawsuit against the El Diablo restaurant, you can’t take an empty space and make part of it inaccessible. While this should be obvious, it’s also illegal.
But what made this depressing, frustrating, infuriating and really sad was that we have been patronizing Izakaya Den and its sister restaurant, Sushi Den, for years. They know us in both restaurants, well enough at Sushi Den that we had a table where we always sat, and most of the waitstaff had served us so often they automatically brought me a phone book to sit on.* We had participated in a private sushi tasting with a chef visiting from Japan, and at that point (and others) met the owners.
It’s bad enough that Izakaya Den got seriously bad architectural advice. It’s really depressing that no one ever stopped to think, this isn’t just a theoretical legal question; we have a regular customer who will want access to the sushi bar. And what’s funny: they have an elevator. They added a second floor and an elevator. Very fucking cool. But damn! Why on earth add an unnecessary, new, inaccessible raised area?
We proceeded from Izakaya Den to Kaos** pizza, which was also inaccessible, then*** on to the Black Pearl which had this gorgeous ramp
as well as truffle fries, an excellent cheese plate, and a nice refreshing bottle of 90 Shilling.
************
* Yes, I’m that short and have that little pride. But it’s nice to be able to look my fellow diners in the eye.
** Sounds like Maxwell Smart should be nearby, talking on his shoe phone.
*** I’m leaving out the part where I crossed the street from Kaos to where Tim was waiting, swearing my ass off, while he made “maybe you don’t want to use those words just now” eyebrow motions. Turns out he was chatting with a nice woman — hidden to me by a parked car — and her cute Lab puppy. I was embarrassed, she was understanding (“that’s OK; let it all hang out!”), and the puppy was really really cute.
[This is cross-posted from CREECblog, though I would like to revise and extend by noting that the HOA in the post below was in violation of not only the Fair Housing Act, but of course the Anti-Butthead Act as well.]
My theory is that homeowners associations (HOAs) are run by the same people who bullied their fellow students in high school for not wearing the right brand of jeans. Only now they have power over the house you bought and live in.
This post is about the Fair Housing Act and the fact that it requires landlords and HOAs to make reasonable accommodations in their policies and to permit residents to make reasonable (physical) modifications to property at their own expense where necessary because of the resident’s disability.* HUD and the DOJ have collaborated on excellent explanatory memos on both reasonable accommodations and reasonable modifications. [Both pdf.]
Seth and Lisa Moates lived in a development called Plantation Oaks** outside of Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Moates uses a manual wheelchair, but was moving toward having to use a power chair which, in turn, would require a lift-equipped van. The Moateses wanted to build a garage to fit their new van as well as Mr. Moates’s therapy equipment. Of course, they couldn’t just build the structure they needed for Mr. Moates’s disability. They lived in an HOA community, in which an “Architectural Review Committee” asserted power over decisions like this. And of course
[t]he ARC denied the Moateses’ initial request on April 8, 2013 for the stated reason that alternate garages and structures were inconsistent with the other Plantation Oaks homes and not in the best interest of the neighborhood.***
That’s right, Mr. Moates, you can’t park your new van in a garage or store your therapy equipment because that would not be “in the best interest of the neighborhood.” And just to be sure nothing as tacky as a van-accessible garage ever besmirched their plantation, “[t]he Covenants were changed to make the building requested by the Moateses prohibited.”**** You see, originally you just needed special permission for your van accessible garage, but now, in response to the request, that garage and others like it are simply prohibited.
The HOA finally relented after the Moateses reduced the size of the planned garage, BUT only on the condition that, when they sold the house, they demolished the garage and returned the property to its original, pristine, plantation-like***** condition.
The ensuing lawsuit is only at the motion to dismiss stage, but generated a well-reasoned decision denying the motion. The judge noted that “equal opportunity to use and enjoy [a] dwelling” means
that handicapped[******] people must be afforded the same (or ‘equal’) opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling as non-handicapped people. . . . [O]thers in the neighborhood are allowed to park their vehicles in garages, thus affording protection. Affording Mr. Moates a similar opportunity by allowing a larger garage wherein he can park his car, in the same way as his neighbors, plausibly will grant Mr. Moates the same peace of mind and security as everyone else in Plantation Oaks.
Luckily the Moateses have connected with a good attorney and the Central Alabama Fair Housing Center and filed suit. The HOA — rather than coming to its senses, doing the right thing, and avoiding imposing attorneys’ fees for its stupidity on everyone else in the plantation, er, development — is fighting the suit, arguing not only that it did not violate the Fair Housing Act, but that the Moatses were not injured (did not have standing) and that the suit isn’t ripe for review because the new power wheelchair hasn’t arrived yet.
The judge properly denied those arguments in his well-reasoned decision; I would have been tempted to deny them on the grounds of “gimme a break!”
In this case and so many others, you really shouldn’t need a federal law to make the HOA do the right thing. All it should require is a bit of common sense . . . and the realization that we don’t all have to wear the same brand of jeans.
**********************
* 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(A) & (B).
** I swear I did not make up the name.
*** Moates v. Plantation Oaks Homeowners’ Ass’n, 2013 WL 5532626, at *2 (M.D. Ala. Oct. 7, 2013).
**** Id.
***** Slight editorial license.
****** Unfortunately, the Fair Housing Act still uses this terminology, so lawyers and judges have to follow suit.
I was at the end of more than a week of travel — two separate trips, one frantic day of laundry and work in between, flying, driving, more driving, new people, familiar people, introvert-stressing PEOPLE all over the damn place. Finally back at DCA ready to fly home, tired, grungy, grumpy … when I started hearing applause across the terminal. Sustained, widespread applause. Turns out a planeload of World War II veterans were flying in for some sort of ceremony. The airline had announced this, and all of my fellow frazzled Friday-afternoon flyers had lined up on each side of the path the vets traveled from the gate all the way to security and were enthusiastically applauding.
Some of the wildest applause came for the handful of female veterans.
And they had a lone musician — a French horn player — playing in each group of vets with a patriotic — or at least jaunty — tune.
After he had exhausted military and patriotic classics like High Flying Flag, that Marine tune that always comes through in my head as “Be Kind To Your Web-Footed Friends,” Battle Hymn of the Republic and — to my extreme joy — This Land is Your Land, he turned to random jauntiness: She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain; I’m a Little Teapot; Oh Susanna!
It was a truly wonderful thing. The vets were beaming, the crowd was smiling and — here and there — tearing up. It took all of us out of our various travel modes (grumpy; hostile; exhausted) and brought us together for a few minutes, appreciating the hard work and real sacrifice of these amazing people.
We have been lucky so far and have not been flooded. Two worms have attempted to shelter in place by crawling in the back door, and our neighbor’s lawn generated this awesome shroom:
… I recently told a friend who had lost weight.
“Not to be sizist about it, but you do, you look terrific.” She thanked me and talked about the time she had put in at the gym. And she did look great. But then, she looked great before she lost weight, too. And as you can tell from my smartass qualification, the exchange had me thinking — mid-exchange — about fat shaming and how to respect one person’s goal for her body while equally respecting other bodies of different shapes. I’ve been thinking a lot about it since I stumbled on the a blog called Dances with Fat. (Motto: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not size dependent.”)
It’s easy: just respect every body. Everybody and every BODY.
This concept is at the core of the disability rights movement. That bodies of all shapes and functionalities — and the people inside them* — are equally deserving of respect. Hell, it’s at the core of the civil rights movement: that people, regardless of the color of their skin or shape of their privates, are equally deserving of respect.
But it seems like the last group of people it is respectable to out and out ridicule — besides lawyers — are fat people. From Conan’s mocking of Kirstie Alley and a female Olympic weightlifter (who pwnd his sorry behind), to Jiminy Glick a/k/a Martin Short in a fat suit, we hear and apparently tolerate jokes about weight that we would never, in a million years, tolerate about, say, race or religion.**
And we’re supposed to “fight obesity.” In one of many examples, the Denver Post reported in July
A 2011 state law requiring 30 minutes of physical activity a day for elementary students was supposed to mark a new tool in the fight against childhood obesity . . .
OK, that’s not a report, it’s a sentence fragment, but in that one fragment, you see the problem: can we encourage physical exercise without “fighting obesity” — which is really asking us to fight against someone else’s body? Why on earth is the shape of your body any of my business much less something I should fight against?
Health risks? Everyone gets to take their own risks. Health care costs? If that’s the real worry — and not our judgmentalism — then encourage healthy eating, not fat shaming.
Here I have to take issue with the First Lady — on whom I otherwise have a totally embarrassing girlcrush. I’m very sorry she decided to label her cause “the epidemic of childhood obesity” rather than keeping the focus on kids eating a lot of stuff that’s really bad for them. You can be a healthy fat kid and you can also be a scrawny kid who eats only poptarts, peanut butter, and microwave pizzas. Though I doubt that either Lady Bird Johnson or Pat Nixon could have gotten me to eat more fruits and vegetables.
Moral: Be happy with your body; don’t judge other people’s bodies; eat more fruits and vegetables!
For example, from a website about my favorite fruit, I <Heart> Coffee
******
*Assumes a duality that we could argue over — from a philosophical, religious, and/or identity perspective — for days, possibly millennia.
** Outside the fringes of the Republican party.
Cara has everyone’s complete attention.
Thinking perhaps we should consider advertising here:
Thought Snax 
