On an utterly and self-indulgently personal note, I auditioned for a role in NZ’s favourite soap Shortland St today! I honestly don’t know whether I stand a chance, so I guess time will tell.. But if I do make the cut, we might finally get some retard representation on everyone’s favourite 7 o’clock show! Well, some people’s favourite, hehe I’ll keep you updated…

Gosh, this is such a tough one. I know I’ve harped on about this before, but reading this article in the Herald today made me think about it all over again, and I’m interested in your thoughts too. The gist of it is this: that a new law being introduced next week will make it illegal for employers to pay disabled workers less than the minimum wage, unless an exemption is applied for. What does this mean? Well, for those

You may remember, if you saw the CloseUp piece on this site, that Starbucks were going to get in touch with me regarding the accessibility of their stores. Whilst I’m pleased to say they did get in touch a week later, and I did meet up with a man by the name of Joe Rich, I’m incredibly disappointed by what has happened since. By “what has happened”, I mean that absolutely nothing has happened. In fact, during Joe and I’s

“Gosh Joe, that sounds ah.. that sounds awful” One of my favourite Family Guy quotes of all time, spoken by Peter Griffin in response to wheelchair-dude Joe’s invitation to watch Grey’s Anatomy with him and his wife, and pretty much summed up how I felt when I saw this site. Take a look around, go on, and tell me how many of their “I have a positive attitude towards my disability” products you’d consider buying. The apparel includes such witty

The BBC have published a fascinating article on disabled people and their issues surrounding sex, most notably whether it is acceptable for disabled people to visit brothels to seek a form of companionship that, due to their impairment, they might not otherwise experience. Obviously there are moral dilemmas in any discussion surrounding brothels and consequent objectification of women, but I imagine for some disabled people they provide a solution to a need that is right up there with the provision

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be deafblind. Not in a perverse, gosh-how-bizarre way, but more to discover how someone copes without two of the senses we so often take for granted. To think that communication would be tactile only, and that so much of your worldly experience would be defined by touch, taste and smell, is mind-boggling to comprehend. So I set out to find a little bit more, and I happened across this blog entry

Hey everyone, this is a quick but quite important post – It’s been mentioned by one or two people that they’re uncomfortable with the third image on my banner above the blog, the one with the nude woman amputee. The image is actually cropped (and slightly edited) from this picture (caution: contains nudity). As far as I’m concerned, it’s a really powerful image that juxtaposes the themes of disability and beauty, two words which are very rarely mentioned in the

Because I’ve only recently started this blog, I’ve been running a fair few Google searches recently, (seeing where my site pops up upon entering different keywords and all that), and I’ve come to quite an unsettling conclusion. There is very little – if any – proof of an online community for people with disabilities here in NZ. In fact, from the first page of results of a “disability nz” Google search, here’s what I found: 6 / 10 of the