Spam-A-Lot and Community Linkage

It takes some time to go through all of the comments submitted to the Staff of Asclepius. I appreciate the views reader’s express and I am so grateful when a few extra minutes are spent contributing information that wasn’t included in the original post. Those informative comments assist in shaping our community. It may take a day or two for your comments to appear because all submitted comments must first be approved. I approve all submissions that are relevant to the post no matter if I agree or not.

IMAGE: Can of Spam circled and crossed out in red. Photo manipulation by hegarty_david at Flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial license. Spam meat product registered by Hormel.

For the past month or so there has been an increase in spam comments from all sorts of sites claiming financial or health wisdom etc. Recently there has been a delay of about four days. Besides filtering through all of trash to grab the true nuggets from real readers, I’m looking for a better comment program and spam filter. That way your comments will be submitted and approved within a day.

And now for something completely different . . . .

Every week there are new press releases, articles, information, and videos popping up concerning Paganism, spirituality, health, or disabilities. Community Linkage is a collection of useful information and sometimes entertainment for you.

disabilityscoop “Special Education Cuts Offer Cautionary Tale” by By Michelle Diament
After cutting millions from South Carolina’s special education budget, the federal government has ordered state officials to restore the money. Read the full article here.

Sports

The 2011 Special Olympics world games are currently being held in Athens, Greece and broadcast by ESPN. There are over seven thousand athletes from over one hundred nations participating.

VIDEO: Montage of the Special Olympics opening ceremony in Athens, Greece.

There are more videos at theAthen’s2011 Youtube channel. ESPN’s website is doing a disgraceful job and not covering the event on their main page. Searches brought up a video link that didn’t work on my Linux based PC.

Entertainment

My Summer Solstice bale fire just got stoked by Faun’s new album release. There is much more to this group of song spinners from Munich, Germany then medieval folk music. From the earth shaking power of taiko drums to the sweeping voices of instruments both human, wind, and stringed they awaken the mysteries of the soul with gentle whispers and Wild Hunts. “Eden” comes with a seventy page book including artwork by Brian Froud. He is famous for his illustrations of the Fairy world and art design for The Dark Crystal movie. That movie greatly influenced my spiritual beliefs as a child and I am eager for the sequel. The Power of the Dark Crystal is in pre-production.

Though it is tempting to download music for free, by honoring Pagan artists with a purchase we can ensure Pagan music will be sustained. You can buy the album from Amazon or Faun’s site.

VIDEO: Release video for Faun’s album “Eden”. Information about the album is provided along with Faun’s music and images by Brain Froud.

The new X-Men movie “First Class” was simply amazing. I’m going to have to see it again without my nieces and nephews. They were cranky at the drive in. The effects, strong well developed characters and story line finally brought the intensity of the X-Men comics to the big screen. In my not so humble opinion, the other three, did not. Here is a review from one of my favorite film critics Tommy Edison the Blind Film Critic. He first watches movies as a general audience member to write his reviews. Later he uses an audio description service.

VIDEO: The Blind Film Critic reviews X-Men first class.

This got me wondering if Netflix offers audio description services for their customers. I did a search and couldn’t find anything about it for streaming or DVD rental on the Netflix website. The Audio Description Project: An Initiative of the American Council of the Blind Formerly AD International has information on their site regarding which DVDs are available in general with audio descriptions. Their site states that “No major commercial Internet service (such as Netflix) is known to offer audio description on any of their movies available for downloading/streaming.” Could the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) lawsuit against Netflix open up the possibility of a similar suit from the ACB or other organizations for the blind? Staff of Asclepius post about the lawsuit. I’ve added a correction to the post. The NAD letter to Netflix where they point out the difficulty of finding movies with captioning is dated 2010. Netflix didn’t provide easier captioning searches until after March 2011. NAD was correct to express that finding movies with Closed Captioning was like finding a needle in a haystack.

Statistics from WGBH Media Access, the largest supplier of captioning and description (Descriptive Video Service), shows that there are many more first run movies available with captioning then audio descriptions. (ADP site)