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"I'm a songwriter. I’ve written loads of music. Why would I try to put out a song and think I’m getting one over on everybody? That’s retarded."

Whoops. For someone whose message is all about how it's OK to be different, this was definitely a quotable misstep, especially after NME decided to put her r-word comment in the headline of their piece. Gaga has since issued an apology via CNN:

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Which is something I never considered before watching the premiere episode of the Blind Film Critic, a new site by radio personality and former mayor of Connecticut (for a day) Tommy Edison. In his review of "Scream 4" Edison, who has been blind since birth, gleefully eviscerates the slasher film for its many non-visual shortcomings.

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Medical examiners said Zahra's death was caused by "undetermined homicidal violence." An autopsy was done even though authorities haven't recovered many bones, most notably the girl's skull, months after she was reported missing. Several bones showed cutting tool marks consistent with dismemberment.

The revelation came in documents released by the state's chief medical examiner shortly after officials in western North Carolina held a news conference about the second-degree murder charge. Authorities said Elisa Baker, who has been jailed since the weekend the girl was reported missing, desecrated Zahra's remains to cover up the slaying.

Prosecutor James Gaither Jr. said at the news conference that there was no credible evidence to suggest anyone else was involved in Zahra's slaying. Hickory Police Chief Tom Adkins called the murder charge "a milestone of holding someone accountable that members of team Zahra have been working toward since the first words spoken on that 911 call."

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"Because of the city's failure to address their unique needs, individuals with disabilities are disproportionately vulnerable to harm in the event of an emergency or disaster," U.S. District Court Judge Consuelo Marshall said.

Marshall ordered the city to meet with the plaintiffs, Audrey Harthorn, a Los Angeles resident who uses a wheelchair, and Communities Actively Living Independent and Free, a Los Angeles nonprofit independent living center, in the next three weeks to come up with a disaster plan for disabled people.

City attorney's office spokeswoman Cindy Shin said the office has not had a chance to fully review the decision and had no immediate comment.

The class-action lawsuit was filed in 2009, spurred by events during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in New Orleans, when many disabled people were abandoned and left stranded during evacuations because of a lack of disability planning.

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"What's that?" I barely look up from the dish I am preparing.

"Mom, I'm gay."

I look at him. He stands there with his hands in his pocket. He looks earnest and hesitant.

"I'm glad you've figured it out." I smile.

He looks disappointed; I feel I have not reacted in the way he expected.

"Really? That's all you have to say?"  His mouth twists into a bit of a grimace.

"Well, yes, I guess. I'm glad you figured out something, and I'm also glad you told me."

He sort of nods and walks away.

------

Twenty-six months ago, my son went from a healthy 16-year-old to being in a coma. Hit by a minivan while riding his bike, he flew 60 feet and landed on his head, which caused life-threatening traumatic brain injuries. He was in a medically induced coma for a week, then was "brought back to life."

My son has been out of rehab for three weeks. These are but the early weeks of hell in brain injury recovery. For now, we still have almost complete control over him because he is not yet back in school. He is constantly monitored at home and only leaves the house to attend therapy for speech, occupation and/or physical needs. He hates being so confined. I understand: Who wants to be watched all the time? But we, his adult caretakers, are hyper-vigilant about his whereabouts. We have seen how impulsive he is, how mentally he is closer to an 8-year-old than to the 16-year-old that he is.

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"Just because I can't speak doesn't mean I don't have anything to say." A poster with those words hung in the waiting room at my speech therapist's office, a place where I spent an evening or two a week during much of my childhood, from the age of 7 until 12, and then intermittently until I went to college. The phrase was meant to be empowering, but even then, I saw it for what it was, a plea to the wider world: Please excuse me, but I'm about to speak, and it's going to take a minute.

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He supports the Civil Rights Act, he says. And he loves (and quotes) Martin Luther King.

According to Paul, the most pressing issue of 2010 -- the modern civil rights movement, if you will -- is protecting "the rights of people to be free from a nanny state." Just let that one sink in for a bit. Calorie counts on menus is Jim Crow redux and Michael Bloomberg is a modern-day Bull Connor:

Now the media is twisting my small government message, making me out to be a crusader for repeal of the Americans for Disabilities Act and The Fair Housing Act. Again, this is patently untrue. I have simply pointed out areas within these broad federal laws that have financially burdened many smaller businesses.

For example, should a small business in a two-story building have to put in a costly elevator, even if it threatens their economic viability? Wouldn’t it be better to allow that business to give a handicapped employee a ground floor office? We need more businesses and jobs, not fewer.

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Apparently, Wolf Blitzer just did that thing where he says the same thing over and over again, and this time the thing was asking Rand Paul if he would've voted for the Americans With Disabilities Act. Paul clearly would not have voted for the Americans With Disabilites Act (which isn't breaking news), though he declined to admit this outright.

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"We're all going to die someday," the realist tells us. "We get older and older, and eventually, we die."

"Jesus, could you stop being so negative?" we respond.

"It's really best to plan for it before it happens, so we have some control over how it goes," the realist counters.

"Plan for it? God, you're morbid," we say, turning back to our iPhones to tweet about the fantastic pastrami we had for lunch.

We actively divert our attention from death each day, and then one day, there it is, rudely interrupting our normal routines, and we're bewildered by how cruel and callous the world suddenly seems. Doctors who refuse to weep with us! Coroners who go about their business as if they do this several times a day! Funeral home directors who gesture gracefully to a plentiful box of tissue, pursing their lips in a grotesque affectation of heartfelt sympathy! It's all so macabre, yet so mundane! It's just so wrong.

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If you listen to an audiobook, have you read the book?

It's undoubtedly a different experience to read a book with just ink and paper (or pixels and screen) between you and the author, than it is to listen to someone's vocalization of the sentences. In "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain" author Maryanne Wolf describes how the brain processes written information differently than audio or other information. Stanislas Dehaene delves even further into the science of reading in his book "Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention." Listening or reading? It seems like an academic question. What difference does it really make? But a couple of articles I read recently have made me wonder.

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Lemke could not sleep for his first 22 days in the medical barracks in Colorado's Fort Carson, where he remained for more than a year on "medical holdover" -- a period during which wounded soldiers await treatment and subsequently either return to duty or get a medical exit from the Army. He experienced flashbacks and temper surges and would hit the dirt at the sound of a jackhammer.

No one approached Lemke to inquire about his mental health. Only when a nurse practitioner happened to ask him how he was sleeping did the story come out -- and even then it took him two weeks to accept her suggestion that he seek counseling.

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Cooper -- a slender man, perhaps 40 years old, with a trimmed beard -- spoke with an easy academic confidence to a hybrid audience of computer geeks and molecular biologists at the second annual O'Reilly & Associates Bioinformatics Technology Conference. The slide on the screen behind him said something about the Whole Genome Shotgun in Genbank and about Sequence Tagged Sites that pinpoint the segment of gene, EST, mRNA or genomic DNA of a known microsatellite position. I sat in the back row, near an exit, and tried not to have a panic attack. My career as a moral philosopher was only 6 hours old but already I could smell it going up in smoke.

I had come to San Diego looking for a deep understanding of the meaning of life, which I was planning to bottle and sell at a decent markup. I wanted to address the questions that have been implicit ever since Rosalind Franklin's crystallography revealed God's schematics for James Watson and Francis Crick to decode: What is a human being? What is our worth? Who decides?

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I peddled insurance and I didn't much like my job. I was a cynic, trapped by lies, drenched in disrespect, and angry with myself for choosing an easy job that paid good money rather than seeking work that might challenge me.

I had even thought about riding a bullet out of this world, but it wasn't because of insurance. Insurance wasn't important enough.

It's easy to sell insurance because most people magnify their fears. But most people also hate the insurance industry because they believe no one should profit from trouble. I understood the hate and refused to let it touch me. I had convinced myself the service I sold was useful enough in the grand scheme of life.

Don't think the lies I'm talking about were my own. I never lied about insurance. I didn't care enough. The lies I hated came through the door and over the telephone and piled up on my desk. I believed nearly everyone would lie to get the best of an insurance company.

Lie to get a better rate: "No, I never drive that car to work. And my son doesn't live with me anymore."

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Ototake, now 24, wrote and published his autobiography, "Gotai Fumanzoku" in 1998. It became the No. 1 bestseller in Japan from December of that year through November 1999, and since its release, the book has sold about 4.5 million copies, which, according to publisher Kodansha Ltd., makes it the No. 2 bestseller in Japan since World War II. Called "No One's Perfect" in English and translated by Gerry Harcourt, the book has just been published in the United States.

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When I first started coming here in 1990, Flor's sister Rosa was our waitress. She was only 10, but because of what happened to Rosa, we have great hope for her young sister's future. For Rosa is now enrolled in architecture school in Oaxaca.

When she returned home for vacation at Christmas, she stepped right back into helping her family at the Mayordomo, but told me she will continue in school, and will graduate in two years. She'll go into practice in Puerto Perdido or perhaps in Oaxaca. She positively glowed as she told me some of the intricacies of structure and form, the art of design drawings, the concept of weight-bearing arches.

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"Stump" is not a derogatory term among these amputees. "Residual limb" is the p.c. term, but everyone here today says stump. As in, "Your stump will change size if you gain or lose weight" or "My daughter-in-law's Dalmatian is fascinated by his stump." In case you are wondering what they call us, we're TABs, which stands for totally able-bodied. "Or, less optimistically," quips one amputee, "temporarily able-bodied."

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The bewildered beefcake left tantalizing photographs of himself in his
wake; they await the eyes of someone lascivious, such as Tellalian or myself.
It probably wasn't only Tellalian's appearance that threw the young actor; her
home-office decor, she concedes, is "not exactly the most professional
environment." In seeking representation from Vesta Talent Services -- i.e.,
Jacqueline Tellalian, personal manager to a small stable of fledgling, unknown
or disabled actors and models -- surely the newbie didn't anticipate
multicolored walls, the kitchen floor inlaid with a giant question mark, the
collection of skull-and-skeleton-theme tchtochkes, the Jimi Hendrix
silkscreen, the autographed photo of John Wayne Gacy (among other
serial-killer memorabilia), the transparent toilet seat encasing a crown of
barbed-wire or the ceramic penis that once functioned as a bong but
presently serves as a vase.

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If it makes you feel any better, thousands of other people will, like you, glance at the calendar over the next few weeks and realize that they meant to plan a Mardi Gras trip. The weak-willed will put it off until another year, but many others, in full Mardi Gras spirit, will charge ahead.

Go for it.

Even the city's dives jack up their prices in the two weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday, and of course they're booked up nearly a year in advance. The key to keeping your housing costs down is teaming up with others. This doesn't necessarily mean sleeping five to a hotel room.

Many residents of New Orleans cash in on the holiday by staying with relatives and renting their homes to outsiders. I once phoned a New Orleans office and asked an acquaintance if she knew anyone renting his or her space. She put the phone aside and I heard her holler: "Soo-zahn, Soo-zahn, are you doin' the Mardi Gras theeng thees year wit' your house?" Soo-zahn, scenting green, didn't miss a beat, and I ended up in a great townhouse complete with garden and Mardi Gras cake.

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