Coffee Break [5/6/23]

Your mid morning pick me up

5/6/23 Hannibal 18

There’s no lack of ugly, discouraging news on the internet. But once in a while, I stumble across something truly lovely and uplifting. And in Texas, no less. Such is the story of Morgan’s Wonderland, a fully inclusive amusement park.

@cbsnews

He didn’t want his daughter, who has cognitive and physical disabilities, to feel left out. So, he built a fully accessible theme park ❤️

♬ original sound – cbsnews

One of my cousins had cerebral palsy. When she was a child, there weren’t many opportunities for disabled people to enjoy the activities I took for granted. She spent two weeks every summer at the Easter Seals camp, where she swam and played with children her own age. The rest of the time she was more or less stuck inside with older relatives or much younger ones like myself. She was well into her 30s the first time she rode a Ferris wheel. Something like this would have meant so much to her.

I don’t really have a point. Or even a prompt. I just thought you might enjoy a positive story on a Monday morning.

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18 Comments

  1. Florida is littered with the corpses of dead amusement parks (not literally — almost all have been torn down and redeveloped). It would have been really cool to do this with one of them, but the most recent demise was The Holy Land (and deservedly so), and nobody could modify that into a normal park (it’s being flattened for an office park).

    • The “Holy Land”? Isn’t that kind of blasphemous? Or is there some kind of breakaway sect that believes that Jesus, in either His human form or post-crucifixion, actually visited the Orlando area? Western Europe is littered with these kinds of stories. Various impoverished and itinerant Jews who became believers in Jesus’s message and, later, divinity, somehow washed up, alive or dead, all over the place. One wonders why. All part of God’s Plan, I guess.

    • …I accept that it depends significantly on the edition/translation…but (I know I’ve muttered about this before) two things I remember from childhood make me almost surprised it’s taken this long for that story to show up

      …one was actually reading the bible…like, the whole thing…most of which is frankly pretty boring…particularly all the “& wotsit lived to 873 & begat hoosit, ruesit & doozit & hoosit lived to 971 & begat…” & so on & so on for whole chapters…but some of which is pretty damn unpleasant…not to mention lurid

      …that said, at the age I plowed through the thing I hadn’t got to things like fahrenheit 451 so the idea that people would like less books in libraries never so much as occurred to me…& even when I did read that stuff I blithely assumed that was the speculative end of it…until I read the day they came to arrest the book

      …which I’d imagine a lot of these fuckwits would ban in a heartbeat if they came across it…since it “predicted” their antics in the early 80s when at least some of them hadn’t even been born…& in that, once the attempt to put twain’s huck finn on trial for moral turpitude is well underway…the bible gets a cameo

      …someone says (more or less) “oh, well if you think huck finn is bad there’s another book I bet is in the library that you’ll need to do something about” before telling a short version of a story in it that is unpleasant enough that I’ll skip over the details

      …so the book-banning contingent immediately swear up & down that it’s wildly not-ok & must be stripped from the shelves post haste…at which point they get told that it’s the story of “the levite & his concubine” from their favorite good book

      …clearly intended to serve as a sort of reductio ad absurdum flight of fancy…but there’s nowt as queer as folk…so it felt like only a matter of time before life imitated art with no sense of irony

      …that said…I read that bible thing early & do seem to have aged into some sort of a cautionary tale…so…maybe we ought to suggest that bible study be reserved for higher education…you know…like CRT?

      • The part where people live to be centuries old is Genesis, so you can easily breeze through that. And even there you get useful phrases, like “I feel like I am as old as Methuselah.” I think even non-Judeo-Christians would understand that reference.

        Nonetheless, my edition of the Bible, a late 19th-century King James beauty, unadulterated by “sensitivity readers” and other charlatans who busy themselves despoiling great works of literature, is an endless source of wonder. It weighs like 30 pounds, is somewhat “illuminated” (illustrated) and has whole sections devoted to maps of the Holy Land and other clarifying features. It has no Latin, because that might tempt the reader to dabble in Catholicism, but it is so beautifully written. Translated, I should say, out of the Aramaic and the Ancient Greek.

        I remember going to a wedding about 20 years ago and there was a Catholic Mass and several attendees decided to give readings. The Mass went on for like three hours but fine, I had nothing else on my agenda. The readings were like Oprah Winfrey-level confessional pablum. One after another: “A reading from the book of [X]” And then this dumbed down…and there was at least one priest, and altar boys, and a choir, and several Catholics in the audience, so you’d think somebody would have said, “This sounds like a teenager’s diary entry” but no, no one did.

        At some point I turned to my “date” (because Better Half loathes weddings) and said, “This is why Church attendance is falling. This is like a particularly boring episode of the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and that’s saying something. The real passage goes–”

        “Quiet!”

    • The Utah state lawmaker who wrote the 2022 law had previously dismissed the Bible removal request as a “mockery”, but changed course this week after calling it a “challenging read” for younger children.

      “Traditionally, in America, the Bible is best taught, and best understood, in the home, and around the hearth, as a family,” Ken Ivory wrote on Facebook.

      I’m fucking dying over here.

  4. right.,,,if by some fluke you catch any news about the dutch house of parliament burning down and possibly exploding….i would like you all to know i had nothing to do with it

    and it definitely wasnt anything to do with them slapping $3,50 in straight tax on my already expensive cigarettes

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