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This lovable chihuahua in Hawaii was born with only two legs, but gets around just fine. You can see more in a second video. -via Buzzfeed
Mastering a musical instrument is a challenge to begin with, but when an injury ruins someone’s ability to play, that generally is the end of their career. Fortunately, some great musicians have been able to work beyond their injuries and relearn to play, in some cases, making them even better musicians than they ever were before.
Jazz fans and gypsy music lovers adore Reinhardt, although the name isn’t familiar to many other music fans. Even so, he was a wildly inspirational musician who pioneered his own style of jazz that blended gypsy roots with jazz guitar. His music has since been featured on about a dozen movies, including The Matrix, L.A. Story, Chocolat and more.
Reinhardt started learning to play music as a boy, starting with the violin and then moving to the banjo and the guitar. When he was 18 though, tragedy struck. Django and his wife were living in a caravan where they sold imitation flowers made from celluloid and paper to supplement their meager income. When Reinhardt accidentally knocked down a candle on his way to bed, the caravan burst into flames, destroying all of his property and leaving him with first- and second-degree burns over the entire left side of his body.
As a result of the accident, his right leg and the 3rd and 4th fingers on his left hand were completely paralyzed. Doctors said he would have to get his leg amputated and that he would never play a string instrument again. But Reinhardt refused to get the surgery and within a year, he was able to walk with the use of a cane. While his fingers never recovered, the doctors were wrong about his music career as well.
As it happens, learning to play guitar again may have saved his life. Reinhardt ended up getting stuck in France during WWII and it was said that and handful of jazz-loving Nazis ensured his safety despite the fact that thousands of Gypsies were murdered under Nazi-occupied territories. To help protect himself further, he also developed a distinctively non-jazz sound to please the Nazis who, like the majority of their party, were adamantly against jazz.
Interestingly, Django wasn’t just influential when it came to jazz musicians, he also played a major role in the creation of heavy metal. You might be asking yourself how in the world a gypsy jazz musician helped create one of the darkest genres around, but the answer isn’t in his sound, it’s in his story.
You see, guitarist Tony Iommi was talented, but he came from a poor, working-class family so he was forced to work at a sheet metal factory as a youngster, rather than chase his dreams of rock n’ roll stardom. Unfortunately, industrial factories aren’t the safest place for the hands of budding musicians. On his last day of work, Iommi severed the tips of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand. As a leftie, this meant his fretting hand was destroyed. Unsurprisingly, the teen was heart-broken and convinced this would be the end of his musical aspirations. However, his boss from the factory inspired Iommi to stick with his craft by bringing him a Django Reinhardt album and telling him about the jazz musician’s injury.
The inspiration worked like a charm and soon enough, Iommi was trying to remaster the guitar. At first he tried learning to play right-handed, but when that didn’t work, Iommi instead developed a few prosthetic fingertips using plastic covered in leather. Because his prosthetic fingers weren’t as tough as the real thing, Iommi started using lighter strings and detuning the strings so the tension would be lowered. To match Iommi’s sound, Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler did the same, and suddenly, the dark, deep sound of heavy metal was born solely as a technique to work around an injury.
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This President’s Day article is from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Presidency.
FDR spent his entire presidency hiding the fact that he needed a wheelchair, and he wanted a memorial that would do the same. Future generations disagreed.
Four years before his death, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that if he had to have a memorial, he wanted it to be about the size of his desk and placed on a patch of grass in front of the National Archives -anything more would be too showy and too costly a remembrance (a granite table fitting the description was placed there in his honor in 1965). Frankfurter may have heard what FDR wanted, but Congress didn’t seem to have been listening. One year after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Congress felt the need to commemorate him on a larger scale and passed a resolution authorizing the creation of a grander memorial, one comparable to the other presidential memorials located around the Tidal Basin. There was just one problem: FDR’s wheelchair.
POWERFUL MAN, INVISIBLE CHAIR
Despite being completely unable to walk, President Roosevelt led the country out of the Great Depression and through World War II during his unprecedented four terms in office. He was the first disabled leader to be elected in American history, but most Americans of the 1930s and 1940s didn’t even know their president required a wheelchair. They were aware that Roosevelt had contracted polio in 1921 and were under the impression that he wore braces or used a wheelchair occasionally for convenience. And that’s just what FDR wanted them to believe because he was afraid that otherwise the world would perceive him as weak.
(Image source: The U.S. National Archives)
Roosevelt went to great lengths to deceive the public regarding his paralysis -he even created a method to make it appear he was walking. With his legs in locked braces, he would lean heavily on a cane with one hand and on someone else’s hand with the other. Then he’d swing each leg forward while leaning on the opposite hand, throwing his upper body forward. When he sat down the braces had to be unlocked. The braces caused Roosevelt to fall in public three different times, but the cooperative press never reported these incidents. In fact they never photographed him in his wheelchair at all. Of the 125,000 photos housed in the FDR library in Hyde Park, New York, only two private photos show the president seated in a wheelchair.
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Instructables member Shawn Melito designed and built a special “water scooter” for his then-5-year-old daughter, who has Cerebral Palsy. This gave her buoyancy, mobility, and independence on the water -under supervision, of course. He explains how he he built at at the link. Then comes the kicker:
BTW – After two seasons of use my daughter has grown out of this, but it still works great. It is free to the first person who has a disabled child the right size that can use it safely. We live near Toronto, Ontario.
Link -via NeatoBambino
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A Braille PDA, a foot mouse, a breath-controlled device that allows computer users to move a cursor around a screen by blowing into a microphone.
There are several gadgets on the market right now, and more on the horizon, that make it easier for people with disabilities to use computers, and TakePart.com reviews some of their favorites.
You don’t have to be disabled to want the futuristic-looking, LED-lit, ergonomic Gravitonus work station (above), but it was designed for people who are paralyzed. Among its many features is a special attachment that aligns three screens with the user’s best field of vision in any body position. It also has surround-sound and a subwoofer built into the back of the seat so the sound is felt, not just heard.
Photo: Gravitonus.com
From the Upcoming 
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This ad for the Thai Insurance Company features children from the Srisangwan School for the disabled, a project of the Princess Mother’s Volunteer Foundation. Link -via b3ta
Still in the concept stage, the Watergate is an alternative to the turnstile. If you’re disabled, getting through a turnstile can be a challenge. That’s why designers Michael Tatschl, Sascha Mikel and Martin Schnabl came up with this solution. It would allow disabled people to get through, and spray everyone else with water.
Neanderthals and their precursor, an early human species called Homo heidelbergensis, were often thought of as violent and uncaring, rejecting newborns with severe deformities.
A recent discovery, however, may change the picture: they might have cared for their disabled children.
… a new study shows that a 530,000-year-old fossil skull belonged to a child who lived to around the age of ten despite being born with a rare birth defect known as craniosynostosis, in which the skull segments close too early, interfering with brain development. [...]
Increased pressure on the brain due to the deformity might have led to learning difficulties and health problems such as mental retardation.
"All children need care," noted study team leader Ana Gracia of the Centro UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamientos Humanos in Madrid. But this child would likely have required "special need care" to have lived as long as it did, she said.
Two students from a technical high school in Argentina built a mouse that can be controlled by eye movements, thus allowing people with total paralysis to use the computer.
The invention is named the "Eye Mouse." This idea is not new but what makes it different is that it is a DIY mouse that almost anyone can build with cheap and easy-to-find components.
How does it work? The free software that they provide, divides the monitor surface in squares and asks the user what he wants to do – focus on an area, right click, left click, etc – with yes and no answers. If the eye looks at the camera, that is translated as a "yes".
With just a webcam, an infrared LED, a small, flexible metal tube and the headband of a welding helmet, anyone can build the mouse at a fraction of the cost of similar devices.
The students wanted to make the Eye Mouse available to everyone, so the software is free. They have published step-by-step instructions on how to build the mouse, originally in Spanish but they have already been translated to English.
Link – via ticbelgrano
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by scbr.
