:thumbs up: New York

[MRT144]

People obviously care about what I write.

If you want to know about stuff, I'll be happy to answer, but telling me that I don't know **** about my own hearing, yeah, that's amusing.

I dont care.

[Ben Kenobi]

512 to 2048 6th to 7th Defines human speech intelligibility, gives a horn-like or tinny quality to sound.

My files. I can't hear 750 HZ at 40 decibels.

So yeah, you should really talk to an audiologist before spouting off.

I'll have trouble making stuff out at 125 HZ.

[Ben Kenobi]

How many people live in Prince George again? What are the chances of a deaf child living there?

80k.

[Al B. Sure!]

You're a tiny, scrawney Christian and now you're acting like you were kicking people's asses. Is there nothing you don't lie about?

Ben is tiny, though. I'm sure Doug Flutie could drop-kick him

[Pax]

I learned to read by reading a lot of science fiction books as a kid. As I grew, I pronounced the words incorrectly but I still knew what they meant by the context of stories. Still I can see how hearing can effect your ability to read.

I mean not being able to see the chalkboard effects your ability to learn so why can't not being able to hear the TEACHER do the same.

[Al B. Sure!]

I learned to read by reading a lot of science fiction books as a kid. As I grew, I pronounced the words incorrectly but I still knew what they meant by the context of stories.

I'm the same way about pronunciation. I'm still really bad where I mispronounce so many words which I usually only see in a written context because I rarely hear them spoken. It's a little embarrassing among more educated company.

I was in speech therapy as a kid but that was a whole different issue.

[Asher]

How many people live in Prince George again? What are the chances of a deaf child living there?

Ben seems to think every village of more than a few people should have full-out infrastructure to publicly educate deaf children. Money is no object to him, when the government is spending...

[Asher]

I'm the same way about pronunciation. I'm still really bad where I mispronounce so many words which I usually only see in a written context because I rarely hear them spoken. It's a little embarrassing among more educated company.

I was in speech therapy as a kid but that was a whole different issue.

I was also in speech therapy as a kid. I never saw fit to mention it before, but now that it's one of Ben's criteria of being one of the raped discards of society, let's have at it.

[MrFun]

Actually, you know, BK is right. Gays have had it so easy in the US.

Anniversary Of Deadliest Gay Massacre In U.S. History PDF Print
Written by Brandon Rolph | Friday, 24 June 2011
Tags: upstairs lounge, gay massacre, new orleans, anniversary

The last Sunday of June holds more gay history in the U.S. than possibly any other day. On the fourth anniversary of Stonewall Riots 32 gay people burned to death by an act of arson at UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. Important but graphic details and images after the jump.

This Sunday will be the anniversary of the UpStairs Lounge fire which massacred 32 gay people. The Lounge had just hosted its regular services for the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church. In the evening about 60 patrons enjoyed David Gary’s piano playing and discussed the bar’s upcoming MCC fundraiser to help the Crippled Children’s Hospital, Queerty writes:

"At 7:56PM the bartender Buddy Rasmussen heard the downstairs buzzer and asked Luther Boggs to go check the door. Normally cabbies would ring the buzzer to tell people that they had arrived, but when Boggs went to answer the door, he found no cab driver. Instead he found the flames of a molotov cocktail engulfing the wooden staircase and climbing towards the bar.

Rasmussen led about twenty or thirty people out through an unmarked exit behind the bar where they emerged onto the roof and hopped from roof to roof until they found a way down.

But the thirty others remaining in the lounge ran confusedly to the barred windows where they tried to escape. One man managed to squeeze through the fourteen-inch gap between the bars and the sill—he jumped onto the street, his entire body in flames, and died there. The Reverend Bill Larson clung to the bars and slowly melted into the window frame where his charred body stayed visible for hours afterwards.

MCC assistant pastor George 'Mitch' Mitchell escaped but when he realized that his boyfriend Louis Broussard was still in the bar, he went back to save him—workers would later find their charred bodies holding each other among the charred wreckage.

The fire only lasted 16-minutes. It killed 29 people and three more who later died from their burns, including Boggs the man who had answered the door. New Orleans had never seen a larger death toll by fire up to that time nor had the United States seen such a large mass murder of gays and lesbians."

I had never heard this story until today. HuffPost remembered the largely forgotten tragedy in 2008 during Pride season:

"It was almost assuredly the largest mass murder of gays and lesbians to ever occur in the United States.

Yet the city tried mightily to ignore it. Public reaction was grossly out of proportion to what would have happened if the victims were straight. The fire exposed an ugly streak of homophobia and bigotry. It was the first time New Orleans had to openly confront the existence of its own gay community, and the results were not pretty.

Initial news coverage omitted mention that the fire had anything to do with gays, despite the fact that a gay church in a gay bar had been torched. What stories did appear used dehumanizing language to paint the scene, with stories in the States-Item, New Orleans' afternoon paper, describing 'bodies stacked up like pancakes,' and that 'in one corner, workers stood knee deep in bodies...the heat had been so intense, many were cooked together.' Other reports spoke of 'mass charred flesh' and victims who were 'literally cooked.'"

upstairs_lounge_fire

Furthermore, media was extremely unsympathetic and even mocked the victims, HuffPost recounts:

"The press ran quotes from one cab driver who said, 'I hope the fire burned their dress off,' and a local woman who claimed 'the Lord had something to do with this.' The fire disappeared from headlines after the second day.

A joke made the rounds and was repeated by talk radio hosts asking, 'What will they bury the ashes of queers in? Fruit jars.' Official statements by police were similarly offensive. Major Henry Morris, chief detective of the New Orleans Police Department, dismissed the importance of the investigation in an interview with the States-Item. Asked about identifying the victims, he said, 'We don't even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.'

In the days that followed, other churches refused to allow survivors to hold a memorial service for the victims on their premises. Catholics, Lutherans, and Baptists all said no.

Even more stunning, some families refused to claim the bodies of their dead sons, too ashamed to admit they might be gay. The city would not release the remains of four unidentified persons for burial by the surviving MCC congregation members. They were dumped in mass graves at Potter's Field, New Orleans' pauper cemetery. No one was ever charged with the crime, and it remains unsolved."

This is a tragic reminder that fighting for our rights is the same as fighting for our lives, and dignity thereafter.

[giblets]

Ooh I had speech therapy too! I'm going to go cry now.

[Asher]

That's still nothing compared to the Deaf Slaughter of 2000, where Deaf people congregated to listen to Limp Bizkit and were shot to death by an irate man of impeccable hearing.

[Al B. Sure!]

My speech was really bad. I couldn't pronounce sh-, ch-, -th, or r's. I would pronounce 'church' like 'sauce'

[MrFun]

That's still nothing compared to the Deaf Slaughter of 2000, where Deaf people congregated to listen to Limp Bizkit and were shot to death by an irate man of impeccable hearing.

Gee, you're right.


By the way, I did not even know about that New Orleans arson attack against gays until today from a friend through Facebook.

[Ben Kenobi]

I mean not being able to see the chalkboard effects your ability to learn so why can't not being able to hear the TEACHER do the same.

Almost all schools use lectures to teach people through all levels of school. But the real kicker is reading. To really learn how to read you have to match sounds to words on the page. If you don't know what the sounds mean then it becomes much, much more difficult to learn how to read.

Interesting that so many of you were in speech therapy. For how long were you in it?

[Pax]

I was never in speech therapy. But I always make a special effort to pronounce words the right way once I hear it.