Peculiarity

[phinnia]

Okay, so in the realm of Stuff I Don't Comprehend:
There is a tendency among certain portions of the blind population to sign their emails or what have you as not just themselves, but including the name of their service dog. Now unless someone has taught these dogs to type (I did hear of someone who was convinced that they could read signs, but typing is a real new one on me) they have no part in the email, yes? They did not write it, send it, compose it ... even Lassie couldn't type.

So WHY DO THEY DO IT?

I don't put my cat's name in MY email. I don't even put my KID's name in my email.

WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE DOG THING?

Seriously, this is torturing me. No one knows. It seems so utterly random and pointless and I have never recieved a good explanation. Theories, of course, but no good explanation.

(This is probably the same contingent that have make-believe weddings for their guide dogs online, too. We won't even get into that kind of weird yet.)

Comments

[just-carrie.livejournal.com]

guide dog weddings? That's kinda freaking me out over here.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

Amen. But then, this is a world where we have "Show Dogs Moms and Dads" coupled with the annual British dog show that just freaks me out, and p.s. don't ever make a dog wear a spangly pink sweater, and there's just too much weirdness in the world for me.

Oh, and the Officer of the Month in the town I cover was a K-9 named Jas. The police chief attempted to shake his hand during the ceremony. Now THAT was funny.

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

Especially when you consider that the dogs aren't even capable of, erm, consummating the marriage, because, well, they're fixed.
Some people have far too much time on their hands.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

May I ask a really rude, obnoxious and nosy question?

What causes tallin and Seaners' blindness? I've been curious, because I'm assuming there's some kind of genetic link to cause it because it would be just too much of a coincidence otherwise, for a father and son to both be blind by different random causes. But I've never heard of congenital blindness being hereditary, so I'm a nosy wench with biological curiosity.

And if you'd like me to shut up and mind my own business, I won't be at all offended. :)

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

I don't find that a nosy or rude or obnoxious question at all. :-) We're going with the theory of a genetic hiccup - we haven't had the tests done partly because of lack of insurance and also because it really doesn't change anything for us - it seems to have no other effect, and the doctors basically agree that there's not much that the tests would do except cause us to spend a lot of money.
(The technical reason for his blindness is a combination of factors: something called 'microopthalamus' (the pupils are abnormally small) and 'coloboma of the retina' (the center of the retina never fully formed past about month 5 in utero). It ends up being a condition which affects different people differently within a certain spectrum: which is why we believe Sean has a very small amount of vision in the lower portion and peripheral areas of his eye (nothing really useful as it happens) and Chris has light perception but nothing else.
Did that make sense?

[faerie-spark.livejournal.com]

You might want to have the testing in the future if your son ever wants to have children. Not sayig that it's a bad thing to have a blind child, but your son might just want to know.

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

If he wants to know that's his responsibility. We'll advise him of the possibility and he can act accordingly, or not, as he chooses.

[faerie-spark.livejournal.com]

He'll still need your co-operation if consulting a genetic counsellor is what he wants to do.

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

Yes, but we'll cross that bridge if that's what he decides to do, or any of our future children decide that's what they want to do.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

Interesting. It raises the question, then, since it seems to be structural and not related to the brain's capability to receive images, that it might one day be correctable. There was a piece recently on a St. Louis woman whose eyes were irreparably damaged in a car accident. After being blind for ten years, she went through an experimental procedure in Europe to attach minicameras to a computer she wore on her hip that fed images directly into her brain, like a prototype of Geordi LaForge's VISOR in "Star Trek: TNG". It worked. She has to retrain her brain to read the images again, and it's not quite like normal vision - but she can see.

So if I can keep being nosy... is that anything you guys have discussed? If it were possible, would Tallin and/or Sean want to attempt such a thing?

Hoooo boy.

[tallin.livejournal.com]

That's kinda the $65,535 question. As for Seaners, I'm reluctant to make that sort of judgment call on his behalf ... thhough I suppose, in a sense, it's a judgment call we have the power to make. Ouch, question with philosophical ramifications like this give programmer headache. I can answer for myself though.

I'm curious about all new things—New York (or, at least, I was, then I went to New York, and am no longer curious), Africa, sight, what it would be like to fly an airplane. Now, each of these curiosities can be satisfied with varying amounts of risk, with New York probably being the most minimal. The problems with having artificial sight hardware installed appear to look something like:

• Relearning to do everything. Ouch. I'm an impatient sort. The notion of having to take six months off or so for rehab makes me twitch. I don't KNOW if it makes me twitch enough to totally abandon the notion, but ... *twitch*
  
• Brain rewiring tweaks me out. What's up there works reasonably well. Again, if they could guarantee me that, yes, they could install this hardware with absolutely no chance of rendering me unable to maintain my current level of mental function, we'd talk.
  
• I'd want an off switch. Certainly for the first while, it would be far easier for me to do things the way I'm accustomed. Having said that, given my tendency to adapt to new situations (OK, so switching from PC to Mac is different than this sort of thing, but, the way I'm looking at this, a new toy's a new toy, be it an iBook or Borg implants), I'd probably pick up the usage of the machinery ... and would be more likely to, given the fact that I could fall back on what for me is more "standard operating procedure" if I absolutely needed to get something done in a hurry.

So ... short answer? It's something I thought about, because I'm curious about that sort of thing, but I'd want both risk and personal downtime to be at a bare minimum, and I'd further want it to be a trifle more generally accepted that this sort of "restoration of sight" doesn't automatically imply, as though it were some kind of "repair operation", immediate knowledge of how this whole sight thang works any more than your suddenly being endowed with the gift of telepathy would qualify you to instantly understand the thoughts of others, even if you could perceive them.

[nihilistech.livejournal.com]

But there are people who do put their cats' names in their email. Hell, there are people who use their pet's name as their userid!

I do not understand this at all.

But yes. The people who sign with their dog's name as well have always bewildered me.

Once, as a joke, I had the sys-admin of my ISP create a userid for my prior guide dog, and would occasional post as her. But I insist that that was different.

[paradoxhorizon.livejournal.com]

I assume it's for the same reason I recently got an letter from a sighted relative who signed her letter with her name and the dog's name. Admittedly, the dog was partly the subject of the letter, but I think she is just one of those people who are very attached to their pets. The midset of "The dog is part of the family too so it gets its name on the card/letter/email, too." Or because it's "cute." There are people out there that seem to think their dogs are people, I guess.
I don't know. I'm not that sort of person and it drives me nuts. My cat is a cat. She's not interested in sweaters, weddings or my email.

[kalidor.livejournal.com]

Uhm .. same reason I have the phrase "In binary no-one can here you scream" in some of my emails? I say they are bored. Yep Yep. Or trying to be cute. Or both.

[tallin.livejournal.com]

I've seen some of these gems actually go out of their way to make sure their guide dog's name is in the message (not as a sigfile, but manually type it in). Guide dogs' names as their email ID. One "guide dog team", Carlos and Derek, had me blinking for about ten seconds and vaguely astounded at "openly gay couple on mailing list". Further, there is an album here that just causes all sorts of compile time errors with me. I mean, there's cute, and there's large scale social neuroses.

[peachtess.livejournal.com]

I've never spoken to someone with a guide dog on the subject of listing themselves and the dog but I did once have a guest speaker in 4th grade who was in a wheel chair and had a companion dog (or whatever you call them) who helped her carry things and would fetch things for her. She saw herself and her dog as a team. The dog could do what she couldn't and allowed her to live independately. I got the impression from her that because the dog could do what she couldn't the dog and her as a team made her more of a "whole person" as it where. All the pictures she showed us had her dog in them and she had stuff that she had written that was signed by her and her dog.
So my guess is some people feel like there service dogs are an extention of themselves.
Either way if its a service animal or just a pet I do sort of think its kind of cute to sign your pets name. In certain circumstances like forums about pets and forums about service animals and those that have them it makes sense. Its the forums that have nothing to do with pets and service animals then it can get a bit much for me. Really its no different from the parents who sign things "Gina's Mommy" or use it as a user name like "MommyToGina".

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

I can kind of see where you're coming from on a pet or SD related forum. But a computer tech list? I don't feel that's appropriate.
To tell you the truth I don't comprehend the people that use their kids' names in their usernames either, really - it just feels too much like they're subsuming their own identities. But I also admit to being very sensitive to that, for various reasons.

[kengr]

I figure it's the "my dog is part of me" meme, combined with the same weird mindset that leads some guys to name their penis and some women to name their breasts.

Just step away slowly...

[lysana.livejournal.com]

My sighted uncle once sent me a Christmas card signed by him and his dog. OK, I realize that in a sense, that dog is family to him, especially since his life partner died of lung cancer a couple of years ago. But, sheesh.