September 16th, 2007
I feel like a billion dollars
Better, stronger, faster? Nope, but certainly cheaper.
Still, these days, being disabled can be considered as an advantage, possibly an unfair one.
Take Oscar Pistorious and his bid to run in the olympics – not the paralympics mind.
I suggest to those athletes that would deny him such a chance on the grounds that he is cheating to have their legs removed and see if they can run any faster.
Technorati Tags: olympics, Oscar+Pistorious, webcomic, comic, disablility, bionic
Sean on 
Maddie on
Carbon fibre prosthetics are so much better than the clunky metal ones they used to use back in the day. There will come a time when artificial limbs can outperform natural ones, at least for specific tasks- I’m not sure that time is here yet, though.
In a kind-of related story, my sister (who, due to a stroke suffered when she was 8, is running on roughly half a brain) is going back to university to finish her Education degree. She’s seeing a psychologist now to determine whether or not she has dyscalculia and can therefore be exempted from the math requirement. She’ll be very disappointed if it turns out that she’s merely bad at math.
I had a stroke at 8 aswell, but I was fine after a cup of coffee.
*tic*
That Oscar Pistorious dude is pretty interesting. If he did compete and did win, it would mean alot of good things for physically disabled ppl and the supporting industry.
The first person I ever saw with those kind of prosthetics was Aimee Mullins in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3. A wild film, with Aimee as a cheetah-woman, using her racing leg to really mess up your head.
I think that was the first time I saw those type of prosthetics too… but not in Cremaster, alas I’ve never seen any of it.
Is it any good?
Quite good. A veritable symbolic mind-trip.
The bionic man came in under budget
because he wasn’t covered by private insurance.
Still, if he’s covered by a HMO,
he certainly had to pay for his own teeth.