This Shabbat, our synagogue featured a program on behalf of Yachad, a truly wonderful organization dedicated to Jewish individuals with disabilities.

As reported to me by Mrs. Manhattan, the Yachad representative addressed the congregation about the importance of accommodating people with disabilities on a communal and institutional level.

I agree.

In fact, it is such a good idea that we hope that our communal institutions - most notably, our synagogue which featured this excellent program - will respond by trying to be even slightly responsive to the concerns of families dealing with disabilities. Imagine that!

Dealing with autism is famous in its necessity for "doing-it-yourself" with respect to treatment and support options. One might have thought that our synagogue, led by a rabbi whom we love and respect deeply, might be somewhat proactive with respect to certain issues with which we need to deal. (Actually, we'd settle for them being somewhat reactive.) Living here long enough, we thought we knew better - yet we've still been shocked at the non-responsiveness we've encountered from our communal institutions. (We have, of course, received much support from certain individuals.) I won't go into too much detail - as some of the people in question will hopefully be reading this - but the ideals in the address delivered by the Yachad representative bore scant relationship to the reality we (and many other families we know) encounter on a daily basis. One might say that it's a finely-tuned machine for forcing families dealing with disabilities to move elsewhere.

It's nice to have an annual Shabbat program devoted to raising money and consciousness for the disabled, but it's nicer to try to integrate those ideals on a regular basis. Many families would be thankful.

Here's a nice...duck story for your weekend.

Why do I only have time to post as I'm running out the door to get home for Shabbat?

I needed this laugh today. Via Galley Slaves, here's a list of things to do once you become an Evil Overlord, based on the experiences of the evil overlords we know and love from the movies and other sources.

A few samples:

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However if circumstance have forced them together against their will and they spend all their time bickering and criticizing each other except during the intermittent occasions when they are saving each others' lives at which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will immediately order their execution.

There's much, much more.

Check out Joel Sherman's thought-provoking piece on the just-begun baseball season (and why couldn't they have hit like this in Games 4 or 5 last year?).

Steriod vapors have indirectly addled the brains of most of the mainstream media's baseball writers (not that flexibility was their strong suit beforehand), but this piece seems a happy exception. Whether he turns out right or wrong, Sherman is at least thinking flexibly.

Also, see Jayson Stark's about-face from the "All Steroids, All The Time" mindset that has possessed most of the ESPN types and their media bretheren (Buster Olney, this means you):

We've spent this spring surveying general managers, managers, assistant GMs, number crunchers, players and other assorted experts about what comes next in this sport. Their answers will come as a major shock to everyone who has concluded that steroids are to blame for anything and everything they've come to hate about modern baseball.

The percentage of players on steroids probably never was much more than 20 percent – even at steroids' peak – which means 80 percent were always clean.

(Emphasis added.)

Please do read this extraordinary piece by Megan McArdle. It's ostensibly about the policy implications of gay marriage, but it is really about different ways of looking at and understanding the world. It defies excerpts; just go read it (even at the cost of - gasp - printing it out ) consider and ponder accordingly.

I've been thinking about the implications in light of what's been written in the blog referenced in the immediately prior post, and I don't like the results. And that's all I'm going to say for now.

(Ve ha-mayvin yavin.)