The Musings of Chris Samuel

As is traditional at this time of the year I must embarrass my brother through a public proclamation of his birthday..

Happy birthday Alan!

Miss you Dad..

Here’s some good news, our good friend Anne McDonald has won the Personal Achievement Award in the 2008 Australian National Disability Awards! She was at the awards ceremony at the Federal Parliament in Canberra on the International Day of People with Disability to hear who’d won. The press release says:

Anne was born with cerebral palsy and at age of three was admitted to the St Nicholas Hospital state institution, unable to walk, talk or feed herself. Eventually Anne learnt to communicate by pointing to letters on an alphabet board and at 18 years old went to court to win her freedom from St Nicholas. She has since written a bestselling book, graduated from university with a Humanities degree and dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of people who can not talk.

But they don’t mention bungee jumping, Mona Lisa or a wicked sense of humour.. Well done Anne!

Good to see it took the Atheist Bus Campaign just 10 hours to raise all the money necessary for this!

With your support, we hope to raise £5,500 to run 30 buses across the capital for four weeks with the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Donate online now!

It really riles me to hear folks say that you have to have religion to have a moral compass, It smacks of a desire to inspire fear in those who don’t believe. I feel there is plenty of evidence that religion itself can result in people doing things that are immoral¹.

I’ve gone through a number of different belief systems in my time but in the long term none of them made any sense to me in terms of gods; in the end it just wasn’t logical to me that supernatural being(s) exist, there’s just no evidence for them and they seem to me to be entirely superfluous.

I concur pretty much with what Alec has to say about things, I’ll just carry on trying to be good to people and treat them as I’d wish to be treated (hopefully succeeding sometimes).

(Via)

1. No, I’m not saying that it’s always a bad thing [back]

So we’ve just received the revised edition of Donna’s classic autobiography “Nobody Nowhere” from the publishers with an updated forward, some of the quotes about it on the back and one of Donna’s paintings, “Swing“, on the cover!

Donna originally wrote Nobody Nowhere was in 1990 and as it is considered a classic autobiography of a person with autism a lot of folks don’t realise that Donna never meant it to be published.

Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks. I barely ate, washed or slept. I wrote the book as a goodbye and a last hope. My plan was to let just one person read it, then shred it and burn it then jump in front of a train. But life is rarely as simple as our plans. Instead of the confirmation of hopelessness I expected, I was thrown a challenge; to allow the book to help others. Instead of shredding it, it became copied and read by millions of people around the world. Instead of being burned, it spent 15 weeks on the New York times Bestseller list and shot to number 1 in US, Canada, Japan, and Norway and got translated into over 20 languages worldwide.

The book is still in print and still selling almost two decades later!

In 1969 Bob Wilson (later the first director of Fermilab) was called before a hearing of the US Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to answer questions about particle accelerators. In it Senator John Pastore demanded to know how such a device improved the security of America and Bob Wilsons response of “nothing at all” didn’t go down to well, and so he was prodded further.

His obituary from Cornell in January 2000 puts it like this:

“It has only to do,” Wilson told the lawmakers, “with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

I have to concur.

You’re getting old, my little brother..

A wonderful poster by Alec Muffett..

I can’t wait till I get back to Australia and can print a colour A3 version of this for my office door..

Today has been a day of sadness and joy.

This morning we took my fathers ashes to Freshwater West and scattered them overlooking his favourite bay in a brief respite from the downpours across Wales today.

This is tempered by the memories of my father, both here and elsewhere in Pembrokeshire.

Hywl fawr Dad!

Mum put the following acknowledgement in the local paper to thank everyone who was involved both with my fathers last few years and for the funeral.

SAMUEL Robert – Pat and family would like to thank all the carers, past and present, especially Sue Lewis and Carole Lovell from Homecare, the Fairwater District Nurses, the Doctors and Staff of Fairwater Health Centre, especially Dr Shon Phillips, the Doctors and Nurses of Ward East 2 at Llandough Hospital for their care of Bob, and help to Pat. Thanks also to Andrew Forse from J Pidgeon & Son, for his courtesy, and the Rev Martin Colton for the lovely service.