h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I just had a look at 'community creations' or whatever it's called on the F Pans I immediately thought of something I heard about the time between old Star Trek and everything that came after. Seems Paramount wanted to have kiddie cadets in any new series and Rodenberry said 'are you nuts?!' But in the end relented a little and let Wesley slip through an airlock.

When I look at the cruise ship proposals in Community Creations, I'm embarrassed that this is the same site as the Guide.

I don't think I'll be wanting to be getting backk to PR now that the kiddy cadets have come on board.

In the vernacular, wtf?

Save an old friend the trouble, and tell me what the hey you're talking about?

F Pans should have been FP. Bleeding autospeller.

Just venting about a new hootoo 'creative' project.

Never mind.

This U14992038 is what I was venting about. It just seems like craft time in some sort of group home.

Or 'care in the community'?

I don't know if you have that in Canada?

We call that 'home care' when it's physical issues.

And here in Alberta we call the equivalent to 'care in the community' for mental health cases 'homelessness' or 'living on the street'


That last one is a bit of bitterness over an actual situation here. A large number of the long-term mental health patients were deinstitutionalized a number of years ago as a cost saving measure. Many of those patients simply joined the ranks of the homeless.

Slightly

We have places here...in the 'community' where people with all kinds of mental handicap/learning difficulties live in houses. They shut most of the big old hospitals where they'd lived all the lives.

I was a Support worker in one for a few years. It was horribly stressful work. In the house I worked in there were people who were deeply brain damaged in various ways..to even one who was utterly institutionalised..because of some sexual misdeamenour years ago.

The institutionalisation though had made her totally incacapable of living independantly.

We had to 'toilet' them, dress them, wash them etc...and every day take them to a day centre where they went through the motions of doing some type of 'creative' activities as designed by the 'art' workers there.

It was utterly farcical most of the time. I don't know what the answers are though. Most people got burned out after about 2 years from working there.

**

That's a bit of an aside though.

When considering Create!® as described on its page, I think of some of the 'arts and crafts' brought home by survivors of addiction treatment centres here: morose looking ceramic Indian Chiefs (problematic to say the least in this part of the world) and wooden airplanes made of scraps of wood stuck together with carpenters' glue. Those things are even more depressing when brought home by very creative people who've not been offered the opportunity or materials to produce anything while in 'treatment'. 'Like Michelangelo working in polystyrene' as someone once said.

On the subject of 'home care' or whatever it's called. Where I live there's a rather ridiculous situation with what is called 'social housing' -- group homes for mentally ill, mentally disabled, physically disabled -- homeless shelters, half-way houses for convicts almost ready for release, etc. Somehow, over the years, they've become concentrated in a single inner-city neighbourhood. On my side of the river there are no homeless shelters apart from what's called the Youth Emergency Shelter which provides limited support for homeless children and youths. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, one small neighbourhood is something like 40% social housing. And government agencies keep trying to put more into that neighbourhood. Needless to say, the 'regular' residents are getting a little upset, and rightly so. The situation is not fair to either the 'regular' residents or the people in social housing: in my neighbourhood, the young people using the YES wake up each morning in a 'regular' neighbourhood. The older people on the other side of the river wake u`p in a ghetto. Church groups on this side of the river have been campaigning for some time for a homeless shelter over here and I think it would be a great thing. I don't think packing at risk people into a single neighbourhood does anybody a service, neither the at risk people nor the rich suburbanites who get to live blind to the reality of the world.