e-mail to Reuters

In this story, [LINK], the last graf states "The event was staged to raise funds for the Special Olympics, which provides fitness training and contests for about 1.7 million mentally disabled people each year."

This is not actually accurate, as Special Olympics serves any individuals who have special needs. A quick visit to their website verifies this. There are many participants who might be a typical professional adult who participates in wheelchair sports, a child with a behavioral disability who has been ridiculed on typical sports teams, or someone with a developmental disability.

Also, if you wish to refer to people with mental retardation and/or developmental disabilities, the term you want is "people with mental retardation" or "people with developmental disabilities." If you wish to refer to people with mental illness, the term you want is "people with mental illness." The term "mental disability" is not a proper clinical term, as this is ambiguous. When discussing people with disabilities, "person" (or "child" or "man" or "athlete" or "lawyer") should always come first, followed by the nominal form of their disability ("with diabetes" or "with a disability" or "with paraplegia"), as you don't want to label someone's entire personhood is "retarded" or "disabled."

The APA has a great website on removing bias in language pertaining to disabilities: http://www.apastyle.org/disabilities.html

Well, it's, um, accurate

From an ad for a job at a large hospital network that has two similar hospitals in Westwood and Pembroke and has a small child/adolescent unit in Lowell:

Salary will be commiserate with experience.

I used to work there; the salary and the experience DEFINITELY commiserate with one another.

.Mac feedback

Dear .Mac folks,

I absolutely love the iCard selection. They're the classiest e-cards around, and I also am comfortable giving e-mail addresses to Apple because I know they aren't going to be used for spam. I do have one suggestion though. I think it would be nice if the iCards could reflect a little more diversity. It would be nice to see, for instance, some same-sex couples depicted in the love and romance section along with the images of heterosexual couples. And maybe some pairs of dads in the father's day sections, as well as imagery that's a little less gender normative, like maybe a father who is sewing or cooking instead of golfing and hammering. Also, more imagery of people of color and people with disabilities would be a great addition to the selection that already includes a lot of great international and non-Western imagery. I would caution you though on not trying to achieve diversity through having a specific GLBT section or an African-American section as some e-card sites do, as I think this sends a message of separatism rather than diversity.

Thank you!