Now, this is cool...
Sep. 16th, 2006 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mni(copied [and slightly edited] from a reply to this thread [WARNING: spoiler for the season opener of House: MD])
That got me curious to see if I could find images of how ancient Greeks actually saw the issue of disability. So I Googled for some images of Hephaestus. Many pictures just showed him having a strong upper body, but skinny legs. But there was this image, painted in 525 BCE, which clearly shows him in a wheelchair (albeit, a godly, flying wheelchair):
As you'll notice, it's got armrests and footrests, and even push handles, like those wheelchairs we mere mortals use... except those push handles are carefully crafted to look like swan heads. I also like the handles in front -- very useful if you ever need to wrangle some helpers to get you up a flight of stairs.
Um... I want my next chair to be like that one, please, especially with the wings. :-)
*(The son of Zeus and Hera, he got thrown from Olympus by his father, iirc, when he tried to get between hia parents during an argument, and became paraplegic.)
[ETA: Right after I posted this, I tried again to install my printer driver. And this time, it installed with no problem whatsoever -- I didn't even have to run any of the fixes suggested by HP. Could it be it was because I'd just spent time honoring the (often forgotten) ancient Greek god of technology? I'm open to the possibility...]
Hephaestus (AKA "Vulcan," in Rome) really is an ancient Geek god. Laughed at by other the other gods for being physically disabled*, he nonetheless gets Aphrodite to marry him by his skill as a jeweler (yes, she sleeps around, but come on, she's Aphrodite). And, to compensate for his physical disability, he builds himself two humanoid servants: one of silver, and one of gold (when I read that as a teenager, I thought imediately of R2D2 and C3PO) -- among the earliest appearances of androids in Western literature (I'm not sure if the Talmudic tradition of a Golum counts as an android).
That got me curious to see if I could find images of how ancient Greeks actually saw the issue of disability. So I Googled for some images of Hephaestus. Many pictures just showed him having a strong upper body, but skinny legs. But there was this image, painted in 525 BCE, which clearly shows him in a wheelchair (albeit, a godly, flying wheelchair):
As you'll notice, it's got armrests and footrests, and even push handles, like those wheelchairs we mere mortals use... except those push handles are carefully crafted to look like swan heads. I also like the handles in front -- very useful if you ever need to wrangle some helpers to get you up a flight of stairs.
Um... I want my next chair to be like that one, please, especially with the wings. :-)
*(The son of Zeus and Hera, he got thrown from Olympus by his father, iirc, when he tried to get between hia parents during an argument, and became paraplegic.)
[ETA: Right after I posted this, I tried again to install my printer driver. And this time, it installed with no problem whatsoever -- I didn't even have to run any of the fixes suggested by HP. Could it be it was because I'd just spent time honoring the (often forgotten) ancient Greek god of technology? I'm open to the possibility...]
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-16 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-16 07:33 pm (UTC)With a toga, a wig of dark, long, curly hair, and a matching false beard, it would be very doable (I could even wear a pair of Spock ears, as part of the "Vulcan" joke). It would be fairly easy, I think, to put the bird heads and wings in the appropriate places on my chair...
no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-18 01:34 pm (UTC)