Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
Wow, a comment on the original topic ! The first in five pages no less.General Brock wrote:Just out of curiosity, does Keith Olbermann have an official position on transgender issues, and has any umbrella group representing transgender rights taken offense to his statements and requested clarification?
There are formal channels to pursue with this kind of thing, as has been pointed out.
Haven't found too much on the nets with Keith Olberman and various combinations of trans-something. There are a few blogs calling for apologies over the Ann Coulter statement. He does seem very appreciative of Dr. Renee Richards who saved Keith's eyesight when he was 21. Dr. Richards is a transwoman who was also the first transsexual to play professional tennis.General Brock wrote:Just out of curiosity, does Keith Olbermann have an official position on transgender issues, and has any umbrella group representing transgender rights taken offense to his statements and requested clarification?
There are formal channels to pursue with this kind of thing, as has been pointed out.
Mr Olbermann wrote:OLBERMANN: Yes. That phrase -- you may have heard the phrase, don’t run for a train, there will always be another one. That’s a warning. That one means business. At Shea Stadium in New York, if you come out of the press entrance, the train there, this New York City subway train is elevated, as much of the subway system is, even though we call it a "subway," millions of people get on board an elevated subway everyday and never stop to think about this and protest it.
From a certain point you can see the train coming from the last stop on the line going back into Times Square. I had a job as a sportscaster at a radio network and I was a little late. I also had a job part-time as a photographer. It’s 1980 -- August 1980. I was 21 years old.
And the trains shot past Shea Stadium once every half an hour or so and I didn’t want to wait because I was going to be late. So I ran for the train, and literally running from a certain point near Shea Stadium, if you run at breakneck speed, which is when I learned they call it "breakneck speed" for a reason too, you run up a set of stairs, across a viaduct, up another set of stairs, and there, bless me, was the train waiting for me.
No damage so far, no head injuries sustained. My mistake was I decided to celebrate that I had defeated time and the train was waiting for me. So leaped on board. I’m six-three-and-a-half. The doorway of the train comes about here on me anyway.
(INDICATES TOP OF HEAD)
OLBERMANN: So I caught the doorway as I descended right here.
(INDICATES FOREHEAD)
OLBERMANN: There wasn’t a lot of blood, it hurt, there wasn’t a lot of stitches. I had a concussion, six months went by, the concussion symptoms passed. Didn’t seem to be a big problem. Then I noticed a little nausea at odd times in the next couple of years, but one day at the U.S. Open, right across the street from Shea Stadium, on the other side of the same subway station, two years later covering the U.S. Open where you watched tennis like this for 16 days.
(HEAD MOVES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT TO LEFT AGAIN)
OLBERMANN: You know, I look over here.
(LOOKS TO LEFT)
OLBERMANN: And this eye is still looking out that way.
(INDICATES RIGHT)
OLBERMANN: That hurts, too. Now I have got the reverse of crossed eyes. I’m Marty Feldman and I’m walking around with my hand in front of my eyes for a couple of days. My optometrist starts laughing when I tell him this story.
I said, well, what is the joke? He said, I have to send you to the best muscle ophthalmologist in New York City. Sure, fine, whatever you like, please make it stop. He said, you don’t know who that is?
I said, I have left my knowledge of my muscle ophthalmologists in my other suit, doc. He said, you have just gone to the tennis for 16 days, covering tennis, and this is where this happened? Yes. I’m sending you to Dr. Renee Richards (ph), the transsexual tennis player.
I said, I don’t care if you are sending me to a monkey smoking a cigar wearing a stethoscope. I go in to see Dr. Renee Richards, it’s two years after this head injury at the train and I’m not even thinking about it. I don’t even put it on my history, and she comes and gets this gigantic device, looks in my eyes and says, did you hit your head in August or September of 1980?
And I said, last week of August. That’s why I couldn’t be sure when, she said, OK, I knew I would see one of these cases eventually. She proceeds to tell me that what I have managed to do by hitting it in exactly the right spot is I have essentially broken my inner ear. That’s the very, very simplest way of describing it.
If your gas tank measure on your car always said empty, whether you had any gas in that tank or not, that’s what my inner ear says. In motion I have no way of perceiving depth past about 15 miles an hour, so I can’t drive and I’m a kind of terrified passenger because things suddenly appear to be closer to me than they really are.
LAMB: And how else does it affect you in your work?
OLBERMANN: I think it might have made me slightly crazy, I’m not sure. It might have improved my syntax, I’m not sure. It improved my hearing. It clearly improved my hearing. What else it did, there have been no other damage that I know of.
LAMB: So you don’t drive.
OLBERMANN: I don’t drive and I lived in L.A. for 10 years without it, and by the end of the first four or five years I was living there, I had friends of mine coming up, saying, can you show me exactly how to do that to my head so I don’t have to drive here, either?
(LAUGHTER)
LAMB: So how did you do it, then?
OLBERMANN: Well, in L.A. -- I mean, how did I get around in L.A.?
LAMB: How do you move around, yes.
OLBERMANN: In L.A. it’s a buyer’s market when it comes to cabs. If you call up and ask for a cab, they will say, well, what color car do you want? Any particular driver? What side of the street? Do you like this license plate number better than the other? It’s a buyer’s market there. It’s easy to do it. And there are parts of the community you can live without a car.
Rye wrote:I think Olbermann's malice is so clearly aimed at Coulter and not transsexuals that the trannies at best have a case for "bad taste" more than grave insult against their community. Holy shit, irony and bad taste in satirical humour? Yeah, let's go be thin-skinned weenies.
But hey, the hijacking was fun in the end - I know I've learned a lot from this thread.The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Rye wrote:I think Olbermann's malice is so clearly aimed at Coulter and not transsexuals that the trannies at best have a case for "bad taste" more than grave insult against their community. Holy shit, irony and bad taste in satirical humour? Yeah, let's go be thin-skinned weenies.
That was the point I--and pretty much everyone else--was trying to explain when this thread got hijacked by Shepples.
