Download today’s Dollop in audio form here
I had another interview with Australian media last night. The call was at 3am, and I’d managed to fall asleep at about 130. I’d set my alarm for five minutes before the interview, but I woke up ten minutes before the interview because the person calling me did so ten minutes early. I woke up to hear the Skype incoming call alert.
“OK David, so this is actually an Internet-based community TV show, which is why we’re doing a video call rather than an audio call.”
What? I had no idea they could see me. I was lying in bed. Being blind, I have no idea what the camera would have been picking up, but I was rather worried, given that I was completely naked. Fortunately, it transpired that the camera was pointing upwards at the roof, meaning that all that could be seen was my bedroom ceiling.
“Could you focus the camera so we can see you?” he asked. I hastily got out of bed and flung some clothes on, keeping low to the ground, just in case the camera somehow picked my naked body up, otherwise that would bring a completely different meaning to the notion of doing an interview from down under.
Fortunately I managed to throw some clothes on, at which point I focused the camera on my face. Although, my hair would have been all over the place, given that I’d just got out of bed, and in my haste to put clothes on I’d put my t-shirt on back to front. Also , I had no idea how to focus the camera, so goodness knows what I looked like. Fortunately, I have no idea where these interviews are being broadcast, so it’s unlikely that anyone reading this will ever find them. But if you search the Internet thoroughly then chances are you might get to see a potentially risqué shot of me naked, before I hastily manage to put some clothes on. Good luck with your search, Chloe.
On the subject of Internet searches, my plan to manipulate what shows up in Google when someone searches for “David Eagle blind” – which apparently is the most searched for query related to my name – has backfired. In case you didn’t read the Dollop in which I originally talked about this (perhaps only finding this blog post by chance when searching for David Eagle naked, or even worse, blind naked eagle, which is a very niche interest, but welcome all the same) I decided that I could influence what results show up for the search term “David Eagle blind” by writing a blog post full of statements about me, related to being blind. This was partly because I was a bit concerned that the thing I was most identifiable by was being blind, rather than any actual talent or achievement.
So I wrote a series of fictional news reports about how David Eagle had been crowned World’s Sexiest Blind Man, World’s Most Intelligent Blind Man, and world’s first blind aeroplane pilot. The idea was that Google would then show these accolades in the couple of lines of text that shows in search results. Unfortunately, a couple of days later, I recklessly wrote a blog post with the following lines:
“I tried explaining to the police who I really am. I pointed them in the direction of my daily blog, hoping to prove that I am who I say I am, but apparently my blog is too full of wild fabrications for them to trust anything I say, and so it was immediately discredited as supporting evidence. In fact they immediately dismissed anything I said to them, because they said that I’d spent my blog posts building up a series of false identities. As they pointed out to me, my blog post from two days ago was full of fabricated identities. I’d claimed that I was a pilot for EasyJet, and I’d faked a number of award wins, including World’s Sexiest Blind Man, and World’s Most Intelligent Blind Man.”
So now, when you search for David Eagle blind, Google shows the following lines of text:
“I’d claimed that I was a pilot for EasyJet, and I’d faked a number of award wins, including World’s Sexiest Blind Man, and World’s Most Intelligent Blind Man.”
Unfortunately I’ve not really made much of a dent in Google’s search results listing for the search query “world’s sexiest blind man.” I am the 23rd result, and sadly the two lines of text that are displayed are: “I’d claimed that I was a pilot for EasyJet, and I’d faked a number of award wins, including World’s Sexiest Blind Man, and World’s Most Intelligent Blind Man.” So it’s patently clear that these accolades are fake and self-contrived.
However, searching for “world’s sexiest blind man” did bring up some interesting results.
“There’s this hot blind girl in one of my classes”, proclaims Bob, for some reason choosing to make this statement on the forum of New York Rap.rock group the Beastie Boys. Perhaps the Beastie Boys have branched out, and are now working as agony aunts. After all, they were the band who offered teenagers in the eighties such sage words of advice as, “you gotta fight for your right to paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarty!” So, agony aunts … why not?
I’m not sure what Bob’s issue is here. He basically finds a blind girl in his class at school attractive, but is seemingly too nervous to ask her out, being perturbed by the fact that she’s blind.
Unfortunately for Bob, it turns out that the Beastie Boys Internet forum might not be the best place to go if you’re trying to get genuine, conscientious, good advice. The asinine replies to this question by the Beastie Boys fans suggests that maybe the Beastie Boys should have been more responsible with the messages in their songs. Maybe they should have said, “You gotta fight for your right to paaaaaaaaaarty! But, remember that it’s also important to stuuuuuuuuuuuuudy, otherwise you might end up a bit thick.” Not as catchy, but more effacacious.
Here is one reply to Bob’s post:
“you can like, tell her to go get a beer out of your fridge….and when she bumps into stuff, you can yell at her and stuff…
“what are you doing! are you blind or som- er….oh yeah…” Oh, it’ll be hilarious.”
If there are any ladies reading this who like the idea of dating a blind man, having him crashing into their fridge while you shout insults at them about being blind, then feel free to get in touch. I will happily oblige, so long as you are willing to occasionally have sex with me (I’d accept once every other month), and perhaps show me a tiny crumb of affection from time to time, even if that affection is in actuality completely fake. But I am only willing to crash into the fridge and be shouted at for a maximum of one hour a day. I am not so desperate as to accept such abuse for any longer than that. I am not your play thing, after all.
Here’s a comment from yet another highly intelligent and witty Beastie Boys Fan.
“Bob, can you ask how she knows when she is done wiping her ass? she SMELLS it! Haahahahahahahh!!!! haaahhahahahahhaah!!”
I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but I get the feeling that this person hasn’t really thought this through logically. Now, before I go any further, I want to remind you that I am blind, and so my understanding of what humans can actually see may not be entirely accurate, however I am pretty sure that sighted people do not actually look to check that they have wiped their backsides properly, as surely it would be a physical impossibility? For a start, you are sitting on the toilet. The only way to achieve this would be to put your head between your legs and push it towards your backside, and even then the lighting probably wouldn’t be good enough, so you’d have to shine a light down there. Or I suppose you could standup, use a mirror and look back over your shoulder and check that way. My point is that you can tell if you’ve wiped your backside properly simply by feel.
OK, I’m back. I stopped writing and went and did some research on this. I’ve just walked into my housemate Elsa’s bedroom and had a rather awkward conversation in which I asked her how she wipes her backside. For some reason, she wanted an explanation as to why I was asking her, as well as why I was naked and lying on her bed. No, that last bit was a joke; I wasn’t lying on her bed.
Apparently, sighted people do check to see whether they have fully finished their bottom wipe, by looking at the toilet paper. So perhaps this person’s question wasn’t so ridiculous as I initially thought. Although, Elsa is French, so maybe this is just the French way. Do English people check the toilet paper too? I assumed you just felt, rather than bringing a bit of toilet paper up to your face and examining it. Surely you can just tell by feeling? It’s just obvious when you’ve finished.
It’s like when people ask blind people “how do you eat? I mean, how do you know where your mouth is?” But you just do. Surely sighted people can eat without first having to see their relative position of mouth to hand? It’s just intuitive, just like wiping your backside. You know when it’s done; you don’t have to check. It’s not like I’m coming off the toilet with my hands covered in crap, I can just tell by the way the toilet paper interacts with my bottom.
I hope you don’t think that this is smut; this is science. It says a lot about how we perceive reality and interact with the world through our senses. You’ve been blessed with the ability to see, yet you use that sense to achieve things that you don’t really need sight to achieve.
Feel free to leave a comment below. How do you wipe your backside? I think of all the conversation topics thus-far, this is the one that is going to set the comments box ablaze. You thought that having a genuine ghost on the blog caused a massive spike in web visitors, well I predict that this bottom wiping conversation topic will cause an even greater spike.
I hope this Dollop hasn’t been too smutty for you. I genuinely had no idea that I’d be writing about arse wiping when I first started writing today, but that’s just what has happened. I see the world so very differently now.
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