In this exclusive shocking new video footage of Anna Nicole Smith, she displays severely impaired reality testing abilities, possibly devastated by substance use or abuse. Watch this new video footage below:
“The message of Team Hoyt is that everybody should be included in everyday life.”
Dick and Rick Hoyt are a father-and-son team from Massachusetts who together compete just about continuously in marathon races. And if they’re not in a marathon they are in a triathlon, that daunting, almost superhuman, combination of 26.2 miles of running, 112 miles of bicycling, and 2.4 miles of swimming. Together they have climbed mountains, and once trekked 3,735 miles across America. It’s a remarkable record of exertion, all the more so when you consider that Rick can’t walk or talk.
For the past twenty five years or more Dick, who is 65, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seat-pod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.
At Rick’s birth in 1962 the umbilical cord coiled around his neck and cut off oxygen to his brain. Dick and his wife, Judy, were told that there would be no hope for their child’s development. “It’s been a story of exclusion ever since he was born,” Dick told me. “When he was eight months old the doctors told us we should just put him away, he’d be a vegetable all his life, that sort of thing. Well those doctors are not alive any more, but I would like them to be able to see Rick now.”
The couple brought their son home determined to raise him as “normally” as possible. Within five years, Rick had two younger brothers, and the Hoyts were convinced Rick was just as intelligent as his siblings. Dick remembers the struggle to get the local school authorities to agree: “Because he couldn’t talk they thought he wouldn’t be able to understand, but that wasn’t true.” The dedicated parents taught Rick the alphabet. “We always wanted Rick included in everything,” Dick said. “That’s why we wanted to get him into public school.”
A group of Tufts University engineers came to the rescue, once they had seen some clear, empirical evidence of Rick’s comprehension skills. “They told him a joke,” said Dick. “Rick just cracked up. They knew then that he could communicate!” The engineers went on to build, using $5,000 the family managed to raise in 1972 , an interactive computer that would allow Rick to write out his thoughts using the slight head-movements that he could manage. Rick came to call it “my communicator.” A cursor would move across a screen filled with rows of letters, and when the cursor highlighted a letter that Rick wanted, he would click a switch with the side of his head.
When the computer was originally brought home, Rick surprised his family with his first “spoken” words. They had expected perhaps “Hi, Mom” or “Hi, Dad.” But on the screen Rick wrote “Go Bruins.” The Boston Bruins were in the Stanley Cup finals that season, and his family realized he had been following the hockey games along with everyone else. “So we learned then that Rick loved sports,” said Dick.
In 1975, Rick was finally admitted into a public school. Two years later, he told his father he wanted to participate in a five-mile benefit run for a local lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Dick, far from being a long-distance runner, agreed to push Rick in his wheelchair. They finished next to last, but they felt they had achieved a triumph. That night, Dick remembers, “Rick told us he just didn’t feel handicapped when we were competing.” Rick’s realization turned into a whole new set of horizons that opened up for him and his family, as “Team Hoyt” began to compete in more and more events. Rick reflected on the transformation process for me, using his now-familiar but ever-painstaking technique of picking out letters of the alphabet:
” What I mean when I say I feel like I am not handicapped when competing is that I am just like the other athletes, and I think most of the athletes feel the same way. In the beginning nobody would come up to me. However, after a few races some athletes came around and they began to talk to me. During the early days one runner, Pete Wisnewski had a bet with me at every race on who would beat who. The loser had to hang the winner’s number in his bedroom until the next race. Now many athletes will come up to me before the race or triathlon to wish me luck.” It is hard to imagine now the resistance which the Hoyts encountered early on, but attitudes did begin to change when they entered the Boston Marathon in 1981, and finished in the top quarter of the field. Dick recalls the earlier, less tolerant days with more sadness than anger:
“Nobody wanted Rick in a road race. Everybody looked at us, nobody talked to us, nobody wanted to have anything to do with us. But you can’t really blame them - people often are not educated, and they’d never seen anyone like us. As time went on, though, they could see he was a person — he has a great sense of humor, for instance. That made a big difference.”
After 4 years of marathons, Team Hoyt attempted their first triathlon, and for this Dick had to learn to swim. “I sank like a stone at first” Dick recalled with a laugh “and I hadn’t been on a bike since I was six years old.”
With a newly-built bike (adapted to carry Rick in front) and a boat tied to Dick’s waist as he swam, the Hoyts came in second-to-last in the competition held on Father’s Day 1985. “We chuckle to think about that as my Father’s Day present from Rick, ” said Dick. They have been competing ever since, at home and increasingly abroad. Generally they manage to improve their finishing times. “ Rick is the one who inspires and motivates me, the way he just loves sports and competing,” Dick said.
And the business of inspiring evidently works as a two-way street. Rick typed out this testimony:
“Dad is one of my role models. Once he sets out to do something, Dad sticks to it whatever it is, until it is done. For example once we decided to really get into triathlons, dad worked out, up to five hours a day, five times a week, even when he was working.” The Hoyts’ mutual inspiration for each other seems to embrace others too; many spectators and fellow-competitors have adopted Team Hoyt as a powerful example of determination. “It’s been funny,” said Dick “Some people have turned out, some in good shape, some really out of shape, and they say ‘we want to thank you, because we’re here because of you’.” Rick too has taken full note of their effect on fellow-competitors while racing:
“Whenever we are passed (usually on the bike) the athlete will say “Go for it!” or “Rick, help your Dad!” When we pass people (usually on the run) they’ll say “Go Team Hoyt!” or “If not for you, we would not be out here doing this.” Most of all, perhaps, the Hoyts can see an impact from their efforts in the area of the handicapped, and on public attitudes toward the physically and mentally challenged. “That’s the big thing,” said Dick. “People just need to be educated. Rick is helping many other families coping with disabilities in their struggle to be included.”
That is not to say that all obstacles are now overcome for the Hoyts. Dick is “still bothered,” he says, by people who are discomforted because Rick cannot fully control his tongue while eating. “In restaurants, and it’s only older people mostly, they’ll see Rick’s food being pushed out of his mouth and they’ll leave, or change their table. But I have to say that kind of intolerance is gradually being defeated.”
Rick’s own accomplishments, quite apart from the duo’s continuing athletic success, have included his moving on from high school to Boston University, where he graduated in 1993 with a degree in special education. That was followed a few weeks later by another entry in the Boston Marathon. As he fondly pictured it: “On the day of the marathon from Hopkinton to Boston people all over the course were wishing me luck, and they had signs up which read `congratulations on your graduation!’“
Rick now works at Boston College’s computer laboratory helping to develop a system codenamed “Eagle Eyes,” through which mechanical aids (like for instance a powered wheelchair) could be controlled by a paralyzed person’s eye-movements, when linked-up to a computer.
Together the Hoyts don’t only compete athletically; they also go on motivational speaking tours, spreading the Hoyt brand of inspiration to all kinds of audiences, sporting and non-sporting, across the country. Rick himself is confident that his visibility, and his father’s dedication, perform a forceful, valuable purpose in a world that is too often divisive and exclusionary. He typed a simple parting thought:
“The message of Team Hoyt is that everybody should be included in everyday life.”
“Have you heard? They hated my television program. The creeps.”
Yes, very sadly, it’s true. Victoria has been terribly misunderstood and subjected to the most vile sorts of public criticism. For example, Linda Stasi had the nerve to write this in the New York Post:
“NBC should get down on its knees and make a giant novena of thanks that soccer star David Beckham was called back to Europe before it could finish filming his relentlessly self-promoting wife’s reality series, “Victoria Beckham: Coming to America.”
And, while we’re at it, the aforementioned relentlessly self-promoting wife should do the same.
If this weren’t a one-shot deal and people were exposed to her vapid, condescending behavior on a weekly basis, she’d not just be unwelcome in America, she’d be run out on a rail - whatever that means.
Anyway, the proposed series, now downsized to a one-hour “special,” is an orgy of self-indulgence so out of whack with, er, reality that you’ll sit there slack-jawed at the gall of these people who think we are that stupid.”
If that wasn’t enough public humiliation for poor Victoria to suffer, Allessandra Standley published these horrible comments in The New York Times:
“There has to be something going on behind the scenes because there is no other way to explain so much time and videotape spent on the moving arrangements of Mr. Beckham’s wife. Mrs. Beckham, the once and future Spice Girl nicknamed Posh, is somewhat famous for being sort of famous, and is photographed a lot in Britain, a nation so open to media hypnosis that a Web site devoted to the ripening of a 44-pound wheel of cheddar has received more than a million Internet hits. (As of today Wedginald is on Day 206.)
And watching Victoria Beckham: Coming to America is a little like that site, cheddarvision.tv — although the cheddar probably has an ounce or two on Mrs. Beckham, who is also famous for being thin but with very large breasts.
“Seriously, do they look that big, do they really?” she asks, shaking her décolletage during a coffee-shop confrontation with the gossip blogger known as Perez Hilton. “They’re not that big in the flesh,” she explains. The blogger agrees and says he would really prefer a nude picture of Mrs. Beckham’s husband.”
Mr. Beckham’s move to Los Angeles has been promoted by AEG, Mr. Anschutz’s company, with even more than the usual meteor shower of publicity that surrounds a movie opening. The arrival is more like a giant P.R. asteroid hurtling toward Earth.”
I have waited a couple of days to collect my thoughts about all of this. First of all, I was very happy to see that Victoria is taking up right where The Anna Nicole Show left off. Anna, of course, had no real friends. She only had the people that she paid to be around her, like the infamous Bobby Trendy and Howard K. Stern (and I do miss them so). Victoria stepped right into that big empty place, filling it in with her own entourage of faux-friends, including her make-up artist and hair stylist “pals,” to name just a couple.
Second, as you will see in the video that is presented below, Victoria has an incredibly talented, astonishing on-screen presence. Or, as she would put it, “major.” The best example that I can point out of that amazing talent is her coffee-shop interview with the self-proclaimed gossip-queen Perez Hilton. Victoria Beckham actually manages to make Perez Hilton look something like a real human being, which probably has never occurred on American television previously.
Then, Victoria gives us a discreet, tasteful look at what it’s like to be the honored guest at an afternoon High Tea with the golden-haired, Botoxed and bosomy matrons of the super-exclusive “Beverly Hills Socialites Club.” That’s where you get an up-close and real personal look at what real Hollywood money is all about!!
Finally, you should know that The L. A. Times came out with the extremely embarrassing report that David Beckham spent $1.8 million on a diamond-encrusted dildo for Victoria. Of course, true lady that she is, Victoria responded that she doesn’t have it. But since other ditzy Hollywood socialites, like Paris Hilton, have been known to lose things like that down there, Victoria’s disclaimer certainly doesn’t mean that she never had it!
The Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street in Manhattan is an elegantly shabby Victorian-Gothic hotel, which is registered as a national historic landmark. The Chelsea has a long history of serving as a sanctuary for the the avant-garde.
Through the years, those who lived at the Chelsea have included Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, Edith Piaf, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leonard Cohen, Willem de Kooning, Jane Fonda, Janis Joplin, Milos Forman, Jimi Hendrix, Dennis Hopper, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, Vladimir Nabokov and Wes Klein. Dylan Thomas drank 18 straight whiskies there, his last. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while living there.
Recently, a corporate-style management team has taken over running the Chelsea, and its artist-residents are worried that the hotel will be transformed into a posh New York “boutique” hotel. A national grassroots protest is underway, and this posting is in support of that protest.
The article contains photographs and a video photography composition with music audio (Lou Reed: Walk on The Wild Side).
Technorati: Shocking Video Footage of Anna Nicole, Appalling New Video of Anna Nicole, Anna Nicole, Anna Nicole Smith, culture, cultural, social, society, mental health, mental illnss, psychology, image, picture, photo, photograph, video, YouTube
