Am I a bad disabled person if I admit that I thought "Tropic Thunder" was kinda funny? I mean, not hilarious, that would make me a bad moviegoer, but I laughed, and I hate feeling that I should feel bad about that, being as how life is so difficult and I love laughing at stuff. It's true "retard" doesn't ping me as hard as maybe it ought to. Mea culpa, as a smartmouthed sportscaster who had his own sins of temperament to confess to once wrote, but I was well into college before I stopped using it myself, and my mother has worked with people with cognitive disabilities off and on for years. But which is the greater Hollywood atrocity? Ben Stiller playing an idiot who says "retard" or Hollywood conventional wisdom that says Sean Penn + jawbreaker=Oscar gold. Much as I admire Mr. Penn, he's not telling our stories when he does that, and that was the point of the "Simple Jack" sequence.

I really didn't watch The Officewhen I first saw "The Injury" but it still totally made me laugh anyway. True, the opening sequence about the Foreman grill only makes sense if you follow Michael Scott's particular combination of brashness and neediness, but the midpoint, featuring Michael as the clueless able-bodied person who "finally understands" about disability issues should provoke rueful laughter in all of us, as should Dunder-Mifflin's pathetic effort at a disability rights presentation(especially Michael's including a poster of Forrest Gump.) Once again, Steve Carrell deserves an award for putting some real humanity into the biggest jerk in the world.

I hope this will be an entertaining Pop Culture Thursday double-header this week. It's funny how that happens sometimes; some weeks there is nothing and now there are two in one day, just out of synchronicity.

Interesting and disability-positive editorial from the The Washington Postthis week, although maybe I have become so accustomed to invisibility any coverage is like crumbs to a starving person