DeafDC.com Blog

Song lyrics: Offensive or…??
DeafDC.com I recently heard a song on the radio that had a catchy beat. Upon hearing it a few times (as the stations here have the same songs on rotation), I started paying attention to the lyrics. I was taken aback a second and started thinking if I should be offended or just let it go [...]
Mon, Jul 13 2009

Do-mest-ic Vio-lence
DeafDC.com Domestic violence.  Behind those Latin and emotionless words lie other, more meaty words.  Pain.  Hurt.  Beatings.  Mind games.  Harsh words.  Rihanna and Chris Brown are the current face of domestic violence, prompting us (especially youth) to think about that anew.  Closer to home I am saddened by the events around Ericka Peters' death; a life [...]
Wed, Apr 01 2009
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Straighten Up and Veeb Right
DeafDC.com Ever heard of the expression, “Straighten up and fly right?” Derived from a popular Nat King Cole song, the expression essentially means to clean up your act, to be on the right path. But in this case, I'm taking the meaning of the phrase literally. Someone I know was chatting with a friend of hers via [...]
Tue, Mar 31 2009

Holiday Visit Survival Tips (or, How to Avoid Family Dog...
DeafDC.com I know many of you are in the same boat as me and Chris right now — we're in the midst of playing musical family houses, each of us following the partner into their respective family's houses and waiting until it's FINALLY time to go home. Whether you're exasperated by playing house-pong like I am when [...]
Sat, Dec 27 2008

Hulu Now Has Closed-Captioning Search Filter
DeafDC.com It's been a long slog, but our usual deaf barriers for watching internet video are crumbling. Hulu.com today added a filter to its search engine to return only closed-captioned videos. I've been catching up on new episodes of The Simpsons for weeks now, and their captioning is wonderful. If you have not been using Hulu, you are missing [...]
Wed, Dec 03 2008

Advice For New Teachers Of The Deaf
DeafDC.com A friend of mine—a new teacher who just started recently—is having a rough week.  We had a long talk about teaching in general and how to get past the rough spots.  I agreed to put some of my advice for my friend into a blog in hopes that it might help someone else out, so [...]
Wed, Dec 03 2008

I Am Not My Ears
DeafDC.com Hearing aids can be a great asset for me, except when the “hearing” part doesn’t work anymore. Then they are of no “aid” at all. One time, my hearing aid started malfunctioning. During this particular period, work was extremely busy so I couldn’t take time off to go get the instrument repaired. As a result, [...]
Fri, Oct 31 2008

The Blogosphere Reacts to Redskins Decision
DeafDC.com So I'm about two weeks slow on the uptake, but I've been watching the reaction to a federal judge's decision that the powers that be over at the Redskins' home stadium must caption all “aural content.” (I'm obsessed with that phrase and am gonna abuse it as much as earthly possible. Be warned.) Find [...]
Wed, Oct 15 2008

Missing a Sense Does Not Equate Loss of Common Sense
DeafDC.com By Julie Feldman Last year, I was waiting to cross a very busy intersection in Penn Quarter. I looked to my left and there was a blind man with his telltale white cane also waiting to cross the street. Instinctively, I reached out my arm; I thought that, obviously, he needed help crossing the street. Then [...]
Wed, Oct 08 2008

Walls
DeafDC.com Have you read Paul Schwartzman's recent article in the Washington Post (entitled “Gallaudet’s New Aesthetic Openness”)?  If not, please do take a look-it's pretty good.  Schwartzman's focus is on Gallaudet University's drive to develop a number of adjacent properties that it owns along Sixth Street using an architectural design conc...
Tue, Oct 07 2008

Eid Mubarak!
DeafDC.com Last Thursday night I had the honor of attending an Eid al-Fitr celebration hosted by Global Deaf Muslim and the Deaf Muslim Student Association (DMSA) at Gallaudet University.  Just in case you are not familiar with the Eid al-Fitr holiday, this is the three day celebration that occurs at the end of Ramadan, a month [...]
Sat, Sep 27 2008

Lights Down on Deaf Athlete’s Paralympic debut
DeafDC.com Teigan Van Roosmalen, a deaf Australian swimmer, missed the start of a final race in Beijing on Tuesday at the Paralympic Games after the light on the block that was supposed to coincide with the starter gun malfunctioned. They immediately re-ran the race, so she was still able to participate.  She came in eighth. Still, [...]
Thu, Sep 11 2008

Hurry: Submit YouTube Videos To Be Captioned!
DeafDC.com A few days ago, YouTube added captioning/subtitle support to its videos. Users can upload their own SubViewer (.sub) or SubRip (.srt) files to videos. Viewers can turn on captioning (if enabled) by clicking on the bottom-right button on the player. Right now, however, YouTube doesn't seem to offer a feature to search for captioned videos only.  Got a [...]
Mon, Sep 08 2008

Deaf Redskin? Nah, Just Semantics.
DeafDC.com Well, who knew? Turns out, according to the Washington Times, Reed Doughty, Redskins safety, has a hearing loss. Don't get too excited. He's definitely not deaf. Just has a hearing loss. Gotta give up a simultaneous eye-roll and kiss-fist for the headline of that story: “Redskins' Doughty tackles hearing loss.” Get it? [...]
Fri, Aug 22 2008

Sticky Rice, I’m Stuck on You
DeafDC.com In DC, is there a place you can go where everyone knows your name in sign? (Okay, sorry for the lame attempt at trying to re-create the spirit of the theme song from “Cheers” ... Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see, our [...]
Thu, Aug 21 2008

Fruits and Elbow Grease
DeafDC.com You work hard. Put in the proverbial elbow grease. Pull teeth in order to get what you want or need, and you got the bite marks to prove it. And then... someone else comes along and shamelessly lays claim to the fruits of your labor. Sounds like a typical cutthroat workday, right? Wrong. I'm talking about [...]
Tue, Aug 19 2008

National DPHH Website Launched
DeafDC.com The national Deaf Professional Happy Hour™ (DPHH™) website ( [link] was launched during the 2008 NAD Conference in New Orleans! We aim to set up and provide support to DPHHs in every major urban area with a significant deaf population. Several cities across the United States were thrilled to sign up their DPHH and many more [...]
Wed, Jul 23 2008

iPhone 3G: First Impressions
DeafDC.com Well, in a word:  “Wow.”  If that's enough for you, you can stop reading. Oh, you want more details.  Okay! First, the bad news:  The TAP plan is not available yet, so us early adopters of the iPhone 3G have had to pick the standard plans, which start at $69.99 per month, plus text messaging for extra.  [...]
Fri, Jul 11 2008

Summer Reading Picks
DeafDC.com Note: These are just the books I've deemed worthy of mention in the last two weeks or so. I know there's more worth reading this summer on the beach, and I know you're itching to add your own pick. Comment away! The Waverley women in Sarah Addison Allen's debut novel, set in Bascombe, North [...]
Thu, Jul 10 2008

I *heart* Muck Redux
DeafDC.com Last week during a hot cloudy hour when we couldn't swim in the pool (I had a housesitting gig at a friend's house with a pool), Muck (or Michelle McAuliffe, artist extraordinarie) and I were driving around College Park, talking about everything from IKEA lightbulbs to hearing boys. “One of the perils of dating [...]
Thu, Jul 10 2008

DeafDC.com Movie Listings
DeafDC.com Captioned movie fans, we've updated DeafDC.com to contain links to two indispensable resources on the top right side of our homepage that DeafDC.com used over the past several years to manually update our captioned movie listings. We want you to have direct access to up-to-date movie captioning times and dates with accurate information. What was once [...]
Thu, Jul 03 2008

SLA, VLI, and GoAmerica Merging
DeafDC.com Via a leak, I just got this announcement from Janet Bailey, president of Sign Language Associates (SLA): Interpreters:  I am writing to formally announce that SLA, VLI and GoAmerica have merged into one new full service company.  You may remember that in January of this year, GoAmerica acquired Verizon’s text and video relay products [...]
Wed, Jul 02 2008

Too Advantaged Yet Still Disabled
DeafDC.com All right, let me get this straight.  First the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) told Oscar Pistorius that he was ineligible for the 2008 Summer Olympics... not because he's a double amputee without a chance in hell of beating, much less competing against, “able-bodied” runners, but because he has an unfair advantage over them [...]
Mon, Jun 02 2008

“The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted...
DeafDC.com It was a breath of fresh air to read the anonymous Professor X's essay in the June edition of Atlantic Monthly entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” In a nutshell, Prof. X debunks the notion that a college education is attainable for everyone, using his own experience teaching at both a community and private [...]
Fri, May 23 2008

AT&T offers “Deaf” iPhone Plan
DeafDC.com So, AT&T has finally offered a “Deaf/HH” plan for the iPhone. Yay! Deaf iPhoners — go forth and changeth your plans to saveth money. AT&T offers iPhone plan (via Engadget) AT&T Text Accessibility Plan Executive summary: $40/month Unlimited SMS & data (web, etc) 40¢ per minute voice visual voicemail (pretty useless for most of us) ...
Wed, Apr 30 2008

“Sweet Nothing” Portrays Ongoing Struggle for Recognition
DeafDC.com There's a plethora of things to praise about Hallmark's Sweet Nothing in My Ear, the film centering on a deaf mother and hearing father's custody hearing, which aired last night on CBS. And at first glance, it seems as if the pervasive controversy over whether the deaf child, Adam, played capably by the charming Noah Valencia, [...]
Mon, Apr 21 2008

Pushing the line between style and function
DeafDC.com As members of Costco, we're constantly receiving “junk mail,” our favorite of which are the seasonal coupon books. Amidst bargains on toothpaste and cereal, we'll see things we really really reeeeally want at really really reeeeally good prices. It's porn for our checkbook's salivary glands. He'll want a flat-screen TV; I&#...
Tue, Apr 15 2008

Deaf Spam?
DeafDC.com Sharing this with DeafDC for our collective amusement — my first “deaf” spam (I don't read spam so I might have gotten one before now, but this one slipped through Gmail's spam filter...).  Pasted verbatim, including errors. Dearest One, It is my pleasure to write you but first I will introduce myself to you. I am a [...]
Tue, Apr 15 2008

Airline Policy Experiencing Turbulence
DeafDC.com A friend sent me a hot-off-the-presses article about deaf people who aren't allowed to fly solo. That's the apparent policy of the Australian subsidiary of Singapore-based budget air carrier Tiger Airways. Deaf passengers who want to fly on the airline must be accompanied by a fare-paying adult care provider, according to Jinky, a Tiger Airways reservation...
Fri, Apr 11 2008

D-PAN Releases “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera in ASL
DeafDC.com Anyone remember that ASL music video from last year, “Waiting on the World to Change”? D-PAN has done it again with Christina Aguilera's “Beautiful.”  According to their website, D-PAN (Deaf Performing Artists Network), based in Detroit, “exists to bridge the existing gaps between the deaf/hard of hearing community, the entertainmen...
Mon, Apr 07 2008

Sign Language in the New York Mercantile Exchange
DeafDC.com Deaf folks aren't the only ones using sign language, as we all know — from baseball umpires to the gnomes on airport tarmacs.  The New York Times published an interesting infographic on the sign language used in the New York Mercantile Exchange here. For me the most interesting thing was to see some parallels between a [...]
Mon, Apr 07 2008

I *heart* Muck.
DeafDC.com I love Michelle McAuliffe, better known as MUCK.  Not just because she’s my long-lost fake sister*, a cooler, hotter version of me but also because she creates gorgeous, thought-provoking work.  I had the privilege of visiting her studio and viewing Muck’s most recent body of work, When The Horse Is Dead, Get Off, created as [...]
Sun, Mar 30 2008

Barking Up The Deaf Tree
DeafDC.com My uncle forwarded me this New York Times article about young John Cave Jr., a deaf student, who wanted to bring his service dog, Simba, to school. There is a cute picture of a Simba, a yellow Labrador, in the article. To summarize: the Nassau County school said no to the Cave family, “concluding that having a dog in [...]
Thu, Mar 13 2008

Notes from Israel: Ten Years Later
DeafDC.com I have been back to the States for a week now. Israel, a 13-day adventure, morphed into a steady line of mental snapshots hanging on a clothesline. Barely a dent in my lifetime and yet, I returned 10,000 times richer in appreciation of my border-free freedom and wide gateway of accessibility. It has been ten [...]
Sat, Mar 08 2008

Interpreting War
DeafDC.com There I was Monday morning at a military hospital in the Intensive Care Unit waiting room, not really sure what I was there for. I only knew that I got a page from a dear friend that simply said- come now. As an interpreter, you get used to this. We met as soul mates on Parris [...]
Thu, Mar 06 2008

Watch Subtitled Movies on iPod, Apple TV, or iPhone
DeafDC.com A friend sent me an awesome link to Submerge, (sorry, Mac OS X only) an new-to-me program that allows you to take any subtitle file (.srt, .sub, etc) and merge it with an mov, m4v, avi file so that you can view the subtitles on any Apple device — from an iPod to the Apple [...]
Mon, Mar 03 2008

The End of Deaf-Blindness
DeafDC.com Last Friday, my sister Liz and I went to the Day of Science conference by the Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB) in San Diego. We were in town anyway for our father's birthday the day before, so this event was a welcome opportunity to find out the latest research in retinal degenerative diseases. We both have [...]
Mon, Mar 03 2008

Based On My Experience
DeafDC.com Based on my experience, twenty-nine year old Deaf women should have twelve tattoos, read Paul Auster, and have a penchant for watching Buffy shows. Based on my experience, Deaf women my age should be spending their days and nights reading the latest (and the oldest) articles about what a sentence means in ASL. Based on [...]
Tue, Feb 26 2008

Does Hollywood Prefer Deaf Actors Who Can Speak?
DeafDC.com Based on recent movie and television shows, there is an inclination that Hollywood prefers deaf actors and actresses who speak. Regardless of talent or experience, there is an obvious preference for actors who can vocalize. Ever since the deaf acting profession lost equal ground in 1929 with the first talkie The Jazz Singer, there has been [...]
Mon, Feb 25 2008

What’s in a Name?
DeafDC.com It has been a long time since I’ve posted on DeafDC.  Too long, in fact. My excuse is that I’ve been writing other stuff, namely a dissertation that has to be defended this term, but also a brief piece on the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill for Bionews co-written with some superb academic colleagues [...]
Sun, Feb 24 2008

Update on GoAmerica Outsourcing to the Philippines
DeafDC.com Several days ago, I blogged about my concerns with GoAmerica outsourcing a chunk of its text relay services to the Philippines. Afterwards, I had a very pleasant and eye-opening videophone conversation with Gerald “Jerry” Nelson, Director of Regulatory and Strategic Affairs for GoAmerica / HOVRS. That, in addition, to some of the [...]
Sat, Feb 23 2008

A Renegade Captionist?
DeafDC.com Reddit.com is one of my favorite sites. If you haven't check it out yet, do so. So, I was looking at it today and found this story: Here are the photos of the CNN Closed Captioning. It's not every day that closed captioning is a story on Reddit's front page, so off I clicked, and found [...]
Thu, Feb 21 2008

GoAmerica Outsourcing Relay Call Center to the Philippines
DeafDC.com According to a recent Modesto Bee newspaper article, GoAmerica has begun outsourcing its Internet relay services to a new call center in the Philippines. As I explained in a recent blog post, GoAmerica operates the popular i711 relay service as well as a number of other state-based relay services, and had taken over Verizon's relay service. [...]
Tue, Feb 19 2008

Deafness Trumps Rape in New Jersey Newspaper
DeafDC.com In rape cases in close-knit communities, it often seems best to leave judgment to those charged with that task. This story out of New Jersey in which a 19-year-old deaf male is charged with the rape of a 16-year-old deaf female classmate at Mountain Lakes High School is probably no exception. Still, it's hard not [...]
Sun, Feb 17 2008

Chris Heuer - You Can’t Hide
DeafDC.com There's a double meaning in that title. Watch for it. I'm writing this for a friend who is having a hard time making a major life decision because she's afraid. I understand. All of us to an extent have to worry about what other people will think of us—whether we blog or not, [...]
Fri, Feb 15 2008

Guest Blogger - Requiem for Kenya: Goodbye, Farewell, and...
DeafDC.com By Allen Neece “Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.” -Chris Marker, “La Jeete” The scars run deep. From my chair on this verandah above the town of Lamu, with the muezzin call to prayer reverberating below (I can hear it because I got my aids [...]
Mon, Feb 11 2008

Shane Feldman - Yes We Can!: An Interview with Shoshannah...
DeafDC.com Last weekend Shoshannah Stern, a deaf Hollywood actress, was part of a pro-Barack Obama web video titled “Yes We Can” along with other celebrities such as Scarlet Johansson, John Legend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Herbie Hancock. The video was posted just prior to Super Tuesday and, according to USA Today, recently hit 3.7 million views. Shoshannah has [...]
Fri, Feb 08 2008

Josh Mendelsohn - Snap!VRS and Ojo Troubles
DeafDC.com Since I haven't received my Ojo videophone yet, I wasn't aware that the Ojo network is now down.  But I just received an email from the CEO of Snap!VRS explaining that the Ojo manufacturer and operator of the Ojo network had been “forced to shut down operations.”  I'm including a copy of the email below. Makes [...]
Wed, Feb 06 2008

Shane Feldman - What Irony, PepsiCo Super Bowl Ads Not...
DeafDC.com After all is said and done, PepsiCo hypocritically did not caption their two Super Bowl spots, and they know how to caption ads. “Bob's House” in addition to the “Making of Bob's House” and the supplemental videos with Keith Wann were all captioned for the deaf-impaired. The opening of “Making of Bob's House” says:...
Mon, Feb 04 2008

Chris Heuer - My Response to Karen Youdelman’s and...
DeafDC.com I'm a regular blogger here on Deaf DC.com, but I have been away from the blogsphere for the better part of a month now because my son was born just a few weeks ago. He's a full-time job in and of himself–if you have children of your own I'm sure you can understand what [...]
Sun, Feb 03 2008