Last Saturday, I took the time to go visit Ohio School for the Deaf for the football game against a Tennessee deaf school football team. It was a really beautiful, sunny day for a football game anywhere. I was very recently aware of a ABC television crew who came to broadcast the entire event for its morning show series, Good Morning America. They came for the OSD's football team and the performance of the blinded marching band from the Ohio State School for the Blind. OSD have re-activated its football team in 2005 after a 41 years absence.

OSD won the game with such an amazing comeback with less than 2 minutes left in the game, previously trailing TSD by 6 points. They scored two touchdowns and an extra point in that span of time, shocking the TSD team. The win stunned the whole deaf community, even surprising the GMA TV crew. In the last two games, OSD suffered demoralizing losses to the other deaf school football teams before this past Saturday game. The amazing comeback victory pretty much erased the bad memory of the two game losses for the team, for sure.

The GMA TV crew filmed the OSSB's marching band, interviewed few people, then proceed to interview few OSD supporters, including a lengthy interview with Willis Cook Sr., whose son is on the OSD team (also have a son playing for Gallaudet football team). Willis Cook Sr. is very well-known throughout Ohio's deaf community, have an all-deaf family and is a fun, spontaneous, passionate fellow if you ever get to meet him in person. Let's hope GMA would be nice enough to show some, if not most of him signing very fluently and not the upper parts of the subjects' bodies that the media in the past have been notoriously known, not showing much of sign language in a fluently, demonstrative manner.

I'm not fully certain when GMA will broadcast the segment on OSD/OSSB football/homecoming event. I was informed just this afternoon by Pam Brodie, the Outreach Service director at OSD, that it may be likely on October 14th Sunday morning. Either the OSD or I will keep you all posted soon.


-- In other news --
Just read a brief tidbit about a lawsuit filed against United Parcel Services (UPS) for discrimination. The reason? UPS is not willing to hire deaf people to drive its UPS trucks or vans for delivery runs. Their pathetic argument? "Safety" issues. I say BS to that. UPS is simply using its "safety" argument as a blatant substitute to discriminate against the deaf by not hiring them to drive their delivery trucks. A defense lawyer for the deaf would simply ask UPS to provide substantial proofs and records to back up their safety claims and reasons not to hire the deaf to drive its brown delivery trucks. UPS is still being stubborn over the discrimination lawsuit and ask for its dismissal.

Over the years, I've met two deaf persons who drove trucks for a living- one works for Fedex as a delivery driver and the other drove big tractor-trailers for years (he has since retired after 25 years of driving big rigs and long haul deliveries). The deaf can drive delivery trucks just as well as hearing drivers and most have good driving safety records (and good eyes). I drove rental trucks few time before and, for a time, drove a delivery van for an art gallery shop. What safety issues are they, UPS?


This past weekend, my Mac computer was behaving badly and I've spent a considerable amount of time troubleshooting it until last night, figured out what may seems to be the culprit: a faulty Firefox browser (version 2.0.0.7). Plus one of my hard drives' data structure was in poor shape, so had to back-up everything, reformat and rebuild the desktop to start anew. It could be one of those days you never know for sure when the computer or the hard drive crash on you unexpectedly, so always take pre-emptive action if you're savvy enough.