I read somewhere that…40,000 new blogs are being created daily. With this degree of popularity, it’s a no-brainer to say blogs are here to stay. As quickly as they surged onto the internet space, they surely can fade into rusted cooper wires just as quickly. But for now, let’s say they’re a permament part of the internet.

The other permament parts are e-mail, web, pager/phones, right? While the internet is slowly making way for video, and eventually voice conversations, the internet has mostly limited itself to text. Much to the deaf user’s delight. In this great technological advance of recent, the deaf user hasn’t been left behind, almost appearing as if on purpose.

With the advent of blogging, not including protected sites, writings are more than ever public. Blogs, which has simplified the process of publishing content to the web, is encouraging the breeding of emormous quantities, paragraphs after paragraphs, sentences after sentences, and even photos after photos.

They all keep us in touch with our friends and family, and those intersted in our topics. Hurricane Katrina spurred numerous blogs that brings us storm news updates faster than our local and national channels. And we’re reading the words of real people. Real experiences.

I’m sure most of you agree with me on most points I’ve illustrated above. The blog has been an exciting new thing to arrive on the internet frontier, right? What about those that are not able to enjoy them as much as the average American? Somewhere on the internet is a group of people that never or rarely have enjoyed such benefits.

I’m not talking about the “Digital Divide”. Although computers are increasingly affordable, a good percentage of Americans still do not have computers, much less internet access in their homes. While that remains a pitiful situation, what I’m looking at is the literacy level of deaf Americans.

The blog has again pushed the digital gap further apart for web surfers that cannot read or write at or above the 8th grade level. Unprotected blogs are so public, yet so personal. They’d rather not make laughingstocks out of themselves by showing how well or badly they write. The blog’s strongest points secretly leaves a group of people behind to live their lives anonymously.

As the internet forges ahead at lightning speed fueled even more so by Stanford University and Lucent scientists, we are given more reasons to remember that deaf education must do everything it can to keep up.

I grew up in southern California, so my fondest childhood memories invariably involve Disneyland. Only a hour-and-half away in lovely Anaheim, the Magical Kingdom seduced my imagination. I remember all the cool new rides and areas like Mickey’s Toontown, Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Michael Jackson’s Captain EO. My precious neon-green/pink/blue Maui hat flew off my head while I hurled down the tallest cascade on Splash Mountain, and they mailed it back to me 3 days later. In my eyes, the happy employees of Disneyland were gods, and the Magic Kingdom heaven. Fantasyland, the happiest place on Earth.

But I’ve entered a new Fantasy of my own. Fantasy Football. The sport of grown-up straight white beer-guzzling men escaping life’s realities. Me, fit in that? No way. But I’m happy to have joined a quite egalitarian league - there’s even a FEMALE in it. Shocked, I was.

With respect to Allison who laments her husband’s disappearance, I’ve found FF to be quite engaging. This is coming from a person who just learned last week that football has centers and tight ends, and that one of the league’s best running backs plays for my hometown team. I feel like I’m moving to a new continent populated by football players. It’s a learning experience for me, and, of course, the potential 933% profit doesn’t hurt, either.

I’d like to humbly reveal my 2005 Retros lineup:

• Kerry Collins (QB) Oakland
• Domanick Davis (RB) Houston
• Ryan Moats (RB) Philadelphia
• Andre Johnson (WR) Houston
• Javon Walker (WR) Green Bay
• Alge Crumpler (TE) Atlanta
• Nate Kaeding (K) San Diego
• NY Jets Defense/Special Teams

and my lovely reserve:

• Kyle Boller (QB) Baltimore
• Kyle Orton (QB) Chicago
• Jerome Bettis (RB) Pittsburgh
• Larry Johnson (RB) Kansas City
• Kevin Curtis (WR) St. Louis
• Courtney Anderson (TE) Oakland

Ok. I had planned on drafting someone from the Redskins, but this will do. Davis, Walker, and Bettis are all injured already, oy. Two of my three RBs.

My team logo also rocks.
This is going to be a fun season.

I think I’m losing my husband.

I even have another husband (or two or three) to thank for this.

CK’s been spending more and more time away from me. Even when we’re together I can see his thoughts drifting away.

Why? It’s almost draft time for Fantasy Football.

Urgh. Over the years I’ve gone from completely clueless cheerleader chick to half-way decent sports chica. In baseball, I can tell you what a full count is and why a double play is good. Football? Sure, I can explain the significance of a down and show you where the red zone is. I might even be able to decipher a ref’s gestures every once in a while without elbowing CK in the chest and going, “huh?” All a far cry from where I was 7 years ago.

But this is where all bets are off.

I don’t understand spending an hour poring over league statistics and coming up with a totally new list of potential players based on those numbers.

I don’t understand (well, not completely) the whole idea of a reserve quarterback for when teams go on bye.

I don’t understand a game where individual statistics count for more than a team statistic. I know in baseball they at least give you credit for sac flies. That doesn’t work here, does it?

Usually, my Wife-Goddess strategy (taken from the book “How to make Hubby Wonder Why He Deserves Someone as Good as You,” written, of course, by yours truly) is to learn a bit about it so I can at least understand what the hell he’s talking about.

But, see, the problem is: if I had to pick my own roster, I’d pick whoever looked the best in football pants minus those with pending criminal sentences (and a deal to suspend said sentence until play ends) and past drug or woman-beating history. Ricky Williamses need not apply.

I hate Fantasy Football.

I sent an e-mail containing a link to my blog to the writer of the infamous Gally football article in the Post. This is what he had to say:

The last person I knew that actively used a Wyndtell pager just bit the dust and switched over to T-Mobile’s Sidekick. His reason: half the pager’s screen suddenly went blank.

Jim was the only person in my address book that still had “@wyndtell.com” next to it. No more. A quick look at www.wyndtell.com will tell you that you can STILL get a RIM 950 and use Wyndtell’s services (now owned by GoAmerica, also owner of i711.com). But no one does anymore.

I think a mention needs to be made about this development. Wyndtell was the first 2-way pager marketed to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community back in 1998 or so. No one could have imagined how devastating the cultural impact would be. I don’t need to rehash all the changes in Deaf culture that 2-way mobile communication created; you’re all living it right now.

Instead, I’ll just tell you my own personal Wyndtell story. I received it on my parents’ kind welfare soon after I was stuck in a 16-hour blizzard on I-90 outside Buffalo. “I can’t use a cell phone; how can I contact you when I NEED you?” I told my concerned parental units. It worked; I got my pager, and they paid for it. Any other college freshman couldn’t have been happier than I was the day I received it in the mail. Finally, I had the power. E-mail wherever I went.

Seven months later, market forces had already led me to abandon Wyndtell for a cheaper alternative, the $22/mo Motorola Talkabout. The interface and equipment were much more inferior, but if I could save $18 extra a month (that’s like, one large pizza!), why not?

So, yeah. That’s my very short Wyndtell story. Hope you enjoyed it. Now here’s my rules about people who’re deciding which pager to get: Blackberry or Sidekick. It’s a simple rule.

1. If you’re a student, get a Sidekick.
2. If you’re a professional, get a Blackberry.

There it is. Yes, I’m breaking my own rule by not getting a Blackberry. Once I go full-time with whatever company I’m working for, I’m ditching my Sidekick. Flippin’ it open in some high-powered meeting just isn’t the best image I want to extrude. Blackberry oozes professionalism.

So, there you go. Pager history!

Hopefully, by now you’ve had a chance to read my husband’s knee-jerk reaction to the Post’s August 18 article on Gallaudet’s goal to bring its football program back to the varsity level.

While his reaction is entirely appropriate, — and, in fact, similar to mine when I first saw the headline — I’d like to argue that CK shoots all his cannonballs at the wrong boat.

Yes, as someone who calls herself culturally Deaf, I feel sucker-punched whenever I see the term “hearing-impaired” in any form of media. But I don’t think using that term is the most offensive or harmful effect the article has.

The worst thing the article does, instead, is play off Gallaudetians’ inability to hear or our novelty-like language when it has absolutely nothing to do with the real story.

The author of the article, Alan Goldenbach is a prolific writer of many pretty well-researched and tight articles, as a casual Google search will reveal. Even a look at a awkwardly adorable 1997 pic from his UMich days makes it hard to stay pissed at him.

But we shouldn’t point fingers at Goldenbach. The article is actually beautifully written. It’s a nice, albeit brief, summary of the history of Gallaudet’s football program. It touches on the whole coach who can’t sign with a team of players who need a good coach who can sign situation. And, the mark of a good journalist, the article even manages to delve a bit into the dark Deafie world of twisted stories as it mentions briefly Andy Bonheyo’s success with the MSD football program and Gallaudet’s subsequent inability to reach a satisfactory settlement in order to recruit Bonheyo as the new head coach — according to an anonymous source, anyway (Go Orioles!).

In fact, if you take away the headline and the one mention of the term “hearing-impaired,” there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the article.

So who do we blame for the stupid headline? Goldenbach’s editors.

Let’s recap: the story is about the athletic department’s drive to breathe some life into a sagging program by aiming for varsity status. The secondary story, of course, is that they decided to do that by hiring a coach who’d never used his hands to say a thing in his life before (and no, flipping people the bird doesn’t count).

Does “A Show of Hands for Gallaudet Football” provide any real information as to what the story is about? No. So the editor (probably a copy editor) who made it up just flunked Journalism 101 and commited the serious social faux pas of saying “lookee lookee — there’s some people who can say things just by waving their hands around in the air! Cool! Let’s mention it in the headline… wow, doesn’t that sound poetic?!”

But then again… in journalism, flouncy, empty headlines are allowed IF, and ONLY IF, the sub-head has the real meat in it. “After 11 Years, School for Hearing-Impaired Tries to Revive Varsity Program.” Okay… I’ll give this one a C+. It does manage to mention Gally’s varsity aspirations. But it also shoots itself in the foot with the “school for hearing-impaired” bit. For one thing, Gallaudet doesn’t call itself a school for hearing-impaired. So that’s loss of accuracy right there. Secondly, Gally has been part of the DC community for, oh, umpteen-and-two years now. Why mention that it’s a deaf school when the real story is about the club program that wished it was varsity?

The online version has a neutral pic of the new coach chatting away. But the paper version really pissed me off. The first pic is ok. It’s a picture of Coach Ed Hottle’s hands signing “hard.” Since the story mentions the second-time-in-recent-memory controversy of hiring a coach who can’t sign at a school that has a history of deaf students raising hell over teachers who DO sign, albeit sloppily, that one’s permissible. But it also is only three by three inches on the front page.

The story jumps to the third page, where the first thing you see is a huge, billboard size picture bigger than anything else on the page. Guess what it’s of? Coach Hottle? No. Football players? Noooo. The athletic director? As if. It’s a shot of the back of offensive line coach Josh Levine’s head. The ONLY thing you see, once you get past his cool spiky do, is his hearing aids (and maybe, if you squint and turn your head 15 degrees to the left, a blurry silhouette of Coach Hottle). There’s nothing else in the picture. So what message does this picture send? Of course, nothing to do with football or the new coach. It just screams, “WARNING, WARNING, DEAF PEOPLE HERE!”

Even more infuriating: the caption reads, “…Levine, who is deaf, prepares for the upcoming Gallaudet football season with head coach Ed Hottle, background.”

How many things can you find wrong with this?
1) Unless preparing for a football season has anything to do with hair product, the pic doesn’t show anybody preparing for any season, football or wiffleball.
2) We obviously know Levine is deaf. The hearing aid shot rammed that down our throats.
3) It’s about time we saw the term “deaf” used. Why now?! Why not way back on page E1 when the editors were drooling over pretty wordage about hands in the air?

This shows serious oversights by the editor. For one, you’re supposed to use the same term(s) throughout the article. The Washington Post has it’s own stylebook. I know this, not just because I learned it in high school (high school, for gosh’s sakes!), but also because the Associated Press stylebook, which is a standard-setter in the industry, calls for using “deaf,” “partially deaf,” or “partial hearing loss. It specifically says “…do not describe an individual as disabled or handicapped unless it is clearly pertinent to a story. If such a description must be used, make it clear what the handicap is and how much the person’s physical or mental performance is affected.” The entry is also found under the heading “impaired.”

I won’t go into the whole “hearing-impaired” thing too much. It’s too tiring. After reading Tom Willard’s absolutely wonderful 1993 classic, “How to Write Like a Hearing Reporter,” I’ve learned to roll my eyes whenever media commits these boo-boos (reprinted on p. 38 in Bragg’s Deaf World, if you’re up for a fun read). In a nutshell, I hate “hearing-impaired,” but other people - deaf and hearing both - don’t. Whatever you call yourself is an individual decision, and it’s a shame when others don’t respect that decision. Furthermore, no one ever says it intending to insult, which means there’s a world of ignorance out there we’ve left to correct.

Most importantly, there’s a huge need for an umbrella term that’s easy to use and remember that will cover all people with a hearing loss without carrying any emotional connotation along with it. Nearly impossible, I think. Once we have it, then, we need to carry out a huge full-scale campaign, complete with celebrity spokespeople (does anyone know if Britney Spears will be free after her baby is born? How about Paris Hilton? Anybody? Just as long as it’s not Tom Cruise), to get media people to correctly use it, and to get them to quit capitalizing on Deafies and ASL in order to sell articles.

So, while I think my husband’s right for wanting to take the editorial staff of the Post out to the woodshed for what he calls a “lickin’” (Heck, I’d give them a lot more if I had the chance), I think taking advantage of what mainstream society perceives as us for sensationalist purposes is the greater sin.

Now, where’d I put my whip? It was next to my red pen and my AP Stylebook last time I saw it. CK…what’s that poking out of your back pocket?!

Lung cancer is the deadliest of all cancers, and the American audience felt the impact as a favorite TV personality, Peter Jennings, passed away almost with surprise. He passed away only months after the announcement of his retirement, and, sadly, being diagnosed with lung cancer.

The announcement did not remind us that lung cancer kills–and quickly. But when Peter Jennings did pass away, we were astounded. Didn’t he retire so that he could focus on recovery? What happened to all those people who had “beat” cancer? Sadly, 85 percent of lung cancer patients have less than a year to live.

So with Jennings’ death, we’re once again reminded that lung cancer kills more than breast, colon and prostate cancer. Combined.

But that’s not to diminish the suffering of all the malignancies. A dear friend of mine is running in the Marine Marathon Corps, which in fact will be his first marathon. He is doing it in honor of his mother, who is battling colon cancer, which has spread. A deaf Washington DC resident, he quit smoking at his mother’s request, and has taken it a step further. While training for the marathon, he’s fundraising money for cancer research. Read the fundraising page; it’s quite an inspiration to see what a son will do for his mother.

» Beat Cancer

Article: The Deadliest Cancer

If there is ever a two-word combination that I have to hate the most in the entire world…it’s HEARING-IMPAIRED.

The word doesn’t even exist in the dictionary. So, I decided to see what “impair” means, for my sanity. Impair means “to make worse, to damage.” There ya go!

Am I damaged? No. Am I worse for the wear? No. Is my hearing damaged? No. I simply cannot hear. I am deaf. Deaf. Deef.

I should take out to the woodshed whoever though of the word “hearing-impaired.” They’d get a good lickin’.

Why am I so peeved today? Because the Washington Post — the top newspaper in this city, used the two offensive words. (Gallaudet football).

C’mon guys…you’re in the city that spawned the Deaf Mecca. If not now, you should at least have known it’s offensive to call Deaf “hearing-impaired.” in 1988.

In 1988, you’d have faced a lynching mob. Now, you may face a few angry letters.

Using “hearing-impaired” is like calling a Black person a n*****.

Sure…there are some deaf people out there who prefer to call themselves “hearing-impaired” rather than deaf.

But when it comes to calling myself “damaged”, no thanks.

I’d rather be called D E A F.

Updated 8/17/2005

Sometimes it takes something surprising like Cindy Sheehan’s stand against President Bush to make you realize that by sitting and doing nothing, you are by default supporting the status quo. And often, the status quo (existing conditions) are not good.

If there is something I know about myself, I do not support President Bush and his political agenda. So I realized, helped by the very helpful MoveOn, that I think I will do something this time around. And maybe next time something comes up. And the time after that.

If you disagree with Cindy Sheehan, that’s one thing. If you agree with her, however, now is the time to say or do something.
Come join us for a candelight vigil in front of the White House this Wednesday at 7:30 PM. Come join us if you believe the way President Bush is treating Cindy is pretty damn shitty. Come if you would like to spend a quiet moment thinking about those who have died at the war in Iraq.

There is capacity for thousands of people. I want a BIG block of signing deaf people right there, front and center. Why not come? If anything… it’ll be a mini DPHH. Bring your candles, I’ll bring mine. We’ll share them. And talk. And sweat.

CANDELIGHT VIGIL @ WHITE HOUSE
7:30 PM Wednesday, 5/17

Along H Street (north end of Lafayette Park). Look for the signing hands. Farragut North, Farragut West metro.

To help MoveOn count how many people are going, please sign up here. You can contact me at deafdc@random.sent.at. Contact everyone you can, post on your blogs, send emails, pages… let’s make this a huge turnout!

As I sit in the gently rocking Metro train, I think of the pollution I’m not putting in the atmosphere. My car sits at home 95% of the time, and I take the Metro everywhere in DC. Less pollution, less global warming. Less global warming, more people live.

Unfortunately, some bad news: as this New Scientist article says, Siberia is warming up. The jet setters out there are rejoicing at adding another new destination to their tired lists of France, Italy, and Costa Rica. As Virgin Atlantic says… go, jet set, go! Siberia happens to be home to the worlds largest peat bog — and because its warmer there than before, the peat bogs are not staying frozen and hence are releasing methane. Buy me a ticket, a nice methane bath sounds fabulous!

But visiting Siberia will bring home a point that everybody seems to accept but yet doesn’t fully realize: global warming is here to stay. As we swim around the humid DC air and look up at the sizzling sun, we need to wonder if our lease on this fair planet is soon up. Between the rising cost of oil, global warming, and instability in the Middle East — what will this planet look like in 5 years? I think it will be a heavily changed place. And not for the better.

Argentina’s Upsala Glacier — Before and After From BBC.