Marlee Matlin — a gorgeous and talented 43-year-old Deaf actress and Academy Award winner — made her debut last night on Dancing with the Stars, but few people realize the magnitude and the magnificence of her accomplishment.
Continue reading → Marlee Matlin Dancing Deaf with the Stars
My newest book, written with Janna M. Sweenie is titled
Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1 and you can now buy it directly from Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble and from your nearby bookstore!
Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1 is our second ASL book that employs our “Deaf Way” of Hardcore ASL teaching.
We have a DVD bundled with the book so you can learn ASL with us in real time!
The most inventive measure of our new book is the “Pick and Say Rubric” that leads you to create quick — “three idea” — sentences constructed in ASL.
You just pick one or more words/ideas from a RED column, a GREEN column and a BLUE column and then sign them in sequence. Easy!
Using that rubric method you can forge more than 27,000 American Sign Language phrases by learning only 90 words — and getting to understand how to “Pick and Say” takes less than 10 seconds.
I know you’ll love the book. You can use the book as a base for understanding Deaf Culture and for learning an exciting foreign language.
If you have any thoughts or feedback, please find me and share your mind!
Pepsi will air a "Deaf" television commercial during the pre-game show for the Super Bowl.
I have watched the advertisement and — as a Hearing Man married to a Deaf Woman for many years, as well as being the author of two books on American Sign Language — I cringe at the silliness and the ineptitude of the commercial.
The entire idea is so precious one can’t stand its lightness pretending to be importance.
I understand why many in the Deaf Community are celebrating the ad — they are so marginalized and ignored by mainstream society that any little bit of looking toward them — any little bone of attention — is gratefully ingested as a confirmation of life and as a recognition of being.
However, that doesn’t mean what Pepsi has done is admirable or groundbreaking. The ad is, sadly, neither.
The Deaf Pepsi ad merely confirms old stereotypes and banishes the Deaf into their current perceived ghetto of selfishness and entitlements.
The ad is based on an old Deaf Joke. Two Deaf friends are looking for another Deaf friend and they can’t find him. So, in the middle of the night, the two friends honk their car horn and the one house that doesn’t "wake up" and turn on their lights is the home of their unable-to-hear-the-car-horn Deaf friend.
So. Not. Funny.
The commercial is also filmed in the dead of night so we can’t see the sign language very well and the actors are using PSE (Pidgin Signed English) and not pure, hardcore, ASL.
We who know better are left to wonder and yearn for what could have been. Pepsi had the money, access, and power to take us directly into the Deaf experience: How the Deaf watch and enjoy a Super Bowl from within the sight of their eyes and minds.
Pepsi could have created a beautiful and ethereal moment for the Deaf that shined light on the joy of their culture instead of mocking it with a tired and old joke that was never really funny.
Even though Pepsi failed with their Deaf Pepsi advertisement, that doesn’t mean they aren’t hawking their work as a sublime and innovative honor for the Deaf Community. Pepsi even created a two minute promo telling us how special they are for creating the advertisement. You can view it on YouTube.
Telling someone how great you are does not create greatness.
Greatness is found in the subtle transmission of hope and yearning that is successfully connected to clear achievement of the spirit — and Pepsi failed the Deaf, and their own company, in missing the greatness mark.
Unfortunately, it is the Deaf Community who are now left to suffer alone in the aftermath of a subtle public mocking that was intended to be a cultural homily by those who never earned the greatness to know any better.
We are celebrating “Deaf Awareness Week” in the USA as we honor the work and achievements of the Deaf on a worldwide scale.
There are few people in the world who are truly ambidextrous — my grandfather was one of them — I am not one. After Falling Down the Stairs and injuring my right hand, I was forced to find a new way to grab and hold things using my non-dominant left hand.
When you write a blog you always wonder who is reading you and why and if what you create is making a difference or not. Here in your favorite Urban Semiotic we work hard to provide you new thoughts in the form of fresh articles seven days a week. We average between 5,000 and 7,000 new words for your eyes and mind every week.
That’s a lot of original writing you get for free and it takes a massive effort to produce. Yesterday the following comment was published in our Info Area:
CBS News linked Urban Semiotic? What fantastic news! We live for links. 
We crave links. We are whores for links. Links provide relevance.
Links are validation that your thoughts and wonderings are shared by others with like minds or minds that enjoy challenging you on their site with their own musings.
One of the most vulnerable
minorities around us in the world are those who are Deaf and Blind.
Being Deaf — or just being Blind — is enough of a challenge to survival but those who are hit with both disabilities in the same body are truly the world’s misbegotten and they deserve our highest protection.
There are approximately 40,000 people in the United States who are deafblind. Hearing and vision are the primary senses through which we learn and collect data. Hearing is the basis of communication and 80 percent of what we learn is through the visual sense.
Continue reading → Stalking Sexual Predators in the Deaf-Blind Community
Today I will provide a warning in an admonition I hope you will accept my correction in the healing spirit in which it is offered. I have a lot of friends and associates that rely on dogs — Service Animals, if you will — in order to live a more average life. These special dogs are raised by families as puppies and only the most dedicated and pure-of-heart dogs make it into a lifetime of service.
The other day Janna went into one of the local shops in our Jersey City neighborhood to buy some food. Janna is Deaf and she usually chooses not to use her voice with strangers because if you use your voice then you are expected to vocally communicate on both sides of the conversation and that puts her at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding what is being spoken by a large immigrant population with many accents and unique vocalizations that are impossible to always comprehend and interpret.
As medicine begins to move forward faster than our shared ability to comprehend the implications and dangers of science moderating morality, we are left alone to fend for our private values precisely as they are being publicly challenged by the preferences and prejudices a brave new round of Eugenics embodying the embryo stage of reproduction in a new movement I call “Proactive Natural Selection.”
Continue reading → Embryo Eugenics: Proactive Natural Selection
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