A Not-Not Public Service Annoucement

I briefly co-hosted a sports talk radio show at my college, and every so often we were required to read PSA's (public service announcements). My co-host did the announcing. In retrospect, I could have memorized a few and done it myself, but it wasn't my top priority.

Anyway, my friend Andrew (who will hopefully write his own contribution to the blog soon) passed along this information for people with vision issues. I'm well aware that most people who read this are fully sighted, but if you know anyone who isn't, please pass this along... and thanks, Andrew!

We are looking for highly motivated and talented participants for the 2010 IISE course. To be able to reach blind and partially sighted potential candidates around the world we would like to ask you to send a small IISE advertisement to the friends and people in your networks. Please find below the advertisement in English. On the following link you can find the same advertisement in several languages: Advertisement IISE .
If your organization happens to have a Braille magazine, we’d be delighted if you could run the advertisement. Thank you very much for your help!

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Attention! Attention!

Are you a blind or partially sighted person over the age of 18?

Do you experience social discrimination?
Is it your dream to change and improve the situation?
If yes, the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs (IISE) is the right place to be.
The IISE seeks to empower people, especially blind and partially sighted, to become social entrepreneurs in your communities.

Candidates from all over the world who are at least eighteen and older and who can read and write English are invited to apply for this one-year program before the 30th of June 2009.

Computer literacy training, public speaking, fund raising, and management are some of the courses offered here.
For more information please visit our website at http://www.bwb-iise.org/

You can also write to file:///G:/aproject/ABWB/BWBnew/ENGLISH/BrailleWB@gmx.net or per regular post to:

Braille Without Borders - IISE
c/o P. Kronenberg
Vivekanenda Nagar, Vellayani, Ookode, Nemom PO , TRV 695020
KERALA, INDIA

or fax your questions to: Fax 0031848307904

Google Can Map My Heart

Thanks to Google Maps, I will get to work tomorrow.

Having grown up in a gridded borough, I get a little confused when I get to Brooklyn. In fairness, I think everyone does. But sometimes I forget, despite its location in the city of New York, that Brooklyn does not have a convenient system of numbered streets and avenues that tell you how to get where you want to go.

This is where Google comes in. Whenever I'm Brooklyn-bound, or really whenever I'm going somewhere new, I like to scope out the territory on Google Maps. If I know a few street names and can mentally walk the path from the subway to the destination, it makes the journey a lot easier.

The only problem is that, for the most part, it's hard to tell north from south when you step out of an underground subway station. This is where the Street View tool comes in handy. Store fronts make excellent landmarks, and if I can see them ahead of time, I can orient myself before I start walking. This saves a lot of wrong-way travel.

I'm teaching at a school in Brooklyn Heights tomorrow, and although I've been there before, I haven't gone alone . Also, the path to the subway was a little complicated, so I didn't remember it. Google has allowed me to look around the outside of the subway station, walk down the correct street, and slide right up to the door of the school without getting up from my desk.

Now all I need is a Google tool that will allow me to teach my class without leaving my apartment. It's a theater class, so I'm guessing that one is only in the R&D stage.

Subtitles 2: The Reckoning

Sometimes, the crowd is wrong. That lone, piping, contrarian voice is the one you ought to listen to. I was reminded of that last night.

Even before the Oscar buzz, I had been interested to see Slumdog Millionaire. Several friends had seen and liked it, and some recommended that I see it. One friend did warn me, by email, that a good portion of the film was in Hindi. But three or four others shrugged it off, saying that the subtitles were only in passing, and that much of the film was not subtitled.

"You'll understand what's going on," they assured me.

I should have been suspicious of this. It's the same language that people used to get me into Fellini films. But I went with the crowd.

Sure enough, more than half of the first half of the film is subtitled. Worse than that, the parts that are subtitled are the parts of the film that actually forward the story. I had no idea which young child was playing the main character as a boy. I had no idea that he and the other boy were brothers. I knew there was some kind of awful treatment going on, but not why or for what purpose. I did figure out what had happened, but not until the second half of the movie, which is completely in English.

It's hard for me to define where the line is between films that rely too heavily on subtitles for me to understand them, and films that have subtitles but do not depend on the viewer to read them. I will say this, though: Slumdog crosses the line, and Gran Torino does not.

For various other reasons, I think Torino is a much better film anyway. Apparently, the Academy disagrees. Maybe, in this case, I am that lone, piping voice in the wilderness. Or maybe I just don't like Bollywood.

Yes Wii Can

I can, at least. Sort of.

The first time I played a Wii, I figured out pretty quickly that bowling was my game. I'm not a terrible bowler in real life, but I'm a better Wii bowler because it doesn't require any vision at all. You just press a button and move your arm. I can see well enough to tell what pins are left, but even if I couldn't, I would do what I do in a real bowling alley: ask someone.

Wii Baseball and Wii Tennis do require some eyesight, mostly for the timing. I may never get the hang of the baseball game. Much like real-life baseball, it really does help to see that little ball moving through the strike zone so that you can hit it. Tennis might be another story.

This weekend, I played tennis -- doubles -- and helped my teammate sweep every match. I'm still not sure how I did this. I was able to sit close ebnough to the screen to see the basics, but a lot of it was guesswork. Maybe the rhythm of the ball is predicatbale enough for me to guess correctly. Maybe my teammate sent psychic messages. Whatever the case, we won a lot, and I really did not screw up too often.

For the record, real-life tennis is my worst sport. At least I used to watch a lot of baseball. An old friend used to insist to me that he could teach me how to play. He might be right, but if it meant running around on a clay tennis court in the summer heat, I woudl probably have to pass. The Wii allows you to play in room temperature. I prefer that.

Subtitles

People used to tell me I should see Fellini films. The conversation would go something like this:

FRIEND: You should see Eight and a Half.
ME: Isn't that in Italian?
FRIEND: Yeah, it's amazing.
ME: I can't read subtitles.
FRIEND: You don't have to read the subtitles. It doesn't really make sense anyway.

Well, I saw it, and I'm pretty sure it made about 100% less sense to me than it did to anyone else in the room. Call it a wild guess, but I'd surmise that the subtitles did help a little.

Fully-sighted people don't understand just how helpful those little words at the bottom of the screen can be when every word of the film is in a foreign language. I do speak French, but I don't understand it when other people speak more than a sentence at a time, so I'm pretty much relegated to films in English. My French class took use to a film about a French queen once, and at the end of the movie, I figured out who the king was.

Having said all that, it's also pretty distracting to sit in a movie theater and have somebody whisper the subtitles in your ear. It's necessary sometimes: I went with friends to see Kill Bill, which we expected to be in English, and half of it turned out to be in Japanese. Had it not been for my roommate reading me the subtitles, it would have been a lot like Fellini (except for the bloody sword fights). But I do prefer to just watch the film and pick up on what's said by the context, if possible. I'd rather just hear the actor speak and concentrate on the stuff I can see.

I saw Gran Torino last night. There were a few subtitles, but it was brief, and I could tell the tone of the lines without knowing the actual words. People did laugh, and knowing the subtitles would have clued me in to the specific joke, but it was funny to me too. And, luckily, they stopped subtitling once we saw the Mung families through the old bigot's eyes. I thought it was great.

Incidentally, my favorite film set in a foreign country is Lost in Translation. There are no subtitles. We're all in the same boat.

I Am Backwards

I just might defy science.

Dr. Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite all-around thinkers. I've been reading his latest book, Musicophilia, which describes a bunch of neurological oddities he's come across that have to do with music. Even if you know a bunch of these stories (as I did before starting it), it's still an interesting read.

Anyway, I just finished a section on people who lose their vision and, consequently, gain musical talents. I've never been a musical genius by any standard -- maybe I'm not blind enough for that -- but I do have a good ear and can make a pretty good sound on the cello. It's not the blindness, though.

Here's the thing: everyone in my family is a musician, and I'm the only blind-ish one. In fact, I probably have the least interest in music of anyone in my family. My musical tastes are broader: I like and know a lot more about rock and jazz, and my grasp of contemporary classical music (nice oxymoron) probably outdoes my mother and sister. But when it comes to the actual attraction to and practice of music, I lag far behind.

My parents were both born into non-musical families. My father was a conductor, a cellist, a pianist, an accordion player, and a music educator. He could look at a page of a score and immediately say what piece it was from. He would sit on subways and read orchestral scores the way most people read novels. My mother trained as an opera singer, studied music teaching at Harvard, taught choruses, and currently plays the flute as an experienced amateur. My sister majored in violin at one of the top conservatories in the world, and now plays with orchestras and chamber groups.

Me? I did take cello lessons for sixteen years, many of those by choice., but never even considered a career. I scraped by to get through recitals. In orchestras, I faked my way through rehearsals, memorizing the tough parts but guessing at the rest. No one confused me for a professional, and if anything, I got away with more because people knew I couldn't read the sheet music.

Long story short, losing vision did not make me a better musician. I do have the ability to recognize music pretty quickly, but I blame that on my family upbringing and my genetics, not on the eyes.

Dr. Sacks would be so disappointed. But, on the bright side, I just found out that we live in the same ZIP code. I might see him around the neighborhood. Or, at least, I might bump into him.