Grendel's Kitchen » Watching

We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot

Grendel — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:39:15 +0000

On On February 14, 1990, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission, to turn around to photograph the planets of the Solar System. One image Voyager returned was of Earth, showing up as a “pale blue dot” in the grainy photo.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan the significance of the photo know as A Pale Blue Dot.

Click here for We Are Here: The Pale Blue Dot (subtitled).

Cocker captioned for the clear-headed!

Grendel — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:00:48 +0000

Joe Cocker at Woodstock: captioned for the clear-headed! With requisite shot of Li-Li blogging at the Apple Store …

“All I need is my butt and I …”

WPvideo 1.10

We’ve come a long way, baby

Grendel — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:54:42 +0000

Update: on The Daily Show, Kristen Schaal says that the media treats Hillary Clinton like a Hooter’s waitress, so she strips to the Indigo Girls to end the sexism. Take that!

Say Goodbye to Hollywood — 3 seconds of fame

Grendel — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:52:05 +0000

I grew up on Long Island, and entered high school during the heyday of the wide post-Farrah side flips (”feathering”), with its straight down the middle part, well before bangs started flipping up high and back. MTV had launched its very first videos and local bands started filming everything they’d ever performed in cheesy bars, bringing in friends and their little sisters to make up an audience. Billy Joel would frequently attend his nephew’s (and my younger brother’s) little league games, so we very dutiful teenage sisters who never missed a game were enlisted to spend an afternoon wearing tight black and white shirts and even tighter dry-cleaned and pressed Calvin Klein and Jordache jeans, holding unlit cigarettes and half-filled glasses of colored water in the dank fog-machine-driven cloud of smoke in a dingy bar in Huntington while Billy Joel and his band repeatedly played “Say Goodbye to Hollywood.” The filmmakers hadn’t counted on the tears: the heavy fog and humidity in the sweaty room caused our audience’s great big mass of hair to go horribly limp (the stiff hairsprayed approach wasn’t yet the rage)!

At the very start of the clip you can almost see Billy in tie and coat and his band with flipped up collars (and hair) in the distance over the top of what looks like my unusually large head, which is pretty much centered in the frame when I swing my many layers around to speak to the person to my right (this was pre-mullet, and yet so close…).

I don’t think the song itself was a rocking hit with our barely-teen aged crowd — we weren’t yet cynical or luxuriating in hormonally-driven depression.

Faces of ASL-CI Users

Grendel — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:43:24 +0000

I don’t yet know who made this amazing video found at the ASL-Cochlear Implant Community site, but I adore it!!

WPvideo 1.10

Better than the Wiggles

Grendel — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:39:05 +0000

First, a gratuitous shot of Li-Li and Tess:

Then, a “Beautiful” video, interpreted into ASL by D-PAN — and I think that’s Rosa Lee!:

And next, not exactly my cup of tea, and not suitable for young ones, but very cool interpretation nonetheless:

WPvideo 1.10

If a television commercial airs on Super Bowl Sunday and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Grendel — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:11:54 +0000

Holy cow! From CNNMoney, looks like the Performance with a Purpose campaign is putting its money where its hands are:

On Sunday, February 3, television viewers will be checking their volume controls when PepsiCo airs a 60-second commercial filmed in American Sign Language (ASL), with open-captioned text for the benefit of all viewers. The spot was created by and features PepsiCo employees who are members of EnAble, an employee network whose mission is to promote a more inclusive environment for people with disabilities. Slated to air on the pre-game show on FOX, the commercial features Pepsi-Cola and Lay’s Potato Chips, but its real mission is to bring awareness of the American deaf community to a wider audience. PepsiCo also will sponsor the closed captioning of FOX’s entire Super Bowl broadcast.

See “the making of Bob’s House“ at Pepsi’s site.Update (via DeafRead.com): here’s the ad on YouTube: Bob’s House and here’s the “behind the scenes“ clip

From D-PAN: Waiting on the World to Change

Grendel — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:35:10 +0000

WPvideo 1.10

I want to hold your hand

Grendel — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:41:31 +0000

What a great way to introduce the wee one to great music using ASL, her primary language! We can’t tell yet if she’s hearing the music, but although he likely thinks of Li-Li as a spooky little Frankenstein since she has the dreaded CI, we still think Mike’s signing rocks it.

WPvideo 1.10

Sesame Street music video extravaganza

Grendel — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:26:04 +0000

We watched some great vintage Sesame Street videos this evening with the little one! Billy Joel and Marlee Matlin with Don’t Go Changing:

WPvideo 1.10

And my all-time favorite — Mahna Mahna:

WPvideo 1.10

and REM’s Furry Happy Monsters:

WPvideo 1.10