410: Late Night News and Coffee Roundup

I had way too much curry last night, so I had some extra time to check out the news...

OBI-WAN, PROTECT ME DEPT: OK-WARN is a new emergency service specifically designed to warn Deaf people in case of emergency:

"About 80 percent of the deaf and hard of hearing population feel uncomfortable because they feel they don't get the proper notification in an emergency event," said Comanche County Public Information Officer Chris Killmer.

That's where OK-WARN steps in. OK-WARN is sponsored by the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management and the National Weather Service--Norman Forecast Office. OK-WARN will send out a page to pagers, cell phones, even email when an emergency or weather event occurs in your area.

I believe they're starting to do this in cities across America. Isn't technology wunnerful? Geo shares his perspective.

HOT GERMAN BOMBSHELL WILL BLOW YOUR MIND DEPT: In the San Francisco Gate, a cool article about a Deaf therapist...

A doctoral candidate in psychology, she's doing her internship at San Jose State University, where she sees 16 to 20 students per week. Some are vexed by relationship problems, others by the stress of exams and heavy course loads. For foreign students, loneliness and cultural isolation are big issues.

They confide in Ulrike, even though she is deaf and requires a sign-language interpreter to be present at each therapy session. Deaf since birth, Ulrike came to the United States from her native Germany 21 years ago. She's fluent in American Sign Language, or ASL, but says she can't lip-read English speakers the way she can German speakers.

STILL HAVING TO PROVE ASL IS A LANGUAGE DEPT: It's old news to most Deaf people that we spend a significant portion of our lives having to convince and re-convince others that ASL is, yes, a language. Banjo and Ben Vess take their turn stepping up to the plate. (I want to include some hearing people in the capital D crowd - my friend the Butterfly once, in medical school, contradicted an idiot who said that Deaf people couldn't think because they couldn't speak to think and therefore didn't have language to think with, or some such nonsensical bullshit. So you see, it's not just us.)

YOU CAN'T PUT THAT UP YOUR NOSE DEPT: DeafAdvocacy.Org discovers the government actually blocked something related to cochlear implants... what do you think it all means?