am psyched a bit silly right now. just got signed up to Apple’s Developer Program. finally can see the back door to the great mac. it’s all codes and lots of nuts and bolts but i admit my inner geek is really intrigued. (i am working with amazing people who know their way around. so i shall watch. observe. jot some notes.) and when i’m intrigued - it can mean a summer spent in the glow of my ipad/laptop/desktop and soon-to-come iphone. i am succumbing. i only want an iphone so i can activate my trigger finger on instagram. aha.

plus show weggaz (on instagram) that i snap some interesting photos.

and to the point: Apple Developer Program. for a mighty interesting (and secretive at this point) work project i’m whittling away on. more to come.

christine sun kim on reclaiming sound - love her concept (and how she puts sonic boom to use) 

i’m reading a very inspirational book by Christopher McDougall titled “Born to Run” which’s really well-written, with research made interesting and trimmed to the point. the book chronicles the author’s own experience in running and his encounters with the super runners of the world, the tarahumara indians of sierra madre in mexico. the book is loaded with lots of super protein information, some of them feels life-saving, but the message basically runs down to this: have fun with whatever you do with your body. your calculating brain needs to relax then everything follows suit. your billowing lungs, your beating heart. your everything - including the soles of your feet and your toe pads.

(“having fun” for the tarahumaras mean drinking lots of local corn-fermented beer and taking off for miles the next day)

so, no matter how long we spend hunched over our digital toys, there’s always time to go outside and have fun.

testing out the new Bamboo Create tablet by wacom. using photoshop elements. never will compromise real ink on paper but this is interesting. very interesting, indeed. i’m calling this drawing Cuatro de Mayo. 

A young prince lost his way in the forest and came to a cave. He passed the night there, and when he awoke there stood next to him an old woman with a bear and a dog. The old witch seemed very beautiful and wished that the prince would stay with her and marry her. He could not endure her, yet could not leave that place.

One day, the bear was alone with him and spoke to the prince: “Pull the rusty nail from the wall, so that I shall be delivered, and place it beneath a turnip in the field, and in this way you shall have a beautiful wife.” The prince seized the nail so strongly that the cave shook and the nail cracked loudly like a clap of thunder. Behind him a bear stood up from the ground like a man, bearded and with a crown on his head.

“Now I shall find a beautiful maiden,” cried the prince and went forth nimbly. He came to a field of turnips and was about to place the nail beneath one of them when there appeared above him a monster, so that he dropped the nail, pricked his finger on a hedge and bled until he fell down senseless. When he awoke he saw that he was elsewhere and that he had long slumbered, for his smooth chin was now frizzy with a blond beard.

He arose and set off across field and forest and searched through every turnip field but nowhere found what he was looking for. Day passed and night, too, and one evening, he sat down on a ridge beneath a bush, a flowering blackthorn with red blossoms on one branch. He broke off the branch, and because there was before him, amongst the other things on the ground, a large, white turnip, he stuck the blackthorn branch into the turnip and fell asleep.

When he awoke on the morrow, the turnip beside him looked like a large, open shell in which lay the nail, and the wall of the turnip resembled a nut-shell, whose kernel seemed to shape his picture. He saw there the little foot, the thin hand, the whole body, even the fine hair so delicately imprinted, just as the most beautiful girl would have.

The prince stood up and began his search, and came at last to the old cave in the forest, but no one was there. He took out the nail and struck it into the wall of the cave, and at once the old woman and the bear were also there. “Tell me, for you know for certain,” snarled the prince fiercely at the old woman, “where have you put the beautiful girl from the parlour?” The old woman giggled to hear this: “You have me, so why do you scorn me?”

The bear nodded, too, and looked for the nail in the wall. “You are honest, to be sure,” said the prince, “but I shall not be the old woman’s fool again.” “Just pull out the nail,” growled the bear. The prince reached for it and pulled it half out, looked about him and saw the bear as already half man, and the odious old woman almost as a beautiful and kind girl. Thereupon he drew out the nail entirely and flew into her arms for she had been delivered from the spell laid upon her and the nail burnt up like fire, and the young bridal pair travelled with his father, the king, to his kingdom.

This is a fairytale! I don’t know why I found this out around a month after the news broke out. I need to change my magazine subscription apparently, or start subscribing to the Guardian in the UK (my gratitude goes to all the artsy folk in London). 

So the good news? A diligent historian by the name of Franz Xaver von Schonwerth recorded, collected, and preserved stories from ordinary folk in then-Bavaria. He was doing it at the same time as the Grimm brothers but while the Grimms colored up the stories, Franz kept them as told, a trained historian at that! 

Some of the stories have been re-printed in a book, called the Prinz Roßzwifl (which translates into “Scarab beetle”), a perfect metaphor for finding buried treasure. I’m gonna dig the Amazon for that book!

(click on photo for the original article, and read on if you don’t believe my post) 

It’s a fairytale in itself!

DYUSA logo created by my sister Megan (see more of her talents on malzed.com)

Great example of a bilingual logo that came before Gallaudet’s. 

In 2007, I was pursuing my masters in Deaf Studies (concentrating in Cultural Studies and Deaf History) and after debating several possible research directions, my passion for social justice pretty much ushered me into my thesis topic. It was after I got elected to the board of the World Federation of the Deaf Youth Section I realized we had a serious problem in America. There was no organized, collective, or a representative body for deaf youth - for us to voice out our issues, ideas, and unite in a common interest. I decided my thesis would be to investigate ‘Deaf Youth in America’ and it eventually led to an establishment of DYUSA. Here’s a link to the body of work and this here is the link to visual slides I developed when I presented and defended my thesis among the professors of Deaf Studies Department at Gallaudet University. In 2008 I got my MA. And hasn’t left Washington DC yet.