Full Transcript
JJ Hunt:
What was important to us when we were coming up with a title for this podcast that both sides be referenced.
Jeff Thompson:
Please welcome, from the creators of Talk Description to Me, JJ Hunt and Christine Malec.
Christine Malec:
Neutrality is something we’ve discussed at length, and is neutrality the best goal? And it’s an important goal, but there are times when neutrality is just not appropriate.
JJ:
-and I have a little bit more of an understanding of what people with vision loss or people who are blind or low vision actually want to hear, not just what, you know, the sighted describer thinks they want to hear.
Jeff:
A collaboration of an artist and cultural consultant and an audio describer. Descriptive conversations of current affairs from around the world.
Christine:
In the discussion about Aunt Jemima, that’s an example of where the cultural context had been completely lost on me, as well as the visuals.
Jeff:
And now, the creators of Talk Description to Me, JJ Hunt and Christine Malec. We hope you enjoy.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson. In the studio today we’ve got the creators of a new podcast that’s actually out right now and you can go get it, it’s called Talk Description to Me.
Christine:
Hi, my name’s Christine Malec, I am a Toronto-based, sort of an arts-and-culture consultant within the blind community, and I’ve known JJ for a couple of years, and we’ve been pals and we chat, and we’ve worked on events together, and we would have these conversations where we’d be talking about current events and he’d come up with these descriptions and I’d think “Oh my gosh, that gold was just lost because only I got to hear it.” And in COVID times, when we had more time to talk, we both got really interested in talking about current events and what they look like, and so we came up with the idea of Talk Description to Me as a way to take those great conversations we were having and to share them, because as a totally blind person there’s a lot in the news that I’m curious about. So, you read something, or you watch something, and they’ll refer to things that don’t get described the way that they might be described in a movie or a TV show. So, with so much going on in the world, I was full of questions, and JJ is fantastic at being full of answers, and so the idea for our podcast grew out of conversations we were already having. So, our first three episodes are available and I’m really excited about them, they’re, I think they’re really quite- even if I wasn’t involved, I would say “Hey, that’s really cool.”
JJ:
I’m JJ Hunt, I’m a describer by trade. Usually I describe movies and television and museum pieces and galleries and live events and tours and things, but lately I’ve really been curious about what else can we describe, where can we place this description skill set, where can we apply these techniques all around the world? And, yeah, so as Chris said, we were having these conversations that were just very descriptive about the world we’re currently living in, and we’d done a few little things together through some of her other groups, so through the CNIB, and we got the idea to kind of formalize it a little bit, and be proactive, and start asking other people “What are you interested in hearing described, what part of the world that we’re living in right now is falling through the cracks? What would you like to hear described?” and so we’re launching this podcast, and I’m really excited because as a sighted- I presume as a describer to have some idea of what people who are vision impaired are going to want to hear described, but that’s just a guess. I think the smarter way to go about it is to ask, and say, “What do you want described?” and then we’re going to try and do it. And that’s one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about my friendship with Chris, is that we can talk about this stuff—she can tell me from her point of view what’s interesting and what’s not, and frankly put me in my place, which she does quite well, let me know “You might think, but actually, this is the interesting thing. What you’re telling me is great, but, like, what about this side-track, because that’s where my interest lies,” and so I’ve always appreciated that, and I think that comes through sometimes in our conversations.
Jeff:
I think it’s really cool—I dug in a little bit, and the one on branding you talked about Aunt Jemima, as she’s being retired, and Uncle Ben’s, and when you asked “How do they look, what do they look like, what’s the objection here?” you went into the history of- you broke it down. It was just a neat conversation between you two, how you broke it down and brought it out, and let someone who, too, may not have realized the significance of what that symbolic bottle of syrup was all about.
JJ:
Yeah, yeah. Well, with something like Aunt Jemima, you know, first of all it can just be a name. If you don’t have an image, if you’re not someone who’s interpreting the world in a visual way, then the image to the logo, the image to the name, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything to you. So then it’s just a name, floating around. When you have an opportunity to sit back, first of all, hear a description of some of those images, both the contemporary ones and the historical ones, and then you get the context for the history, well, it changes everything. And that was one of those moments where I was talking to Chris, and she had said, like, I think she says in the podcast something to the effect of, like, “I guess I intellectually knew that Aunt Jemima was Black, but it hadn’t really occurred to me,” and that was one of those lightbulb moments where I was like “Oh, I don’t get it. I have to listen here, because I am being told something about how people who don’t interpret the world visually do interpret the world, what matters to them,” and as a describer that means an awful lot to me, I have to listen, because as a describer I do a lot- spend a lot of time talking.
Christine:
One of the ways that I think the podcast works so well is, and this is something I respect so much about JJ’s work, my first experiences with JJ professionally were when he was leading described walks through Toronto, and so it’s kind of like a tourist walk that you might do, except it’s geared towards people with sight loss, so he’s describing things as we go, but JJ can’t just stay on the surface and so we’d be talking about planning these things and there’d be hours of research and I’d think “Ok, well, you’re just describing, I’m not really clear what all the research is for,” and then I’d go on the walk, and he would put the building he’d just described into this fabulous historical context, and so there’s such an element of storytelling in a lot of what JJ does naturally, and in the discussion about Aunt Jemima, that’s an example of where the cultural context had been completely lost on me as well as the visuals, and so when we have conversations about things like taking a knee- so in a lot of the protests, and I think this started with the football players, during the national anthem taking a knee, and this phrase was being used all over the place and I just said “I don’t know what that means, what is-” so he would- he described what it looks like in one of the podcasts, but then I had to, we had to hash that out a bit because for me, kneeling evokes, in my head, these things like prayer, or proposing marriage, or submission, how does this all work? And so it’s not just the images that are in front of you that are relevant. I think when you’ve had sight loss, particularly if you’ve been blind since birth, maybe, there’s a whole cultural context in there that you’re going to miss. So, you can have an image described, but it doesn’t mean as much unless you can say “So when they do this, it evokes this,” or reminds me of that, or it’s referencing this cultural icon that you might not be aware of if you’re visually impaired, and I think that’s where a lot of the depth and the satisfaction comes from in our conversations, is that you take a visual image and you parse it out, and so you describe it but you also put it in a context that makes it easier to understand.
JJ:
I was also surprised when we were having conversations that were about big and important things like taking a knee, like the protests, it didn’t surprise me there that the context was so important. But what surprised me was when we started to talk about some fun things like Justin Trudeau’s hair, our prime minister here in Canada had been giving these daily briefings-
Christine:
Oh, true.
JJ:
-and every day he’d come out and address the nation, and his hair would get a little longer and a little longer every day, and it became a bit of a national pastime to enjoy beautiful Justin Trudeau’s hair. And so we were talking about how that looked, and I was realizing just how much the visuals of Justin Trudeau’s hair were keying us to moments of his past, because he comes from a political dynasty, we’ve watched him grow up from a kid, so seeing his hair at different lengths was keying us into moments from his youth, and I didn’t realize that until we sat down and talked about it, until we were talking about those visuals, and the context for those visuals, like “Oh, yeah, that’s why we all have such a warm affinity for watching his hair grow out, it’s- not only is it humanizing, not only does it make him seem more like us, but we’re remembering, like, little Justin Trudeau, and we’re remembering teenage Justin Trudeau,” and so the act of talking it out, the act of chatting about it with Chris, I learned so much about it, it’s been fantastic for the funny things as well as the deep and heavy things too.
Christine:
That’s a great example, because some press is made out of his looks, he’s a good-looking guy, he’s pretty young, and in Canada he is the son of a former prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, and so, yeah, very much an iconic people, family, images for Canadians, and that was definitely an aspect that I hadn’t considered. I actually read about Trudeau’s hair in the New York Times, of all places, it was quite surprising to me, I was like “Oh, that’s funny,” and I hadn’t really heard about the sort of public pastime of watching him, so I asked JJ “Well, what is this about,” so hearing that whole background of the cultural context of Canadians knowing what Justin looked like through his life and what his dad looked like, that was completely new to me, and yeah, those are the kinds of fun discoveries and explorations that come out, just, all JJ and I have to do is start talking and these things come out that are interesting for both of us and for other people as well.
Jeff:
I’m listening to this and I’m thinking “I want to go listen to this podcast,” and I’m realizing this is the podcast, and it’s like, this is good, you guys are talking, just-
Christine:
We could do this all day!
Jeff:
Talk Description to Me, I like the title of it, how did you come up with the title?
JJ:
Oh, man.
Jeff:
Uh-oh!
Christine:
JJ?
JJ:
We were just, we went on and on, like how can we- so what was important to us when we were coming up with a title for this podcast that both sides be referenced, that it wasn’t just a podcast about description, and it’s not just a podcast about how you see the world when you’re blind or vision-impaired, it was the conversation. So we needed a title that bridged that, and had all of it, and Talk Description to Me, I mean, we’re both a little bit irreverent, and we both like to- our conversations can get a little bit blue sometimes, which they don’t on the podcast, but we- so we thought, let’s give that a shot! The only problem we had with it was, you know, of course one of the reasons we’re doing this podcast now is because of the heavy state of things in the world, there are some very serious issues that are being thrown about on social media and in the world at large and we wanted to be talking about those things, and so we had to get over ourselves a little bit and say “It’s going to be okay, we can use this as our title, this is a reflection of who we are, the kind of conversations we’re going to be having, even if we’re talking about heavy things, even if we’re talking about important societal things, there’s still, in our conversation, a bit of a playfulness,” and it works for us as friends and I hope it works for the audience as well.
Christine:
That’s something that I’ve thought about, that we both have discussed, is that episode one, it just, like, boom, you’re in the middle of heavy duty, very- the most difficult kind of material, and we’ve talked and thought about how to make a balance, because this isn’t a fluffy, bubblegum kind of podcast, you know, there’s lots of room for fluff in there, but as JJ said, these are serious times, there’s a lot of very important, difficult things going on the world, so we do want to have a balance, between the very important, impactful serious stuff, and more less impactful stuff, so the title, yeah, that’s a good way to put it, it’s kind of a reflection that we…part of it I think alludes to the rapport that we have, and I know a couple of people who’ve listened to the podcast have remarked upon the conversational nature of it, and it sounds like you’re just eavesdropping on a conversation between friends, which kind of essentially is what’s going on. So the title is, yeah, a little bit alluding to the lighthearted side, but the podcast definitely does have some pretty heavy content as well.
Jeff:
Well, I think you both have a great ability for conversation, I feel like I’m the one eavesdropping right now. It’s good—when I went through the titles at first, I was like “Wow, this is heavy, this is stuff a lot of people might say ‘don’t touch that,’” you know, but- you’re digging into it, but you’re doing it in more of an explorative way—is explorative a word? In a way that actually, as someone who’s visually impaired, sometimes I want a little bit more description than what people just saw, and “Here we are at the national park, blah blah blah,” and they just say something and it’s like, huh. You’re left on your own, you kind of drift off a little bit, but listening to how you guys, as I said it before, you give a little piece of the history of it, you dig deep into it, and the conversation, it seems to me like it really works and it’s current events and it’s right now, but it’s not the heavy side where you’re going to- someone’s going to, like, either object to something. You’re being very objective, and I really like it.
JJ:
Thank you, yeah.
Christine:
Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that, because- and JJ will have stuff to say about this as well, actually JJ more so, because neutrality is something we’ve discussed at length, and is neutrality the best goal? And it’s an important goal, but there are times when neutrality is just not appropriate. And so we both understand the privilege that we live within our own ways, and we approach these topics with a great deal of respect and care, and so our goal is the objectivity that you referenced, so thank you, I’m glad to know that we’ve sort of achieved that, but when you’re talking about George Floyd, and describing the videos and the images, how can you be neutral about that? And so that neutrality and objectivity is something we’ve discussed, and JJ, you have to deal with that more, because you’re actually doing the describing.
JJ:
Yeah, it’s really tricky, because, you know, I come from a describing background where I’m describing TV, I’m describing movies, I’m describing pieces of art, and you have to be neutral and objective about that so that the people who are listening can make up their own minds about this piece of art means or what that gesture meant in a movie or television show, that’s a key part of audio description. And I want to bring some of that to my descriptions in, you know, when we’re talking about what is the look of a police officer these days? It’s not fully for me to tell you to be scared of the militarization of the police. I’m comfortable saying that police officers have a militarized look, that’s an assessment that I’m comfortable with, but I’m going to try and tell you that in a way that allows you to decide if that’s appropriate or not, or if it’s over the line or not. But then when you get to something like the George Floyd video, as Chris says, like, I can’t in good conscience describe that in a way that is emotionally neutral. That feels wrong, it just feels inappropriate, so in moments like that, or, you know, describing the branding of some of these sports teams that have absolutely, positively, objectively offensive caricatures as their mascots, I can’t possibly describe that and try to be neutral and be like “Hey, I don’t know where you lie on the political spectrum,” but for me, no, that’s one of those times where I’m going to draw the line and I’m going to say “Here’s how I feel about that,” and I’m going to tell you how I feel with the tone of my voice, with the vocabulary that I choose, and then Chris and I are going to talk about it, and we’re going to, you know, share some uncomfortable laughs about some of these outrageous images, and so we have to, in order for our conversations to be vibrant we have to have some sort of opinion. We have to be engaged enough, we can’t be totally neutral, which is a shift for me that I’m still kind of feeling my way around as a describer, you know? That’s a new one for me, it’s a new place for me.
Jeff:
Both of you—Christine, you’re an author, songwriter, creator of arts, and creating this podcast or working with this podcast and the topics of it, it’s right up your alley, and JJ, being a storyteller and a describer yourself, you know, some people might think “Oh, you guys just started a podcast,” but actually, you both kind of started this a long time ago, about your interest in current affairs, topics, what to write about, what to talk about, but JJ, usually as a describer you get a script, and you have to insert bits and pieces, so I believe the city tours let you embellish a little bit, so you’ve been building to this podcast where you get to inject your thoughts as well.
JJ:
Absolutely, and it is something when I’ve been, it’s been four or five years that I’ve been doing these tours, and I’ve been collecting all of my material, and you’re right, building is the right word for it, like the first few tours I did, again, it was one of those cases where I thought I knew, right, I came out there, I wrote some scripts about some parts of Toronto that I thought people who were vision impaired would love to hear, and, you know, folks were gracious enough to come along even though I didn’t really know what I was doing and led these tours and I got some very positive feedback, and some of the feedback I got was I just had to really listen to responses. So a favorite example of that—I think Chris, you might have been on this tour—we were downtown walking, downtown Toronto, walking along King Street, and there are streetcars on King Street, and this was at a time in Toronto when we had just been replacing our old streetcars with these brand new ones. And so I wrote fantastic, what I thought were great descriptions of the vintage streetcars, the new, kind of futuristic-looking streetcars, really nice descriptions. So we get to the spot where the streetcar goes by, I’m smart, I know to wait for my audio cue, so the streetcar goes rolling by with its very distinctive sound, and the doors open with the distinctive pings, and when they go by I’m like “Okay, great, I’m going to launch into my description of the streetcars,” and I start telling people what they look like, and there’s a wire that’s running overhead with a wheel that’s collecting power from there, and I keep going with my descriptions, and I think someone kind of coughed, and said “Excuse me, a wire overhead?” I said “Yeah, yeah, so the streetcar, it’s an electric vehicle and there’s a wire overhead, that’s where the power comes through, and there are some crossing wires as well that support that, but anyway, back to my beautiful description of the streetcar!” Someone else said “Wait a minute, wait a minute—there’s a grid of wires over our head right now?” And I said “Yeah, yeah, most downtown streets that have these streetcars on them have grids of wires.” And people were fascinated by this! So, like, I have lived in Toronto my whole life, and I had no idea-
Christine:
I remember that.
JJ:
-there’s a grid over my head, and I’m thinking “Okay, I could be offended, because I’ve got these beautiful descriptions of streetcars that no one wants to hear, or I could be smart, and listen to what everyone else wants to hear about.” So then I babbled on for five minutes about, like, wires overhead, and so that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been trying to collect on, that’s the kind of knowledge I’ve been trying to build on so that now when we have the opportunity to have these kinds of conversations hopefully I’m a little- my tuning’s a little bit better and I have a little bit more of an understanding of what people with vision loss or people who are blind or low vision actually want to hear, not just what, you know, the sighted describer thinks they want to hear.
Christine:
And I think that actually the next tour you did was sort of un-glamorously promoted as the infrastructure tour, and so it was a walking tour but there were things like you described postboxes with paintings on them-
JJ:
Yeah.
Christine:
-and the sidewalk furniture, and things that as visually impaired people moving around the city we’re completely oblivious to-
JJ:
Yeah, yeah.
Christine:
-so I do remember that, that was really interesting.
JJ:
I had a great time, I remember we stopped in front of a church on that second tour, and I gave like a little snapshot description of this church, and the stained glass windows, and the stone that it was made of, and I said “But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the sidewalk.” And then we started talking about the sidewalk and how it was covered with these old pieces of gum that had blackened over time, and there were, like, markings from four or five different public works departments, blue spray-painted lines and yellow spray-painted lines, and I had found an article that broke down what different lines and markings meant from what department, and so we ignored this beautiful church, and instead we stared at the ground and we talked about the gum and we talked about these hydro-markings, and to me that’s as interesting, I love that stuff, and so I was quite pleased when I learned that other people were going to be interested in that too.
Christine:
It was a hit, it was a hit. Our ambition is to- well, my ambition is to, which I’m trying to get JJ to- I think JJ’s excited about it too, is a people-watching tour.
JJ:
Yeah, yeah!
Christine
So all we have to do is go sit in an urban park, and JJ’s just going to, like, talk. But the problem is that people can hear you, you know, so we’re working out the headset model.
JJ:
Totally, you need the headsets, and like, as a person who’s talking, as long as you’ve got like an earbud in, you can say whatever you want, people are going to, “Oh, he’s in his own private world,” but yeah, I think if we all are in- if we do some kind of live broadcast where everyone’s hanging out in different parts of the park with their own headset on, and I just describe “Okay, there’s a family of four walking by, oh, the little kids really sulking,” like, you know? I’m with you, Chris, I think that’s fascinating, that’s the kind of stuff that people don’t get an opportunity to do.
Christine:
Well, one of the tours you did just happened to be on Mother’s Day, and at one point we were in an alley or something and you said “Oh, there’s a gentleman walking by with a big bouquet of flowers.” And the guy was very gracious, he didn’t get offended, but it was like “Oh yeah, it’s Mother’s Day, there’s probably a lot of people walking around with flowers.”
JJ:
That’s right, that’s right. Were you there for the Christmas walk, in the Distillery District, when Santa came by?
Christine:
Oh, of course, that was fabulous!
JJ:
Oh my god, I couldn’t believe this, Jeff, so we’re like downtown, we’re in this really picturesque area-
Jeff:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. So there is a Santa.
JJ:
Oh yeah-
Christine:
Oh, there sure is-
JJ:
-and he came to visit just us, just us!
Christine:
He’s in the southeast corner of Toronto. There is a Santa, that’s where he is.
JJ:
So we’re doing this, you know, this Christmas tour, this walking tour, in an area of Toronto that is very Victorian, the architecture is beautiful and Victorian, and so they do a Christmas market down there. And so we’d been doing our tour, going from place to place, looking at the different vendors who are selling Christmas-y treats, and we’re putting those Christmas-y treats into some cultural, historical perspective and whatnot, and suddenly this guy walks by, and I couldn’t believe it, it was as if I’d planted him. He was a big jolly fella, and he had a, you know, a huge white beard, and he had on like a black and red checked suit, like a lumberjack Santa. And I just- my mouth dropped, I’m like “Sir, would you mind- may I please-” and he very graciously stood there and let me describe him, and then I can’t remember, one of the participants was like “Oh, come on, the white beard? Come on, can I touch it?” And so someone came forward, the guy was so lovely, and he let people, like, touch his beard, so that they could, like- “Come on, is that really a guy? You’re not just saying this, because it sounds Christmas-y?” and like, I swear to god, Santa just showed up for our tour.
Jeff:
I want to invent a smart cane with JJ in it, so every time I tap something-
Christine:
I know, right?
Jeff:
-like, usually you just tap something, it’s shrapnel on the sidewalk, but now, if you tap it, it’ll go “This is a postbox, it’s covered in paintings.”
Christine:
Oh, god, a smart cane with JJ in it, that’s priceless-
JJ:
Oh, there you go-
Christine:
-so great-
JJ:
Make some good residuals off of that, I think.
Jeff:
There you go.
Christine:
[laughing] Oh my gosh.
Jeff:
So, Talk Description to Me, I think this is perfect for both of you, it’s a great fit. From what I’ve listened to so far I’m just riveted, you know, I’m just diving into it, and it seems like an innocent dive in, in a sense, for me, because typically if I get an article it’s going to be one side, or what paper did this come from, so I like, like what we talked about, the neutralness of it and the honesty that’s in it as well, so- and it’s current, you know, you’re not diving back, like the Victorian tours are interesting but this stuff is right now. Perfect timing, perfect timing.
JJ:
Yeah, it’s- I mean, how of the moment it is I think going to be essential to the listenability, because people have questions about the world as it’s unfolding, and it’s unfolding in all kinds of crazy ways right now, and so giving people an opportunity to dive into these descriptions and then take them and apply them to the things they’re reading and seeing and hearing about online and in their world. Hopefully it’s not just a podcast that is fun in the moment, but hopefully it is also something with some information that can be carried forward with people’s- you know, throughout their day, and give them an opportunity to understand some of the other things that they’re hearing about with some context, and with those descriptions fully intact.
Christine:
And we definitely want to hear from people about what they’re curious about-
JJ:
Yes.
Christine:
-so one of the things that motivates the podcast is my curiosity, which I’m always wondering about something, and so we definitely want to know what other people are feeling gaps around, and what other people want to hear about, so we encourage anyone who’s listening to this or to our podcast to get in touch and just say “Hey, have you thought about doing some description of” whatever topic, or, and it doesn’t have to be super, you know, impact- like we talked about seasonal things, like cherry blossoms or tall ships or the color of the leaves in the fall or something, so it’s current, but it doesn’t have to be terrible.
JJ:
No, that’s right, we even had someone who somewhat recently- it was a part of a different conversation, had asked about jazz hands, someone had referenced jazz hands-
Christine:
Oh, yeah!
JJ:
-and I thought “Oh yeah, we should make sure we get that on the show at some point,” like gestures, what are all these gestures that people make and reference, you know, the bunny ears, the jazz hands, what if we do a bit about that. We’re open to all kinds of things.
Jeff:
Like dragon boat.
JJ:
Yeah!
Jeff:
It just sounds like it’s a dragon, right?
JJ:
That’s a good one, I like that. Oh, yeah, we could definitely do some- I mean, boats and ships and trains, I was thinking newspaper or magazine covers, there’s been some great graphic design in magazine covers, and, yeah, people are throwing some interesting ideas at us.
Jeff:
And what makes Vikings so different than any other group, you know? It’s really interesting.
JJ:
Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah-
Christine:
It’s the axes. It’s the axes. Just kidding, I don’t know anything.
Jeff:
I’m from Minnesota, we have the Minnesota Vikings, and I was thinking, as other football teams are changing their names and stuff “Vikings!” and I thought “I don’t know.”
JJ:
You know, that’s a great idea. As different sports- like, as different sports enter- you know, go live again, talking about breaking down some of those logos, breaking down some of those designs, that’s a great idea.
Christine:
And it’s so interesting, that- is anyone challenging the Viking name, and if not, why not? Okay, topic for a different podcast, but still-
JJ:
It’s true! Well, I mean, the Edmonton Eskimos, they’re looking at their name, and, oh! So I like to think- so, Washington, after we did our podcast and we talked about the Washington Redskins, which is not even a term that I relish throwing out there even in reference to the team itself, but they drop the name after our podcast, I don’t think it probably had anything to do with us-
Christine:
[laughing] Not yet!
Jeff:
So humble!
JJ:
Give us a bit.
Christine:
Not yet.
JJ:
But then they- I love that they just announced their team name for a little while, like until they come up with a good proper name, now they’re known as the Washington Football Team. And I’m like “Oh, really? I hope you didn’t pay the marketing team too much to come up with that, that’s a, oof.”
Jeff:
Yeah, they really, it’s something.
Christine:
Well, it gets the point across, anyway.
Jeff:
So yeah, there’s been actually, some radio stations have been going out there like, someone said “How about the Senators?” Well, that was a baseball team, that was-
JJ:
Yeah, the legislators.
Christine:
You’ve still got the hockey team-
JJ:
Yeah, there’s a hockey team, called the Senators, Ottawa Senators.
Jeff:
I think Seattle just came up with the Krakens?
JJ:
Yep, the Krakens.
Jeff:
Kraken!
Christine:
Oooooh!
Jeff:
What does that mean-
JJ:
It’s like an old-timey fish and chip shop, you know-
Christine:
It’s a sea monster.
Jeff:
Oh!
Christine:
Isn’t a kraken a sea monster?
JJ:
It is, it is. It’s a giant octopus, or a giant squid or something. But the font that they’ve chosen-
Jeff:
And this is how these podcasts get started, right?
Christine:
Yes!
JJ:
Exactly!
Christine:
That’s exactly right!
Jeff:
See, I want to know what a kraken is, I was like “Kraken?” I had to just draw from what I was thinking, I was just thinking “Is this a wrap, representing, name, is this…”
Christine:
Well, that’s right, because you could google it, even, and read a, you know, it’s a sea monster, lalalala, here are 59 images, and you’d still be no better off because it’s just going to throw- even Google is just going to throw pictures at you, so, yeah, that’s exactly where the podcast comes from, is those gaps, where I go “Okay, I just googled that, but that didn’t really help, so JJ, what’s a kraken look like?”
Jeff:
From dragon boats to krakens-
Christine:
Episode four, the kraken!
JJ:
That’s right, that’s right! I like it, I like it.
Jeff:
JJ, Christine, this has been great talking to you, the new podcast, Talk Description to Me, go check it out, it’s on all the platforms, I believe.
JJ:
It is, it should be by now.
Christine:
Yep.
Jeff:
Yeah, you can just click on it, subscribe to it, and dig in because it’s a good listen. Thank you both for coming onto Blind Abilities, and sharing this with the world.
JJ:
Well, thank you so much for having us, it’s been fantastic.
Christine:
Yeah, thank you, it’s always great to chat with you.
Jeff:
Such a great time talking to these great conversationalists, JJ Hunt and Christine Malec. Be sure to go out and check out the podcast, subscribe to it, Talk Description to Me. Big shoutout to Chee Chau for his beautiful music, thank you Chee Chau. And from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times, to you, your family, and friends, stay well, stay informed, and stay strong. I want to thank you for listening, hope you enjoyed, and until next time, bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with the blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities. Download our app from the app store Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
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