Say What?

One of the modern marvels of our age is closed-caption television. I'm not kidding.

Think about it. If you are a deaf person, or even a hard-of-hearing person, it must be a godsend. I always used to wonder how horrible it would be to be deaf and not be able to enjoy televison. Yes, I know there are at least a thousand jokes you could make about that statement, but, you know, I guess I am a pod and I wonder about these things. I used to think, "Ooooh, I'll bet the hard-of-hearing love foreign films with subtitles - they can enjoy movies too!"

Then along came closed-captioning. And we rejoiced.

I mean, to think that there's someone there, transcribing every television show on TV, movies on cable, and everything else is one thing to marvel at. But, listen! Live shows! Awards shows, and sports, and well, and whatever else is live on TV. That's pretty damn cool.

And yet, in all this marveling, I'd never really used closed-captioning. Never felt the want or need to. In fact, always felt like I was kind of stealing if I did. You know: "Hey, this service is for us! You hearing people use your damn volume. Now, beat it, ya damn hearing people!"

That was, of course, until Mr M came along. Mr M is, well.... He's certainly not deaf. And I certainly wouldn't class him as hearing-impaired. It's more, he's got a bad case of the "huh?"s. You have to repeat things for him, especially if you have a godawful hick southern accent and say pen and pin and boil and bull alike (according to some cruel folks). And when we watch TV, he likes the volume up, and the closed-captioning on. (And as of yet, we haven't been attacked by any deaf people for using their service.)

When I'm at Mr M's, watching closed-captioned TV has become pretty much second nature. It used to be disconcerting because I'd be so busy reading I lost sight of what was actually happening on the screen. That was a short-lived phenomenon, though, thankfully.

However, there is one thing I can't seem to get past. There are some serious mistakes in the closed-captioning world.

Most of them have to do with names. Like when an announcer tells us a story about Nicole Kidman or Alicia Silverstone, we're likely to see their names appear in the captioning as "Nick Old Kid Man" or "A Leash Unsilverstone."

But there can also be errors in conversation. When someone in a TV show tells us he's through playing football, what we see in print is that he's "threw playing footbowl." Or "she herself went dancing" can show up as "she hurts elf wind dancing" when read instead of heard.

Then you've got those wacko weird days when either 1) the closed-caption machine is just fucking broken, or 2) the closed-caption typer is on peyote, or 3) possibly both. When these days happen, you get nuggets like this. When Dan Rather says, "Iraqi insurgents crossed into Tikrit today, shooting several US soldiers and destroying several buildings in the downtown area," what we read is "Zusszi inph0nt &fn78eU llllll8ehhrnwz ONENKDO3 Ohddln30$@3 svinUliqZ fo^dCifh¥r." The corresponding action when that happens, for me, anyway, is to just get drunk and enjoy the flow.

Then, there's the sin of omission. (Is omission in fact a sin? Can be, says I.)

It must be a bitch having to type rapid-fire conversation for a program that's an hour long, or a movie that's two, or, God forbid, a sporting event that's four. So you get a lot of omission of text in conversations, news, and the like. So where John Madden might be waxing poetic about a football (or footbowl) player and say, "You know, when he came out of college he was very highly touted by the scouts. But what with his knee and the lewd conduct scandal with the underage girls and the positive drug tests and the fact that he hasn't scored a touchdown since God was in the third grade, most people would agree his career has been less than stellar." When that comes up on the screen in captioning it's something closer to "He was highly touted by the scouts, but his career has been less than stellar." Loses a little something in the translation, if I may say.

A few days ago, I found myself on my own for lunch with no errands to keep me occupied. Normally when this happens I'll go home and do laundry, or sit and catch "Law and Order." But I was hungry this particular day and decided to go to a local spot for a sandwich. It's one of those places where, thankfully, they have a couple of TVs suspended from the ceiling (I say thankfully because it's hard for me to eat and read a book - my normal "out by myself" activity - at the same time). But these TVs are, of course, mute, and so we get to enjoy, depending on which direction we're facing, either CNN or the Weather Channel in all their closed-captioned glory.

So I'd gotten my sandwich and drink, and made sure I was facing the CNN side of the room, and I began to chomp and watch. There was a story about the missing student case in North Dakota, and the sheriff's office had called a press conference for later in the day. The anchorwoman was reading the ins and outs of the case and leading us to believe there might be a big announcement at this conference. So I'm reading along, and I'm reading (I'm paraphrasing here), "The press conference will be at 3pm. As you know the student has been missing since November and although someone has been charged in connection with the disappearance, he is no longer speaking to the police. Of this press conference an insider has said, and I quote - "

And it ended! It flat-ass ended on "and I quote!" How can that happen? That's like saying, "We're going live now to an announcement that will change the earth forever from this moment on," then never going there.

At first, well, after the initial shock wore off and I recouped enough to swallow my bite of sandwich that had lodged in my throat, I thought, "Well, the typer wasn't fast enough, ran out of time, and we're paying the price for it."

But then I began to think otherwise. What if the typer got sick suddenly? What if he/she keeled over and died? What if, in a complete Pythonesque stroke of bad luck, the hairy hand of a monster reached out and knocked the typer unconscious?

We'll never know. But such is the world of closed-captioning. In fact, and I quote -