Riding the backs of giraffes for laughs is all right for a while

[austin_dern]

Given the choice I'll watch TV with the closed-captioning on. If I'm not watching the screen it's irrelevant, but if I hear something I don't quite get I can look up and the words will be scrolled off as I watch. My father likes closed captioning too, mostly because he can't hear anything except me watching my shows after 11 pm and this lets him see what's going on. It'd be on all the TVs in the house except that my mother can't stand it. In her case there's a perfectly normal minor psychological disorder for it: she can't force herself not to read words that her eye catches, and the continual flashing of words up on the screen means she can't half-watch TV and half-do anything else. Combine that with wanting to read a book and there's a hopeless conflict.

But the captioning is on in my bedroom, at least, where a TV was installed as part of a chain reaction I can't quite understand in which my parents got a new HDTV in exchange for some house work that my father did, and we threw out the TV set which had been in the living room because it was over a decade old and had imaginative new ideas for what colours everything should be in a process that required my finding where the recycling center was and then tossing the television set into the compactor, and somehow we had a new TV in the living room that wasn't either of these and now I think the TV in my bedroom is the one that used to be in my parents' bedroom, which is fine since it was the one I got for my grad student apartment back in 1995. You see why I'm confused.

All of which is preliminary to the minor thing which had me watching the set in wonder and fascination: on Boomerang was a block of Pink Panther cartoons, and someone had thoughtfully close-captioned all of them. So there was a steady stream of >> [ BLAM ] >> [ PLINK PLINK ] >> [ WHAM ] throughout the show. I'm curious whether the closed captioners like doing these cartoons because there's so little dialogue (Aaron Sorkin shows must be a real pain to transcribe) or whether it's a nuisance finding the right onomatopoeia for the occasion.

Trivia: Several days after his mechanical-scan television first succesfully broadcast his first TV image in 1924 (of a Maltese cross) John Logie Baird was evicted for failing to pay his rent. Source: Please Stand By: A Prehistory Of Television, Michael Ritchie.

Currently Reading: The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned From The Market's Perfect Storm, Robert F Bruner, Sean D Carr.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I have trouble not paying attention to an active TV even if it's not captioned: While I can avoid it, i have to be intently avoiding it, and usually I just head to a room without it if I don't want to watch whatever Mom'goose is watching.

TiVo has worsened this to the point where I will actively pause shows like America's Test Kitchen for minutes at a time to let Mom and I converse, then restart it, then twenty seconds later she'll have one more thing to say and pause again, and then have to deal with her saying "Well let the show play!". I can't pay attention to TV, and someone else, ably. Especially as rapid remote-pressing on TiVo condenses down commercial breaks to about eighteen seconds.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Huh. While I like letting my eyes touch the closed captioning I don't feel like I'm missing much if I do look away. Admittedly, I don't have my main focus on the TV when I mean to do something else, but I'm a very ... radio-oriented mind, if you understand.

I do pause the Generalized Tivo when people are talking, particularly on the phone; this has been known to irritate my father when he's not the one being talked to. But I'm not generally in a rush for whatever I want to watch either.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, if I'm on the computer and, say, listening to Mom'goose watch TV I can do that. But my multitasking abilities break down rapidly. I can barely handle listening to, say, Car Talk on podcast while talking on FurryMUCK; I realize I've been paying attention to the latter and missing the former, and have to rewind, and go back again.

Mind, if it's actual broadcast radio, I can leave it as pleasant background noise.. but I don't think I actually own one of those anymore, outside of the car.

No wait, yes I do. The iPod dock/alarm clock also serves as an AM/FM Radio.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The Tivo has spoiled me to expecting I can jump backward a few seconds on everything I might be listening to, which makes radio (air and Internet) a bit less pleasant than it would be back when I didn't know any better.

There are some activities I can't do in parallel to watching TV pretty easily. Curiously, they're not always ones that go along with composing or understanding narratives.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I've noticed closed captioning varies widely in quality. A lot of reality shows, in particular, seem to use some kind of speech-to-text software that completely screws up two words out of three.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There are quite a few companies, yeah. I know a guy who used to work for Vitac, which does many shows including for a while late night talk shows, and so picked up various working secrets from there. For example, for the late night talk shows, he had to work from just the audio feed with no scripts or video to use as reference.

Probably not surprising anyone is the transcribing is done with a sound-based, syllabic keyboard like what court reporters use. So when a word does get screwed up, it's almost certainly going to disassemble into a rough sound-alike. This is probably what gives the speech-to-text software effect.