For several months now, our television has been displaying those “closed caption” subtitles even though we don’t want them.  We just can’t figure out how to turn this feature off (we’ve tried all the obvious stuff on all of the menus, but nothing works.)  It can be annoying, especially when I’m watching my beloved UFC (mixed martial arts) on Spike TV, because the subtitles run across the top of the screen, inevitably cutting off the head of a fighter at just at the moment he gets clobbered with a spectacular spinning back fist.  So when Joe Rogan yells, and the screen displays, “WOW!  Did you see that punch!”, I tend to yell back at the screen, “NO!  I DIDN’T!”

But there’s a benefit to closed captioning: the hilarious errors that the computerized transcription system generates.  Tonight, for example, on the 10:00 news, there was a feature on President Obama’s tribute, earlier in the day, to Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.  Except that, at the moment the announcer said, “today, President Obama honored the legacy of Lincoln,” the closed-caption subtitle read, “today, President Obama honored the legacy of Lenin.” 

I suppose that this could have been something other than a computer error.  For example, there may be a real live person who’s responsible for typing in the transcription, and he could have been spelling-disabled (which reminds me of the joke: “Two dyslexics walk into a bra…”) 

Another possibility is that the transcriber is unhappy with what he considers to be the socialistic implications of the Wall Street bailout, and, in the grand tradition of the Boston Globe staffer who inserted the headline “Mush from the Wimp” over an otherwise sober editorial about Jimmy Carter, was committing a nasty little political grafitto.  If the latter is the case, I suspect he’ll be getting a bit of a spinning back fist of his own from his bosses tomorrow morning.

 

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Tags: ends & odd, trusted media & news // 3 Comments »