Does it seem slightly, just slightly, mind you, incongruous that while we deplore the display of the Confederate flag in any and all public facilities (particularly those in the South) we can glorify it with a representation of a Civil War re-enactment?
That’s the thought that struck me as I saw the full front-page article in Saturday’s Life section of this newspaper, concerning the weekend activities near the Veterans Memorial Museum. If this activity were to take place anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, it’d be called to be inappropriate at best. Some might even say unpatriotic, vindictive and in poor taste.
I guess it’s true that the winners get to set the rules, no matter what the subject or activity happens to be. My goodness, that’s almost un-American, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s just what we, as humans, do best.
I was about to say that I’ve never wanted to re-enact a war or don medieval armor and joust a bit with the Society of Creative Anachronism, but I certainly can’t condemn the urge to do some roleplaying, given all the years that I spent acting on the stage as both an amateur and part-time professional.
I’m always astounded anew whenever I read about the estimated 2.5 million casualties, sons, brothers and fathers — both North and South — in order to wind up back where we started: one nation, indivisible, etc. And we have to remember that all that carnage was accomplished with single-shot, muzzle-loading weapons. Think what they could have accomplished using the over-the-counter weapons we have today.
Enough of that. I have a new hobby, and you’re certainly encouraged to join me. First, some background: I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have a hearing problem, rather severe in some respects. Oh, I hear instrumental music clearly and crisply. The same goes for mechanical noises.
The problem is that I have difficulty understanding the human voice. The spoken word is transformed into a series of undecipherable noises in my brain. For that reason I rely heavily on closed captioning on the TV for any spoken words.
When closed captioning was first tried, it consisted of a very fast typist who could transcribe the spoken word into printed script. Like everything else, this crude beginning has been electronified (if that’s a word) and it’s all done by computers now. A robot computer hears a word spoken, recognizes it from its memory bank and prints it almost instantly.
The drawback is that everyone does not speak clearly and distinctly, (especially teenage girls) and the computer sometimes gets confused and prints out something totally different in meaning.
I started collecting some of those bloopers, hoping to someday fill out a column, but fate is interfering. The first two examples were, as I remember, hilarious, but my air conditioner fan apparently blew them off the table beside my recliner, and I can’t find or remember them exactly. They WERE hilarious, though, I assure you.
Then there’s the one which I wrote down in such a hurry that I can’t decipher my scribbles. One I do remember had to do with one of the recent outbreaks of forest fires. The newscaster was relating how two acres of land had to be evacuated. The way it appeared on the screen, though, was “two nakeds have been evacuated.” I should hope so.
So here’s what I propose: if you spot any of this sort of thing on your TV screen, please send them to me at the email address right about here, at the end of this column.
Another exercise in how to get some people ticked off at you.
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
