Not All Who Wander Are Lost

"movie magic for the hearing impaired"

There's no question that "talkies" leave the deaf out in the cold...a fact which, in turn, has for decades left our own enjoyment of cinema ever open to some politically correct idiot ready to corrupt our moviewatching experience in the name of that illusory mistress "fairness."

But rather than settle for the obvious overly PC, easy-to-ridicule requirement that would block some of the picture of every movie with open, visible-to-everybody captioning, courts are taking a sensible approach to accomodating the deaf. Coming soon to a theater near you: legally mandated rear-window captioning, a nifty "closed" technology which in no way interferes with the traditional moviegoer's experience (and which is far too complex to explain here, so click on the link already and prepare to be amazed by Rufus Butler Seder's verycool invention).

To be fair, this will add the cost of the technology to everyone's ticket price. But though this make the recent rulings tenuously legitimate by our usual PC-watch rules -- because the accommodation does impact our overall movie experience (cost-wise, even if not the watching of the movie itself), and because the slippery slope here would necessarily need to eventually include adding the cost of tapes describing the scene for all blind movie-goers as well, right -- I, for one, applaud the compromise, and hereby declare a willingness to pay the extra ten cents so that my hearing-impaired friends and students can avoid that long-time segregation-not-accommodation stopgap, the "special showing for the deaf."

Meanwhile, those looking for more traditional idiocy in the PC realm need go no farther than Puyallup, the Seattle-area school district which has cancelled all Halloween activities and observances, from posters to costuming, on the grounds that "Halloween celebrations and children dressed in Halloween costumes might be offensive to real witches" -- thus taking the fun out of Halloween for the rest of us in order to protect not Wiccans, but stupid people who don't know the difference between witches and Wiccans.

Comments:

Oh, how cool is that?! Yay! Hmm...I wonder if it'd work for foreign films too? You know, the ones that are in another language and that put up the translation underneath in TEENY TINY lettering that the legally blind like myself can't read, forcing me to turn to the person in the next seat and go "What's that say??". I must be so annoying. And its not only foreign films. Any movie that uses an "alien" race that speaks its own "language" that must be translated. It's quite annoying for everyone concerned. Think it'd work for that?
Anne
http://muddyblog.typepad.com

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:42 AM, October 22, 2004

What, you don't speak Klingon? Pity...no Oregon County interpret job for you!

(http://www.allforums.net/history/topic1951-1.html)

# posted by

boyhowdy : 12:02 AM, October 23, 2004

No Klingon, no. Neither do I speak Lakota, Scottish, or Middle English. Sad for me, no?
Anne
http://muddyblog.typepad.com

# posted by

Anonymous : 4:20 PM, October 24, 2004