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| Planet earth is blue, and I could really go a chicken laksa. |
So as it's been almost a month since my last confession, I thought I'd unload the torrential backlog of errata, before settling down to write something more substantial. To refresh everyone's memory, I live caption TV, through a combination of typing and talking into a microphone, and blog about it. "Mishaps" posts like these document the absurd mishearings made by an otherwise brilliant piece of voice-recognition software called Dragon which will one day become self-aware and enslave us all. The "offline" ones were corrected before air time, the live ones went to air as glorious accidental defacements of the whitewashed surfaces of the professional television network.
So without further achoo, here are the latest Mishaps from your humble RC.
I've posted before about the wonderful silliness of offline captioning televised Catholic Mass. I recently captioned some episodes for the Advent season, which tragically may signify an end, for now, to this rich vein of delightfully Pythonesque religious mishearings. Anyhow, the virtue of "devotedness" became altogether more pragmatic (if perhaps a little fetishy) by becoming "devoted nurse."
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| That was not the most safe-for-work of google image searches. |
I know the Christmas season brings its familial conflicts, but the idea of getting on with "Christmas reparations" still seems a bit drastic. The analogy of the shepherd obviously tends to crop up from time to time, but I admired Dragon's moxie when, in the spirit of Ronald D Moore, the religious analogy was projected into space. So we had the shepherd "gently lead the mother ship". "Messianic cheeses" also appeared (In Gouda We Trust?).
Things took a sharply progressive turn during the creed when, rather than affirming the canonic status of the saints, Dragon declared a belief in "the communion of sex". In the spirit of Christmas, the infant Christ was "by Sears foretold" (their catalogues are certainly illuminating, but their flair for prophecy is so often overlooked). Back in the Old Testament, I was surprised to learn that the father of nations will be "a broom".
The bisyllabic "blessed" continues to delight - "the acid is he who comes in the name of the Lord" sounds like the plot of a Ben Folds song. In the same spirit, while "O Most High" is an apostrophe to the heavens, "though most high" is a striking disclaimer.
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| What happens in Denver stays in Denver. |
We had some religious silliness actually go to air as well - the Bishop of Rochester was waxing conservative, but Dragon attributed his opinions to the "airship of Rochester". And of course, crossing the spiritual gulf, we observed the holy month of "run and gun".
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| Sweet. |
Captioning the weather always leads to some corkers - the pace at which meteorologists extemporise leaves no time for correction when captioning live. So in no particular order: Tomorrow's weather in the Midlands will be "nowhere near as human". Which can, one assumes, only be a relief for those in the Midlands. One day recently the weather rose dramatically, but an overcaffeinated Dragon decided on "roaster manically".
Ex-Hurricane Bertha spent a lot of time approaching the British Isles, but when it got there, the low pressure system settled over the "reddish piles". The word "temperature" is a fraught one too. The way I pronounce it, there's just a fraction of a second of silence after the first syllable, which gets Dragon's knickers in a twist. So we had "temperatures rose" come out as "the frigid rose", which sounds like the name of one of those ice bars where a girl named Inga serves shots in glasses made of ice.
Finally, I use a house style for weather which autocorrects a whole lot of words often used in the forecast. It's important to take it off when the weather is done though, as I discovered when just after the weather "my dad is really funny" was autocorrected into "my damp is really sunny".
Offline nature documentaries continue to offer fantastic blunders. We had a "reading program" for endangered pandas, which I can only guess is so that they can decipher the Kama Sutra and get cracking. We had meerkats, who I discovered stand upright to "watch out for creditors". I guess "hakuna matata" is no way to manage one's finances. The echidna, by contrast, "uses its spikes to deter editors". I guess he's on a deadline. Still on weirdly bureaucratic wildlife, I was surprised to learn that kangaroos use their pouches to carry "juries".
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| We find the defendant adorable. |
More great mishearings in offline cooking shows as well. Some lovely dishes are sweetened with agave, but for far rarer fare, discerning chefs use "a Garbo". Well, she was great in Anna Christie, and not too syrupy.
"Two eggs, lightly Britain" seems a little much for a Spanish omelette. A home-made mayonnaise came with the serving suggestion "add it to a salad or some savages". Perhaps Dragon intends to trade fine condiments for a sturdy canoe. "Nanna and chocolate" seem like fairly troubling ingredients for a smoothie (need a hell of a blender). And I think it's well past time to turn down the heat on the roux once the "brothers melted".
Finally, an incidental instruction took a surprising turn when "just to go into the mix" came out as "just a goat into the mix". While one can presumably cook goats whole, I felt the lack of preamble was disconcerting. Cooking got a bit ideological too - "you've left this little bit for me" became "a leftist little bit for me".
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| Submitted without comment, comprehension. |
Finally a selection of random bits and pieces from live news. The less said about Netanyahu the better, but when he was asked about "proportionality", Dragon made it a question of "Porsche and Audi". Guess genocide goes better with nice cars. I was weirded out to discover my Dragon didn't know the words "Loch Ness Monster" at all, it became "lot less monster", which does, I grant, reflect Nessie's critically endangered status.
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| Ruh-oh. |
The Ebola outbreak is desperately difficult to manage, but I was alarmed at the proposal to pursue "excremental drugs". Still, anything to contain it I guess. Christopher Reeve made the news in relation to his friendship with Robin Williams, but my Dragon thought I meant Pakistani politician "Mr Sharif", who has to date appeared in far fewer Superman films. Rather subtly, Russia's threat to withdraw from the International Space Station may herald the end of the era of "space without Borders". I guess an orbiting book store with convenient coffee shop would be kind of neat, a weird thing to threaten the West with though. Dragon struggled a bit with antonyms lately as well, suggesting that "love will triumph over Kate".
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| Surely nothing can triumph over Kate. |
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