My NEW Amusement

Hoo-boy, am I ever having fun with this!

It started out from necessity, having my ears a bit plugged, so in order to catch the dialogue on the TV and not disturb the neighbours, I turned on the captioning option.  I’ve left it on just for fun, though some days it’s more a strain not to bang your head than it is a giggle.

If you ever want to see what kind of impoverished vocabularies people who have gone through our dumbed-down reading and English classes have got, then this is the way to do it.  Some of the mistakes are simply hilarious, as on one of Sir David Attenborough’s bird shows, where he was talking about a budgerigar, and it came up on the captioning as bugery guard.

Sometimes the captioning is so bad, that I wonder how those who rely on it solely have any clue as to what is really going on!  I’m not talking about the odd – or even more – typo, as I know if I had to keep up my keyboarding to the speeds some of those folks talk, it might look a lot like Hungarian.  But things like on the newscasts, countries’ and people’s names spelled so wrongly that if you didn’t already know what they were talking about, you’d never guess at all from what was written.

For those of you who need some cheap thrills and astonishments, turn on your captioning.  It can really be a hoot!!

It’s about time!

Just heard that the recently publicised report on Tazer use by the RCMP was highly critical, both of their usage and of the safety of the implement itself. And that was with 16 pages removed from the report that they wouldn’t make public.

It’s about time! I have written before about the seemingly indiscriminate use of Tazers by our police forces. Last year 22 people died after being tazed, and from what can be seen on the news reports, most of them weren’t doing anything that a translator, a doctor, or a bit of time wouldn’t have solved. There was no need for what they have been calling ‘non-lethal’ force. And as we can see, that force is clearly anything but non-lethal.

Now never let it be said that I’m unsympathetic to the job our police forces do. They daily face stresses and dangers that the rest of us can only imagine. BUT what seems to be in short supply in their training is a bit of common sense – or else a strong directive from on high that just because they have a new toy is no reason to use it for everything, everywhere.

I could say a lot more about the seeming inability of the adrenaline junkies on all the forces to remain rational during a rush, but that will be a topic for another day.

Keep well.

Civilian rights and dash cams

I’m beginning to wonder why we’re not seeing more legal charges against police officers with the use of dash cams in the cruisers.

I sometimes watch those TV shows – World’s Most Amazing Video-type of program – and frequently they’ll have a show that seems to be mainly taken from police cameras. I simply cannot believe what I see there.

Recently there was a sequence where two police officers completely emptied their revolvers at an unarmed, fleeing person who had been pulled over for some minor infraction and then gotten stupid and resisted (not violently) and run. It was pretty scary too, to see that those bozos didn’t hit anything once with all those bullets. What if they had really needed to hit something to save their lives? Who is training these incompetents?

There have been countless videos showing police officers needlessly crashing their cruisers into a suspect’s car and doing major damage to both vehicles and to both drivers. Who pays for these cruisers that they ruin without need? And since it seems that they crash them either out of a disinclination to have to chase the guy if he exits and runs (it’s also amazing how many *really* fat police officers there are) or out of adolescent spite and testosterone overdosing – who chose these guys to be peace officers in the first place, and who is making sure that they are fit to remain in that position?

And for those police officers that aren’t really fat – has anyone else notice that some forces seem to have these Schwarzeneggar types pretty consistently? I know the stories of steroid use/abuse on the police force in my own city are in every hard-core gym in town, and just looking at the types that are on some of the other forces, it’s pretty obvious that Mother Nature is getting a large helping hand. Are these guys ever tested for steroid abuse when thy flip out on some poor citizen? Are they tested for anything? Ever?

Pretty scary stuff . . . . and that’s before we even start talking about the recent (over)use of Tazers and stun guns, which seem to be turning out to be just new, shiny, fascinating – and dangerous – toys for big boys, and they can’t resist using them whether they need to or not.

I asked a police sergeant I knew years ago, out of curiosity, how many men he was in charge of.  He gave me the strangest look, and said “Only two.  The rest are animals.”  If that’s the situation in ‘Toronto The Good’, how much more dreadful must it be in other places?

Not yet ready for prime time

Why is it that so many tech toy and computer companies seem to get away with putting things out for sale that are completely unready to be used? They seem to do it over and over again, from what I read, and I have problems accepting the fact that these corporate decision makers have no more respect for their customers than to throw them in as lemming beta-testers for each new product that they want to appear to have beaten their rivals to the market with.

Have consumers taught these companies that they can get away with this kind of disrespectful behaviour – and repeatedly? Are there people so desperate for the next new thing that they’ll buy it whether it works or not?

I had forgotten how often I had read these things when I bought my Archos media hoo-hah before Christmas. After numerous software upgrades and the tech support phone number being removed from the website, I gave up. It sits here, in its little black bag, unused, with it’s owner hoping that they’ll get their act together before I go off on the long trip I bought it for.

BAH!!

And if you want to see what happened with that, and the service -or lack thereof- that I endured on my trip from both Archos and Sony (why did I ever buy anthing from Sony when I know their reputation is so bad?) you can check it out on my trip blog at: grannym.wordpress.com