#232: Larry Norman, Visitor

March 31, 2018 M.J. 11 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #232, on the subject of Larry Norman, Visitor.

I floated the suggestion on social media that I might begin a somewhat disjointed series of my recollections of the Christian Contemporary and Rock music scene in the late 70s and early 80s, and it was well received, so I’m going to begin. It seems that one cannot begin such a discussion without Larry Norman, so that is where we will start.

First, though, let’s clarify my credentials. I was in high school from 1969 through 1973 (that’s four years, fall to spring), and although the east coast was a long way from the center of the action, the Jesus Movement had hit our town hard, so I knew a fair amount of the music of the time. I then attended two Christian colleges in succession, and after obtaining two degrees in biblical studies along with a lot of exposure to the music my peers were hearing, I tried out for an established Christian band (more on that later) and in 1979 took a job as a disk jockey on a Christian radio station, WNNN-FM, which a short time before my arrival had been ranked the #12 CCM/Christian Rock station in the country, and just before my departure was said still to be on the short list of fifty radio stations which Christian record company promotions people made sure to call every week. We reported our top songs to the magazine then called Contemporary Christian Music Magazine, which later shortened its name to Contemporary Christian Magazine but kept the CCM logo. More significantly, during that span of five years and a month I heard every contemporary Christian recording released by a major label, and quite a few independent ones. I lived this music.

Of course, memory is imperfect, but it’s one of those things that the longer you think about a subject the more you recall, so we’ll be remembering a lot along the way.

Song title links are to YouTube videos; no representation is made as to whether they are legal copies.

Larry Norman Photograph by Michael Sierra upon induction to San Jose Rocks Hall of Fame

My problem with discussing Larry Norman is that I don’t really feel that I knew him all that well. I owned a pirated copy of the live performance of Sing that Sweet Sweet Song of Salvation (link is the studio version), and I must have heard other recordings of his. I jammed on Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus with some college friends who knew it, and knew Six-Sixty-Six, Unidentified Flying Object, and I Wish We’d All Been Ready–three songs strongly reflecting his premillenialism, the last of which made it into a few hymnals–but I was never a serious fan beyond recognizing his importance in the field. I attended a concert he gave at Gordon College, but only remember the conversation I had with him backstage afterwards (the gist of which is given in my previous web log post #163: So You Want to Be a Christian Musician); my wife says we heard him again at the Levoy Theater in Millville, New Jersey, but I do not remember so much as being at the Levoy. I can picture the cover of his cleverly-entitled album Only Visiting This Planet, but barely remember the title song and am not certain I heard any more of it than that. In the five years I was on the radio station, we never received a single recording from him, so although he was still touring for years (it’s what musicians do, apparently–I recently heard that Blood, Sweat, and Tears was playing at the Levoy) he seemed to have largely dropped off the radar by the early 80s. He died early in 2008 at sixty years old.

Still, his impact was never insignificant. He is known to have been instrumental in the salvation of early CCM folk-rock artist Randy Stonehill (and we did receive one album from him during those early 80s years). He was an acquaintance of Paul McCartney, and I recently heard that Bob Dylan came to Christ in Larry’s kitchen. He is said to have been the original Christian rock musician, and may well deserve the title.

On the other hand, it might well be argued that his early dominance can be attributed to a lack of competition. His at times squeaky tenor voice is an acquired taste, and his songs were mostly simple pop progressions and melodies with shallow lyrics–good solid evangelistic material, most of it, but not very competitive with the sounds that would come starting in the mid seventies. If you liked Larry Norman, it was almost certainly because he was the first decent alternative to secular rock and pop music, or because you had met him and heard him live. He was charismatic on stage, and well worth seeing in concert. He was a powerful personality off-stage, and a minister with keen discernment and an understanding of the people he met. His ministry counts for a great deal, even if his music is not all that remarkable.

And in heavenly terms, that’s what really counts.

Law and Politics

#231: Benefits of Free-Range Parenting

March 26, 2018 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #231, on the subject of Benefits of Free-Range Parenting.

I was completely stunned by an article reporting that Utah had passed a law protecting what is apparently called free-range parenting. I posted it to my Facebook page and got some feedback which jarred a memory and got me thinking. So here are some of those thoughts.

To clarify, “free-range parenting” means that children are not constantly monitored, but are given freedom to move about alone. To view it from the negative, what the Utah law does is state that it is not criminal child neglect or abuse to permit a child to ride a bicycle to school, walk to a park unattended, or wait in a car while a parent runs into the store for a few things. As one of my sons observed, his childhood would have been rather different had it been necessary for one of us to be watching him and his four brothers constantly. I don’t think my mother could have raised the four of us and maintained the house if she had been required to be able to see us at all times–and I’m sure we never would have been able to play outside with other neighborhood kids, never mind play in the woods.

One of those commenting suggested that this requirement of constant monitoring (which, he asserted, is very real) causes children to stay home using their electronic devices to communicate instead of meeting in the real world, and is helping raise a generation of people who cannot make decisions for themselves. That was the comment that jarred my memory, recalling for me another article on a very loosely related subject, about a study of primates.

I think the subjects were chimpanzees; they might have been a breed of monkeys. What researchers observed about their charges is that there were two types of mothers. One type paid very little attention to her children except when it was time to feed them, checking on them rather irregularly, just satisfying herself that they were somewhere nearby and not in danger. The other type was constantly keeping the children near, in sight, within arm’s reach, becoming concerned as soon as the child vanished for a moment.

Following from this, they noted that as the children grew, those who were given freedom of movement became bold and assertive, willing to try new things and explore new places, while those who had been raised by protective mothers became cautious and restrained, risk-averse. They became fearful, and in their turn became highly protective parents.

My first thought was that we want adults who are willing to explore, not afraid of the unknown. Then I remembered another unrelated but useful bit of information. It seems that the sensitivity of our gustatory sense (taste) does not follow a bell curve, as we might expect. That is, most people do not have median powers of tasting with some better and some worse. Rather, we have more of a horseshoe, that there is a group of people with highly superior gustation and a significantly larger group with very poor gustation, and almost no one in the middle. The source from which I learned this stated that this was good from an evolutionary perspective, because in an environment in which most things are edible a species that is highly social and communicative needs only a few members who can identify food that is bad, and the rest of us can simply eat what they approve.

How is that relevant?

Another of the commenters noted that he would not want his children wandering free in the neighborhood in which he was raised, at least as it is today. It is certainly the case that some of us live in rather dangerous places, while others live in relatively safe places. Granted that no place is completely safe and no place completely unsafe, the survival of the species is enhanced by having some members willing to take risks and explore while others are more cautious and protective. I know people who were kids on the streets of New York City and survived, who never really gave a thought to the notion that this was a dangerous place to live. Not every kid makes it to adulthood no matter where he lives. That some parents raise frightened cautious adults and some raise bold experimental ones is in that sense good for humanity. I might prefer to see more bold experimental people, but we need the cautious ones, too.

The problem is that our society has been moving toward a place where the government itself is becoming too protective, and so raising frightened cautious citizens. We attempt to coerce parents into being overly protective of their children, on the threat of sending them into foster care (which no one believes is safe). As I mentioned in my original comments, the worst thing you can do to a family in New Jersey is make allegations to what is perhaps not inappropriately called Die Fuss, that is, DYFS, the Division of Youth and Family Services. The intrusive investigations that follow from such allegations are always tinged with the threat that children might vanish into “the system” forever, giving them to paid child care workers in order to protect them from loving but not always fully capable parents. As another commenter observed, parenting is mostly a guessing game in any generation. We believe that our parents did some things right and some things wrong, and we attempt to do better, but also have to face public and official opinion concerning appropriate versus inappropriate childraising practices.

Utah has taken a positive step in the right direction here. Let’s make it clear that parents who give their children more independence at a younger age are not being neglectful or abusive, but are helping them grow into responsible and courageous adults. To do otherwise might be to deprive the next generation of the kind of people willing and able to lead us into the future.

Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning

#230: No Womb No Say?

March 23, 2018 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #230, on the subject of No Womb No Say?.

I read an excellent article by the President of Care Net, Roland C. Warren (pictured), addressing the question of how men who oppose abortion should respond to women who say that because they are incapable of becoming pregant they have no right to an opinion on the subject. Warren provides an excellent response, including first that those who use this argument want to include the opinions of men who agree with them but exclude opinions of men who oppose them (and in so doing agree with other women), and second that there are many issues on which people who are not directly affected still deserve to express opinions because we are indirectly affected. However, I felt that there was a very strong argument that he missed.

Let me be clear that, as I have previously expressed, men are not on equal footing with women once there is an unintended pregnancy; women have all the advantages. I note that I have never met a woman who was sent to jail for failing to pay child support for an unwanted pregnancy, but have known several men for whom it has happened and others who lost drivers licenses and went into hiding because they were unemployed and that’s a sure ticket to jail. Even if abortion were off the table, women would still have more options than men under current law.

Certainly men could say that. Yet I think there is a much more potent argument. I would ask whether men are permitted to have an opinion about vaginal rape.

I certainly think that vaginal rape is wrong, and I think it ought to be a crime. That’s not because of some sort of medieval ownership of women notion; it’s because, as I said in the other article, “anyone who has been raped has had rights fundamentally violated, quite apart from the problem of potential pregnancy.” The fact that I do not have a vagina should not mean I’m not permitted to have an opinion on the subject.

I recognize therein that the fact that my position against vaginal rape is my opinion means that others might have a contrary opinion. We have previously noted that the Marquis de Sade believed that rape was a correct and morally praiseworthy act, because nature made men stronger than women and it is therefore right that men exercise that strength against women. He managed to persuade some women to believe that as well, apparently. That there exists a minority who honestly believes rape is good does not mean that the majority of us cannot express our opinion against it and based on that opinion enact and enforce laws against it. Perpetrators of rape might think we ought not be entitled to our opinion, but victims and potential victims are likely to appreciate our support.

Part of that lies in the fact that the opinion that vaginal rape is wrong and therefore ought to be criminal is an opinion that defends a usually weaker victim against the assaults of a usually stronger attacker. We generally applaud those who come to the defense of the weak, even if they only do so by words and the support of public policies and laws.

Yet when it comes to the question of abortion, those of us who would defend the weaker party against the attacks of the stronger are told it is not our business. If the accidental but capable mother decides she wishes to kill the completely defenseless unborn child, the opinion of someone else supporting that defenseless child should not be considered relevant.

Yet if the powerful and cunning rapist decides he wishes to ravage the weaker almost defenseless woman, suddenly an opinion in defense of the woman matters.

Go figure.

Elections, Law and Politics

#229: A Challenge to Winner-Take-All in the Electoral College

March 18, 2018 M.J. 2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #229, on the subject of A Challenge to Winner-Take-All in the Electoral College.

We have frequently discussed the Electoral College, the system by which States send Electors to select a President of the United States. Much of that explanation appears in the page Coalition Government, compiled of several previous related articles. That discussion included the suggestion that the “winner-take-all” system for choosing Electors, adopted by forty-eight States and the District of Columbia, should be replaced, on a State-by-State basis, with a proportional system–and why such a change was unlikely to be made by any of them. (We more recently noted an opposite movement, an attempt to replace the State vote with a national vote that effectively eliminates the significance of any state, in web log post #203: Electoral College End Run, an idea having a much better chance of passing but which is probably unconstitutional.)

Now an organization called Equal Citizens has decided that there might be another way to eliminate the winner-take-all system and replace it with proportional representation: have the winner-take-all system declared unconstitutional. To this end, they have filed lawsuits against the practice in California, Massachusetts, Texas, and South Carolina.

That might seem like overkill. After all, wouldn’t one successful lawsuit fix the problem? However, it probably wouldn’t.

Suppose they filed in Texas and won in Texas. There are four Federal District Courts in Texas, any one of which would do, and victory would mean it was illegal to assign all thirty-eight of that State’s electors to the candidate winning the majority vote–in Texas. At that point they have to hope that the State appeals the decision to the Fifth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, and that they win there. If they do, it will be illegal not only in Texas but also in Louisiana and Mississippi. However, it will still be legal in the rest of the country.

In order for it to become unconstitutional nationwide, the Supreme Court of the United States would have to decide the case. That means getting the Court to hear the case, and as we know the Court is rarely forced to hear any case and might prefer to stay out of this one. The best shot at getting Certiorari at the Supreme Court for a case like this is to get decisions in more than one Circuit which hold opposing positions. That is, they need one court to say it is constitutional and another to say it’s unconstitutional, so that the Supreme Court will see that it is necessary for it to resolve the matter for everyone. That means in filing four lawsuits they are hoping to win at least one and lose at least one, at the appellate level.

In theory, they could win an effective victory if they won all four suits, as States might see that as an indication that other circuits would agree and avoid a lawsuit by complying with the change. However, compliance would only be mandated in those circuits where the decisions were made, and additional lawsuits might be needed to change some recalcitrant States.

So how can a practice that is so nearly universal (only Maine and Nebraska do not follow it, and they both use district voting, that is, the state is divided into sections each of which picks a representative elector) be unconstitutional?

The argument is based on the XIVth Amendment, and specifically the Equal Protection Clause, which states that every citizen of legal age is to be treated equally by the States in all matters of law and politics. That means, according to the Amendment, one person, one vote. The claim is made that in a winner-take-all system, if fifty thousand voters pick one candidate but fifty thousand one voters pick the other, fifty thousand voters are disenfranchised when the entire electoral vote goes to the other candidate. In order for their votes to be protected, the electoral vote should be divided based on the proportion of voters supporting each candidate–in this case, equally, or slightly in favor of the majority candidate.

So is it a good argument?

Maybe.

The XIVth amendment is one of the Reconstruction amendments following the Civil War. The “Original Intent” of its reference to one person, one vote was to prevent discrimination against black men specifically; it was amending the section of the Constitution that counted slaves as partial persons by giving the emancipated slaves voting power equal to their white counterparts. In that sense, it has nothing to do with the method of selecting Electors for the College. However, as often happens, what the Framers of the Amendment wrote has been applied beyond what they intended. This clause is the basis for all those lawsuits over reapportionment: the claim that one party has by drawing the district lines given itself an unfair advantage by disenfranchising voters in certain geographic areas. The connection is obvious: if white government officials can set up districts such that blacks are always in the minority in every district (that is, by identifying black neighborhoods and apportioning them into several predominantly white surrounding neighborhoods) they can smother the voice of black voters. Thus “gerrymandering” to oppress racial voting blocks is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Yet the Equal Protection Clause would itself be inequitable if it only protected blacks or other racial minorities. If it is a constitutional violation to stifle the representation of any one voter, it is equally a violation to stifle the representation of any other voter. Arguably winner-take-all voting does exactly that, and on that basis could be ruled unconstitutional.

On the other hand, as we have noted in previous articles, the Framers of the Constitution did not intend for Presidents to be chosen by democratic process. Quite the contrary, they expected that the Electoral College would always be hopelessly deadlocked and so serve effectively as a nominating committee offering a slate of candidates from which the legislature would select the one they believed would best serve them. As we noted in #172: Why Not Democracy?, that has happened exactly once. However, the process was intended to empower the States as States, not so much the individual voters save as they are citizens of their respective States. If we look at the Original Intent of the Constitution, it is evident that Electors are to be chosen by the States, by methods determined individually by each State.

Of course, the XIVth Amendment changed that at least in part. The question is, in doing so did it mean that a State’s Electors had to be representative of all the voters proportionately, or is it sufficient for a State’s Electors to represent the majority of the State’s voters? Are Presidents to be selected by the people, or by the States?

If winner-take-all Elector voting is deemed unconstitutional on that basis, it probably means that district apportionment is similarly unconstitutional, and electoral votes would have to be assigned based entirely on the proportion of the total vote in the state. Israel uses such a system to elect its Parliament, and it is not an unworkable system. If implemented, it would move us slightly closer to a President elected by the majority.

It is certainly worth considering.

As a footnote, in researching this article I stumbled upon this interesting toy which permits the user to experiment with various methods of choosing Electors and see their impact on the most recent two Presidential elections. What intrigued me was that of eight possible methods (including the current one), Trump won the Electoral College in all but that one specifically rigged to give the Democrats the most electoral votes (that is, by using winner-take-all in states they nominally won and proportional in states they nominally lost). That caused me to wonder how that could be if, as is often claimed, Clinton took the majority of the popular vote. The answer seems to be in part that despite the fact that Trump took more votes in California than in any other state but two, Clinton took enough votes in that state to tip the balance of the popular vote, but not of the Electoral vote, because California is underrepresented in the Electoral College (because it is underrepresented in the House of Representatives). That in turn reminded me that in the aforementioned web log post I commented that we did not want California to be the big bully that dictates the law to the rest of us. The other part of the answer is simply that Trump took more states, and because of the “plus two” Electors each state gets, the geography worked for him: the fact that Presidents are on some level chosen by the States, not the people, meant that having more states choose Trump gives him more Electors.

Books by the Author, Logic and Reasoning

#228: Applying the Rules of Grammar

March 9, 2018 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #228, on the subject of Applying the Rules of Grammar.

This web log entry has little to do with my recent decision to collaborate on the next Multiverser novel (tentatively entitled Garden of Versers) and more to do with my dissatisfaction with a book I am currently reading that aims to teach aspiring writers to write better.

Some years back I was chatting with C. J. Henderson (pictured) at Ubercon, and he said that he didn’t really understand what a split infinitive was. I explained, using what is perhaps the most famous example, and that example had a story attached. It seems that when Patrick Stewart took the Star Trek role of Jean-Luc Picard he was bothered by the opening speech in which he was required to say, “to boldly go”. That is a split infinitive–the infinitive being “to go”, and thus it ought to be “boldly to go” or “to go boldly”. C. J. decided right then that he was never going to give any concern to splitting infinitives because, he said, he thought that one of the great speeches in modern writing.

Well, I still think that a bit hyperbolic, but I do see his point. It is a strongly inspiring speech, and made stronger by the force of the split infinitive. However, to some degree that force arises precisely because it breaks the rule–which brings me to one of the points I want to make.

When I was studying music theory, one of the first points Mr. Bednar made concerned the purpose of the course. The first lesson to learn, he explained, was the rules, but then the second lesson was the reason for the rules. Every rule in music theory exists because it prevents a typically undesired effect. Once you understand the reason for the rules, you can decide intelligently when and how to break them to achieve that effect. For example, in writing block harmony, the rule is to avoid parallel octaves, parallel fifths, and unsupported parallel fourths. The reason for the rule is that the resonance between the notes in such parallels causes them to stand out against the other parts. Thus you avoid such parallels when you want the harmony to blend evenly, but you choose to use these parallels when you want those parts to come to the fore: you break the rule when, but only when, you are trying to achieve the result, and do so in ways that will effect the result only when it is wanted.

It is certainly possible in the course of writing to unintentionally or otherwise in attempting to fully and completely engage the reader split an infinitive or two–even to nest them as demonstrated in the first part of this sentence (to…to…engage…split). However, although a brief interruption in the infinitive such as “to boldly go” can add force to the statement, a longer one such as just used here tends rather to be confusing. That statement would have been easier to read as “It is certainly possible in the course of writing in attempting fully and completely to engage the reader unintentionally or otherwise to split an infinitive or two.” (It is admittedly still a cumbersome sentence which could be significantly improved with more resequencing and a bit of trimming, but the point is still there.) It is better to avoid them.

When I encounter a split infinitive in my reading, my mind usually attempts to repair it; it does the same when I encounter sentences ending with prepositions and a few other common mistakes. (I refer the reader to my collected list of The Self-Breaking Rules of Grammar for a wonderfully illustrative set of mnemonics for some of these.) However, I make a clear distinction in my writing, and particularly in my fiction.

Writings such as these web log posts, called “expository writing”, are supposed to be formal, and as such the rules of grammar should generally be followed. An “intentional error” occasionally which creates impact is permitted, but it should be evident that saying it “wrong” is more effective than saying it “right”. However, people don’t generally talk that way. I often hear myself breaking the rules, particularly splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. (It annoys me, and my mind sometimes goes back and attempts to edit what I said.) Thus the rules are looser when writing fiction, and particularly when writing dialogue. Fictional narrative is often in the voice of the character, or similarly approaching the voice of the character; dialogue is always in the character voice. Thus my characters will split infinitives and end sentences with prepositions because they are supposed to come across as people, and that’s how people talk. My narration almost never does so, unless I am trying to capture the impression of character thought and feeling (or I miss something in the editing process).

The rules exist partly for clarity. Breaking them often creates narrative that is less easy to follow. Some of the rules are what might be called grammatical formalities, artifact from previous centuries and source languages–someone has said that the reason we object to ending sentences with prepositions is that it is absolutely forbidden in Latin, although much of our usage is derived from German, where it is considerably more common. The problem with doing this is it divorces the preposition from its object, and sometimes the object is omitted entirely, which makes the language less clear. Yet native speakers provide the needed objects easily enough most of the time, and so native speakers omit them.

So the point is that you should understand the rules, figure out why they exist, what they prevent, and then learn to follow them most of the time, breaking them when doing so will achieve the kind of impact you want. And remember: the more frequently you break them, the less impact breaking them has.

Books by the Author, Reviews, Time Travel Movies

#227: Toward Better Subtitles

March 7, 2018 M.J. 2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #227, on the subject of Toward Better Subtitles.

Decades ago I saw a joke birthday card. On the face it raved about how it was the first perfect birthday card, designed and printed entirely by a computer so nothing could possibly go wrong. Inside, it said in Courier Block lettering, MERRY CHRISTMAS.

It came to mind recently because I have come to watch television with the subtitles activated so that if somehow I miss what someone says I can read it and keep up, and sometimes they can be rather silly. In a recent time travel movie I analyzed, Paradox, one of the characters at one point asks what it is they are seeing, and another reasonably clearly says, “Quark gluon,” but the person writing the subtitles apparently had insufficient education in advanced particle physics to recognize those as words, and so subtitled it “[Speaks Indistinct]”. My wife recently reported watching a British mystery series and seeing the name “Wetherington Perish Church” as the local parish church.

The reason I thought of the birthday card is upon reading some of these I began to wonder whether someone was experimenting with speech-to-text software, feeding the soundtrack into a computer and getting it to figure out what everyone is saying. I somehow doubt it–speech-to-text software has its limitations, but some of the mistakes I’ve seen could only be made by a human. The kind of mistakes I see strongly suggest that someone is sitting at a keyboard listening to the soundtrack and typing what they hear, and that no one is proofreading the finished product. Yet it strikes me that the people who do these subtitles are missing an obvious aid in their efforts.

I once watched an excellent Spanish-language time travel move, Los Cronocrimines a.k.a. TimeCrimes, which was both subtitled and dubbed in English, and it was intriguing to me to notice that the subtitles did not always match the dubbing. My conclusion was that the subtitles were probably the more accurate rendering of the original Spanish. My reasoning was that the dubbed text had to be adjusted so that the words we heard in the audience credibly matched the movement of the lips of the speakers, but the subtitles would be a direct English translation of the original Spanish dialogue. Therein lies my solution: use the script.

It wouldn’t work for a lot of programs–news, reality shows, talk shows–but the majority of the television I watch is scripted. The people on the screen aren’t making up their lines; they’ve memorized them (or sometimes are reading them from a teleprompter). The script is available, and given the ubiquity of computers it’s almost certainly available in an electronic file format. So the obvious fix is for those who write the subtitles to start with the script, copy/paste the text into the subtitle program, and then simply adjust it whenever the actor got the line wrong–or not. I often see subtitles in which the actor actually said about twice as many words as the subtitle, but didn’t really change the sense.

This solution seems so obvious to me that I find myself swithering between two conclusions. It may be that the people responsible for the subtitling just aren’t bright enough to realize that they have an available resource for any text of which they are not certain, or to recognize that what they typed can’t possibly be right. On the other hand, maybe the attitude is based on that corollary to the familiar law, Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well. After all, how many of us out here really rely on subtitles? Why spend a bit more time, a bit more money, a bit more effort on getting them right? I’m constantly reading and reviewing books which are poorly edited; should I expect better of television and movies? Does the subtitle audience really matter?

Maybe we don’t–but we aren’t all hard of hearing. Some of us use subtitles because we watch late at night and don’t want the television to be so loud that it disturbs the sleep of others in the house. Some use subtitles because we’re watching at work, such as night security, and we don’t want the noise of the television. Some use subtitles to get past character accents that are sometimes challenging to understand (oh, that’s what she said!). They’re a convenience–but an annoying one when they make stupid mistakes.

I don’t have much influence in the film industry. I write a few articles about time travel in movies, and I’m aware that a few independent film producers have read them, but in the main I’ll probably be ignored. However, it would be nice to have the subtitles match the dialogue, or at least accurately represent it, especially if the people typing them can’t understand what the actors are saying–that, after all, is when many of us most need to have the written form. So here’s hoping that those who provide the subtitles can do a bit better for those of us who use them.

mark Joseph "young"

Monthly Archives: March 2018