Squelching, Part 2.

Having already written a blog post called "Squelching" this morning, I feel compelled to show you this London Times article: "Mumbling, [squelching] and the danger of badly captioned TV subtitles/Half of the nation like to watch with words appearing on screen. For most people, it’s not that they can’t hear":

[S]ubtitles can be worse when they get it right, especially during a sex scene. No one wants to be sucking peppermints with their Aunty Pam when the words, “Yes! Yes! Harder!” and “Is that good for you, baby?” pop up on screen. Descriptions of sound effects can be quite appalling, such as “[groans of pleasure]”. Or just “[squelching]”. In Stranger Things there was once a caption reading “tentacles undulate moistly”, though I don’t think it was describing sex, mercifully....

"With those beautiful ears of yours — he's got great hearing."

Periodista : pregunta de la nasa

Trump: el mas indicado para responderte es el director de la NASA con esas orejas que tiene, escucha re bien, tiene oido de gato😳

*le hacen zoom a las orejas* pic.twitter.com/SGUOv46qmo

— ElBuni (@therealbuni) April 30, 2026

"I love the way an audiobook brings me one step closer to a story, removing the middleman of paper or a screen. I’m not just hovering over the action, I’m in it. Channeling it."

Writes Elisabeth Egan, in "Why I Stopped Reading and Embraced Audiobooks/On the joys of having stories in my ears — and yes, listening counts" (NYT).

This is a genuinely new point in what is for me a very old question/"question." (What's the question? Do audiobooks "count"? What does that even mean?) Egan also makes many of the familiar points about audiobooks: You can do other things while listening — chores, crafts, exercise — and it's good for people with vision troubles, great for drifting off to sleep, etc. etc.

But I love this idea that the audiobook is more intimate, bringing you closer to the material. Is that even true?! I think she's saying something about the experience of hearing in contrast to seeing. When seeing, you are looking at a physical object outside of your head. Or so it seems. The words are out there, on the page, your eyes allow you to sense them. But sound feels like it has entered your head, almost like your own thoughts, especially if you're using earphones. And yet both hearing and seeing happen in your brain, through a nerve located deep inside the organ that is part of your head — your optic nerve in the back of your eye or your auditory nerve in your inner ear. 

So the intimacy of hearing as opposed to seeing is a subjective feeling, don't you agree? But then the question becomes whether we prefer this intimacy when reading? I suspect that by using vision to consume a book, you maintain a more sharply critical mind. The page is out there. It's the other. We're suspicious. Or admiring. The audiobook reaches us differently. It's automatically already inside us, stirring us like music, like the murmurings of a loved one.

"With subtitles on, I find myself being able to quickly gather what one character has said, look down at my phone, react to a message..."

"... then look up before that character has even finished their line. The viewing experience thus becomes multifaceted and efficient. The subtitles allow us to go on our phone but still absorb the content and gist of the TV show....  And social media itself has encouraged the use of subtitles across the board. It is now a given that most creators add text captions to their videos – without the option to turn them off.... This isn’t simply a trend but a feature anchored in the algorithm itself. Text captions, rather than dialogue, encourage the video to crop up in the TikTok search engine.... It began as an accessibility improvement, but the rapidity with which it has caught on suggests it’s business-oriented and crucial to getting that sweet algorithm boost. The fact that 85% of social media visual content is now watched on mute... coupled with the ease with which AI can generate subtitles without the need for human transcription, means we’re living in a subtitled world – one that is often poorly translated, low-quality and error-ridden...."

Writes Isabel Brooks, in "Most of gen Z watch TV with the subtitles on – and I understand why" (The Guardian).

"Do you think it’s a good idea to bring a 1-year-old baby to a concert where the decibels are this f–king high? That baby doesn’t even know what it’s doing here."

"Next time, protect their ears or something. For real. It’s heavy. It’s your responsibility. You’re waving them around like they’re a toy.. That baby doesn’t want to be there, for real. I’m telling you with all love and respect, now that I’m a father… would never bring them to a concert. For the next time, be a bit more aware."

Said Maluma, quoted in "Rapper Maluma stops concert to scold mom for ‘irresponsible’ act with her baby" (NY Post).

"Don't ask me nothin' about nothin' – I just might tell you the truth."

Sang Timothée Chalamet, on "SNL" last night, where he was the host, in a bunch of skits, and also performed, in his Bob Dylan persona, as the musical guest.

There were 3 songs — "Outlaw Blues" and, surprisingly "Three Angels"...

... and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time"...

What did you think? It's very hard for me to judge... other than that I was delighted that "Three Angels" was chosen and disappointed that the sound wasn't balanced properly in the end of the song and we lost Timmy's voice. But does anyone hear the music they play, does anyone even try?

I'm interested in the fashion interpretation of Bob's famous polka dots. Bob's were a shirt. Timmy's — same size and color — were a hoodie. The shift from shirt to hoodie sheds light on the choice to do "Three Angels." It's a rap song.

ADDED: I haven't been able to force myself to go see Chalamet's movie yet, so I don't know how close these performances last night are to his embodiment of Bob in the movie. In a Reddit discussion, the top comment is: "Actually credit for Timmy for not doing Bob, I much more appreciate a Dylan cover that's not trying to be Bob and that rendition of Three Angels sounded fresh." 

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

"Biden’s word salad and sudden drops in volume to pianissimo are relevant for reporters to cover because they’re a microcosm of the questions..."

"... at the heart of the 2024 Democratic campaign: Is the president’s mental state strong enough to beat Donald Trump and can he serve for four more years? The desperate Biden team is ready to go to war over every syllable."

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Joe Biden, in the Goodest Bunker Ever" (NYT), detailing how the Biden team came for her:

"I never used to talk to myself. Now I do it constantly."

"When I asked my middle-aged friends if they did it, too, the confessions flooded in. One said that when she texts people, she says the message out loud when she’s typing, even in public. 'I just looked in my cabinet and said aloud, "Please, god, let there be vanilla extract,"' said another. Do middle-aged people talk to themselves all day, every day? And is this a problem? I consulted some experts."

Writes Jancee Dunn, in "I’m Middle-Aged, and I Talk to Myself All Day/There, I said it" (NYT).

Unfortunately, the experts — there are experts on what's "called private speech or external self-talk" — hadn't studied the phenomenon of talking to yourself more as you age. So the author didn't get the reassurance she seems to have sought: It's a very common development in middle age.

I see that more than one commenter over there says I talk to myself, but I'm not really talking to myself, I'm talking to my cat/dog. Now, this is one reason I don't want a dog. I'm pretty sure it would cause me to talk to it all the time, and I think that would change my pattern of thoughts into things one says to a dog. 

Actually, I think the practice of speaking aloud would change what I'm thinking. Even if there is no listener to make me ask is this intelligible? is this boring?, putting things into speakable words absorbs my attention. I would imagine a listener. 

But the external self-talk discussed in the article sounds like speaking you would limit to yourself because it would annoy another person: expressing anxiety, encouraging yourself, asking where you put various items, narrating squirrel antics. And it's no wonder such spoken-aloud thoughts make you worry you're slipping into an unwholesome version of old age. You're fussing endlessly over trifles. That's something you can do silently, but when you do it out loud, you get a bit of distance on yourself: you hear that person and you think she's turning into that stereotype of an old person I've always worried I'd become.

"Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds."

Wrote Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in "Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters On the Odd Case of the Musical Anhedonic" (via Metafilter).

The article is by Michel Faber, who says:

Musical anhedonics are thought to account for up to 5 percent of the world’s population....  The syndrome is often discussed in the same articles that pon­der the mysteries of autism.

Jordan Peterson and Vivek Ramaswami talk about attention span.

This is extraordinarily insightful:

Peterson observes that the idea that attention spans are shrinking fails to account for the widespread consumption of audiobooks and very long podcasts. Ramaswamy first responds by speculating that there's a kind of "low-level dyslexia," and most people are a little slower reading than listening, and that means they are really capable of absorbing more complex material than they're willing or able to read.

Ramaswamy immediately posits a second theory: There's a hunger for "human connectivity," and people want a "disintermediated relationship" that they get from hearing the voice of the person who is generating ideas. Peterson jumps on that: It's why unscripted podcasts work so well. Peterson says books can go deeper, but it's easier to deceive people with a book. You can "craft your lies." But with a podcast, you get spontaneity, tone, and demeanor. People experience Joe Rogan as "genuine." "It's the antithesis of the crafted Hillary-Clinton political-class message." It's why Donald Trump was so successful. 

I'm just summarizing (as the presence of Abraham Lincoln in my tags hints), and the conversation continues. I haven't set an end point. You'll see how long your attention span reaches.

"Any owner of a modern television will benefit from plugging in a separate speaker such as a soundbar... At $900, the Sonos Arc..."

"... made a big difference in helping me understand the mumbly villain of the most recent James Bond movie, 'No Time to Die.' But the Sonos soundbar’s speech enhancer ran into its limits with the jarring colloquialisms of the Netflix show 'The Witcher.' It couldn’t make more fathomable lines like 'We’re seeking a girl and a witcher — her with ashen hair and patrician countenance, him a mannerless, blanched brute.' Then again, I’m not sure any speaker could help with that. I left the subtitles on for that one." 

From "Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone. Many of us stream shows and movies with the subtitles on all the time — and not because it’s cool" (NYT).

When characters don't speak like normal people, it's much harder to guess what they are saying.

Heard just now: the rain drops became tiny ice pellets.

It's a gentle transition, barely audible.

Here's how it looked on the radar map:

The cloud cover is 100%, so I'm skipping the sunrise — 7:05 today — and perhaps waiting for some of the 5 to 8 inches of snow to prettify the landscape. It isn't cold. It's 34°, but it's windy and the National Weather Service is saying the snow will be "wet" and "heavy." So it's a good time to get clobbered by a falling tree or tree branch. 

"Yes, ban the office cakes. Obviously.... I have been campaigning [against obesity] for more than 20 years...."

"And all I have met is anger, abuse and accusations of 'fat-shaming.' From the right, because I seem to be after restricting people’s right to choose how they live; and from the left because, since obesity disproportionately affects the poor, I must be motivated by class hatred and snobbery.... I have moved on from any notion I might once have had about personal culpability and now hold the government and 'big sugar' (which pulled a nefarious con on the public by repositioning sugar as 'energy' when it is, in fact, sloth, weakness and depression) entirely responsible. Which is why I am with [ chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, Professor Susan Jebb] all the way in calling on people to stop buying this poisonous shite in pretty packaging and forcing it into their ailing colleagues like corn down the diseased gullet of a Perigord goose. An unrelated story in The Times on Wednesday celebrated a new wonder-drug proven to prolong the lives of mice, inspiring the dream... that it might work on humans. But do you know what is also proven to prolong the life of mice? Severe calorie restriction. Cut their intake by a third and they live up to 40 per cent longer. Before we plough billions into yet more drugs, shouldn’t we at least give that a go?"

Writes Giles Coren in "Cake debate is no laughing matter — seriously/Snigger at comparisons with passive smoking if you must, but only if you’re blind to the scale of our obesity crisis" (London Times). 

The gym stays quiet for the first 10 points so the autistic, noise-sensitive brother of a player can attend a volleyball game.

WAOW reports. 

"My coach, [Justin] Jacobs, came up to me and asked if Payton was going to come to any of the games," [the player, Malina Carratini] recalled.... "Two days later, [Jacobs] came up to me and was like, 'I came up with this idea. It really hurt me that Payton wouldn't be able to come,' so he was wondering if we would do a silent night"....

Here are 7 TikTok videos I've selected as right for just now. Let me know what you like best.

1. The "squirrel" is crazy about the trampoline.

2. Yeah, I'll back you up on that.

3. Joni Mitchell, in 1970, telling the audience they're "really a drag."

4. Orson Welles saying he puts loyalty to friends above art.

5. He just happened to find everything he was looking for at World Market.

6. The rigors of Chinese womanhood.

7. How to write about characters who are not autistic.

I've curated 8 TikToks for your pleasure tonight. Let me know which one (or ones) you like best.

1. That fish!

2. The dog's delicate care for a plant.

3. Sounds you don't hear anymore.

4. Do you pronounce these words correctly?

5. A designer food experience.

6. How to dress for a work meeting.

7. Her not understanding any critically acclaimed film.

8. The jazz they play in stores in Tokyo. (And here's his "In-Store (Tokyo Jazz)" playlist.)

"The world is getting louder, and we are listening (and performing) music louder than we ever did in the past."

"I recently attended a wedding reception at which the sound level was an average of 105 decibels. I had to leave the event, and felt shocked the next day. I heard a performance of Mahler's 5th Symphony last year. Again, 99-105 decibels -- on the opposite side of Carnegie Hall. Movies and Broadway shows are even louder. And these levels are louder than the subway station at Lincoln Center. Here's the main thing: People around me didn't react! They didn't notice..... Our children are going to grow up with significant hearing losses! Protect your ears, and those of your loved ones! You won't notice that you are losing your hearing until you start to develop tinnitus, and start to feel the pain that won't go away."

The top-rated comment — from "a professional musician in NYC" who wears ear plugs "whenever I am on the street, on the train, or in loud indoor settings" — at "Are Earbuds Damaging My Hearing? And if so, are they more harmful than other headphone styles?" (NYT).

"The society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise was founded by a physician named Julia Barnett Rice in 1906."

Rice believed noise was unhealthy, and enlisted New York City’s gentry (including Mark Twain) to lobby for things like rules governing steamboat whistles, and silence pledges from children who played near hospitals. The group met in posh spaces like the St. Regis hotel, but Rice insisted that she was not solely interested in protecting New York’s upper class.... In 1909, the organization celebrated the passage of an ordinance that prohibited street vendors (many of them immigrants) from shouting, whistling, or ringing bells to promote their wares.....  Attempts to regulate the sounds of the city (car horns, ice-cream-truck jingles) continued throughout the 20th century, but... in the ’90s[, t]he city started going after boom boxes, car stereos, and nightclubs.... In 1991, the NYPD launched Operation Soundtrap, a campaign in which cops would trawl streets—often in majority-Black-and-brown communities—hunting for and confiscating cars with enhanced stereo systems.... When Rudy Giuliani became mayor in 1994, he used a cabaret-license law to force clubs out of gentrifying neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Chelsea....New York was effectively codifying an elite sonic aesthetic: the systemic elevation of quiet over noise...."

From "Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? The sound of gentrification is silence" by Xochitl Gonzalez (The Atlantic).

"The electrification of mobility presents humanity with a rare opportunity to reimagine the way cities might sound...."

"As a result of [the 2010 Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act], every E.V. and hybrid manufactured since 2020 and sold in the U.S. must come equipped with a pedestrian-warning system, also known as an acoustic vehicle alerting system (avas), which emits noises from external speakers when the car is travelling below eighteen and a half miles per hour....  Automakers have enlisted musicians and composers to assist in crafting pleasing and proprietary alert systems, as well as in-cabin chimes and tones. Hans Zimmer, the film composer, was involved in scoring branded sounds for BMW’s Vision M Next car. The Volkswagen ID.3’s sound was created by Leslie Mándoki, a German-Hungarian prog-rock/jazz-adjacent producer.... The Porsche Taycan Turbo S has one of the boldest alerts: you’re in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab as he flips the switch to animate the monster.... If Boombox, a software feature in Teslas, is any indication of what’s on the way, it will be difficult to limit the sounds that drivers play through E.V.s’ external speakers. Boombox, which was released in December, 2020, as part of a software update, allows Tesla drivers, according to its promotional literature, to 'delight pedestrians with a variety of sounds from your vehicle’s external speaker,' including goat bleats, ice-cream-truck music, applause, and flatulence."

From "What Should a Nine-Thousand-Pound Electric Vehicle Sound Like? E.V.s are virtually silent, so acoustic designers are creating alerts for them. A symphony—or a cacophony—of car noise could be coming to city streets" (The New Yorker).

The Boombox feature violated some regulation, and now it only works when the car is parked, but still, you see the problem. The basic quietness of these vehicles demands that noises be concocted for them, and these noises could be anything. You'll be warned of their approach by all sorts of odd sounds and forced to live in a city that doesn't sound like real machines doing their mechanical work but like the imagination of whatever artist or prankster the manufacturer chooses. You can call that "a rare opportunity to reimagine the way cities might sound" or the inexorable encroachment of insanity. We had a chance to quiet things down, and we threw it away.