October 3, 2004

"A T-bone moment."

Fooling around with my new TV, I turned on the closed captioning (which my old TV didn't have). I was watching the tail-end of my TiVo'd "Fox News Sunday," where they had just shown the clip from the debate with Bush snapping that he knows that Osama Bin Laden attacked us. Juan Williams comments:
Well, I think, if you look for a TiVo moment ...

Closed captioning had:
Well, I think, if you look for a T-bone moment ...

"A T-bone moment"--I guess that's when a candidate gives us some of that "red meat" we keep hearing about.

A minute later, Brit Hume, refers Bush's demeanor as "peevishness," and the caption is "peacefulness." Two minutes later "neutralize" is rendered as if it were a guy's name: "Newt Ramize."

On the other hand, there are times when the closed captioning is more accurate than the spoken word. In the first episode of this season's "Joan of Arcadia," Joan's boyfriend Adam is telling her about his summer spent working full-time in a hotel and the caption reads: "What do you want to know about plaster, grout, or unclogging toilets? And don't get me started on caulk 'cause that's my passion." But the actor clearly mispronounces the screenplay's word "caulk" in the most hilarious way possible. I mean, look at that line. It's hard to believe the whole thing wasn't set up as a joke. With the help of the TiVo, we got many laughs from that T-bone moment.

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