2001-03-07 - 5:12pm

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: Some classic rock song from the radio this morning.

First, a special message for Michelle:

Michelle! Buy me! I'm so cute! Buuuyyyyy meeeeeeee!

(Image is not mine; it's from VW.com. You can send this adorable thing as an e-postcard to your friends here.)

There are literally dozens of familiar songs I hear on the radio and have no idea what their titles are. The reason is that I can hear the music and hear the DJ, but I can't understand the lyrics or what the DJ is rambling about.

This is something that mystifies a lot of people, so let me explain.

Y'know how there are pitches of sound. High pitched and low pitched. My hearing loss in the low pitches is not quite as severe. This means that I can hear things like thunder, construction trucks, etc. without hearing aids on, although not quite as loudly as most people.

As the pitches rise -- to the level of human voices -- my hearing gets worse. But hearing aids amplify the pitches I can hear, so that people's voices are recognizable to me. The sounds that people make using their voices -- primarily vowels -- I can hear with hearing aids. I can recognize whether it's a man or a woman, and through personalized things like rhythm of speech and inflection, recognize who it is that's speaking, without looking at them.

But here's the rub: My hearing for the pitches which define consonants -- those little quiet breathy noises people make with their lips, teeth, and tongue that distinguish between B and P, or T and K -- is totally shot. I can't differentiate, without lipreading, the difference between "tack" and "pack", for instance. So I'm walking around hearing a lot of vowels and very few consonants, my own personal hangman/Wheel of Fortune game.

So you see, this is enough for me to hear music (with the exception of high pitched stuff like flutes, upper violin notes, and high-pitched percussion). And I can hear the DJ, but can't understand a word he says.

Lipreading fills in the blanks to an extent. "B" doesn't look a damn thing like "L" or "K". On the other hand it DOES look a lot like "P" and "M", so there's a lot of mental shuffling going on, trying on different possibilities to see what fits in the context of the conversation. Lipreaders depend very, very heavily on context. I might not be able to comprehend a sentence someone says out of the blue, but if we're already talking about a specific subject, it helps a lot with the guesswork.

One of the oddest things I've caught myself doing is the mental work that goes into deciphering something said from across the room without me seeing the speaker. I have a jumble of meaningless vowel sounds in my head, and I hold onto them -- including tone and inflection -- and my mind starts racing through the possible things the person could be talking about given the topic of conversation at the time. About 5-10 seconds later, when I hit on the right guess, suddenly all the pieces fall into place and I realize exactly what they said, word for word, by fitting the topic to the jumble of sounds I was holding on to.

It's really, really freaky. Even more freaky is how speedy and subconscious the process is. It's very similar to how sometimes I'll fall asleep working on a mental problem of some sort, and when I wake up in the morning I know the solution. It's like my brain is working overtime without any help from my consciousness.

I think I am also extremely lucky in that I have something of a knack for languages. My brain seems to be pretty open to the idiosyncrasies of other languages and doesn't try to map them directly to English. This same openness probably helps with all the context-driven guesswork of lipreading. I think sometimes other people with similar hearing losses have more difficulty deciphering spoken English, in which case I can understand why they might want to isolate themselves in an ASL community.

Anyway. Lipreading for a long period of time is exhausting. One thing I particularly envy of hearing folks is the ability to understand speech with no effort. I would love to be able to do one thing with my hands and eyes while using my ears for listening -- I bet I would be a talk-radio FREAK if I could hear. But oh well.

So, I have had enough of winter. Go away.

So, that Senator Byrd, huh. He's got a way with words. Not to mention his white-sheets-as-outerwear style as a young 'un.

Quite frankly, as a proponent of free speech I think he should be able to say whatever he damn well pleases. His constituents can then decide whether they want this man as their representative. Me, I don't have to like it, or listen to it. But I am appalled at the hypocrisy of Democrats letting this slide, given the fits they pitch when Republicans say just about anything.

While I'm ranting, did I mention I am apoplectic over the Republican legislature here in Virginia trying to repeal the repeal of the car tax? What the HECK?! More proof that the "smaller government" line is just that, a line.

Which leads me to this:

Some people keep calling Larry Browne a "freak" or some other such thing, but I really can't figure out why. He's really good at stating his case, whether you agree with it or not.

Check out this comment out from his guest column today on NRO:

"Both political movements are hypocritical. Conservatives sometimes claim to be for economic freedom, but the people they elect consistently vote for corporate welfare, foreign aid, government education, farm subsidies, government health care, and $2-trillion budgets. Liberals claim to be for personal freedom, but their leaders consistently vote to censor the Internet, put a V-chip in your TV set, continue the insane War on Drugs, and violate the Bill of Rights in every conceivable way."

You can call him simplistic if you like, but I'd probably counter that everyone else is making things overly complicated. If nothing else, we need people like Larry Browne to make us think about it from a different perspective. Somebody pulling us back to the freedom side occasionally from the "let's regulate everything we can get our hands on, unless the other side is already advocating regulating it, in which case we'll say it shouldn't be regulated so that we look good compared to them" crap represented by Democrats and Republicans.

Libertarians aren't a perfect match for me, of course. I don't particularly agree with their views on foreign policy -- I voted for Bush instead of Browne specifically due to this issue -- and am waiting for a really good idea for the environment. But to call myself Democrat or Republican would mean I'm identifying myself with a party with whom I disagree on roughly half the issues. In the case of Libertarians, the rate of disagreement goes down to about 10%, tops. It's a percentage I'm much more comfortable with.

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