Welcome to Earthrid’s weblog

This weblog section announces news about Earthrid’s music releases and other activities and also features some topics of tangential interest and slight relevance. Opinions expressed will come from various sources and will not necessarily reflect the collective aims or policies of Earthrid.

Carry on…

Excited semi-whisperers accused of undermining literacy

As AJMG reported in a review of the DVD of The Singing Ringing Tree, some of us remember a muted voice mumbling away in the original UK broadcast of that creepy fairy tale series, separate from the English narration and the original German dialogue. Well, we didn’t necessarily recognise the dialogue as German at the time, but the intonation of that mumbler was something that could never be forgotten, and with hindsight (hindhearing?), it sounded like some Slavic language. We recently came to suspect that the episodes show in the UK were prints prepared for the Polish market, since reading in The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Poles about a peculiar practice of Polish television broadcasters: rather than prepare subtitles, or dub foreign dialogue, they employ an actor to read translated lines on top of the dialogue, in, as the Guide says, “an excited semi-whisper”. The effect was in this case really quite sinister.

Now the Polish Blog reports on a move to replace this peculiar practice with subtitling for foreign programmes, and laments the popular opposition to this innovation. There is of course the point that people are used to the Mumblers and may resist change on the basis that they like what they grew up with. However, the Blog goes on to note the prevalence of Poles who “are functionally illiterate” and suggests that subtitling may play a role in encouraging literacy. If that is the case, perhaps we should encourage subtitling of programmes in English, for the training of our own illiterates. Dubbing all programmes into Polish – or better still, a language that is not widely spoken in the UK – could only help.

Google promises some decent verdammt software

Deciding not to wait for a suitable quantum computer, Google explains the thinking behind its new browser, Chrome.

One feature – the ability to move tabs between windows – is already implemented in the Omnigroup’s browser for “Mac fans”, Omniweb. But Omniweb doesn’t have one feature of Chrome, the omnibox. Confused? Well never mind. What counts is that Chrome is an open-source attempt to produce not just a fast, “rock-solid” browser, but to improve all actively developed browsers. It’s in Google’s interest, and those of Web users, for browsing software to be better. And companies that haven’t been sufficiently imaginative or perfectionist can treat this as a simultaneous hand-out and kick up the rear.

Pretending that cuil.com is updating lynx to be a “Chrome killer” would be cheap so let’s not do that.

Ken Campbell

It’s sad to see that Ken Campbell has died, at the age of 66. As this obituary states, “he will be known for his commercial cameos on TV, such as In Sickness And In Health or Fawlty Towers, but the legacy of his live work will be the true measure of the man.”

Beyond these effective appearances there were Ken Campbell’s televised explorations into the nature of consciousness, which were rather laboured – whereas in live performance, he was probably the only person able to hold a general audience with an explanation of qualia, in the same set as a tale of translating Ken Dodd jokes for performance in the New Hebrides.

In fact – that’s almost certain.

Welcome

This weblog will feature some topics of tangential interest and slight relevance to Earthrid, which is a non-profit project that releases unusual music. You can find out more about Earthrid from the main site.

Most “bloggers” eventually lose interest in their weblog and fail to update it often. We are avoiding the interim stages by having very little interest to start with, and by resolving to hardly ever update it…

Opinions expressed on this site will come from various sources and will not necessarily reflect the collective aims or policies of Earthrid.