Off Topic And Now for Something Completely Different

Seriously how much does it cost to do our own website?

 

Seems to have been fixed.

 

We almost had our lives back

 

Bit of light relief from the Supporter Meeting thread.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-...hed-burglary-in-china-with-unexpected-results

 

Awesome

 

I prefer this one from a few years back.

 

Instant karma

 

But for pure pmsl, this one is brilliant.

 

A new addition to the Rooney family, Cass Mac Rooney. So is that to remind them he was conceived in McDonalds Castleford? will they put a feather in his hat and call him macarooney?

 

Its the person with 2 black eyes, a couple of missing front teeth and a busted nose officer.

 

Hearing.

Do you wear glasses, and does anyone pass comment, or more to the point take the piss? No? Probably because quite a few of the nation wear glasses and no one bats and eye (sorry for the pun). Well why is it different with hearing aids? If you think it’s not, your wrong, muffled giggles, pointing, sarky comments like eh? This and much more is all part and parcel of being hard of hearing or just totally deaf. For some reason hard of hearing is a joke opportunity, sign language brings out the piss takers in abundance, of course for the recipients of such mirth won’t know, they won’t hear it. Hearing aids have improved in leaps and bounds, even NHS versions, but with private versions costing anything around £5,000, yes that’s right five thousand pounds, most people rely on their NHS electronic ears.

Hearing aids are OAP territory, or so the theory goes, but many people won’t admit that they cannot hear as well as they used too. Unless you are born with the defect or suffer from an early age, then most people are reluctant to have hearing difficulties investigated. Most of us know of various pop stars who suffer hearing problems because of how loud they played their music over the years, but have you seen any of them wearing hearing aid? ( Yes I know Johnny Ray was one, who’s he?) Pete Townsend, and the AC/DC bloke are just 2 that I recall, and they do not as far as I know, how many others suffer but won’t say I have no idea.

I wore a hearing whilst at school in the 1960’s, I had no choice for after numerous investigations and operations by an ear, nose and throat surgeon, the hearing aid was the only option left for my worsening problem. But I was soon to encounter a problem of a very different kind, piss taking. My early hearing aid was a square box with a clip on the back that I used to clip to the pocket of my school blazer, and when I took that off it was the ‘V’ neck of my school jumper, in fine weather it was my shirt pocket. It was heavy so tended to sag a little no matter what I did, it was basically an amplifier, so as well as making speech louder it also made every other noise around it louder. In effect all it did was to higher the sound levels all round and unless you were in a quiet environment then the speech element was lost again. Then the piss taking.

A wire looped from a connection on top of this box like object, then went around the back of my head and the earpiece was on the end of this wire. That of course went in the ear but the complete set up was ungainly to say the least, there was a couple of occasions when someone decided to pull on the wire, why I have no idea, but fortunately no harm, or damage to the hearing aid ensued, or myself. The main attack on this level was coming up from behind me, and of course I wouldn’t hear them, and shouting as loud as they could, something inane like ‘boo’, into the small microphone area on the front of the aid.

Some of this micky taking was in jest, like the teacher who asked me if I was actually listening to the radio instead of his lessons. But I got used to this deficiency discrimination, although at school some kids were called 4 eyes for wearing glasses, mainly those with NHS specs with one side blanked out with tape. And so life rolled on and to be honest any comments over time were met with my reply of ‘yeah I am deaf’, but then when as an adult, and working on a building site, of which my disability brought out the comedian in some guys (well not really but they thought they were) my mum and dad turned up on site to see me about something.

Explaining to this guy who she was looking for, by the way mum was 4ft 11ins, this guy said ‘oh you mean eh what?’ This lit a fuse in mum’s head and she flew at this guy who was, shall we say, built like a brick ****house. I knew nothing of any of this until the foreman asked me to come and see my mum. Mum? What’s she doing here? I climbed down the scaffolding and could hear laughter from various guys and my mum a funny colour red in her face. She explained what I had been called, which made me laugh, and I explained that it was one of the better things that I had been called on a building site.

And so we come to today, and because I wear hearing aids I notice a lot more of it about, and less of the sarcasm funnily enough, but I still find it has a bit of a stigma around it as its a touchy subject to someone to ask if they have had their hearing checked lately. Wax is a problem, but admitting hearing problems is, it seems, a problem in itself. Subtitling on the tv is a must now, when it first appeared on good old Ceefax it was sensational, the only problem was, and still is, was the lag of the text actually keeping pace with a person speaking. In those days someone actually typed in the words being spoken so that they ended up on the screen, so some lag was to be expected. But technology has improved in leaps and bounds, years ago I used some software called Dragon Naturally Speaking that allowed you to speak into a microphone and the words appeared in Word on the screen. This must be at least 10 years ago but the lag on the subtitles still persists so maybe it’s a transmission thing.

I have read of some progress, in the lab, of the ability to allow some deaf people to hear certain sounds as deafness is linked to minute hairs inside the ear that vibrate and send the resulting sound to the brain. There are also certain types of deafness, a hearing test is similar to plucking the strings of a guitar, starting with the base E string through to the higher pitched thinner E string. It’s the level of the frequency that some people have difficulty with, dogs can hear very high-pitched sounds, humans can’t. And so people may be able to hear lower frequency sound but not the higher one, or vice versa, and its those different frequencies that you hear through the headphones in a hearing test. Your response to first hearing those sounds, a button is pressed, is determined on a graph and hence your level of hearing is found for each frequency. As I already know my hearing has deteriorated with age, like a lot of other people, but with having a deficiency from birth my deterioration is more pronounced.

Will the stigma ever go away? I doubt it for as I have said deafness is a subject for the jokers of this world. But for those who actually suffer from the ailment it is anything but a joke, eh?

 

Top, top post.

 

I had my ears tested 7 years ago and was borderline for an hearing aid. It's got worse obviously but not too bad.
As you say ref it's a piss take, even from my own family.
When someone's speaking directly to me, even at home, it's fine but if the mrs turns her head or talks walking away I finding it difficult to hear her. Cue jokes.
If I'm in a group in the pub I find it difficult to hear when all are talking at once.
Often new blokes to my group think I'm a bit standoffish but it's cos I can't hear them or their tone as yet.

Using jack hammers, wackers and compressors without any ear protectors took its toll.

 

Good post. I'm not ready for hearing aids yet but I'm not ruling them out! I had the speccy, four-eyes bit through school but that wasn't really too bad.

Read a book called Deaf Sentence by David Lodge a while ago. Dark-ish comedy about a middle-aged man gradually going deaf, I think it's semi-autobiographical, it seemed to me to be absolutely convincing. Recommended.

 

Sorry to hear of your problems.

Your mention of Johnnie Ray reminded me of this. First time I heard it I creased myself, especially the dramatic bit in the middle. You have to be a certain age to get why it is so funny.

 

I haven't heard that for donkeys years - it's as funny as **** for me; I am of a certain age though

 

****ing hell...you’re me!
I regularly have the conversation with Mrs Tash “how do you expect me to hear what you say if you’re not facing me when you say it?...don’t you know how soundwaves work?!”

...to be fair I do also use it when I can’t be arsed to listen...or did hear, but didn’t like what I heard.

 

Heard it first on an album of his. Some great stuff on it.

 

Ditto

 

Double ditto.