Charles on… anything that comes along

OK, should I claim any credit for the fact that first I get a piece into New Statesman about podcasting, and then The Guardian runs one in its G2 features area (ie not the dweeby Online bit, because obviously - huh! - that doesn’t count in this game), and then this morning the Today program has an item on it? I mean, they’ve happened within about two weeks of each other.

I mean, knowing how these things tend to filter through the system - seen here, repeated there…?

(Yes, I know - the BBC has been doing podcasts itself for absolutely ages, and Ben Hammersley wrote about podcasts back in December in Online. It’s just when these things break into the open, so to speak, by getting spoken by John Humphrys, and written in the bits of the paper that don’t have weird graphics to indicate that Here Be Dragons (& Dungeons).

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Video podcasting to iTunes; Cocoalicious; Camino hits 1.0a1 (16 September 2005; score: 42.56%)
• Dowling on Adam Curry: nailed in a second; and looking back at predictions for 2005 (23 January 2006; score: 34.43%)
• Podcasting: a victory for the pajamahadeen? (2 June 2005; score: 32.31%)

Wonderful series on the BBC about deafness, to be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/adifferentworld.shtml. It’s a series of five programmes, each just 15 minutes.

I’m just listening to programme one (requires Real Player), which is billed as

Two mothers of deaf children talk of their experiences. Sharon Ridgeway explains her delight that her baby daughter, like her, is deaf, while Cornelia Wilson, a hearing woman with two deaf sons, describes other people’s reactions to her children.

Other people’s reactions certainly is the strange one. It varies widely when we tell them about baby3’s deafness. (You can find all the postings on this topic by clicking on the “Silent World” link to the right.) I think that tabloids’ overuse of “tragic” means people use the word too easily.

(”I’m a deaf person first, and my daughter is a deaf person,” one of the mothers is saying. Speaking perfectly - you’d not know that she’s deaf. This is strange. Is she being voiced, or interpreted from sign language? Seems like she’s not profoundly deaf.)

The series also has the transcripts of the programmes in PDF format. What a fantastic resource. How odd that Fox News - say - hasn’t done something like this, eh? You’d think commercial broadcasters would be falling over themselves to do stuff that would be useful to the wider community.

(”The babies don’t like hearing aids, they take them out, chew them, go for the batteries… but this is what’s normal for us, this is our reality,” the second (hearing) mother is saying.) I think that’s it: this is our normal.

..And now on to programme 2, which is about cochlear implants… A woman who became deaf and has one cochlear implant: “It brings me to the level where if a normal person had this hearing they’d want to go and get a hearing aid.” And a psychiatrist who had had some deaf patients, and then had a daughter who was diagnosed profoundly deaf (which is same as baby3). He didn’t find out until she was five or six months old. Hooray for early screening.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• An iPod quirk: you haven't played a song until you've played it all (7 December 2005; score: 35.98%)
• Strictly speaking, it's Catch-26: of deafness, syndromes and DNA (28 February 2006; score: 30.85%)
• The big black wings of decisions avoided (14 May 2005; score: 28.54%)