WOW #62

I suffer from tinnitus.  Oh, my wife actually has it, but I must endure the consequences.  She cannot sit quiet in the living room, reading or knitting.  For her, it is never quiet.  To drown out the internal whistles, squeaks and crackling, she has the TV on constantly, as background noise.

Her constant quest to play something inconsequential, leads to this Word Of The Week.

HINTERLAND

Often hinterlands. the remote or less developed parts of a country; back country: The hinterlands are usually much more picturesque than the urban areas.
the land lying behind a coastal region.
an area or sphere of influence in the unoccupied interior claimed by the state possessing the coast.
an inland area supplying goods, especially trade goods, to a port.

Several years ago, before we cut the cable, Canadian TV stations sometimes added a little PSA between one show and the next, called Hinterland Who’s Who.  We would get a little 30-second introduction to loons, ruffed grouse, or brown bears.

I have been involuntarily exposed to subtitled shows from Iceland, which was settled by Norway, and from Sweden.  While trying to do crossword puzzles, or read, myself, I’ve been exposed to 4 seasons of a show titled Bordertown, which I thought might be Detroit, Bellingham, WA, or Laredo, TX..  Turns out that it’s Saint Petersburg, Russia, with half the dialog in Russian, and the other half in Finnish.  It’s hard to figure a 4-letter kitchen appliance in the middle of a United Nations debate – with gunfire.

My reading was distracted by 5 seasons of Shetland, a British police procedural set on an island off the west coast of Scotland, where the sheep outnumber the humans, 500 to 1.  I thought that the most likely illegal offense might be bestiality, but the already meager population was reduced by at least one, in each episode.  The wife drooled over the many gorgeous knit sweaters worn by the plodding hero.

I thought that my life wasn’t particularly interesting or adventurous, but Shetland attracted enough viewers to lead BBC-TV to follow it with Hinterland, an attention-grabber set on the rocky Scottish peninsula that projects toward the island of Shetland.  Here, the ratio of sheep to people is only 400:1, and folks speak English almost as well as those on Iceland.

The son has acquired a set of Dr. Dre Beats headphones.  I often try to speak to him, only to realize that he is listening to audio for something that he is watching on his tablet.  The muffs disappear into his shaggy hair.  Maybe I could wear them, disconnected, as sound-deadeners.  I’d use the ones that I wear when I mow the lawn, but she would be somehow disturbed and insulted.  Silence is golden – but I get the brassy alternative.

Please quietly return soon, for my next whine and cheesy party.