Today's newsletter will get back to an underappreciated source of levity - captions (or more precisely, the mismatch of captions and program). While Austria's public broadcaster, ORF, will likely forever stay in the lead on the celestial scoreboard of getting captions wrong (Austrian politics - a soap opera), Sweden's SVT2 broadcaster and Netflix come in as a close second.
Jurassic Parliament - dinosaurs and sandcastles are two topics whose Venn diagrams overlap not nearly enough during conversations. This is even more true in politics. Luckily, Sweden's broadcaster SVT2 (broadly similar to the US's C-SPAN) made sure that at least once it seemed these two topics were on the agenda in the Swedish parliament. In 2016, it broadcasted a debate from the Rikstag chamber when captions appeared from a popular children's show. The result is excellent:
Asa Romson, then Minister for the Environment, kicked things off to a promising start...
...followed by a plea from the Minister of Education for dinosaur equality:
Then the Prime Minister offered his thoughts on the country's transportation infrastructure:
The captions likely originated from children's show called Dinosaur Train (or more precisely, an episode called Submarine Adventure). You can find the full story here - Link
Call of the wild - as the world's most popular streaming subscription service, Netflix apparently also tried for a spot in the hall of fame caption competition. That is according to Reddit user BenMeiri84 who was watching a BBC nature documentary on Netflix and took the following set of screenshots. The captions belong to stand-up comic Aziz Ansari's Live from Madison Square Garden show. There is no further commentary required:
