Jul 23, 2014

She’s Real

The Cities’ Local entertainment rag, City Pages, did a pretty decent article on ear plugs back in June: “Can Minneapolis Make Ear Plugs Cool?”. A lot of the technical information in the article came from a friend of mine, Sarah Angerman, of the University of Minnesota’s Speech and Hearing Impairment Research Center. Sarah was my technical reference, a few years back, in my Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly Geezer column, “Hearing Damage and Motorcycling.”

One of my favorite crazy person responses to an MMM publication came from a loud pipes lunatic who hated every aspect of my hearing loss warning and doubted that “Sarah Angerman is a real person.” Now, he can be doubly pissed at City Pages and me, since we’ve both used this mythical expert (who is, even worse, a pointy headed PhD) to warn the general public about the fragility of their hearing mechanism.

The City Pages article is a little fluffy, due to R&R’ers love of deafening noise and a traditional fear of getting old and feeble. Mostly, it’s a good thing, though. A few years back, I read a technical paper that stated there are more hearing impaired 18-27 year old males, percentage-wise, than 60-75 year olds. Regardless of the numbers, it is a serious problem for today’s young music fans. Today, if you do a Google search on my article’s title, you will get 3.7 million hits. That ought to freak you out, if nothing else does.

That old piece of hate mail was preserved by my publisher, Victor Wanchena and you can read it and weep/laugh/agree/whatever right here:





3 comments:

Russ said...

Per your recommendation, I bought a pair of earplugs. I won't ride without them now.

T.W. Day said...

My "habit," is do a quick bike inspection, put all of my gear on, fire up the bike, remember my ear plugs, pull the helmet and gloves, install the ear plugs, put the helmet and gloves back on, and go riding. I haven't gone anywhere without ear plugs in a couple of decades, but I still forget to put them in before I gear up. Almost every ride.

T.W. Day said...

Russ,

Thanks for commenting on this post. Once again, I re-read that deranged piece of chickenshit anonymous hate mail and it reminded me that I'm proud to call Pat Hahn a friend and really appreciate the support, encouragement, and humor I've come to expect from my MMM publisher and editors. What a fun ride MMM has been!