as dad and i changed
as dad and i changed the gas tank before i went to shower just now, a thought ran through my mind. a thought that has always been in my mind for quite some time, but never been brought up before. being a pessimist that i am, i’ve always been, and probably will always be doubting the safety of heating units.
in the course of my life (yeah, as if i’ve lived for THAT long), i’ve experienced bathing using 2 kinds of heaters: one gas, at my home in indonesia and the other one electric, at the boarding school. as dad puts it, gas heating units are safe, as long as there’s no leakage. but the thing is that there’s always this possibility where, say, the safety ring gives way, and lets gas to leak out, filling the bathroom with flammable gas. and the next thing you know, you switch on the lights and you’re fried, together with your house. or maybe it’s also possible that the mechanism controlling the gas flow fails when you’re showering, allowing access of flame to the pipes and, well, the gas tank. although there’s little or no case of such thing happening (at least none that i know of), the thought always makes sure i shower quickly and switch off the gas water heater when i don’t need it anymore.
as for electric heaters, it’s also possible that the protective layer separating the filaments and the water pipes inside the unit to be corroded over time, allowing electricity to pass into the water flowing, which ultimately will come into contact with your body. or maybe you happen to point the shower head to the heating unit, as i did accidentally before, wetting the filament and allowing it to come into contact with water. i mean, being electrocuted while naked with soap all over your body is not something that anyone would like. being in the bathroom, it would also take some time for people to realise that something was amiss and come to your rescue, unless you can manage to make enough noise while you’re being electrocuted. luckily for my case of me wetting the heater, no water seeped into the unit, thus nothing exciting happened. but of course, you can imagine my horror as i frantically turned the tap to stop the water flow.
oh, in case you’re wondering, yes, gas leakages did happen a few times at my house, but they were detected quickly and were put to a stop before anything bad happened.
oh, there’s a question that i’ve wanted to ask for quite some time too. that’s regarding dubbing of a movie into another language. as you know, there are background noise, background characters chatting etc. etc. in addition to the main character speaking, which is the one dubbed into the different languages. my question is that, do they re-create the background noise when they’re dubbing the movie? or does the producer provide a template for the dubbers to fill in with their voices? i tried observing a bilingual movie (that is, a movie which is broadcast in 2 different languages which you can choose, in case you don’t know), and it seems to me that the background noise in the two different languages are the same…
let me end with this interesting picture that a friend sent in a yahoo group message. yes, this isn’t new for those who are from the class, but i know there are a few readers who are not from the class. so here it is:
