Howdy, BRI fans, we’re busy working on our next book, Uncle John’s Tunes Into TV, and I’ve got a request: I’m working on an article about the history of closed captioning—the subtitle-like text that allow’s you to read, rather than listen to, a show’s dialogue. It’s a surprisingly fascinating subject. Just imagine, for example, that millions of deaf or hard-of-hearing people were not able to fully enjoy that most ubiquitous of modern life experiences—watching the television—until the 1970s, and that it didn’t become truly widely available until the 1980s.