Man With World's Deepest Voice Can Hit Infrasonic Notes 173
An anonymous reader writes "The man who holds the Guinness record for the world's lowest voice can hit notes so low that only animals as big as elephants are able to hear them. American singer Tim Storms, who also has the world's widest vocal range, can reach notes as low as G-7 (0.189Hz), an incredible eight octaves below the lowest G on the piano."
World's Worst Superpowerr (Score:5, Funny)
"You can break glasses with your voice?"
"No, that's at the other end of the scale."
"But you can communication with elephants? Call them to rescue you and fight battles?"
"No, but they can hear me."
Re:World's Worst Superpowerr (Score:5, Funny)
His superpower is the ability to make you shit your pants with the brown note.
Yeah, yeah, I know... Mythbusters, bla bla bla...
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His superpower is the ability to make you shit your pants with the brown note.
Yeah, yeah, I know... Mythbusters, bla bla bla...
Only if he sings "Chocolate Rain" ...
*ducks
Re:World's Worst Superpowerr (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not willing to rule out his ability to call elephants to battle.
He's badass until proven otherwise.
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I can still hear his lowest notes, you insensitive clod!
But can he sing? (Score:4)
With all the innuendo around Barry White's voice, if this man can sing he'd be a real crowd pleaser!
-Matt
Re:But can he sing? (Score:5, Funny)
Not sure he'd want to even try. He might end up on the business end of some elephant wood!
Re:But can he sing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But can he sing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks. TFS's link had nothing more than some British woman's voice to offer.
He's got something special going on there, but saying he can go 2 octaves below a normal bass voice is a probably pushing it, let alone 8 octaves below the end of a piano's range.
0.187Hz? Consider it takes a 64 foot pipe and a lot of blower horsepower to produce 8Hz in an organ. There are only two such organs in the world so equipped, most big organs "settle" for 32 foot stops and 16Hz. I think his voice is plenty impressive without indulging in wild hyperbole.
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Thanks. TFS's link had nothing more than some British woman's voice to offer.
He's got something special going on there, but saying he can go 2 octaves below a normal bass voice is a probably pushing it, let alone 8 octaves below the end of a piano's range.
Based on what my ear was able to hear (highly unreliable, I know), I say he can do at least as low as 24-30 Hz (one octave lower that the power network hum). One of these days and just from curiosity, I'll try to rip the sound from the YouTube videos, pass it through a FFT and see what it'll show.
Re:But can he sing? (Score:5, Informative)
One of these days and just from curiosity, I'll try to rip the sound from the YouTube videos, pass it through a FFT and see what it'll show.
Probably futile, due to lossy compression algorithms filtering out frequencies that statistically most people can't hear
(almost) anyone alive can do .187 Hz (Score:5, Informative)
OT - your sig (Score:2)
You're a fan of Aleister Crowley? Have you read his hagiography? The man was batshit insane, but the book was fascinating.
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Shipping Forecast (Score:5, Funny)
Is it so wrong for a man to do the shipping report?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emh75AYxnzk [youtube.com]
No longer vocalizations (Score:3, Informative)
For reference, 0.189 Hz is roughly once cycle per five seconds. Take a finger and raise it for 2.5 seconds, then lower it for 2.5 seconds.
This doesn't count as anything more than discrete pulses. I understand that the muscles controlling his vocal folds are performing similar activities to singing, but this is not sound anymore.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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actually, breathing constitutes an infrasonic sound, in every sense of that term
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For reference, 0.189 Hz is roughly once cycle per five seconds. Take a finger and raise it for 2.5 seconds, then lower it for 2.5 seconds.
This doesn't count as anything more than discrete pulses. I understand that the muscles controlling his vocal folds are performing similar activities to singing, but this is not sound anymore.
sound 1 (sound) n.
1.
a. Vibrations transmitted through an elastic solid or a liquid or gas, with frequencies in the approximate range of 20 to 20,000 hertz, capable of being detected by human organs of hearing.
b. Transmitted vibrations of any frequency.
c. The sensation stimulated in the organs of hearing by such vibrations in the air or other medium.
d. Such sensations considered as a group.
Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:5, Insightful)
"this is not sound anymore"
Tell that to the elephants.
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And the whales.
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I find it exceeding improbable these animals use sounds at 1.87Hz, let alone 0.187Hz.
Wikipedia list 10Hz as the bottom range for whales. Note that is a vibration more than 50 times faster than this guy is supposedly producing.
There is infrasound, and then there is earthquake sound...
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The guy can make infrasounds [wikipedia.org]... maybe he's related to Inframan! [wikipedia.org]
Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:4, Insightful)
Your 'sound' wouldnt travel far in air, as it would not be loud enough (does not have a good enough amplitude). His sound would.
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Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not quite true. No, you can't just make a click every few seconds and call it "sound" at the corresponding frequency.
You can, however, simply breathe at that frequency, which follows a not-too-shabby sine wave.
For comparison, one of the "loudest" subwoofers made (though damned if I can find a link to it ATM) uses a fan with blades that pivot in pha
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For comparison, one of the "loudest" subwoofers made (though damned if I can find a link to it ATM) uses a fan with blades that pivot in phase with the sound... Effectively "breathing" in and out based on whether it has a positive or negative pitch to the blades at any given point in time.
I'd love to see the link on that. I have some experience with variable pitch propellers (althought I am not claiming to be an expert). It seems like you wouldn't be able to vary the blade rotation fast enough unless the blades were quite lightweight or small. And if they were small, there wouldn't be a point- you could just use a normal subwoofer.
Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.sonicflare.com/archives/eminent-tech-trw-17-the-most-powerful-subwoofer-in-the-world.php [sonicflare.com]
Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:4, Interesting)
For reference, 0.189 Hz is roughly once cycle per five seconds. Take a finger and raise it for 2.5 seconds, then lower it for 2.5 seconds.
I am having a hard time imagining how, physiologically, the human voice mechanism could be capable of producing a vibration at such a frequency. Frankly it sounds like bullshit to me.
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I knew pciminion was an elephant!
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Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't go quite as low, and try to keep your voice as pure as possible, and then *at the same frequency* go all Hetfield-like and back to pure again you'll hear, and feel, the difference. With a bit of practice you'll be able to precisely pick the balance between the use of two membranes at will.
With infinitely more practice, you'll be able to get those other membranes vibrating at half the frequency of your vocal chords, at which point you'll be well on the way to mastering one of the Tuvan harmonic singing techniques.
It's clear from some of the youtube links that have been posted that this guy is effectively just using the same kind of technique, and whilst it's very impressive for what it is, his parps are way less musical than say Paul Pena's harmonic singing, which was reaching an octive below normal ranges. (And which caused the Tuvans to nickname him "Earthquake".) If you've not seen the film
As for the "infrasonic" claims in TFA, they're mostly bullcrap. He may be able to modulate sound pressure waves at those frequencies, but so can I - by breathing normally.
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Hetfield's toprange (without going falsetto or non modal screaming) is upper fourth, and recently he's managed as a low note, a B1 ("All Nightmare Long") but his earlier stuff only went as low as C2 ("Bad Seed", "Enter Sandman").
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
This looks absurd to me too. I know nothing of anatomy, but I think the vocal chords work like strings.
Can you imagine a string vibrating at 0.189Hz? That is 5.3 seconds per period! Until Guinness verifies it, and be open about how they verified it, I am skeptical.
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If the speed of sound is 340 m/s, then the wavelength of A4 (middle A, 400 Hz) is about 0.85m, on the order of the size of the human vocal tract.
The wavelength of a note at 0.2 Hz would be 680 m. Not to say that a human could not make such a sound--you can do it by slowly waving your hand--but it would be so poorly coupled as to be lost in the background noise. This would be like trying to broadcast AM radio with a cell phone antenna instead of a longwire or mast. To effectively pump out a sound at that fre
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For reference, 0.189 Hz is roughly once cycle per five seconds. Take a finger and raise it for 2.5 seconds, then lower it for 2.5 seconds.
This doesn't count as anything more than discrete pulses. I understand that the muscles controlling his vocal folds are performing similar activities to singing, but this is not sound anymore.
You sound like an 80 year old nerd doing the equivalent of yelling at the neighbor's kids, "Darn rock & roll! That ain't music! Its noise!"
In my day, musicians sang. They didn't just fluctuate their vocal chords in 5 second intervals to produce vibrations in the air!
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If you agree that AM radio waves are "light" then I'll agree that sub-1Hz vibrations are "sound".
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Well, yes and no. [answers.com]
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So... sounds like AM waves are as much light as visible light is. Our sensory organs don't define the true nature of something, which is true regardless of whether us humans observe or comprehend it.
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If "made of photons" == "light" then that makes perfect sense.
But as it turns out both "light" and "sound" are defined in colloquial English as perceptual phenomena, and not as categories in physics:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/light [merriam-webster.com]
1 a : something that makes vision possible
b : the sensation aroused by stimulation of the visual receptors
c : electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength that travels in a vacuum with a speed of about 186,281 miles (300,00
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specifically such radiation, but generally not. Definitions are fuzzy. And I think that specificity is based on the tradition of the archaic meaning of it as an observable phenomenon. Science considers visible light a subset of all light. ...And Merriam-Webster -- although it is my favorite of the dictionaries -- doesn't define science. Probably a good thing. .... Supersonic sounds that only cats hear: I guess it's not sound because we don't hear
Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:5, Funny)
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Back to school, now, seriously.
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Radio waves? There is nothing electromagnetic about mechanical sound waves
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Actually, no. Discreet pulses resolve to a fairly broad series of sine waves. That is quite distinmct from the spectrum of a human voice with the fundamental in the infrasonic range.
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Yes, I sincerely doubt this man's vocal apparatus can actually move enough air back and forth to create a 0.2Hz fundamental tone which is actually separable from background noise by any instrumentation. At the very best he is creating harmonics which mathematically 'imply' such a fundamental.
Re:No longer vocalizations (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that would be more impressive. You would have to sing two (or more) discrete pitches, without much in the way of harmonics for either one.
If an ear/nose/throat doctor says he has vocal cords twice as long as normal, and muscles that work differently, I'm more inclined to believe that he can produce a note that low, more than I would believe what you suggest.
In fact, what exactly do you think the Guinness Book of World people are measuring?
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-1/lowest-vocal-note-by-a-male/ [guinnessworldrecords.com]
I can read it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
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But the fundamental never ACTUALLY disappears except in the degenerate case where there is no signal at all.
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That's why I used the carefully-chosen qualifier "which is actually separable from background noise by any instrumentation."
If this guy is producing 0.2Hz oscillations with his actual vocal cords, they are of such a low amplitude as to be quieter than the noise floor of any sound transducer ever devised, or else he is somehow displacing large fractions of a liter of air per cycle, which is not really possible unless his larynx is many times bigger than an average human's
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The human voice also includes the entire chest cavity as a resonator. The vocal cords are just how we inject sound energy into the resonator.
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Breath in - wait 10 seconds - breath out - repeat..
Congratulations you have now broken the record with a sound at 0.1Hz!!!
Btw, everything can be broken down to a fairly broad series of sine waves, it is called a fourier transformation and works on any function.
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And some of those spectra resemble a voice and some do not. Your example will not. As for the rest, isn't it pretty damned obvious that I already know that?
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Actually, we can all produce something resembling a pure "sound" at 0.189Hz. All you have to do is compress and uncompress air in your mouth (or lungs, or a bottle) at that rate. The small air volume variation (translating to a variation in the volume of your body) should be enough to produce a sound pressure level of a few decibels at that frequency, particularly if you're in a small airtight room.
I doubt Tim's voice, in practice, produces more energy at frequencies that low than the above method. More lik
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Every person's voice breaks up as they reach their lowest possible note. When he sings in his deeper pure tone range, I can sing right along with him. As he gets lower, he retains the pure tone, but I start breaking up. Does the fact that my voice is breaking up mean a person can't sing that low?
No, it means that I am bottoming out my range, and I have probably relaxed my muscles enough they are just flopping about. With extra long vocal cords, he can go a lot lower before getting floppy. At his lowest
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I actually did the math for the pressure variations in a small airtight room (3x3x3 meters), and came up with 5 microliters - that's the RMS delta volume of air that would be required to produce a sound pressure of 0dB for large wavelengths. At 40dB, that becomes half a mililiter, which should be achievable for a human, perhaps with the aid of a glass bottle. By blowing, though. Not with your vocal folds.
The ability to produce sound without a rigid airtight compartment depends on the inertia of air - this i
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The human voice is analog, not digital. This cannot be approximated by a discrete pulse once every 5 seconds, because it is a continuous wave that peaks every 5 seconds.
There is a *HUGE* difference.
If you were to meaningfully digitize it, then you must still sample it at thresholds above human hearing, and it would appear as discrete pulses whose peaks would appear to form a sine wave... one which has a frequency below that which we can hear ourselves.
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At that frequency can you really call it sound anymore? I can make my hand move back and forth at roughly 0.189Hz which will move the air and thus could potentially be detected. Young adult humans can hear down to 20Hz, elephants possibly 1Hz. But remember that even at 20Hz for humans that sound is almost inaudible, so presumably 1Hz for an elephant is at the edge of their senses. Plus what elephants hear as infrasonic sound is transmitted through the ground and not the air. Ie, I could set up a 1Hz w
Obligatory (Score:1)
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Film trailers (Score:2)
Storm's incredible voice also made him a hot commodity in the Hollywood voice over business, where industry executives eagerly track down people with low voices to add drama to film trailers.
Add drama, or sound stupid? [youtube.com]
Like a G7! (Score:1)
Good. Sign him up. We need somebody on Earth who can scare the shit out of Thanos in the deeper-is-more-badass category.
Perfect match (Score:5, Funny)
Between him and Mariah Carey, they should both be able to summon every animal in the vicinity.
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Brown Note (Score:5, Funny)
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We're gonna shit our pants once we hear him reaching the brown note [wikipedia.org].
Damn. I wish I still had mod points.
Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Is there an MP3 of him singing?
Oh... uh... damn...
0.189Hz is (surprisingly) not an typo (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually thought the claimed frequency was a typo in the article. But in the interview, Mr. Storm says he can sing 8 octaves below the lowest note on a piano. If you work backwords and double 0.189Hz eight times (for each octave), you get 48Hz, making his lowest [claimed] note 8 octaves below the lowest G on a piano.
As for whether this qualifies as singing, I would argue that to be considered real singing he should be using the same vocal cords and musculature required to produce human-audible sounds. I.e. he should be able to produce a continuous sound that starts at a normal note and drops down to the claimed note, without any fundamental change in the way in which he's producing the sound. My $.02.
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Everyone has a slightly different vocal cord length, and certainly different musculature based on their singing/practice experience. If everyone had the same physical attributes, they would have the same range.
Yes you can start out with exactly the same attributes and develop different ranges, but your musculature changes in response to training, and you can develop nodules and other problems which change the quality and/or range of your voice on top of what you mentioned.
Your argument is absurd, and he ca
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Come at me bro (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwHWbsvgQUE [youtube.com]
Well no wonder (Score:2)
Sorry, I do not believe this! (Score:2)
A human simply does not have the resonant cavity to produce such notes.
Anyone can make glottal clicks at 0.18 Hz (about 5 clicks per second).
A train of such clicks does have a fundamental frequency 0.18 Hz, but most of the energy will be in the higher harmonics.
A genuine 0.18 Hz note has a 0.18 Hz fundamental as the loudest component.
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A human simply does not have the resonant cavity to produce such notes.
Anyone can make glottal clicks at 0.18 Hz (about 5 clicks per second).
Also known as about five seconds per click.
Well-Validated, by SOPA (Score:2)
Note on image: The rifle is for non-believers.
yeah. I call bullshit. (Score:2)
If Homo sapiens were so equipped to *detect* such frequencies with auditory sensors (we are not), we would also be equipped to produce them. For that we would require a neck a mile long.
5 sec per wavelength? (Score:2)
That's approximately how I breathe. Inhale, 2.5 sec later exhale, 2.5 sec later repeat. So am I making longitudinal compression waves like this guy? What's the difference between him and me?
Re:G-7 is a chord not a note (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's G *negative* 7. Not a G7 chord. As in a G 11 octaves below middle C.
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No, I'm pretty sure C4 on a piano is more like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue_X_1wZTEM [youtube.com]
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But you are also correct that the G7 (should be G superscript 7) chord, which is the G minor 7 chord has thee notes G, Bb, D, F
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G7 is not Gmin7, G7 is the dominant seventh, which is the major chord with the 7th added. G B D F
Re:G-7 is a chord not a note (Score:5, Informative)
Beyond being schooled by AC here [slashdot.org], let me add this.
G superscript 7 is the standard jazz (fake book) notation for a major chord with a minor seventh added. G7 without the superscript is also acceptable, but you will generally see this in music where the presentation is less important than the information conveyed. Discussion forums, as an example, or lead sheets. The superscript is mandatory only in formal music theory, and assists quick reading while improvising so it is effectively mandatory, though variable, there.
"G minor 7 chord has thee notes G, Bb, D, F" would be written as "Gm7", traditionally without the superscript, or "G-7" (again without the superscript) in a jazz setting. It is a minor chord with the minor seventh added.
Traditional music theory (Helmholtz) would write C4 as c' with C3 as regular c (with nothing following it). Lower octaves are indicated with capital letters, the next lower being C (again with nothing following). Then commas indicate lower octaves starting with C, as the next example.
It is only a logical extension for the subsubcontra range to use a negative number, since C0 was really quite low and anything below it was pretty much unheard of. Helmholtz allowed for an infinite range, but as you can see the scientific notation system really did not count on notes below C0. C-1 is the lowest I have seen, which is why it is very unnatural to refer to a note as G-7.
So you are correct that G-7 is much more likely to be understood, outside any context, as a chord. But for the wrong reasons. And of course if we are talking about a note, then how would you confuse it for a chord? Unless you wanted to demonstrate a tiny bit of trivia you picked up accidentally?
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To indicate these lower notes, Helmholz notation uses subscript markings, not negative numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_pitch_notation [wikipedia.org]
Re:And the rockets red glare (occult & war) (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever anyone says "wake up" to someone who isn't literally asleep, what they really mean is "change all your opinions to match my own, and don't you ever dare contradict me or disagree with me".
You are not an exception.
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are you trying to wake us up to the real meaning of waking us up ???
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Yeh given that every reduction of 1 octave requires double the power to have the same volume, it couldnt be that loud.
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I can attempt to explain two things. First, you can beat the time-frequency uncertainty principle if you're willing to be wrong sometimes. The ear does this, functioning foremost as a wavefront detector.(*) Second, most sounds including the human voice follow an approximation of the harmonic series. (Always an approximation; sometimes, it's not a very good model at all.) So you can detect the upper partials and reconstruct the fundamental if the audio in question fits the model well enough and the harm
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Doesn't the sampling theorem mean you need at least 10.6s of sample to reconstruct suhch a frequency? That makes me think you'd need that length of sample to measure such a frequency too. (Dunno, I lost all my DSP smarts many years back.)
Moreover, having a component at a particular frequency doesn't make it a note at a particular frequency. Modulate a 5s 'wah-wah-wah' with your mouth over a normal tone, and you'll measure a 0.2Hz component using FFT analysis. (Which is why single-bit very-
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Why the fuck did some idiot mod my post "Offtopic"? Is he such a child that he's never heard the Grinch song and doesn't know who Thurl Ravenscroft is AND couldn't be bothered to Google the name and discover that his deep booming voice was quite famous?
This is one of those times when I really wish there was some accountability in the Slashdot moderation system. People should be held responsible for irresponsible use of the moderation system.
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Wave your hand back and forth eleven times per minute. Hear it? I didn't think so.
How many elephants do you think read slashdot?
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