After every Super Bowl, I would count the days until Bad Lip Reading [1] released its annual NFL compilation. Bad Lip Reading is a YouTube channel that is exactly what its name claims — lip readers being intentionally bad at their jobs. They haven’t released an NFL video for the last couple of years, and I miss it.
While it’s not even close to the original, I have managed to generate my own version of Bad Lip Reading on the job. After resisting technology for most of my career, a while ago I finally began recording the interviews I do for the magazine. This made my life a lot easier, especially since I have the second most illegible handwriting of anyone on the magazine staff. If I didn’t immediately transcribe my notes, I would be puzzling over what exactly I meant when I wrote things that looked like “make paint a solvent” or “5th grade = blue.” Neither of those stories made their way into print. 
Just last year, a colleague alerted me to the fact that Microsoft Word has a transcription feature, where you can just upload your recording into a document. Since I am tight with a buck, I use a free recording app, and every once in a while I get what I paid for. But that makes for occasional forays into poetic words of wisdom. Also, I realized I say “mm-hmm” and “OK” a lot more than I realized.
Here’s a sampling:
Definitely don’t park on the passes. Check the smoke lines of the pension. The smoke alarms is most people.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
So what we do is we played off the upper part of life and then they each, yeah, mine, OK service station and institutes each one would do. And then there would be little trees. And things that they would yak as they stop at each station.
All right.
It’s a design and build business blackout smell that you have black outfield design. Higher than the higher than typical like. Park or dorma?
Uh-huh.
General Eric has been working a lot with Sylvia Asylum. We’re thinking of something and reaching out to the three, the console, three Euros.
Yeah.
So immaculate, yeah. He wanted to know a little bit about October. I told him about speech popular.
OK
Oh yeah, Dylan model copy a little bit. And the differential cloud and be looking.
Mm-hmm.
I don’t know that we recognize what the dogs were. It’s called the roaming being.
Mm-hmm.
We have the yoga book of flood. Be out there. Engage the community and what? Some storytelling following the folk music on the manslaughter.
MHM.
We have sixteen location codes and we might even have sex.
Mm-hmm. OK.
That’s just gonna be a fun kind of fairies. Tiny maths. Birthday extravaganza. Please, let’s get him to say that. But blade before you go out.
Uh-huh.
Right. Launch. That’s me. I’m Adrian.
OK.
How did that happen? Oh yeah, your mom, I start to cry.
Yeah. Yeah.
Trucks, training. Carving. I love you.
Mm-hmm.