I can hear you, can you hear me?

It's been suggested that noise pollution will be the secondhand smoke of the twenty-first century. Here's an unusual LATimes piece that says quiet is going extinct.

Garret Keizer wrote about this in the March 2001 Harper's; this person has remarks too. But who knew these people were out there?

My block's pretty quiet, for a residential district in a city of this size. But it's only since moving out here that I've found myself irritated by the garbage truck or the street cleaning vehicle. Perhaps the quieter the neighborhood, the more noticeable loud sounds become. It never bothered me to live on 33rd Street in Baltimore, even on Sundays when the Ravens were playing a few blocks away and traffic was awful. Maybe I just expected noise.

Can it really be that an 80-year-old Sudanese villager has better hearing than a 30-year-old American? Unsurprising, I guess.

Funny that the NASCAR track in New Hampshire -- the site of noise-related controversy with the neighboring town of Canterbury -- is located in a place called Louden.


FMFM: The Jimmy Giuffre 3, featuring the masterful "The Train And The River" and a very nice reading of "The Song Is You"