Vuvuzelas at the World Cup

I have never minded those plastic horns at sporting events....until now. Every time I have heard them in the past, fans have used them to cheer for or about something rather than as substitutes for the drone pipe on a set of bagpipes. Making noise, all sorts of noise, when cheering seems appropriate at sporting events. For background, see this as just one example, which concludes:

... of course the last laugh belonged to the U.S. fans, who saw their team capitalize on a blunder by England goalie Robert Green, who now joins Bill Buckner and Steve Bartman at the Home for Unfairly Demonized Sports Villains.

Mr. Green probably wouldn't mind if someone blew a vuvuzela in his ear. Even the Infamous Plastic Horn of Distraction is less shrill than the panic coming from his homeland.

The constant drone of the vuvuzelas seems pointless other than to say, "See? We can keep up this pointless, annoying sound steadily for nearly two hours!"

I confess it might be fun to be a part of the annoyance if I were in the stadium. But watching a World Cup match on television is far less pleasant with all that noise in the background. And friends tell me that listening to a match on the radio is really unpleasant with all the vuvuzela noise going on.

My solution, however, is not to ban the plastic horns from the stadia. I see two possible alternative options:

• Glass in the announcers' booths so we hear less of the drone over tv and radio. 
• I'm not sure this would work, but it might: use similar technology to that of noise-canceling headphones to offset the sound of the vuvuzelas.

Comments

[Ted]

Bad news: what you hear on TV is the drone of vuvuzelas after the noise-canceling technology--it's apparently even more unbearable when you're physically present. Only other possibility is to have announcers off site with no sound being piped in from the stadium, but then you miss cheering entirely.

Unfortunately, FIFA thinks it wouldn't be culturally sensitive to simply bar the damn things from stadiums and let people make do with singing.

Separately: http://deadspin.com/5561573/annoying-use-of-the-vuvuzela-throughout-history-a-video-retrospective

[Kais]

Colour me cynical, but given that there are apparently FIFA-branded vuvuzelas on sale at the matches (Mark Ogden, journalist for The Times, tweeted this), I don't think there is any chance FIFA will considering banning them.

The company that makes these now infamous purveyors of aural assault estimate that 1.5 million vuvuzelas have been sold to date and that they will achieve 2.6 million dollars in sales. If FIFA are going to benefit from a portion of this, then I suspect that invoking "cultural sensitivity" is nothing but subterfuge.

[Kais]

Correction: Mr Ogden writes for the Telgraph, not the Times. His Twitter name is "markogden4", in case you are interested to read the actual tweet for yourself.

[Ted]

I would think they're doing their tv ratings more than $2.6 million in damages, but I suppose they might be short-sighted enough to think that they've already collected the tv money. Of course, it sounds like that they've already collected the vuvuzela money, too, so it wouldn't be such a big deal to ban them at this stage.