Me and my English

Your Linguistic Profile::

55% General American English

15% Dixie

15% Upper Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Thanks to Curb Girl for this.

The results are a little skewed but so am I.

- I grew up saying "pop" but have since taken to calling sweet carbonated beverages "soda".

- I've never pronounced "aunt" to sound like "ant" although that is the prevailing pronounciation where I grew up (and I took much ribbing on account of it).

- I think of "the sweet spread on top of cake" as frosting, but the I'd never swap it out in the expression/cliche, "...the icing on the cake."

- I never called an easy class a crip course, a gut, or a blow off. I called it an easy class (and believe me, there weren't that many). When I moved to Missouri for college, I noticed that people referred to low-level classes as "bonehead" classes.

- "Y'all" doesn't trip off my tongue, but I think that English is much in need of a second-person plural.

- I suspect my 5% Yankee is just pretentiousness.

- Finally, what does "Midwestern" sound like?

A doghouse ramble

Caught the Kansas City Bass Quartet at Jardine's last Sunday. For the record, they are bassists Bob Bowman, Gerald Spaits, James Albright and Craig Akin. Four upright basses (a.k.a., bull fiddles, doghouses, etc.) two hours of music, three beers. The performance was exactly the elephant freak show I had hoped for. (In case you're curious, the quartet played the Friday before on KCUR's Up to Date. And if you are curious, you are curious indeed.)

The KCBQ was recording the show, which must explain the tent cards at each table. A nice gesture, although not to everyone's liking as the photo above demonstrates.

It reminded me of a recent post (of mine) about a loud drunk woman at this same venue. I don't think it would've helped much. The challenge, as always, is getting people to read. Just ask anyone who owns a newspaper.

Pity the Sportcow

KC Sportcow: Loss #13
Originally uploaded by oddsandwich.

The Royals snapped their losing streak at #13 yesterday by squeaking past the Yankees 7-6. People who care about this sort of thing heaved a sigh of relief. But as of this morning, the beleaguered Sportcow at 53rd & Main was still hooded in shame.

Wabbit season

Right there beind the fence post. That's this year's bunny. But don't go getting attached.

Last year about this time, a cousin of this creature found its way under our deck. It's bound to happen in a place like Kansas City. There are urban patches here, but this is essentially a city in a park. Which means birds, squirrels, possums, rabbits and varying degrees of vermin. And in the spring, everybody breeds.

Last year's bunny spent a few days darting out from the under the deck to nibble grass (as well as more valued plants) until the we let the dogs out. There would be much commotion and the bunny would dart back under the deck. The dogs would sniff indignantly for a while and eventually give up.

Then a thunderstorm drove a feral cat and her four kittens under the deck. That was the last we saw of Bunny '05.

Bunny '06 appeared on Sunday at the back of the yard, trying to get out under the fence. Or in. Who knows. All I do know is that there was excited dog activity and then an eerie whelp. We called the dogs off, but attempts to shoo the bunny out of the yard ended with it under the deck.

Today, my wife came home from work and let the dogs out just like always. And like in some after-school-special version of Watership Down, '06 had strayed from the safety of the deck and found itself in No Bunnie's Land.

Too bad for Bunny '06. I just hope it's the only one.

Software employees FO after receiving email

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Employees at WeltSoft, a local software firm, mistakenly fucked off yesterday when a light-hearted suggestion was inadvertently emailed to the entire company.

Jay Gopalakrishnan, a support technician at Systems, was demonstrating some of the features of his recently purchased Blackberry 6510(tm) handheld device to programmer Carl "Ferstie" Ferst. The BlackBerry features email, phone, web browser and organizer applications, as well as a 'walkie-talkie' feature.

"Ferstie asked if I could show him how the email function works, and I said, like, 'Dude, no problem', said Gopalakrishnan. Gopalakrishnan then coached Ferst on using his thumbs on the backlit QWERTY keyboard.

"I thought it was kind of tricky getting the cursor back to the address book," said Ferst, "so Jay said to just to reply to an old message."

Ferst typed out "fuck off" in reply to a company-wide message from Help Desk Coordinator Dave Hurst who was at his desk on the other side of the large open work area shared by the company's 47 employees.

Gopalakrishnan countered that replying to Hursts message was "so not" his idea. "And I so told him to check the To field. Jack ass."

Reactions to the message varied from confusion to acceptance, but by the end of business Friday a total of 15 employees had fucked off.

"I have a lot of work to do before the next release," said QA technician Havlova Vassilovskya, "but I think it's important to be a team player. So I fucked off."

Another employee said she was already fucking off at the time and took the message as a confirmation.

"We're in code freeze until next month so I've been fucking off all week," said Technical Communications Lead Cecily Guildensleeve, who spent the afternoon updating her Amazon.com wish list, pricing villas in the south of France and entering sweepstakes. "If Publishers Clearinghouse ever comes through for me, I'm going to fuck off out of here."

Overheard

I came across Overheard in KC a few weeks ago and experienced a pang of regret or more specifically a re-pang.

OKC operates on a simple model: People overhear something funny/strange/poignent or whatever while they're out and about, write them down and send them in. The site was inspired by Overheard in New York, which has been around since at least 2003, near as I can tell. I came across ONY a few months ago and experienced the original pang.

I lived in New York for the better part of 1997 and 98 and was a very happy pedestrian, riding the subways and buses and ferries, pounding the pavement, sitting in libraries and coffee shops. And of course eavesdropping, which is the unofficial pastime and inalienable right of anyone living in that humming hive of humanity.

One day in May 1998 I was walking through the East Village. I turned off Sixth Avenue at 8th Street and within the first block I overheard the following snippets of conversation:

- Her father's in the construction business in Indianapolis. Very sweet...
- You can't talk to the dead. Everybody thinks you can...
- I think I'm gonna turn into a piece of falafel.
- I think I'd like to become a professor.
- Only the stupid people like to spend money.

I took out my little notebook and jotted it down. That evening I shared it with my girlfriend and some of her friends. We all laughed. I discovered that I had a bunch of eavesdroppings in my notebook. For example, a woman in her 20s saying to her friend: "What he doesn't want to hear is that she wanted to kiss me."

Someone said I should just walk around and write down what I hear. I said, "Yeah, I could just label each one with the location I overheard." My girlfriend said, "Yeah, you could publish it with pictures of street corners. New Yorkers eat that kind of stuff with a spoon." And like so many of my plans from those days, that's as far as it went.

Five years later along came S. Morgan Friedman and Michael Malice and overheardinnewyork.com. Then last January they published the book. And sure it's only #13,347 on Amazon's top selling book list, but I'm not bitter. The site is a fun stop although the titles are a little show-offy for me. I wish them well, even as I grind my teeth.

Overheard in KC has some nice photos but it hasn't exactly been mobbed with material, a fact to be speculated on. Maybe we're just more discreet here. Or maybe because people in KC spend more time in their cars we have less opprotunity to snoop. There's also something un-bloglike about having to submit something and then waiting for it to be approved. That's a little too much like old-skool publishing. (Overheard in New York does the same thing.)

Speaking of snooping, I overheard something recently that I thought was great. It was the sort of thing you probably wouldn't hear in NY.

At Costco, man to female companion:
"We oughta get us one of them high-end chicken pot pies. Whaddya think?"