Posts in category "Random"

The Garden In The Back

It turns out I have a garden.

I moved in when there was still snow on the ground, and I only knew that there was a little patch of soil in my backyard from the few dead stems sticking out of the snow canopy. Eventually the snow melted, then spring came and passed, but the soil remained barren and dry. Summer started, and Trolley noticed some sprouting when he would go to smoke outside. He pulled some dead growth and weeds but did nothing more, not even a watering. The garden just started to bloom by itself.

I have no idea what kind of plants they are, but they seem to be doing well.

Protected: The Ping-Pong Penis

Speaking Of Accents...

Louise once told me that she liked the way I say want because it apparently sounds like wunt. I can’t really hear it, of course, and I think it’s the only word that I can’t quite say the right way.

A-E-I-O-Accent

This is one of the most interesting things I’ve ever come across. People from around the world are asked to read the same paragraph in English. The paragraph has been designed to include most of the consonants, vowels, and clusters found in standard American English, so that one can really get a sense of all the variations in an accent.

I love the gentleness of Lebanese Arabic (perhaps I associate it with the charming, well-educated, velvet-voiced Lenanese gentleman at work). The interesting thing is that it sounds completely different from Palestinian Arabic. As a small example, the former has a more exaggerated “ee” sound, while the latter has a windier “r” sound.

I hate the painful sounding Cantonese accents. Somehow, each one is so uniquely bad that it’s passed humourously bad, and gone back to uniquely bad again. None of them can properly pronounce “pl“s, “th“s and “ll“s, and the consonants are harsh to the ear. There are also very subtle differences between these Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, and a Cantonese speaker from China. One can hear the slightly more delicate letter combinations from a person surrounded by Mandarin speakers on the mainland.

For me, the most interesting comparisons are between native English speakers. I let Shirley listen to the Glasgow version, and she couldn’t get over how hot it is. Of course, the most neutral accent to me is from Toronto, seeing as how I grew up there. I hear this accent the most, and always find it amusing when foreigners can pull off a fake accent (I’ve been told we sound very bland). Jackie had the most adorable New Jersey accent, and at one point Angie admitted that she had somewhat of a Southern drawl.

Perhaps my fascination with (and attraction of) things speech related stems from an early study of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. One of the scenes in My Fair Lady that really stuck out in my mind was the ability of the protagonist (whom Shaw describes as an “energetic phonetic enthusiast”) to distinguish 130 vowel sounds from a simple, short recording of a voice going through A–E–I–O–U in one fluid motion with no consonants.

Usually I can recognize someone from a voice and accent, sometimes better than I can from a face.

Yoghurt And Rice

Someone used a yoghurt and rice example on me the other day. In his beautiful Lebanese accent, he told me, “It’s like yoghurt and rice. I can explain it to you, but you won’t understand until you try it for yourself.” There must be several other ways of saying the same thing, but the most interesting I’ve ever heard was two examples at once: Taco Bell and anal sex.

Now I’m dying to try yoghurt and rice. I’m guessing that it would only work if it’s white rice (jasmine fragranced would be neutral enough), and a plain, non-fruity, yoghurt.