Who was that guy, again?

At the urging of wonderturtle I found myself watching Overboard on TBS today. I found myself transfixed by the fact that the middle boy looked amazingly familiar and yet I couldn't figure out who he was.

What did we do before the The Internet Movie Database ? How else would I know that the girl who played Mia's best friend in The Princess Diaries was the same awkward girl from Welcome to the Dollhouse?

Or that the third son in Overboard was also Josh Baskin's best friend Billy in Big? I feel so much better now that I know who he is.

Accents

There was a linguist on NPR the other day who created this test http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/yankeetest.html. He analyzed speech patterns and things and devised a test to determine just how much southern people have in their speech. It's actually neat. Give it a try.

Then he went on to say that west of about Ohio there are no accents because accents arose from people adopting the mispronunciations of immigrants. But I don't buy that. First off, I've heard plenty of non-Southern accents from the western part of the country. Second of all, in a highly mobile society, how do you track that sort of thing?

I grew up in New Jersey. Never had too much of an accent, but then I move to Ohio and my dad started making fun of the way I was flattening out my vowel sounds and things. Now that I'm in Kentucky, there are certains words that I say with a distinctive light twang. And there are words that I never used to use that I use now. So, how would my speech patterns get analyzed now. According to the test I'm 25% Dixie (my Kentucky born and bred husband was 96%...), but what happens five or ten years from now?

And on a related note: one of the girls on our tour group in the UK was a nice girl from Arizona, reasonably bright, but when one of the Australians said to her, "I don't have an accent, you do," she really didn't get it. She didn't understand how someone with such an obvious Australian accent could say she was the one with an accent. And I tried telling her three times that to Australians, she has an American accent...

weird things people have said in my bedroom while sleeping

"In the MagicWorld, I think they're called Suprise Popups" (spoken just after the alarm went off)

"I think I figured out the trick...you know, to let the air out of the thing...the thing under the La-Z-Boy."

"Don't go cloning anything...just don't do it...because you don't know how." (sound advice at all times)

Grr. People annoy me sometimes

Critical to understanding my complaint here is a little knowledge of the layout of our neighborhood. Our house is on a relatively busy secondary urban street. People have postage-stamp front and back yards and no driveways. Instead, everyone's parking space and/or garage sits facing a narrow street (more or less an alleyway) behind the house that is accessed by one of two equally small, narrow streets. It's hard going if you come down these streets and someone else is trying to pass in the opposite direction...it's that kind of narrow.

7:30 p.m. I'm on my way home from the gym. All I want to do is get inside and cook dinner. I turn off of the street on which I live and onto the little street that will lead to the alley behind the house.

There's a blockage.

Two morons have somehow managed to have a fender-bender at the intersection back there. How do you hit someone when you should both be driving about 15 mph?? Whatever.

Here's my complaint. Why do so many people firmly believe that not only do the police not want you to stop blocking traffic with your minor accident, but they will go so far as to refuse to take a report if you do? Cops are smarter than that. They can still figure out who was positioned where. I have a friend who is a former cop, he said they would much rather you remove both cars from the road, so long as they can be moved.

No. Let's block up a narrow intersection and risk another accident by making everyone who comes towards you back down the alley and onto a busy street to go around you.

As if this weren't bad enough, when I finally did get to the garage and got out of the car to cross the street and go open my garage, some other idiot nearly hit me as he came barreling down the alley at 40 mph.

There are innocent bunnies and kittens living back there people!

For my dad

In honor of Father's Day, I just wanted to mention that I hae an excellent Dad (my Mom's pretty cool, too, but I didn't have this on Mother's Day). He's always been a good dad and, as far as I can tell, my sisters and I turned out pretty darn good.

I know we weren't always all that easy to raise, especially when there were three teenagers vying for "Moodiest Actress in an Argument" 24/7...but he did a great job.

Thanks, Dad. I love you.

Not the Man of Steel

I was shocked to see this article http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Movies/06/14/film.supermanchristfigure.ap/index.html on CNN.com this morning.

Haven't evangelical Christians staked their claim on enough? Why is it that any story that involves someone returning after a long absence or someone's father sending him somewhere to help is obviously a Christian allegory. Oh, and anyone who can't see that is clearly a moron.

Best part of the Superman one is that Superman was created by two Jews. It was originally intended as a metaphor for the isolation and duality of being a Jew in America in the late '30s and early '40s. Now, it's being claimed as a Christ tale? Isn't this just what the creators were commenting on?

Super Icky (addendum)

So I walk into the lunch room at work the day after watching Super Size Me and someone has left a Big Mac, fries and a sundae on the table. I almost threw up.
I am never touching fast food again and if I have to eat it...salad only.

Super Icky

Just finished watching Super Size Me.
Disregard the extremes to which this man took it. It's still gross.
It's 11 pm and I want to go to the gym.
I am giving up food.
Ew.

Types at the gym

Tough guys/girls: big, over muscled, often tatooed. Tend to lift more than they can handle and then drop the free weights loudly on the ground in case you didn't notice how much they picked up in the first place. Listen for the grunts.

Pretty boys/girls: Want to be seen as tough and athletic. Always on the machines so you can't tell how much they're lifting. Usually more interested in scantily clad members of the opposite sex on treadmills. Make a big show of toweling off sweat or getting a drink. Very loud so you notice them.

Lookin' for a (wo)man: Either young and perky and always hanging around the tough guys and pretty boys or middle aged and constantly glancing around to see whose checking them out. Always wearing more makeup and jewelery at the gym than the rest of us wear on a date. Never dressed in sweats and aT-shirt.

Serious athletes: Often carry notebooks to mark down what they did this time around. Usually sweaty. Not afraid to take the scariest classes (just thinking about Advanced Spinning makes me tired). Among the only people getting their money's worth.

I'm cool (as long as you don't know my mom pays for my membership): Who are all of these people buying $40/month gym memberships so their 13 year old sons can glance at a weight machine occasionally on their way to play basketball? Is it just that they're too old for a babysitter and you don't trust them at home alone? Isn't this why Little League and the Boys and Girls Club were invented?

Seriously interested in their health: Often seen with personal trainers. Usually at least mildly overweight/out of shape. Just show up, do their thing and go home. I go to a gym on the yuppy side of town. We're short on these.

Social Insecurity Office

The wedding was May 13, but between the honeymoon and post-honeymoon unpacking and a business trip to Colorado, here we are a month later and I hadn't changed my name yet. I got home from the meeting in Colorado absolutely exhausted. The three of us went all agreed that if none of us showed up Monday morning at work, no one would even notice we were back.

After lolling in bed for as long as I could tolerate the incessant yipping of next door's hideously untrained poodle, I got up, read some news and made a brief appearance in the lab to grow some bacteria for use tomorrow. Then, it was off to the Gene Snyder Courthouse so I could put this whole name change thing into motion.

I think I need to recreate the whole experience for you to appreciate it here.

First, the "tightened" security at the downtown Louisville federal courthouse. I showed my driver's license to the very bored looking security guard. Not really sure why they needed photo ID. I mean, they didn't write my name down or anything. Did they just want to see that I could claim to be someone?? "Well we don't know who carried the bomb inside, but there were five people that came in this hour. Two of them were from Indiana, two from Kentucky and one had a state issued ID. Find one of them, and you've got your guy."

I put my purse on the X-ray scanner that they keep for purely decorative purposes. The man didn't even look at the screen. A second bored looking security guard vaguely glanced up as I walked through a metal detector.

In the Social Security office, there was yet another security guard. This one was at a desk with such a high barrier I don't even think she could see the room. You have to go to this huge computer terminal and push a number to say why you're there and then it spits out a reciept with an unreadable number that you will have to guess at to determine when it is your turn.

Then came the interminable waiting. As I had parked at a meter witha 2-hour limit, all the while, I was studying my watch trying to decide how high my risk of a parking ticket was climbing. I didn't dare leave the building to feed the meter, I might miss my turn. And if you think Motor Vehicle is tough, these folks don't play around.

I saw every imaginable character in this tiny waiting room.

There was a woman about my age with another, somewhat older woman, two small boys (maybe 5 and 7) and a little girl (3ish). In the course of 30 minutes, I saw her raise her hand at least once to whack or threaten to whack each child. Let's guess how these kids will turn out.

Next to me was a couple that had to be doing a name change. They couldn't keep their hands to themselves and the guy kept trying to make small talk with a seven year old girl as if to prove what a wonderful father he would make.

The aforementioned seven-year old girl who carried a tiny blue purse that appeared to be some sort of magical Mary Poppins bag that had a million things in it. Including a rubber keychain of Sponge Bob No-Pants.

A walking stereotype of a biker dude complete with handle bar mustache, do rag, beer gut and Harley Davidson T-shirt.

Four 19-20 year old guys who made a ton of noise, mocked every name that was called, were to loud to hear when their number was called and had to be called three times. Then, it turned out only one of them was there for a reason. Apparently, his three buddies were moral support.

A vaguely drunken looking man who slept across four chairs until the third time his number was called at which point he staggered to the window and had the woman check his number a half dozen times. As he was leaving he muttered something about "I'm a metro councilman. Leash-t I was till I done got locked up..."

There were more, but they were kind of just variations on a theme. Oh...the actual name change took like two minutes. The woman did, however seem baffled by whyever could I possibly want to keep my own name in addition to his...

Ice cream is a good thing

There's a really good Cincinnati-based, family-owned ice cream chain called Graeter's. I mean really good. Oprah once talked about it on TV and the next day they had like 500,000 mail orders for ice cream. And it is totally worth the shipping cost.

My boss is currently out of town...at a meeting in Tuscany, no less. We're always well behaved when he's out of town. We deserved a little misbehaving.

At three o'clock today, we all packed up our things and headed to the nearest Graeter's. As good as a waffle cone of coconut almond chocolate chip ice cream tastes, it tastes even better at 3 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon in June.

They Don't All Hate Us (international edition)

I got married a few weeks ago and this was, as is customary, followed by a honeymoon. We aren't beach people. Well...I'm a beach people (what proper Jersey Girl isn't?) but he can't swim and burns in the sun. I think his version of hell probably involves a beach. We're doers. So, for our honeymoon we did...go to the UK and Ireland. It was a fabulous opportunity to learn about the way the English-speaking-non-US-world is seeing us right now.

1) Every Canadian I saw had a Canadian flag somewhere on their person. It was as if they were quietly conveying "Hey, I look like 'em, and I kinda talk like 'em, but I swear, I'm not one of 'em. See this flag. I'm okay. I'm peaceful. Leave me alone."

I have a friend who is Canadian. Her parents are Malaysian and Sri Lankan. Her husband is a white boy from Minnesota. When she and her husband and parents travelled to Sri Lanka, they asked him to wear a Canadian flag somewhere on his person to kind of play down the fact that he could have just as easily passed for an Army Ranger out of uniform.

2) Every time it came up in conversation that Americans are not the most popular people in the world right now, an Aussie or a Brit or a South African would pipe up that it wasn't our fault and, in fact, their own leader had his/her head somewhere kind of close to W's rear end. It's true. They don't blame us. They get that this is all some sort of cosmic practical joke and Ashton Kutcher's going to pop up any minute to tell us all we've been Punk'd.

3) Every English speaking non American who has ever travelled has been to America. And usually not to the cool places or the pretty ones. Usually to Vegas or the touristy parts of Florida. That's cool and all, but...we're more than drunken Spring Breakers, Mickey Mouse, show girls and gambling.

3a) Every one of the aforementioned world travellers really wants to see the cooler parts of the US. In fact, every one of them seems to want to see Kentucky because they've heard it's so pretty (it really is).

4) We got really lost in Edinburgh. Really lost. Like, headed towards a not-so-nice neighborhood lost. We stopped some random guy on the street and he was kind enough to walk us back to where we wanted to be. His commentary on America:
"I really wish they'd open a Denny's here. Ooh. And a Taco Bell. I like Taco Bell."
"You know what I really like in the US? When you go into a restaurant, you get actual service. People there are nice to you. Here they just kind of slam things down in front of you."


Look at that the nicest man in all of Edinburgh (as far as I'm concerned) thinks we're nice.

5) Everyone seems to have heard of the Kentucky Derby

Totally unrelated, but I was driving behind a car with the coolest vanity plate ever: MPECHW
Say it fast, you'll get it.
I don't know who you are....but I like you.