Several months ago, maybe in February, a strange thing happened near my house. There were several police cars and an ambulance at the traffic light to the left of my house. The light itself was not working as usual, instead flashing yellow constantly. So that’s not too weird, maybe an accident. As I pull into my drive and notice that cars are being directed to turn around and go back the way they came. There are also several parked at the corner. I can’t tell if they are crushed up at all, or just went off the road, or what. So it is also garbage night and I go back out several times to get the garbage and recycles out. On my last trip out I notice this incredibly, huge-gigantic thing coming up the street from the corner with the busted light and it has a police-ambulance escort. It is riding on a wide load type truck, mostly covered, but it does appear to be made of metal, really enormous and shaped with rounded sides like a tank. But I can tell it’s not a tank. What it is?! By now Dan has joined me outside and we watch amazed as this thing rolls slowly by. It continues to the other corner to the right of my house and turns down that street. Eventually I can no longer see it. We never figured out what it was. We think the light at the corner to the left was hit by this thing as it tried to pass and police had to show up to help. I’m actually surprised it cleared the light at the other corner as neither light is that high up.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine
Dan and are watching it. So we get to this one disk and I swear from the episode titles we could be watching a bible study series. Here are the names of the episodes:
The Ascent
Rapture
The Light and the Dark
The Begotten

After the second episode, Dan points out, “Look their uniforms have changed. That’s after the movie where they try to ruin first contact.” (pause) “Except on Voyager where the uniforms stay the same, because they didn’t know about the sale at Macy’s on uniforms.”

A few minutes later, just to clarify, I guess, Dan says,
“You do know that they don’t have Macy’s in the delta quadrant, right?”

Yeah. Totally.

Me- Now you stay right here and play, I’m just going to the bathroom, I will be right back.
Niece- Come, come?
Me- You’re asking to…come with me?
Niece- Yeah!
Me- Um, no sweetie. Big kids don’t need help. They can go by themselves.
Niece- (looks indifferent, goes back to playing)

One for the road:
Where I work there is a hallway blocked off for construction. A sign on the wall nearby proclaims, “Cooridor closed.” And someone has used marker to cross out the second ‘o’ and write an ‘r’ over it.

Me- Now you stay right here and play, I’m just going to the bathroom, I will be right back.
Niece- Come, come?
Me- You’re asking to…come with me?
Niece- Yeah!
Me- Um, no sweetie. Big kids don’t need help. They can go by themselves.
Niece- (looks indifferent, goes back to playing)

One for the road:
Where I work there is a hallway blocked off for construction. A sign on the wall nearby proclaims, “Cooridor closed.” And someone has used marker to cross out the second ‘o’ and write an ‘r’ over it.

Back on Ash Wednesday, before lent and Easter, I was thinking about several things. I want to put them into a post now. I had ash all smudged up on my forehead. I’ve been told that the ash churches use is from burnt palms saved from the Palm Sunday of the previous year. They say, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” What does that mean to me? We are all going to die someday. We are all dust like that black dust on my thumb from my forehead. So we are all similar. Humans, we are like one another. Carbon-based like the dust on my thumb. We are all carbon. Strange that it is the same stuff diamonds are made from. Identical carbon makes diamonds or dust. Why do I consider diamonds so much more valuable than the dust? Perhaps all humans are made of dust. Or perhaps it is that we all are potential for diamonds.

The diamond thing is nice. I think I’ll hang onto that. Now take one of those rolling standing still devices and follow me to the next thought…

Good Friday this year was a fairly normal day. I’ve never really followed the Catholic no meat thing. I get that from my parents who always said the no meat thing was meant as a sacrifice, when eating fish instead is really sort of an upgrade. So we would eat a meal that was less fancy and not worry about whether there was meat or not. In retrospect, if vegan and veggie substitutes were more common when my parents were raising me, we might have eaten vegetarian on Good Friday.

Step on a segway and follow me now to…

A really great thing I like to do around Easter is listen to the CD Jesus Christ Superstar. I’m always a sucker for cool music, cool musicals, and Andrew Lloyd Weber. I often sing along with this CD (record when we’re at my mom’s house). It helps me remember the Easter story. I think I have a greater connection to music than other forms of media / other delivery methods of stories. I always feel so sad when Judas sings, then you know he has to die because that’s how the story goes. Even Jesus’ death they don’t dwell on so much. Maybe because it happened relatively quickly for a crucifixion, maybe because he wasn’t tortured by guilt like Judas, or maybe because you know he’s going to rise. Anyways I feel so much worse for Judas. At least Jesus knew in his head he was a good guy. What did Judas have in his head and what was he feeling at the end?

That, the weather and some other things prevented me from really feeling happy about the resurrection this year. They say, “Rejoice! He is risen!” I will rejoice. Soon, but not yet.

Means:
Understanding that if you put an imaginary cake in an imaginary oven, you must pretend it is hot when taken out.
Not understanding that someone else’s mom cannot be your mom just because you say she is.

Dan and I were somehow on the topic of discrimination and he told me something interesting. He said in the past, Kodak company did not hire Italians. My response was to laugh. Because this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. In my mind it seemed impossible that this could ever have been a reality. I would have trouble picking out an Italian person from a group, but then to use that as criteria in hiring or not hiring? Completely ridiculous. Then I wondered- If someone had told me a company now doesn’t hire black people, would I laugh? No, because I’d believe that. I wouldn’t be happy to believe it, but I would believe it. I hope that someday in the future a conversation about blacks not being hired is met with laughter for the same reason I laughed. Because it is so completely incomprehensible that it seems ridiculous.

I have written a letter to someone I know is in trouble, and probably having the worst time in their life. I have offered to help, only I have no idea what that means. I don’t know anything about this person’s support system or many of the details of their situation. But this person is my friend, was my friend in the past. I am afraid that this person will not write back to me, and I will not know why. I am also afraid that this person will write back to me. Can I really do anything meaningful? What it’s not enough? What if the response is anger towards me? Maybe I’m not up to this. But still I wrote. Because, if my friend is alone, crummy help from me would still be better than no help at all.

Thought I would belatedly review the movie Avatar. I saw it around Christmas in 3-D but not imax. After watching it I felt as if I had seen two movies rolled into one; one extremely awesome movie and one really terrible movie. I shall explain! Visually this movie was amazingly good. The flora and fauna of the world created for this movie were exotic and magical. Someone had to think of all the flying, running, growing, hair-bonding creatures and someone else had to bring them to life. I salute you both (well, several). Also the CGI was incredibly smooth. At the beginning of the movie when you first see an avatar standing there looking alive, I actually asked Dan if it was a makeup job. The 3-D was good, much less in-your-face-y and more reach-out-and-touch-y. Now on to the second movie in there. The plot was pretty much a total waste. It was predictable: Fern Gully plus Pocahontas. Some parts were long and boring, other parts were long and violent. Also, the good versus evil was way too clearcut for me. They gave no redeeming qualities to the ‘bad guy’, made no attempt to make him seem human. Don’t get me wrong, I like clearcut good vs. evil- in movies like Disney cartoons. But the more realistic a movie gets, the more fleshed out the characters should be. And for my final peeve about the movie, think about this. When the Navi first try to fight the humans, their spears do not penetrate the glass of their vehicles or compound. Later when there are more of them, those same spears (still thrown one at a time!) somehow shatter glass…
You’d think with so much attention to detail in other aspects of the movie someone would have caught something like this.

So Dan was reading about dialect the other day and we found out what makes our hometown dialects different from one another. Dan has what’s called an Inland North accent, however it seems to be not as heavy as accents farther west. I have basically a Vermont English accent with some Canadian influence.

Some characteristics of our accents/hometown dialect:

Northern Cities Vowel Shift:
Dan has a Northern Cities Vowel Shift which I do not have. This means he uses a diphthong for words like cat, back, and map. (ca-yt, ba-yuck, ma-yup) The parenthetical pronunciations are of course, greatly exaggerated so you can get an idea of the difference. When I say the words cat, back, and map, they have much shorter, single vowel sounds.

Cot-caught merger:
I experience the cot-caught merger which Dan does not. For him words like cot and caught are distinct and pronounced differently. For me they are identical and both sound like the short and simple ‘cot’.

Canadian Raising:
Both of us experience some amount of Canadian Vowel Raising. There are several results of the raising. For us it presents most recognizably as the difference in the words ‘writer’ and ‘rider’. Assuming for now that the t and d are identical in pronunciation (another topic for later) Dan and I still say the two words distinctly, raising the vowel in the word ‘writer’. The most common example of Canadian Raising, which Dan and I do not experience, is the about-> aboat (or about-> aboot) shift.

My Canadian influences:
I do not personally experience the about->aboat shift, however I can detect slight tendencies towards that in my hometown dialect. It is very subtle and results in a slight change in the vowel o. It is especially common in the speech of my French-Canadian relatives. I also can say that I note some loss of the ‘th’ sound in the same relatives, making the word ‘three’ sound like ‘tree’. This seems to be due to an influence of Hiberno-English which crops up in various places around Canada and the Northeastern US.

Other points of interest:

D-T similarites, glottal stops:
This is something Dan and I both experience and have rarely heard not in use. Many words with a ‘t’ in the middle substitute either a ‘d’ sound or a glottal stop. The word mitten has the glottal stop (mi ! en) sounding like someone cut you off in the middle of the word. And since I’m using it quite a bit here, the word ‘glottal’, amusingly, has the shift to a ‘d’ sound (gloddal). Everyone I can think of speaks like this, rarely have I heard a proper ‘t’ in the word mitten.

Rhotic speech:
Dan and I are rhotic speakers. This means we pronounce the ‘r’ in words like, dancer, father, player, and driver (non-rhotic speakers pronounce these words as dansah, fathah, playah, and drivah).

Soda-Pop Line:
Apparently this is an actual term for the divide that splits New York in terms of which name you use for a soft drink. I imagine that if you are drinking a soda east of the line and walk west across it, suddenly the drink in your hand becomes a pop.

Wondering if this is how people keep finding my blog…

(phone rings)
SB: Uh the Pizz, thanks for calling?
KOT: Lemme get about 50 thanksgiving-lovers pizzas, delivered to the only castle around…
SB: King of Town, how do you even know about this place?
KOT: If you must know; I spend most of my time calling random numbers in the hopes of finding a new restaurant.
SB: Wellll we’re not a real place.. this is all wrong! The Cheat, in our effort to make a pretend pizza place, we somehow created a successful and well reviewed actual pizza place!

Let it be known:
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
I assume this is fairly important as my computer tells it to me frequently.

The other day Camden was walking through the house and bumped into a low table. She hurt her arm on the pointy corner and started to cry a little. I said, “Oh did the table hurt you?” Camden’s eyes got wide and she turned on the table, tapping it severely with one finger to scold it. Through tears she upbraided it fiercely saying, “NO! No no nooooo! No, NO!” I’d like to see that table even think about bumping her again.