Offbeat retreats and obscure tours thru the heart of Americana:
“Losing It at Universal Studios” (4:37) Mark Allen
Temporarily insanity during a tour of Universal Studios in southern California. So many cool things to see, to do, to tour. The writer is overwhelmed by the magnificence of it all, and pretty much loses his mind. Based an Mark Allen’s web essay “I Suffered Stendhal Syndrome At Universal Studios Hollywood!.”
Boonville is a small community in Northwest California, founded in 1862, a few hundred feet in elevation, with few hundred residents. And… the town has it’s own language, Boontling. We go sharkin’ and harpin’ thru Boonville with Charles C. Adams, author of Boontling: An American Lingo.
“David Lynch goes into clean neighborhoods and finds the germs and bugs beneath; I go into dirty neighborhoods and find the life.” That’s how filmmaker Tony Buba describes his twelve documentaries about his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Buba is the son of Italian immigrants, part of the wave of Europeans who came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the steel mills of Braddock and other towns around Pittsburgh. Now the steel industry is almost dead, and Braddock is the prototypical post-industrial “‘rust belt” town, a town where a person either lives by his or her wits or lives in poverty. Buba tours through the streets of Braddock, past the old Croatian and Slovak social clubs and through streets, now empty, that once bristled with activity.
From LHP’s series of radio works: Place Portraits. Music: “The Very Thought Of You,” instrumental version by Eddie Lockjaw Davis off the 2006 compilation Jazz For Lovers, and Elvis Costello singing on Marian McPartland’s 2006 Piano Jazz: McPartland/Costello.
In Montana, a rabbi is an unusual sight. So when a Hasidic one walked into the State Capitol last December, with his long beard, black hat and long black coat, a police officer grabbed his bomb-sniffing German shepherd and went to ask the exotic visitor a few questions.
Post-Madonna Prima Donna (2001) is a one-act opera. The subject is language, sepcifically, in this excerpt, the Minnesota vernacular. “Post-Madonna Prima Donna: Recitative 1 | Aria” (1:01 | 3:02 mp3):
Also on the CD is an 11-part Odi et Amo (2006), a cantata inspired by the love poems of the ancient Roman poet Catullus.
Forvo is another online pronunciation guide. But this one via a social-net hopes to have “All the words in the world pronounced by native speakers.”
Forvo is the place where you´ll find words pronounced in their original languages. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. You can also help others recording your pronunciations in your own language.
As some of you already know, I’ve signed a contract with Riverbend Press (formerly Falcon Press in Helena) to concoct material for a ‘cliche-a-day’ desk calendar. It will be published in October: 365 synopses of common expressions in the tradition of the ‘word-a-day’ calendars that verbivores enjoy.
The publisher just sent me a draft page of the calendar [below], and I am quite inspired by it. I have to share it with you, in hopes that you will send me cliche suggestions, and to simply show it off!
So for the next several months, I’ll have my geeky head buried in dictionaries large and small, tracing the stories behind a year’s worth of cliches.
So submit those cliches to Chrysti, and tell her HV sent ya.
Turns out all those Bollywood dance videos were in English all along. You just haven’t been listening close enuf to the lyrics. YouTuber- buffalax trascribed for us this “Crazy Indian Video… Buffalaxed!”:
“Have you been high today?”
h o w j s a y . c o m is an online English Pronouncing Dictionary. The site uses
They’re associated with fonetiks.org‘s free “guides to the sound systems of ten languages” (including nine varieties of English) and “pronunciation samples by over 40 native speakers.”Their Phonetic Alphabet for Keyboards is potentially useful for radio scripts. “We needed a practical phonetic alphabet for use with a standard computer keyboard. These phonetic annotations were needed as an aid during recording sessions. To increase typing speeds, upper case symbols were mostly avoided and the commonest items were assigned to easy-to-reach keys.” For example:
Hearing Voices from NPR®
The NYTImes caught this canine-capitol-Chanukah connection: “
Forvo