nancynall.com » Friday leftovers.
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Friday leftovers.

I’ve got­ten a par­tic­u­lar piece of wie­nie spam four times today. The first one said, “I don’t care why your woody is so small, but 81% of women do.”

The sec­ond one said, “I don’t care why your sch­long is so small, but 74% of women do.”

The third one said, “I don’t care why your mem­ber is so small, but 85% of women do.”

The fourth one said, “I don’t care why your sausage is so small, but 70% of women do.”

Check­ing the junk file, I see I also got a ver­sion with a slightly dif­fer­ent sen­tence con­struc­tion, with the same tic — the euphemism changes, along with the percentage.

Oh, wait, another just arrived: “woody” and 80 percent.

Spam­mers. If only we could har­ness their pow­ers for good.

It’s Fri­day, a sunny but cold Fri­day, which means today I’m a-gonna live large. Put in the con­tact lenses and wear my sun­glasses, maybe hit an estate sale, work a bit and look for­ward to the week­end. On the strength of a hunch and a Free Press pre­view, I just bought tick­ets to the Moscow Cats The­ater for tomor­row. Kate loves cats and needs to be exposed to more weird­ness out­side the bound­aries of Grosse Pointe, so this seemed to fit the bill. I liked this detail:

When a stray cat jumps into the orches­tra pit or refuses to move off the stage, Kuk­lachev will just move on to the next rou­tine. “When they notice that all eyes are off of them, they will do some­thing to win the atten­tion back,” Gelf­man says. “The show never plays the same way twice.”

Cats. If only we could har­ness their pow­ers for good.

Well, the Rock­ettes aren’t bring­ing their Christ­mas show to the D this year, and it beats the drive-thru Nativ­ity in Ster­ling Heights.

This feels like an end-of-the-week stew already, so let’s get to it:

I know I haven’t been keep­ing up with “On the Night­stand,” and yes, I’m about to change it, but before I put “The Woman at the Wash­ing­ton Zoo” back on the shelf, a plug for its won­der­ful­ness. I’ve been read­ing com­pi­la­tions of jour­nal­ists’ work for years, and not all of them are worth the paper they’re printed on, but this one — this one has legs. A bou­quet of won­der­ful pro­files, fol­lowed by per­sonal essays of grace and style. It would make a fine book club selec­tion, or beach read­ing, or what­ever. And yes, it has a new web­site, full of sup­ple­men­tal mate­ri­als. Enjoy.

I just read a rave of “Apoc­a­lypto” by one of my favorite crit­ics, but you know what they say about opin­ions. Here’s another take, from Slate’s Dana Stevens:

Here is a par­tial list of the indig­ni­ties to which the human body is sub­jected in Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic Apoc­a­lypto (Buena Vista): being impaled on a trap made of ani­mal bones. Being forced to ingest tapir tes­ti­cles. Being tricked into rub­bing a caus­tic agent on one’s own gen­i­tals while the whole vil­lage watches and laughs. See­ing one’s father have his throat slit. Get­ting one’s heart cut out in a sac­ri­fi­cial rit­ual. Hav­ing one’s head sub­se­quently chopped off and thrown down the stairs of a pyra­mid. Hav­ing one’s face chewed off by a pan­ther. …Gibson’s fas­ci­na­tion with the Mayans seems to spring entirely from the fact (or fan­tasy) that they were exotic badasses who knew how to whomp the hell out of one another, old-school.

Extra credit for a fresh use of that old anal­ogy: “so (blank) it makes (blank) look like (blank).” Ahem: A chase scene at a roar­ing water­fall is so spec­tac­u­lar, it makes “Last of the Mohi­cans” look like an Esther Williams musical.

Mercy. I’ll wait for the cable debut. Although I still haven’t seen “The Pas­sion of the Christ.” Doesn’t Mel believe in HBO?

Finally, I pride myself — not really; I just take note of it — on not hav­ing any accent. I’m from the mid­dle of Ohio, where the natives have no regional accent what­so­ever. My St. Louis-raised par­ents said “fark” and “harse” for fork and horse, but they moved me to the Buck­eye state before I started kinder­garten, and so — no accent. Evi­dently, experts agree:

What Amer­i­can accent do you have?
Your Result: The West
 

Your accent is the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor of Amer­i­can speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could eas­ily be from Florida or one of those big South­ern cities like Dal­las or Atlanta.
The Mid­land
 
Boston
 
North Cen­tral
 
The Inland North
 
Philadel­phia
 
The South
 
The North­east
 
What Amer­i­can accent do you have?
Quiz Cre­ated on GoToQuiz

Glad to clear that up. Now, on to “What men­tal dis­or­der do you have?” Have a swell weekend.

Posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 10:32 am
in Movies, Same ol' same ol'.

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30 responses to
“Friday leftovers.”

  1. brian stouder said on December 8th, 2006 at 10:38 am

    Hah! You for­got to close a tag! Off to vol­un­tary sus­pen­sion with you!

  2. nancy said on December 8th, 2006 at 10:47 am

    And if I had to pick the one per­son who would have caught that in the approx­i­mately 30 sec­onds it was up, it would be you, Brian. Con­grat­u­la­tions. You’ve now been entered to win a fab­u­lous prize.

  3. brian stouder said on December 8th, 2006 at 10:58 am

    Words to live by: “If it’s close to 10 in the morn­ing, it’s time to check NN.c”

    And now, I am off to hange black bunting — just read that Jeane Kirk­patrick died. (and unlike Cheney, she won’t be aris­ing from her cof­fin each night!)

    I always found her writ­ing to be gen­uinely tren­chant and insight­ful, and news of her pass­ing made me say “oh” — very like when you hear of a teacher you once had pass­ing away

  4. mary said on December 8th, 2006 at 11:30 am

    The Woman at the Wash­ing­ton Zoo is won­der­ful, and it’s on my night­stand right now. The Bar­bara Bush pro­file is my favorite so far.

  5. Emma said on December 8th, 2006 at 11:43 am

    My accent: The Mid­land. It says I have a good voice for radio. Funny, I’ve heard the same thing about my face! (drum fill)

  6. Connie said on December 8th, 2006 at 12:08 pm

    You actu­ally read your spam?

    And maybe HBO doesn’t believe in Mel.

  7. basset said on December 8th, 2006 at 12:15 pm

    what a reserved and cul­tured group… six responses so far and nobody’s said any­thing about what the per­cent­age REALLY is .

    and me, I’m a South­ern accent. native Hoosier but I’ve been down here, let’s see, 23 years now.

  8. Sue said on December 8th, 2006 at 12:21 pm

    Nancy,
    Born and raised in the U.P, I had to take the quiz. Since I’ve been away (Florida & S. Cal.) for the past 28 years I was curi­ous to see the results. It pegged me as being mis­taken as a Cana­dian. Ya, you betcha, it was cor­rect.
    In my defense, I could never be con­fused with some­one from Fargo.

  9. MarkH said on December 8th, 2006 at 12:27 pm

    Never even been to New Eng­land, but now I’m from Boston (!!).

  10. mary said on December 8th, 2006 at 12:35 pm

    I’m from the Inland North. I did have about an hour lay­over on a flight through Chicago once, but that’s about it for my inland north expe­ri­ence. New Jersey/New York/Philadelphia/Denver/the Netherlands/Los Ange­les cre­ated my accent. Go figure.

  11. brian stouder said on December 8th, 2006 at 12:50 pm

    Go fig­ure

    But, Mary, what did you think of Mary, merry, and marry? (where’s Peter and Paul? — is my first reaction)

    I’m ‘mid­land’.

    I think another few decades of elec­tronic mass-media, and we’ll ALL be ‘mid­land’ (and we’ll all do that busi­ness of speak­ing with one cadence at work, and another around ‘our people’ — as many south­ern­ers and black Amer­i­cans do)

  12. mary said on December 8th, 2006 at 1:16 pm

    Mary has the a sound like air, merry is a short e like pet, and marry is a short a like hat.

    They rhyme with fairy, cherry and Harry, if that helps.

  13. brian stouder said on December 8th, 2006 at 1:29 pm

    See, I’d say ‘air’ with a longer ‘a’ than the ‘a’ in Mary (so that ‘air’ would sound more like ‘layer’) — but I would rhyme ‘Mary’ and ‘cherry’.

    But I agree with the a in ‘hat’ for ‘marry’ (like the way Carly Simon says ‘marry’ in “That’s the way I always heard it should be”)

  14. mary said on December 8th, 2006 at 1:41 pm

    From my in-house Brit: “I don’t care that your pork-sword is small but…”

  15. Maryo said on December 8th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    After hav­ing met with both my fifth-grader’s and kindergartener’s math teach­ers this morn­ing, I’m tempted to put all those “woody” per­cent­ages together and have them do a math equa­tion for me.

    Regard­ing the Mel Gib­son flick, did you hear Ken­neth Turan’s review of it on NPR this morn­ing? Harsh, harsh and — I’m a west­erner who some­times favors long vowels — Haaaaaaarrrrrsh!

  16. Dorothy said on December 8th, 2006 at 3:27 pm

    No sur­prise here. Mid­land. Born and raised a Pitts­burgher (PA, not Kansas)

  17. Sue said on December 8th, 2006 at 3:35 pm

    Fairy, cherry, Harry, rhyme to each to me. I won­der if any­one under­stands me when I talk. They must.…cuz I use my hands.

  18. Bob said on December 8th, 2006 at 4:38 pm

    I remem­ber a seg­ment some time back on (I think) 60 Min­utes where they man­aged to track down and con­front a porn spam­mer. That proves that it’s pos­si­ble, despite the pop­u­lar con­cep­tion that these folks are untraceable.

    There should be enough legit­i­mate phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal mak­ers, OEM soft­ware ven­dors, invest­ment bro­kers, and annoyed inter­net users to fund a cadre of expert hacker-investigators to track down the hand­ful of spam­mers prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for most of the traf­fic, and a cou­ple of enforcers to admin­is­ter Mel Gibson-inspired jus­tice and post video clips of the event online.

    While they’re at it, they could fer­ret out the suck­ers that encour­age that crap by falling for the scams, and put them out of their misery.

    I’ll bet there would be a sharp drop in the amount of spam.

  19. ashley said on December 8th, 2006 at 9:08 pm

    Brian: “we’ll all do that busi­ness of speak­ing with one cadence at work, and another around ‘our people’ — as many south­ern­ers and black Amer­i­cans do”.

    Yep­per. Evi­dently, that’s me, as I’m “mid­land”, how­ever my yan­kee friends say that when I’m on the phone with my brethren, I regress.

  20. Susan said on December 8th, 2006 at 10:26 pm

    Nancy,
    Took your quiz and am pos­tively 100% Mid­land (Fort Wayner for the past 45 years). I wanted to tell you that I recently stum­bled onto your web­site via Mitch Harper’s Fort Wayne Observed and blog links, and am delighted to see you in “print” again! I miss your Ft. Wayne columns; my mother and I used to dis­cuss them back when… You’re on my favorites now and I’m call­ing Mom, for sure. Thanks, Nancy, for your great sense of humor and wit.

    Susan

  21. alex said on December 9th, 2006 at 1:59 am

    I was astounded to learn I was Philadel­phian. I went back a sec­ond time and decided to pro­nounce marry the same as Mary/merry and came up Midland.

    There need to be more cri­te­ria than these to per­form a truly accu­rate test. The Philadel­phian descrip­tion also lumped in places like Bal­ti­more, which to my ear is dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent than Philadelphia/New Jer­sey, which is dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent from Mid­land. I had a friend from Bal­ti­more and Bal­ti­morese has its own dis­tinc­tive inflec­tions and pro­nun­ci­a­tions. I knew him in Chicago, where there’s a strong under­tone of shanty Irish, and so he really stood out. We had a book one time with a lin­guis­tic map and what they speak in Bal­ti­more is known as the “Nor­folk twang.” Won­der if that’s pro­nounced “Nor­fuck” as it is in Virginia.

  22. Caleb Cook said on December 9th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    I took the quiz, hit Sub­mit Answers … and found that I was “10% per­fect as a girlfriend.”

    Maybe it’s my accent or something.

  23. Danny said on December 9th, 2006 at 9:31 am

    Alex, being a native Bal­ti­moron, I do agree we have a weird, sub­tle accent. I think I mostly speak with­out it nowa­days, but I some­times lapse back into it for an odd word or two. My mother still “warshes” clothes and drinks “warder.” But then I do get the south­ern accent back if I spend a long spell with my other kin. Raised in Bawlmer by a bunch of hill­bil­lies. Geesh. It’s a won­der I can talk at all.

    From Wikipedia: Baltimore’s accent exem­pli­fies a dialec­tal con­tin­uum between Tide­wa­ter Amer­i­can Eng­lish and Delaware Val­ley Amer­i­can Eng­lish, loosely pos­sess­ing the vowel shifts of the for­mer and gen­eral pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the lat­ter. For instance, “Bal­ti­more” is pro­nounced “Bawlamer” or even “Balmer,” and “Mary­land” becomes “Mur­land” or “Murlan.” Other com­mon pro­nun­ci­a­tions include “ool,” “amblance,” “wooder,” “warsh,” “sharr, or shaow” “dug,” “tew” (oil, ambu­lance, water, wash, shower, dog, and two, respectively).

  24. Danny said on December 9th, 2006 at 9:43 am

    You know another odd thing I just remem­bered about Bal­ti­more is that they have these road­side stands where you can get open pit beef sand­wiches. How strange is that? Grow­ing up there, I never ques­tioned it, but I’ve never seen it else­where and I’ve won­dered how they came to be. I mean, were there enough peo­ple that said to them­selves, “Man, some­times I’m dri­vin’ down the road and can barely think straight for want of an open pit beef sand­wich. We must have one of these lit­tle stands every so often as we drive, lest we perish.”

    What­ever.

    I guess it is kinda like the boiled peanuts they have in South Car­olina. Dorothy knows about them.

    Hey Dorothy, we’ll be out there next Fri­day. My sister-in-law turns 40 on Sat­ur­day. She wants to go eat in Greenville at the Bankok Thai Cui­sine restau­rant. But who knows, some­one may have pre­pared a sur­prise for her.

  25. nancy said on December 9th, 2006 at 9:54 am

    Danny (and all the rest of you), if you haven’t dis­cov­ered the nov­els of Laura Lipp­man you’re really miss­ing some­thing. All are set in Bal­ti­more (one goes to Texas, but begins and ends in Charm City), and there are exten­sive dis­cus­sions of Bawlmer pronunciations.

    Appar­ently “hon” is a big word there. I was thrilled to hear Mar­cia Donnelly/Tootsie Duvall call some­one “hon” on an episode of “The Wire” this season.

  26. Danny said on December 9th, 2006 at 10:29 am

    Nancy, thanks. I’ll check her out over the hol­i­days which I can hardly wait for to come. Lately, my free time has been scarce because it is crunch time. I’m design­ing a gear­box that is going to weigh 18,000 lbs and trans­mit 44,000 horse­power. Sure hope it works because that would be an embar­rass­ingly big paper­weight! I’ll know in March 2008. ;-)

  27. wade said on December 9th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    I took the accent test — I’m 2% of a good girlfriend.

    Maybe the site couldn’t under­stand which quiz I was taking…

  28. Dorothy said on December 9th, 2006 at 4:23 pm

    Danny I wish we could arrange an acci­den­tally on pur­pose bump into each other, but my kids are com­ing to town on Wednes­day and Thurs­day this week, and we are hav­ing early Christ­mas on Fri­day. I“m tak­ing the day off, as is my hus­band, and we’re exchang­ing gifts and mak­ing a big ham din­ner. Let me know next time you’re here, though!

    Is that Thai restau­rant on Pel­ham Road by any chance? I think there are two of them up in that vicin­ity. I’ve eaten at both.

  29. Danny said on December 10th, 2006 at 10:35 am

    No prob­lem, Dorothy, the hol­i­days are going to be busy for us family-wise too. We’ll be out for sev­eral weeks, but most of the time we are going to be in North Carolina.

    Yeah, I am pretty sure it is the one on Pel­ham road. Speak­ing of accents, it always makes me smile when the young Thai girl at the restau­rant greets us with the thick­est, most south­ern ver­sion of “Heeaayyy! How y’all doin’?” I guess south­ern accents are like kudzu, They grow on you whether you like it or not.

  30. Bob G. said on December 12th, 2006 at 4:07 pm

    Sim­ply AMAZING.…!!!

    Says I have a 100% PHILADELPHIA accent…and I come from Philly…who’da thunk, eh?

    Now…if ONLY these “Hoosiers” could learn to make a GOOD Philly cheesesteak…!

    ;)

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