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Just So We’re Straight…

3 Comments

  1. Marco McClean August 24, 2021

    Zack, the video cuts off abruptly at 57 seconds. Is they finished talking? I don’t think they is.

    There should be nothing taken as insulting about finding this sort of talk funny. Unfamiliar distinctions are funny. It used to be there were protons (+), neutrons (0) and electrons (-), and that was it, and it still works fine for most people to use only those terms. Now there are quarks and leptons and spin and phase and charm and anti-[fill-in-blank] and fermions and bosons and sub-properties and spooky interactions and whatnot. If new sex or physics or religious terms are important to you for work or play (or time-travel machinery or flying skateboards or public stonings or holiday dinner seating or picking someone up in a bar), you memorize all their names and special properties and details and maybe argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or how many circles of Hell there are. If not, not.

    And if the toilets have non-stick visual partitions around them, and there are enough toilets, why does any store need more than one restroom? The baby-changing tables should be out back of the building anyway, under an awning, like the smoking facilities. People who smoke in the bathroom should be detected by an intelligent machine, put on live-stream, locked in, hosed down and then released.

    Another thing I think is funny (and so what?) is the old-fashioned and still fresh gay accent. Years ago someone from Virginia told me, “All Yankees sound gay”. I was told by someone from South Korea, “Westerners all talk with butter in the mouth.” Biff Rose said, To the rest of the world Americans sound like /BARKing DOGS/. (Many people from the Southern U.S. sound to me like they’re a little drunk or mentally retarded, or like people that you’ve used a sound editing program to slow way down and then pitch-correct.) (You can try this by playing YouTube videos at .75 or .5 speed.) Recordings of my own Ohio/California voice sound funny /to me/. One time back at KMFB I was on the air and trying to run down the source of a whining sound in my headphones, talking about it as I moved around turning things off and back on again, and someone called and said with what he probably thought was a mean edge, “/I/ hear a whining sound.” I think that was the guy in Ukiah whose liver replacement meds made him irritable, so every once in awhile he’d call to order me to shut the fuck up and get off the air and just put the automation music back on. Or it might have been the chemtrails/aliens-obsessed guy– he also would get stuck and say one thing over and over no matter what you said in return. (“/I/ hear a whining sound.” I: “Describe the sound for me.” He: “/I/ hear a whining sound.” I: “Wait a minute. Are you a machine that can only say, I hear a whining sound?” He: “/I/ hear a whining sound.” I: “So, yes, then.” He: “/I/ hear a whining sound.” Only, the chemtrails guy was against microwave ovens, and he said, “/You/ wouldn’t put your head in it.” I: “I wouldn’t put my head in what? A microwave oven?” He: “/You/ wouldn’t put your head in it.” And so on.)

    The sexiest accent, to me, is a toss-up between an Irish or Icelandic woman whisper-singing and a young woman who worked in Coast Hardware for a short while in the 1980s who had a thick low Southern drawl floating chips of vocal fry you could hear from halfway across the store. She was a tough-looking, skinny little thing with a full sleeve of tattoos way before that got popular for girls. Here’s something like her voice:

    Lucinda Williams – Rightously.

    • Zack Anderson Post author | August 24, 2021

      They’s done in 58 seconds in the only clip I found.

    • Zack Anderson Post author | August 24, 2021

      I always get a chuckle out of this Aussie.

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