The Phone Company

If you've ever spent any time around people from Finland, you may well have heard them speak. Finns tend to speak very good English. Good in the sense that they have good vocabularies and grammar. Their pronunciation is also pretty good in terms of forming the individual words they use. If you tell a Finn to say "dinosaur" it will say it perfectly. (Why the "it"? Please hold all questions until the end.) With said Finn, things start to get interesting when it puts a couple of words together to form a sentence. Again, the words will be pronounced just dandily but you will notice that the whole thing comes off as sounding quite alien. Italians and Frenchies have problems with the allocation of word stress resulting in things like "inTEResting", "EXciting", "EXpensive", and "DEmocaracy". "blowJOB" is another popular one. Especially with the Italians. blowJOBS all over the place. It's like they're giving them away. The Finn does not have this problem. The Finn never stresses a word incorrectly. The reason behind this is simply: It does not use stress in its speaking. None. Zero. Zilch. Words have no stress nor do parts of a sentence. A question sounds the same as an insult which sounds exactly the same as a compliment which sounds exaclty like Wolf Blitzer. (Remember what I said about questions) Listening to a Finn is really tiring because you can never tell where one sentence begins, ends, or when a point is being made. It all blends together into this perfectly striaght line of noise that is virtually impossible to follow or to pay attention to. Everything blends together creating this thing that one has no choice but to ignore. It's like bad computer generated speach, no wait, it's like listening to an automated telephone menu system that interacts. When a Finn is talking to me I am always overcome with the desire to press "0" to be connected with a representative. They are not human and they never shut up. Now you understand the "it" thing and this is where Wolf Blitzer comes in.
Wolf Blitzer, or as he's known in my houseehold, Paul Wolfoblitzer, is a Finn in Wolf's clothing. His voice has virtually no inflection and sentences and paragraphs just merge together into blather. For some reason I always feel like he is about to rev it up and explode a bit, but then I realize I'm just projecting. I am the one who wants to explode. He could be talking about dead bodies floating down Bourbon Street or he could be telling me why I should stay tuned for the next segment of Late Edition. It's all the same. Non English speakers who flip onto CNN International must get confused when they hear this robotic drawl with pictures of corpses on the screen followed by more of the same drawling with the backdrop of smiley happy people. Unbearable. The man uses no punctuation either. I will close with a written interpretation of this guy.

new york city was virually destroyed today following a nuclear explosing downtown what caused it and who is reponsible those are questions we will be covering here today it was a tragic day for the nation as the big apple was blotted off the map what will the international reaction be around the corner also our online quesiton of the day should we retaliate with nuclear strikes against those reponsible and is gin a fruit we're looking forward to hearing from you the viewer on these important questions of the day you'll be pleased to know that my beard has managed to escape the carnage unschathed as it has done for the last 15 years i like my beard and others have also remarked on it's tempering of my clean cut image by injecting a modicum of scruffiness to said image there will be an online poll on this later you don't want to miss that on to the state of emergency in new york but first these messages we'll be right back cnn the most trusted name in news


Somebody get this guy a blowJOB. posted by Kermit at 9/22/2005 10:11:00 AM |

I'm an athiest agnostic athiest agnostic athnostic agthiest no more!! Join the new Him. All hail the FSM!!

No really... go click on over. Your soul is at stake steak and it needs a side dish. Arrrrrr! posted by Kermit at 9/20/2005 04:05:00 PM |

I knew spending all that time on Google Maps would pay off. posted by Kermit at 9/20/2005 02:24:00 PM |

Germany had an election and no one won. Now all the politiker will argue for weeks in an effort to form a government. It may well take a month or they might just have another election soon. How efficient. However, I'm still a little jealous because having no government is better than the one my country has. posted by Kermit at 9/20/2005 11:58:00 AM |

The place never fails to offer up something ridiculous. Under the headline "Indianna School Converted to Swingers Club..." posted no doubt to avert people's attention from other things, the link leads to a short little ditty that as usual showcases our ability to freak out over nothing. The first line gives these people away:

Residents of a southwest Muncie neighborhood thought the 110-year-old former school with purple doors had been vacant these past 14 months. So neighbors were surprised to find out the building _ which was last used as a bingo hall _ is home to one of Indiana's seven swingers clubs.

"I thought it was empty, to tell you the truth," Mary Neal, who rents a house across from the club, told The Star Press. "That shocks me. I'm just floored. There are a lot of kids that walk around here."

Ok so that's 2 lines but the point is that these people are convinced that this place that no one even knew about for over a year will destroy their families, corrupt the childern, and serve as a constant temptation for unsatisfied couples everywhere. See if you label everything a problem, then you'll have problems everywhere. Big fun. posted by Kermit at 9/20/2005 11:46:00 AM |

Sorry to have gone missing for so long. Well, actually I'm not. It was totally worth it. Got to take a trip back home to the good old New of York and haunt the haunts. Afer reurning, I had but 5 weeks of vacation left. What to do. What to do. A week of despondently puttering around the house, reading books, interrupted only by the daily trudge to a beer garden to wallow in my misery, feet up on the chair across the table, nurse a couple of weiss beers, all the while cursing the gods (You don't capitalize the plural) for smiting me with their wrath. Then it was off for two weeks to drive through most all of this decadant continent. First The Netherlands. Boring. The Belgium. Ditto. France. Old. Monaco. Richer than me. Italy. Cheaper than Monaco. Switzerland. More mountainous than Italy. Lichtenstein. A rather interesting pla... oh that's it? Austria. Always good to pump you up. Then back to the land that's uber alles. $ 1000 poorer and still 2 weeks left. Joined a baseball team. Practiced a lot. Cue beer gardens again. And finally sweet heaven, back to work this past Monday. What the hell was I bitching about? posted by Kermit at 9/16/2005 02:06:00 PM |