Barkerburgh

I loves me a little Doctor Who once a week or so. Nanogenes, 51st Century sensibilities and nobody dies!

———————————–

Ann Bancroft died on Monday. When I heard about it this morning I actually got a lump in my throat for Mel Brooks. I remember how surprised I was when I heard they were married. What a couple! What? A couple? What an odd couple!

I’m remembering how taken I was when I saw “The Miracle Worker” as a child.

Now I’m remembering how much I was befuddled by “The Graduate.”

Okay, now I’m remembering how much I enjoyed “To Be or Not To Be.”

I could go on.

———————————–

For fun, interest, and your own private Meadian Samoa, I recommend the discussions on plastic.com.

Whadda y’all think of this?

Here’s the discussion on Plastic.

Gosh, that was ripping! WWII! London! The Blitz! Barrage balloons! Ghosts! Alien ambulances! Time travel! I may very well run out of exclamation points before I run out of kudos, plaudits and lauds!

Loved the story, the CG, the shots, the subplots, the lines, the zingers.

I just might cry for joy.

This morning, CNN’s morning curmudgeon, Jack Cafferty, made my point from yesterday’s post twice in two minutes for me.

He was mocking Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico. Yes, that’s the correct spelling of his first name, and yeah, his last name is Fox. Go figure. He’s Mexican, from Mexico, where they speak New World Spanish. Neither he, nor his name are Italian. His name should be pronounced approximately Vee-SEN-Tay by North American English speakers. Nasty old Jack, who just doesn’t care, gives us Veen-CHEN-tay. Nobody’s gonna tell him and he’s one of those - I want to say Americans, but it’s universal - idiots who, even if they were corrected, would say something like ‘But he’s just a Mexican,’ or ‘I don’t give the tiniest rat’s tiniest ass.’

Then, mere minutes later, he starts talking about a valedictorian who thanked his high school for teaching them all how to work at any station in any Mcdonald’s anywhere in the world - can’t find a reference to the story on line. His pronunciation of the lad’s name wasn’t even close to what was on the screen. And yes, in this case, I question Jack’s on-the-ballness rather than whoever typed the name on the chyron thingy.

And this guy also thinks Deep Throat was wrong to do what he did because his motives were impure. Hmm, what insult to his intelligence and humanity would nicely complement a reference to Deep Throat? Oh, yeah. Dick.

For the love of God, get your anchors some lessons in pronouncing foreign words!

Sometimes you can tell these whitebread farmers have never seen that foreign word on the teleprompter before in their lives. For example, the name of the new French prime minister is not Villapin, like a large town in Iowa, it’s [comically_exaggerated_french_accent_with_appropriate_nasalized_sound] Villepin [/comically_exaggerated_french_accent_with_appropriate_nasalized_sound].

How hard is that?

And it’s not the first time by a long shot. Happens all the time. To fire your imagination, I will merely mention polysyllabic Arabic, Indonesian and Danish.

To be fair, it’s not limited to CNN. Here in Toronto there’s a broadcast TV station called CityTV, with a sister cable news ticker station called CP24.

There’s a City anchor called Gord Martineau who tries really, really, really hard to pronounce foreign words and names with a really, really, really foreign accent, kind of like the generic foreign accent from Mission:Impossible.

But he can’t or won’t pronounce his colleague’s name properly. Her name is Laura Di Battista, with she herself pronouncing her given name as in Italian, with the first syllable rhyming with ‘cow’. Not hard, but Gord can’t handle it. It’s really funny, and a little sad.

The worst, best, funniest example was from CP24, back when Akira Kurosawa died. Now look at the name. Say it out loud. Romanized Japanese is probably the easiest language in the world to pronounce because you say it the way it looks. And it’s almost always a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel sequence, and the exceptions are straightforward themselves.

So the name is easy to pronounce, and, and, Akira Kurosawa has been famous and admired for decades.

The dimwit newsreader on CP24 apparently had never heard of him, couldn’t pronounce basic Roman letters and hadn’t tried to read the news before she went on the air.

I’m making the unimportant part up. “Sad news for the film world today with the announcement of the death of acclaimed Japanese director Akeesha Kulawakkalakka. Akika Koshawasha. Akashakka Kulawallashallawalla. Shabba-labba-blabba-blabba.”

Swear to God.

I’m not even going to mention the spelling and factual errors that show up in the news ticker all the time.