"I'm not from the South!"It happens every so often that somebody at work will make a reference to my being from the South.
I was born in Chicago.
Moved to California before I was three.
I have never lived in the South.
What the hell is it about me that passes for a Southerner I have no idea.
Half of a pipeline is not a pipeline. Kinda like a garden hose, you need to hook it up to a source at the other end if you expect anything out of it. But I guess with just the right teleprompter settings you might be able to fool enough of the people who are inclined to agree with you anyway.
Through no fault of their own, some people know not what they do. Is this why they offer free contraception in Sweden?
I give the defense a 'B' for originality. A+ if they pull it off.
Been hearing a bit about this "Hunger Games" movie. The word is that it's going to be the biggest thing this year. Maybe, maybe not.
What I do know is that it stars Jennifer Lawrence in a big way.
Yeah, Jennifer Lawrence, who became one of my favorite actresses after turning out one of my favorite performances in what is still one of the best films I have ever seen: Winter's Bone.
If you haven't already taken my excellent film watching advice, now would be a good time to do yourself proper and see it.
View the trailer here.
14 comments:
I assume we'll have people line up at the Canadian border with buckets and walk down to the point where the pipeline starts, then pour the oil into the pipeline so it can get to the refineries.
Jobs program.
Nobody believes me when I tell them I am from the south.
Brian--all you have to do, if you're like a lot of expatriate southerners I've known, is be around the doubters when you're really, really tired or....inebriated. The old speech patterns will come right out. :^)
And Gino, you've got a touch of a southern vibe about you. Willing to stop and chat, willing to say what you're really thinking....well bless your heart, you must be a Southerner!
(runs for cover)
brian has a touch of the midwest speech pattern, not as lazy as the southern. if he claimed to be from kansas, i'd believe him.
bubba: i've gotten lots of explanations: i shoot dear. wear a cabela's hat. drink wild turkey. occassional use of "y'all" and "ain't no". non PC bluntness. food preferences.
yet none of these cant be found in the north.
i'm not insulted in the least with people thinking i'm southern. i just find it puzzling. i been working there 20yrs, they should know all about me by now cause i'm not a wallflower.
No problem being a Southerner, but if you start rooting for SEC football you're gonna be on my list.
Yeah, Gino's heard me speak while (slightly) inebriated. His assessment is pretty accurate.
Being around family and friends from back home does more to my accent than alcohol.
I've moved around a lot, married a Cannuck, and work with lots of foreigners (which puts you in the habit of speaking clear, non-idiomatic English). It tends to flatten things out.
shoulda heard me after a summer of working with blacks. the stuff you pick up. sheesh.
I think you mean "sheeeeiiiitt".
Lawrence is definitely the best thing about Hunger Games.
some of that, yeah. my blacks were mostly older and from LA, OK, AR, MS... and all grew up rural. great buncha guys, though it would be hard to convince an alien that i was from the same nation as them.
it was like learning a new language.
Brian married a Cannuck....I'm imagining "Y'all come back now, eh."
Sorry, couldn't resist....though I do remember the story about how movie producers sent Elvis to Canada to even out his thick Mississippi.
I spent a lot of time in Missour-ah growing up. (If you want to insist that it should be pronounced the way it is spelled I'll ask why the same rule doesn't apply to Arkansas.) We certainly weren't deep-South at all, but I did like moon pies and RC (ar-uh cee) Cola. Latent pronunciation quirks tend to come out in me when I'm talking on the phone to someone from home.
I'm also partial to a quote from Flannery O'Connor about the South:
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
Bubba--The in-laws are from SE Manitoba, to be precise. They sound more like western Minnesota/eastern ND than anything else. (Though they do say "eh".)
Plus, the (very, very small) town where my father-in-law lives is mostly Mennonite, and a lot of them still speak "low German". Which sounds like a cross between Dutch and Yiddish. So you get conversations that sound like a collision between Francis McDormmand in Fargo and Jackie Mason, peppered with the MacKenzie brothers.
And my sister-in-law (herself married to a Scot, for crying out loud), upon hearing where I was from (before we met) wanted to know if I "talked funny".
Eastern Wisconsin accents often sound like they are half "Da Bearz" skits and half "Fargo." It's a little unnerving to some people. "Dat's da way we do tings in Green Bay Wis-KAHN-sin!"
We have a lot of Germans -- my very Catholic grandmother (3/4 German, 1/4 Belgian) lived a block away from a Lutheran church/school. When my siblings and cousins were visiting her house, the temptation was always there to take over the playground at the school, but my grandmother would sternly tell us, "you dasn't go over there. That belongs to the Lutherans."
In fact, she'd probably be a little bit aghast that I'm friends with Picklesworth.
germans: always tempted to take over somebody else's land.
what is with you people?
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