A reading, yea?

Here's a fun little thing, on the nightmare of English pronunciation. It's the first part, and I may or may not do the second half at a later date. It looks quite daunting, really.

Most of the time, I've seen British (or RP) renditions of this poem. I wanted to try my hand at the American/Canadian/Standard English.

By Gerald Nost Trenité:



The Chaos

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

First snow of December!

A little tune to celebrate this:

Macro Mondays are back! - "Threads"

Macro Mondays....already on hiatus

Sorry people,

Despite my good intentions, my desktop decided to blow up on me. This happened sometime after downloading a no-cd patch for Warcraft III, wouldn't you know.

So, while my pictures are all still intact, I do not have access to them, and my laptop does not currently have the picture-processing capability of my desktop. I'll be leeching off the school's internet tomorrow in hopes to remedy to this problem.

Macro Mondays!

So, Friday I received my Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro. I think I've never been more excited over a photography prospect. So with that excitement and good intentions in mind, I think I'll have Mondays become Macro Mondays on my blog. How does that sound? I think it might incite me to update more often.

So, here's to start it off, my very crappy test shots of things lying around the house:

Oh it's possible.

Terra Naomi!

She's the greatest.

Check out her music here.

Also, the video that started it all!

Oneshot 3

So! I finally managed to find a new way to record. Unfortunately there is still quite a bit of noise so I apologize for that. It'll have to do for now. Tried a more classical approach to chord progression, this time around.