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Robert Goddard Patent 1914

A happy dog in a pile of leaves [via].

Dog puzzle.

What a hurricane sounds like: Hurricane Ike 2008 [via].

“Hey, yinz. Stillers ain’t jagoffs. We gotcha tear-bull talls, yah.”  This long linguistic analysis of Pittsburghese is missing one thing: audio examples of the dialect [via].

It’s also come to my attention that the Pittsburgh “yinzer” accent was voted the most annoying dialect in the Nation, and I disagree. The New York accent that pronounces the word “all” as “ohl” is worse than the Southern California accent (made famous in Zappa’s “Valley Girl“) that inflects statements into questions?

Shipwrecks.

Amazing wood carving.

Sparkling bat poop [via].

Robert Goddard’s 1914 Patent for a liquid-fueled rocket. Consider that in 1914 we barely knew how to design airplanes. In those days, the fuel gauge was a pocket watch hung on a nail.
[Top image from here.]

Saturday Matinee – American Dialects, W.C. Clark & the Fabulous Thunderbirds

American regional dialects are curious, and when I hear one I haven’t heard in a while I try to identify where the speaker grew up. If you listen closely, you can hear the ancestral accents and phrasing as well: English to the north, Scottish and Irish to the south. As for me, I have no accent, but Mrs. Strutts says I do… I sound a lot like central Ohio mixed with some faint Texan stuff. (Here’s a simple online test if you’re curious what accent mix you have.)

W.C. Clark backed by The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and featuring Angela Strehli is an awesome mix of Texas blues. Never heard of W.C. Clark? Try this:

Yep, that’s Stevie Ray Vaughan with W.C. Clark. Next question?