Hmmm, depends on your definition.  I can muddle my way through Spanish if it is written.  I can get the jist of a spoken Spanish conversation, mostly, but don't "speak" it very well.  I can't remember enough words to hold a conversation.

Does Ebonics and Southern count as language?

What about pidgin English?  I've gotten quite adapt at deciphering badly spoken English from dealing with so many international students who butcher the language through miss use of words and bad pronunciation and rhythm.

I've got a good head for accents and can copy them pretty well when trying to learn new words, especially Chinese for some strange reason.  That really surprises me.  I don'tt even try learning Vietnames words.  That language sounds like they are swollowing their tongues.

LOL, mostly all true and the accent portrayed here is pretty much Georga which does not make up the whole South.

...I have been told that I have an accent though :)

There is a cookbook featuring Southern recipes, not the best versions of the recipes (maybe it was written by a transplant), but the title is typically Southern: "Who's Your Mama, Are you Catholic, and Can you Make a Roux?"

And yes, my husband and I found out that we were related by marriage at our wedding.  One of my cousins had married one of his aunts.  My cousin received two different wedding invitations made out in different names.  My side of the family called him bubbee (My side being heaveyly cajun French.  My grandmother was straight off the bayou). The other side called him bubba, a common Southern nickname.


Southern women appreciate their natural assets:
Clean skin.
A winning smile.
That unforgettable Southern drawl.

Southern women know their manners:
'Yes, ma'am.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Why, no, Billy!'

Southern women have a distinct way with fond expressions :
'Y'all come back!'
'Well, bless your heart.'
'Drop by when you can.'
'How's your Momma?'

Southern women know their summer weather report:
Humidity
Humidity
Humidity

Southern women know their vacation spots:
The beach
The rivuh
The crick

Southern women know the joys of June, July, and August:
Colorful hi-heel sandals
Strapless sun dresses
Iced sweet tea with mint
Straw hats and big sunglasses

Southern women know everybody's first name:
Honey
Darlin'
Shugah

Southern women know the movies that speak to their hearts:
Fried Green Tomatoes
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Steel Magnolias
Gone With The Wind

Southern women know their religions:
Baptist
Methodist
Catholic
Football

Southern women know their country breakfasts:
Red-eye gravy
Grits
Eggs
Country ham
Mouth-watering homemade biscuits with momma's homemade jelly

Southern women know their cities dripping with Southern charm:
Chawl'stn
S'vanah
Foat Wuth
N'awlins
Addlanna

Southern women know their elegant gentlemen:
Men in uniform.
Men in tuxedos
Rhett Butler

Southern girls know their prime real estate:
The Mall
The Country Club
The Beauty Salon

Southern girls know the 3 deadly sins:
Having bad hair and nails
Having bad manners
Cooking bad food


More Suth en-ism's:
Only a Southerner knows the difference between a hissie fit and a conniption fit, and that you don't 'HAVE' them, you 'PITCH' them.
_____
Only a Southerner knows how many fish, collard greens, turnip greens, peas, beans, etc, make up 'a mess.'
_____
Only a Southerner can show or point out to you the general direction of 'yonder.'
_____
Only a Southerner knows exactly how long 'directly' is, as in: 'Going to town, be back directly.'
_____
Even Southern babies know that 'Gimme some sugar' is not a request for the white, granular sweet substance that sits in a pretty little bowl in the middle of the table.
_____
All Southerners know exactly when 'by and by' is. They might not use the term, but they know the concept well.
_____
Only a Southerner knows instinctively that the best gesture of solace for a neighbor who's got trouble is a plate of hot fried chicken and a big bowl of cold potato salad. If the neighbor's trouble is a real crisis, they also know to add a large banana puddin!
_____
Only Southerners grow up knowing the difference between 'right near'and 'a right far piece.' They also know that 'just down the road' can be 1 mile or 20.
_____
Only a Southerner both knows and understands the difference between a redneck, a good ol' boy, and po' white trash.
_____
No true Southerner would ever assume that the car with the flashing turn signal is actually going to make a turn.
_____
A Southerner knows that 'fixin' can be used as a noun, a verb, or an adverb.
_____
Only Southerners make friends while standing in lines, and when we're 'in line,' we talk to everybody!
_____
Put 100 Southerners in a room and half of them will discover they're related, even if only by marriage.
_____
In the South, y'all is singular, all y'all is plural.
_____
Southerners know grits come from corn and how to eat them.
_____
Every Southerner knows tomatoes with eggs, bacon, grits, and coffee are perfectly wonderful; that red eye gravy is also a breakfast food; and that fried green tomatoes are not a breakfast food.
_____
When you hear someone say, 'Well, I caught myself lookin',' you know you are in the presence of a genuine Southerner!
_____
Only true Southerners say 'sweet tea, ''sweet milk,' and 'light bread'. Sweet tea indicates the need for sugar and lots of it -- we do not like our tea unsweetened. 'Sweet milk' means you don't want buttermilk. And 'Light bread' is white bread.
_____
And a true Southerner knows you don't scream obscenities at little old ladies who drive 30 MPH on the freeway. You just say,'Bless her heart' .. and go your own way.
_____
To those of you who are still a little embarrassed by your Southernness: Take two tent revivals and a dose of sausage gravy and call me in the morning. Bless your heart!
_____
And to those of you who are still having a hard time understanding all this Southern stuff, .. bless your hearts, I hear they are fixin' to have classes on Southernness as a second language!
_____
And for those that are not from the South but have lived here for a long time, all y'all need a sign to hang on y'alls front porch that reads 'I ain't from the South, but I got here as fast as I could.'


Southern girls know men may come and go, but friends are fahevah !
Now...... Shugah, send this to someone who was raised in the South or wish they had been!
If you're a Northern transplant, Bless your little heart, fake it.
We know you got here as fast as you could.

OMG!!!

Did these guys peg it right on or what? As a gamer girl to all the gamer guys out there.

Playing For Change | Song Around The World "Stand By Me" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

Obama-idiot

http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/22189430/plane-stupid.htm#q=air+force+one

Doing better this evening.  I had a good talk with the Assistant to the Dean of College of Arts & Sciences.  It calmed me down a lot.  I still might be looking for a job, but I have a better outlook on it.  There is a slight chance, slim to none, that Linguistics may be able to appeal the termination.  There is the possiblity that if Linguistics folds, ELOP might still remain, but I don't know what we will do without our GTAs.

The situation is dire, but not lost at this point.

Well, I was going to bitch about having to go to my son's high school "Senior Supper" with that crowd of mundane, white bread, middle American parents that I don't belong to.  I put on my social camouflage (skirt, silk blouse, heels, hair and make-up), sucked it up, and took one for the boy, to come home and find that the Louisiana Board of Regents has voted to terminate the Linguistics department (my department) at my university. 

I don't know what will become of my program.  There isn't another department that they can shuffle us off too.  Not everyone is qualified to teach English as a second language, not even English students.  Just because you are majoring in literature or writing doesn't make you qualified or able to teach a language.

I'm not actually worried about a job.  I'm civil service; they have to find me something elso on campus or with the city .  The city hasn't started laying off mass quantities of people yet, so I think I'm safe. 

I like my job.  I like working with all the international students, but there aren't a lot of positions for International Student Advisers laying around.  We'll just have to see what happens.

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

HATFIELD, England – In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."

Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.

Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a "good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets."

Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the "habitable zone" — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface, Mayor said.

He spoke at a news conference Tuesday at the University of Hertfordshire during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science.

Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a "large and deep" ocean.

"It is the first serious 'water-world' candidate," Udry said.

Mayor's main planet-hunting competitor, Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, praised the find of Gliese 581 e as "the most exciting discovery" so far of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system.

"This discovery is absolutely extraordinary," Marcy told The Associated Press by e-mail, calling the discoveries a significant step in the search for Earth-like planets.

While Gliese 581 e is too hot for life "it shows that nature makes such small planets, probably in large numbers," Marcy commented. "Surely the galaxy contains tens of billions of planets like the small, Earth-mass one announced here."

Nearly 350 planets have been found outside our solar system, but so far nearly every one of them was found to be extremely unlikely to harbor life.

Most were too close or too far from their sun, making them too hot or too cold for life. Others were too big and likely to be uninhabitable gas giants like Jupiter. Those that are too small are highly difficult to detect in the first place.

Both Gliese 581 d and Gliese 581 e are located in constellation Libra and orbit around Gliese 581.

Like other planets circling that star — scientists have discovered four so far — Gliese 581 e was found using the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile.

The telescope has a special instrument which splits light to find wobbles in different wavelengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

"It is great work and shows the potential of this detection method," said Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

___

Associated Press Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.

I finally made it through dance class Monday with a minimum of stumbling.  I even had some new routine to learn.
Go me!

*Paring down the collection of left feet

We had the best pork loin for supper last night!!! We slow cooked it on the BBQ pit for about 3 hours.

John got the idea off of a cooking show he watches. We made pecan wood charcoal in the fire pit, and as the charcoal was ready, moved it to the BBQ pit to slow cook the meat. I must say I was really doubtful of this whole process. There just didn't seem to be enough heat being generated to cook 3 pounds of meat. But, it worked and worked well. On top of all that, John injected the pork with Creole Garlic Butter seasoning.

OMG!!! It was so tender and succulent and flavorful. It practically melted in your mouth. We had beans on the side (they had BBQ beans and I had black beans) and a wonderful salad made with spinach, leaf lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, mushrooms and sweet peppers. Everything was supper yummy.

John is thinking we need to build a smallish fire box to make our own charcoal, though the fire pit process worked pretty well. Someone just needed to be aware of it and keep a fire going and moving coals over as necessary.

Next on our cooking agenda is slow cooked chicken then a brisquet.

A wooden thing with circles that cuts my head off.

The 5 year old came up with this description because the didn't know the word.

John figured it out pretty quickly.

Can you guess what it is?

If I could spell, I'd be dangerous.

It's a good thing I can't spell.

That was supposed to be "loose" balls.

>Doh<

Half the time I still spell "go" as "goe."  What can I say, I like to add "e"s on the ends of things.

CANNON BALLS!!! DID YOU KNOW THIS? I DIDN'T
 
It was necessary to keep a good supply of cannon balls near the cannon on old war ships. But how to prevent them from rolling about the deck was the problem.

The best storage method devised was to stack them as a square based pyramid, with one ball on top, resting on four, resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon.

There was only one problem -- how to prevent the bottom layer from sliding/rolling from under the others.

The solution was a metal plate with 16 round indentations, called, for reasons unknown, a Monkey. But if this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it. The solution to the rusting problem was to make them of brass - hence, "Brass Monkeys"
.
Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled.  Consequently, when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannon balls would come right off the monkey. Thus,it was quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

And all this time, you thought that was just a vulgar expression, didn't you? You must send this fabulous bit of historical knowledge to at least a few uneducated friends.

What really happens in the Batcave.

[VIDEO] Batman Gets Pwned

Posted using ShareThis

This is an email I got from a friend this morning.  It really rang true for me, so I thought I'd share it.

Last night I decided to ride over to the local bar to check out bike night... it's been a while since I've been. As I rode I was thinking... "I'm sure gonna look cool riding my awesome, vintage chopper up into the crowd."
      About that time the beam from my headlight shifted down sharply. "This road is really rough... It took a hard jolt... I probably just need to pull it up a little." Just as I reached for the light the bracket broke free from the front-end... I was now holding the light in my hand.
      Now... I'm travelling down the road in heavy traffic with my right hand on the throttle and my left hand reaching way forward holding the lamp trying to keep it grounded so it keeps burning. My shifter and kill switch are below my left thigh and behind my ass. There's no place to pull over and I don't even know what I'm gonna do when I actually try to stop. It's about a 1/2 mile to the stop sign.
      I had to laugh... God really has a sense of humor. Instead of pulling into the bar looking all cool and shit, I'm rolling down the road looking like a retarded monkey fucking a football. Ha! 
      Finally I made it to a parking lot and got the thing stopped. After much effort with zip ties (including an essential one that "happened" to be lying on the ground) and some mini bungee cords, I secured the headlight enough to ride back to the house.
      An old friend used to say "When you think you're lookin' good, you're lookin' bad." And... sometimes you get a little lesson in humility when necessary!
 
Tree
  

Greetings All,

I have so much rolling around in my head that I want to put out in LJ land, but it never seems to quite trickle down to my fingers. It's always, "Oh, I'll do it later," then other things happen and, . . . well, you know . . .

Let's see first topic: 
 

( Shoulder )

 

( Dinner with Students )

  

( Survival of the Fattest )Quick update.  The bathroom floor is up and the old mortor is gound off thanks to John who spent his Mardi Gras day off doing it.  Next we put in the new tub, then hang the sheet rock.  I have some pictures, but I will have to post them later.

And, I still need to tell you about the Day of Presents!

http://www.explosm.net/comics/1562/

Dinosaur Comics on snacks http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000761.html  
 
White Ninja on boogers (Yes, I said boogers.  I don't write the comics folks. I just report them)
http://www.whiteninjacomics.com/comics/checkoutboog.shtml