Ooh baby!

Pretty much worksafe.

I went to Subway for lunch and instantly fell into a junk food stupor. Cannot focus...must nap...

To go back a bit, the last thing that made me smile was when at the bookstore last night, I was calling the special orders we had received. I got to a stack of archy and Mehitabel books for a customer named "Richard Schingoethe." Now, when I call someone, I like to ask for the person using their full name, so I took a few minutes to figure out how to pronounce it. I knew that the author Goethe was pronounced "Grr-tuh," so I figured this name would "Shin-Grr-Tuh," and dialed and asked for him with that pronunciation.

There was a rather prolonged silence, then "Oh. My. God." I started laughing and said, "So, I got it right then?" His response was that he doesn't even pronounce it that way anymore because of all of the mangling it goes through, and has anglicized it to "Shin-Go-Thee." He then assumed I knew German a bit, which I let him believe instead of telling him I was just a book geek who knows my international authors.

Kathy, that's like the time I was doing phone support and getting lots of calls from Cajun country. I very rarely had trouble pronouncing the French names properly because I spent several years doing TV new monitoring from New Orleans. It was easier to just say I'd spent some time in New Orleans. Thanks to Hubby, who grew up in Hawaii, I could also pronounce Hawaiian names, much to the locals' delight. When I told them my husband grew up in Hawaii, they always wanted to know where he'd lived and tried to find out if there were people in common that they knew.

My Sunday school teacher LOOOVED me because as a 6 year old, I pronounced her name correctly without being told -- Jock(w)aLEEN, not Jack-lyn.

She thought I was a supergenius, and gave me presents!

After working at Waldenbooks near Little Warsaw on the NW border of the city, not too far from Belmont/Central, I got really good at figuring out how to pronounce Polish last names (it's just a matter of sounding out every single syllable). Then, when I moved up here and found out that this is where the Polish immigrants go when they can afford to move out of their city apartments and head to the 'burbs, I've been able to keep up my pronunciation practice. I now have Russian names to figure out, as well.

Russian is fun. We've been watching Russian musicals on public broadcasting channel, and it's amazing how many French sounds are in Russian.

Some people think McCain's latest bizarre stunt was intended to draw attention away from Palin's gawdawful interview with Katie Couric:

Palin: ‘What The Bailout Does Is Help Those Who Are Concerned About Health Care Reform’»

This morning on the CBS Early Show, Katie Couric previewed the second half of her interview with Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK). During the interview, Couric asked Palin why she believes the Wall Street bailout is needed.

Palin responded incoherently by claiming that the bailout would “help those who are concerned about health care reform.” Palin then appeared to look down at her notes and says, “Oh, it’s got to be all about job creation”:

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? … Instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy– Oh, it’s got to be about job creation too. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions.

There's also a video.

That reminds me, I'm going to a local Uzbek restaurant with people from another board on Friday night. I've never gone to one of their F2Fs before, but since it's just a few miles from my apartment and I've been wanting to head back there for some time, I figured why not. Every time I've gone there when other customers have shown up (which hasn't been every visit), it seems that the other table(s) had Russian families.

Interesting thing is that, with all the Russian immigrants around Chicagoland, there are very few traditional Russian restaurants. Apparently, when Russians go out to eat, they want more exotic food, usually Afghan, Uzbek, or Georgian. They can get the traditional stuff in their own kitchens, so why bother going out for it?

So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions.

And this has to do with giving $700b to giant investment banks...what, exactly? Or is she just trying to win at Buzzword Bingo?