English Pronunciation

After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

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.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

English Pronunciation by G. Nolst Trenité

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2011/12/23/english-pronunciation/

mood: UN-caffeinated

music: moves like Jagger

I am reading through “A Complete  Course in Freshman English” by Harry Shaw. It is an old book. The pages are thin and brittle and whose bindings, I have reinforced rather pathetically with some tape. But it looks rather impressive so I figured its a good place to start to clock in my hours to become a writer.

“In no sense is it a course designed for the training of professional writers or speakers.”

oh great.. the book disagrees with me. Well its my only English book so its this or nothing.

It says to do an self evaluation. The purpose being that:

” Some of us go for years at a time without doing what a good store keeper does periodically- take stock. The whole process of writing consists of two steps: first, finding out what we think and feel about people, places, happenings, (<- see comma before the and its correct I checked..hmph…long story ) and ideas, and, second, communicating our thoughts and feelings to our readers.”

First question:

“What are my social beliefs?

Do I like people in general ? What are the qualifications necessary to gain my friendship? Do I like men more than women?”

Uhmm .. when was this book written? ( checking book now.. oh goody it was written in 1940 )

I think I’m going to skip this question.

Second question:

What are my religious beliefs?

uhmm ..skip -> and will now skip to the bottom of the page..

“Am I an observing person, alert to what’s going on about me?”

Well , I have been called a bubble head at times and my brother often calls me the worst ninja in the world. So I would have to say no.

“Am I capable of self -analysis and criticism?”

I believe I am but who knows I could be lying to myself.

Am I open minded- tolerant of other people and their ideas?

Most definitely..

“Am I capable of reflection and meditation?”

I’m not naturally inclined to it but given my new profession I suppose I will learn to be Ms. Inner Reflection. I’m not sure about the meditation though..that always puts me to sleep.

Am I aware of my limitations?”

I would have to say so.. but I have been wrong before.

Hmm so now it goes on to say how “when you write which really means something to you, something which is or was really important,your writing is interesting even though you may think it will sound flat to others.”

Right.. oh well. One step at a time right? sigh.. one step at a time

In fact I have been working with that particular mindset in place, which did a couple of things to my demeanor at work; one, it made me feel like I had nothing to lose since they were going to fire me anyway so I might as well do what I think was best without editing myself for political correctness and two, it made work rather fun so ergo I was fun and three, I was frightfully candid.

A couple months later they still have not fired me and I have somewhat gotten faster at writing if not better.  So I have decided if they are going to keep me around I will learn to be a writer and if it takes me 10,000 hours then it will simply take me 10,000 hours. It seems depressingly long time but I choose to follow where my feet bring me and it has brought me to this doorstep.

I guess I will be sticking around awhile.

http://dailyinfographic.com/

So I’m writing now just so I can write. One can only stare at empty piece of paper for so long.

Maybe because the scene well is so boring. I cant get a feel for the character. Live like an alien, breathe like an alien be the alien.  I think its the name. They gave the alien a name. Now the name is stuck in my head and lives  encased in its name like a cement coffin.

6 Ways to be a Bad Teacher by Don Skoog

Six Ways to be a Bad Teacher

by Don Skoog

When I was a kid, I had the chance to study with a well-known drum teacher in Chicago. At the first lesson, my enthusiasm turned to fear when he began to nitpick every detail of my playing, angrily, as if each tap of the drum was a personal insult. His attitude said I was hopeless, a waste of his time…. I walked out of the studio, shattered. I eventually found another teacher but the damage of that one lesson affected my confidence for years to come. Later, when I began to teach, I promised myself I would never do to a student what he had done to me.
As a teacher, your influence affects the life of every student who walks into your studio. You can be a force for growth or withdrawal in the lives of the people who come to you for help, so think carefully about what type of impact you want to have on them. Here are some attitudes or personality traits that negatively impact other people. If you recognize yourself here you should think long and hard before taking up a teaching career.

1) The worst possible teacher is one who, deep down inside, really doesn’t care. I have seen teachers cancel students so they could go to lunch. I knew a guy who would stare out the window while the student played, and another that would fall asleep during the lesson. Anyone that can fall asleep during a drum lesson shouldn’t be teaching. Here’s the bottom line––if you don’t enjoy the work you won’t be good at it and, even worse, you will be a negative, unhappy influence in the lives of your students. If you don’t care that you’re a negative influence then you really shouldn’t be teaching anything.

2) One good way to tell if your heart’s in the right place is to ask yourself if you’re only in it for the money. If the paycheck is really your main motivation then you probably shouldn’t be teaching. It takes a lot of thought and preparation time to be a good teacher. Unpaid preparation time. If you’re not prepared then you won’t do well, and you won’t be very successful anyway, so put your heart into something you will enjoy.

3) Sarcastic, cynical people should not go into teaching. This seems obvious yet many teachers have no real empathy for their students. I know a teacher who says she has fifty students but none of them are any good. What does that say about her? I tease my students to ease the tension and make them laugh at themselves and at me, but real sarcasm hurts. And cynicism defeats the whole purpose of teaching. If you’ve gone negative on people, or the art itself, then what will you impart to others?

4) Quitters should seek employment elsewhere. A good drum teacher must also be an active player. I consider myself a drummer who teaches, and so should you. How can you guide someone else’s career if you have given up on your own? Someone who is no longer practicing has nothing new to bring to the lesson, and the evolving art of music is leaving him behind. If you have quit on your own artistic development you are on the way out. So do the music world a favor and don’t take your students with you.

5) Know-it-alls should keep it to themselves. Every artist is still a student, and every musician, not just teachers, should be regularly receiving instruction. The first time I went to Cuba, I was humbled by the realization of how much I didn’t know about their music. I spent a lot of time pointing and saying, what’s that? The panorama of drumming is indeed vast, spanning the geography and history of the world in a rainbow of cultures. There is no way anyone can know everything about percussion, or music in general, so being honest about your grasp of the art and enthusiastic about your own growth helps you to be honest and enthusiastic about your students’. An arrogant teacher (an attitude best described as ‘I know something you don’t know . . . nah . . nah . . nah nah . . nah’) is a real downer for his students.
Some years ago, I talked to Anthony Braxton after he gave a brilliant lecture. He told me that he had to get home because he had a piano lesson the next day and needed to practice. (He said his teacher yelled at him when he wasn’t prepared.) Here was one of the finest minds in contemporary Jazz racing home to practice a Bach fugue. For someone who has accomplished so much, he was remarkably funny and self-effacing. Undoubtedly, Braxton’s commitment to self-growth, and his sense of humor, enrich his teaching as well.

6) Last but definitely not least, is the insecure teacher. This is a guy who is actually worried that his students will become better players than he is. He is the worst possible teacher because he will unconsciously try to undermine his students’ confidence and deliberately slow down their progress. He doesn’t realize that his reputation is based on his achievements, not theirs. He doesn’t want to look bad in comparison so he sabotages anyone who shows signs of real talent. I regularly deal with students who have more natural talent than I do (but I’m still craftier and way more experienced than they are). To me, it’s an honor to be entrusted with the guardianship of such treasures. Regardless of what I achieve as a musician, I’m determined that others will remember me as the one who helped them towards their dreams––not as the guy who tried to screw them up.

Everyone brings baggage to the teaching studio. Will you let your personal disappointments warp the growth of those who come to you for guidance? Or will you use the opportunity you’ve been given to really help someone else along? You can’t control what has been done to you, but you can decide how you will treat others. By teaching well, you can choose to make your corner of the world a little better place. And by paving the road for others, perhaps you can ease your own journey as well.

http://www.contemporarymusicproject.com/six%20ways%20bad%20teacher.html

Instead of an ending it really does seem more like a beginning.

Yesterday Batch 1 of my Nosework 2 Class had just graduated.  My students are a Golden Retriever named Cash, a Dachshund named Hershey, and a Siberian Husky named Watson. I learned a lot from this class, the first and primary one is , though I may have all the documentation necessary to say I can teach detection in the end of it all dogs cant read.

This class made me a better teacher because of the students , canine and human, kept pushing the line. The only one who was very obvious about pushing the boundaries was Watson who was the best in his class in his tenth class of Nosework. For some reason, he decided  that it would be more interesting to hold my heart on a string and attach that string to a roller coaster as he toed the line of disorderly conduct, insubordination, and mutiny for the first 9 classes. I know one cannot prove that dogs have a sense of humor scientifically but Watson has me thinking that science needs to hurry and figure that one out.

Hershey, little Hershey aka SuperGirl, reminds me of my bestfriend … a lot ( obsessively organized, practical, and knows she is smart without being arrogant ) and is probably one of the smartest dogs and bravest dogs I have ever met. Who knew in that teeny tiny princess prancing dog lay a full blooded German Shepherd.  I own a German Shepherd  and I see Hershey as a travel sized version of a working K9 because working with her really felt  like working with the Belgians and German Shepherds I had worked with before. That tiny little dog , with her stroller in tow, is in all and every aspect of the word a working canine.  I even had to be careful when I would tell her owner where the target was because Hershey would go directly to the locations I would say it was. I swear that dog can speak English . The challenge with Hershey was she was too organized . I had to make sure to keep things random for her as possible or she develops a search pattern and wont deviate from it making her time slower than necessary. I felt like Adam Sandler in 50 first dates. I had to keep it different and yet the same over and over again.

Then there is Cash,our class’s efficiency expert. Cash found one hundred and one ways to cheat around actually having to scent. He first tried peaking through the doorway when the puzzles were being set up, then he moved to opening all the boxes, then graduated to profiling his owner’s body language and his latest “efficiency upgrade” was tracking his owner’s footsteps to see where she laid the scent down.   Cash kept forcing his owner to create more and more complex puzzles and forced me to open more and more puzzles I had no intention of putting in Nosework class at all.  He just kept surprising me and it was a pleasant surprise.

So it is because of these 3 dogs that Nosework is as much fun as it is today. I changed it a lot to adapt to the dogs in that class . I had a plan. Really I did. It was suppose to be really really easy and not to demanding for the dogs because they are “pets” only. Probably the most important I had  learned in teaching Nosework is that all dogs   are genetically the same as wolves.. so don’t let the cute fluffy exterior fool you , they are born to hunt and when we go into scent detection we are on their turf not ours.

I will start documenting my classes now. So I raise my glass to a future where I get to hang around superheroes .. for legged ones. So I’m sure I will be writing about these three super heroes more in the future. this is more of an introduction than a proper blog.

So I suppose this is just the beginning , I raise my glass to the stories I am about to live nose down eyes up.

Cheers and may the “paws” be with you

Nudork

time: 5:51

music: garfunkel and oates

I will hate to admit this but I truly believe that my dog has an evil peanut dog in her head that seeks to undo me and my reputation at any minute. It plots on a daily basis to embarrass me and make me look like a complete and total moron.

Dont get me wrong, I love my dog the way she is.. and she definitely keeps me in on my toes and my coworker in a fit of giggles.

I suppose if I had to be more scientific about it , my dog has a really high prey drive combined with the awesome combo of rank drive and defensive drive.  .. and she has a sense of humor .

( haryuken .. super combo .. you win )

But I prefer the story of the evil peanut  in her head, mostly because its really hard to be scientific when  your dog has adoring liquid brown eyes and sports a  permanent grin on its face as its feigning a lack of comprehension. One can read all the books in the world but in the face of stupidity its really hard to think of what to do but its really easy to imagine an evil peanut.

Yesterday, as I was taking Ali for a walk  ( or more precisely Ali is taking me for a run ) when someone had caught up to us  and asked me if Ali was my dog and if I knew how to train dogs.  I look around to check the ground to where she was pointing to make sure that she was pointing at Ali and not some random dog that happened to be around my feet.

And there she was sure enough , chewing on a tennis ball with a stupid grin too busy to react to the stranger that popped behind us.  She wasnt in a sit or a down, she was just standing there chewing happily.

I stared at my dog and   wondered where my dog’s predictable defensive behavior went .

So a bit stunned and befuddled , I nodded and said “Yes , I am a dog trainer .”

Her response, ” I want my dogs to be good like yours is . ” I look Ali and think , ” What stupidity are you plotting now? ” but because I was trying to figure out my dog , I really wasn’t thinking about my response when I replied to her and said, ” All dogs are good. “

Which was weird because evil peanut or no evil peanut ,I hadnt realized that I actually thought of Ali as being “good”  .

Its weird how the universe shows you what you really think when you least expect it.

Blog:

I love this song. It explains how pagmamahal works. .. Who knows , I could be wrong. Being a mayor of the simpletons means you are wrong ..alot.

Cheers! Enjoy!

Nudork

Never been near a university,
never took a paper or a learned degree,
and some of your friends think that’s stupid of me,
but it’s nothing that I care about.

Well I don’t know how to tell the weight of the sun,
and of mathematics well I want none,
and I may be the Mayor of Simpleton,
but I know one thing and that’s I love you.

When their logic grows cold and all thinking gets done,
you’ll be warm in the arms of the Mayor of Simpleton.

I can’t have been there when brains were handed round,
(please be upstanding for the Mayor of Simpleton)
or get past the cover of your books profound,
(please be upstanding for the Mayor of Simpleton)
and some of your friends thinks it’s really unsound that
you’re ever seen talking to me.

Well I don’t know how to write a big hit song,
and all crossword puzzles well I just shun,
and I may be the Mayor of Simpleton,
but I know one thing and that’s I love you.

I’m not proud of the fact that I never learned much,
just feel I should say,
what you get is all real I can’t put on an act,
it takes brains to do that anyway. (And anyway…)

And I can’t unravel riddles, problems and puns,
how the home computer has me on the run,
and I may be the Mayor of Simpleton,
but I know one thing and that’s I love you (I love you).

If depth of feeling is a currency,
(please be upstanding for the Mayor of Simpleton)
then I’m the man who grew the money tree.
(no chain of office and no hope of getting one)

Some of your friends are too brainy to see that they’re paupers
and that’s how they’ll stay.

Well I don’t know how many pounds make up a ton
of all the Nobel prizes that I’ve never won,
and I may be the Mayor of Simpleton,
but I know one things and that’s I love you.

When all logic grows cold and all thinking gets done,
you’ll be warm in the arms of the Mayor of Simpleton.
You’ll be warm in the arms of the Mayor of Simpleton.
You’ll be warm in the arms of the Mayor.
(Please be upstanding for the Mayor of Simpleton.)