I will not buy this record. It is scratched.
In the spirit of giving gifts, appreciating myself, and generally bumming around on the web, I bought a couple of things from McSweeney's last week. Yesterday I received a package containing two (2) books: English As She Is Spoke and The Future Dictionary of America (which includes a bonus CD).
The first is a Portuguese-to-English phrasebook written by a man who knew no English at all, deciding instead that combining a Portuguese-to-French phrasebook and a French-to-English dictionary is all that's really needed. As others have said, it gives the impression that, facing imminent eviction, he assured his publisher that of course he could write an English phrasebook. With helpful sayings like "What time from the month you are to-day?", "Alls hair dresser are newsmonger.", and "What come in to me for an ear yet out for another.", any speaker of Portuguese should be able to get along easily with his English-speaking brethren.
The second is "a brilliant, acerbic and provocative imagining of the American language sometime in the future, when all or most of our country's problems are solved and the present administration is a distant memory." The search for a short-and-sweet example gives me mezuzahideen [mez-oo'-zuh-hid-een] n. an American Jew who believes Israel should dissolve its nation status and move its citizens and national boundaries inside British Columbia, Canada.
And last night I finally opened one of the rubber-band balls, disassembling it on the couch and discovering two things in the process. The colors are not found in equal proportions (the yellow pile being substantially smaller than the other three), and the core is fairly loose and irregular, likely a result of this being created by machine instead of bored/obsessed human. As I sat at home, chatting here and there and letting the DVD player go through bits of Amadeus, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and extra featurettes for each, I decided to convert the yellow and red piles (from that single ball) into balls of their own. The red ball is about twice as large as the yellow, and I believe the blue and green piles are about the size the red pile was. My calculations, of course, were based on the assumption that the colors would be found in equal proportion, and this randomness could easily be evened out among the entire collection of ten balls. We'll see when the time comes.
The first is a Portuguese-to-English phrasebook written by a man who knew no English at all, deciding instead that combining a Portuguese-to-French phrasebook and a French-to-English dictionary is all that's really needed. As others have said, it gives the impression that, facing imminent eviction, he assured his publisher that of course he could write an English phrasebook. With helpful sayings like "What time from the month you are to-day?", "Alls hair dresser are newsmonger.", and "What come in to me for an ear yet out for another.", any speaker of Portuguese should be able to get along easily with his English-speaking brethren.
The second is "a brilliant, acerbic and provocative imagining of the American language sometime in the future, when all or most of our country's problems are solved and the present administration is a distant memory." The search for a short-and-sweet example gives me mezuzahideen [mez-oo'-zuh-hid-een] n. an American Jew who believes Israel should dissolve its nation status and move its citizens and national boundaries inside British Columbia, Canada.
And last night I finally opened one of the rubber-band balls, disassembling it on the couch and discovering two things in the process. The colors are not found in equal proportions (the yellow pile being substantially smaller than the other three), and the core is fairly loose and irregular, likely a result of this being created by machine instead of bored/obsessed human. As I sat at home, chatting here and there and letting the DVD player go through bits of Amadeus, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and extra featurettes for each, I decided to convert the yellow and red piles (from that single ball) into balls of their own. The red ball is about twice as large as the yellow, and I believe the blue and green piles are about the size the red pile was. My calculations, of course, were based on the assumption that the colors would be found in equal proportion, and this randomness could easily be evened out among the entire collection of ten balls. We'll see when the time comes.