Daily fortune cookie: 4 March 2011

 

"All that office talk around the water cooler would be much more exciting if it were held around a Slurpee machine."

Long Distance Dialing Codes Make No Sense At All

Some three years ago I had a blog that I called "Makes No Sense At All", named after the Hüsker Dü song. The point of it was to give me an occasional soap-box from which to give into Andy Rooney tendencies and just grumble and complain about whatever took my fancy. I didn't carry on with it too long, and it was read by, like, a maximum of five people who were not GoogleBots. So since it's just sat there moribund, collecting digital dust down the years. I decided I might as well close down the old blog and syndicate its contents here, in weekly installations. I've eliminated a few blog entries that seem too anachronistic by now, but the blogs that I have included I've not edited at all. So enjoy watching me at my grumpiest... Makes No Sense at All.

Originally published 19 June 2008.

Okay, this one is more than a little Andy Rooney-esque.

Let me explain the situation to you. I live in Toronto, but Iknow that similar things exist throughout the +1 phone dialing area. So if you live in or near even a moderately big city, it will most certainly apply.

Toronto's main area code is 416. It's also overlaid with 647. The main area code of the areas around Toronto is 905, though it's overlaid with 289. So far, so banal. Some Torontonians actually make a point of calling the area within the city limits of Toronto 'the 416' and the suburbs around it 'the 905'.

Well, some Torontonians. Not me.

Okay, as I said, so what. When I was a kid,the whole mess was 416, now there's a lot more phones these days. It happens throughout Canada and the USA, and is no biggie. The local calling area in Toronto is larger than the whole 416 telephone exchange. So there is actually local calling across four area codes. When you get a number that starts with 905, it might be local. It might be long distance.

This is where it starts to get odd. When a number starts with 416, I know it's local. When it starts with, say, 212, I know it's in Manhattan and, ergo, long distance. When it's 905, it might or it might not be.

But what makes no sense at all is that, when I dial a long-distance 905 number without putting the '1' first, the phone company refuses to put the call through. It tells me it's long distance and that I need to hang up and dial the damn number again.

For the life of me I can't understand this (additionally, when I'm outside Toronto I can't use my cell phone's address book since I need to go in and manually add that '1' to all the numbers). 80 years ago, when Bell was staffed by little old ladies pulling out and pushing in cables, this might have made sense. But certainly it can figure out how to insert that '1' all by itself, right? Certainly the pleasant operator voice could say "We're sorry. That number is long distance. Please press 1 to put it through." Would that be so big a deal? Why force me to hang up and call again? Do I have to memorise the entire list of suburban and exurban Toronto hamlets to know which ones are local and which ones aren't? After all, I'm still going to call that humber; just this time I'll have to pay for it.

Perhaps I doth protest too much, but a computerised phone system that can't sick in a '1' makes no sense at all.

Daily fortune cookie: 3 March 2011

 

"If opportunity comes knocking, lock your door and pretend you're not home."

Changing of the Guard

For the past ten months or so (I can calculated it, and I will, but I can't be bothered at the moment), the title of 'most viewed of my blogs' has been the same: this one, A Proper Blog. And with my 2011 commitment to posting at least one entry a day on this blog (obviously as a result meaning less frequent posts on other blogs, the majority of which I'm now let fall entirely dormant), I certainly expected that to continue. I had a theory that a much more frequent updating schedule would endear this particular blog to the Google Gods.

To an extent, it has (I think). But against all expectations, in the month of February, it lost the title of 'Most Popular Bungle Jerry Blog'. One other blog of mine has whooshed ahead of it, with a 500% increase in views in February over January. And it hasn't gone viral: that's all organic Google searching. Someone up there in Mountain View must love me.

Or must love 'Album Cover Gallery', anyway, for it's the blog that's broken ahead, gone off-and-running and left this here blog in the dust. It was my Hipgnosis special, where I exhibited 75 covers designed by Hipgnosis. That went over well, and clearly I need to really concentrate on that blog in March, in a 'strike-while-the-iron-is-hot' kind of way. It's not my favourite blog to do, but I launched it on a hunch that Google would like it. And Google does seem to, even if it only has a dozen or so entries.

Who'd have thought it?

Anyway, hats off to the new king. From the new #2.

Daily fortune cookie: 2 March 2011

 

"You're feeling positively breezy this week, which could turn to gale force winds by Thursday."

Breaking the Rhyme: Four Songs That Would Have Rhymed With a Different Singer

So I've been listening to the Smiths. There's a certain line in "A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours" that stuck out, that I'd like to show you:

Oh, but don't mention love
I'd hate the pain of the strain all over again.

What's intriguing is that, written down, it looks like a triple internal rhyme, but the way Morrissey sings the word 'again', it isn't. 'Again' is an interesting work, mind you: it has two different pronunciations, with no regional preference as far as I can tell. I can't say 'Morrissey pronounces that word /əˈgɛn/ because he's Mancunian' or anything like that. Additionally, of course, with Morrissey, you can never be sure what's supposed to be a rhyme and what isn't. After all, he hardly follows ABABCDCD rhyme schemes.


But it reminded me of a few different songs down the years I've noticed, songs with rhyme schemes that would work in one accent but are sung by people who speak a different accent. Observe:

(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care

Take this fifties rocker, written by New Yorkers Lieber and Stoller and sung by Tennessee native Elvis Presley. Building a rhyme entirely around function words, Lieber and Stoller write the following:

I don't know why my heart flips.
I only know it does.
I wonder why I love you, baby.
I guess it's just because
You're so square.
Baby, I don't care.

Apart from noting that I never thought the verb was 'flip', note that while Northerners Lieber and Stoller have no problem rhyming 'does' and 'because' as /dʌz/ and /bɪˈkʌz/, Southerner Presley breaks the rhyme by pronouncing the latter as /bɪˈkɔz/.

Still a great song either way.

Downtown

I had to do a bit of research here; I thought this one was a north-south thing, but it's not. The map of 'rhotic accents' in England is rather more complex than I'd thought it was. The lines in question in this brilliant 1960s song are:

Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova
You'll be dancing with 'em, too, before the night is over

Tony Hatch, the songwriter, was born in London, where most accents drop the letter 'r' at the end of words (creating the distinct 'driving in my kah' accent one associates with England as a whole and with Boston, Massachusetts). So for him 'bossa nova' and 'over' made a perfect rhyme. Petula Clark was from Epsom, Surrey - almost walking distance to today's London but, if my dialect map is to be believed, on the 'rhotic' side of th eline. Whatever her native accent ought to be, there's no doubt that Clark sounds that 'r' in 'over' about as strongly as any English-speaker could, wreaking havoc on the rhyme in question.

All Apologies

Obviously, this song was made famous by its composer, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, rather famously from Washington State. Dubliner Sinéad O'Connor is one of several people to have covered it, though. The rhyme in question is just that - a rhyme; no more, no less. It's the part that goes:

In the sun
In the sun I feel as one
In the sun, in the sun
Married
Buried
Married
Buried

The strange spelling given 'buried' is no problem: 'bury' is a homophone for 'berry' everywhere. It's that other word, one of the most intriguing to students of English dialects. Mary, merry and marry can be pronounced three different ways or all the same, depending on where you're from. West Coaster Cobain would have pronounced all three the same. O'Connor probably says them all differently. She whispers (I can't call it 'singing') /ˈmærid/ before /ˈbɛrid/, breaking the rhyme and turning it into merely two words repeated one after another.

Russians

This one doesn't quite fit. Sting wrote it, Sting sings it. Still, it's a mystery that can only be solved by looking into the head of history's most pretentious songwriter. Observe:

In Europe and America
There's a growing feeling of hysteria

And believe me, that's pretty tame for someone who has rhymed 'cough' with 'Nabokov' and 'apprentice' with 'Charibdes'. Anyway, 'hysteria' has two pronunciations: the middle syllable can be 'stair' or 'steer'. Neither exactly rhymes with 'America', but the former comes close. So that being the case, why oh why, Mr. Sting, did you pronounce 'hysteria' with the second pronunciation? It's an ugly rhyme anyway, why make it even more uncomfortable by pronouncing it so it doesn't rhyme at all?

Daily fortune cookie: 1 March 2011

"There's never been a Sesame Street character who knows your inner soul like Snuffleupagus."