Yo Hablo Español

Many years ago, I studied Spanish in junior high and in high school. Though I have far more opportunities to practice my Spanish here in California than I did during my childhood days spent in Kansas, I have to admit I rarely make use of what little Spanish I remember - aside from "taco", "burrito", and the like.

Somewhere in my busy schedule I apparently managed to find time to bust out my rusty language skills, dust them off, and do this video in Spanish. Here's the original video in case you missed it when it was first released. My accent is muy bueno, don't you think?

In high school, I switched from Spanish to German. Here's a German video. I have to say that the pitch of my voice is a bit higher than usual.

And I even dabbled a little in French at community college one summer during high school. Here's a French video.

My memory must be fading with age. I don't recall learning to speak Mandarin, Korean, Russian, and Portuguese, but apparently I did. The proof is right there on the Internet, and we all know that everything on the Internet is true.

Okay, so the speakers in those videos are obviously not me. But I have to say that it's cool to see (and hear) that my work (not exactly War and Peace I admit) has been translated into numerous languages. [ Full disclosure: Some of the slides in videos were created by my talented co-workers. ]

For me, being translated is especially cool because one of my majors in college was Linguistics. I've long been fascinated by languages and enjoy the opportunities I get to practice (a.k.a. "mangle") them when I travel. I don't speak any language (with the possible exception of English) particularly well, but I've always felt that the locals give me credit for trying (a.k.a. "butchering").

My other major in college was Computer & Information Science. CIS + Linguistics is a big factor behind the languages that I do "speak" well:

C, Bourne shell, Korn shell, BASH, Csh, Perl (Tk and DBI), PHP, CGI, HTML, Java, ASP,
SQL, TCL, Expect, sed, awk, Visual Basic, PowerShell, PowerCLI, Orchestrator, Javascript, ActionScript,
SwishScript, and x86 assembly.

Time to pick up one more language: Polish. I'm doing a mileage to Warsaw run in December. :-)

The King

Hello from several tens of thousands of feet above Santa Barbara.

On my way home from <sarcasm> lovely </sarcasm> Ontario, I saw an amusing billboard - amusing to me anyway - heading southbound on the 605 on my way to LAX.

[ Clarification: I was heading southbound, not the billboard. ]

I wouldn't ordinarily notice (or care about) a Budweiser sign, but I couldn't possibly miss the gargantuan slogan screaming out at the drivers passing by.

I wanted to snap a picture of the billboard, but reaching back into the trunk area while driving wasn't an option. So I went online in the Red Carpet club before my flight and did some hasty googling in the hopes someone had posted a picture of the billboard. Didn't find one, but I did find this:


"The King Never Looked So Good." If you watched the boob tube as much as I did growing up, you'd immediately get the "King" reference. If your memory needed at little jogging, the accompanying pictures of the (apparently) new Budweiser cans would do the trick.

My immediate reaction to the slogan was, "They're absolutely right!"

I imagine that the designers of this new can would be pleased by my reaction… so long as they didn't know me.

For those of you who do know me, you might have noticed that I'm a bit of a stickler (aka. pain in the ass) about language. Majoring in Linguistics only made it worse. One of the things about language that amuses and intellectually stimulates me is ambiguity.

Some folks are the "life of the party." Me, I'm the guy you want around at the end of the party. I'm the perpetual designated driver. I don't drink (never have), so my immediate interpretation of "The King Never Looked So Good" was they're right, drinking Budweiser has never looked like a good idea to me. Beer smells disgusting. Why would I want to drink it?

Let's hear it for truth in advertising!

I can see SFO off in the distance, so I need to go for now.