down and out

I caught a cold.

It started Thursday as a runny nose and by Saturday had evolved into a fully functional ass kicker.

I had hoped to spend the weekend riding my bike and getting some stuff done around the house but instead spent the weekend horizontal, moaning.

In my reclined state I did get to catch a little TV and noticed that the news reporters all do something really funny anymore. When they pronounce a foreign word, they do some sort of cartoon impression of someone from that country.

This first started right around 2000 when the country went into a Latino frenzy - you remember - when Nacho's superseded the potato chip, the Miami Sound Machine did that conga, and Edward James Olmos or whatever the fuck his name is was being talked about like Al Pachino ( who ironically enough had been on the cutting edge of the movement, trading in his guini-tee for big tab collars of Tony Montana)

but I digress...

Back then you'd hear Daisy Fuentes introducing a song in perfect Queens English and then get to a word such as " enchilada" and suddenly she'd be like Speedy Gonzalez offering some food to Yosemite Sam, " On-chillll-(rolling tongue)-taaaaaa" then right back into English like nothing happened. It would be like drive by Spanish....whap-pa-pa-pa and then right back into English.

But whatever. Daisy was in fact Hispanic, and hot, so whatever she wanted to do was fine with me. And the whole thing, while odd, did not give off a sense of affect as much as it did cultural pride.

Well some time between then and now, the whole thing has gone to hell in a handbasket. Apparently any word, or worse yet any name, that doesn't appear on the side of a Happy Meal box now has to be said as spoken in its country of origin.

The first blatant example of this was with Qatar. KA-TAR....sounds like guitar was fine for most of us. Then it began. QUA-TER, KA-TEAR, Mis-ta KOT-TAH...until finally some dope settled on CUTTER. CUTTER ? Come on, that's purposely being obtuse.

My recent favorite is seeing how many syllables the anchor can add to the Russian Presidents name. Medvedev Having the D and the V next to each other has sent them into a tizzy. Now, rightly or wrongly, MED-VED-EV is simple enough. We know who you're talking about, he knows who your talking about, and its easy on the English ear. But no, they're rather MED-VI-ED-VI-EV, ME-ED-VI-ED-DI-EV or the CNN preferred pronunciation all slurry like Rocky after fighting at 15 rounder with Apollo Creed, MED-VIED-EV.

I did notice that they tried this shit with Al-Qaeda for a while but then just gave up and went back to AL-KI-DA. Maybe the whole thing comes down to a matter of respect.