At the Dentist

Today I went to the dentist to get a filling.  My regular dentist, who owned the dental clinic, retired earlier this year and I have had a string of dentists since then working on my rather poor teeth.  This one was named Dr. Yuri.  I recognized this as sounding Russian, so I asked him if he was Russian.  "No," he said, "Ukrainian."  I told him I was studying Russian. "That's great.  It's a wonderful language." During this snippet of conversation, Dr. Yuri was giving me a shot of local anesthesia and I was getting goofy from nitrous oxide.  "Yeah, it's really hard though.  I learned pronunciation and spelling right away---my cursive is great.  But my grammar...it's really slow going.""Why did you want to learn Russian?'  "Well, you know, I'm a cold war kid [I doubt he is, since he didn't have a gray hair on his head], and I always was curious about the culture, but we could never find out about the culture, and then I got to know a bunch of Soviets who emigrated here..."

"Could you open your mouth for me?"  I did, as wide as I could.  "Hmmm," he said, "I think you're going to need to use a block,"  which turned out to be a large piece of rubber that went in my mouth on the opposite side of my jaw than the one on which he was working. Now my mouth was fixed in an incredibly wide open state.

"Is that ok?" he asked.

I answered "Ah-hah..." which is what "Mmm-hmm" sounds like if your mouth is stretched as wide as an alligator's.  And then he started to work.  This is what I imagine he was thinking:

On the Recording of “How Do You Do”

https://youtu.be/KAGAf85613A

The scene:  A 70s era recording studio in the 70s.  In Amsterdam.  Their manager watches in as they start to perform their first take.

MOUTH AND MACNEAL:  “🎤🎧📇🎵💲How do you do, Uh Huh/ I thought why not, na na na na  Just me and you and then we can na na na na...

MANAGER:  (waves to the producer to stop). (To M&M: ). What the hell is this, this na na na business??

MOUTH OR MACNEAL:  Well, that’s as far as we got. 

 MACNEAL OR MOUTH:  It’s hard to come up with good English. 

MANAGER:  Do you have a Dutch version?  

MOUTH OR MACNEAL:  It HAS to be in English.  We won’t make the US charts otherwise.

MANAGER, (sarcastically). Well Ok John Lennon.  But the only chart you’re gonna make with those lyrics is “Sub-par Bands Who Aren’t  American.”

MOUTH AND MACNEAL(murmuring to each other in Dutch, trying to sing a little bit and making half hearted effort to fill chorus with real words.)

MANAGER: Well, I guess you’re gonna have to do it your way.  We don’t have time to write a new song.

MOUTH AND MACNEAL:  (Records song and releases it.  Song makes it to the American charts.  Young Boomerlets like me march around together in Girl Scout Canps singing chorus.)

The Individual-crushing Machine of Identity Politcs.

Allow my to introduce myself.  My name is Kelly. It is true that in the year of my birth, there were many births of people named Kelly.  But I didn't really have anything in common with those Kellys because I was this Kelly, the only one I know of  who was born at 11:50 a.m. on August 7, 1962, at St. Mary's hospital in Livonia, Michigan.

Things I think about when I wonder why Jesus is waiting so long to come back (which is a lot these days)

How the Americans Really Should Have Ended

(Safe house.  Claudia is meeting with Elizabeth and Phillip)

Attender les Americains

It's Saturday.  More pointedly, it's Saturday, the 11^th of March.  If you are reading this post, you no doubt are seeking the first Keblog on the fifth season of The Americans, the show that makes you wonder if your kid's best friend's mom could be a Putin plant.

But I'm sorry, minions.  There is no blog here about the first Americans of the season, which was on on March 7.  First of all, I DVRd it on the 7^th because I work midnights and I sleep through its time slot.  No worries, my mom & I planned on watching it together the next day anyway. 

Then,  the next morning I got an Emergency Weather Alert in my email.  The news?  It's gonna be windy.

Windy?  I thought.  They're warning us about wind?

Don't worry, they're not leaders anyway. They're your employees.

Now that the Apocalypse has come and gone and the guy who is by all accounts the scariest contender for the US presidency...

Lingua French-a

You've finally arrived, you precocious little polyglot from middle America, you.  Armed with a suitcase you've packed, unpacked and repacked for the last 6 months, a brand spanking new passport (because our neighbors don't care), a Eurail Pass,  the required English/Your Second Language Here dictionary and/or app; and sporting a t-shirt with a maple leaf that screams "I'M AN AMERICAN TRYING TO NOT LOOK LIKE ONE", you have landed somewhere overseas (probably in Europe) where the primary language is not shared by Shakespeare and the commercial flight industry, ready to show off your 1-12 or so years of classroom grammar and of course study of relevant literature, encompassing fond memories of "Sur le pont d'Avignon", "Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank?", "Cielito Lindo" or the "Gena Krokodil Song" (I think that about exhausts the foreign languages taught in American schools).