The Tiger and the Girl

Albert Wolfe from Laowai Chinese left a comment on the post about the Mission: Impossible III poem, and linked to a short panphonic story he’d written called “The Tiger and the Girl.” It goes like this:

The Tiger and the Girl
by Albert Wolfe

There once was a tiger living in China. Each year he took a ship to an island. He loved visiting the sheep on the beach. One day, after he ate a little sheep, a girl saw him. She said, “What in the world are you doing?” He said, “Because all the sheep are white, they are like toothpaste to me. I usually eat just one sheep every day to keep my teeth clean.” At that time, he took a step and a beige thorn went into the flesh of his paw. He roared. The pain was like fire. The girl was so afraid that she could barely breathe. But she bravely said, “When I need help, I always ask my mother. Would you like my mother to help you? She’s not far away.” The tiger agreed and went with the girl to her hometown. The daughter found her mother, who was a doctor, prancing and singing near a big hedge. She asked her mother to help her new friend that very hour. The mother told the tiger to lie down and be quiet. She pulled the thorn out of his lowered paw. Her husband, who was a lawyer and basketball player, gave the tiger a toy wristwatch. The tiger said, “Thanks a million for everything you’ve done recently.” “It was our pleasure,” replied the couple. And the tiger and the girl went off to take a cab to the zoo.

I wondered if Wolfe had succeeded any better than I had at getting all the allophones of all the phonemes in there, especially since he was not constrained by length, rhyme, and meter. It looks like he came pretty darn close.

Speech Accent Archive Story on NPR

Hey, remember this panphonic paragraph that I mentioned back in May in this post?

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

They did a segment on NPR about it this morning. It’s about Steven Weinberger’s Speech Accent Archive project at George Mason University.

A Panphonic Poem for Mission: Impossible 3

This weekend, I want to see Mission: Impossible 3, in spite of Tom Cruise. Wait, no. Not in spite of Tom Cruise. That sounds like Mr. Cruise doesn’t want me to go see this movie, and I want to go and see it anyway, just so he’ll make a little bit more money. I’m not too enthusiastic about doing that for this increasingly creepy, couch-jumping, not-content-to-
keep-his-cult-religion-discreetly-to-himself-instead-of-infecting-young-
women-who-fantasized-about-marrying-him-when-they-were-little-
girls-with-it celebrity. What I should say is that I want to see the movie in spite of the fact that Tom Cruise is in it. (Interesting that this ambiguity only arises when the object of in spite of is animate: I lived there in spite of the polluted air isn’t ambiguous.)

Why, you may ask, do I want to see Mission: Impossible 3 in spite of the fact that Tom Cruise is in it? That goes back to the “other story” I mentioned at the end of my last post.
MILD SPOILER AHEAD

The Alias Phonology Essay Question

Now that Alias is winding down to its series finale, I’m remembering back to a time a few years ago, a time when Alias was still good, and my wife and I still watched it every week. When the series premiered, I wasn’t planning on watching it at all. I was in the middle of writing a dissertation, and I had even dropped my longstanding Sunday night date with The Simpsons, so I wasn’t about to start watching some new show, no matter how much the critics liked it. But that was before Glen told me that our friend Bob Orci was one of the writers.