Once when I was attending a pair of friends' wedding in Michigan I was asked what part of England I was from. What was surprising about this was that I was asked by the English aunt of the bride. The bride, Christine, was English/Indian herself from Bangalore, India, so you might think that the excuse would be that the Aunt was biased about all accent because of her own--but no, this Aunt was 100% English who lives in London and nurses at a big metropolitan hospital.

I only had a couple of explanations for the aunt's misapprehension of my accent: 1) that Utah accents sound as if they come from somewhere in Great Britain; 2) I sound like a stuffed shirt; or 3) the aunt was hopped up on coke, or was one of those crazy English eccentrics that one hears so much about.

As to the first possibility, I don't think that the state that brought you "MOW'UNS" for mountains or even "CLIN'UN" for my name or "CARN" for "corn" sound particularly British. Now this may indeed be the root of the issue. I've always thought such accents sound, to be blunt, moronic. Now I don't wish to insult a whole group of folks with such a broad evaluation, but come on. If you've heard some Utahn's speak, you might wonder at their IQ level. This, of course, leads the issue 2 that I am indeed a stuffed shirt. Richelle, as you may recall, once compared me to Fraiser Crane. I'm not necessarily insulted by that, but I don't think I affect such a haughty accent as he does. As a matter of fact, I don't think I affect an accent at all. All of this, I think, stems from my voco-linguistic background (yes I am making that term up): my father was from Northern Utah from a very proper standard American accent background and my mother was from Southern Utah with its more broad accent. As a child I could hear the differences in their accent and I fairly certain I picked up on my dad's as the model rather than my mother's.

As for the third option of the English aunt--she did sniff a lot and wore the craziest clothes I've ever seen. She also insisted on calling me "Cliff" no matter how often I corrected her.

And now another in the series of Days of 47 movies. Enjoy.

Meh.

Proving that you can clean house and have fun at the same time, I've made the Days of 47 Samba in order to gear up to celebrate my Utah Pioneer heritage. Days of 47, for those of you not in the know, is the celebration of the entrance of the Salt Lake Valley of the Mormon Pioneers of 1847 on July 24. I usually celebrate it by drinking too much, but, thinking that there might be a better way, I decided to let Brigham Young and Orson Pratt celebrate in a little more dignified way: the samba. Hey they might not have gotten along while they were alive, but they can cut a mean rug now that they're dead. Orson's not as light on his feet as Brother Brigham, but I guess that's how it was in real life too.

The file, unfortunately, is in Windows Media and is 2.7 MB long. I really need to learn Flash.