Some of you must be familiar, at least vaguely, with phonetic alphabets. The various worlds militaries have developed different variations for disambiguating radio conversations, where each word’s pronounciation is very distinct from the others in the list. NATO’s standard is probably the most widely used and is well known via the media: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, etc. We civilians often require a similar system (completely unstandardized and up to the individual, unfortunately) for spelling words over the phone, i.e. “G as in girl, R as in run, A as in apple, H as in hockey, …” So {Kimsal} at work had a funny idea: make the most confusing phonetic alphabet possible. His classic examples were K as in knife and P as in pneumatic.

So he and I went about filling out his list. There are some really great ones and some fairly weak ones. The best ones send you in the completely wrong direction. Imagine hearing someone say, “That’s A as in i, E as in ate, G as in naw, S as in c, T as in dow, W as in y, Q as in k, Y as in u”. How confused would you be? I love it! My apologies in advance to any call center workers or other customer service reps. Find my version of the complete list below…

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What have I been up to, you ask? Well, working mostly of course, thanks for inquiring. But here and there, in betwixt, I’ve done a few interesting things. {Andrew} and I went to a decent concert at the Cat’s Cradle a few Mondays ago. The headliners were the Electric Six who are probably most famous for the very humorous “I wanna take you to a gay bar” (this is an even funnier third-party video using their song, circa 2003). They were pretty good, but honestly better were their opening acts. The Blue Van is a really good Danish modern-day classic rock band, akin to Led Zeppelin or The Doors. It’s not normally something I spend much time listening to but I could definitely appreciate their talent.

Aberdeen City were the true standouts for me though. It’s somewhat hard to categorize them: a bit Interpol-ish but more like early Radiohead. I picked up their CD and it is pretty damn good, especially for just $10. I did make one fairly large blunder though; I forgot my earplugs. We were standing fairly close to the stage and were too close to the left speaker and I had ringing for days. This was worse and longer than my previous run in and it scared the crap outta me. Seriously, I had resigned myself to a life of slightly impaired hearing and it was a sad few days there. Fortunately it did fade away but I have to be way more careful — there’s a set of earplugs in my car now, just in case.

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