Being a folksy type, I am partial to American Beauty. Gorgeous collection of folk-rock songs.

'Bout the same time Beauty came out, this group had a few good hippie tunes.

You may recognize the impossibly young Steve Windwood.

He's like a teenager here.

You know many of the ancient TV shows are all posted on youtube now.

Also, in case you wanted to know, there is no hard "k" sound OR hard "g" sound in Korean phonetics.

Instead, there are TWO different Korean consonants that are "in between" the hard K and the hard G sound.

In Romanized transliterations, these are printed as "k" and "kk".

Examples- "kim-bob" (tasty rice wrapped in seaweed)

"dukk-bokki" (tasty, and not made out of ducks, oddly enough).

I can now pronounce both of these consonants well enough to be understood here, but it took me two years of practice.

You understand that if you say "kim" with a hard K, like we do in English, a Korean will literally "not hear" you.

He/she will not understand what you said.

Yes, this is how pronunciation works in all languages.

Also, there is no hard B or hard P in Korean.

Again, they have TWO consonants that are "in between" these sounds.

Also, they have THREE "s" sounds-

"s" followed by an "a'" is the same as we pronounce it-

"san"

"s" followed by an "i" is pronounced "sh"

Jin-Shil

And they also have a sound in between a "s" and a "z".

"Bizsil- san"

In short, Romanized versions of Korean are close to useless as a guide to pronunciation.

Many thanks for your learned treatise on the "guhs" and "kuhs" of Korean.

Learning to pronounce a language via "tapes" is futile if you're past a certain age- or maybe altogether.

You need a live audience.

For example, if I try one of the trickier ones- seems simple but it isn't-

"(p/b) a (d/dd) a" (ocean)

If I don't say it EXACTLY RIGHT the kids go "que? que?"

And when I hit it right they go "Ah so!"

There's no "near misses" allowed in the pronunciation of languages.

On the other hand, I speak to them frequently in atrocious "German" and "French", and I tell them I am fluent.

heh

You might be pleased to know that a "part time job" is called <ar-bite> in Korea-

They got that in the 1980s from the German word for work-- <arbeit>.

Do you know that not one single Korean person has ever seen the tv show <MASH>?

Not that they're missing anything.

Alan Alda as Hawkeye: "If only someone would come up with a cure for the common war"

It was a pastiche of Ronald McDonald in front of Auschwitz with that exact slogan.

The same slogan was on the gate at Treblinka as well as Auschwitz.

If you watch <Shoah> you can see the interview with a retired SS Officer who sings the Treblinka camp song- with genuine nostalgia in his voice.

the interviewer filmed him with a camera he had concealed in a briefcase.

My little hippie cartel took special glee in exposing morons like the the Dianetics automatons and right wing fanatics.

One evening we went to the Schnitzelbank restaurant. They have serviceable kielbasa and kraut and live polka music.

My fiend Saul found out that the band took requests. He asked for Die Wacht am Rhein. The band dutifully began to play and around this enormous room, old men stood at attention.

After all, Wacht am Rhein was popular before the invasion of France and came to represent that period. This was known by the German soldiers as "The Good Times".

I'm writing a book on the ditzy language of poker.

But I can't decide on the title.

"That's What She Said"

"Rent a Room and Get It Over With"

"Big Enough, She Cried"

Any suggestions?

On a side-note, when I still played poker (long, long time ago ;) I called it (AJ) with a friend the doomed hand since we seemed to only lose with it.

"Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda"