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In article ,
Bruce in Bangkok wrote:

Just talk ENGLISH, or maybe Australian (everyone in the States has
seen at least one of the Crocodile Dundee movies) and you'll get along
all right. If you can talk like Banjo Paterson wrote they won't be
able to make out what you're saying :-)

I'm English from London. With a London accent.

Everyone, and I mean everyone in the USA thinks I'm Australian!

I've given up explaining that the accent Aussies have is a direct
descendent of London criminals!

LOL

--
Molesworth

On Mon, 12 May 2008 13:42:09 -0500, Molesworth
wrote:

In article ,
Bruce in Bangkok wrote:

Just talk ENGLISH, or maybe Australian (everyone in the States has
seen at least one of the Crocodile Dundee movies) and you'll get along
all right. If you can talk like Banjo Paterson wrote they won't be
able to make out what you're saying :-)

I'm English from London. With a London accent.

Everyone, and I mean everyone in the USA thinks I'm Australian!

I've given up explaining that the accent Aussies have is a direct
descendent of London criminals!

LOL

I was born in New Zealand but couldn't speak English until I first
attended school as age 5. For some reason as I got older a lot of New
Zealanders thought that I was either English, South African or as one
put it "born with a silver spoon in my mouth". I think the reason was
a combination of having learned to speak English not from my Mother's
knee and having lived as a child with a host of different families. In
Australia many can detect the New Zealand accent but others still hear
either a South African 'clip' or an English accent.

Can't bloody win. I can do a good impression of a North Indian English
accent though, enough to fool a native India at times and a Southern
drawl. I think I need professional help.

Bruce in Bangkok wrote in
:

If you do run into Larry make sure he feeds you some ethnic food like
"field peas", "collard greens", "red-eye gravy and biscuits", and
"chitlins" and "black eyed peas". That "good old boy" diet is like
eating some of the great Chinese dishes like fish head curry and
swim-bladder soup..... WHO ATE THE GOOD PARTS???????

Oh, no. We take all "furiners" up in the country to eat SC open-pit
barbecue (except Jews, of course). Some people I met on this newsgroup
left their boat here and went home to Quebec for Chrismas with family.
When they came back, they met some French people who had come across the
Atlantic on their sailboat. They all wanted me to take them out for open
pit BBQ, one of our specialties.

so, I loaded them all into my '73 Mercedes 220D sedan and drove them up
in the country about 35 miles to Ridgeville, SC, a tiny hamlet beside the
original railroad track up from Charleston, to a family owned BBQ
restaurant owned by the pig farmers of the Dukes family (no relation to
TV shows from Hazard). This family owns BBQ restaurants across Eastern
SC, uncles, sons, brothers, etc.

I'm not sure whether they liked it or not, but some at 4 plateloads!...
(c; The fun part was I don't think any of the people in Ridgeville ever
met someone from France, or even Quebec, and certainly never heard anyone
speaking French at all except on TV. Sitting at the fancy, unfinished
picnic tables inside the dining room with the farmers, factory workers,
townspeople all dressed up in their Bubba clothes in from the parking lot
full of pickup trucks and Big rigs, we caused quite a stir. The family
behind the counter were totally enthralled with the new international
customers!

I'd love to get some people from Oz or NZ up there with the proper brogue
from down under. I don't think those red necks still think you can be
from that FAR away....certainly not in a boat!...(c;

Damn, it's almost 2AM! I'd better get in the berth!....

ping Larry - AIS unit

Herodotus wrote in
:

BTW, do they speak standard English in Charleston or do I have to
learn beforehand how to listen slowly when I visit your fair city and
the Folbot factory? I seem to be able to read your words at the same
speed as Bruce's and Roger's. Is it just the spoken word that slows to
a crawl in the South? I was in a shop at the airport in Dall Fort
worth and actaully heard a man who was leaving saying "Buy yawl" when
there was only the shop assistant there. By his reference to "y'all or
"yawl" or "you all" I presumed he was addressing more than on person
which he clearly wasn't. He may of course be giving advice to the girl
to purchase a sailing boat with the mizzen mast aft of the rudder post
as that was what it sounded like.I hope I don't get arrested as either
an illegal or a foreigner because I don't speak the lingo and slowly
enough.

The important two words are "slowly enough". Yankees that come through
here are in WAY too much of a hurry for their own good. It's no wonder
they have awful heart attacks, strokes and die young from chasin' around
so hard after that dollar. Noone in the "Low Country", an area of
intense swamps, old rice paddies now flooded over, unnamed islands full
of crabs, sea grasses and sand dollars separated by 3500 miles of
navigable waterways within 50 miles of this keyboard....is in much of a
"hurry" to do anything....except eat, of course. We eat professionally,
as you'll notice by the number of restaurants between any two parking
meters.

The Navy Wives Club rented a billboard that said it all back in the
1960's, early 1970's....."WELCOME TO CHARLESTON! Don't forget to set
your watch back 200 years." That pretty much sums it up. If someone
invites you to "come sit a spell", don't plan on getting anything done
for the next 6 to 8 hours. Oh, you won't be bored or go hungry. Hell,
in 8 hours we've already had two full meals in Charleston....maybe a
couple of snacks, too...with gallons of supersweet iced tea that will
make any British subject just want to PUKE!! Cola drinks only have 1/4th
the sugar of the same quantity of Southern Ice Tea. If the temperature
drops much, you can see sugar precipitating out of the saturated
solution...(c;

Speaking of TEA, you might like to know tea isn't all bad, here. Out
there on Wadmalaw Island, is the ONLY tea plantation in America! It's
called American Classic Tea and those tea plants are as old as the
country, having been brought here by the British! They went bankrupt a
few years ago and the plantation just closed, but it has re-opened by
Bigelow Tea. They have several products.
http://www.bigelowtea.com/act/
The Tea Festival starts in 3 days. It's THIS weekend!

The old Southern languages, Geechee in the whites and Gullah in the
blacks, has pretty much been homogenized by mobile America in the cities,
including this one. I can take you to some places where you can get to
hear these original languages, especially Gullah, which is still spoken
away from the city center, especially on the barrier islands. I could,
for instance, drop you off in Rockville on Wadmalaw Island, where the
Americans stood in the church tower that's still there, today, and
carefully peered into their telescopes watching for the Red Coats'
sailing ships in the War of Independence in the 1700's. The older people
in Rockville speak both languages, depending on who they want to
communicate with. The elderly white lady, brought up on Wadmalaw Islands
plantations, speaks Gullah to her maid, still, and I cannot tell you what
was said between them. They've been together all their lives, long after
the end of slavery. Neither would have it any other way. The trick is
to find your way back into Charleston from there, not speaking the
language. You might as well be in Afghanistan's rural backwaters....(c;

Yawl is a boat. Y'all has many meanings as do many other "expressions"
in the South. Even if you don't stop, monitor Channel 10 on your VHF so
you can hear Geechee spoken by our colorful shrimp boat captains,
especially if someone screws up and makes him angry. Shrimp boat
captains, here, have curse words never before heard outside the coastal
plain. Many rich Yankee boat owners have heard them, some close up!
Shrimp boat captains don't have gelcoat that needs "scratch avoidance".

ping Larry - AIS unit

"Hoges in WA" wrote in
:

BTW - can you please repost that story about the fake radar you aimed
at the Russian fleet? I can't google it up and I've told a Pommy mate
of mine (ex-submarine-carried Russian linguist) a bit about it but I
don't know enough electronic stuff to tell him properly
thanks

Sure. It was great fun playing with RF.

The forward radar mount on our ship had an air search radar on it,
AN/SPS-6 from Korean War era. We really didn't have a use for it as we
had no way of defending ourselves being a floating shipyard, a service
ship, so it was decommissioned but I got them to leave the mount and its
electronics working because I wanted to use it for a big TV antenna for
the Crew's TV antenna system I was installing.

We put two big long Winegard VHF-UHF broadband log periodic TV antennas
up there that were anodized blue. They each had two VHF log periodic
sections that pointed inward to a long UHF log periodic that stuck out
the front towards the station. We stacked two of them on top of the
radar mount about 80' off the water on top of the forward king post. To
keep the cable from winding up around them as the ship turned and the
gyro input kept our antennas pointed to the same compass point, the
reason I wanted to keep the original radar mount active, we built some
slip rings to run the RF through into the base of it. You could leave
them rotating like a real radar, which is what we did for this story.

We weren't any kind of high tech ship, being a destroyer tender. Hell,
our HF transmitters were from WW2! But, for some reason, on the Med
Cruise (my first), this Russian ship kept shadowing us for the longest
time and they were taking pictures of our old 1952 ship! It caused quite
a stir during the Cold War as it was right after the Israelis tried to
sink the USS Liberty (www.ussliberty.org). We traveled alone, too!

I finally noticed, one day, the Russians were intensely interested in our
new "secret weapon" antenna located on the forward king post! THEY WERE
TAKING PICTURES OF MY TV ANTENNA STACK! I pointed this out to my Comm
officer and Captain showing them the long lenses pointed towards the TV
antenna, and asked my captain if I could play some games with them using
the antenna. He loved this idea.

I worked in the Metrology Lab, the electronic calibration lab, on the
main deck, aft. One of the things we did was calibrate peak responding
RF power meters used to measure radar peak power output (after it was
attenuated by a calibrated coupler, not in megawatts). To cal these
meters I had a "power pulser" that had wide bandwidth from 1GHZ to 12 or
14 GHZ in several bands. It's output was about 1KW PEAK power with
variable pulse width, repetition rate, etc. you could vary all over the
place to test the meter's response you were calibrating.

So, I took the power pulser and a section of large coax with several
different frequency bands of waveguide adapters and feed horns (feed
horns couple the RF out of waveguide into the open air, in both
directions, to match the impedance of the air to the impedance of the
waveguide. They will radiate at CONSIDERABLY higher effective radiated
power than their input because they are very directional.

I borrowed a box of powered carbon from the electricians that would
absorb the RF energy when I pointed the feed horn into the carbon,
turning RF into heat. I took all this to a light lock deck hatch we used
to keep from radiating light at sea from the lights inside the ship.
This little compartment was flat black with a plastic black curtain
hanging over the opening so they couldn't see me and my contraptions.

We set the "secret weapon" antenna to slow rotation. I could see where
it was pointing with a mirror attached to the handrail near my hatch.

Every time the antenna pointed towards the Russians, I took the feedhorn
out of the carbon box and pointed it at them on "some frequency, rep
rate, pulse width, etc.", then put it back in the box. While it was in
the box, I changed frequencies, rep rates, pulse widths, everything, even
feedhorns as I had about 10 seconds between "sweeps". Some sweeps I just
cut it off to "listen mode".

God, every ECM antenna that rotated spun around and pointed at us on that
ship! I kept this up for hours, on and off. Whenever we'd start it
rotating, I'd start radiating towards their ship, from either side of
ours. They'd get closer to receive every pulse.

Then, we simply hand slewed the antenna forward and stopped......our
mission complete.

The Russians stayed about 8 more hours and went away to "analyze" their
findings. I never heard anything about it beyond that point. It was
great fun for a bored crew to play with. I wonder how many satellite
photos of USS Everglades (AD-24) were taken with closeups of our TV
antenna carefully poured over in KGB or military intellegence HQ?...(c;

BTW, the antenna could pick up Charleston's VHF TV stations over 130
miles at sea, distributed to every shop throughout the ship. As "Cable
Operator", I had quite a lot of political power and could get most
anything I wanted from anyone aboard. My captain, especially, couldn't
believe how great his TV looked from 100 miles offshore all up and down
the coast. I'd go up about once a day and "correct" the small angle
change our breakneck 17 knots cruising speed caused if we were heading up
the coast at the hand controls of the radar mount in CIC. But, with gyro
azimuth correction, if the ship took a turn for some reason, the antennas
stayed pointed at the TV stations very nicely.....

The Russians loved it.....(c;

ping Larry - AIS unit

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Hoges in WA" wrote in
:

BTW - can you please repost that story about the fake radar you aimed
at the Russian fleet? I can't google it up and I've told a Pommy mate
of mine (ex-submarine-carried Russian linguist) a bit about it but I
don't know enough electronic stuff to tell him properly
thanks

Sure. It was great fun playing with RF.

snipped

Thanks Larry
He'll love it. I couldn't do it justice.

BTW, he tells me the story of an audio tape review they did from a transit
in an Upholder. Boring boring boring, listening listening listening to old
tapes from three weeks before. Until, quite distinctly and verified by
everyone who listened to it, they got a Typhoon passing a couple of hundred
yards behind them. Neither the Russians nor them had any idea they were
that close to each other. They were kicking themselves because they should
have picked up a Typhoon that close.

Hoges in WA

"Larry" wrote in message
...
Bruce in Bangkok wrote in
:

snipped

I'd love to get some people from Oz or NZ up there with the proper brogue
from down under. I don't think those red necks still think you can be
from that FAR away....certainly not in a boat!...(c;

Couple a years Laz, and I'll be campin on your doorstep. You want me to
talk funny? No wuckas.

Hoges in WA
(As in Western Australia)

"Hoges in WA" wrote in news:qZaWj.655$IK1.461
@news-server.bigpond.net.au:

Couple a years Laz, and I'll be campin on your doorstep. You want me to
talk funny? No wuckas.

Yes! I want to set you up talking to some real SC Redneck bubbas...(c;

They all think Crockadile Dundee is the PM of OZ....(c;

ping Larry - AIS unit

"Hoges in WA" wrote in
:

BTW, he tells me the story of an audio tape review they did from a
transit in an Upholder. Boring boring boring, listening listening
listening to old tapes from three weeks before. Until, quite
distinctly and verified by everyone who listened to it, they got a
Typhoon passing a couple of hundred yards behind them. Neither the
Russians nor them had any idea they were that close to each other.
They were kicking themselves because they should have picked up a
Typhoon that close.

Navy used to have a real monster of an air search radar. I think it was
designated AN/SPS-30, a height finder that had this huge round antenna
with a feed horn arm protruding way out one side. The antenna could be
pointed about anywhere with megawatts of real power.

In the Med, the guys on a cruiser had a Russian playing dangerous games
cutting across their course and getting closer and closer, why I'm not
sure. Anyways, the cure seemed to be to point this monster "Death Ray"
at the bridge of it, causing flourescent tubes to explode and things to
arc around port holes.

I didn't see this, but heard it from a first-hand observer. Of course,
with many incidents, it "never happened".....(c;

There was one on top of ET School in Great Lakes and they could point it
at the "strip" of whorehouses and bars outside the gate, lighting up the
whole place's flourescent and neon signs! That "didn't happen",
either....(c;