MASH on the great ocean road

Here in Melbourne at Richard and Aimee's for only a few more hours. I will blog more about C and me getting our heads 3D x-rayed by Dr. Richard on the first day and discovering that my sinuses occupy roughly one third of the volume of my head, repeating the phrase "If I could, I would take this fucking tennis ball and shove it down your fucking throat and kill you" about a thousand times, taking photos pretending to eat Richard and Aimee's amazing collection of oversized plus food simulacra, and other Aussie adventures, tomorrow from Tullamarine Airport. Until then, let me leave you with the insights I have gained on the Australian accent:

- Short "e" and "i" sounds are pronounced like the long "e" sound

- "O" is a dipthong pronounced "oir"

- "Er" is non-rhotic ("uh")

- The long "i" sound is not exactly "eye" like the American "I," but more like "oy"

The best way to practice the accent is to repeat the phrase "Like a bridge over troubled water." Say it: "Loike I breedge oiva trebled wadda." Try it! Also, the phrases "We are going to recycle some bottles in Cairns" and "We are going to recycle some bottles and cans" have exactly the same pronounciation. Furthermore, today C and I did each other's MASHs on our twelve hour bus tour of rocks along the Victoria coast. In the future, C will be living in a shack in the Great Barrier Reef with Edward Cullen, enjoying her second career as a fishmonger. She will have an internet affair with Takeshi Kaneshiro eight times a week. An interest she will unexpectedly develop in her 40s will be making wire bicycles. She will hike the Appalachian Trail. I will be living in a house in Brooklyn with Olympia and working as an untenured professor of English at a community college. I will have a constant, one-sided love affair with OZ. I will take up antiquing and will raise well-behaved, conscientious children. Now we are doing Aimee's MASH. Will update on the results soon.