Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Talk with Iran? Yeah, talk with Iran. We talked with the Soviet Union. We had a phone next to each other for 40 years. Anybody forgotten that? We didn't blow each other up. That's what you do with Iran. It's what you do with Syria. It's what you do with North Korea. You start talking. It's a sick idea, I know, but..." -- Iraq Study Group member and former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition, December 7, 2006 [Thanks to syntonic_comma, who posted this quote 2006-12-08 (this entry is a cut-and-paste from his, with only the most trivial of edits)]

<large diesel motor sound> [cra-splash-jangle-ash] *jingletinklecrash* <idling large diesel motor sound>

Huh-wha? That's a very different noise than I'm used to hearing. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[run to window] Ah. An 18-wheeler wedged in the intersection, mostly on the wrong side of Lombard but angled back into Fulton ... and the lamppost on the corner lying all smashified along the sidewalk. (The semi was trying to turn right from Fulton onto Lombard, a turn that would have been illegal a couple of years ago before they made my section of Lombard two-way, and which I can testify is a damned tricky turn to make in a helluva lot smaller truck than that!) Fortunately the lamppost comes before the fireplug, and fortunately my car is still farther along than that.

Okay, now I know what that sounds like. It sounds a lot more like a dump truck full of nickle-plated steel chains dumping its load on the street^[**] than like other accident sounds I know.^[***]

[*] But so important to try, n'est-ce pas?

[**] (Or at least what I imagine that would sound like -- or maybe the chains, with link sizes ranging from 2cm to 6.5cm, y'know, still in the lots-of-high-frequency-tinkle range with a little bit of clank and a fair amount of clatter, would have to be dropped from something holding them a little apart from each other instead of just sliding out of a dump truck in one mass, but you get the idea, right? Anyhow, a shitload of nickle-plated or chromed chain hitting the pavement was the very strong filled-in-by-my-brain visual that accompanied the sound when I heard it, and sufficiently unlikely-seeming that I just had to go look and see what had really produced the noise.)

[***] I guess I'm sort of collecting sounds -- or knowledge of sounds -- as a hobby. Those scenes in police procedural shows on the telly where an audio expert boosts the background of a recording and says, "That sounds like a Jaguar with a V12 engine at 15,000 RPM, with a bad clutch, going past an open window that has to be about five meters from the street, on an overcast day; I think the car is green," seem less and less unlikely all the time. But some sounds really are pretty distinctive -- consider that Volkswagon put a bunch of effort into trying to make the new Beetle sound as much like the old air-cooled Beetle as they could (or so I'm told), and that I've never heard another airship (or another motor at all, for that matter) that sounds anything like the Goodyear blimps. Anyhow, this kind of feels like, "Oh, I just added another sound to the collection in my brain."