Darkoshi

PBS food show, "Somewhere South": https://www.pbs.org/video/dumpling-dilemma-wxy3aj/
Mostly not vegan food, but still interesting.

The above episode is about dumplings, but also talks about people from China who settled in Mississippi back in the 1940s. The one older lady's stately Southern accent is very much like how Qiao's older sisters speak. (It's unlike how most younger people speak.) I know very few people with an accent like that, so it surprises me in a nice way to see & hear someone with Chinese ancestry speaking that way too. The part in the video with her speaking starts at about 16:20.

The show also featured Kool-Aid Pickles.

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This YouTube channel has funny videos about the South:
It's a Southern Thing


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What N.Y.C. Sounds Like Every Night at 7

The house's side door has a motion-activated light fixture mounted by it. The lights always attracted moths and other flying insects. To prevent the bugs flying into the house, I always had to slip inside the door and shut it quickly, but sometimes moths still got in. Now I've replaced the two bulbs with LED bug light bulbs. It's amazing the difference that makes. Light! And yet absolutely no bugs flying around in the light! The light is yellow, but that's no problem. I should have done this years ago.

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Qiao bought a set of lithium battery-powered yard tools. At first the hedge trimmer looked scary to me, with all the sharp teeth. But it is easy to use. So easy that I have to remind myself to be careful with it. It's so much easier than using clippers to cut individual stalks, especially for the jessamine bushes on the fence.

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Cyber bank robberies... North Korea to blame?

North Korea Linked To $81 Million Bangladesh Bank Heist
Obama strikes back at North Korea

...or maybe not North Korea, exactly?
Vietnamese bank hit by cyber heist
North Korean Cyberhacking Redux: The Bank Heist Cases

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The unstoppable march of the upward inflection?
High rising terminal
(aka "upspeak")

A lady was talking on TV a while back, and I wasn't interested in whatever she was talking about, but was fascinated by her manner of speech. Her sentences kept ending on a rising note, as if she was asking a question even though she wasn't. It was much more pronounced than the audio samples on the first link above. When I recently came across that page, I realized that maybe it wasn't a peculiarity to her, but a common way of speaking, where ever she was from.

Then I realized the similarity of that to another manner of speaking which at first struck me as odd. Some people insert phrases like "you know what I mean", "you get me", "you know what I'm saying?", "you know?" in the middle of each sentence and/or after each sentence. They don't necessarily pitch it as a question, nor even slow down waiting for feedback - it just seems to be how they are used to speaking.

The rising pitch is similar, in that the speaker sounds like they are asking the listener if they understand or agree with what is being said, except without adding any extra words in.

Then again, maybe that is just my biased impression of it, and not what is actually intended by the speakers.

Vocal fry register : Speaking in the lowest register of your voice, where it makes a creaky grating sound. I do that sometimes, and didn't realize there was a term for it.

Apparently there's been a lot of criticism of how young women speak these days.

From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices?

From the audio samples given in that NPR broadcast and elsewhere, women using vocal fry in their speech sounds totally normal to me, and not bad. The upspeak can be a bit disconcerting to me, but not much so. That one lady I mentioned hearing speak on TV had a much more pronounced and unusual version of it, which is why it fascinated me so much. I wish I had written down who the speaker was.

Went grocery shopping yesterday. Red chard (so pretty - the combination of reddish purplish stalks and green leafy parts), later cooked for dinner. Big sweet ripe raspberries - they drew my eye as they were larger and darker-colored than the ones in the adjoining cartons. But they really were raspberries. Their taste reminds me of ones picked wild in Germany.

In Germany, vanilla ice cream with hot raspberries is a common dessert. The combination truly tastes wonderful.

Right before entering the 2nd store at 6pm, nearby church-bells started ringing, and I tarried outside a while to listen. Nice sounding bells; real bells. They reminded me of Germany too.

In the 3rd store, I overheard another customer asking an employee for help in finding an item, "Jum". She had a foreign accent, and I wondered what this "Jum" might be. Jumbo? Gumbo? Jambalaya? Even when she explained to the employee that it was something one eats at breakfast with bread and butter, both he and I were still puzzled. (Does one eat gumbo for breakfast?) When she mentioned marmelaide, it finally clicked for me. Jam! The poor employee still wasn't getting it, so I went over to help him out.

Later, it occurred to me that the woman's accent was very familiar to me. Sort of Indian; sort of German. I can hear someone's voice in my head speaking with the same accent, but can't remember who it belongs too. Maybe someone on TV or in a movie.