Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough –
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Does anybody know the source of this piece? Maybe it’s not even Palestrina, although I’m pretty sure of it. If you have a clue, please let me know! I’m always looking for music for the 2 SATB groups in which I sing, so other suggestions are appreciated.

There’s my working set. There are other modules I use occasionally, so I’ll get to those in a subsequent post.

Here’s my first installment in my Working Set series: my standard set of WordPress plugins. Future articles will cover special-purpose WP plugins; standard jQuery plugins; special-purpose jQuery; jQuery hacks I use; Firefox plugins for Web development. I make no claims about these being the best or anything like that, but this is a really useful, robust set of plugins that will be useful in any WordPress installation.

So there’s my Working Set of WordPress Plugins. I have some others I use occasionally, but this is the set that I grab pretty much every time I create a new WordPress site.

Here’s where you come in. SETI uses the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure to process data using volunteer computers. All you have to do is install the BOINC screensaver, and tell it which project you want to join. There are many teams around the world—your team gets part of the credit for discovery if your computers discover the first verifiable signal from an alien intelligence.

Join my team! We are called AstroScum, Team 747680. Even though we are only 3 strong now, our combined scores for data processing are better than 76% of the teams out there. But I suspect that there are some guys out there with access to server farms that are running the screensaver. The links to locate and sign up are in the right sidebar—please join!

This is the article today about the new project to scan planets.

The answer is simple — use the nifty hoverIntent plugin to manage the dropdown events. If you’re not aware of it, hoverIntent delays the invocation of the mousedown event until a settable threshold is reached. This allows you to slide the mouse quickly across a bunch of menu items without triggering a dropdown event on each one. Much less confusing!

To use hoverIntent with SimpleDrop, first load the hoverIntent.js code. Next, change the invocation of simpledrop to use hoverIntent.

OLD VERSION:

$(document).ready(function() {
$('#jsddm > li').bind('mouseover', jsddm_open)
$('#jsddm > li').bind('mouseout', jsddm_timer)
});
document.onclick = jsddm_close;


NEW VERSION:

$(function() {
$('#jsddm > li').hoverIntent(jsddm_open, jsddm_timer);
document.onclick = jsddm_close;
});


That’s really all it takes, and it definitely adds a lot to the package. I did try suggesting that Javascript Array add this bit to their page, but I got no response. They disallow comments on their site, however, and I guess my email went into the bottomless bit bucket.

The Harmony Festival Web site shows all of the contestants, and links to all their Web sites. The contest is this Saturday evening, March 13, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

If you find yourself there, please cheer for us! We’re bringing a contingent of fans, of course, but keep it in perspective: there will probably be more people in attendance Saturday night than live in Mendocino. That’s actually a good thing, except that the pool of potential fans is just a puddle in the hinterlands….