Chinglish is one thing, but Americans travelling to the U.K., Australia, Ireland, or other English-speaking countries often find that they can’t make any sense of the local accents. Heck, sometimes just travelling around the U.S. you can’t understand what some people are saying.

This website at George Mason University has a collection of almost 300 audio samples of various regional accents of the English language from all over the world. When you hear someone from, say, Davenport, Iowa and compare it to someone from Cape Town, South Africa you can really tell the difference, but there are also distinct regional differences within England, Ireland, and Australia that Americans may not quite appreciate. In England, for example, the Birmingham accent (called “Brummie” by the English) is still regarded as the sign of a person who is not too bright. When we went to Montreal early this summer, I managed to insult a group of elderly tourists fron New Zealand for failing to distinguish their accent from an Australian accent, but the Australian accent differs from east to west and from north to south.

Well, I had fun listening to many of them and trying to see if I could mimic them. Then, when you get tired of the English variations, you can also check out the several dozen other languages they have catalogued from Afrikaans to Zulu.

The Russian website EnglishRussia.com always has fantastic photographs. Sometimes they’re intentionally funny (sometimes unintentionally funny, especially when the poster’s English isn’t so good), sometimes they are simply fascinating glimpses into the daily life of a country that most Westerners have absolutely zero exposure to. The other day this post had a whole series of photographs taken at the Moscow Zoo in the 1920s and 1930s.

I have it on good authority that the camel in this picture was later framed by the KGB as a counter-revolutionary and Stalin himself signed the orders to ship him to Siberia.

Yesterday, the Republican leaders in the House all came out from the vote on the bailout bill and tried to blame the defeat on Nancy Pelosi for making partisan remarks at the last minute. You have to give them credit for trying, but that was more transparent than Saran Wrap. Well, here’s her speech. There’s no doubt that it wasn’t the best time to stand up and point fingers, but it’s not like she was making anything up out of thin air (like the people who pulled the figure of $700 billion out of their asses). It made the Republicans look incredibly petty and whiny at the worst possible time, and Barney Frank got in one of the best comeback zingers of all time (you’ll have to listen to Cenk Uygur for about a minute into that clip, but he makes a decent point too). By this morning, though, even the Republicans were willing to go on TV and say that her speech had nothing to do with it.

But Jeebus H. Tittyfucking Christ On A Pogo Stick, the partisanship has to end. There’s no doubt that the bill they brought to the floor was bad — even Pelosi and Frank were willing to say it was a stinker, but as the leadership of the House they had to make the effort. Voting the bill down was without a doubt the best thing that could have happened, because it lays bare the lie that the proposals from Paulson and the administration are anything short of plundering the wealth of the citizens of this country. When the far-right and the far-left (such as we define “right and left” in our political spectrum) wrap around so far that they touch and agree on an issue, then you have truly failed at whatever you were trying to achieve.

What went mostly unnoticed while the House was fighting over all this is that the Federal Reserve did an end-run around them anyway and pumped $630 billiion into the banking system. How did they do that? They borrowed money from the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank. Well now that’s the thing to do when your entire banking system is failing due to unsustainable debt — borrow a little more money from someone else! So now all this cash goes into the system to ease the credit crunch, which is what we’ve been told for the last week was the whole point of the bailout in the first place. And guess what? The stock market is rebounding from yesterday’s big dump! (although the credit market remains locked up)

So the time is NOW to throw out the bill that Barney Frank had to bring to the floor yesterday. There is still a LOT of opposition to the idea of a bailout whatsoever, and with the Fed dumping all that cash to quiet things down, it only shows up the TARP as a ploy to let the banks off the hook and stick the public with the consequences. Below the fold, I give you the complete text of the New York Times Editorial Board’s remarks from this morning’s edition:

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Yeah, still not a political post, but I bet you can see where I’m going with today’s theme.

This post is actually a linkapalooza post of some assorted links, all of which revolve around the slimy things that ordinary people do…

We’ll start with one of the slimiest forms of humanity — the CEO. In this case, it’s the CEO of Washington Mutual, which went belly-up over the weekend. His name is Alan H. Fishman, and he became CEO and a member of WaMu’s Board of Directors on September 8 of this year. On September 25, a mere 17 days later, WaMu failed and was swallowed whole by JP Morgan Chase. Now, Mr. Fishman certainly can’t be pinned with any substantial blame for WaMu’s failure, having barely had time to find his was to the Executive Washroom yet, but he certainly didn’t suffer the loss too badly: for his 17 days on the job, Fishman collected a total of $19.1 MILLION between his severance package and his signing bonus. That’s 1.12 million dollars a day simply for being the guy who turned the lights out. If this man had a decent bone in his body, he would refuse the money or donate it to the bailout plan or something, but do not hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

The Consumerist spends a lot of time documenting the slimy practice of what they call “the grocery shrink ray” — that clever marketing technique that puts LESS product in the same old package and charges you the same old price. So, maybe the friendly local folks who run Gorton’s, which is still based in Gloucester, MA, thought they were being good guys when they opted NOT to put fewer fish sticks in each bag, but yesterday the Consumerist had an e-mail from someone who was asked to participate in a marketing study which offered these two different packages for fish sticks. As you can see, thanks to the helpful red arrow, the new packaging informs us that their fish sticks only contain 40% actual fish! Which, needless to say, should cause everyone to wonder what the hell the other 60% is made of. Now, obviously the bread-like coating makes up a significant portion of the rest, but is it really 60%? And if it is, shouldn’t the label call them “frozen bread sticks with fish” or some other more appropriate name? I guess I’m glad that the Gorton’s people are willing to be honest, but now maybe it’s time for them to go back and revisit their approach to food labelling in general.

Okay, no snarking for a moment. Via Daily Kos comes a disturbing story from Dayton, OH: someone sprayed some sort of gas or chemical into the day care area of the local mosque (pictured above). They sprayed it directly into the face of the young girl who was babysitting children while their parents attended Ramandan services. The girl told police it made her face feel like it was burning, and apparently some of the small children and an adult who was present also complained of symptoms. The Daily Kos poster and members of the Dayton mosque have speculated that the incident is related to a DVD that was distributed with the local Sunday newspaper this past weekend. The DVD was entitled “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”.

The police say they don’t think it’s a “hate crime”, but how else do you explain this? “Haw, haw, just some kids getting out their jollies” does not cut it when something like this happens. For my money, this is nothing less than terrorism. It may not be blowing up a bus or flying a plane into a skyscraper, but it was done with the intent to frighten and discourage a specific group of people for no other reason than a political or racist agenda, and it has succeeded in chasing away innocent people from their community center by physical intimidation. A couple of years ago there was a big brouhaha in my hometown because somebody thought it would be a good idea to throw a pig head into the local mosque there — that’s a hate crime, and there have been a number of other incidents there, both serious and minor. many of which might be said to skirt the same threshold. Spreading the actual terror of the threat of being gassed, however, steps things up to a whole new level, and if the persons responsible are found, it wouls be a travesty of justice if they were not tried as terrorists.