Suhdookoh

I don't know what it is about strange words with more than two syllables. Americans can't pronounce them. Heck, if Americans weren't so used to pronouncing American, they'd mess that up too. Really.
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There's this new craze of a game called Sudoku. The game's simple enough to explain. You have a 9 by 9 board (that's 81 squares for the mathematically challenged). You can think of this as a 9 tic-tac-toes in a 3 by 3 grid.

Let's try this experiment to visualize that. Draw a box. Draw two horizontal lines (left-right) about a third down, and then two-thirds down. It looks like three stripes.

Now draw two vertical lines. A third and a third. It looks like a tic-tac-toe board with a box on the outside. Now copy this 9 times.
Arrange 3 tic-tac-toe on the first board, 3 on the second, and 3 on the third.

Now, why tell you this convoluted picture? I suppose I should have just found some image of a sudoku board, and have you look it up.

But I didn't. Anyway, here are the rules. Some of these squares have numbers. The numbers are between 1 and 9. Pick a column. That column must have the number 1 through 9 somewhere in that column. Since there are 9 squares, each number can only appear once.

Now, this is true of all the columns. You must place them in such a way that all columns have the values 1 through 9. Same thing with every row. Same thing with every 3-by-3 tic-tac-toe board.

It's one big constraint game. Some numbers are filled out, and you must use those.

Sudoku is relatively young, maybe a year and a half before it became all the rage in England, then hopped the Atlantic and became all the rage in the US. It's supposed to be Japanese.

There's a related game called Kakuro. I forget the exact rules. I think you need to find some set of values that sum up to a number. It looks a little like crosswords. You'll have, say, the number 11. There will be 4 squares across. You need four numbers that add to 11, but do not repeat. Thus, 1, 4, 5, 2, could be those numbers.

Like crosswords, you have these values across and down. Unlike crosswords, you need not know anything about a culture to figure out the clues. You just need numbers.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

Read the following word: Sudoku.

Now, break it apart. Su. Do. Ku.

Let's try to pronounce it. There's "su". That's like "Sue". Most people don't mess this part up.

Then, there's "do". I see. People do mess this up. They think it's "Love me do" or "Do..or do not...there is no try". They don't think it's like "d'oh" or "dodo" or "do-re-mi". Once they want to pronounce it like dew, they're in trouble.

Because now you get to the last syllable. It's "ku", pronounced like "koo" or "coup". It's almost "kool", but not quite there.

So, if they put all that together, it sounds like: sue, dew, koo. And that grates on my ears, though I can sorta see where it comes from now. But wouldn't they have spelled it "Suduku"? And then, I suppose some people think "sue, dew, koo" doesn't sound Japanese enough, so they make it "sue, dew, koh" (as in almost Coca, but no "ca").

It's sue, d'oh, koo!

Read it slowly, syllable, by syllable.

And that's not what I really wanted to talk about either.

I want to talk about Mike Birbiglia.

Pronounce his last name.

Go on.

Birbiglia.

Let's try breaking this into syllables. You know. How they taught you to read when you were a wee tor.

Bir. (That's like "brr", it's cold). Big. You can probably handle that. And "lia" (as in "lee-uh). Bir. Big. Lee. Uh. Bir-big-lee-uh.

Well, Mike knows people can't pronounce his name, because many people syntax parser breaks down after four letters of unknown origin.

Now, this is the Internet for you. I was going to read one of my favorite movie critics online, a guy named Scott Renshaw, who's been writing in Salt Lake for a while. Normally, he does movie reviews, but he occasionally does other reviews. This time, he wrote about Mike Birbiglia.

I do the sensible thing. I google him. Yes, you know a company is successful when people use it as a verb. Google's been the best verb since. Well. Xerox. Or Kleenex. Or Band-Aid.

This leads me to his, surprise, myspace page. Here it is: Mike's Myspace page. Of course, he also has a page for himself: Mike's page. And while he's at it, why not have one for t-shirts?

He does two routines that are pretty funny, if only because they have more context for me than most people. Both can be found on his myspace page.

The first is "Cracka Please". Apparently, African Americans like to call white people "crackers". Birbiglia wanted to do a routine about this because he noticed how he could use it as a riff on the word "nigger".

That word has become so offensive, that people won't even pronounce it. But, much like the gay community embraced the pink triangle, a symbol the Nazis used to refer to identify gays, some folks in the African American community, particularly rappers, use it internally. Thus was born the phrase "Nigger, please!", which then somehow evolved to "Nigga, please!". "Nigga" was seen as more hip, and not nearly as offensive.

Thus, there's "cracker" and "cracka". In the end, they're words, but people have elevated how bad it is by now referring to it politely as the "N" word. Comedians are, if not anything, observers of human behavior. The refusal to use the word "nigger", the hipness of "nigga", the use of "nigger" within a cultural group. That really makes little sense, and yet, it represents the culture as we stand. Even Birbiglia has to be careful talking about it.

The other routine is far funnier if you know someone like it. This is about the "guitar-playing guy" who comes to parties to play his guitar, with the hopes of stealing someone's girlfriend. It's funny on a variety of different levels. First, that Mike's even been able to observe this often enough to make a joke of it. Second, the kind of music such a person would play. Third, the reason he's playing guitar to begin with.

I had to play this for one of my housemates, and it was just too funny. Once I play it for the other one, he'll just die. It's scary real.

There's one other thing that's particularly indiciative of the evolution of music tastes, and I wonder if this is a trend that's generally held true.

In the US, who are the main listeners of jazz? Probably white folks, right? (Crackas!). Who plays jazz? African Americans, for the most part (there are folks like Benny Goodman and perhaps contemporaries that aren't Kenny G). R&B still appeals to enough of a mixed audience. Rap is also crossing over in the last ten years. I know quite a few, non African-Americans, who listen to rap as part of their regular music listening. (To that end, I have more of a "white" listening habit, as I don't think Asians have managed to carve a niche in their own music scene). Is rap going to go the way of jazz? Soon, a new form of music that comes from African Americans will rise and replace rap, much like rap replaced rhythm and blues and disco.

But this is my shout-out to Mike B. Give him a listen.