Girassol

The Great Iceblocking Mystery of 2005

My New Year's Resolution this year is to do something I've never done before during every month of this year.  So last night I met my goal for May by going iceblocking.  Basically you slide down a hill on a 10-lb. block of ice, eventually get too scared to keep sliding, and roll head over heels until you crash into something and then lug the ice back up the hill and do it again and again.  This way you can still go sledding when there is no snow, and it really was great fun! 

I personally had never heard of iceblocking in my life before moving to Utah, and a couple of friends from the East Coast said they hadn't either.  I have my suspicions that it's a Utah invention.  Or possibly a Utah Mormon "creative dating" invention, much like eating a picnic on a highway median strip or asking someone to a dance via a personalized scavenger hunt.  Everyone I grew up with in Pennsylvania was too busy stealing lawn ornaments and getting high in the woods to think up stuff as wholesome and inoffensive as iceblocking.

Call it an informal, unscientific study on the origins of iceblocking: I want to know where you grew up and if you ever heard of or went iceblocking there.  I need to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Welcome to Utah

Good, but not as good as the time I drove to work behind a Jeep with Utah plates spelling out "FETCHER."  Oh, how I was kicking myself for leaving my camera at home that morning!

The Deal Pickle

So I'm sitting there this afternoon, minding my own business, watching Eddie Timanus, former 5-time Jeopardy! champion, who also happens to be blind, win a lot of money on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Then the universe spontaneously combusted, Eddie was stopped at $50,000, and life as I knew it abruptly ended, all because of a TV commercial for The Deal Pickle. 

You see, the announcer on the commercial was pronouncing it EXACTLY like "The Dill Pickle," but there it was, clear as day on my screen: "The Deal Pickle."  Utahns have this simultaneously fascinating and nerve-grating habit of reducing their diphthongs.  (For those not in the linguistic know, a diphthong is a combination of two vowel sounds within the same syllable, as in "oil" or "mine.")  This slack-jawed pronunciation allows one to hear, for instance, will for "wheel," jell for "jail," mell for "mail," sill for "seal," and rill for "real."   This often results in confusion for those unfamiliar with the Utah accent, as will can mean both "wheel" and "will," and well can mean both "whale" and the expected "well."  A most perfect example of this usage came later this afternoon in an e-mail from a friend, announcing that he and his wife are moving so their house is now "for sell."  (Immediately after reading that, my head exploded.)

Hence, The Deal Pickle.  If you're a native Utahn, of COURSE it makes sense!  Well, guess what?  People of Utah, you are WRONG! "DILL" AND "DEAL" ARE NOT HOMOPHONES!!!

There.  I feel better now.