New! From Ronco!!!

Are you already a member of Mensa? Do you surf the universe using Einstein’s theories because they are just so damn easy for you? Can you converse with most of the commuters on the New York subway…in their native languages? Okay, face it, you’re brilliant. And, what do brilliant people need during a deployment? Brilliant people need a distraction to keep their lightning-quick minds off the separation. Brilliant people will certainly benefit from a true challenge. Challenges are what life is made of, people. They inspire you to become more than the sum of your parts, they get the blood flowing, and the swearing, too. But, we’ll get to that in a minute.

Ronco kept all this in mind when they developed the latest challenge for smart people. Ronco, makers of the “Chop-o-matic,” the “Dial-o-matic,” and, my personal favorite, the “Five Tray Food Dehydrator” (it makes jerky out of Tofu, otherwise known as Tofurkey Jerky…yumm…sorry, having a moment here!), have come up with a brand new product!

It slices, dices, minces, and chops…your brain! Let me spend a moment extolling the virtues of their newest product:

- Convenient Design
- Fits in Your Glove Compartment
- It’s the Best Gift You Can Give a Child or an Adult
- It’s Always Ready for the Fish to Strike…oh, wait, sorry, wrong product. That was meant for the Ronco Pocket Fisherman Spin Casting Outfit. No, I’m not kidding. And, Ronco is celebrating its 50th Anniversary. Happy Anniversary to them!

Anyway, back to the product at hand: Irish Gaelic. Now, stay with me, brilliant people. You want a challenge to overcome while your beloved is overseas? Why not teach yourself a language that is endangered? Less than 1% of the population in Ireland speaks Irish Gaelic. If you’re like me, you, too, are a sucker for anything endangered: baby seals, baby tigers, languages with fewer than 500,000 speakers. Why not help out? Learn to speak one of the Celtic languages and keep them alive. Okay, I’m going to shift gears here and tell you ‘why not.’

It’s ridiculously, insanely, ludicrously, preposterously HARD, people!!! That’s why! I now truly grasp why it’s an endangered language. Those crazy Celts have stolen all the vowels from the former Soviet-Bloc countries’ languages and shoved them into their own words. It’s not that they pronounce them or anything; they just sit there, along with a passel of other letters, taking up space, mocking any attempts at pronunciation. For example:

fheabhas – it means excellent – it’s pronounced ‘ous’
What the hell? Not kidding, here! What about the f, the two h’s, and a b for pity’s sake? You don’t pronounce them? Okaaaaaay. Next!

Tá orm dul abhaile anois, a Bhríd.
It’s pronounced ‘TAW* OH-ruhm duhl uh-VWAHL-e uh-NISH, uh VREED.’ It means I must go home now, Bridget.
Me, too, Bridge, cuz I have no idea what you people are talking about. To make matters worse, if she’s a Bridget you don’t know it’s spelled Brid and pronounced Breed; if she’s your friend and you’re talking to her, it’s spelled Bhrid and pronounced Vreed. Now, do that with all the names and words that refer to people, things, well, nouns, in general. Auuuuuugghhhh! What??? So my husband is pronounced and spelled differently than a generic husband? Well, that goes without saying, he’s a Seal after all, and as he always says, his ego protects him from negative emotions. Now, how the hell am I supposed to say all that in Gaelic?

Really, what I’ve learned is that I MAY not actually be a genius or brilliant, at all, but the Celtic languages still interest me. From this group of people have come some of the great myths I still enjoy reading about. From the Welsh, comes Taliesin, Merlin’s father. (Forget learning the Welsh dialect, it’s even harder than Irish!) Faeries populate a lot of their mythology and literature, as well. And, as Michael and Ash discovered, I loves me some faeries!! (Fireflies, faeries…it’s all the same to a girl from Idaho!) So, I keep working at this “challenge” a little bit every day.

I’m just thankful that I really don’t have to pay Ronco for the language tapes. Talk about adding insult to injury. (I’m sure they’d keep the price down, though. Pay just a mere $9.99 if you call in the next ten minutes, and they’ll even throw in Welsh and the really, really, really endangered language of Manx from The Isle of Man. Twelve people and forty five cats with bobbed tails live there, I think.) I’ve been using a great, free website called Erin’s Web to learn Gaelic. I've included it in my favorites above, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to trail their toes in the Celtic language and culture.

I can now truly appreciate how smart the Irish are; if they can learn this absurdly complicated form of communication then I think they may just be able to fix the banking woes of the world. And, I can honestly say that trying to learn this language does, indeed, distract me from the fact that the hubby isn’t around. It’s probably better that he’s away, as I’m learning to swear in Gaelic now…at least I think it’s Gaelic…the leprechauns blush when they hear me, anyway. I’d like to have it perfected before the husband gets home! I don’t want him to think I was sitting around letting my brain rot, eating Tofurkey Jerky the entire time he was gone. There's no accounting for taste, I guess. :-)