To fend off invaders or rats?

Home defense . (has a serious background but I don't wanna go into details -- the post was still hilarious!)

I particularly like the way that the #8 has been transformed by the power of emojis.

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"Only connect!"

https://youtu.be/ezbWVysJAOY
https://tapm.bandcamp.com/

Sorry I meant an "Irish cast" as opposed to an international cast, which results in one or more fake accents.

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Richard Cook
1978 Quinn uilleann pipes
1945 Starck Highland pipes
Goldie Low D whistle

My wife was victimised by the Sisters Of Mercy Model of #4.

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Richard Cook
1978 Quinn uilleann pipes
1945 Starck Highland pipes
Goldie Low D whistle

I was a bit tongue in cheek there. Dornan's attempt at a sort of midlands accent was also widely ridiculed. So there's really no guarantee actors from the island will get it right.

People in the Irish filmindustry are forever complaining any film with an Irish cast will be Very Hard to find backers for. Money will be put up only if there are international names added to the bill. They wouldn't have been able to make 'Michael Collins' if they hadn't agreed to having Julia Roberts in it, generally seen as teribly miss-cast for the role, but what could they do? Plenty of examples like it. There's also the perception other speakers of English won't be able to grasp a true Irish accent, which will lead to made up Oirish accents that nobody in reality speaks.

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My brain hurts

That's such an aggravating thing with so many of the Hollywood suits.

There are exceptions, or at least near-exceptions, with Game Of Thrones having a British and Irish cast save for Peter Dinklage and his fake accent.

Thing is, our family and many other people here in the USA watch almost no local television. The shows we watch are English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Australian, and (in one case) Danish. Once in a while American shows like Boardwalk Empire and Stranger Things will grab our attention.

The last thing we want to see is a token American shoved into a show that has no call for one.

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Richard Cook
1978 Quinn uilleann pipes
1945 Starck Highland pipes
Goldie Low D whistle

The crazy thing is that Dornan is himself Irish and still manages a godawful Oirish accent. Sure, he's from the North, so an Irish person wouldn't believe he';s from Mullingar or wherever it's supposed to be set, but it'd still be better than what he manages there.

Obviously these are a couple of examples spread across decades, but a few Irish movies with mostly-unknown Irish casts have become critical darlings in the US. Wakign Ned Devine, The Commitments, Once, all very popular with American audiences. If only studios realized that there's a profit to be made there! I would mind seeing some Brian Friel plays given the same treatments August Wilson's plays have been given in recent years.

Well there's Meryl Streep doing an Irish accent in Dancing at Lughnasa, based on Friel's play. Apparently she did a good job--I've never seen it.

Somebody should make a movie of Translations--it's the great work on colonialism

As an American television and film watcher for way too long I've seen things go the other way too. Nichole Kidman, Russel Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Laury, Dominic West, Paul Bettany, are a handful of actors from other linguistic backgrounds that try with some success to get the American accent down. There seems to be a bit of "forcing" a harshness in their early attempts that eventually evens out (sort of forcing their voices through a meat grinder in a tube.) I guess this as well as many other skills takes time. Ruth Wilson seems to have done the best job of Americanizing quickly. Although there may be many other actors who have just done such a good job I haven't noticed them as non-native speakers.

It seems like Meryl Streep has been one of the few actors that can pull an accent out of her hat as a one off for a film. Another may be Daniel Day Lewis.

One of the most famous American leading men for decades, Cary Grant, was actually Archibald Leach from Bristol. His early work in film is in that silly Mid-Atlantic accent that Hollywood was pushing when talkies first came out. Fortunately that weirdly forced strangulated accent died a natural death by WWII.

The silly thing here is that there is no one ´Irish Accent´ spoken by English Speakers on the Island. As the central authority of English Dominion expanded over nearly 800 years, and took place one geographical locale at a time, the need for the Gaeilge speaking population to ´Have the Béarla´ didn´t occur all at once. And it took place while at least one Great Vowell shift occurred and many alterations in spoken English occurred. Couple this with the well acknowledged social conservatism of the Irish people, then every little nook and cranny got its own version of ´Received Spoken English´.
RTE-Speak, like BBC-Speak, is knocking some of the corners of regionalism off, but we are a long stretch from homogeneity.

Bob

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Not everything you can count, counts. And not everything that counts, can be counted

The Expert's Mind has few possibilities.
The Beginner's mind has endless possibilities.
Shunryu Suzuki, Roshi

I'd recommend a Chieftain whistle for that, I wouldn't want to be hit with one of those! Good busking whistle for rough parts of town.

On a more serious and on-topic note, despite the fact that I haven't fully gotten on with the Chieftain high whistles I've owned, they're a great example of staking your claim in a unique part of the whistle world. They're half the price of a Goldie, unlike most other whistles, and if you're looking for a whistle with certain properties, that's a great option. Not for everyone, but for enough people that Phil Hardy can keep business going there.

This McNeela whistle looks like much the opposite of that, a whistle that is very much like many others on the market, without enough of a price difference to distinguish itself, and in all likelihood not quite as good as them either. As I mentioned before, if they're going to go with the same design as the Sindts and Killarneys I'd have loved a wide-bore Sindt-like design, or a two-piece Sindt-like design, or some other way to set this apart from the crowd. Maybe I wouldn't like it, but I'm sure some people would love it. Not sure what its "killer app" is besides that black matte finish that'll supposedly get everyone at your session making googley eyes at you.

Already have a few of those (low D Thunderbird, high D and C and the V4 and V5). The low D Thunderbird is particularly great -- lovely sound, never ever clogs but takes slightly more air than the V4 and V5. The best low D for self defense that I own would be the brass low D "trad" Tony Dixon that I have. That is one heavy whistle. One of the reasons I never play it. I also made a low D quenacho from aluminium pipe with 3mm wall thickness, which would make for a great self defense tool.

I would be in the market for a #9 if it comes equipped with notes from the doctor.

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“Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”

Some are spectacularly good at American accents, in addition to Hugh Laurie there's Bob Hoskins and Stephen Graham.

Though there is a more-or-less generic US accent, general Midwestern I've heard it called, you can have a dozen Americans with a dozen clearly different accents. I'm from West Virginia and I think I might be on par with the Irish in hearing my native accent butchered by outsiders! Russel Crowe is one...whatever was he trying to do? It's just as bad with American actors from New York or California, trying to do West Virginia. Think Laura Dern, doing something halfway between Alabama and Texas maybe.

Speaking of Nicole Kidman, her Irish accent was very unstable in Far And Away. She'd switch from Aussie to Irish to American in a single sentence.



Yet Sean Connery stuck with his for his entire career, a blend of Edinburgh, London, and American. It played well everywhere.

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Richard Cook
1978 Quinn uilleann pipes
1945 Starck Highland pipes
Goldie Low D whistle