scrabbled Eggs

*I...fondue...resent cellar...buy mighty pavrotti...a thorn into...newer type cast...period... *

(Delete)

I found viewer offer decent...wet biller...tie die ferret window...the lewd jerk...vast geek...period... *
(Delete)

Eye foundry woofer bent best jello...bye bye...savor it...autumn orient nuclear fines...blast weed...period... *

(Delete) (ESC)**

Oh, hello. Please excuse the mumbo-jumbo up above. I just bought one of those voice command programs. You know, you speak it, it types it. I loaded the disc and rebooted. Then I went through the "simple" set-up steps. I had to read aloud into a microphone a couple of passages from The Grapes of Wrath and Joyce's Ulysses .

The next step instructed me to read a list of two hundred fifty words. Supposedly the combination of the passages and the word list was necessary for the program to familiarize itself with my voice patterns.

Lastly, I was prompted to pronounce the various punctuation characters such as comma, period, question mark, and colon, etc. Once those were processed along with other commands such as space, return, and delete, I was ready to enter the "wonderful world" of voice command entry.

It certainly isn't very useful if my text resembles a cross between scrambled eggs and a bunch of Scrabble tiles. Indeed, those scrabbled eggs above make little sense. Perhaps it is this hybrid dialect of mine that is fouling the works. While not truly Bostonian and no longer a pure West Virginan drawl, the merger of the two no doubt has the program perplexed. Even though I have avoided such inflections like y'all and have made sure to pronounce my R's, it is proving to be quite a difficult task to get this program running as advertised.

My impersonations of John Wayne, Elmer Fudd, and Miss Piggy have proven to be of very insignificant help in the matter. I thought about putting on some too-tight BVDs, but I doubt that a falsetto voice would work either.

* By the way, the sentence that I was attempting to talk/type was: "I found a review of a recent best seller by my favorite author in the New York Times last week."

** a-s2d ...?...#*/3!_Q*&>**

Oops! Excuse me! The cat just jumped up onto my keyboard!

No.32