Announcement—Class Action Settlement Reached SpecGram Vol CLIV, No 1 Contents UX<sup>n</sup>: The Implications of Sampson’s Proof of Universal Science—Bjorn-Bob Weaselflinger

From the Department of Cheap Research: Easy Money

by Woody Ellen

When I was a kid I noticed, with inexpressible disgust, that in sci-fi movies the whole universe spoke flawless midwestern American English. So to create an extraterrestrial accent for movies (and make a million dollars) I worked out a system. You take your English text, and you transcribe it phonetically backwards.

You rehearse that until you can rattle it off, and then you record it. Follow me so far?

Then you play that backwards for the movie sound track. You get English with a killer extraterrestrial accent. I tried it first with the Spanish cigar name “El producto”. You reverse that and you get roughly “Oat, coo door play.” (but keep the stress in the same place; remember this stuff has to be more or less intelligible when you’re finished). Record that, then play it backwards and you get “El producto” again but sounding very alien, like some creature trying to use unfamiliar speech organs.

English is harder than Spanish to reverse-transcribe. “This is my alien speech” becomes “Cheeps, Neyeeley, I’m ze Sith.” “Ohm woe ook oh eeram oot dnepah revetaw yayse” is “Say, whatever happened to Mario Cuomo?” I rehearsed this stuff for months, and continued when I got out of Waterbury Retreat House. I wanted that million dollars. That would have been exactly one million dollars profit; all this cost me diddly squat since I borrowed the reversible tape recorder from my uncle, a fish merchant, also with dreams.

I never got the million. Some lousy Hollywood hack apparently cottoned on to it and it’s been used several times. I bet you never noticed it but I have noticed it. How could I not notice it? It was my idea. It’s a doggy dog world.

Announcement—Class Action Settlement Reached
UXn: The Implications of Sampson’s Proof of Universal Science—Bjorn-Bob Weaselflinger
SpecGram Vol CLIV, No 1 Contents