Lieutenant C. wrote:

Academic reason has been posted.  Long story short, I'm researching the Sherlockian community for an academic paper.  Yeah, my professor is awesome.
Oh, just to set the record straight, I'm a she, not a he.

ACK! Sorry. Sleepy, getting ready to go to work, not being careful about my pronouns.

Correction: Of course SHE is.

That's alright, I think I get what it means. Well, you know our shared interests, and I'm sure you can deduce what (or who) my particular interest is. I'd have to think a little bit about the rest. I don't know if I have any values or goals which pertain to this particular group, but I may be able to come up with something.

That's interesting. Values in what sense? What we hold dear? Morality?

NW16XE wrote:

But fandom does allow one to direct obessesive tendencies to harmless pursuits. Except the occasional Moriarity-type fan, of course...Oh dear, this is going in the wrong direction. I'll just shut up now. 

HEY! I resent (or resemble) that remark... haha.

veecee wrote:

I'm not from Michigan originally, but my accent is very similar. Many of us "suffer" from the "Northern Cities Vowel Shift." I cringe when I hear my own recorded voice, although I can speak without the NCVS when I want. According to this article (link below), though , many of us NCVS speakers are not aware of our own accent. Well, I guess that is true of speakers all over.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2012/08/northern_cities_vowel_shift_how_americans_in_the_great_lakes_region_are_revolutionizing_english_.html

Born in AZ and moved to MI as an infant, moved again when I was 7...I feel like not originally from anywhere, haha, though I guess I've lived in MI the majority of my life. I think because I've been around a few different American accents, I can still hear my own and try to adjust for it. I agree with the article, and there is a very distinct accent around the Great Lakes (though, as I said to Davina, Chicago has their own thing going on) but sorry, I don't care for the nasally vowel shift. With coworkers I tend to slip into more lazy speaking, dropping the ends of my words, not enunciating properly saying things like "jahb" instead of "job," but I don't like how it sounds. That's probably why my new Irish coworker made fun of me and Canadian coworkers have laughed (for example, I say "sahccer" instead of "soccer").

veecee wrote:

Welcome, Ban! I'm in Michigan, too!

YAY! We're smitten with the mitten!

hepzibah wrote:

Hi Banbha, welcome to the madness. What on earth does your name mean? Is it something Sherlock related that I am missing or did you just select letters at random and that is what you came up with? Too rude? Sorry 

I gather you have a thing for Andrew Scott. Have you read the Boss' rundown of her trip to Edinburgh? You are in for a treat.

http://sherlock.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=1688

Pronounced BAN-uh-va. She's a Celtic goddess, the patron goddess of Ireland. I'm actually Scottish by blood (with, I'm told, a smattering of Irish) and American by birth. I liked the name and the meaning, and use it for online gaming as well.

And I just read her story. I would die. I would simply DIE! I was speaking to a coworker last night about how you simply cannot fangirl out if you want to have any kind of meaningful encounter with a celebrity. Confronted by Andrew Scott I, however, would probably either clam up or start babbling and stumbling over my sentences. Despite what most people irl think of me, I can be quite shy.

I don't know how I'd do around the others. Though I know that I possess a reasonable amount of intelligence, I would probably hang back out of fear I'd say something stupid! I'll be honest; I haven't read the books. I'm an avid reader and I can't believe I never read them as a teen, but I've been in school for what seems like an eternity, so my reading for pleasure has been at a minimum the last few years. My friend got me interested in reading them so they were on my list, and then the show came out. I think I will eventually give it a go, but as of yet I haven't. *hangs head*

^^I don't get the feeling from the articles that they're together in any significant way but I sort of feel weird getting too deeply into this part of an actor's life, even if I'm VERY curious. Especially about certain other Sherlock cast members. But if there is indeed a thing going, like I said, good for him.

ancientsgate wrote:

We're so physically isolated from most of the rest of the world here in the States, most of us don't get that much opportunity to interact with foreigners/tourists, so I have no idea how we're perceived down at street level. Exception to that would be in downtown NYC or LA or San Francisco or DC or Chicago, I suppose. People who live or work there have a more per capita possibility of running into someone from another country.

Where I live, we have loads of Canadian tourists every summer, lots of license plates from Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. I hope they find us friendly enough. I haven't heard otherwise. It helps to speak the language, of course.

I've visited NYC (Manhattan) a few times and have been treated very well by people on the streets there. Granted, I'm an American, just like then, but lost is lost, and when someone's lost in NYC, they're l-o-s-t. Asking for directions or help, I've never gotten an iota of attitude from the natives. Which I think is very nice.

I live in Michigan and I feel like we're kind of a Canadian/American melting pot though I've worked with Canadians and we do have to get over each other's stereotypes a little bit. 99% of the time it's good for a laugh, but there is always that one person who gets offended by trivial things.

I've been training a lot of our new hires at the hospital this summer, and one of them is a nice girl from Dublin who married an American man also working for the hospital. She's lovely but when she repeated my American accent back to me, she made me sound like a Texan (she said we sound twangy) so yeah, I think that's the stereotype quite a few people from across the pond have of us. I can assure you, to Americans, the Midwestern accent sounds nothing like a Texan accent. No way.

Oh man...isn't it though? I'm partial to the black and white though I think I like looking at Andrew enough that I'll even take the one in the corset!