Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Don Davis

Actor Don S. Davis has died. While the obits say he's best remembered for Stargate SG-1, I'll always think of him as Major Garland Briggs on Twin Peaks.

7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Maybe Bob is just the evil that men do"

5:26 AM, July 02, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Actually, I always thought of the two as the same character.

I would feel the same way if I saw John Ratzenberger playing a mailman with a Boston accent in a new television show.

(And why were Cliff and Coach the only folks at Cheers who had Boston accents?)

12:44 AM, July 03, 2008  
Blogger LAGuy said...

I didn't even notice Coach had an accent.

As for Cliff, he wasn't even a regular at first. Maybe they threw him in to have the accent. And they'd have background characters with accents. Sam, Diane and Woody all come from non-Boston-accent backgrounds. I'm not sure about Norm, but I guess he's just from Chicago or something. Carla had a tough accent, just not from Boston.

12:56 AM, July 03, 2008  
Blogger New England Guy said...

Cliff and Coach are meant to have accents but I don't think I 've heard them in Boston (Cliff's accent is I guess what the rest of America is supposed to think a Boston accent sounds like) The real boston accent is higher-pitched and more whiny (think the "Nomahh" sketches on Saturday Night Live)
The only character with a recognizable accent I've heard in Boston is Carla's but I agree its more generic Italian- American (thank you Ms. Pearlman) than Boston-based.

I love the line by General Briggs quoted by anonymous (from the last episode of season 1, I think)- its so oblivious to its obliviousness.
Firewalk with me.

5:29 AM, July 03, 2008  
Blogger New England Guy said...

Ok Major Briggs and it was the middle of season 2 where they wrapped up the Laura Palmer mystery

6:01 AM, July 03, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When I meet folks from the suburbs around Boston, they don't have accents. Those from inside the big cities of Boston and Rhode Island that I have met do.

Being from California, of course I define "no accent" as "talking like the folks from the West Coast or the non-big-city Midwest." Having lived in L.A., the Bay Area, and Seattle, I consider the West Coast to have one single way of talking. The only significant way it departs from the moderate Midwest is that we don't differentiate between the vowel in "Don" or the vowel in "Dawn", nor between the vowels in "Mary", "marry", and "merry". Almost everywhere else distinguishes Don from Dawn and Mary from marry; in Philadelphia they distinguish Mary from marry from merry.

Still, I consider this to be the default non-accent. This is probably due to radio, movies, and TV. I once asked a guy from Little Rock if he thought he spoke with an accent. He said he didn't notice it when he was talking, but when he listened to his voice on tape he was always startled to hear he had a southern accent.

Think how bad it would be if Hollywood had been based in Minnesooata!

11:46 AM, July 03, 2008  
Blogger QueensGuy said...

A friend of mine from Newton, MA, outside of Boston, has an accent that's strangely similar to Cliff's. I had a pretty distinctive Queens accent in college (according to my foreign-born wife), but lost most of it in law school. I guess it's only the true-born trial lawyers who keep theirs and maybe even thicken them.

6:35 AM, July 05, 2008  

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