Fun with the Swan Flude--in Russian

In RantWoman's recent experience, the internet basically has cooties. RantWoman supposes the problems she has been having with slow performance, webpages seeming to need to detour to the moon before displaying, and cursors that refuse to stay where they are supposed to be probably have a much more technical-sounding, geekery-filled description, but cooties is sufficient for RantWoman's purposes at the moment.

The point is that RantWoman has been dawdling about some needed downloads. Over the last couple days, mainly in an effort to exorcise the cooties, RantWoman has finally been downloading, reading the release notes, and other fun and jollity. Along the way, RantWoman also picked up something that has been vexing her for stupid reasons for quite awhile, a voice that will make Mr. JAWS read in Russian.

Well, Mr. JAWS in Russian has a lovely grammatically correct female teacher-perfect voice. Katerina Jawsovna reads English like on menus with perfectly Russified pronunciation. Even when RantWoman tries to set the speed fast enough that she does not either fall asleep or send the brain on extended walks along some mental beach, Katerina J is downright pokey.

RantWoman also notes that she has always liked lower-frequency voices better than some soprano ones. RantWoman will not go near what that suggests about her own hearing or mindset. RantWoman will opine that now she needs to find a male Russian voice, preferably one that is free or that RantWoman can just talk up in exchange for...

And what texts did RantWoman attempt to use to put Katerina J through her paces. Why, the swine flu selection on http://www.gazeta.ru/ of course. No swine flu does not sound any more delightful in Russian than in English. Apparently the death toll is (only?) 76 worldwide so far. RantWoman read of a new case in Australia. Then RantWoman lost patience with the peculiarities of the Russian voice. RantWoman PROMISES to revisit the issue of a different voice at some point a bit further down the road. In the meantime, she is multiprocessing, metaphorically killing several birds with one stone: technical installations and testing, glossary development, self-training....