>>After Hurricane Katrina I was drove, along with two others, to Houston. We drove straight through and stopped in the middle of night for Cokes at a convenience store in Arkansas. They had one of those coffee and soft drink areas and only styrofoam coffee cups of various sizes. I went up and asked the clerk where the soda cups were. "The what ones?" he said. I repeated the question and he repeated the answer. Finally I realized he was saying "the white ones," i.e. same cups as for coffee.
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>Confirms what I think about the southern pronunciation (why not proNOUNciation - it's the way they proNOUNce, or not?). It's not the drawl. It's the way they conveniently omit (omid, that is, and then omi~) most of the consonants. Or just mangle them until all the rough edges are smoothed out into something unintelligible. I had no trouble understanding anyone in New York, or anyone English, Scottish, Canadian, even Ozzie or Kiwi - I have trouble with my... what do you call the people with whom you share a city? We say sugrađani (su=with, grad=city, akin to Italian, IIRC, cocitandino, so the English construct would be concitizens, or co-citizens perhaps?).
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>>BTW, soap must be expensive there if it's worth the trouble of making your own ;-) (Oh wait, there must be something horrible I don't realize about capitalist soap, right?)
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>She came across a report on the toxicity of soaps, shampoos (it's not a real poo, it's a sham, just like shamrock isn't a real rock), etc. Found out that what we use isn't as bad as the more expensive stuff (go figure), but is bad anyway. And, know what, after a few weeks of washing my hair with this, it doesn't get greasy as fast, not nearly. The girls also love it.
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>And the youngest one just had an assignment for her chemistry class to do some chemical process at home, and make a video of it, so she donned the yellow rubber gloves and, under mom's supervision, made another batch. When I put the video together, I named the file "soap opus.avi". She actually didn't know that "opera" was plural of "opus", so I had to slip that bit of information in an en passant manner, during an unrelated talk. And then the pun worked, when she saw the filename again :).

I didn't know opus was the plural of opera, either. Thanks!