The Tell-Tale Heart

We've had enough horror stories lately, and I'm not particularly fond of the genre, but you know that I do like E.A.Poe: The Tell Tale Heart, first published in 1843, "a story told through the eyes of a madman who, like all of us, believed he was sane. "

True!—nervous—very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’’


The story is a psychological portrait of a mad narrator who kills a man because he didn't like his 'vulture eye' and ultimately his guilt and madness give him away in the final hallucination that the man's heart is still beating under the floorboards. HA-HA-HA...

This is just a pre-view. You'll have to go to other versions to see the complete story. It's a really short piece, so you can read it HERE

- Columbia pictures 1953 Animation , narrated by James Mason.

- Vincent Price version HERE. You probably recognized Vincent Prince's laugh as part of the rap he performed in Michael Jackson's Thriller, already a classic for Halloween.

- And some more music: Alan Parson's Tell-Tale Heart in Tales of Mystery and Imagination, a record inspired in Poe's work.

**If you like E.A.Poe and want to see different versions of 'The Raven' (The Simpson's included), go to last year's entry.

Happy Halloween, or castanyada, or whatever you celebrate!

Innit?

The other day we were talking about tag questions, and we mentioned that sometimes all the variety of tag-questions including the use of all the auxilliaries is sometimes reduced by teenage slang to 'innit?' (isn't it?). Ok, Emma Thompson doesn't like that, and she doesn't like the teenage use of 'like' either. You can read it HERE.

Slang : very informal language that is usually spoken rather than written, used specially by particular groups of people. In The Sun you can find a glossary for different types of slang from various occupational and lifestyle groups (hip-hop, police, etc).
DON'T use that in your compositions, ya smell me?

Our House

Download this mp3 from Beemp3.com

Have you seen our house? Our provisisonal provisisonal house is not in the middle of the street, it's up in 'La Collada'. Classes re-start Thursday 21st, 17:30. The show must go on.

Torn

This is not the post I had in mind, but as you problably know the wind has torn the roof off the building and all the 3rd floor classrooms are, as you can imagine, destroyed and flooded. You've probably received the 'avis urgent' we've been sending this afternoon to all students, and we have also posted an 'official' message in our school web page .
We've been working this afternoon trying to rescue what's left of our computers, beamers etc and still have to assess the damage done.
So I'm sorry to say next Wednesday, Thursay and Friday classes have been cancelled.
Now we are definitely torn and homeless. But let's be positive and think that every cloud has a silver lining.

	Natalia Imbruglia - Torn .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Please check the EOI Garraf webpage for official updates on the situation.

The answer, my friend, may be blowing in the wind. Who knows?

*** Update Oct 13th:
As you can see, I've posted a slide show so that you can have an idea of the damage. This is not going to be repaired anytime soon. Our laptops and beamers are OK. We are the trolley teachers.

Fantasy Festival time

Imagine your are nine years old and your favourite hero knocks on your classroom door. That's what happened to Beatrice Delap, who wrote to Captain Jack Sparrow asking for help to raise a mutiny against her teachers at Meridian Primary School in Greenwich, south-east London.
Watch the video, read the story HERE ... and depending on who you call I'll join you in the mutiny.

• a heartthrob: a famous man, often a singer or an actor, who is attractive to many women
• to turn up: to arrive or appear somewhere, usually unexpectedly or in a way that was not planned

And a tribute to John Lennon in his 70th birthday

	The Beatles - Rain .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Here his 10 best songs (according to The Huffington Post) on video.

*** Update October 10th

OOOps, and a tribute to Solomon Burke, the king of soul ("everybody, needs somebody"...remember?), who passed away this morning in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, on his way to a sold out show.

Minimal pairs

Sorry I don't want to repeat blog entries but the other day we were talking about pronunciation, and I think this story is particularly funny and illustrative of how a sound can completely change the meaning of a word:

These words are called “minimal pairs”, and here (and in your multi-rom) you have many other good examples:

http://www.shiporsheep.com/page1.html

(By the way, sorry about the dirty words -I hope nobody takes offence ... and thanks Anna, happily living in London this year, for sending the link last year).

And now, talking about pronunciation and current events at the same time, in this Daily Express cartoon you can see that problems are pretty much the same in Britain as in Barcelona. The lady is reading a newspaper that says "Yobs rule Britain", but you know that Job/Yob are two different things, don't you?