Happy 2011!

That's what everybody in English speaking countries will be singing at midnight 31st Dec. (and at 7 AM Jan 1st too) but few really know what the words mean. Its a traditional Scottish song, with words written by Scottish poet Robert Burns, probably inspired by some traditional verse. HERE is the translation into English.

So happy new year everybody!

Merry Christmas

The time has come for Christmas greetings and I'm always quite at a loss as to what to post. So this year it's going to be an invitation to come to the EOI celebration tomorrow (lots of food, drink, live music, and a good laugh)...

Update Thursday 23rd
Thanks everybody who came to the party yesterday, it was really nice to see you all there eating, drinking and having a good time. So I'll change this post a bit and embed this e-Christmas 2.0 sent by Mireia (4C).



Some music ...

	BB King - Christmas Celebration
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

And I'd like to repeat a classic from last year:

Stephen Fry is a well known British actor, writer, and comedian.
Here's the script if you need it (some aspects you've been working on this year highlighted in yellow) .

I wish you a merry Christmas and all the best for the coming year !

Shoot this Bear?

This is, to my mind, a great piece of advertising:




Type anything you want ...Kiss? Talk? Drink?....? and help the hunter rewrite the story!
Make sure you have "English" selected in your language settings (bottom of the page), or click here for the English version.

What is Beauty?

For me, beauty is being able to draw like this!

Denis Dutton is a philosophy professor. Animator Andrew Park has illustrated Denis Dutton's theory on beauty -that art, music and other beautiful things are a need built into our systems, and a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.

*If the drawings and words are not enough, you can turn on the subtitles in English or, alternatively, you can also get the video from 'English Central' , with its hide/show script and dictionary.

Buy Nothing Day

As we were saying the other day, time flies. We were sunbathing on the beach a couple of weeks ago and now Christmas is just round the corner. And what is Christmas about (apart from family getting together, love, and all that)? Shopping, of course. In order to make people aware that we live in a consumer society (really?) and that you don't actually need half of what you buy, Buy nothing day is celebrated every Nov. 27th (OK, it was last week, but you can also make it a 'buy nothing week'. 'Buy nothing day' tries to counterbalance the craze of Black Friday, the day that signals the start of the shopping season in the USA, and that can be as dangerous as this.

This week we are going to talk about shopping, business, work, AND connectors (in order to, although, in spite of, etc.) So before you fall into the Christmas shopping frenzy (in spite of the crisis) think that you can concentrate on learning English -it's safer and you can save money!