Books for this term

So tomorrow we'll be starting again in the old place, which means new books for you to read. This term you can choose either a classic of English literature or two American short stories:

Alice Adventures in Wonderland: What can I say about this marvellous book by L. Carroll? But I admit you must be comfortable with the bizarre -falling down a rabbit hole and finding yourself eating biscuits with strange effects, shrinking to the size of a mouse, talking to a caterpillar who is sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah, being a guest at a mad tea party (nothing to do with the American republicans!), making friends with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the Queen of Hearts, the Mock Turtle and the intriguing Cheshire Cat... wouldn't you like to have a Cheshire cat popping in and out of your life?

But if you prefer a more 'down-to-earth' sort of thing ... mmmh, I'm afraid we don't have anything remotely realistic this term ...just the following two short stories by American authors :

- The Strange Case of Benjamin Button (1922, by Scott Fitzgerald), the story of a man who is born old and ages backwards. The story was made into a film not so long ago starring Brad Pitt and Kate Blanchett. Here you can see some parts and the actor/actress comments:



The Swimmer (1964, John Cheever), also made into a fim, is the story of the man who "swims back home" using all private and public swimming pools in his affluent neighbourhood.



So which one are you going to choose?

The Smoking Ban

KEY WORDS: ban, law, to outlaw, school playgrounds, café-bar culture, a drop in trade, a fall in business, supporters, health benefits, smoke-related illness, passive smoking.

Use your monolingual DICTIONARY

Read the story HERE

Health benefits but poor profits for café owners, or so they say. I'm not a smoker now, but I do feel sympathy for the poor people who pay lots of taxes and have nowhere to comfortably satisfy their craving for smoking. Are you one of them? Are you happy about the ban? Or maybe you think it's time to quit? Then go to the NHS (UK's National Health Service) and see the resources you get in the 'Quit kit', which hopefully will help you give up smoking.

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!

Breathe in Breathe out

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

It's certainly reassuring to see that we are not the only ones with weird ideas here -though I agree that it takes a lot of breathing in and out, and a lot of physical and mental control to cope with certain policies and attitudes of our city councils/governments. Watch this video -transcript included- and just picture the situation: you receive a parking ticket with a yoga pose and some 'take it easy' advice printed on it in an attempt to cool down your anger. Do you think you would relax? Would you think it's a joke? Make a note of it - it wouldn't be a surprise to see this brilliant idea implemented here one of these days. Ommm...

Don't touch my junk!

Click on the image and find out about the new security measures being enforced in the USA: either a patdown procedure,which includes the touching of passengers' inner thighs and women's breasts, or a full body scan.

From pilots' unions to viral online protests, Americans are telling the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that the government has gone too far in the name of security, equating the new searches to "sexual molestation" or "sexual assault." Pilots are against both the patdown procedure and the alternative full body scanner.

"If you touch my junk I'm gonna have you arrested!" That's what a 31 year old passenger told the officers who were giving him detailed instructions on the new methods.
- Text and video HERE
- And the interview with John Tyner, the offended passenger, explaining what happened HERE

Apart from having to take off my jacket, my boots, my socks, my belt, my watch, and having a lady searching all over my body because the metal detector (search arches) invariably keeps beeping when I walk through it, I've always been treated nicely (!). As a passenger, you want to be as safe as possible once on the plane, but whether these invasive security measures are useful or not to prevent a terror attack is a real mystery to me.
PD: By the way, some of you mentioned yesterday that you didn't like to fly Ryanair. READ what happened the other day on a Ryanair flight.

Road to Grammar

This is a website devoted to language learning with lots of quizzes and explanations on every aspect of the language, from very easy to advanced (as usual, click on the picture). There is a Games section which I find highly addictive - I particularly like FLUENT and WORD SLAMM (a kind of scrabble). There is also a 'Road to Grammar' version for kids, so everybody in your family can play.

Have fun!

PD: Talking about words that English has borrowed from other languages, we mentioned the other day that 'machismo' is one of them, and you can read it HERE in the Independent's article on recent changes in surnames in Spain.