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?

Q & A

Do you kow what the hottest place on Earth is? Can rocks grow? How far does dust blow in the wind? How long is a martian year?
Test your knowledge of scientific facts and figures with these 101 questions from Live Science.

If you'd prefer the more ethereal, philosophical, or just bizarre, unexpected, trivial and perverse kind of questions (Who invented buttons? How do you mend a broken heart? Do I need a mobile phone?) try The Guardian's Notes and Queries, an old favourite. This is a very popular site in which for more than 15 years readers have been posting questions and answers to what you always wanted to know and were too afraid to ask. It comes in different categories depending on your field of interest.

And if you want to go really deep into the core of philosophy the 10 big questions will probably give you food for thought and leave you wondering.

**Browse through the questions, play with the answers, and make sure you perfectly understand word order in the different types of questions (direct, indirect, subject, object, etc)

OK then, any questions (or answers) anybody?

Chunking and gridding

Those of you who have kids at primary school level should start brushing up on your maybe long forgotten maths skills. This year British kids will be learning an apparently better method for long divisions and multiplications. Except for those of us who have always had problems with numbers, it's easy to do 3 times 4 (4 x 3), but try "twenty-three times three hundred and five" (305 x 23)!
- Not clear enough ? In this BBC article " Why parents can't do Maths today" you'll find more step by step explanations, instructions and also, quite interesting, parents' opinions.
- And Here you can test your skills at basic addition, subtraction, times tables, etc. and also learn some maths vocabulary.

Don't ask me. It's all Greek to me .

Hi again

Hi again, ex-level4, level4-to-be... I hope you've had a good summer break and you are ready, looking forward to, just can't wait to start the new course. Since this year I'll be repeating Level4, I thought I could keep the same blog, so no need to do a new one, but as you can see I've changed things a bit -colour, layout, etc. Also, I've just deleted the 'class stuff links' and 'vox links' so that I can periodically add them again as we work on the different units.
OK, so that you can warm up a little, and just to continue with animal stories, this happened a couple of weeks ago in Coventry, England: a lady dumped a cat into a bin... and she was caught on CCTVcameras - damn cameras! Lola, the terrified cat, was trapped in the bin for 15 HOURS before Darryl, her owner, finally found her the following morning. Britons were so enraged by the woman's action that she is receiving death threats, needs police protection, and the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals -remember Adrian Mole?) are leading an investigation into the incident.

Video on woman dumping cat into bin
Mail Online: Read the story
BBC Video: Lola's owner interviewed.

Woman apologizes/defends her actions - The Guardian
This cartoon appeared in The Sun

I'm a cat lover myself, but would you say they are overeacting? How should the cat-dumper lady be punished? So be careful with the CCTV cameras next time !

***Update September 20th:
Catwoman (anti-cat? woman) charged

Summer whale

It was not my intention to work on the blog this summer (though I'm not on holiday yet and, as you can see, I'm playing with new layouts, colors etc) and I found this incredible pic of something that happened a couple of weeks ago so I thought I wanted to share it with you (you? who? hello? is there anybody there?) Most of all because we had that controversy last year about whales, and lions and all that. Obsessed with whales ? Bff,I wouldn't say so... but I like them, and I do find this photo impressive. I'd love to see one like this ... ok, from my balcony. So what happened? Read this
- Follow up: For those of you who thought the photo was manipulated, here's the video evidence. Yacht owners are being investigated for harassing the whale by getting too close to it.

I hope you have a whale of a time this summer!