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Swine Flu

So many recommendations! Swine Flu seems to be the main conversation topic these days. Everywhere you go, there are people who know of someone who has had it or who is afraid of having it. Thanks to Linda, who told me about this video, we could see that swine flu is a global worry.

If you want to watch the video again and check for vocabulary and pronunciation, here you are.

Style Icons

If you want to see  Audrey’s video again, here it is for you to enjoy it again.

OF MICE AND MEN

I had already heard about John Steinbeck, since I watched two impressive movies based on his novels: John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) and Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” (1955). Yet, I had never read any of his books. He has always been known as a great storyteller who had been able to build so strong and unforgettable characters like Tom Joad and Cal Trask (played in the cinema by Henry Fonda and James Dean, respectively).
Thus, being in the EOI’s library, searching for a book to read in my last Christmas holiday, I had no doubt when I saw his “Of Mice and Men” laying unnoticed on a shelf: “This one”, I thought.
Apart from being a biography lover, I have always been interested in knowing the writer’s historical context, in search of the motives that made him or her devote himself/herself to the art of writing.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was born in California, in a region famous by its immigration tradition, which made him grow up influenced by social problems of poor people from working class, many of them migrant workers.
“Of Mice and Men” is a gripping novel about two friends who, having neither family, nor a place of their own, search for employment in some ranch, after having lost their former job in a farm.
George promised Aunt Clara, Lennie’s only relative, to look after the mentally handicapped guy. Since her death, they both become inseparable. Yet sometimes George loses his patience with his dumb friend.
Some of the most pleasant passages of the story are related to the times when Lennie asks George, for the umpteenth time, to talk about their dream of having their own ranch. After refusing it firmly, George ends up agreeing to his friend childish claim, providing him with a wonderful description of a paradisiacal place in which they both would be finally happy.
The author manages to impress the reader by showing not only a beautiful pure friendship between two grown-up men, but also the imaginative resources to which they appeal to escape from the long-suffering lives they have here and there.
Yet, the story has an unexpected sorrowful ending which in no way diminishes the sympathy the reader feels towards these two modest men.
Although the book is written in a simple style, I sometines found it  a little bit difficult to get accustomed to the colloquial language, plenty of slang, Steinbeck employed to give realism to his characters’ dialogues. Nevertheless, the reading rapidly turns into a delightful experience, boosted by this odd language itself.
Steinbeck won both Pulitzer (for “The Grapes and Wrath”) and Nobel Prizes for Literature in 1940 and 1962, in the order given.

By Helga Maria Saboia Bezerra

Yesterday’s lesson

Yesterday’s lesson was based on two activities made by two friends and colleagues: Carmen López (EOI Mieres) and María Valdés (EOI Oviedo).Thanks to them, we learnt things about San Francisco and the reasons why men and women are so different (fortunalety, if I may say so!)

If you want to do Partners in Crime again, click here and if you want to try with the test again and get the answersheet, click here.

There are also some videos in Maria´s Blog you may find interesting.

Thank you for your help and support, dear colleagues.

To blame or not to blame

Believe it or not, while we were doing an exercise on verb patterns, David asked me about the dependent preposition that goes after the verb blame. I still don’t not how, but we ended up talking about Rita Hayworth and her role in GILDA (1946), where she sings a  song which represents one of the most powerful scenes in the film.

Well, the good part of the Internet is that you can find nearly everything  “out there”. Here you have the famous song and scene from the film

Gilda (1946) is a black-and-white film noir directed by Charles Vidor. It stars Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in her signature role as the ultimate femme fatale. The film was noted for cinematographer Rudolph Mate’s lush photography, costume designer Jean Louis‘ sexy wardrobe for Hayworth (particularly for the dance numbers), and choreographer Jack Cole’s staging of “Put the Blame on Mame” and “Amado Mío.” (from Wikipedia)

Unreal past tenses

Just click here and you’ll find a clear explanation dealing with unreal uses of past forms.

And here you’ll also find a clear explanation on how to express wishes.

If you finally want to do some more practise here you’ll find some audio and quizzes to practice WISH.

I wish you enjoyed it!

BBC LEARNINGENGLISH is great!

APRIL FOOLS’ DAY

Although there is a widespread custom of celebrating April Fools’ Day (April 1st) – exception made to Spain and Spanish America, which have their Día de los Santos Inocentes on December 28th – Anglo-Saxon people seem to be the ones who  most enjoy this date, marked by the playing of practical jokes.
They take this day tricks so seriously, that even mass media succumbed to temptation of committing hoaxes on their public on April 1st. If you don’t believe, just take a look at internet and you’ll find a large list of well-known pranks carried out by radio and television stations, magazines, newspapers and websites in the last fifty years.
Behind one of the most famous April Fools’ Day hoaxes of all time was BBC, the successful, trusted and respected British news channel.
Well then, on 1 April 1957 BBC fooled the nation broadcasting a program called Panorama, in which Richard Dimbleby, its famous presenter, narrated a documentary about spaghetti crops in the borders of Switzerland and Italy.
Despite the doubts about credibility such piece of news would certainly prompt in current minds, a combination of factors made that television program quite reliable, convincing people about the goodness of that tree. Apart from being still a novelty then, television, as BBC itself says, “has gone down in broadcasting folklore”.
Moreover, in the aftermath of two wars, the world was rather a patchwork of countries shut off from the others, when British people barely knew the Swiss or the Italians, their countries, ways of life and economic activities, including what they used to grow in their fields
In addition, most people had just eaten tinned spaghetti – pasta, which were then still in its infancy in the UK, was considered by many as an exotic delicacy – and they didn’t know how it was produced.
The spoof documentary was idealized by a BBC cameraman who had a teacher in his school in Austria who used to mock her pupils for being so foolish, that they certainly would believe if they were told spaghetti grew on trees.
As a result of the transmission – which was watched by some 8 million people when in Britain 7 million homes had television sets – hundreds called the channel the next day to ask about the truthfulness of the story or to tell them they had enjoyed the joke (someone complained that spaghetti didn’t grow vertically, it grew horizontally). But others were interested in obtaining more information about spaghetti cultivation, because they wanted to have their own spaghetti trees. The BBC went on fooling these ones by telling them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.
Although BBC had been criticised for the trick, more than half a century on, “Spaghetti Trees” remains one of the UK’s most famous April Fools’ Day jokes.
Watch the documentary at Youtube:

By Helga Maria Saboia Bezerra