Invest a quarter of an hour into watching the speech Mr Obama gave at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It is chock-full of funny lines, self-deprecation and, at the end, even a little pathos. Most excellent.
May 11, 2009
February 12, 2009
It’s Darwin’s birthday – let’s devolve!
Haven’t you always wanted to see your teacher as an Australophithecus afarensis from 3.5 million years back? (more…)
January 18, 2009
Jokes (some of them homophonephiliac)
Der Englisch Blog has been talking a lot about puns recently, so when some of my invisifriends posted these jokes today*, it felt particularly serendipitous. Not all of them are puns, though all of them are bar jokes. Take that, Englisch Blog** – I’ve got more puns than you do!
- A mushroom walks into a bar, the bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind here.” The mushroom says, “Why not, I’m a fungi.”
- Two pieces of string walk into a bar and order a drink. The bartender says “We don’t serve string here. Get out.” They go out and the first string wants to go to another bar, but the second string is miffed and he wants his drink. He twists himself up and messes his hair, walks back in and orders a drink. The bartender looks him over real close and says, “Say aren’t you a piece of string?” And the string says, “I’m a frayed knot.”
- A guy walks into a bar with a salamander on his shoulder. “What do you call that?”, asks the bartender. “I call him Tiny, because he’s my newt!”
- A dyslexic walks into a bra.
- Two hydrogen atoms come out of a bar
One says: Hey, I lost an electron in there.
The other says: Are you sure?
The first says: I’m positive - A skeleton walks into a bar. He asks for a drink and a mop.
- Aand the old classic: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says: “Hey, why the long face?”
*the larger part appeared in the print version of the New York Times. It is good to have invisifriends.
** you know I love you, Markus!
January 13, 2009
“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
For half a year now, classes have been chanting “Yes, we can” at me whenever they found the slightest excuse for it. Yes, even the little ones. The ones that know little more English than the words yes, we and can. Are we looking at an era of classroom-invading presidential catchphrases? As much as I enjoy Mr Obama’s eloquence, I do hope he keeps the infectious slogans to a minimum. They get really old after a while, to be honest.
A year after the end of the Clinton administration, people were beginning to feel impeachment nostalgia (not really the Bush administration’s fault, though). Hardly anyone is going to feel nostalgia for the years of George W. Bush, arguably the worst president the US has ever had. Except for one standard he set that Obama cannot hope to live up to: as creator of the choicest malapropisms and verbal gaffes since, well, Mrs Malaprop.
Jacob Weisberg of Slate Magazine has been collecting them for years and celebrates the end of the Bush administration with a collection of The Top 25 Bushisms of All Time. Really, read them all. They won’t come again.
NB: When I read through Weisberg’s text again, I misread “the rising cost of malpractice insurance” as “the rising cost of malapropism insurance”.
January 5, 2009
A New Year’s treat for my linguist friends
The Academy of Linguistic Awarness (sic!) appears to be an entirely fictional body. This poster seems to be designed to tickle the inner prescriptivist (because we’re all descriptivists, right!).
December 12, 2008
Validation
We all need some validation every now and then. If you don’t know what validation is, look it up first, and then watch this 15-minute short film about validation. It’ll make you feel good.
And don’t forget – YOU ARE AWESOME!
November 18, 2008
On Vetting
Vetting (originally: having a racehorse checked by a veterinarian before you bet on him. The horse, that is) is an important process for a politician who has posts to fill. Barack Obama, the president-elect, has a very large number of posts to fill right, and to avoid future embarrassment, he’s REALLY vetting those people. If you are considered for a job in Washington, you may have to answer a number of very strange questions, starting with whether anyone in your family owns a gun to if you ever kept an embarrassing diary (are diaries ever anything else?). (more…)
October 21, 2008
Are you a digital native?
My wonderful class created the questions for this quiz. Go on, take it!
And now some idiot has flagged the (perfectly innocuous) quiz as “adult“, so you have to log in to take it. I’ve complained, and really hope it will be easily available again shortly. (ok, it’s back up now. Thanks Quibblo people!)
October 20, 2008
Who is Barack Obama – really?
Over the last weeks, both presidential campaigns have gone more negative and have been more prone to untruths ranging from ‘misleading’ to what the Truth-O-Meter calls ‘pants on fire’ (from the children’s rhyme “liar, liar, pants on fire”). In addition, people are sending round rather extraordinary e-mails claiming that John McCain suffers from Alzheimer’s or that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist.
There’s a lot of fun to be had, to be sure, by creatively calling candidates things they are not. Some silly (and not-so-silly) attempts:
There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama:
Barack (his name means “lightning” in Hebrew!) Obama is the best candidate for your Jewish grandmother in Florida.
(Make sure you watch the whole video, it is very irreverent and very funny)
October 2, 2008
Campaign Ads V: Art imitates life – or is it the other way round?
These days, you can never be certain.
Of course, this is a spoof by the wonderful Stephen Colbert who once spoofed G.W.Bush to his face.
