Feminists don’t have a sense of humour

Agree or disagree? Whatever you think, watch this video, it’s smart, funny and very accomplished:

Some word explanations (thanks, LDOCE)

• vicious: violent and uncruel; unkind
• funny bone:  the soft part of your elbow that particularly hurts when you hit it
• degradation: an experience or situation that makes you feel ashamed and angry
• rampant: very fast-growing and difficult to control
• objectification: treating a person or idea as a physical object
• lighten up: used to tell someone not to be so serious about something

Dance break!

Something to give you courage

It’s only one day to go to the Abitur, so I’d like to encourage you to stop studying (if you ever started in the first place) and watch this extremely heartwarming video of street musicians all around the world collaborating, thanks to a brilliant producer.

This video has been viral all over the internet for over a week. I listened to an interview with Mark Johnson, the producer, who told this story that when they were recording in South Africa, these two unsavoury-looking characters came by and looked over their equipment; Johnson happily showed them his iPod with what they’d recorded so far and they were so enchanted that they promised they would watch the recording team’s back while they were there. Turns out they were actually the bigshot gangsters in this area, who ordinarily would have stolen everything and beaten them up. Ah, the power of music.

Zadie Smith: Speaking in Tongues

If you want to know more about Zadie Smith’s language, you can go to Youtube and actually listen to parts of her lecture:

The full article is here and I highly recommend that you read it, because it contains so many interesting ideas. Reading it, you will learn about

• English linguistic taboos
• Shaw’s Pygmalion
• Cary Grant (!)
• the many voices of Barack Obama
• unwritten rules of the black community
• blackness, whiteness and inbetweenness
• Shakespeare the equivocator
• the value of intellectual peculiarity
• the joys of living variously

Understanding the credit crisis

We’re living in scary times, with the financial markets crumbling all around us. Frankly, I don’t even pretend to understand exactly how banks I’d only driven past and never really noticed now require one trillion euros to be saved, but I do have a general idea of how the credit crisis came about. If you want to know (or if you’re cramming for your economics Abitur and can do with some help), invest ten minutes and watch this excellently made video:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo. (I failed to embed the video, but it’s all vimeo’s fault)

Words you might want to take away:

• mortgage (in homeowner societies, this is an important lexical item in everyday conversation. We call it “Hypothek”, but as more people here rent rather than own their houses, they’re not as common.)
• down payment
• debt
• interest (definition 4)
• to default
• treasury
• return on investment
• the difference between lend and borrow (important in these troubled times!)

By the way, the leverage system nearly froze up at some point last autumn, and for a moment the world teetered on the brink of total financial destruction. It was a scary moment.

Via Andrew Sullivan

The Bennets on Facebook

It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone should read Pride and Prejudice before they die, but if you don’t have time, you can now follow the story on FaceAustenbook.

This advert is completely beside the point, but go have a look anyway.

It’s ridiculously beautiful. I’ll be queuing up on January 23rd to buy the CD. 

Let’s slip in a little vocabulary. In the video section of the site, you can see such antediluvian instruments as a theorbo, a cornetto and a psalterium or hammered dulcimer.

Translating Margaret Drabble’s “The Sexual Revolution”

Margaret Drabble’s 1967 text on the sexual revolution is certainly very interesting, but for a successful writer, she writes, ahem, a little sloppily, as I found out when I wrote the “perfect version” (not my words! one of you said this!) of our class translation. You can download it here. 

We don’t really have time to discuss this translation in class, but if you have any questions, I’ll gladly answer them here.

A Presidential Prediction from 1958

“What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country’s role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade. … Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics … those in the vanguard may expect to be the targets for scurrilous attacks, as the hate mongers, in the last ditch efforts, spew their verbal and written poison.”

A liberal Republican Senator from New York called Jacob J. Javits really predicted this back in 1958. He was a bit of an optimist to go for the year 2000, but nevertheless! What a prediction!

From a moving article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, in Root Magazine. 

Electing a US president in plain English

Der Englisch-Blog unearthed a very useful video on the US presidential election process.  Before you look at it, head over to the Englisch-Blog and have a look at the neat vocabulary lists. Yesterdays post was a lucid explanation of the difference between politics and policy, by the way. With a Sarah Palin video!

Thank you, Markus. I just needed an excuse to nudge my students into the direction of your blog.

Basic Computer Secrets

Nobody, but* nobody, is going to give you half of $80 million to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire…from Nigeria or anywhere else.

I really hope you had worked that out on your own. David Pogue’s Tech Tips for Basic Computer Users has a lot more in store for you – and don’t pretend you are not a Basic Computer User. In my experience, almost all students are, with the notable exception of Max the helpful computer guy. Even as a Seasoned Basic Computer User, I read a few things there that I didn’t know and found highly useful (such as “Apple Key and +/- make font size larger/smaller” – JochenEnglish is going to laugh at me for that). It even tells you when’s the best time to buy new iPods!