The famous Stephen Colbert dinner speech

Re-posted by popular demand:

Stephen Colbert spoofing George W. Bush to his face:

Death Star Canteen

There is a good chance that everyone who’s ever been on the Youtube site has seen this, but it makes me laugh uncontrollably every single time I see it: Eddie Izzard’s Death Start Canteen skit. The fun begins at 2:00

Even better is the Lego-mation version.

Anyone who doesn’t laugh at this has something wrong with them.

A Trip to Snowhere

The Guardian (also known as The Grauniad) has a wonderful piece by Stuart Jeffries on the unexpected and apparently utterly delightful snow that shut down London and transformed its inhabitants yesterday. 

My soul was swooning (there, I admit it) yesterday as I stood and saw the snow falling, not on Joyce’s Ireland, but on dirty old London, reborn as a thing of beauty. It was snowing from Epping Forest to Heathrow, Upminster to Uxbridge, on duke and dustman in a way that it hasn’t for ages and probably won’t for a good while. Savour it, I told myself.

They’ve got a nice video summing up everyone’s feeling: “It’s a happy day.”

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!

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.

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.

Some water idioms

I’ll be honest. This is a politics post thinly disguised as a language post. Read on, and you’ll see why.

As we all know, water is a dangerous element, which is why teachers don’t like their students to frolic around in it unsupervised. Water idioms reflect this: for instance, you can

• be in deep water: you’re either in trouble or in a difficult situation. Many banks are in deep water these days*.
• be thrown in at the deep end: you’re pushed into a situation where you have to do a difficult job without being prepared for it. Those who enjoy risks can jump in at the deep end by themselves.
• be like a fish out of water: you feel very uncomfortable in a situation.
  
• pour cold water over/on sth: to criticize someone’s plans or ideas so that you make them see the plans are bad and nothing to be excited about.
• be out of your depth: literally (in BE), this means that you are in deep water where you can’t swim**; figuratively, it means that you can’t deal with a situation properly because you don’t understand it.

Sleep no more

Here’s the snippet from the 1979 Dench/McKellen Macbeth I wanted you to see:

It’s scenes II.1 and II.2 – Lady Macbeth walks on at 3:30. The totally riveting “sleep” sequence begins at 5:39.

Oh, and I might as well let the cat out of the bag: The Macbeth Navigator is an extremely useful site, with a clickable full text version of the play, with lots of fascinating notes, all done by an English professor.

The Gunpowder Plot

As a little background material to today’s lesson, here are a number of BBC clips:

The Gunpowder Plot: Act of Uniformity (what it was like to be a Catholic in Elizabethan times)

How the plot was discovered

There are more, but I am sure you can find your own way around YouTube.

For the pyromaniacs among you, here’s the first clip of an ITV series in which they rebuilt the Houses of Parliament and actually blew them up to see what would have happened. The part with the crash test dummies they used for King James and Francis Bacon and everybody else is especially fun.

Clearly, as a Catholic in 1606, you would have equivocated for what your life was worth.

Sound like you know what you’re talking about?

The US travellers among you will laugh at this comedian’s take on the recent (well, it’s been around for a while) trend in attaching imaginary question marks to everything you say. With some “you know”s and “like”s thrown in for good measure.

The language teacher says: raising your intonation at the end of declarative sentences will add that little extra bit of authenticity to an American accent. But remember: as with “like” and “you know”, a little of it goes a long, long way.