The English Blog

Hollande Tiptoes Into His New Role

Source: Mail Online

VOCABULARY
The Mail's headline features a play on words. If you tiptoe somewhere, you walk there very quietly without putting your heels on the floor when you walk. But tiptoe can also be used figuratively with the sense of doing something warily or very carefully. • However, the limited losses in Asia were likely to encourage European players to tip toe back into the market after heavy selling the day before.

ALSO SEE
• How Sarkozy stood up to Obama (The English Blog)
• Cartoon: We Care About The Small People (The English Blog) 

April Fools' Day Pranks By Brands

I know April Fools' Day was yesterday but, it being Sunday, you may have missed some of the pranks played by major brands. Not to worry though, AdFreak has a great roundup of the best brand hoaxes. Google's Gmail Tap is my favourite (though the YouTube collection is pretty good too).

COMMENT
Those guys at Google have a great sense of humour.

Google Maps April Fool

Google proved it has a sense of humour with an early April Fool’s Day joke that puts the fun back into map reading. The technology giant released its latest feat – a version of Google Maps for the ‘long neglected’ Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The game features old school pixelated graphics, synonymous with the original games consoles. Read more >>

Online Hangman Game

I was looking for an online version of Hangman to play in class with my students, and came across www.hangman.com, which was perfect for two main reasons. First, you can create your own word lists (or choose from a list of topics) . And second, it looks super on a video projector screen. Great for practising the alphabet, or as a fun lesson starter.

COMMENT
Click here to see the answer to the game above.

Rolls Off The Tongue Cartoon Idioms Blog

Andy Martin sent me an email telling me about Rolls off the Tongue, a new cartoon idioms blog where you have to guess the English idiomatic expression being illustrated. See if you can guess this one (click here for answer):

COMMENT
The cartoons (which are great, by the way) are designed to show both the literal and figurative meaning of the idiomatic expression, but English learners might need a more detailed explanation. For that, you can consult IdiomDictionary.com or UsingEnglish.com. You should also check out the Rolls off the Tongue Facebook page.

101 Uses For A Cat: #1—iPad Stand

As this picture from Lifehacker's article Seven DIY iPad Stands for Six Bucks or Less shows, cats do have their uses (though ours seems to spend most of its time figuring out how to get us to feed it—or sleeping). Anyway, it occured to me that a fun idea for a lesson would be to show students the cat pic and ask them to come up with some more whacky uses for a cat. They could even take photos. Of course, it should be stressed that cats should not be mistreated in any way, shape, or form.

April Fool!

Hopefully, you spotted that the previous posts about prescription windscreens and Google's animal translation app were April Fools. Here is a round-up of some of the other hoaxes, spoofs and jokes that have appeared in the media today.

• Radio 4's Today programme suggested that Shakespeare was French.
• The First Post said that Gordon Brown had got a border collie puppy called Avril (with pictures!)
• The Moscow Times reported that supermodel Naomi Campbell is set to become a member of United Russia (Vladimir Putin's party).
• The Daily Telegraph claimed that specially trained ferrets are being used to deliver broadband to rural areas (see pic above).
• The Guardian features a new Labour poster campaign portraying Gordon Brown as a 'Dirty Harry figure' (very good, this one!)
• The Daily Mail introduces us to the AA Rocketman (lots more on the Automobile Association site).
• According to The Sun, football referees are to use Segways during next season's Premiership matches.
• Google changed its name to Topeka (it's complicated!).
• Dogs to test foreigners' English (great story from 'EnglishClub.com)

If you're still not fed up with hearing about April Fool's Day, The Guardian News Blog has a round up of the best (and worst) hoaxes from this year and previous years. The Daily Telegraph has a collection of April Fool PR stories. Social Media news blog Mashable presents its choice of the 'Funniest April Fools Jokes', while TechCrunch has a 'Definitive List'. Finally, BBC News Magazine has '10 stories that could be April Fools... but aren't'.

LINKS
• The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time (Museum of Hoaxes)
• April Fools' Day (Wikipedia)
• April Fool's Day (h2g2)

Music Video: OK Go—This Too Shall Pass

This video by little-known Los Angeles band OK Go featuring a four-minute chain reaction of household objects crashing into one another has become a YouTube hit, attracting more than 8.9m views in just three weeks. You can read about how the video was created in this article from The Times.

FOOTNOTE
Rube Goldberg, or Heath Robinson, devices appear to be universally popular. In Germany they are called “what happens nexts”, in Turkey “crabbys”, named after a professor who said they should move sideways like some crustaceans. In Japan they are chindogu, or incredible machines.

LESSON IDEA
Students design their own Rube Goldberg machine (or Heath Robinson contraption) on paperboard or OHP and present it to the class. See examples here and here.

Pic of the Day: The Upside Down House

This bizarre upside down house was created on the grounds of a German zoo. Read more and see more pix >>

VOCABULARY
If something is upside down, it has been turned around so that the part that is usually lowest is above the part that is usually highest. • No-one realized that the painting had been hung upside down.

Ten Word Wiki

Wikipedia is a fantastic resource, but some of the entries can be rather long and sometimes tell us more than we need to know. Enter Ten Word Wiki. TWW is an "encyclopedia for the ADD generation" in which every entry uses up just ten words—no more, no less. Oh, and unlike Wikipedia, TWW has a sense of humour. Here are a few definitions:

• France: Nice and warm and pretty, but full of French people. (Ouch!)
• English (people): Likes: Soccer – Dislikes: Foreigners. Invented English, but can’t speak it.  (ditto)
• Twitter: A virtual social network service with tweets posted by twits.
• People: Other living creatures you should make babies with. Except cousins.
• Amy Winehouse: Singer told to go to rehab. Maybe should have gone.
• Dogs: Not cats. Stupid. The internet is not made of them.
• The iPad: Essentially a giant $500 iPod Touch. No Flash, no porn.
• Albert Einstein: Biggest super genius of all time. But it's all relative.
• Toyota: Manufacturer of cars that run forever... because they can't stop.

LESSON IDEAS
1. Get your students to come up with 10-word definitions for whatever (or whomever) takes their fancy.
2. Give students a list of TWW definitions, and see if they can guess the headword.

Above Cartoon by Peter Steiner. The New Yorker, July 5, 1993 issue (Vol.69, no. 20) page 61

Picture Gallery: People and Signs

When celebrities and signs are juxtaposed in the same photo, the results can be amusing or ironic (or amusingly ironic, or even ironically amusing) as this picture gallery from Telegraph.co.uk shows. Here, Labour's hard man John Prescott makes a point at the party conference in March 2004.

Celebrity Cutout Challenge

Messageboard b3ta is running a challenge which involves creating 'cut-out-and-keep dolls based on celebrities'. Some of the entries are very funny. Some are also very rude or in very bad taste, so you've been warned! Click here to see the most popular entries. (Thanks to Frogsmoke for the tip.)

Video: How to Open a Bottle of Wine with a Shoe

If there's one thing the French are good at it's opening bottles of wine (certainly better than speaking English). But what if you haven't got a corkscrew? No worries—just use your shoe (and a convenient wall).

Video: The Fun Theory

These videos demonstrate that there's more than one way of marketing a car. Volkswagen has launched a series of social experiments in Sweden designed to get people to live greener, more healthy lives by making everyday tasks more fun. The results can be seen on The Fun Theory website.

COMMENTS
1. This is a great example of a viral marketing campaign. The escalator video has had over 3m views on YouTube and is N° 4 on this week's Guardian Viral Video Chart. 
2. The implications for teachers should be obvious: make lessons fun and pupils will want to learn. Well, that's the theory, anyway.

15 Optical and Audio Illusions

The internet is awash with optical illusions and other tricks to fool our senses. Many are diverting; a handful are truly amazing. Telegraph.co.uk has picked 15 of the best on YouTube and Vimeo. Here's one of my favourites.