The English Blog

Halloween Crosswords

Here's a Halloween crossword from BBC Learning English. 

And here's another one.

W. (pronounced "dubya")

W., the new film by Oliver Stone, director of one of my all-time favourites Wall Street, recounts the career of President George W. Bush. W. scores 57% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and Rotten Tomatoes is the place to go if you want to read reviews. RT sums up the film as follows: 'A surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the 43rd American president, W. is fascinating in spots, but merely rudimentary as a whole'. We can safely wait for the DVD then.

You can watch an extended trailer on the official site.

Language notes: 'W' stands for Walker. 'Dubya', a deformation of  the more correct 'double you', is Bush's nickname. Interestingly, in French the letter 'w' is 'double v'.

CNN Video - Food from China

There have been a series of scares involving food produced in China recently. First, there was a scandal about contaminated milk and now eggs. This CNN video looks at what food China produces and who buys it. I've provided a transcript below. The Guardian has a good article on the background to worries about Chinese food safety.

Lesson idea: You could use this video as part of a lesson on food vocabulary. A good site for learning food vocabulary is LanguageGuide.org.

Food from China - Transcript

JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The Chinese import more food than they sell to the rest of the world. Even so, they've managed to corner the market on things like garlic. This country produces about 75% of the world's garlic. That's one reason, perhaps, why food exports from China have increased by almost 30% this year alone. And Japan is China's number one customer. Last year, the Japanese bought about $9 billion U.S. worth of food, and a third of that was seafood. The United States also bought more than a billion dollars worth of seafood, and overall, the U.S. is China's number two customer for food. And despite all the controversy there over Brand China, the Americans are actually buying more food from China than ever before, up almost 20 percent this year alone, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

So, what are the Americans buying? So far this year, Americans have bought more apple juice than they did for all of 2007, spending half a billion dollars, a lot more than any other country. The same deal with canned mushrooms. In fact, China is one of the biggest exporters of fruit and vegetables, sending apples to Russia, tea to Morocco, rice to Korea, and last year, selling a million tons of fresh eggs around the world. But it's still not known what impact the contaminated milk scandal will have on exports. Tainted milk powder ingredients have been found in everything from cookies to chocolate to pizza in more than a dozen countries so far. In the coming months, the world might just lose its appetite a little for food coming from China. John Vause, CNN, Beijing.

Halloween Logos around the Web

From Mashable:

It’s that time of the year again - a slow news Friday turns into a Halloween logo design contest. All the web companies will try to show off how cool, funny, and unbusinesslike they are by adorning their logos with cute little pumpkins and ghosts. See the logos >>

And here's one they missed:

Kaltoons - the official site of Kevin Kallaugher

 One of my favourite cartoonists is KAL, who does a weekly cartoon for The Economist. KAL's official website is Kaltoons, where you can find a portfolio featuring his favourite cartoons and magazine covers from his 30-year career. KAL also produces animation clips and has his own channel on YouTube. Here's a clip featuring the future ex-President of the U.S.A. 

Slideshare Puts Spotlight on Election Slideshow

Some good news to start this Halloween Day. My slideshow on US Election Advertising has been included in the 'Spotlight section' on the SlideShare homepage.

Portfolio.com - Multimedia Business Resources

Portfolio.com, the online edition of Condé Nast's Portfolio magazine, has an excellent collection of multimedia business resources including interactive features, videos, slideshows, audio slideshows and graphics.

Verdict: A great source of material for the Business English teacher.

Here's a topical cartoon from the weekly editorial cartoons slideshow (click to enlarge):

Hallowe'en Resources

Hallowe'en (derived from "All Hallow's Eve," so called as it is the day before All Saints day) is celebrated on the night of October 31, usually by children dressing in costumes and going door-to-door collecting sweets.

In some countries, notably the USA, Halloween is big business. A few years ago it looked as though Halloween was going to become popular in France. Marketers invested a lot of money in promoting it but it hasn't really caught on and is now just a minor distraction. Full marks to the French for resisting American cultural imperialism!

If are interested in Halloween, you can find articles, stories, games, cartoons and trivia relating to Halloween on the British Council's LearnEnglishCentral site.

US Election - Top Ten YouTube Hits

In this election, YouTube has provided a new way for people to consume and communicate their views - from the serious to the silly, the official to the outrageous. BBC News has compiled a list of the Top Ten YouTube Election videos. No Paris Hilton I'm afraid but here's one of the most powerful:

Zombies in Plain English

The fact that it's Halloween provides a good excuse to re-post this Zombie video from CommonCraft.

The Local - Sweden's News in English

The Local is a site offering news about Sweden in English. Here's a selection of headlines from today's edition:

• Diarrhea 'no excuse' for speeding
• Traffic agency bans reverse oral sex
• 'One-eye' defence fails for drunken driver
• Swinging: A very Swedish pastime or the last taboo?

OK, I admit I was being selective (there was also "How has the financial crisis affected you?") but it makes one suspect there must be some truth in that Swedish stereotype!

Palme d'Or Winner - The Class

A very different film from Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (see post before last) is Entre Les Murs (The Class), which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year. 

The film chronicles a year in the life of a junior high school class in one of the rougher districts of Paris. I haven't seen the film yet but I wouldn't expect too many laughs...

The New York Times called it 'an artful, intelligent movie.' Here's the trailer, subtitled in English.

'The Class' Theatrical Trailer @ Yahoo! Video

Halloween Slideshow

Here's a Halloween slideshow I created for use with my English for Marketing students. There are some graphs and charts at the end which would be useful for practising the language of trends and numbers.

Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis

Forget about Halloween, the big marketing sensation in France at the moment is the DVD release of the film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks). The shops are full of Ch'ti merchandise and spin-offs. The film, which tells the story of a a post office manager from Provence in southern France who is relocated to Bergues, a small town in the north, was a surprise box-office hit earlier this year. Over 20 million people went to see the film, a figure bettered only by Titanic. It fared less well in the UK despite an ecstatic review in The Guardian:

An unexpected pièce de résistance emerges from a surprising quarter. The subtitler succeeds in matching French mis-speaks with plausible English equivalents in a tour de force which merits the creation of a whole new Oscar category and provides British audiences (insofar as there are any) with an extra layer of entertainment denied to their francophone counterparts.

Will Smith's production company has bought the rights to remake the film in the U.S. I wonder how they will adapt the story. Much of the humour in the French original comes from the fact that the southerner can't understand the local dialect (Ch'ti). I suppose a west-coast yuppie ending up in Harlem might be one possibility... Or is that too obvious? Any suggestions?

While we're all waiting for that, here's the French trailer with English subtitles.

US Election Sites 27 - C-Span Classroom

I know it's a bit late in the day now but here's one more election resource from C-Span which features lesson plans produced by teachers.