Docile Whale

Here’s one of those little things that amuses me far more than it should: my wife gave me this notebook to use at work. She said, “It’s friendly. The children will like it.” And it is and they do.
But I like it because of its friendly and charming little poem. Across the top it says: [...]

LOLing

During episode 105 of Californication, the protagonist, Hank Moody as played by David Duchovny, sets off on a beautiful diatribe about the decline of the English language through blogspeak while appearing on the Henry Rollins show.
It’s a great speech in a great episode of a great show. So, great, right?
The trouble is, it’s based [...]

Throw Away Lines

I stayed up late last night, re-reading an old favorite: Glen Cook’s The Black Company. It is a military fantasy, telling the story through the eyes of the company physician and annalist. The world is bleak, harsh, and gritty; the story is primarily action and military campaigning with a dash of romanticism [...]

Impractical Linguistics

It’s no secret that I love languages.  It’s also no secret that I think learning languages is a royal pain in the fundament.
My students know that I study Japanese and Spanish, although I freely admit that I usually only study the later when I am thoroughly sick of the former and can not stand the [...]

Yo' Mama

I just spent my evening translating “yo mama” jokes into Japanese.  Go ahead and take a second or two to wrap your little mind around that.
Can’t quite do it, can you? No, me neither.
It’s a strange little life but I do enjoy it at times.

technorati tags:jokes, japanese, japan, english, yomama

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Last Kyoto Notes

Saturday night, heading back to our hotel from the Gion area, the cab driver took us to the wrong hotel. We had piled into the cab and I spoke to the cab driver in Japanese, telling him the name of our hotel. He leaned over and yelled that there were two hotels in [...]

Tourist Talk

Kyoto is a beautiful city. There are hundreds, literally, of shrines, temples, gardens, and historic places to visit. There are also some fantastic restaurants and shops tucked into the back alleys and side streets. I have now visited Kyoto four times and noticed some changes that I thought were quite interesting. [...]

Incesticide

It’s amazing how some things just get stuck in one’s head. Well, not stuck. More like put away in the mental equivalent of a kitchen drawer and forgotten about. For years even.
I came up against this today when trying to explain the word insecticide to my students. We had been discussing [...]

eBible.com Invitation

My invitation to join eBible.com was in my gmail when I got home from soccer tonight, so I went over to check it out.
My first impression, after about five minutes of playing is that this is a great service for scholars and devotees alike. I ran my first search on "Moses" and spent a [...]

The Best Class I Have Ever Taught

Tonight’s class was the easiest class I have ever taught. It was also one of the more fun. I had only two students and none of us felt like doing much in the way of proper study. So we watched Superman cartoons.
Yeah, Superman.
Along with all the podcasts I subscribe to are a few [...]

Pod People

One of the projects I’ve been working on, one that is taking up an extraordinary amount of time, is finding podcasts for work.
I teach between 12 and 15 classes a week, all focused on either Public Speaking and / or Debating, Marketing, Business English, and Conversational English. It is classes in the last category [...]

Slang

Tonight’s impossible-to-answer-easily question from a student:  When watching or listening to English media, how can one identify slang usages?
My too-difficult-to-understand-easily answer:  The best way to identify slang usages in English is to listen for adjectives used out of context, e.g. “That’s a really cool movie.”  Of course, the movie is not physically cool, hence the [...]