Here’s a bit of ESL stuff I’ll be using with my class: handout on using tables to build lists of contrasts in writing.
Month: September 2004
Poll Results and New Poll
It’s been an age, but here are the results of the last poll: For the question, 30% of respondents favored him saying, “Excuse me, sir, but could you say that again in English?” while 20% of the twenty respondents (likely SF fans) favored him asking random Texans, “So do you know Bruce Sterling, like, personally?” If you would like to check the poll results, please feel free to do so. And please vote in the new poll in the right sidebar. We at eclexys I hope that this new poll is a little more amusing than the last one.
Do students want foreign teachers?
Found at Simon’s ever-worthwhile Asia By Blog roundup: Scott Sommers has written an article about his perception that Taiwanese students don’t particularly want foreign teachers. There are some points in the comments section relating to the parallels in Korea, especially posts by our famous Blinger. I disagree with some of what Blinger says, such as the terribly superficial judgment on how real professors and teachers ought to dress, and I can say from experience that it seems to me professor who wear ties can, at least in some places, expect just as much ridiculous treatment from the Korean administration as …
Rats, Levers, Bad Couples, And the Cost-Benefit Analysis
Over at Every Topic in the Universe(s?), the blogger for whom I have no other name than either “omniverse” (or “impressed”, the name under which she last posted) raised the following question: If they give a rat a lever it can push to get a food pellet, it’ll push whenever it wants a food pellet. If they give a rat a lever it can push that will SOMETIMES give it a food pellet, it will push the lever CONSTANTLY, will become virtually obsessed with pushing it. HUH?!! It’s counter-intuitive, isn’t it? To me, not really. It makes a lot of …
Can you explain this?
APOD: 2004 September 13 – Identify this Phenomenon UPDATE: The guy who took the picture explains here. Other discussion can be seen here.
Rare KLF, Weird Commentaries That Aren’t So Weird, and Thoughts on the Kleptocrats
I’ve downloaded something quite incredible, by that old group the KLF. I queued up the two long tracks and set in to listen. The first track seems to be a lot of prescient stuff foreshadowing a lot of later releases, but the second track is quite something, a spooky narration with a rich electronic background. The narration is a storyteller’s apocalyptic vision, but very much of a latter-day visionary’s trek into the strangeness of outside of the world we normally live in. Anyway, the limited edition LP I downloaded is something that doesn’t seem to be listed in most of …
The Time Traveler’s Dinner Party
Friday Five, a few days late, from the evil mind of… oh, gee, that’s my question: You’re given a chance to use a time machine to snatch five historical personages and bring them to the twenty-first century. Perhaps you’re saving them from their awful fates in history, or perhaps just picking them up for teatime and a Saturday night dinner party. The catch is, there’s a problem with the time machine and a possibility that you will need to house all of them in your living space for a few days, pehaps up to a week. So they’d better get …
Yeah, That Makes Sense!
So I did my first hour in the English Cafe today. It was alright I suppose, though there was one conversation and one expression I thought worth noting. I’ll start with the expression first: 동부인 하다. It means “to go out with one’s wife” or “to accompany one’s wife”. What a nice thing, to have a specific verb for going out with your wife. Sounds nicer than saying, “We still date, even though we’re married now.” Anyway, I liked it. More amusing was this conversation I had with a girl who came to the cafe to interview a foreign teacher. …
My Song, Coming To a Cell Phone Near You
Okay, it’s probably more like “our song, coming to a cell phone somewhere which you’re unlikely to call…”, but hey, it’s my baby and I am a little pleased. Apparently, SK (or is it KT? one of those big Korean telecom companies, anyway) has purchased the rights to provide users with a “Color Ring” using one of Dabang’s songs, “Deep End” which was penned by me. (See lyrics here.) What’s a Color Ring? In Korea, telephone companies provide all kinds of services to users. One of them, among the many hundreds, is that for a small fee, you get to …
Another Article On Why We Should Try Not To Be Illiterate
There was a time when I would have thought that anyone would agree that being a literate person is a good thing—literacy, by which mean more than a mere ability to read, I also mean a decent knowledge of what has been written, at the very least by significant writers in the world (however one defines that). But since leaving University, I have discovered that, no, in fact, most people don’t think that waY at all. I should have seen it before; while one of my two siblings shares my bookish interest and some of my reading habits, most of …