2010/06/25 10:39
Ken Livingstone was asked in an interview what he would most like to achieve as mayor. He replied:Total independence for London. If London was independent we would have more people than half the members of the UN do, we’d be able to use more of our wealth to provide better infrastructure and a better quality of life instead of pumping...
2010/06/21 6:40
Lena Meyer-Landrut's weird English pronunciation (only when she's singing – when she talking, it's just normal mediocre school English) has attracted some attention.I've tried to transcribe the beginning of the song:Some people (at least in Germany and Denmark) have been trying to defend her pronunciation by claiming she's singing in Cockney (by which I guess they mean Estuary English), but...
2010/06/29 22:36
On Marcel’s last day of school before the summer holidays last Friday, he claims only 50-60 kids turned up (out of two thousand pupils or so).
However, all the teachers were there.
Now, I might be getting old and grumpy, but the teachers are paid by our taxes, so this seems to be a waste of money.
They should either make it an in-service day, so that the teachers can use the day on something useful, enforce attendance, or start the holidays one day early.
At the moment we pay for the teachers to do nothing, and the few kids whose parents won’t let them be off are suffering while the rest are out having a great time.
2010/06/24 21:20
Det var ganske fortjent, at Japan lammetævede Danmark.For det første var alle danskere – inkl. landsholdet – iflg. de danske aviser overbeviste om, at Japan var et ubetydeligt hold, som det ville blive let at vinde over.Til VM er der ingen dårlige hold, og alle modstandere skal tages seriøst. Det er trænerens ansvar.For det andet tog Danmark ikke højderne seriøst. At placere sin træningslejr ved kysten, når alle ens indledende kampe er i højlandet, er amatøragtigt. De danskere spillere har...
2010/06/22 6:00
After my recent blog posting about penis vs. peonies, I found this in John Wells's Accents of English: The British Isles:Some speakers also have instances of apparently autonomous length contrasts in other environments, e.g. leek [lik] vs. leak [liːk], vane [ven] vs. vain [veːn], creek [krik] vs. creak [kriːk], choke vs. joke, made vs. maid, badge vs. cadge.However, when I...
2010/06/20 8:29
¿Qué pasó con mi tío bisabuelo (el hermano de la madre del padre de mi madre), un hombre que se llamaba Niels Peter Sørensen Smidt (o Schmidt) y que nació el 18 de enero de 1878 en Vrinners (o Vrinders)...
2010/06/19 23:38
Today's wedding of Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden was not a big media event in the UK.Because my mum is a royalist, I tried to find it amongst the hundreds of TV channels on our Sky box, but to no...
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