The English Blog

Audio Slideshow: Classic Cigarette Ads

Cigarette vending machines should be banned and shops in England, Wales and Northern Ireland should keep stocks out of sight, MPs say. Similar plans are being discussed in Scotland.

But there was a time when there were very few restrictions on tobacco promotion. In this BBC News audio slideshow, Larry Viner, of the Advertising Archives, takes a look at the ingenious, and not so truthful, ways the ad agencies tried to sell cigarettes in the past.

FOOTNOTE
Lest We Forget is a phrase popularised in 1897 by Rudyard Kipling; it formed the refrain of his poem Recessional. If you do something lest something should happen, you do it to try to prevent the other thing from happening. This usage is formal or literary. In everyday speech we would probably say 'in case we forget', etc. In the ad, the sailors have tattooed a capstan on their forearms so that they won't forget which brand they smoke (which doesn't say much for naval intelligence!)

Slideshow: The Most Ridiculous Patents

From Business Week:

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is drowning in a deluge of applications. On Mar. 16, Acting Director John Doll said that even if the office closed its doors, it would take almost two years to clear the backlog. With the agency understaffed and underfunded, it's no wonder some silly applications have slipped through the net. Here are some of the most absurd patents awarded in the past decade, courtesy of Totally Absurd. You'll find some choice statements from the actual patent applications (good luck deciphering some of the language), along with our, often incredulous, commentary.

The patent for the bulletproof desk (drawing below) says: "The present invention relates generally to protection against personal assault, and more particularly to personal assault protection for those in vulnerable environments such as school rooms."

COMMENT
I wish I'd had one of those at school—we had a teacher who was fond of throwing pieces of chalk (or occasionally board rubbers) at inattentive pupils. These days the danger is more likely to come from gun-toting students.

LESSON IDEAS
1. Show students a selection of patent drawing and get them to speculate what the inventions might be for (you'll find plenty more examples on www.totallyaburd.com).
2. Students design their own crazy inventions and present them to the class using the OHP or paperboard (this always works well).

LANGUAGE NOTES
1. A patent is an official right to be the only person or company allowed to make or sell a new product for a certain period of time.
2. You can also use patent as an adjective to describe something, especially something bad, in order to indicate in an emphatic way that you thinks its nature or existence is clear and obvious. • It was a patent lie. • It's patently obvious that he's in love with her.

Slideshow: Photoshop Marketing Disasters

Here's a slideshow I put together to accompany a lesson I'm doing about the recent controversy over Microsoft's digital replacement of a black worker with a white one in a photo on their Polish website (see earlier post on this). 

Photoshop Marketing Disasters

View more presentations from jeffreyhill.

Mills and Boon Turns 100

Mills & Boon, the publisher of romance novels, is celebrating its centenary. Harry Potter may have shifted 400m books in 11 years but Mills & Boon sell the same amount every two. In the UK, it releases 50 romantic titles a month. Its novels, translated into 25 languages, are sold in 109 international markets, and this year it began publishing for 300m English readers in India, where the books, uniquely, are popular with men as well as women. Read more >>

TimesOnline has an amusing picture gallery showing how Mills & Boon covers have changed with time. Here's one of the earlier ones from 1952 (bizarre title—and what's she planning to do with that whip?). 

Slideshow: ELT Blogging

Karenne Sylvester of Kalinago English has posted the results of her blog carnival, which asked the question "What advice would you give to another TEFL teacher interested in becoming a blogger?" The accompanying slideshow contains a lot of useful information for budding bloggers.

English Language Teaching Blogging

View more documents from Karenne Sylvester.

What the F**K is Social Media?

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia are all examples of social media. But what exactly are social media and why are they so important? This excellent slide show provides some answers (via Mashable).

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Words in the News Quiz 2

Here's another quiz based on 20 newspaper headlines which I've featured on The English Blog over the past few weeks. See if you can find the missing words. Answers on the last slide.

Words In The News Quiz 2

View more presentations from jeffreyhill.

Video: 'Charlie's Angels' Actress Dies

Farrah Fawcett has died in a Los Angeles hospital after a long battle with cancer. The actress, who rose to fame as the star of the U.S. TV show "Charlie's Angels" was 62 years old. Sky's Mark Stone reports.

SLIDESHOWS
• Farrah Fawcett (TimesOnline)
• Farrah Fawcett - a life in pictures (Guardian)

READ MORE
• Farrah Fawcett: the crime-fighting sex symbol who lived and died on screen (Guardian)
• Obituary (Guardian)

Words in the News Quiz

See if you can find the missing words in these 20 newspaper headlines which appeared on The English Blog over the past few weeks. Answers on the final slide.

Words In The News Quiz

View more OpenOffice presentations from jeffreyhill.

Picture Gallery: Iran Elections

TimesOnline has a picture gallery on the Iran elections.

MORE IRANIAN ELECTION PICTURE GALLERIES
• The Big Picture (don't miss these incredible images!)

• Guardian.co.uk

• Time

• New York Times

• BBC News

• Wall Street Journal

LINKS

• Iran on the Edge (Pulitzer Center)

• Iran News (Telegraph.co.uk)

• BBC News 

• guardian.co.uk

• The Best Sites For Learning About The Protests In Iran (Larry Ferlazzo)

Doll's House Sells For £50,000

From MailOnline:

You might think someone buying a period house for £50,000 is onto a bargain, until you realise it's only one metre tall.

This breathtaking doll's house is about to sell for the price of several real homes on the UK property market after winning the heart of an overseas collector.

Miniaturist Peter Riches, 64, is planning his first world cruise after a Canadian fan spotted the 23-room masterpiece online.

The tiny 10-bed mansion, with its own servants’ quarters, a music room with grand piano, a hand-crafted games room with snooker table and a library with over 1,000 separately bound books, took Peter a painstaking 15 years to complete.

By comparison, a bona fide two-bed semi-detached end-terrace in Edge Hill, Liverpool, Merseyside, comes in a pound cheaper - at £49,999. Full story and more pictures >>

Click to enlarge

COMMENT
Telegraph.co.uk has a great picture gallery about the doll's house.

Fotopedia: The First Collaborative Photo Encyclopedia

Fotopedia is a new photo sharing site. Here's what Mashable has to say about it:

When we think of online photo sharing, we typically think of sites like Flickr and Picasa where photos are hosted and organized by users. Though these sites definitely serve a purpose in helping us host and share our photos, they don’t do a great job at collectively organizing and displaying photos by content type or subject matter. 

Fotopedia, a photo encyclopedia site that launches to the public today, hopes to become the Wikipedia for photos by centralizing the photo experience around user-created topics and subject matters. The sleek web interface is coupled with a desktop application for a community experience on site or off. 

With Fotopedia, users can create or edit pages, which are photo-driven articles, and can use the desktop application to add photos from their desktop library, or online libraries like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook. Full review >>

COMMENTS
First impressions are very positive. The quality of the photos is excellent. A particularly useful feature is the Wikipedia and Google Maps information which accompanies the photos to make up an article. You can also create your own widgets. Here's an example:

London on Fotopedia

D-Day Anniversary Slideshow

Click to see the Guardian.co.uk slideshow.

MORE PICTURES
• MailOnline

• The Independent

• Downing Street's Flickr photostream

Crisis Stings Britons in France and Spain

The New York Times reports on the problems facing Britons who have set up home in France and Spain and are now feeling the pinch as the recession bites.

A stumbling British economy is doing what the French have not been able to do in 200 years: rout the British.

For more than a decade, Englishmen have been one of Britain’s biggest cross-channel exports: they bought second homes in French villages, or even retired there. They came to make up as much as one-fifth of the population in some French villages.

But now the flow of Britons is slowing and, in some cases, reversing course. Full story >>

COMMENT
Englishmen? What about English women? And the Scots, Welsh and Irish, for that matter?

SLIDESHOW 

• Britons in France Getting By (New York Times)

General Motors Resources

This 1954 photo showing a man leaning on his Buick comes from Telegraph.co.uk's slideshow A History of General Motors in Pictures. Here are some more GM resources:

• In Pictures: General Motors (BBC News slideshow)
• From biggest carmaker to biggest bankruptcy (BBC News: news, features, analysis, videos, links)
• General Motors (Telegraph.co.uk: news, analysis, pictures, graphics)
• General Motors (Guardian.co.uk: audio, video, articles)