LnR 048 Throw under the bus

Two friends are talking on the phone:

A: Hi, Monica, this is Joanna.

B: Oh, hey, Joanna! What's up?

A: Nothing much. I haven't talked to you for a while, so I thought I'd give you a call.

B: Yeah, I've been busy with a project at work. Our team had four weeks to renovate ten rooms for a law firm downtown. 

A: Four weeks?

B: Right. The first three weeks were for designing the rooms and choosing the materials. We had meetings with a representative of the law firm twice a week to make sure we were on track. 

A: Then only one week to do the renovations? Is that enough time?

B: Yes, because we hire contractors to do most of the work, like painting the walls and putting in new carpeting. Some of the rooms got new office furniture, so we also had to hire movers. 

A: So, did you meet the deadline?

B: No! We forgot to order the curtains! The windows in that building are an unusual size, so the curtains had to be custom-made. That takes two weeks. I was the one who chose the color of the curtains and the team leader chose the place that would make them. I thought he would place the order and I guess he thought I would place the order. 

A: What happened?

B: When the law firm complained to our supervisor, my team leader totally threw me under the bus! He said I was supposed to order the curtains, so I was reprimanded by my boss. I was so hacked off. 

LnR 047 The Brothers Karamazov

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28054

The Brothers Karamazov

Translated from the Russian of

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Constance Garnett

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.

He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri, by his first wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor Pavlovitch's first wife, Adelaïda Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly rich and distinguished noble family, also landowners in our district, the Miüsovs. How it came to pass that an heiress, who was also a beauty, and moreover one of those vigorous, intelligent girls, so common in this generation, but sometimes also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless, puny weakling, as we all called him, I won't attempt to explain. I knew a young lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot of hers, had been less picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most likely the suicide would never have taken place. This is a fact, and probably there have been not a few similar instances in the last two or three generations. Adelaïda Ivanovna Miüsov's action was similarly, no doubt, an echo of other people's ideas, and was due to the irritation caused by lack of mental freedom. She wanted, perhaps, to show her feminine independence, to override class distinctions and the despotism of her family.

LnR 046 Hip Hop Slang (JK!)

Slang - Jargon - Regional Expressions

A conversation between a student and a teacher (me!)

A: Miss Buswell, can you teach us some slang words?

B: Well, I have a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is "no".

A: What's the long answer?

B: Slang is for a certain group of people, in a certain place, sometimes in a certain time.

A: We want to learn some hip hop slang!

B: Well, you're talking to the wrong person! Few people of my generation listen to hip hop and rap. I don't even know the difference between the two!

A: How can we learn it?

B: Simple. Listen to the music and read articles about it online.

A: I've heard of the word "bling".

B: Yeah, that's an example of a slang word that is now commonly used. It means flashy, expensive jewelry.

A: Right.

B: Now, you know I'm from the South.

A: South America?

B: No, the southern part of the U.S. We have words in the South that others areas don't use. "Fixing to" means "about to" or "getting ready to". And "y'all" means "you all", or the plural form of "you". "Y'all" is very common in the South. But I don't use it when I talk to you and I don't teach it, because it's not useful to you unless you are going to live in the South.

TQ 045 Janek from Germany

Janek and his friend Jonathan stayed in my apartment in Nanning for three nights. They were volunteer English teachers in a town in Myanmar for three months, then they rode their bikes to Hong Kong. When I hosted them they had already cycled 3,500 kilometers, from Myanmar to Thailand, Laos and Vietnam to China. Listen as he talks about cycling and camping, his favorite sport called parkour, and an interesting book, "The Lord of the Flies". You might want to watch some parkour videos. It's amazing what people can do!

Here are some words you may not be familiar with: flooded, inflatable air mattress, interactive, snowboard and paranoid.

LnR 045 Sherlock Holmes' A Study in Scarlet

by Arthur Conan Doyle

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/244

IN the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.

The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.

Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawar. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was dispatched, accordingly, in the troopship "Orontes," and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.

LnR 044 I caught a cold

I wrote this dialogue because I've been a bit under the weather lately. I thought I had a cold, but it turned into a mild sinus infection. I will survive. :-) This is just a short podcast, and I didn't take the time to edit out when I had to cough. Fortunately, I just had to cough one time.

This is a dialogue between two people who work together:

A: Hi, Melinda. I didn't see you yesterday.

B: Yeah. I took a sick day. My daughter caught a cold at kindergarten last week. I must've (must have) caught it from her.

A: Did she miss any days of school?

B: Yeah, two. My husband stayed home with her. His job is more flexible than mine.

A: That's for sure! If we miss a day of work here, we have twice as much to do when we come back.

B: I know. The work just piles up when we are gone. The company really needs to hire some more people.

A: Yeah, I know. But they are too cheap. So they make us do more and more work.

B: You know, I'm still not feeling well, but I didn't want to miss another day.

A: You look a little red.

B: Yeah, I still have a fever. And a headache. You know what? Forget all the work. I'm going home. I need to go to bed. I'll call the manager from my car and explain.

A: I understand. See you tomorrow.

B: I hope!

TQ 044 Jonathan from Germany

I hosted Jonathan and his friend Janek at my apartment in Nanning for three days. They are on a gap year (between high school and university) and have recently been volunteer teachers in Myanmar. They stayed with me as they were cycling from Myanmar to Hong Kong. Jonathan has lived in several places, including Hong Kong, New York state, Berlin and Potsdam, Germany. He has a near-native accent in English because of living in the U.S. as a boy and has a very broad vocabulary because of a good education and untold hours spent reading books. He's a vegetarian who likes sushi. Listen as he talks about how Germans celebrate Easter (Easter bunny, Easter eggs) and about how unique the Burmese (Myanmarese?) capitol of Naypyidaw is.

Warning! Jonathan speaks quickly sometimes and he uses a lot of words you may not know. Here are some of the words that may be unfamiliar to you: to theorize, derived from, to tone down, to slack off, trilogy, grief, interaction, intuitive, to reinforce, brevity, nuclear family, to correlate, to be miffed, hit or miss, dye, bonfire, gigantic, surreal, testimony, and astrology.

LnR 043 Shakespeare's St. Crispin Day's Speech

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Crispin's_Day_Speech

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say "To-morrow is Saint Crispian."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words—
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

LnR 042 Pets

Note: I have a rather long introduction. If you want to start at the dialogue, go to 8:45.

A: Say, do you have any pets?

B: Yeah, I've got a dog.

A: What kind? A little one?

B: No, not at all. I've got a German shepherd. It take him for a long walk every night.

A: Ah, those are beautiful dogs. Me, I've got a cat. She's a white Persian. You know, the kind with a flat face. I have to give her a bath once a week.

B: I bet she's really pretty. Does she like to play with toys?

A: Yeah, but not as much as when she was a kitten. Her favorite toy is a simple ball of yarn.

B: That sounds really cute. My dog doesn't do anything special. He just follows me around the house, and he likes to sleep on the floor by my bed.

A: My cat sleeps on the bed with me! Do you have any other pets, like a bird or a fish?

B: No, just the dog. But my friend has a rabbit.

A: Oh, I love bunnies! I'm thinking about getting one next year. I've got a friend who has a snake and a lizard.

B: Oh, my gosh! I would be so scared to have those in my house. I think they are creepy.

A: They are unusual, that's for sure.

LnR 041 Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row,

Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas

Phileas Fogg was a member of the Reform, and that was all.

The way in which he got admission to this exclusive club was

He was recommended by the Barings, with whom he had an open

Was Phileas Fogg rich? Undoubtedly. But those who knew him best