Happy Easter!

A dozen funny eggs get boiled and coloured just to wish you a Happy Easter! :-)

Happy Halloween! (but don't drink and fly...)

The lost consonant

The Lost Consonant is a series of funny illustrations made by Graham Rawle, which appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian for 15 years. Each picture had a caption with a spelling mistake which created a humorous effect. Can you find the mistake in the caption below? Check clicking on 'comments'

Murphy's Laws

If anything can go wrong, it will. And if there is a possibility of many things going wrong, the one that will go wrong is the one that will cause the most damage. Thoughts like these have made American engineer Capt. Edward A. Murphy and his Murphy's Laws famous worldwide. What makes these laws so interesting is that they really seem to work every time! Here are some more examples. Do you know any others? Write them in the comments area - it's easy! For example: If you are in a hurry, the other line will always move faster!

- If it works in theory, it won't work in practice. If it works in practice it won't work in theory.
- If a circuit requires n components, you will find only n - 1 components in stock.
- If the course you want to do has room for "n" students, you will be the "n+1" to apply.
- If you drop a tool or small part while working on a car, it will roll to the exact center underneath the vehicle.
- If you throw anything away, you will need it the next day.

Would you like more practise with "if" sentences? You can find explanations about conditional sentences here. There's also a matching activity, a quiz and two gap-fill activities, with one or two gaps.

Is that what he said?

This is a simple - and clever - TV commercial for Maxell tapes I first saw in the late 1980s. Native speakers can have problems understanding their own language too and may end up hearing strange sound combinations (like in the song below, "cheese head" instead of "she said")! Click here to learn more about connected speech.


And here's what the singer actually said:

Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, Israelite.
My wife and my kids,
They are packed up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to be seen.
Poor me, Israelite.

And here's another funny Maxell advert. But this time the singer simply has terrible pronunciation! :-)

Crazy English

This poem jokes with the idea that the past form of English verbs does not always follow a logic... Look at the verbs in bold; their past form is wrong. Can you correct them? Check the answers (and find more activities) here.


The verbs in English are a fright.
How can we learn to read and write?
Today we speak, but first we spoke;
Some faucets leak, but never loke.
Today we write, but first we wrote;
We bite our tongues, but never bote.

Each day I teach, for years I taught;
And preachers preach, but never praught.
This tale I tell, this tale I told;
I smell the flowers, but never smold.
If knights still slay as once they slew,
Then do we play as once we plew?
If I still do as once I did,
Then do cows moo as once they mid?

I love to win, and games I won;
I seldom sin, and never son.
I hate to lose, and games I lost;
I didn't choose, and never chost.
I love to sing, and songs I sang;
I fling the ball, but never flang.
I strike the ball, that ball I struck;
This poem I like, but never luck.

I take a break, a break I took;
I bake a cake, but never book.
I eat that cake, that cake I ate.
I beat an egg, but never bate.
I often swim, as once I swam;
I skim some milk, but never skam.
I fly a kite that once I flew;
I tie a knot, but never tew.

I see the truth, the truth I saw;
I flee from falsehhod, never flaw.
I stand for truth, as once I stood;
I land a fish, but never lood.
About these verbs I sit and think.
These verbs don't fit. They seem to wink
At me, who sat for years and thought
Of verbs that never fat or wought.

Richard Lederer

Medieval helpdesk - a funny video!

We know that books have been around for centuries, but can you imagine what it was like when people first started using them? What kind of problems did readers have? This funny Norwegian skit plays with the idea that in the beginning people needed help from a 'helpdesk', just like we often do nowadays when we have problems using computers. Here is the short video with English subtitles.
You can also watch an interview with the guy behind the idea.
If you would like to try an activity to practise homophones (words with similar sound but different spelling), click here.

Getting names right

Trying to get the names of some authors and their books right is not easy sometimes... Here is a text (written originally in Portuguese) by Luis Fernando Veríssimo.

- Ok, let’s start again. It´s D.H. Lawrence, of Arabia. T.S. Lawrence wrote ‘Lady Chatterley…’.
- Exactly. Wait! No. It´s T.S. Lawrence of Arabia. D.H. Lawrence wrote ‘Lady Chatterley…’.
- Are you sure?
- Wait a minute. It´s not T.S. Lawrence. It´s T.S. Eliot.
- Eliot of Arabia?
- No! Eliot the poet. It´s E.M. Lawrence.
- E.M. Forster. A Passage to India.
- Then it´s H.G. Lawrence!
- Isn´t it H.G. Wells? War of the Worlds?
- That’s right… So the guy from Arabia is…
- D.H.!
- D.H. wrote Lady Chatterley. Didn’t he?
- Ok, so it´s D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells and… W.H.! That´s it! W.H. Lawrence, of Arabia!
- W.H. is Auden.
- So it must be V.S.. V.S. Lawrence, of Arabia.
- It´s V.S. Naipaul. Or is it W.H. Naipaul and V.S. Auden?
- Naipaul?
- Of India?
- Bingo!
- Why ‘Bingo’???
- I don't know… Oh well, let´s start again…

What you learn watching the film "300"

People sometimes discuss crazy things in online message boards. Going through imdb.com the other day, I came across a funny thread where movie fans talked about Zack Snyder's hit, "300". It's called "300 things I've learned watching 300". Here are 10 things people say they've discovered (my selection):

10- Phalanx: a formation where Spartans hold their shields & spears to protect themselves, kill around 3 Persians and then go off and fight however the hell way they want to fight.

9- It is completely possible to stack a 40-foot-high wall of rotting corpses in a four-hour time span without the use of heavy machinery. And dead Persians make EXCELLENT mortar for stone walls.

8- Blood disappears soon after it's exposed to oxygen.

7- Spartans were terrible at counting: 300 Spartans + 700 Thespians + 1,000 helots = 300 Spartans.

6- Rejected Spartan newborn babies skulls will mysteriously grow to full-size, adult skulls when thrown from a cliff after birth.

5- If you overfeed a rhino, it can grow twice as big as a man.

4- Ninjas were employed by the Persian army.

3- No matter what question a Spartan Captain asks his troops, "OH-WOOOOOH" is considered a completely acceptable answer.

2- The Spartan army brings a CD player with loud rock music to any war.

And...

1- Spartan shields are made from the same metal as Wonder Woman's bracelets.

Read also:

What I've learned watching Hollywood films

Snoopy and the IRS

As the deadline to present our income tax to the IRS (Receita Federal) approaches, wouldn't it be great if we could simply cancel our subscription?





http://www.snoopy.com