Mortimer's English Corner

Margin Call script

2011-12-09T04:28:00.000-08:00

Hi howya doing?

Here's a link to the script of the flick we saw at the end of the Fall Semester, called Margin Call. I would read it about fourteen times until I memorized the dialogue, then watch it again with no subtitles....if I didn't:
ALREADY.
KNOW.
ENGLISH.

That's what I would probably do, anyhoo.

See you around,

Mortimer

Margin Call script

Margin Call trailer (youtube)

M2 Wednesday Learn to Croon with Bing Crosby

2011-12-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

Hiya how ya doing?

Boy are you guys in for a treat! Here are the lyrics for "Learn to Croon" sung by my old pal Bing. Bub-bub-bubba-boo! With a link to the youtube.

See you around,

Mortimer

Learn to Croon

SSE L2 TOEFL group 3 Remise à Niveau #1;

2011-11-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

Hiya Bud,

Here's a link to the test we did on November 22.

See ya around,
Mortimer

November 22 MCQ structure and vocab test

DSP groups 1 & 2 Boston Tea Party speaking exercise

2011-11-18T01:27:00.000-08:00

Hiya there,

Here's the link to the recording of "Things We Forgot to Remember: The Boston Tea Party" by Michael Portillo.

The Boston Tea Party

See you around,

Mortimer

SSE L2 Group 3 and 4 There Will Be Blood speaking exercise (with a link to script and video extract)

2011-11-15T12:07:00.000-08:00

Hi there all you Toefl economical socialist scientists!

The script has 3 pages, plus a bit of a page 4 but only down to "Don't bully me, Daniel!"
You need to have a group of 6.
One pair does Daniel and Eli on page 1. (2 out of six done, then)
One group does Daniel and Eli on page 2 (4 out of six done, then)
One group does Daniel and Eli on page 3 and a bit (that's 6 actors out of six).

That would be 6 people or one group. Then another group of 6 will take over and continue in the same way until we have everyone in the groups who has done at least one character, either Daniel or Eli, on at least one page.

You must memorize your lines: no paper.

Oh, here's the link to the script:

Script for final scene of There Will Be Blood

Download final scene (click "download anyway")

If you have any further questions, I can be contacted under a tarpaulin in the main circus tent.

See you around, Mortimer

M2 TOEIC Wednesday: A "Point of View" about tyrants and despots from Mary Beard

2011-11-08T05:58:00.000-08:00

Hiya M2 TOEIC Wednesday class,

Take a listen Mary Beard's opinions about despots and tyrants and see if you can make a 125-word summary for the Wednesday November 30 class.

See you around,

Mortimer

Tyrants and despots

For DSP!! Philip Bond on the Monarchy and the complex constitution

2011-10-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

Hi there!

Here are links to Philip Bond's essay on the Monarchy. 200 words in a summary would do very nicely on November 5.

See you around,

Mortimer

The Monarchy part 1

The Monarchy part 2

There Will Be Blood script

2011-10-20T08:17:00.000-07:00

Hi there Bud,

Here's the script for There Will Be Blood. If you read it, you'll be able to talk out loud during the film and annoy everybody!

There Will Be Blood script

See you around,

Mortimer

M2 Toeic Wednesday Blue Moon by Ray Noble's Orchestra sung by Al Bowlly

2011-10-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

Hiya Bud,

Here's the song from the Wednesday M2 Toeic class. See if you can get all the words (no cheating).

Al Bowlly: Blue Moon

See you around,

Mortimer Snerd

2011-10-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

SSE L2 group 3 & 4: Holy Smoke! Quantifiers, Determiners, Pronouns and other hocus pocus!

2011-10-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Well I'll be! I never thought I'd be saying those long word without strings and wires. Anyhow, here are some links to some pretty hefty grammar words:

Both, neither & either

Each & every

Determiners or pronouns

Quantifiers

Rotsa ruck!

Mortimer

SSE L2 group 3: Here are some dumb US State Laws

2011-10-04T08:07:00.000-07:00

Hi there SSE L2 Group 3,

Try these laws on for size. Put these laws in your pipe and smoke them.

Dumb state laws

See you around,

Mortimer

America,not the Middle East

2011-09-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Hiya there Group 4 SSE L2 Toefl!

Here's the text you must summarize in 200 words for Oct. 6

Rotsa ruck!

Mortimer

The Americas,

Not the Middle East,

Will Be the World Capital

of Energy

Adios, OPEC.

BY AMY MYERS JAFFE | SEPT/OCT 2011

For half a century, the global energy supply's center of gravity has been the Middle East. This fact has had self-evidently enormous implications for the world we live in -- and it's about to change.
By the 2020s, the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere, where it was prior to the ascendancy of Middle Eastern megasuppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1960s.
The reasons for this shift are partly technological and partly political. Geologists have long known that the Americas are home to plentiful hydrocarbons trapped in hard-to-reach offshore deposits, on-land shale rock, oil sands, and heavy oil formations.
The U.S. endowment of unconventional oil is more than 2 trillion barrels, with another 2.4 trillion in Canada and 2 trillion-plus in South America -- compared with conventional Middle Eastern and North African oil resources of 1.2 trillion. The problem was always how to unlock them economically.
But since the early 2000s, the energy industry has largely solved that problem. With the help of horizontal drilling and other innovations, shale gas production in the United States has skyrocketed from virtually nothing to 15 to 20 percent of the U.S. natural gas supply in less than a decade.
By 2040, it could account for more than half of it. This tremendous change in volume has turned the conversation in the U.S. natural gas industry on its head; where Americans once fretted about meeting the country's natural gas needs, they now worry about finding potential buyers for the country's surplus.
Meanwhile, onshore oil production in the United States, condemned to predictions of inexorable decline by analysts for two decades, is about to stage an unexpected comeback. Oil production from shale rock, a technically complex process of squeezing hydrocarbons from sedimentary deposits, is just beginning.
But analysts are predicting production of as much as 1.5 million barrels a day in the next few years from resources beneath the Great Plains and Texas alone -- the equivalent of 8 percent of current U.S. oil consumption.
The development raises the question of what else the U.S. energy industry might accomplish if prices remain high and technology continues to advance. Rising recovery rates from old wells, for example, could also stem previous declines.
On top of all this, analysts expect an additional 1 to 2 million barrels a day from the Gulf of Mexico now that drilling is resuming. Peak oil? Not anytime soon.
The picture elsewhere in the Americas is similarly promising. Brazil is believed to have the capacity to pump 2 million barrels a day from "pre-salt" deepwater resources, deposits of crude found more than a mile below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean that until the last couple of years were technologically inaccessible.
Similar gains are to be had in Canadian oil sands, where petroleum is extracted from tarry sediment in open pits. And production of perhaps 3 million to 7 million barrels a day more is possible if U.S. in situ heavy oil, or kerogen, can be produced commercially, a process that involves heating rock to allow the oil contained within it to be pumped out in a liquid form.
There is no question that such developments face environmental hurdles. But industry is starting to see that it must find ways to get over them, investing in nontoxic drilling fluids, less-invasive hydraulic-fracturing techniques, and new water-recycling processes, among other technologies, in hopes of shrinking the environmental impact of drilling.
And like the U.S. oil industry, oil-thirsty China has also recognized the energy potential of the Americas, investing billions in Canada, the United States, and Latin America.
The revolution-swept Middle East and North Africa, meanwhile, will soon be facing up to an inconvenient truth about their own fossil-fuel legacy: Changes of government in the region have historically led to long and steep declines in oil production.
Libya's oil output has never recovered to the 3.5 million barrels a day it was producing when Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi overthrew King Idris in 1969; instead it has been stuck at under 2 million barrels a day for three decades and is now close to zero. Iran produced more than 6 million barrels a day in the times of the shah, but saw oil production fall precipitously below 2 million barrels a day in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
It failed to recover significantly during the 1980s and has only crept back to 4 million in recent years. Iraq's production has also suffered during its many years of turmoil and now sits at 2.7 million barrels a day, lower than the 3.5 million it produced before Saddam Hussein came to power.
The Arab Spring stands to complicate matters even further: A 1979-style disruption in Middle Eastern oil exports is hardly out of the question, nor are work stoppages or strikes by oil workers caught up in the region's political zeitgeist.
All in all, upwards of 21 million barrels a day of Arab oil production are at stake -- about a quarter of global demand. The boom in the Americas, meanwhile, should be food for thought for the Middle East's remaining autocrats: It means they may not be able to count on ever-rising oil prices to calm restive populations.
This hydrocarbon-driven reordering of geopolitics is already taking place. The petropower of Iran, Russia, and Venezuela has faltered on the back of plentiful American natural gas supply: A surplus of resources in the Americas is sending other foreign suppliers scrambling to line up buyers in Europe and Asia, making it more difficult for such exporters to assert themselves via heavy-handed energy "diplomacy."
The U.S. energy industry may also be able to provide the technical assistance necessary for Europe and China to tap unconventional resources of their own, scuttling their need to kowtow to Moscow or the Persian Gulf. So watch this space: America may be back in the energy leadership saddle again.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930

2011-09-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

Hiya there!

Here's your scan for the collective sentence you made, with corrections,

and a link to infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

Smoot-Hawley made the world poor but increased business for ventriloquists, oddly

See you around,

Mortimer

SSE L2 : FDR was a great leader, but...

2011-09-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

Hiya there!

Here's a link to Amity Schlaes' article in the Washington Post:

FDR was a great leader but a lousy economist

See ya!

Mortimer S.

Barron's ibt Toefl 12th edition contents and learning strategies

2011-09-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

Hiya there Bud!

I bet you want to learn English really fast, eh? Well, all you have to do is follow these instructions here. This is a genuine way to learn the lingo in no time (8 - 16 weeks. That's pretty fast for learning a language, I've been told. So here's the contents of the book, and at the back you have the timetable for learning English.

Here's the link:

Genuine, bona fide way to learn English, guaranteed.

See you around,

Mortimer

Get your As It Happens podcast here!

2010-02-04T03:30:00.000-08:00

Hiya fun seekers!

Here's a link for podcasts from the As It Happens radio program from the CBC. These two ladies interview pundits, news makers, victims and perpetrators. They talk about law, politics, international relations and zany stuff like transgendered puppies dancing during the beginning of the baseball season in Florida.

Listen to this everyday instead of news of dancing puppies on French radio, and your language skills will increase exponentially while you sleep. It works in iTunes, Google Reader or in all other podcast readers.

http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/

Get Canadian university info here!

2010-02-03T01:30:00.000-08:00

Hiya Bud,

I know a lot of you guys are thinking about going to Harvard or Oxford, which are pretty snazzy places with neat colourful sweaters and stuff. But boy, do they cost a lot of dough! You’ve got to be raking it in to go there, or maybe kidnap the dean.

How about heading off to a Canadian university? I'm sending you a podcast on the subject from Toronto's Financial Post newspaper where they shoot the breeze about the problems and benefits of uni's.

Canadian university podcast

You can also go to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_Canada and look at each university website.

A larger list is from the University of Waterloo (one of the best schools) http://uwaterloo.ca/canu/index.php

Here is an interest site called univforum: http://www.univforum.com/ They do a free ranking of universities for us skinflints. http://www.univforum.com/canadian-university-ranking.html

There is also a forum. http://www.univforum.com/canadian-universities/viewforum.php?f=1 where you can learn where to get the best pizza, etc.

This site analyses the uni's by study subject: http://www.canadian-universities.net/

Another site which does this a bit more precisely is here: http://oraweb.aucc.ca/dcu_e.html

So happy hunting. The bottom line is that if you go to U. of T(oronto), UBC, McGill, U. of Western Ontario/Queen's U. (business), U. of Waterloo, U. of Carleton (Pol Sci) or several others, you're getting Ivy League quality at much cheaper tuition prices and living expenses. Whatever financial difficulties Cdn uni's are having are nothing compared to the hard times at US universities, which are virtually bankrupt.

Canada

's economy is in much better shape than the

melt-down, where people walk around in sandwich boards. But don't take my word for it, check out these links and make your own decision!

Keep your stick on the ice (Canadian salutation),

Mortimer

Get your English phonemes now.

2009-11-26T08:10:00.000-08:00

Hello there, Bud,

Some of you guys sure sound weird, like you just got off the boat. Sometimes I can't tell what you're talking about! But you can fix this and train yourself to get the sounds of English just right. Here are two places you can go:

BBC Learning English Pronuciation: The Sounds of English videos

and to fool around with the sounds with games and quizzes so you'll be saying them in your sleep:

Cambridge English on-line: phonetics (try out the "Phon' Maze")

If you can't stop using your mouse, there's a clickable phonetic symbol chart which give the sound for each one:
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/try/activities/phonemic-chart

So you'll feel the difference with the new muscles you have to use to make yourself sound like an English person.

See you around,

Mortimer

The TOEFL Book Creed. Away you go!

2009-09-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

Hiya there!

Sometimes I need to get all excited if I have to learn. It's sort of what Schopenhauer and Vygotsky were talking about around the campfire, you know, when they said there was a need for emotional input for the brain to work. So I found this in the ventriloquist library. It was originally about dummies, but I changed the words for the Toefle test. It's best to memorize it by heart and shout it every night before you go to sleep. It goes like this:

This is my Toefl Book. There are many like it, but this one is MINE. My Toefl Book is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My Toefl Book without me is useless.

Without my Toefl Book, I am useless. I must answer my Toefle test true. I must answer straighter than my anglo who is trying to test me. I must answer him before he asks me. I will...

Before God I swear this creed. My Toefl Book and myself are the defenders of my future. We are the masters of our destiny. We are the saviors of my country. So be it, until there is no enemy, but PEACE.

So start chanting now, good and loud (unless the the neighbors complain and say they have to get up early to study their Toefl).

See you around,

Mortimer

Check out your QWERTY keyboard

2009-09-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Yikes!! What was that?

Oh yeah, I've seen one of those, it's a US QWERTY keyboard!

Charlie read in the fine print that when you do the test, you'll be using the above QWERTY layout. So take a good look, since you don't want to be looking for your keys.

In fact, it's very simple once you get the hang of it. Remember there are no accents in English, so the keys are free to do lots of good things. For starters, all your numbers and the period are accessible directly in one hit, so you can finish your sentences and make phone numbers faster than in AZERTY. No need for a number pad on the right, since all your numbers are at the top, a huge advantage for a laptop.

Metropolitan France is the only country in the world which has AZERTY (the francophone Swiss, Walloon Belgians and French Canadians have QWERTY, like every other country in the world).

The big differences are:

Q/A

W/Z

m/;

M/:

and then all the symbols are up above the numbers. A nice convenience is the @, which is above the 2.

Learn the , : ! ? . ; ( ) & % $ stuff too.

Maybe you could study this picture until you get used to it. You could even print it and practice in the trolley car. It's not such a big deal, but don't walk in cold or you'll go haywire with your keyboard and lose valuable test time! That would be typical of me, but I'm a block of wood, so I have an excuse.

PS: When we anglos need to write schädenfreude and dénouement in English, we use the "International US Keyboard" setting and fiddle with the CTRL key and bingo, we have our accents.

Voice of America in Special English and "Games with Words"

2009-09-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

Hi there Bud,

What you've got to do is pretend you're a normal English speaker, except that you're not made of wood. It's kind of like being a spy behind enemy lines, so that's what reminded me to tell you about the Voice of America site.

They were set up to send radio into countries where you couldn't elect your own dog catcher. The Commies would choose a dog catcher for you and you couldn't do anything about it, even if he was lousy at catching dogs. So here's the link:

VOA news podcasts in Special English

People tell me I'm 'special', so if you want to be special too all you have to do is listen to the Special English. It's like English, only 'special'. You'll hear the difference.

So a special "See you around",

Mortimer

PS: VOA also has a "Games with words" section where you can while away the hours improving your vocabulary. I've used them while fishing and didn't miss a single fish, although these exercises have no fish questions. You'll have to find fish questions somewhere else. I'll get back to you on that.

VOA Games with Words

The Meanings of Prepositions

2009-09-22T00:13:00.000-07:00

Hello there then,

Ever have trouble telling up from down? Like when Charlie puts me in the washing machine? Then this list of preposition meanings will help you know what up is, down is or around and around is. You can combine these with neat verbs like "go", "put", "cut" and "look" to create new alchemies.

So look them "up" "over" here.

Preposition meanings

See you "around",

Mortimer

Here's the book you need

2009-09-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hi there bud,

Here's the book you need for preparing the TOEFL exam. Get it on Amazon.fr because it'll be a lot cheaper than getting it from a funny old man in an old shop near the river.
Don't mind the sour puss who says "it's highly unrecommended!". On the other Amazon sites the reviews are excellent, so he must have some issues with his dog or his older brother.
It'll be delivered free in about 3-4 working days. Here's the kicker: you've got to bring it to the class! At least for the beginning, that is. It weighs a ton, so maybe you can pull out the CD-ROMs first, they're silicon and it's like carrying a crate of Orange Crush bottles around. Anyway, you'll improve your upper body strength. Or maybe you can hire somebody to carry it for you. Here's the URL and the ISBN:

Amazon: TOEFL IBT with CD-ROM

ISBN-10: 0764179055

ISBN-13: 978-0764179051

So there you go, bring it to class and we'll try to figure out how to use it.

Stay out of jail,

Mortimer

You mean you've never seen my films?

2009-09-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

Hiya Bud.

Here is a short excerpt from my stellar film career, showcasing my illustrious delivery and flawless repartee.

Youtube: Mortimer Snerd in "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man"

Hope you like it,

Mortimer

How I write persuasive essays

2009-09-17T10:33:00.000-07:00

Hiya Bud,

How are things? Oh yeah, I was going to share with you how I write essays. The last time I wrote an essay was to ask Charlie to get my pine legs replaced with ash, which is the same tree they use for baseball bats. So that when I walked on the sidewalk I would remember the last ball game I saw. It worked!!

Essay writing's an important part of the writing task in the TOEFL exam. My French buddy Pépé tells me it's not the same as what they call a "dissertation" over there in the land of frog legs. I think it's a bit less rigid. But you know, sometimes when you're trying to be simple it can complicate things for people who are used to things being complicated. In any case, we keep it simple.

So here's a link with a little explaining about how to set it up.

Writing a persuasive essay

You could practice with trying to persuade your neighbour to stop dancing the Watusi at 4 am.

See you around, Mortimer

Maybe you need to brush up on your grammar and English structure. Maybe you've just plain forgotten some stuff.

2009-09-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

Oh, hi there Bud,

For some mysterious reason, the good people at TOEFL have decided that there are no more structure, um, grammar exercises in the test.

It just dawned on me that you may have forgotten some of your grammar over the last busy months of doing bricklaying or building bird baths in the fine weather we had. In that case, you need to brush up a little, so here's a method for that, the Grammar in Use Intermediate with Self-Study and Practice. Self-study meaning that you can study by yourself without a teacher, not some Freudian mumbo-jumbo psycho stuff where a shrink with a beard asks you to study yourself.

So, then, the Grammar in Use Intermediate with Self-Study
ISBN-10: 0521734770
ISBN-13: 978-0521734769

You can get it here:

Amazon.fr

or go straight to the publisher's* site:

Cambridge.org

*uh, yup, that's Cambridge University over there in Englandland. Well I'll be!!!

TEOFL tips

2009-09-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

It's me again,

The best place to get started if you want to nail your TOEFL and study in some big university. There you can wear neat sweaters and use big words, so you need some inside pointers about how to study. So here's a .pdf called "TOEFL tips".

Get it from the ETS site:
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/TOEFL/pdf/TOEFL_Tips.pdf

I read this in my box but you could read it in your bed or anywhere I guess, with a mug of cocoa.

Read this, then do the TOEFL training.

Mortimer Snerd

Mortimer's favourite learning strategies

2009-09-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

Hello there!

Here are some links and files for improving your English. If a block of wood like me can speak perfectly, then you can too. So get cracking and give it a whirl!

See you soon,

Mortimer Snerd