Pig Sty Avenue

Woohoo!

...is also trending on Twatter.

Go on lad, get a hat trick.  Plenty of time left.  And could you get a more poetic red card than Tightarse Bumble?

Surely, a parcel posted in Yemen, and addressed to a Chicago synagogue , would be liable to draw attention to itself?  Why address it there if it was designed to explode in mid-air, surely somewhere anonymous, a New Jersey pork butchers, for example would be better?  Or were they thinking, "Well, if it doesn't go off in the plane, maybe we'll get a few American Zionists as a consolation prize"?  Reasoning that a Chicago based rabbi would be dopey enough to eagerly open the unexpected package from a Muslim country, where murderous Islamists are known to hang out.  Halibut, forsooth.

Who started all this bullshit ?  Ms Malignant C must be strongly implicated, of course, as her team (who, we learn, have a   polymath captain ), square up in a match which apart from the colossal derby rivalry, is in any case offering three very valuable mid table points.  Win or lose, I can't wait to see what she manages to write in tomorrow's Guardian, another nuanced approach to the beleaguered Hughton theme, I'll bet. And now, as if in a sports' reporters lager fuelled dream, Maradonna appears on the scene .  Could you imagine him at St James?  Plenty of entertainment for the supporters of every other team, it would be another nightmare for us.  So, Ashley, you fat fuck, put pen to paper on a new contract for our Chris.  Now.

It's worth looking at this report for the photo at the head of it.  Listen to Mick and you will see that Barnsley and Sheffield, where John Shuttleworth comes from, have similar accents.

Given that it's a filthy night in south west Scotland, this topic may seem like wishful thinking, or something, but watch this space, we are TEFL teachers, and some corners of the world seem to be recession- and cuts-proof. Bougainvillea .  I've always liked the name when I've encountered it in novels, but never grown it, or known anything about it.  Nor in my times in hot places have I consciously noticed it. Getting to grips with the manifold varieties looks like a whole wee world, unto itself . I like the idea of growing succulents, too, especially aloe vera, which would grow lovely and big in a hot dry climate.  And cacti, of course, big time.  Also drought resistant culinary herbs - sage for starters.  Man, I'm telling you, I need a hoe in my hands and earth under my nails, this weather.

Pah!

I need to get a look at this article in full, when I've got an Athens log in. Yan Jin  The place of language testing and assessment in the professional preparation of foreign language teachers in China.  Language Testing , Vol. 27, No. 4.  2010 pp. 555-584.

Well, that was a very handy three points.  I did like the idea of Carroll and Nolan as a comedy duo, too , with Scouse v Geordie domestic humour, burning cars and rude graffitti.  Was it rude, though, does anyone know?

If you were going to think about learning Chinese, this would be a plausible starting point .

It feels like we're at an important stage in the season, when we need a bit of consistency.  A couple of wins would push us back into mid-table, which, let's be honest, has been our statistically mean home in the last fifty odd years.  This article in the Telegraph is interesting.

The English Premier League: soap opera for blokes.  And it was thoughtful of Rooney to hog the headlines, and divert attention from Andy Carroll's latest antics .

...ace."   That is the lyric, isn't it?

For the gravy, stock from your meat, whatever it is, skimming off most of the fat, (depends how greasy you like the end product); simmer it with a finely chopped onion and maybe a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed or chopped or wtf.  One beef oxo cube.  A forkful of plain flower, left to settle for 20 mins or so in a large glass of wine, (you can be sure it won't go lumpy if you stir that straight in), and then a bit more wine and/or a bit of the stock off your veg, according to how wine-ish you like it, and how thick.   Add herbs to taste. For the yorkshires, three heaped forkfuls of plain four (in a pint jug, is what I use), two eggs, and a bit of milk, and mix it all up.  If you do this a few hours before it's wanted and leave it in the fridge, and give it a wee beating with a fork every hour or so, then you won't get any lumps - which only applies if you don't have a food processor.  Pour about 1/4 inch of the batter into a well pre-heated yorkshire pudd...

Which is one person's view of that (ex) Liverpool owning Hicks.  It's a fair point, and could serve as a handy description of most of those who own or have owned big football clubs, including Newcastle down the years, (and I'm talking as a man whose great grandma was once engaged to Stan Seymour , forsooth).   The Liverpool saga this week has been great fun for all of us who aren't Liverpool supporters, and were secretly hoping they might end up doing a Leeds. Not that anyone can afford to be too smug.  Newcastle, like everyone else's club, is owned by someone for whom silverware only means a better bottom line.  It's all about bucks, kid.  And I just don't know how we can get from this plutocratic situation to a more equitable one, where big chunks, if not most, if not all, of a club is owned by its supporters, like Barcelona or Real Madrid.  Who seem to do all right, btw.

Teaching exam classes is theoretically straightforward.  There should be motivated students, and a common goal, namely an exam to pass.  Naturally, human nature intervenes and it's not so simple.  For example, a class of Libyan middle managers would frequently complain to me "we're not just here to pass [the exam], we're here to learn English."  Which was a reasonable observation, though you would need to qualify it if you knew that this class complained about everything from the perceived shortness of their prayer breaks, to the sugar in their tea. But this got me thinking about possible research parameters around a real life testing and SLA situation.  Say there's a commercial motive, in enabling students to pass a high stakes pen-and-paper test.  One can of course provide classroom tuition for this, and no doubt would.  But bearing in mind that most of this exam's candidates are teenagers, it would be useful in motivational terms to give them prac...

The significant development is Unified State Exam , which became compulsory just last year.  There are a bank of past test papers, here .  There's an early (2006) article from Avanesov .  I also need to spend some time with this Council of Europe document .  There's a lot more.

This is a note-to-self to research this next week.  I'll consult Prof Wikipedia first.

There's a patch at the bottom of the garden had been used as a rubbish dump when the flat was let.  A feral privet and a couple of elders had overgrown the rubbish, so I chopped them right back, got rid of the rubbish and old bricks lying around, (there were the remains of an ash-paling fence, the wood badly rotted, but the galvanised wire in perfect nick after what must be at least forty years; I remember those fences being ubiquitous in the 60s), and heaped up the cuttings from the trees.  I'll have a bonfire, probably on Bonfire Night, glyosphate the very coarse grass that's growing along the path edge, and then turn it over.    I've got four gorse plants, the only survivors, I think, from the seeds I blogged about here  which are therefore nearly five years old. I'll plant them there.  I've also got a jam jar full of poppy seeds.  They're at least two years old, but they've been in a cool dark cupboard, and there are a lot, so hopefully if I...

Did I really just hear  Thatcher's ET refer to Ed Milliband on the Today programme as "Mr Bean"?  Bit rich. In other news, why have all my blog posts become Tweet-sized?  And mostly about football?  I need to find an activity which will rescue the attention span from its current miniature state, something like Alice's cake.  Was it a cake?