Category Archives: Entertainment

135. Raining Animals – “It’s raining cats and dogs”

“It’s raining cats and dogs” – Do native speakers of English often use this idiom to describe heavy rain or do they use different expressions? Also, is it really possible that animals can fall down from the sky like rain?

Right-click here to download this episode.
Introduction
What do people really say when they’re talking about heavy rainstorms?
Is it really possible for animals to rain down from the sky? What are the explanations of this phenomenon?
What is the origin of the expression “it’s raining cats and dogs?”
What other idioms about heavy rain exist in other countries and languages?
What would happen to Luke if he was struck by lightning while recording an episode of the podcast? Would he just be electocuted to death, or would he become some kind of podcasting super-hero? (probably the former option)

In this episode, I discuss all of these questions, while a thunderstorm passes overhead and the rain beats down on the roof of my apartment. Listen, and please add your comments below.

How’s the weather where you are, while you listen to this?
What idiom do you use in your language to describe heavy rain?
Do you have any stories about animals falling from the sky?
We’d like to know about them!

Extracts from Wikipedia
I read a few extracts from the wikipedia page for ‘raining animals’ in this episode. Below you can read those extracts. Time codes are also given in square brackets [15.42] – these indicate the times at which I say these things in the episode.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals

[15:42]

Raining animals

Raining animals is a rare meteorological phenomenon in which flightless animals “rain” from the sky. Such occurrences have been reported in many countries throughout history. One hypothesis offered to explain this phenomenon is that strong winds traveling over water sometimes pick up creatures such as fish or frogs, and carry them for up to several miles.
[16:10]

[17:41]
However, this primary aspect of the phenomenon has never been witnessed or scientifically tested.
[17:48]

[17:55]

Explanations

Sometimes the animals survive the fall, suggesting the animals are dropped shortly after extraction. Several witnesses of raining frogs describe the animals as startled, though healthy, and exhibiting relatively normal behavior shortly after the event.
[18:13]

[22:00]
In some incidents, however, the animals are frozen to death or even completely encased in ice. There are examples where the product of the rain is not intact animals, but shredded body parts. Some cases occur just after storms having strong winds, especially during tornadoes.
[22:22]

[23:35]
However, there have been many unconfirmed cases in which rainfalls of animals have occurred in fair weather and in the absence of strong winds or waterspouts.
[23:46]

[24:00]
The English language idiom, “It is raining cats and dogs” (referring to a heavy downpour), is of uncertain etymology, and there is no evidence that it has any connection to the “raining animals” phenomenon.
[24:13]

[24:52]
This is a regular occurrence for birds, which can get killed in flight, or stunned and then fall (unlike flightless creatures, which first have to be lifted into the air by an outside force).
[25:05]

[25:56]
Sometimes this happens in large groups, for instance, the blackbirds falling from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas, United States on December 31, 2010. It is common for birds to become disoriented (for example, because of bad weather or fireworks) and collide with objects such as trees or buildings, killing them or stunning them into falling to their death.
[26:22]

[27:02]
The number of blackbirds killed in Beebe is not spectacular considering the size of their congregations, which can be in the millions.
[27:11]

[27:32]
The event in Beebe, however, captured the imagination and led to more reports in the media of birds falling from the sky across the globe, such as in Sweden and Italy, though many scientists claim such mass deaths are common occurrences but usually go unnoticed.
[27:50]

[28:36]
French physicist André-Marie Ampère was among the first scientists to take seriously accounts of raining animals. He tried to explain rains of frogs with a hypothesis that was eventually refined by other scientists.
[28:51]

[29:02]
Speaking in front of the Society of Natural Sciences, Ampère suggested that at times frogs and toads roam the countryside in large numbers, and that the action of violent winds can pick them up and carry them great distances.
[29:18]

[30:30]
More recently, a scientific explanation for the phenomenon has been developed that involves tornadic waterspouts.
[30:38]

[31:31]
Waterspouts are capable of capturing objects and animals and lifting them into the air. Under this theory, waterspouts or tornados transport animals to relatively high altitudes, carrying them over large distances. The winds were capable of lifting the animals over a relatively wide area and allow them to fall in a concentrated fashion in a localized area. More specifically, some tornadoes can completely suck up a pond, letting the water and animals fall some distance away in the form of a “rain of animals”.
[32:06]

[33:54]
This hypothesis appears supported by the type of animals in these rains: small and light, usually aquatic, it’s also supported by the fact that the rain of animals is often preceded by a storm. However, the theory does not account for how all the animals involved in each individual incident would be from only one species, and not a group of similarly-sized animals from a single area.
[34:20]

[34:45]
In the case of birds, storms may overcome a flock in flight, especially in times of migration.
[34:59]

[35:10]
The image to the right shows an example where a group of bats is overtaken by a thunderstorm. The image shows how the phenomenon could take place in some cases. In the image, the bats are in the red zone, which corresponds to winds moving away from the radar station, and enter into a mesocyclone associated with a tornado (in green).
[35:34]

[35:44]
These events may occur easily with birds in flight. In contrast, it is harder (here we have mistake in audio, should be harder not easier) to find a plausible explanation for rains of terrestrial animals. The enigma persists despite scientific studies.
[35:56]

[36:20]
Sometimes, scientists have been incredulous of extraordinary claims of rains of fish

For example, in the case of a rain of fish in Singapore in 1861, French naturalist Francis de Laporte de Castelnau explained that the supposed rain took place during a migration of walking catfish, which are capable of dragging themselves over the land from one puddle to another. Thus, he argued that the appearance of fish on the ground immediately after a rain was easily explained, as these animals usually move over soft ground or after a rain.
[37:18]

[38:11]

Occurrences

Fish

Singapore, February 22, 1861
Olneyville, Rhode Island, May 15, 1900
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, July 1, 1903
Marksville, Louisiana, October 23, 1947
Kerala, India, February 12, 2008
Bhanwad, Jamnagar, India, October 24, 2009
Lajamanu, Northern Territory, Australia, February 25 and 26, 2010,
Loreto, Agusan del Sur, Philippines, January 13, 2012

Frogs and toads

Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, June 2009 (occurrences reported throughout the month)
Rákóczifalva, Hungary, 18–20 June 2010 (twice)

Others

Unidentified animal, which was thought to be a cow fell in California ripped to tiny pieces, August 1, 1869
Jellyfish fell from the sky in Bath, England, in 1894
Spiders fell from the sky in Salta Province, Argentina on April 6, 2007.
Worms dropped from the sky in Jennings, Louisiana, on July 11, 2007
According to a video, spiders fell from the sky in Santo Antônio da Platina, Brazil, on February 3, 2013. (However, it has been suggested as falling from a mass web between elevated poles.)

[40:17]

[42:22]

“Raining cats and dogs”

The English idiom “it is raining cats and dogs”, used to describe an especially heavy rain, is of unknown etymology, and is not necessarily related to the “raining animals” phenomenon. The phrase was used at least since the 17th century. A number of improbable folk etymologies have been put forward to explain the phrase
[42:47]

[43:08]

An “explanation” widely circulated by email claimed that in 16th-century Europe when peasant homes were commonly thatched, animals could crawl into the thatch to find shelter from the elements, and would fall out during heavy rain. However, there seems to be no evidence in support of either assertion.
[43:28]

[45:56]

Drainage systems on buildings in 17th-century Europe were poor, and may have disgorged their contents during heavy showers, including the corpses of any animals that had accumulated in them. This occurrence is documented in Jonathan Swift’s 1710 poem ‘Description of a City Shower’, in which he describes “Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,/Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.”
[46:26]

[48:12]

“Cats and dogs” may be a corruption of the Greek word Katadoupoi, referring to the waterfalls on the Nile, possibly through the old French word catadupe (“waterfall”).

The Greek phrase “kata doksa”, which means “contrary to expectation” is often applied to heavy rain, but there is no evidence to support the theory that it was borrowed by English speakers.
[48:38]

[49:08]
There may not be a logical explanation; the phrase may have been used just for its nonsensical humor value, like other equivalent English expressions.
[49:18]

[49:50]
Other languages have equally bizarre expressions for heavy rain.
[49:53]

‘Heavy Rain’ Idioms From Around The World (care of Wikipedia)
Other languages have equally bizarre expressions for heavy rain:[37][38]
Afrikaans: ou vrouens met knopkieries reen (“old women with clubs”)
Bengali: মুষলধারে বৃষ্টি পড়ছে musholdhare brishṭi poṛchhe (“in a stream of mallets”)
Bosnian: padaju ćuskije (“crowbars”)
Bosnian: lije ko iz kabla (“it’s pouring like from a bucket”)
Cantonese: “落狗屎” (“dog poo”)
Chinese: “倾盆大雨” (“its pouring out of basins”)
Catalan: Ploure a bots i barrals (“boats and barrels”)
Croatian: padaju sjekire (“axes dropping”)
Czech: padají trakaře (“wheelbarrows”)
Czech: leje jako z konve (“like from a watering can”)
Danish: det regner skomagerdrenge (“shoemakers’ apprentices”)
Dutch: het regent pijpenstelen (“pipe stems or stair rods”)
Dutch (Flemish): het regent oude wijven (“old women”)
Dutch (Flemish): het regent kattenjongen (“kittens”)
Faroese : Tað regnar av grind (“Pilot whales”)
Finnish: Sataa kuin Esterin perseestä (“It’s raining like from Esteri’s ass”)
French: il pleut comme vache qui pisse (“it is raining like a peeing cow”)
French: il pleut à sceaux (“it’s raining like from buckets”)
French: il pleut des hallebardes (“it is raining halberds”), clous (“nails”), or cordes (“ropes”)
German: Es regnet junge Hunde (“young dogs”) or Es schüttet wie aus Eimern (“like poured from buckets”)
Greek: βρέχει καρεκλοπόδαρα (“chair legs”)
Hindi: musaldhār bārish (“a stream of mallets”)
Hungarian: mintha dézsából öntenék (“like poured from a vat”)
Icelandic: Það rignir eins og hellt sé úr fötu (“like poured from a bucket”)
Italian: piove a catinelle (“poured from a basin”)
Latvian: līst kā no spaiņiem (“it’s raining like from buckets”)
Nepali: मुसलधारे झरी (“a stream of mallets”)
Norwegian: det regner trollkjerringer (“she-trolls”)
Polish: pada żabami (“frogs”)
Portuguese: está a chover canivetes (“penknives”)
Portuguese: Chove a potes (“It is raining by the pot load”)
Portuguese: Chove a cântaros (“It is raining by the jug load”)
Romanian: plouă cu broaşte (“frogs”)
Russian: льет как из ведра (“from a bucket”)
Spanish: están lloviendo chuzos de punta (“shortpikes/icicles point first” – not only is it raining a lot, but it’s so cold and windy that being hit by the drops hurts)
Spanish: está lloviendo a cántaros (“by the clay pot-full”)
Spanish: llueven sapos y culebras (“toads and snakes”)
Spanish (Argentina): caen soretes de punta (“pieces of dung head-first”)
Spanish (Venezuela): esta cayendo un palo de agua (“a stick of water is falling”)
Spanish (Colombia): “Estan lloviendo maridos” “Van a llover maridos” (It’s raining husbands, It will rain husbands)
Serbian: padaju sekire (“axes”)
Swedish: Det regnar smådjävlar (“It is raining little devils”)
Swedish: regnet står som spön i backen (“the rain stands like poles out of the ground”)
Turkish: bardaktan boşanırcasına (“like poured from a cup”)
Urdu: musladhār bārish (“a stream of mallets”)
Welsh: mae hi’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn (“old ladies and sticks”)

Song – Why Does It Always Rain on Me by Travis

Note: Red T-Shirt designed by my bro ;)

Get the Song

Click here to visit the Amazon page for “Travis: The Singles” where you can buy their album, or buy the song “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?”

Read the Lyrics
Click here to read the lyrics to “Why Does It Always Rain On Me” by Travis, and to read some comments about the song’s meaning.

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Thanks also for messages which are sent to me all the time (even during the recording of episodes). I carefully consider everything which is written to me. All the best and enjoy this episode, Luke

133. Hip-Hop Lyric Analysis

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A look at hip-hop culture and analysis of the lyrics to a classic rap track. FULL TRANSCRIPT AVAILABLE BELOW, OH YES!

Right-click here to download this episode.
There’s an introduction, then the lyric analysis begins at about 21mins.
HIP HOP LYRIC ANALYSIS

I wonder if you’re a fan of hip hop. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. If you already are, then sit back, enjoy the episode. If you’re not then listen on, because you might learn something about the world of hip hop music which you previously didn’t know. You can also learn some slang in the process.

In this episode:

1. I’ll tell you a bit about hip hop, and its history, but not too much because I don’t want to bore you.

2. We’ll listen to some hip hop and have a look at the lyrics and analyse them. I’ll explain them, and kind of give you my thoughts on them.

There is music in the background on this one. I thought it was appropriate because of the subject of this episode. Future episodes will not always have music, but this one does. If you really can’t hear what I’m saying then let me know and I might be able to upload this episode again without the background music. If you like the music and would like to hear more, let me know by commenting on this episode. I should be able to recommend some albums or tracks for you.

I understand that hip hop is not everyone’s cup of tea, or perhaps you’ve never considered listening to it. Well, you know with Luke’s English Podcast you never know what you’re going to get each time. Variety. This time it’s hip hop, next time it might be about something else like kittens. A whole episode about kittens, that would be nice, or maybe something about football… that’s in the pipeline, and more interviews and all kinds of things, but for now it’s all about da hip hop game, straight up, no nonsense, no diggidy, no doubt, the ill communication… You’re probably thinking, “why is Luke speaking strangely, or more strangely than usual”. Well, I’m throwing in a bit of hop hop slang into my sentences sometimes, just for a laugh really.

I love hip-hop but sometimes I don’t feel like I can truly relate to it. It’s an amazing musical genre. There’s a lot of talent, great music and clever lyrics.

What are The 3 elements of hip hop? How did it develop?
First of all, the term ‘hip hop’ is used to refer to both the musical genre and the culture in general. This culture of hip hop is considered to have a number of elements. I think it boils down to about 3 main things:

1. DJing – this involves the creating of loops of music, usually taken from old jazz or funk records played on two turntables. This is clever because it involves a lot of skill. Two copies of the record are needed, and the record needs to be chosen carefully. Usually the piece of music to be looped is a drum break from a funk tune. That’s the bit where only the drums are playing. That section is just played over and over on the two turntables, the same bit being played and then rewound and played again- the music gets looped, and you get a continuous beat which people can dance to or rap over. The DJs would either do it live at parties or they would make mix tapes to be shared and used as the backing track for rapping.

2. Rapping. This is talking into the microphone over the top of the beat. The best rapping involves clever rhyming of words, and a unique flow or rhythm in your voice. It’s also known as MCing. MC means master or ceremonies. The original job of the MC was to be a kind of host for a party. He or she would liven up the audience and get the atmosphere going. Later, MCs started rhyming and creating stories or commentaries. MCs sometimes battle with each other. This means that they take turns to do a verse of rhyming in which they have to be more inventive, funny or insulting than the other one. An example of this can be seen in the movie 8 Mile with Eminem.

3. Breakdancing. This was the dancing associated with hip-hop in the early days. People seem to do it less these days. It involves body popping, robotic movements, or acrobatic spins and jumps. It’s also possible to have a breakdancing battle in which two teams take turns to perform better and better dance moves.
Graffiti is also associated with hip hop. That’s the painting of large graphics or tags in public places using spray cans. Now, DJing has been replaced by more sophisticated forms of sequencing and sampling using computers, but the effect is still the same – funky beats and samples of well chosen old records. Beats can also be created without samples as well, but most of the classic hip hop of the 90s was made with samples from 60s jazz/funk records.

Some also consider ‘knowledge’ to be an essential part of hip hop culture. This means the understanding of your cultural history and the reality of the situation you are living in. More specifically this relates to the condition of black Americans as a cultural minority in the United States, but it can also apply to a wider state of mind in which you ‘keep it real’. Keeping it real just means being true to yourself, trying to ascertain what really is going on around you, questioning authority and everything around you and not believing ‘the hype’. Public Enemy released a famous rap/hip-hop track called ‘Don’t Believe The hype’. I think the message of this is ‘don’t believe what you read in the papers, or don’t believe what everyone says about something. Check it out for yourself first. Have some independence of thought. Don’t accept the common opinion. Have confidence in your own sense of judgement. Don’t believe the hype.

Click here to hear Public Enemy “Don’t believe da hype”

Hip-Hop is also notable for it’s recycling of previously released music, particularly music created by soul, funk and jazz artists of the previous generation. This shows us how hip-hop is a kind of ‘do it yourself’ cultural movement. The musicians who made this music just used what was available to them there at the time. They didn’t have instruments, or classical musical training. There wasn’t a lot of money going round. What they did have was old records, possibly from their parents’ generation, and so they used that as a resource. If they were lucky they had record decks or other equipment. Otherwise they would use tape players to crudely edit together selected pieces of music from old records. This cut and paste approach is one of the things that defines hip-hop culture.

My personal favourite era for hip hop is the early to mid nineties. I think this is when it was at its best. If I could recommend one hip hop album it would be “Midnight Marauders” by A Tribe Called Quest. Why? The samples are very well chosen (some amazing bits of classic soul, funk or jazz) the music is positive, the rhyming is inventive and funny, it’s catchy, I never get bored of listening to it and it always puts me in a good mood and reminds me of great times. I strongly believe it will be considered one of the all-time great hip hop albums. Click here to see the album on Amazon.

Hip Hop music is often associated with poor urbanised black american communities, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not about being poor black Americans. The music might have come from that community, but ultimately music transcends racial barriers and can be enjoyed by everyone. But, saying that, there is something weird about middle class English white kids acting like rappers from Compton. They’re not keeping it real, and the importance of keeping it real is one of the things you can learn from hip hop. Be true to yourself, don’t play yourself because that’s just straight up wack! A lot of rappers are very rich these days. Some are white, some are of other ethnicities. This just goes to show that it’s not just a simple question of black or white, rich or poor or whatever. Gangster rap is one sub-genre of rap music. There are other types of hip hop that don’t involve being a gangster. Positive hip-hop or political hip-hop. I suppose within gangsta rap there is the idea that hip-hop can be a way for poor people in America can escape from the ghetto. In the case of someone like Jay-Z who apparently used to live a gangster life, music did help him to escape the world of crime.

Hip hop music can give you an insight into life in the ghetto in America. The stories I hear in rap are like crime novels or a gangster movies. They can be evocative, moving, frightening and just very exciting tales of life on the edge. I must say though, as a white middle class English guy I can’t fully relate to the music, and sometimes I feel slightly ridiculous listening to rap music. I find I feel embarrassed sometimes listening to tales of the gangster life while I’m on shopping in Tescos or walking along the Champs Elysees. I can’t really relate to it, but nevertheless I love the music, and I wonder if you also like hip hop.

Anyway, I decided to play some hip hop in this episode and discuss the lyrics with you. First up, it’s a genuine hip hop classic. This one is from the 90s which is the best era for hip hop in my opinion. It’s basically gangsta rap. It’s moody, dark and tells a story of how difficult life can be in the ghetto. The track is called “My mind is playing tricks on me” by Geto Boys. Listen to the track, and then I will explain it all, and analyse the lyrics after. You’ll appreciate it more when you hear it the second time. If you like it, click the link to see the album on Amazon, where you can buy it and support this group. If hip hop is not your thing then I hope this episode at least educates you about a musical genre that you’re not familiar with. You don’t have to like it, but knowledge is power. Also, the English you’ll hear is a dialect (to an extent). It’s the language of black American youth, and this is one of the most pervasive English dialects. It has influence on many informal dialects in English, including youth in London and all over the UK in fact. It’s interesting that the social group with the least status – poor African Americans, has some of the most widespread cultural influence though its music and its English slang. Well, maybe that’s the thing about hip-hop – it really changed the status of many poor young people in America, by making them into superstars. Although being a superstar is not the end of your problems of course, because you know, Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems… So, here it is.

GETO BOYS LYRICS

“My Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me”

Click here to check out the song on YouTube

[Intro: Scarface]

I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles

“Cool out man, we on the Radio dukes”

We’re on the Radio dukes

“yeah”

Ooh, alright, check this here

[Verse 1: Scarface]

At night I can’t sleep, I toss and turn

He’s having a bad night. He can’t sleep. Maybe he’s had too much coffee, or maybe he’s got an exam tomorrow. You know the feeling, you’re nervous, you can’t sleep. Very frustrating.

Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned

If he’s got candles burning I’m not surprised he can’t sleep. You need to extinguish all lights. Anyway, he shouldn’t leave a candle burning when he’s going to sleep. It’s quite dangerous, it might start a fire and the smoke could choke him to death in his sleep, or he could be very badly burned.

Visions of bodies being burned. He’s having a very bad night. I know that sometimes your mind wanders when you can’t sleep but that’s quite extreme. Maybe he’s been watching too much of The Walking Dead. It’s ironic that he’s thinking of burning bodies when he’s dangerously leaving candles lit while going to sleep.

Four walls just closing in, getting bigger

I know the feeling. It can be like you’re trapped in your room, especially if you’ve been indoors all evening revising and now you can’t sleep.

I’m paranoid, sleepin’ with my finger on the trigger

Woa! He’s sleeping with a gun in his hand and his finger on the trigger? He’s likely to have a bad accident, especially if he starts to drop off to sleep and his hand jerks. He must be paranoid if he’s sleeping with a gun. I wonder what happened.

My mother’s always stressin’ I ain’t livin’ right

Well, she’s right because already you’ve got naked flames and a gun in the flat.

But I ain’t going out without a fight

Ok, he’s determined.

See, everytime my eyes close

I start sweatin’ and blood starts comin’ out my nose

You might want to get that looked at. If blood comes out of your nose when you close your eyes, you might have a serious condition. I don’t think it’s paranoia. Those are genuine symptoms. Go to a doctor. Call NHS direct at least.

There’s somebody watchin’ the Ack’

But I don’t know who it is, so I’m watchin’ my back

OK, I’m not sure what that means but it seems that someone is watching him, and apparently they’re not really looking after him because they haven’t stepped in to give advice or help. Whoever this person is, it seems that they don’t have his best interest at heart. Again, I don’t think he’s being paranoid. This guy is probably not a friend. But then again it is quite normal to just see the same people in your neighbourhood and just because they’re not friendly, it doesn’t mean they want to kill you. I mean, in London I never talked to my neighbours but I saw them all the time. Didn’t mean I wanted to kill them. Just saying.

I can see him when I’m deep in the covers

When I awake I hear a car burning rubber

When he’s deep in the covers, that means when he’s in bed. So, what he can see him when he’s in his bed? That is pretty weird, what is he doing in the guy’s bed?? Or maybe he’s in the bed and looking out of the window and he can see him in the street or something. Oh I see, he can see him in his sleep. Bad dreams.

He owns a black hat like I own

A black suit and a cane like my own

Perhaps this is just a mirror. I wonder if he’s considered the fact that he’s seeing his own reflection in windows or something. That happened to me once. I was walking alone in the street and I thought I saw someone following me. I got really scared and ran home. Turned out it was just my own reflection in the windows of houses. I used to be scared of the dark so I suppose my mind was playing tricks on me too.

Some might say, “Take a chill, B”

Yes, it’s a good idea. Take a chill. Relax. Have a cup of tea. Watch some telly. Put your feet up. Just take the afternoon off. No need to go round being a gangster today. It’s hard work being a gangster. Just take it easy for a change. You’ve got to look after your health. Take some you-time. Just watch “Friday” or something.

But I can’t see, because there’s somebody trying to kill me

Mmm, that will tend to make you a bit uptight.

I’m poppin’ in the clip when the wind blows

Every twenty seconds got me peepin’ out my window

This means he’s putting a clip of ammunition into his gun whenever the wind blows. Now, the wind blows quite a lot, especially when it’s windy. Does this mean he’s just putting the clip in when he hears the wind, and then going “oh no it’s just the wind” and then taking it out, but then hearing the wind again and going “What the hell is that?!” and popping the clip back in again, and again and again. He needs a holiday. He’s peeping out of his window, with a gun. THis is an awful situation.

Investigatin’ the joint for traps

Checkin’ my telephone for taps

Ok, so I assume that he’s really nervous because of something he did in his past. Maybe he criticised someone’s mother, or stepped on someone’s sneaker. Now he’s worried that someone wants to take revenge on him and he’s so paranoid that he’s convinced that someone has set traps in his house. Perhaps like a bucket of water above the door and when you open it = splash. Or worse. Maybe a broken chair or a whoopee cushion. He’s checking the phone for taps. That’s a wire tap. Perhaps people are trying to listen in to his conversations. It could be the mob getting ready to kill him or the FBI surveying him, or maybe he’s just been smoking too much weed and he’s imagining it all.

I’m starin’ at the woman on the corner

It’s f*cked up, when your mind is playin’ tricks on you

The woman on the corner? I expect that is a prostitute. It’s quite sad that there’s always a woman on the corner. It’s even sadder that this guy is staring at her because he’s paranoid that ‘someone is trying to kill him’.

[Verse 2: Willie D]

I make big money, I drive big cars

Everybody know me, it’s like I’m a movie star

Sounds like Luke from Luke’s English Podcast.

But late at night, somethin’ ain’t right

I feel I’m being tailed by the same sucker’s head lights

This means he feels like someone is following him. He’s being tailed by someone’s headlights. But normally you’re tailed by someone in a car, not just some headlights.

Is it that fool that I ran off the block?

Or is it that clown last week that I shot?

He shot a clown? Why did he shoot a clown? They’re basically harmless. They’re just kids’ entertainers. He’s gone too far, shooting a clown.

To be honest, I think that by ‘clown’ he means a ‘fool’ or an ‘idiot’. But really, was it necessary to shoot the guy? Two words: Gun Control.

Or is it the one I beat for five thousand dollars

He beat a guy for 5 thousand dollars. That is a lot of money but is it worth it for the risk. You could be sent to prison for aggravated assault. I’m not surprised he’s having a bad time, because you know “what goes around comes around”.

Thought he had caine but it was Gold Medal Flour

His mind really is playing tricks on him. He’s seeing people doing their grocery shopping, and mistaking them for badass gangsters who want to kill him. The guy needs to just stay in for a while and wait for this all to blow over.

Reach under my seat, grabbed my popper for the suckers

Ain’t no use to me lyin, I was scareder than a mother*****

This means he reached under his seat to get his gun in order to shoot these bad rude boys, and truth be told he was very frightened. Scareder (not correct English) than a mother-. One can only assume that ‘a mother’ is usually quite scared, for some reason. I think we know he is referring not to a Mum, but to a swearword, a motherf***er

Hooked a left into Popeye’s and bailed out quick

If it’s goin’ down, let’s get it over with

So, in order to escape, or find a good place to hide or escape he turned a quick left into what I assume is some kind of shop. He was ready to have a fight if it was necessary. So, he thinks that these gang-bangers are going to get him as an act of revenge, but perhaps he’s just paranoid and imaginging it all.

Here they come, just like I figured

I got my hand on the chrome (gold?) plated the trigger

So, they’re coming just as expected. He’s got his hand on his chrome plated gun. The trigger is the part that your finger squeezes to fire the gun..

What I saw’ll make your ass start gigglin’

Three black crippled and crazy senior citizens

What he saw will make you laugh because it was three black crippled and crazy old people. He must have been tripping because he thought they were all gangsters. He’s in a real mess.

I live by the sword

I take my boys everywhere I go, because I’m paranoid

To live by the sword means you live a violent life. He takes his boys everywhere – not his sons I imagine, but some of his home-boys, some friends or fellow gangsters as protection.

I keep lookin’ over my shoulder and peepin’ around corners

My mind is playin’ tricks on me

Looking over his shoulder, looking around corners. He’s certainly got to be vigilant at times like this.

[Verse 3: Scarface]

Day by day it’s more impossible to cope

I feel like I’m the one that’s doing dope

Ok, this really is a messed up life. He’s find it hard to cope. He can’t manage it or deal with the pressure. He feels like he’s the one doing dope – I guess this is a reference to the fact that he’s a drug dealer, and usually his clients are the ones who are strung out and losing control of their lives because of the drugs they’re taking, but this time even he is losing control. This is a messed up story of criminal life in America. Have you seen Scarface? This song is one of many similar crime stories which for me form part of American popular culture in literature, film and music. Yes, I’m saying this is art. Sue me.

Can’t keep a steady hand because I’m nervous

Every Sunday mornin’ I’m in service

Prayin’ for forgiveness

And tryin’ to find an exit out the business

He’s going to church every sunday, praying to be forgiven by god, and trying to find a way to leave this terrible business of drug dealing and extortion. So, he does want to get out but apparently he is trapped. I wonder what you think. Does he have a choice? I suppose he is so deep in crime that if he tries to leave he risks losing his life.

I know the Lord is lookin’ at me

But yet and still it’s hard for me to feel happy

He believes in god but it’s almost not enough because of his guilty conscience.

I often drift while I drive

Havin’ fatal thoughts of suicide

BANG and get it over with

And then I’m worry-free, but that’s nonsense

He sometimes considers killing himself in order to escape, but yes, that’s nonsense. Suicide is the coward’s way out.

I got a little boy to look after

And if I died then my child would be a bastard

Technically that is true. That’s in line with the literal meaning of ‘bastard’ but does it also mean his son would be a bad guy? Quite possibly, if he’s deprived of a father and growing up in tough conditions, and considering his Dad is a bit of a bastard apparently it must run in the family, so yes if he is killed then his son is likely to be a bit of a bastard. BUt also, his son would be fatherless, and that’s serious.

I had a woman down with me

But to me it seems like she was down to get me

He used to have a girl friend, but it seemed she didn’t support him. Maybe she was not good for him. Maybe she nagged him, and it didn’t help.

She helped me out in this

But to me she was just another chick

OK, she did help a bit, but he didn’t love her. Sad story. Sorry listeners.

Now she’s back with her mother

Now I’m realizing that I love her

All right, so he does love her! Make your mind up!

Now I’m feelin’ lonely

My mind is playin’ tricks on me

You have my sympathy sir. Although I do think it was wrong that you committed those crimes and you shouldn’t have done it. There’s no way of justifying those criminal acts. Still, I will raise a glass to you sir.

[Verse 4: Bushwick Bill]

This year Halloween fell on a weekend

Me and Geto Boys went trick-or-treatin’

Robbin’ little kids for bags

So they went trick or treating. Not exactly the behaviour of authentic straight up gangstas. Why are they trick or treating? Aren’t they a bit old for that now? Don’t they have business to attend to?

And robbing little kids for bags?? Really? Literally stealing candy from children. That’s hardly the way a true gangsta rolls? It’s almost pathetic, stealing sweets from children. It’s a serious act of bullying and seems out of character. So these are very well esteemed bad-boy gangstas, who act like they’ve killed and done bad things, and here they are stealing sweeties from kids. Pathetic.

Till an old man got behind our rags

Too right. The old man was correct and I’m glad a member of the community stepped in to get behind their rags and tell them off.

So we speeded up the pace

Took a look back, and he was right before our face

They decided to leave quickly and walked away, but when they turned around he was right up in their face. Wow, that guy is fast!

He’d be in for a squabble no doubt

So I swung and and tried to take him out

So the guy wanted a fight, so Bill swung his fist and tried to knock him down. ‘Take him out’

He was goin’ down, we planned

But this wasn’t no ordinary man

The plan was to put this guy down, but apparently this was no ordinary man. Maybe it was, like, Batman or just an extraordinarily tough guy who they shouldn’t have messed with.

He stood about six or seven feet

Now, that’s the creep I’d be seein’ in my sleep

This is a very tall guy, and the ‘creep’ he’d been seeing in his sleep too. So, this is the scary guy that Bill was dreaming about earlier on. Wow, so here he is in a fight with him. Scary.

So we triple-teamed on him

Droppin’ them 5th ward B’s on him

Triple teamed on him – this means the 3 of them teamed up to fight him together. Ladies or in fact anyone else, if you’re listening – I’m sorry about the violence. More civilised topics will be dealt with in due course.

The more I swung the more blood flew

Then he disappeared and my boys disappeared too

The more he punched the more blood there was, but then suddenly he disappeared, and so did his friends.

Then I felt just like a fiend

It wasn’t even close to Halloween

He felt just like a fiend – this is someone who is evil and kind of obsessed by doing bad things. So, he frightened himself by realising he was a fiend, a monster. This is dark…

It was dark as death on the streets

My hands were all bloody from punchings on the concrete

Oh man, homie

My mind is playin’ tricks on me

The streets were pitch black, and his hands were bleeding from punching the concrete. So, he imagined or hallucinated the whole thing and in fact had been punching the street itself thinking it was a man. His mind is playing tricks on him.

What a dark tale.

Let’s lighten things up a bit. Now we’re going to listen to a short rhyme by De La Soul from their amazing album 3 Feet High and Rising. This one is all about the importance of washing yourself with soap to avoid BO or Body Odour, which can be a problem on public transport for example. Again, listen to the whole tune and then I will explain…

De La Soul “A Little Bit of Soap” – Click here to listen to the song on YouTube

Please, listen to this simple De La style I’m gonna sing

It’s strongly directed to all the misery you’re bringing

Now I’m not all about dissing someone else personnel

But there’s no quota on your odor, that’s right, you smell

Now you might feel a little embarrassed, don’t take it too hard

And don’t make it worse by covering it up with some Right Guard

Before you even put on your silk shirt and fat gold rope

Please, take your big ass to the bathroom

And please use a little bit of soap

Okay, contestant number two, do you have the answers?

No, no I don’t

SOME HIP HOP SLANG, DEFINED:

da hip hop game = the hip hop industry. ‘da’ means ‘the’

straight up = simply

no nonsense = simple

no diggidy = no doubt, definitely

the ill communication = ‘ill’ here means ‘good’

wack = not cool

sucka = a sucker, a stupid person

LINKS:

For more hip hop slang, click here.

To download some free hip hop mixes, click here. I personally recommend this one.

Visit this page to play around with ‘gizoogle’, which is a website that translates everything into hip hop slang.

Here’s an example of what it does. Look at the below sentence, which is normal.

Hello, my name is Luke and I am an English teacher. You probably know me from my podcast which is called Luke’s English Podcast. I really enjoy making episodes of my show and I hope that you like listening to it. Good luck!

Here’s the hip-hop slang version:

Yo muthaf*cka, hoes call me Luke n’ I be a Gangsta mackdaddy n’ sh*t. Yo ass probably know me from mah podcast which is called Lukez Gangsta Podcast. I straight-up trip off makin episodez of mah show n’ I hope dat you like listenin ta dat sh*t. Dope luck!

‘Dope luck’ indeed…

130. A Cup of Tea with… Sebastian Marx

7 Replies

Conversation with a real American person from New York! Complete transcript available.

[Download]
This episode is now fully transcribed, and you can read that transcript below.

Sebastian Marx was born in New York and went to Boston University. He is a stand-up comedian in Paris and regularly performs in English and in French. You can visit his website here and find out about his comedy shows!

In this episode I invited Sebastian to my flat where we had some tea and some chocolate brownies. Listen to the episode as I ask questions which were suggested by listeners from the Luke’s English Podcast Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lukes-English-Podcast/227129545507

We talk about topics such as:
-Growing up 30 minutes away from Manhattan
-Going to university in Boston
-His experiences of leaving America and moving to France
-How he learned a second language (French)
-Some advice on how to learn a second language
-Differences between America and Europe
-Accents from USA
-Time travel
-Spirituality and the meaning of life!
-Gun control
-American junk food and obesity
-The Boston bombings from last Monday
-America’s foreign military campaigns
-The amazing sport of ‘disc golf’!
I also help Sebastian learn to speak with my British accent.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. It’s another long one, but as I’ve said before – you can listen to it in stages, and if you’re using iTunes or other podcast players, your audio player should remember your position if you stop listening, although I can’t imagine why you would want to do that ;)

Please leave comments below and tell me your thoughts.

Thank you if you are kind enough, or are able to leave a small donation by clicking the button in the top-right corner of this page.

Best regards,

Luke

HERE ARE THE QUESTIONS FROM FACEBOOK!

Luke’s English Podcast · 2,532 like this.
22 hours ago ·
Hello listeners! Tomorrow I am going to interview my American friend Sebastian. Do you have questions for him? I will ask him the questions on the podcast. Please write your questions here. Thank you!
1Like · · Share

o Jairo Trujillo García: If you had the chance to go back in time, for 24 hours, where and when would you go?

o Christopher Soto Antilem: What accent does he prefer? british, american or other country?

o Hiroshi Maruyama: How does he think about ban the gun movement in America? I cant believe they are allowed to keep the gun. I strongly against it. Why they don’t ban the gun with a strong the strong decision like the decision they begin war.

o Atsushi Yoshida: I want him to talk about American regional accents ;D

o Camila Andrade: Would you rather go back in time and meet your ancestors or go way into the future and meet your great grandchildren ?

o Wassim Benny: Ask him about his spiritual beliefs. Does he believe in life after death? and if not, what does he think would happen after death…

o Hải Tuấn: As a American, which accent do you think is the most easy to understand? British, Australian, South American or Asian English?

o Stefano Pierini Hi Luke. Ask him about the bomb blast of Monday’s marathon in Boston and the fear of terrorist attack.
Also you could talk about the poor education of Americans when it comes to diet and food.
Cheers :)

o Kohei Okutani: Hiya,Luke!!
I’d like to know how popular JPN MANGA is in USA! :) I’ve got some American or French friends who really love that but i heard that it’s not true, actually.
They say that’s for limited maneas｡｡｡ Please,ask him on the topic as far as he knows!!
HX!!

o Khazan Anna: First, i would like him to accept my deep condolence in connection with the terrorist action in Boston. Second, my question is: Has he ever been to Russia and what is his view of my country?

o Pedro Barreto Gamboa: Tell him that, here in Peru, we’re all sorry about the recent incident in Boston.
My questions would be:
How hard is it really to understand certain non-native accents? And what makes a foreign accent pleasant or unpleasant in his opinion?

o Cuneyt Tiryaki: Please let him tell us the differences between Europe & THE US. His first time experiences and odd feelings as an American in Europe.

o Luke’s English Podcast: Wow, lots of questions! Thanks a lot. The interview is in 6 hours so there is still more time if you have other questions. :D

o Cristina Ricciardo: Hello Luke, and thanks for giving this opportunity! I’d like to know something about American junk food and obesity problems.

o Hanaé Georgette Berton: Once again, « Are you sure you’re the man on the flyer ?».See Translation

o Jarek Jarsson: Luke ask him if he knows any foreign languages :) And one more question – what he thinks about USA military mission in Iraq and Afghanistan :) Thanks a lot !

o Hiroshi Maruyama: Ask him his favorite sport. I like disc golf, rollerbladingand salsa dancing. Doesn’t he do any of them? Is discgolf popular among us people? I think it’s a excellent sport.

o Flavio Gasperini: I would like to hear him try to pronounce a few words in British English…like “water”, “territory”, “thought”, “advertisement”, “I can’t eat eggs”. That would be quite funny, :S.

o Vanessa von Aspern: What are the most stupid clichés about america?

o Luke’s English Podcast: Hi, the interview is finished and we answered your questions, but Vanessa you were a bit too late I’m afraid. We do talk a bit about America, but not all the stupid cliches. Next time!

o Vanessa von Aspern: Well, thats all right! :)

o Luke’s English Podcast: Podcast is now uploading and should be available online soon. Kohei Okutani, I just realised that we didn’t answer your question about Japanese manga, but I can tell you that I am a big fan of Dr Slump and Doraemon, as well as others ;)

TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 130. A CUP OF TEA WITH SEBASTIAN MARX

[BEGINS FROM 00:00:00]
Welcome good people of the world to episode 130 of Luke’s English Podcast. This one is called “A Cup of Tea With Sebastian Marx” and in this one I invited my American friend Sebastian into the apartment to share a cup of tea and some lovely chocolate brownies while we discuss various things.
Sebastian was born in New York and he went to Boston University. He’s a stand-up comedian in Paris and he regularly performs both in English and in French. You can visit his website by going to my website or just directly to his website which is www.sebmarx.com. You can visit my website in order to find that website. It’s just too confusing. It’s like “Inception” for websites. I don’t know.
In this episode as I said I invited Sebastian. We talk about lots of things and we answer various questions which were suggested by listeners to this podcast on the Facebook page.
We talk about, em, diverse things such as:
– His experiences of growing up in New York
– Going to university in Boston
– Leaving America
– How he learned a second language to a very high level, French in this case
– His answers to questions about accents from the USA
– The differences between America and Europe
– And also, more serious things like gun control, American military policy, and the amazing sport of disc golf which is something I’d never heard of before.
All of it is contained in this rather long episode of Luke’s English Podcast. So, I hope you enjoy listening to it and it’s about to start now now now.
Luke – So hello ladies and gentlemen. I’m very pleased to announce that for the first time on Luke’s English Podcast, I have an actual American man, an American person in front of me. I kidnapped him. I didn’t really, but I kidnapped him and I’ve held him hostage and I’m giving him cakes and tea. The cakes probably are okay, but is tea normal for you Sebastian?
Sebastian – Yes, yes, we are aware of that. We like drinking tea in the States.
Luke – You do, because, I mean, people say that tea is very, you know, very English thing, don’t they? But… and coffee is like associated with America. But…
Sebastian – Is it really?
Luke – Well, yeah!
Sebastian – I thought, coffee was associated with Italy and France and…
Luke – Oh, yeah? It is too. …you know, definitely, but certainly…
Sebastian – StarBucks I guess gives that reputation all over the world that Americans drink watered-down coffee.
Luke – Yeah, Americano…
Sebastian – Yeah. Exactly.
Luke – …is what they call it. Do you call it Americano? You don’t call it…
Sebastian – No, we call it Coffee.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – If you order a coffee in the States, you get a big mug of coffee.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Is that maybe in a diner?
Sebastian – Yeah. it could be in a diner.
Luke – Served by a sort of… a slightly bored, overworked middle-aged waitress?
Sebastian – Yes, can be either jewish or Greek often,
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – Often. Yeah.
Luke – And you have to tip, don’t you?
Sebastian – You have to tip a lot.
Luke – Do you tip?
Sebastian – Tip? Do I tip when I’m in the States? I have to!
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Because, if you don’t tip the manager comes running at you.
Luke – Really?
Sebastian – Well, if you don’t tip at all, the manager can come out and ask you – “Well, was there a problem with the service?” and you have to justify why you didn’t give any tip, because the waiters or waitresses over there, they uh… make their living off of tips.
Luke – Alright, okay. So, it’s essential.
Sebastian – It’s essential.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – Which, at the end of the day really helps the managers, because they just get away with not having to pay or pay very little their wait staff and so… the salary of the wait staff falls on the customer.
Luke – Right, so if there are any listeners out there who are going to America or maybe living in America right now… and if you don’t tip, you should be ashamed of yourself, because these waitresses and waiters,
Sebastian – Waiters, there are waiters as well in the United States
Luke – They… they need your tips. So, just remember that! Is that rule number one if you go to America?
Sebastian – Yes, rule… I think, yeah – rule number one, yeah!
Luke – Obviously it’s rule… maybe “rule number one” is like, you know, like get your passport
Sebastian – Yeah. Well, get your passport. You get a visa! I think that the United States requires visas for pretty much every country.
Luke – it’s difficult to get in.
Sebastian – They’re a pain in the butt. They are real, uh… when it comes to entering into that country, I don’t know.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – It’s not easy.
Luke – Alright. But you actually managed… How are they about leaving the country because when it gets…
Sebastian – Oh, they love when people leave the country.
Luke – Really?
Sebastian – They’re thrilled about that so uh…. It’s only about getting in.
Luke – Okay. So, ladies and gentlemen. Here I am with Sebastian Marx who is, as I’ve… as you’ve obviously already worked out, is American.
Sebastian – Yes, I am.
Luke – So it’s, you know… it’s great because you’re the first American person I’ve had on the podcast.
Sebastian – I feel honoured.
Luke – You are, you should be honoured. I think I might give you some sort of award for this.
Sebastian – Well, I’m already, I think brownies is a very good reward already… and tea.
Luke – Tea and…
Sebastian – I’m more of a tea person by the way. I’m more of a tea person.
Luke – Okay, so, you know, if there’s a cliche about Americans
drinking coffee all the time, it’s not necessarily true
Sebastian – No, they do in detective movies.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – It’s obligatory.
Luke – If you’re a cop or a cop (American pronunciation)
Sebastian – Yeah, a cop (American pronunciation)
Luke – Then, then you have to drink some.
Sebastian – donuts and coffee
Luke – donuts and coffee.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Does that help, do you think, does that help detectives to solve crimes?
Sebastian – to solve crimes? Yeah. It helps them to solve crimes and not to be able to run after the victim as he’s running away or the suspect.
Luke – That’s why they have guns though.
Sebastian – Yeah. that’s why, that’s exactly why they have guns.
Luke – They don’t need to run.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – They can just shoot.
Sebastian – Yeah, they can just shoot.
Luke – They can eat as many doughnuts as they like.
Sebastian – Exactly.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – It’s a free country.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – It’s to defend the freedom to eat donuts.
Luke – Okay, this is the beauty of… Well, we’ll come back to the gun question later on, I think, Sebastian.
So, as I have, I expect, already said in the introduction, what we’re gonna do is just to find out some stuff from Sebastian about America and differences between America and Europe and Britain, some things about accents as well, other questions which I have received via Facebook. So some of you, listening to this, you sent your questions to me on Facebook today. So, I’m gonna be asking Sebastian some of those questions later on, but first of all, let’s just get to know you a little bit then, Sebastian.
Luke – So, you’re American, we’ve established that.
Sebastian – Yes.
Luke – You’re definitely American
Sebastian – Definitely.
Luke – Where exactly in the United States do you come from?
Sebastian – I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, about half an hour North of Manhattan.
Luke – Half an hour North of Manhattan?
Sebastian – Yes, in a place, in the county, called Westchester.
Luke – Westchester?
Sebastian – Yes.
Luke – Okay. I’ve heard about Westchester.
Sebastian – Yeah. What did you hear about it?
Luke – Well, what I’ve heard about, all I know about it is that there’s a song called “Westchester Lady”, which you probably don’t know.
Sebastian – No.
Luke – and it’s by a Jazz pianist called Bob James.
Sebastian – I don’t know either.
Luke – Bob James did the music to the TV show “Taxi”
Sebastian – I know “Taxi”!
Luke – Yeah, and “Westchester Lady” is a sort of a piece of jazz-funk music.
Sebastian – It’s weird that I don’t know him, because I do listen to jazz and I do listen to jazz funk, but I don’t know uh… Bob James, you said?
Luke – Bob James.
Sebastian – I don’t know Bob James.
Luke – You gotta check him out. It’s quite, it’s a little bit cheesy, but it’s good, because especially the rhythm section…
Sebastian – made in the 70s?
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – It’s all proper New York, I guess, New York early 1970s all mid-1970s, genuine article jazz-funk. It’s classic.
Sebastian – kind of fusion.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – I love that stuff.
Sebastian – Yeah. Me too. Unfortunately, my girlfriend doesn’t like it at all. So, there’s only, I’ve been very limited on how long, you know, like there are certain hours of the day when I’m allowed to play that music.
Luke – Headphones?
Sebastian – Headphones is the way to go.
Luke – Yeah. Me too. I’m was always rocking the headphones.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Okay. So, you’re from Westchester.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – What is… that’s very close to Manhattan, half an hour away.
Sebastian – Yeah. Well, it’s uh… North of Manhattan you have the
Bronx
Luke – Mmm-hmm
Sebastian – Which is part of New York City, and then, you have Westchester, which is the suburbs. So, it’s, you know, it’s a pretty cliche American suburb with lots of nice houses and a garden and…
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Cliche, white picket fence and stuff like that. So, it is pretty close to that cliche. So, it’s great uh… a place to grow up if you’re kid. When you become a teenager you wanna kill yourself.
Luke – Really?
Sebastian – Yeah! Oh, it’s boring, it’s very boring.
Luke – Yeah, but you’re so close to New York.
Sebastian – that’s the thing, yeah. I mean everything… why it’s borings is because everything is centered in New York.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – You know, so… you kind of have to go into the city for most, well no! Not movies of course. Movies you’ve got everywhere, but… yeah I mean most cultural things… so, I mean, I’m not gonna complain. It was great. Yeah. because I would, you know, every weekend with my parents growing up we would go to wonderful museums in New York and so I feel very lucky.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Besides, wanting to kill myself for five year period. No, no, no, It was a very… I feel very lucky to have grown up in the
greater New York area.
Luke – Yeah. It would be amazing. I think, probably as you said “wanting to kill yourself” is a kind of a teenage thing perhaps.
Sebastian – I think anywhere, I think it’s a universal teenage thing even if you live in the heart of New York or the heart of many places.
[ENDS AT 00:10:00]
[BEGINS FROM 00:10:00]
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – or the head of many… the left foot of many places.
Luke – because, New York is not the capital, as you say it’s like the left foot, so Washington is the right foot?
Sebastian – No, no, no. New York is definitely the heart. New York is …no what I was saying was like… like someone who might wanna kill themselves if they were in Nebraska which would be the equivalent to the left foot.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – But, no. New York is not the capital Of the United States, Washington DC is the capital of the United States but New York feels like the capital of something. I don’t know what, but
Luke – It maybe the one of the cultural capitals perhaps.
Sebastian – Yeah. Well. It’s definitely the cultural and economic capital.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …of the States.
Luke – …with Wall Street and so on
Sebastian – Exactly.
Luke – Yeah. Okay. So you grew up in… in New York, but I understand that you have lived in Boston.
Sebastian – Yes, I went to school in Boston. I went to college, what they college in the States, which is university.
Luke – You went to Harvard?
Sebastian – Oh ,no. Unfortunately, not. Unfortunately, not. I went to Boston University which is actually right across the river, of the Charles River.
Luke- Yeah.
Sebastian – from MIT and Harvard, which is actually Harvard and MIT are technically in the city of Cambridge,
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – …which is, there’s a Cambridge in Massachusetts as well.
Luke – That’s confusing…
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – because, okay. Because Cambridge – obviously, Cambridge in England isa very famous place for its University there
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – but there’s also another Cambridge in America…
Sebastian – which is famous for its universities
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – But, there isn’t… there isn’t a university called Cambridge University in the United States
Luke – Thank goodness for that. That’d be really confusing.
Sebastian – really confusing.
Luke – Alright.
Sebastian – So the city of Boston has pretty much, I mean, there are two kind of halves. One is Boston proper, the other is Cambridge which is right across the river, which is pretty much the same city. Technically it’s another city, but in Cambridge it’s a little bit more residential than Boston is. There is Harvard and there is MIT, is over there as well.
Luke – Okay. Sorry. I’m just eating a strawberry. Again, my girlfriend, because she’s really nice and lovely, she provided us with not only home-made
Sebastian – Home-made ?
Luke – …kinda brownies – brownie cakes
Sebastian – Delicious. What nut is in this?
Luke – There’s almonds.
Sebastian – Mmmmmmmm
Luke – So, these brownie cakes are obviously just like brownies but with almonds inside them. And also we have a plate of strawberries because it’s a nice warm day here. So, strawberries can be the perfect snack.
Sebastian – Wonderful snack.
Luke – nice fresh strawberries.
Sebastian – To counterbalance this brownie.
Luke – Yeah. The unhealthiness of a brownie is balanced by the healthiness and sweetness and lightness of a strawberry, and we also of course, have cups of tea.
Sebastian – Green tea!
Luke – Yeah and as I’ve said before on the podcast, it’s obviously very rude to speak with your mouth full, but we like to break the rules here at Luke’s English Podcast.
Sebastian – Thankfully!
Luke – Thankfully! Yeah. So, that includes speaking with your
mouth full and it also includes slurping your tea. Do you slurp your tea?
Sebastian – I do, I do.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – I’m a fan of slurping, can I slurp?
Luke – yeah, go ahead.
Sebastian – Should we…?
Luke – Yeah, cheers
Sebastian – Cheers.
Luke – Mmmmmmm.
Sebastian – Mmmmmmm.
Luke – Obviously, it’s very rude to slurp your tea and we’re only doing it…
Sebastian – …even in the United States!
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – Hahahaha.
Luke -Pierre yest(erday)… last time we started talking about slurping tea and he mentioned Iran for some reason. I don’t know why. He seemed to think that in Iran people didn’t…people did slurp their tea and it was polite.
Sebastian – It was polite, okay.
Luke – He’s wrong. I got an email. So, no. In Iran it’s very rude if you slurp your tea so… there we go. Anyway, we talked enough about slurping tea. So, grow up in New York. University in Boston, but not Harvard.
Sebastian – not Harvard. It’s a university called Boston University,
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – which is actually very big. It’s a very big University.
Luke – what did you study?
Sebastian – I studied Film.
Luke – Oh, really?
Sebastian – Well, I went to the college of communications then I majored in film and then minored in history.
Luke – Film and a bit of history as well?
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Okay. So did you do like a dissertation or…
Sebastian – I did a final film. Yeah.
Luke – Oh I’m sorry, you majored in making films or studying films?
Sebastian – Both,
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …but making films as well and now my final dissertation, well project, let’s say, was a final film and so right after I left university I had lots of knowledge of how to be a waiter. It was…it helped a lot.
Luke – Because it doesn’t necessarily prepare you for…
Sebastian – …for much else, and even, even the world of film-making it’s… Well, because it’s a creative, it’s an artistic field so…there’s only so much you can learn.
Luke – Yeah. It sounds a lot like my degree,
Sebastian – which is?
Luke – …except, that I didn’t learn actually how to do anything. I just learned how to read about things and crit…, you know, I did a critical-theoretical, cultural-theoretical degree. It sounds much more complicated than it actually is.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – I did Media and Cultural studies
Sebastian – Aha.
Luke – in Liverpool
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – in the the north of England, famous of course for the Beatles and football and that’s it.
Sebastian – that’s it.
Luke – No, it’s a fantastic place, of course. But yeah, I did Media and Cultural studies. We studied lots of movies. I wrote long essays about Clint Eastwood.
Sebastian – Aha.
Luke – and Batman
Sebastian – Yeah
Luke – and…
Sebastian – The modern hero or what?
Luke – Yeah. The sort of postmodern detective
Sebastian – Ah… kinda Dirty Harry?
Luke – Dirty Harry. I’m a big fan of Clint Eastwood films
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Anyway, anyway. So, you studied film. I see. So, are you a film-maker now?
Sebastian – I am working on a web series right now, but I don’t consider myself so much a filmmaker, because I’m not really doing that right now I’m focusing much more on stage stuff, performances and stuff like that.
Luke – Okay. In fact that brings us quite neatly to the fact that’s, well.. now, here in France, in Paris, Sebastian is a stand-up comedy performer and you in fact, you’re kind of one of the main comedy performers in English, here in Paris.
Sebastian – Yeah. I started a night, a night of English stand-up comedy. When there wasn’t anything, pretty much, going on in English stand-up comedy in France.
Luke – Was it difficult?
Sebastian – It was very difficult. For uh… both sides of the stage, if I can say… meaning – finding the audience and finding the comics.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – So, the first couple of times when I did the show which was… the idea was to have what they call a “Showcase”, meaning – several different comedians, because I didn’t have anybody that I knew who was able to be funny in English. I was pretty much doing my one-man show. I mean, that’s pretty much what happened.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …and then slowly, started to have… I started with the French comics who were interested in performing in English.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – and then, slowly, but surely, I got some English, native english-speaking comics like you.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …performing more and more. So, it took a while because yeah, as I said it’s been oh almost three years now.
Luke – The scene is developing?
Sebastian – It’s developing and it’s been developing mostly within the last year.
Luke – Okay. It’s good. It’s very promising. So, briefly let’s just talk about the shows that you do.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Sebastian is responsible for three shows here, in Paris
Sebastian – mhm.
Luke – I think, you have your one-man show.
Sebastian – Yeah, called “A New Yorker in Paris”.
Luke – “A New Yorker in Paris” – it’s very funny and it’s full of interesting cultural points and… it’s fantastic. Also, you do that show in French.
Sebastian – Yeah. I actually did it up until last Tuesday. I decided to take a little break on my French show and to put it aside, to kind of… because I’ve had many projects, so I kind of said – “Okay, I need to take a break on some things to focus more creatively on other ones”.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – But, yeah. I was performing in French my full one-man show as well.
Luke – Wow! You must speak very good French?
Sebastian – Decent enough. I speak French well enough to be funny… in it.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – But I’m not sure if it’s… they’re laughing where they’re
supposed to laugh or where the joke is or they’re laughing at my accent.
Luke – You’re not sure if they’re laughing with you or if they’re laughing at you.
Sebastian – At me, exactly. Well, most of time they’re laughing with me.
Luke- Yeah.
Sebastian – But it’s true that being funny in a foreign language is hard. It’s very hard.
Luke – Yeah, because I imagine that being funny is like… what you achieve at the very end.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – like it’s the last thing you’re able to do.
Sebastian – Exactly.
Luke – First of all, you’re just able to, like, order a coffee and then it gets a bit more complicated you can do a presentation or get involved in a meeting and then, at the absolute peak, you are able to do a one-man show for an hour in front of an audience of French people in French.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – In this case it’s French but it could equally be in English, if English is not your first language.
Sebastian – Yeah, but it’s the… one of last things because not only you need to speak the language very well and you need to be comfortable in the language that you can kinda improvise a little bit, also you need to have the cultural references – the slang words. You know, there’s a lot in humor.
Luke – Yeah
Sebastian – So if you don’t have all that it’s hard and so… it’s still hard, you know, even though I’ve had some success with it and, you know I’ve done my French bits on French television.
Luke – Yeah.
[00:20:00]
Sebastian – it’s still… I definitely feel, I’m not where I would like to be, because of the language barrier.
Luke – I think it’s very difficult to get to the sort of bilingual stage if you didn’t start when you were a kid.
Sebastian – Yeah. if you didn’t grow up with it, I think it’s very difficult.
Luke – but do you have any tips for learning a second language?
Sebastian – I think, immersing yourself,
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …kind of in the language. I mean, of course, if you can live in the country where they speak the language, of course, that’s ideal!
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – That’s really, that’s the best way, because more or less unless you’re, kind of, in a relationship with someone who speaks your native tongue, you’re forced to speak the language.
Luke – That’s interesting.
Sebastian – If you’re working, if you’re working, for example, you know, you have to understand what the person is saying, you have to respond. So, immersing yourself is the best way.
Luke – Essentially, I think what this means is that we have to push ourselves, we have to throw ourselves into situations where we will struggle to survive, as it were, and then in that struggling that’s where the learning takes place. So, we need to be challenged, don’t we?
Sebastian – Forced almost, I mean, I don’t know if this is a personal thing because I know that like if I have the escape route where I know that the person speaks English and I’m frustrated, I’m gonna go back to speaking English, but if I know that the person in front of me doesn’t understand English which was the case, I was forced to express myself in French whether it’d be… even if it was awkward,
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …but after a while, by the end of the day there was eight hours of the day where I was only communicating in this other language, so unfortunately, I had to force myself and, you know, kinda put myself in a corner where I could only survive by speaking that language
Luke – I think it’s… a lot of it is about comfort zone.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – So, if you’re in your comfort zone, if you’re comfortable, you know… the learning isn’t really going to happen. You’ll be comfortable, it’ll be very nice but you’re not necessarily going to really learn. So, we need to try and push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to give ourselves a chance to really let learning happen. So, when it comes to like… learning English people listening to this – just keep that in mind I suppose, like when you’re watching a DVD in English, comfort zone, have you got your subtitles on? Maybe turn them off!
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Because…
Sebastian – …or watch with Amer… uh…English subtitles.
Luke – Yeah. Well, people say that. Yeah, I think that’s definitely a good idea – watching english-language film with English language subtitles, but then when you get so used to that, the next step is switch off the subtitles.
Sebastian – Yeah, and see how much…, but it’s amazing how much more your ears start to open once you don’t have that crutch…
Luke – Yeah, yeah.
Sebastian – …of the subtitles.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – and I realized that in French when uh…when you put yourself in a situation whether it be, yeah, It could be a passive situation when you’re watching a film but you’re forced to follow the story. It’s amazing how much you’ll be surprised that you cou…you understand.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – You’ll surprise yourself, I think.
Luke – Yeah. Okay.
Sebastian – …once your ears adapt.
Luke – Yeah. Well, I have to take on that advice as well, because now I’m learning a second language, you know, it’s difficult… early days.
Sebastian – but it’s a very difficult language.
Luke – French?
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Yeah. Tell me about.
Sebastian – I mean, you know, it’s been nine years now that I’m here and…
Luke – nine years now?
Sebastian – Nine years and I still make mistakes all the time.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – I still have a very strong… and it’s very frustrating because I can say two words and a French person knows already that I’m not French. “Bonjour!” and they’re like “Ah, hi!”, you know.
Luke – Yeah. I find that when I start speaking French to people they just start speaking English to me because they’re like – “clearly, he doesn’t speak our language! I’ll speak English to you.”, and maybe they want to practise their English with me. They’re like – “Ah, an English person? Let me speak English to him!”
Sebastian – but I can’t help but sometimes get offended. Well I didn’t at first, but now after nine years Im (like) “uh, you know, I do speak French.”
Luke – Yeah. So you’re like – “Just, speak French to me, for god’s sake”
Sebastian – Especially, also because their English is not necessarily spectacular either you know but they want to speak English so…
Luke – Yeah, yeah. Maybe they would like a little mini English lesson. Okay, so… you’ve been living in Paris for nine years. So, you’re an American, you’re a New Yorker in Paris and that’s the name of your show.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – So, what brought you here to Paris then? What brought you here?
Sebastian – Well, actually, I wasn’t in Paris, I didn’t live in Paris at first. I was in the south of France for a while.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – And uh…now, it’s been four years that I’ve been to Paris and so when I came up to Paris I was in Toulouse for a while
Luke – It’s down south
Sebastian – Yeah, down south-west. The south-west of France. I came up to Paris to, kind of… Well, France is very centered in Paris.
Luke – Everything is based in…Paris
Sebastian – Yeah, lots of the jobs are here, lots of, kind of the entertainment industry is here. It’s very centered. So, being someone who majored in film, and all that stuff, I realised that Paris is kind of the future and I wanted to start performing again because I did perform uh comedy when I was in New York and Boston and I kind of missed the stage.
Luke – Yeah. So…but uh.. Why did you leave America? Why did you leave your home country?
Sebastian – My home country? Well, because I was with a French girl.
Luke – Ah, well, love
Sebastian – Well love, there you go. And so uh.. but you know, that was a part of it, but I also, you know, I had recently graduated from college and I wanted to see, I wanted to travel as well, so there were different reasons… love being one of them, also adventure, wanting to… you know. I had no idea how long I would stay, you know, I didn’t know. And so… you know, here I am, nine years later, went by pretty quickly.
Luke – Yeah. Time flies when you’re having fun.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Okay, so… so what’s it like being an American in France? How is it being an American in France, generally?
Sebastian – Generally, it’s fine. I mean, the French and Americans have a love-hate relationship.
Luke – What’s a… you love them and they hate you?
Sebastian – Both, mutually, we both love and hate.
Luke – Yes.
Sebastian – …both, each other, for different reasons. We get very pissed off about each other you know, and get annoyed by each other.
Luke – Yeah? Can you tell us some of those things, like what do the Americans get annoyed with the French about?
Sebastian – The fact, that they are… well it’s funny because both have the impression that the other is arrogant.
Luke – Right.
Sebastian – So, the Americans have the impression that the French are arrogant…. that the French are pretentious and rude. So, these are the big cliches. And that’s uh…that the French kind of try to counteract the Americans often, to criticise.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – And uh…Which on the other hand, lots of Americans are here because of that, because also lots of American citizens are very critical of the American government as well. And so coming to France there’s this kind of haven of people who are not necessarily gung-ho for everything that America stands for and can put the American way of life and the government into question. You know, not necessarily being against but just, asking more questions.
Luke – So, I tend to find that Americans who have come here to France to live tend to be more open-minded perhaps or they have more perspective on America than…
Sebastian – Well, I think, I don’t know if it’s specifically to France. I think just leaving the United States automatically gives you more perspective, you know. It’s very easy, living in the United States, to feel that the United States is the world.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Because, it is a microcosm of the world. There are people from all over the world in the United States more than in any other country in the world. And it’s a very big country and you kind of have everything represented there.
Luke – You’ve got like two sides.
Sebastian – You’ve got two sides,
Luke – There’s ocean on both sides.
Sebastian – Yeah. And… and you’ve got all different landscapes and as I said, all different countries are represented there, and so… you know… And there’s the television that’s very, you know uh… American television is very identifiable and so it’s very easy to forget that there’s a world outside.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – And so, you know, whether you come to France or any other country, I think right away you get another perspective and it helps you give a perspective on the United States. So I think naturally, someone who lives abroad has that perspective that someone living in the United States who never traveled will probably not have.
Luke – That’s one of the big criticisms that people have of America is that they don’t know anything about the rest the world.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – but I guess when you leave, you know, you get a lot more perspective on things.
Sebastian – The thing about the States is – it’s everything! It’s a country of extremes. You have the most ignorant people as you can have the most culturdl people, you know, and New York is totally different from Kansas, you know it’s…it’s… you’ve got everything.
Luke – Yeah. Before you came to Europe what did you expect Europe as a whole to be like? Sorry, have you visited many other countries in Europe?
[00:30:00]
S: I had been, before coming to France, I’d been to Spain, England and Portugal
L: Ok and since, have you travelled around?
S: Yeah, since now I’ve been nine years I’ve been in France, now I’ve been to Italy, Germany, aahh, papapa well, Belgium, The Netherlands, still mostly western Europe
L: Been to the UK?
S: Not since I’ve been to France
L: You haven’t been to the UK?!
S: Not since I, I went to London, oh, no, no, so that’s not true, I have been to the UK, I went actually two summers ago, we actually drove across the UK to go to Ireland
L: Oh right, so you were just passing through
S: Just passing through, I saw Stonehenge, for ten minutes
L: It’s not very…
S: Disapointed
L: You mean you stopped and you looked at it …
S: I looked at it
L: … on foot
S: Yeah, there is a gate, there’s like kinda fence around, so I didn’t go cause I think I had to pay
L: Yeah, yeah, you have to pay to get in
S: I didn’t pay I saw it from the outside and that was fine
L: To be honest, Stonehenge is, is a bit disappointing but it’s not because of the, the, the site, it’s not because of the monument itself, it’s not a monument, it’s not because of the …
S: the structure?
L: the thing itself, I mean we don’t really know what it is, in fact. It’s not the stones that are disappointing, it’s just the way that the location is presented, in fact, because it’s a deeply significant sight in terms of ancient history of the area and what you have now is a motorway
S: the road, the road
L: it runs right past it, so that doesn’t help. Back in the …
S: I didn’t expect it there, just been to a gas station but no, it was Stonehenge
L: yeah, yeah. It should … I think originally Stonehenge was at the end of a long path and it was kind of at the top of a small hill and so to get to Stonehenge would you have to walk quite a long way across a lot of open land with the rising kind of gradient so you would be walking uphill and you would see Stonehenge in the distance and then when you get to Stonehenge, this is five thousands years ago, when you got to Stonehenge it was much much more impressive because of the surrounding area and the context. Now it is not the same because there’s this big motorway that goes right past it, so unfortunately it spoils
S: It’s true that if I had to get to Stonehenge by walking a little bit it would definitely would have had a different effect
L: I don’t know that’s because you would be relieved
S: You finally got there
L: Oh god, I’m finally here, not that it’s that impressive but because you don’t have to walk anymore
S: walk anymore, yeah
L: Ok, I would love to hear what you think about other countries, I mean, cause we can’t just talk about France, I have listeners from all over the world and, in fact, on Facebook, some of them have sent me questions. So the first question I have it’s from Jairo, I’m not sure where Jairo is from actually, but what he said is: “If you have the chance to go back in time for twenty four hours, so just for one day, where and when would you go?” So you’ve got a time machine, you can use it for twenty four hours, where’re you going to go, when are you going to go to?
S: I think I … ancient Grece
L: Yes?
S: Yeah
L: Why is that?
S: Because I think they really had another way of thinking, I think it would be really interested to know what humans were like before the dawn of our modern religions I think that would be … they must have thought very differently and I think it would be very interesting to spend twenty four hours, and would I think really open up my mind to see how humans were, because I think we chose a different path instead and I think it would be interesting to see really how they thought and ..
L: Yeah, when I imagine ancient Greece I imagine sort of guys sort of lounging around with tablets
S: Yes
L: But it’s not like tablet computers like we have now
S: No
L: They had the original tablets
S: The original, yeah
L: The stone tablets. Can you imagine that any time you wanted to write something down you had to engrave it
S: Chisel, yeah and especially later with the numbers, well, yeah ancient Greece or ancient Rome, but yeah what the numbers, the roman numerals, if you wanted to represent 1943 you had to have, like, many characters
L: Ok, you have to learn a new alphabet
S: Yeah, pretty much a new alphabet, yeah
L: Ok, ancient Greece, awesome, brilliant. So ok, the next question is from Christopher and Christopher says: “What accent do you prefer Sebastian?, do you prefer the British accent, an American accent or an accent from another country? So what’s your favourite accent?
S: oh, ahm, I don’t have a ‘favourite’ accent, I mean there’re accents I find funny that for comedic potential as a comedian work very well, a German speaking English for some reason is very funny. I don’t know if it’s thanks to Mel Brooks films or what but there’s something funny I think about german speaking English
L: Really? Cause I have a lot of germans who are listening to this
S: Oh-oh!
L: and they are thinking l like “Oh is my English funny?” They might be
S: Offended
[ENDS AT 00:35:00]
[BEGINS FROM 00:35:00]
Sebastian – Offended? I just offended them all.
Luke – You’ve just offended the whole nation of Germany
Sebastian – …of Germany. No, I like the Indian accent. When Indians speak English, I find it I don’t know, there’s a ring to it that I appreciate
Luke – Going going back to the German thing again
Sebastian – Yeah. I have to make up for it now.
Luke – Yeah. You do. But I think, there is, I think, the thing about German accent that makes it funny is as you said like some movies
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …and stuff and some comedy movies have presented some germans as comedy characters with the voice and so on, but Okay. You find Indian accent to be pleasant.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Charming?
Sebastian – I mean, I love the British accent as well.
Luke – Of course!
Sebastian – Irish accent. I feel the Irish can see anything and it’s adorable. They can curse, they can see terrible news, but it’s charming.
Luke – Hiroshi from Japan is a regular contributor to the Facebook page. Hiroshi says, he has rather a serious question for you, Sebastian. He said:
– “How do you, what do you think about the ban and the gun movement in America” (Hiroshi)
and he adds:
– “I can’t believe they’re allowed to keep the gun. I’m strongly against it” (Hiroshi).
Luke – That’s what he says:
– ” Why don’t they ban guns with the strong decision like the decision to begin the war” (Hiroshi)
Luke – Wow, it’s a controversial question from Hiroshi.
Sebastian – Yes. Well, I mean, I agree with him, generally speaking that there should definitely, definitely be more gun control in the United States. Why I don’t know. This is a very complicated question. I don’t know if we really know why Americans love guns, but, you know, we do love guns! I mean, we, speaking very generally of the American people, I think, it will…, Well, it’s written in the constitution that it’s a right. It’s one of the first bills of the constitution, I don’t know which number.
Luke – I don’t know either. [It’s the 2nd amendment to the constitution! – Luke]
Sebastian – I should know this, but I didn’t memorise the whole constitution. So I think, because it’s like top 5 they think that it’s necessary to hold onto, which of course, is a big mistake in the sense that guns when the Constitution was written were, was a very different beast, you know, a gun and you shoot one bullet and it took you 5 minutes to clean out your…
Luke – They didn’t have AK-47s or M-16s, back in those days.
Sebastian – So, definitely a different kind of thing that we’re dealing with 230 years ago. Why? I think, it’s fear. I really think, it’s fear. I think that…, there’s a big fear that’s…, it’s a vicious circle in the sense…, it’s a vicious circle of a fear in a sense that you know that someone on the street might have a gun, so in order to defend yourself the only way is to have a gun. So, you have a gun and then that person of course is afraid that you might have a gun and so everyone winds up having a gun. Lots of people have guns in the house because they’re worried that someone will rob their house at gunpoint.
Luke – It’s terrible. That means the guns just multiply
Sebastian – Exactly.
Luke – Because all it take is for like a certain number of people to have guns for everyone else to feel that they should have guns.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – But it seems to me that it goes a little deeper than that as well, and when you start talking about gun-control, people feel it’s like anti-American to to ban the gun. So maybe that is the constitution but…,
Sebastian – That’s linked with the constitution because we have this association that…, because the constitution defines America, this is kind of the idea, so that if you kinda get rid of one of the fundamental aspects of the American constitution it is unamerican.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – But in my opinion it is also very much American and necessarily American to put these things in question.
Luke – Yeah.
[00:40:00]
Sebastian – the American way of life, in my opinion, the positive aspect is to put constantly be putting yourself in question which i think the American people and government don’t do enough.
Luke – Yeah. Well, I hope that there is more gun control, just as a final point, I think as you said about it being American, it seems that its central, somehow it is connected to some core American values.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – One of those being freedom or liberty.
Sebastian – Definitely.
Luke – I think that to an extent some people in the States value the right or…, yeah, the right to have a gun as somehow connected to the ability to be free.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – and, having the right to bear arms is more valuable than the fact that some people will die from from shootings.
Sebastian – We’re very much afraid of the government in the United States.
Luke – You don’t like the idea that the government control over you…
Sebastian – Yeah, control and telling somebody an individual what to do. So this is a general, you know, I’m talking very general. As I said the United States is a very big place for 300 million people. It, you know, it’s very hard to categorise a whole country, but I’m talking about the people who as you said hold on to their rights, and yes, it’s that they consider it a right and if the government would say no you can’t carry a gun they would take it as an infringement on their freedom and, because there was established a long time ago and, the United States was, it’s a big country that had pioneers coming in and they needed to explore the land and they needed their gun and so they needed to hold on to it. It’s changed a lot as I said so…
Luke – I think, maybe…, to be honest, maybe the British, I think, it’s our fault. Sorry. I think, it’s our fault, because obviously in America there was a war of independence and they had to fight against the colonials, the Brits, they had a war against the British. So, maybe, adding into the constitution that all Americans were are allowed to have guns and that they should be allowed to have guns was a protection against the British. Because we had guns and we were fighting against you. So, you said: – “Right, American people, you can have guns. In fact, you should, because you need to protect ourselves against the British. So it is our fault.
Sebastian – Yeah. it’s become…, It’s always the British’s fault. Let’s get that clear. It’s always the British’s fault.
Luke – We’re responsible.
Sebastian – but now, it’s been replaced with, you know, but it’s the same ideas, it’s the same concept. Now, it’s been replaced by criminals, you know, the people, the criminals out there who’re gonna attack me and I need to defend… and it also comes back to this idea of fear that I need to defend myself and that no one will do for me.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – So, there’s this mistrust that the government or police won’t do it and it’s also another thing, the citizens say: “- Well, if the cops have guns that’s not fair, I should have a gun as well” and so the cops have guns because the criminals have guns and so, everyone winds up having a gun.
Luke – Yeah. Well, Hiroshi, I hope that answers your question. I think it is clear, you know, that’s not…, it’s a very complex issue. We know that much and you can see how it’s all related to national identity. That actually is very important, you know, in how people define their lives. It’s very complicated, but yeah:
“- Why don’t they ban guns with the so strong decision?” (Hiroshi)
Luke – He says:
– “That’s Americans took a very strong decision to go to war” (Hiroshi)
Luke – So that’s a very, sort of, decisive thing that America sometimes decides to go to war, for example, in Iraq or in Afghanistan that leads us onto another question here. sorry to put this to you sebastian. Today, you have to justify everything that your country has done.
Sebastian – for the last 50 years.
Luke – Yeah, as an American you have to explain why America does these things.
Sebastian – Well, I want to say one thing that, unfortunately with all these gun massacres recently in schools and all of that, I feel and, I’m, you know, hopefully that there’s a tendency that the United States will wake up and really start to put a restriction on guns when you see how rampant the guns are all over the place.
Luke – This is very dangerous. Again, very complicated thing. We could talk about that for ages
Sebastian – Sorry… that’s war
Luke – but the next one is like war, isn’t it. We’ve done guns. Let’s move on to war. So – “What do you think about the American military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan”. That’s a question from Yarek. He asks:
– “What do you think about US military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq” (YAREK)
Sebastian – Well, I’m not very well-informed, enough, I think, to talk about this. I mean, you know, I’m very much against war in general. I’m not for Americans getting involved in such places. Especially, where’s so much irony, in the fact, that the countries that the Americans are invading into the same countries that they supplied guns thirty years ago.
Luke – Well, Bill Hicks who is, you know, a great stand-up comedian, he is unfortunately not with us anymore. He made loads of very funny jokes about it like, one of them was, like, When American politicians appear on the news and they say: – “The Iraqi army”, this is from the original gulf war, 1991 part 1.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – (telling a joke)
– “The Iraqi army, they got terrible weapons”
– “How do you know that?”
– “well, we’ve checked the receipts”
So, you know, so these weapons that America actually, originally sold to the Iraqi army…,
Sebastian – Yeah, exactly.
Luke – …and then they fight against the Iraqi army, with even better weapons than them. So, they know exactly what they’ve got because they sold it to them.
Sebastian – Sold it, yeah.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – So, you know, afterwards as far as specific interactions with Iraq and and Afghanistan, I don’t know enough details. I think that it’s very hard to know what’s going on, really. I mistrust the American news and so, in what aspect am I against it, it’s really hard to know, but I mean, I have to say also that there’s this tendency that I agree in some regards that there needs to be a democratic system that’s put in place in some way. I don’t necessarily agree with the methods that the American government is doing, but, you know, there is, it’s true that there should be some democracy in these countries.
Luke – Yeah.It’s very complicated. Thank you for your questions about this. We’re not necessarily the people (the most informed) to finally answer these very complicated ones, but still it’s interesting to see the opinion of an American person. Yarek also asks:
– “Do you know any foreign languages?”
Luke – I suppose, this is because we assume that Americans don’t know foreign languages, but you’re slightly different because you’ve been in France for a while.
Sebastian – Yeah. I am a weird case even though I am a real American because I was born and raised there. My parents are from Argentina. So I speak a bit of Spanish. I grew up with Spanish in the household and now of course I speak French, because it’s been a while that I’m here and well, yeah. It’s atypical. It’s not necessarily, not many Americans speak foreign languages, but more and more I would say. Especially, because there are such a heavy immigration and a very very big Latino population now in most major cities in the United States. More and more Spanish is being heard on the street everywhere, especially in major cities. So more and more people are, you know, opening up to foreign languages.
Luke – Can I ask you quickly about Argentina?
Sebastian – Yep.
Luke – Do both your parents come from Argentina?
Sebastian – Yes.
Luke – Did they move …
Sebastian – …
Luke – Go on
Sebastian – They were born and raised there both of them. They met there, they married there. My brother was born there and then, they moved to the united states and I was born in the United States. Did I answer your question?
Luke – Yeah. You did. Yeah. I see. Have you been to Argentina yourself?
Sebastian – Yes, several times. Yeah. Well, I know my parents are from Buenos Aires. I know Buenos Aires quite well. I don’t really know that much else of the country unfortunately. I’ve been around a bit. I’ve been to Iguazu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iguazu_Falls) which is the waterfalls in between Argentina and Brazil – gorgeous! Gorgeous place, but I haven’t been to, many places I still need to visit in Argentina. It is a very big country.
Luke – Yeah. Can you just tell us one thing that you remember about your time in Argentina? Did you eat a lot of steak?
Sebastian – Lots of steak. Very good steak. Very good beef.
Luke – Apparently, it’s the best beef steak you can get, in the world?
Sebastian – Yeaaaaaaah, it’s great I don’t know ‘best’, I mean France is very good the States as well. I mean, it’s hard to say, because it also depends a lot how it’s prepared. Yeah. The quality of the beef is true, it’s very good. It’s very much a part of their diet, everywhere. It’s like normal. Every day you can eat beef and don’t think twice about it. It’s also very nice city. Buenos Aires is actually, very nice city. it’s very European influenced city.
Luke – Yeah?
[ENDS AT 00:50:00]
[BEGINS FROM 00:50:00]
Sebastian – lots of French architecture that you can find, like aspects that kinda remind you of Paris or…, but an older Paris.
Luke – Really nice people as well. The people I’ve met from Argentina have always been like really friendly, interesting and warm
Sebastian – …warm.
Luke – Yeah. I’d love to go one day. Maybe, when I finally do my round-the-world adventure – “Luke’s round-the-world adventure” and I’ll make a podcast.
Sebastian – …and do a podcast from each country.
Luke – It would be brilliant. I’d love to do that. Okay. Let’s see – Atsushi Yoshida who is from Japan would like to know… He says:
– “I want him to talk about American regional accents” [Atsushi Yoshida]
Sebastian – Okay.
Luke – I talk about British regional accents quite a lot. I love accidents. I’m really into it. Sometimes, I talk about American accents, but I don’t know which part of the country my American accent comes from.
Sebastian – Okay.
Luke – If I can, you know, sort of like, start speaking with generic American voice. I don’t know where it comes from. I mean, okay, so…
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – The first question: How many different regional accents are there in the USA.
Sebastian – You can’t number them like that. I mean, it gets very very specific. You know, even in New York there several accents. So there’s Italian-American New York accent.
Luke – “Hey, how are you doing? Come on! What is the matter with you?”
Sebastian – Exactly.
Luke -Do you get some cannoli?
Sebastian – Exactly, very good. So, which would be different from a typical New York accent, which is kind of like the Woody Allen?, would “New York”. They kinda put an emphasis on the “K”, like – “New York”.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – “Water”. Some people say that I have slight New York Jew-accent. I am Jewish, so… I don’t hear it, but sometimes people do say that
there is like, it’s kind of, you might hear it with the “T”. We kind of replace “T” with “D”, like a clear example with “Water”.
Luke – “Water”.
Sebastian – “Water”.
Luke – That’s interesting, because whenever I do, I always use “Water” as an example, I’d say: – “water”.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Now, you say “Water”
Sebastian – Water, water, water.
Luke – Water, water, water, because I emphasise the “R” sound a bit too much.
Sebastian – When you’re doing in American accent?
Luke – Yeah. Can you say
Sebastian – But that’s a New York accent. That’s also my accent, meaning yours, I think, is more of a Middle America accent .
Luke – Yeah. So, Can you say: “can I get a glass of water please?”
Sebastian – Can I get a glass a water please?
Luke – “Can I get a glass of water please?”. So, I think mines is more exaggerated or something.
Sebastian – Yeah, but not that much. Yours is pretty straight on, I mean, there are definitely Americans who speak like that. So…
Luke – Does it have any particular regional…
Sebastian – Nah, I mean, you have to speak more for me to try to place it.
Luke – I guess – “I’m sitting here with the Sebastian Marx and he’s a comic. He’s very funny. We’ve just been drinking some…”, now, that’s kind of “We’ve just been drinking”… it’s kind of really middle American.
Sebastian – Yeah. It’s hard to place. I mean, I’d say, it’s a middle America, but it could be someone from New York as well or any. I think, also I think, it’s starting to blend more and more. I mean, I think, with mass communications all Americans are watching the same television shows, being influenced by the same news broadcasters which, you know, apparently, this is what I’ve heard, I don’t know if it’s true, no matter in which country or language, apparently the newscasters are supposed to have the most neutral accent, which I think is not the case in the BBC, because they speak weird as your sketch so clearly says, but it seems like an American newscaster kinda has to have a relatively neutral accent.
Luke – Okay. Yeah, listeners to the podcast know that part of my comedy routine involves speaking like a newsreader who for some reason speaks like this. That’s a bit exaggerated.
Sebastian – but, is it true?
Luke – Yeah. It is. It is. I was watching the Margaret Thatcher’s funeral today and they were doing it – “The coffin there being lifted by members of the SAS the Royal Marines and the Gurkah rifle infantry”. You know, it’s just like- “Why are they speaking like that?”. Anyway, that’s a different question about the way newsreader speak. Okay.
Sebastian – other American regions you want?
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Okay. There’s a southern accent which is
Luke – “Hey y’ain’t from round here are ya? We don’t take too kindly to strangers round here”
Sebastian – Yeah, it can be very, you know, what we call redneck-y kinda like that the cliche you did, but it could also be very sweet. Can be…, I have to say that there’s something very seductive of a southern girl. When a southern girl has a southern accent it can be very charming as well: – “what has a girl gotta do to get a nice cold drink around here? ” and it can be also very nice.
Luke – “I gots to get myself back home now. Well it sure is getting late”
Sebastian – Exactly.
Luke – I don’t know, I don’t know what this accent is.
Sebastian – No, it was great. It was like a scene from a 1950s movie with James Dean or something.
Luke – Yeah? Brilliant! A lot of people talk about the Texan accent.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – So, what is that, because I have this kind of cowboy voice that I like to play around with which is like, sort of…
Sebastian – John Wayne-y
Luke – No it is more kind of gritty sort of 1970s character from like “The Outlaw Josey Wales” It’s like – “Well I’m prouder than a game rooster to have rid (ridden) with you”, you know, that’s kind of thing, like – “I’m hungry and tired as a Missouri heelhound”, you know, like what is that?
Sebastian – I can’t take responsibility for this, because I don’t know what it is. I mean, I don’t know, sometimes for me as a New Yorker, it’s hard to tell the difference in the southern accent the Texan accent.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – You know that they’re both from the south, but like as, you know, I’m sure that there’s a difference between someone from Georgia and someone from Texas.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – but I wouldn’t be able to necessarily…, yeah, perhaps if I heard I’d be oh that’s this accent but I wouldn’t be able to reproduce it. But you sounded like you’re doing pretty good.
Luke – Yeah. I think, I’m doing a character rather than an accent.
Sebastian – Well, it’s definitely a character of the cliche of that accent.
Luke – He’s a is a gold prospector basically.
Sebastian – Okay. Well, that can be more West, like that can be even more, you know, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, kind of, it’s also a question of what century we’re talking about.
Luke – Yeah. It is. Yeah.
Sebastian – Another accent which, I don’t know if you want to continue with accents, but that’s pretty clear as a Boston accent, being someone who lived in Boston, which is the accent that you can really hear with John F Kennedy.
Luke – Yeah. – “People….”, I can’t do it.
Sebastian – They don’t pronounce, the main thing is the “R”. They don’t pronounce the “R”. The cliche, the key phrase that we always say to make fun of the Boston accent is – “Park the car in Harvard Yard”.
Luke – “Park the car in Harvard Yard”
Sebastian – “Park the car in Harvard Yard”
Luke – That’s P-A-R-K T-H-E C A-R I-N H-A-R-V-A-R-D Y-A-R-D
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – “Park the car in Harvard Yard”
Sebastian – Yeah. – “A wicked kisser” So, that’s the cliche, that’s a typical Boston accent. so: – “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” and that’s kinda like rhythm to it.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – That’s very typical.
Luke – If you wanna, listeners if you wanna hear what the Boston accent really sounds like, then you could probably watch “The Departed” or – “The Departed”.
Sebastian – …which I haven’t seen, but yeah.
Luke – It’s great! It’s really good film. It’s set in Boston,
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …all the characters like gritty Boston, you know, locals and they speak with a strong Boston accent. It’s sort of Irish influence.
Sebastian – Yeah. very very heavy …have a huge huge Irish immigration to Boston. Also if you wanna hear a typical Boston accent which is kinda making fun which is a character based on the Kennedy is in “The Simpsons” – Mayor Quimby.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – If you hear the American version of “The Simpsons”, Mayor Quimby has a typical Boston accent.
Luke – Mayor Quimby?
Sebastian – Mayor Quimby, he’s of course a corrupt mayor, you knows, all the cliches of a politician.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …and he has the cliche of a Boston accent.
Luke – because, he is basically John F Kennedy isn’t he?
Sebastian – Yeah, pretty much or Ted Kennedy, you know, or who was a governor of Massachusetts. There’s a huge Kennedy family in…
Luke – Yeah. It’s interesting the way you say the word “mayor”, because I say “mayor” which is “A-A-A-A-A”, “MA-A-A-A”, that’s it. You say?
Sebastian – mayor.
Luke – mayor
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – kind of. Okay. “MA-A-A-A”.
Sebastian – You say, like almost French do “MA -AH”
Luke – MA AH.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Except without the “H-H-H-H” in the end
Sebastian – Yeah. Yeah.
Luke – I think the way that the British or the way I say it, it sounds a bit ridiculous. I sound like a sheep.
Sebastian – MA-A-A-A-A AH
Luke – MA-A-A-A-A,
[SPK1] – “The MA-A-A-A-YOR of London.”,
[SPK2] -” What? Did you just become a sheep at the beginning of the sentence?”.
[SPK1]- “The MA-A-A-A-YOR of London”.
[SPK2]- “What?”
Luke – You know, “MO-O-O-O-O” is that a word as well? I don’t think so. Next question, Camila Andrade, and I know that she comes from Brazil.
[ 00:60:00]
Sebastian – u-huh
Luke – It’s another question about time. on the subject of time we’ve been going for about an hour.
Sebastian – u-huh
Sebastian – What the hell? It’s a podcast !
Sebastian – They can listen how ever much they want.
Luke – They can pause and come back later.
Sebastian – Can I have another brownie?
Luke – Please have another brownie. You need the energy, because it’s a long podcast.
Sebastian – I’m not gonna pass out
Camila from Brazil, who’s a previous winner of my competition. I launched a competition over a year ago.
Sebastian – Aha.
Luke – She won the competition
Sebastian – What did she have to do?
Luke – She had to record erm a couple of minutes of dialogue, a couple of minutes of talking
Sebastian – u-huh
Luke – In response to one of the episodes of Luke’s English Podcast and she won. People had voted for her and she won the prize which was a dictionary.
Sebastian – Oh, wow! What was the subject of conversation?
Luke – Oh, goodness me. It’s a long time ago now. I’d heard so many…,
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …that I can’t remember what they were about about. All I remember that she, you know, she just was very impressive, and charming, and so well done Camila. Alright?
Sebastian – u-huh.
Luke – So, anyway. She said to me:
– “Would you rather go back in time and meet your ancestors or go way into the future
and meet your great grandchildren”? (Camila Andrade)
Sebastian – ooh.
Luke – What would you rather do? Who’d you rather meet, your ancestors from the past or your grandchildren from the future?
Sebastian – Very interesting question.
Luke – time travel related.
Sebastian – Yeah. Yeah. there’s a theme here. I don’t know. I think, they’re both interesting.
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – I would say the future.
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – I’m very skeptical about the future. I’m very skeptical and very worried about the future. so….
Luke – You think it’s all going to be zombies…
Sebastian – Yeah. Zombies at best. The zombies at best.
Luke – Really?
Sebastian – If the world is still even exists. If the planet still exists.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Yeah. In the future, I think it’ll be very interesting to see
if anything I do has any influence on anything in the future.
Luke – Really?
Sebastian – But I’m also very curious, I would also be very curious, where I’m coming from, what…, because, you know, I was pretty close to all my grandparents and it’s fascinating, and to really see the lineage and, what, how much I inherit. So this hard, It’s really hard question, but I think, I would say the future.
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – Yeah. How about you?
Luke – I see… It’s a very good question too. If I went back into the past..,
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – I’d be worried that if I did something it would affect the future.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – For example, If I, sort of, you know like, do you know the movie “Back to the Future” ?
Sebastian – I know it very well.
Luke – If I went to the past and I met my ancestors, if I sort of said something wrong or, your know if I, you know, dropped a glass in the kitchen or If I sort of caused something to happen which somehow divided the family,
Sebastian – Yeah
Luke – …you know if I like tried to make a joke and no one understood and they all got offended and then there was a big argument and then my parents for some reason…
Sebastian – Split up.
Luke – …never met each other and I would just disappear, I wouldn’t exist anymore.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – So, I be worried about sort of breaking the space time continuum
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – You know…
Sebastian – but I think, even if you just said – “Hi I’m your great-great-grandchild” I think that there was already kind of influence, that would screw-up everything.
Luke – I think, that would it, wouldn’t it? I think, there’s a number of theories about what can happen if you go into the past.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – One is that you affect of the future which then affects who you are in that situation. If I, for example, I’ve made a mistake or said a bad joke of my parents never got together, then I would just disappear.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – But the other option, the other theory is that another version, another plane of existence would be created.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …and so, it would be alright.
Sebastian – Yeah, because it’s just another plane.
Luke – Yeah, exactly! So I don’t think I would go into the past, because I’m scared of what I would do.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – So I would like to go to the future.
Sebastian – Yeah, but that would screw things up as well.
Luke – Would it?
Sebastian – Wouldn’t it?
Luke – Would it?
Sebastian – Imagine now, if our grand-grandparents decided to come visit us, to see how we are doing, that would…
Luke – for example, if they came back and they look really ill and really poor.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – and they would like, look, you know, it’s really hard in the future, you know, we haven’t got any food, we haven’t good any money
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …you know, we’re homeless what are you doing then I’d feel really guilty and I’d just…
Sebastian – Yeah, or you would be like, how did you travel? It would open up your mind to a whole ‘nother realm.
Luke – Yeah. I’d just say, I would accept that in the future at some point we will be able to travel in time and obviously, we can’t do it now, but they could. So, I don’t know.
Sebastian – But if in the future we can travel in time we would know that now,wouldn’t we?
Luke – Yeah. We would. I think if we’d got the ability to travel through time then all the time would just become meaningless, and you know, the space time continuum would break down, it would just become chaos.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – But, you know, I’m not a physicist
Sebastian – Me neither.
Luke – I’m not a quantum physicist, I think we need ask people like, what is he name? Michio Kaku I think, he is a Japanese-American physicist. He’s a sort of guy who can answer these questions or Doc Brown Doc Emmett Brown
Sebastian – Yeah, of course. He’d be the most obvious.
Luke – But if you did he would probably just go “Marty” “Get to the Delorian” or something like that. that’s what I think. I’ll go to the future just so I could get, like, the next iPhone.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – and bring it back.
Sebastian – iPhone 25.
Luke – Yeah, and I would show people – “Look at this I’ve got the iPhone 25”, but I don’t know how it will be, what the iPhone 25 will be like.
Sebastian – I think, It won’t be a phone.
Luke – No?
Sebastian – I think, it’ll just be like a thing that you attach like helmet or I don’t know an ear piece
Luke – I don’t think, it will be as big as a helmet. I think I’ll be just…
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – it’ll probably just be like a little tablet that you swallow.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – and you just swallow it once and then…
Sebastian – a beam comes out your nose and you can touch the screen which could be like a projection coming out of nose.
Luke – Yeah, exactly. You can send laser beams out of your face which allow you like visit websites.
Sebastian – Yeah, like to have your agenda in front of you.
Luke – Yeah. You could just like things
Sebastian – Yeah, you could like things.
Luke – You’d be able to just like things more conveniently. Okay. So again, I hope that’s the answer your question Camila. Let’s move on, Wassim. Wassim – I know, he’s a clairvoyant. He lives in New Zealand. He is originally from Iran. Interesting gu,y and Wassim is interested in your spiritual beliefs.
Sebastian – Ohoommm
Luke – Do you have a spiritual belief? Do you believe in life after death? What is your spirituality Sebastian?
Sebastian – I don’t, I do not adhere to any religion. That’s true, but I do consider myself a spiritual person, but I’m not sure what exactly I believe and I think, I’m discovering that more and more every day. I do believe that there is a sort of intelligence, but I don’t necessarily think that intelligence is not us. In the sense that I think, we are utilising a very small percentage of our capacity and I do think that we are deities in our own way.
Luke – We are gods.
Sebastian – We are, and I think, we don’t realise it, as if we kinda spiritual, we have a creative power that were not aware of and we don’t utilise or that were afraid of. So I believe in human potential. I don’t know if that’s spiritual or not. I believe it is spiritual, and I do believe that we are linked as living beings on this earth.
Luke – Yeah. Facebook, you know.
Sebastian – Facebook that’s the clearest example of my spirituality.
Luke – I’m joking, I’m joking of course. I’m being facetious as usual. Yeah. I agree. I think that we do have hell of a lot of untapped potential. We’re probably learning more and more as time goes on. I don’t know, if I would, speaking for myself, I don’t know if I would call it spirituality, you see, like…, I think that our subconscious or the way how our minds work is kind of a mystery to us.
Sebastian – It’s a very big mystery. I mean, I believe in dreams. If I can say. I mean there’s nothing to believe in, we are there, but we have no idea what it is. We have so little information about it. That’s what I’m trying to say that we’re barely scratching the surface on what we are, and I think the miracle is – look at us, we’re incredibly complex beings. We’re inventing complicated computer just to mimic.
Luke – But also there are some things which people, there are things which people, let’s see understand or yeah people understand as a spiritual phenomena. Let’s say or supernatural things which may be explained by other things, you know, like the fact that, maybe sometimes, certain, close friends or brothers or sisters, when they’re separate from each other they feel a connection and one of them decides to call the other one on the telephone, and at that moment the other one picks up his telephone, and then that the call arrives,
Sebastian – …synchronicity kinda…
Luke – …synchronicity, and then they conclude that they have some spiritual link,
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …but it could just be explained by something else that we don’t really have the language or the we can’t really explain that right now, but it might not be that it’s sort of some supernatural force like some kind of extra sensory force. It could just be, you know, at since they are apart, naturally they are going to think about each other, sometimes when when they both think about each other at the same time, one of them calls the other one
Sebastian – Yeah.
[ENDS AT 00:70:00]
[STARTS AT 00:70:00]
Luke – It’s not that unbelievable, it’s quite reasonable actually that would happen.
Sebastian – I think, I think, that’s, that’s always, always seems like it’s the fine line between miracle and something very banal, you know, these kinds of phenomenon. I think, that’s, that’s, you know, I think, it depends a lot on how you want to take it.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – You can see life as, as series of miracles and, and, and a strange phenomenon and you wouldn’t wrong and you can see them as just the sequence of events, and you wouldn’t be wrong either. I think, lots has to do, lots has to do with your perspective and I think, that’s what I’m saying – we create are world, I think, that’s, you can see the magic in a moment, the magic in the moments or not.
Luke – Yeah. It depends on how you understand things that happen. … for example you might see that the birth of the child and you might say – “Oh, my God! It’s a miracle!” and another person would see the birth of a child and he’d say: -“Well it’s not really a miracle, it’s science”
Sebastian – It’s science.
Luke – Yeah. That’s what the body does we know how it does it. Yes.
Sebastian – …but there isn’t a miracle. I mean, science sometimes it’s just an explanation of the miracle.
Luke – Yeah. They don’t really explain why these things happen.
Sebastian – They explain how a child is born, but they can’t explain really how… the driving force behind it either.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – It’s, we can go on for hours…
Luke – keep talking about. Life after death? We don’t really know do we?
Sebastian – No, we don’t. Do I believe? I’ve, I actually have no idea. Of course I don’t have any idea.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Do I think, do I feel? I think there’s something but I don’t know much more really.
Luke – Yeah. Okay. Alright. So, Wassim, I hope you like that rather vague answer
Sebastian – very very vague
Luke – Okay, next question is from … I don’t know how to pronounce your name Hải Tuấn, Hải Tuấn I think and Hải Tuấn says as an American Hải Tuấn:
– “As a American, which accent do you think is the most easy to understand?(Hải Tuấn)
Luke – This is a difficult question>
Sebastian – within the United States or?
Luke – the question continues British, Australian, South American or Asian English? Do you find that there’s one accent that is easier to understand than others?
Sebastian – Well, it’s hard to say, because I’m not objective. An American accent is the easiest for me to understand, because I’m an American. Out of those that were listed…
Luke – Surely it’s just the accents you’re the most familiar with.
Sebastian – Yeah, Yeah. I think, but I would say between an Australian and British, but also like British there are several, you know, like a cockney accent, I wouldn’t understand.
Luke – Yeah, if you meet someone British, if you meet someone from Scotland, Glasgow, like a working-class guy from Glasgow, it might be very difficult to understand because they’re using a dialect.
Sebastian – I will need subtitles.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Scottish films I often need subtitles.
Luke – “Trainspotting”, for example
Sebastian – for example
Luke – Yeah. I personally, if I can answer this question I would say, it really depends on the kind of accent your most familiar with.
Sebastian – Yeah. Of course.
Luke – So if you’ve never ever heard an accident from Edinburgh then it might seem very strange and difficult to understand, but if you grew up in Edinburgh and that’s the accent the you’ve listened to since you’re a baby then that’s going to be the easiest one. So for learners of English maybe they, I would say, there is no one accent which is easier or less easy to understand it all depends on how familiar you are with those accents. So for learners of English what you need to do is to try and expose yourself to as many different accents in English as possible so that they are less foreign to you.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – I would say. Let’s move on. Stefano says: – “Hi Luke…” he would like to find out from you about the bomb blast which happened in Boston.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …on Monday. So, in fact, there’s another question about that from Khazan Anna who is from Russia and she said
– “First I would like him to accept my deep condolence in connection with the terrorist action in Boston, if it’s a terrorist action.” Khazan Anna
Sebastian – Yeah. Do we know anything more. Cuz I saw it, when, you know, I was watching the news that night, but I haven’t….
Luke – I don’t think we do know anymore except that some, I think, some politicians in America have described it as a terrorist action. CNN described it as a terror attack.
Sebastian – Okay.
Luke – We don’t really know who
Sebastian – How many dead finally?
Luke – I think, it’s three.
Sebastian – Okay.
Luke – But we don’t really know more about who did it, but what do you think about this Sebastian?
Sebastian – What do I think about…? I don’t think we know enough. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I don’t know…, I think, if it was an act of “terrorism”, quote unquote, I don’t understand, I don’t think it was very effective honestly.
Luke – They didn’t do a good job?
[ENDS AT 00:75:00]
[STARTS AT 00:75:00]
Sebastian – I mean in a sense…, that’s, I think if you wanted to kill the maximum amount of people like they didn’t really do their job. I don’t know.
Luke – Thank goodness
Sebastian – Thank goodness. So, well, I mean, I’ve spent five years in Boston. I love the city, and I think, it’s of course like any, you know, if it was an intentional act, I think, it’s, you know, of course a terrible act, I don’t, you know, I don’t understand the meaning or why someone would do that.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Besides that I don’t know what else to say about it.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – I’m sorry. It happened and definitely condolences to the people who were injured or lost their lives in…
Luke – Yeah. very sad.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – We, you know, we can’t say much more about it, because really we don’t know exactly who was responsible…,
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – or how it came about. All we can say is that’s very tragic of course.
Sebastian – …and very an unfortunate event.
Luke – Yeah. Absolutely. Just like any other attack in any situation…
Sebastian – …on civilians
Luke – Yeah. Exactly. It’s all very tragic. We’ll find out more as we know from the news. Let’s see. I’ve got more questions, Sebastian, is that right?
Sebastian – Yes, I’ve to go on about 10 minutes, but…
Luke – Oh, really?
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Okay. Cunyt T, I think that’s how I say his name. He said, he asked about differences between Europe and the US. I think, we’ve talked a little bit about that. Cristina Ricciardo would like to know about American junk food and obesity problems.
Sebastian – Yes. Woooooooooooa! Yes.
Luke – What do you think about that? People say that the Americans are really fat, because they eat hamburgers all the time.
Sebastian – Yes. That’s not only the hamburgers, that’s everything. It’s, okay! Let’s put it this way. First of all the United States once again is a very big place. You’ve got people really, who have really very different eating habits, whether you know, you find someone in a big city which big city, which states and even within one city of people who eat, you know, very differently. Once again, especially in major cities in the United States, you can really get anything you want. So you have the choice to eat healthy or not. We are constantly bombarded by food, in a sense, advertisement for food or the capacity to get it in the United States.
Luke – …very convenient.
Sebastian – …very convenient, and so there’s a big tendency to overeat. So it’s a mix of things. The American diet is not necessary that healthy, because, first of all there’s lots, first of all, the quantities are very big. If you go to a restaurant usually the platters are more than what is healthy to eat. That’s why there’s a whole culture of doggie bags which is the little package that you can ask for to bring home half of your meal.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …which is regularly practiced over there, because the portions are so big. So I think it’s also a question of quantity. I think, it’s also the quality of lots of the food is very processed.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …lots of heavily processed foods.
Luke – So is it, you know, a welcome change to be in France?
Sebastian – Yeah. Food wise, I mean, there are few countries, I think, where you eat as good as you do in France. I mean as far as freshness of food and variety, it’s a very, pretty varied cuisine.
Luke – Except for Britain. Obviously English food, I think, no one can argue that English food is not the best. What I’m saying is of course British food is number one. Then French food, then, you know, other countries. We all know, I mean, everyone denies it, but we all know that English food is clearly the best food in the world. I think no one can argue against that.
Sebastian – There was an interview with John Cleese from Monty Python, and he had a great come back
Luke – John Cleese
Sebastian – John Cleese, you know, and he was on The Daily Show, it was like ten years ago, and the guy asked – “Why does British food suck?”, and he responded – “Well, because we had an empire to run”.
Luke – Yeah. We were too busy taking the world.
Sebastian – Too busy taking over the world than focus on cuisine.
Luke – …and then we just took everyone else’s food.
Sebastian – Yeah, well, one thing to say about American food is that American food is also very varied as well, in a sense that what is becoming more and more the definition of American food is international.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – You go to a city like New York where a typical newyorker will eat Thai for lunch and then Mexican for dinner and, you know, really go all over the world within a week, culinarily speaking. So of course there are American typical dishes, but…
[ENDS AT 00:80:00]
[STARTS AT 00:80:00]
Luke – It’s not simple, it’s not simple ladies and gentleman
Sebastian – No.
Luke – You can’t just say American food any more.
Sebastian – No, it’s complicated.
Luke – It’s complicated. I think, maybe
Sebastian – It’s complex, complex.
Luke – I’m gonna call this episode a cup of tea with Sebastian Marx, but it could easily be called it’s complicated
Sebastian – It’s complicated.
Luke – Right, I’m sorry, I’m just gonna ask you a couple of other questions.
Sebastian – Ohoom
Luke – Hanaé Georgette Berton
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …asks:
– “once again, are you sure you’re the man on the flyer?” (Hanaé Georgette Berton)
Luke – Does this make sense to you?
Sebastian – Yes. Yes. This is person has seen my show or..,
Luke – I think, this person has seen your show.
Sebastian – Yes. I am the person on the flyer. I usually wear glasses and on my flyer I do not have glasses, and on the flyer, it was, the person took the photo of me when I was in the middle of laughing. I was a pretty good hearty laugh…,
Luke – Yeah? “hahahahaha”, that’s a hearty laugh.
Sebastian – Yeah, and I was really cracking up and so you might not see that face often in real life …
Luke – So people ask you you: – “Is that you on the flyer?”
Sebastian – Yes, often.
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – Yeah
Luke – Hanaé there you go. I hope that’s the answer to your question. She is nice Hanaé, I’ve met her, she came to “French Fried Comedy Night”.
Sebastian – WOooooa. Okay.
Luke – She was shy. It was very sweet.
Sebastian – I don’t think, I don’t think she introduced herself to me, does she?
Luke – I don’t know.
Sebastian – I don’t know
Luke – She introduced herself to me, Sebastian. I’m Luke, from Luke’s English Podcast.
Sebastian – I see. So she’s shy, but up to a certain point.
Luke – Exactly, you know, she managed to overcome her shyness to ask.
Sebastian – Luke’s English Podcast.
Luke – Exactly.
Sebastian – …The host of Luke’s English Podcast a question
Luke – Hiroshi… I’ve just got two more things, if everyone has got the time, including the listeners. I might divide this podcast into two episodes.
Sebastian – You do, whatever you want.
Luke – We’ll see and Hiroshi Maruyama comes back with the second question, and he says:
– “Ask him his favorite sport. I like disc golf, rollerblading and salsa dancing.” I don’t think dancing is a sport, but it’s fine “Doesn’t he do any of them? Is disc golf popular among US people? I think it’s a excellent sport.” (Hiroshi Maruyama)
Luke – I know what you’re thinking, Sebastian. You’re thinking: – “What these disc golf?”
Sebastian – Yes.
Luke – I don’t know what disc golf is either.
Sebastian – Disc golf
Luke – Disc golf. Can you imagine? Have you ever heard of disc golf?
Sebastian – No. I imaginegolfing like with plates, but…,
Luke – Right, it’s here on the internet, on Wikipedia. Wikipedia says:
Sebastian – Are there some images?
Luke – Yeah. There you go. It looks like it is an American sport.
Sebastian – Aha.
Luke – It must be an American sport. It says..
Sebastian – Ok it’s been like throwing a frisbee into a basket.
Luke – It’s like basketball but with a frisbee
Sebastian – But, but it seems more like golf, in the sense that it’s not like… it’s not like basketball in the sense that there are teams, it seems like there are holes, you know, baskets that you have to throw the frisbee into I guess.
Luke – It’s like playing golf…,
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – but with a frisbee…,
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – …and you throw the frisbee into a basket
Sebastian – Instead of putting a ball in a hole, you put the frisbee in a basket. I guess.
Luke – …and I expect you can’t walk with the frisbee
Sebastian – Yeah, I guess. That would kind of defeat the purpose.
Luke – It sounds good.
Sebastian – Yeah. I’d like to play it. I have never seen a disc golf course, but…
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – So disc golf, I do enjoy dancing salsa, it’s not a sport. I don’t think that we can consider dancing a sport, unless it’s a competition, so you can do that but… Yeah, I do enjoy dancing I took classes, salsa classes, and lots of fun, lots of fun.
Luke – Mmmmm, okay.
Sebastian – I don’t play much sport right now. I played baseball when I was young.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Baseball, American football,
Luke – little league?
Sebastian – little league and all. I wasn’t too short for basketball
Luke – Okay. Good, good. Final point, Sebastian.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – This is the last question from Flavio who says:
– “I would like to hear him try to pronounce a few words in British English…” (Flavio Gasperini)
Sebastian – Oh, dear…
Luke – and he’s listed some words, alright?
Sebastian – Yes.
Luke – So the first word is “water”. So how would you say it normally, first of all?
Sebastian – Water. Well, like sorry because now, I’ve got the pressure and I know
I’m suppose to … “water”.
Luke – Let’s do like this. Say it in your normal accent and then say like a British person.
Sebastian – Water.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Water.
Luke – Alright. Water.
Sebastian – Water.
Luke – Pretty good.
Sebastian – Water.
Luke – Pretty good. Yeah. Can I…
Sebastian – Can I have a glass of water?
Luke – Yeah. Alright, not bad, the “T” sound. There’s another one, the next word is “territory”
Sebastian – Territory.
Luke – …or actually I would say “territory”
Sebastian – Hmmm. Territory.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – Territory.
Luke – T-e-r-r-i-tory.
Sebastian – Te-rr-i-tory. what am I missing.
Luke – What are doing there?
Sebastian – Territory.
Luke – So, not – “territory”, it’s not a question, but “territory”
Sebastian – Territory.
Luke – Yeah, okay.
Sebastian – Territory.
Luke – This is British territory.
Sebastian – This is British territory.
Luke – Alright.
Sebastian – Not bad?
Luke – Not bad, Sebastian. “Thought”.
Sebastian – Thought.
Luke – Yeah. “Thought”.
Sebastian – Thought. There I’d think just like Darth Vader
Luke – Really? That’s “the force” isn’t it?
Sebastian – the force!
Luke -Darth Vader would be like: – “I was thinking about your birthday”. Now, what’s the joke?
Sebastian – “I have a thought”
Luke – Yeah, and – “I have a thought”.
Sebastian – Thought.
Luke – “I know what you get for your birthday, Sebastian. I’ve felt your presents” So, okay – “thought”. “advertisement”
Sebastian – Advertisement.
Luke – Alright. now…,
Sebastian – Advertisement.
Luke – …in America you’d say what?
Sebastian – Advertisement.
Luke – Advertisement, but…
Sebastian – …or commercial.
Luke – Advertisement.
Sebastian – Advertisement.
Luke – Alright. Okay.
Sebastian – Advertisement.
Luke – Adver”T”isement.
Sebastian – Adver”T”isement. Adver”T”isement.
Luke – Pretty good. Now – “Look at that advertisment!”
Sebastian – Look at…
Luke – Look at that advertisement.
Sebastian – Look at that advertisement. I can’t do without going into cliche.
Luke – It’s fine, and finally – “I can’t eat eggs”.
Sebastian – I can’t
Luke – I can’t eat eggs.
Sebastian – I can’t eat eggs. I can’t eat eggs.
Luke – I can’t
Sebastian – I can’t
Luke – Yeah, that’s good.
Sebastian – I can’t
Luke – I just can’t
Sebastian – I just can’t eat eggs.
Luke – I hate eggs.
Sebastian – I hate eggs
Luke – Very good, and in American accent?
Sebastian – I hate eggs.
Luke – Yeah. Do you really?
Sebastian – I hat…. no, I love them.
Luke – Me too. I love eggs as well. Well, Sebastian, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you with me.
Sebastian – Pleasure is all mine, delicious, I ate two brownies.
Luke – Fine, it’s great.
Sebastian – I’m eating like an American now.
Luke – Go ahead. Do you want…
Sebastian – It’s been nine years trying to break the habits, and now here at Luke’s English Podcast, I fall back in
Luke – I to treat my guests well by providing them with snacks and beverages.
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – I’m glad that you enjoyed the brownies. You can have another one if you like.
Sebastian – Oh, no. I’ve already had two, and…
Luke – Okay.
Sebastian – I have a line I have to now dance 45 minutes of salsa.
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – …in order to make up for…
Luke – …to burn off the calories.
Sebastian – Yeah. Minimum.
Luke – Okay. Well, thank you, Sebastian. Ladies and gentlemen if you’re interested in finding out about Sebastian’s shows which, if you’re in the area you should be interested in, you can check out his website which will be printed on my website. sebastianmarx.com
Sebastian – sebmarx.com – “s”-“e”-“b”-“m”-“a”-“r”-“x” “DOT” “COM”
Luke – DOT COM
Sebastian – DOT COM
Luke – Alright.
Sebastian – Yes.
Luke – I hope to have you back at some point Sebastian
Sebastian – with pleasure.
Luke – Great. Sebastian also has a podcast in French
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – If you’re interested.
Sebastian – It’s called “Donc Voila Quoi”
Luke – “Donc Voila Quoi” which is like saying, “So, there you go”
Sebastian – Yeah. Pretty, pretty much means nothing.
Luke – Really?
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – It’s like -“So there you go”
Sebastian – So, there you go.
Luke – ”Donc Voila Quoi”
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Okay. How is my French?
Sebastian – Wonderful.
Luke – Is it really?
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – Non, c’est ne pas vrai
Sebastian – Well because I think you are accent conscious
Luke – Yeah.
Sebastian – I think within a year you’ll have a better French accent than I do.
Luke – Yeah?
Sebastian – Yeah, because I don’t pay any attention to and so that’s why.
Luke – C’est tres important pour moi
Sebastian – Yeah.
Luke – This is not Luke’s French Podcast, I just wanted to
Sebastian – not yet, not yet.
Luke – Not yet, maybe there will be another one, but I think, I’m gonna stick to the English one for the moment.
Thanks very much for listening to the podcast ladies and gentlemen. What I normally do at the end is that I go like “bye bye bye bye” like, sort of, echo?
Sebastian – Yeah, okay.
Luke – Do you want to join me with a “Bye bye bye bye”
Sebastian – Yeah.
Thank you very much again for listening to the podcast
Bye bye bye bye
[THE END OF THE EPISODE]

128. Luke’s Stand-Up Comedy Show

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In this episode you can listen to 30 minutes of my stand-up comedy performance from last Friday in Paris.

Right-click here to download the audio episode.

127. Computer Games

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Luke gives his personal history of computer games.

Right-click here to download this episode.
This episode is all about computer games or video games, from the early days of PONG, Space Invaders and Pac-Man to the multi-billion dollar industry that we have today.

While talking in this episode I use various pieces of vocabulary to describe comptuer games and the games industry. Scroll down this page and you can find a list of expressions, phrases and sentences that I say in the episode.

Also, if you scroll down you can watch some videos about computer games which I think you might enjoy and find interesting.

What’s in this episode?
1. I’ll give you my own personal history of computer games (from my first hand-held Nintendo Game&Watch device, to the PS3 that I now have in my living room).
2. I’ll discuss some questions and issues that relate to computer games.

What do you think? I am very interested to know what you think about games, so please JOIN THE DEBATE by leaving your comments in response to this episode and these questions:
-What do you think of computer games? Do you love them or hate them?
-Do you think they’re sad or cool?
-Do you like all games or just some specific ones?
-Do you prefer any games genres more than others?
-Do you play games often, or do you avoid them completely?
-Are they just for boys or do girls play them too?
-Are they just for children, teenagers or adults?
-Do you think they are a good use of your time, or just a total waste of time?
-Are they bad for us, or do they help to keep us fit and teach us skills?
-Are they a good way to connect with people, or are they anti-social?
-Are they immoral or just a bit of fun?
-Can they be the future of entertainment? Will they replace movies as a way to tell a good story?
-Can computer games ever become an art-form?

Listen to the podcast to hear me discuss some of these questions and please leave your comments below this post.

VOCABULARY, PHRASES, EXPRESSIONS AND SENTENCES FROM THIS EPISODE
You should read these while listening to the episode. This page is not supposed to be read like a blog entry, it is here to help you understand the audio episode.
*I recommend that you double click words you don’t know, then paste into google or an online dictionary to get definitions*
Many people believe that computer games are just something that is used or done by geeky teenage boys with no friends who never go outside, never see the sun and who just spend all of their time indoors playing games and maybe learning how to become a murderer or something like that.
Maybe we can use America as a kind of benchmark for the way games are consumed all over the world.
Generally speaking I think the trends in America are quite reflective of trends in the rest of the world, more or less, when it comes to computer games anyway.
Consoles – e.g. the Playstation 3, the Nintendo Wii and the XBox 360
There’s a massive variety of games now and they come ‘in all shapes and sizes’.
My girlfriend got completely addicted to Angry Birds.
Games still have a long way to go before they can rival art forms like film or novels in the way that they can tell stories, but they have so much potential in terms of the way they are interactive.
I was born in 1977 and computer games had been around for quite a while when I arrived.
Atari were the original, old-school, retro computer games maker. (They weren’t retro at the time, but now they are really retro!)
IN 1972 they came up with a very early computer game concept, called PONG. (In fact Atari were later sued for allegedly stealing the idea of Pong from someone else)
It was very basic, it was very simple and essentially it was a kind of table tennis or tennis simulator.
You might have even played it, maybe on an emulator on your PC.
There was a little white ball, which was basically a tiny square made of probably about 4 pixels.
The white lines represented your bats, your table tennis bats or your tennis rackets.
It was very basic, but somehow very addictive.
There was something satisfying about the analogue sounds that you got from this game – BOP BIP BOP BIP.
It started out as an arcade machine.
A computer games arcade
Coin-operated games machines
It wasn’t until the early 70s that electronic games were introduced.
They introduced the very first games console, which had a space in the top where you could insert cartridges and the cartridges would be different games.
You could plug this thing into your TV and then “bingo” you’ve got your own tennis simulator.
He brought home some sort of Pong copy of some kind, that he borrowed from a friend I think, and he plugged it into the TV and then we started playing Pong.
I remember there were these kind of dials or paddles that we used to control the line going up and down.
The next game that I got was after my Dad had been to Hong Kong on business.
Hand-held games, e.g. the Game Boy
It had a little arm that would come out of the back and you could prop it up on your bedside table. It would work like an alarm clock.
It was a combination between a bedside alarm clock and a computer game.
The guys in the parachutes would slowly descend.
At the start it was easy because they would just come down one by one.
You’ve got to be very fast with your thumbs in order to catch these guys in parachutes.
You see this little shark’s fin coming through the water, and then they get eaten by the shark!
It was quite a lot of fun, and required quite a lot of skill and dexterity in your thumbs.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum – it had something like 64k of RAM. (not Random Assisted Memory but Random ACCESS Memory)
You could write code so you could program your own games.
You had to load computer games onto it using a tape player.
They were pretty unreliable and they would crash quite a lot.
It crashed and it never worked again.
An AMSTRAD CPC 6128
I wouldn’t say it was a next-generation computer.
You’d put the cassette in the tape machine, rewind it, get the computer ready.
It would go into a ready mode and then you’d press play on the machine.
You could hear the sound of the code going in. It was a kind of analogue code.
Very slowly the game would load.
Probably about 50% of the time, they wouldn’t work.
If you even breathed on the computer, the chances were that it would crash.
The title screen would be some sort of picture to represent the game.
You’d keep your fingers crossed that it would crash.
BMX Simulator had a top down view.
There were these little, very basic looking, little blobs.
You had to avoid puddles of water.
Everyone would have to crowd around the keyboard.
Not very practical but certainly a lot of fun.
You had to type in the code in order to launch a game.
You had to learn a basic set of commands.
You had to control a little car going through a valley.
A valley, made of ‘number 1s’.
We used to actually want to get up early in order to play the games.
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) arrived.
I had a paper round. I was a paperboy.
I saved all my money from the paper round and I used it to buy my first NES.
If you don’t know who Mario is then I don’t know where you’ve been.
More American kids were able to identify Super Mario than Mickey Mouse.
A very playable platform adventure.
Super Mario was an Italian plumber.
He used to travel through these green pipes.
Don’t ask me why he was Italian.
They gave him a hat, and they also gave him a mustache.
She was constantly being kidnapped either by Donkey Kong or by Bowser, who was a kind of huge green monster, some sort of evil turtle.
It was up to Mario to find his way through these different worlds in order to defeat Bowser and rescue the princess.
Make sure that you don’t fall in holes.
The sound effects were really great and very memorable.
If you get touched by a turtle, then you would die. I don’t know why if a turtle touches your foot then you would die.
There were various little touches in this game that made it very special.
You felt that he had a sense of weight.
There was a sensation that he had some inertia.
I don’t know what kind of mushrooms Mario was eating.
Not real-world logic there.
All kinds of spin-off games.
It was basically just a grey plastic box with a lid on top.
The Game Boy (1989)
It was a very simple design, very appealing, a very nice aesthetic, very simple layout and everything.
It just oozed charm.
The cute noises that this machine would make.
It was a 2 bit machine.
Any yet with all of these basic limitations, Nintendo managed to produce some really classic games.
It just shows, you don’t need amazing graphics, you don’t need high-quality HD graphics.
All you need is a, kind of, inventive game designer, a simple set of rules and addictive gameplay.
TETRIS
God knows how Nintendo managed to get the rights to put it on the Game Boy.
It’s an interesting story of espionage and computer games.
It was very difficult to master the game.
You get a square, an oblong, a little higgledy-piggledy shape.
You have to make sure that the blocks don’t all pile up.
My parents didn’t really agree with games. They frowned on them. (frowned on / frowned upon)
Once they started playing Tetris, they got hooked, and they couldn’t put it down.
You could play Tetris for hours on end without even realising that the time had gone by.
In fact, if you played Tetris too long you would experience ‘Tetrisitis’!
Eventually you start seeing the graphics wherever you go.
That just shows how engrossing and how, kind of, addictive and fun these games are, that you just get completely sucked into them. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I wonder, I really do.
So after the NES and after the Game Boy, the next console that I got was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES or Super Famicon in Japan).
It was a lot more powerful than the NES and it had much better graphics and there was a huge range of new games that you could get for it.
As a result you got lots of innovation.
It also looked cool. It was nicely rounded. It looked like it was out of the Star Wars universe in some way. It was kind of grey plastic and it was kind of rounded. It just looked nice, and when you put the cartridge in the top it made a satisfying ‘clunk’ sound. You’d put the cartridge in and it would go ‘CLUNK’. And there was a big button in the middle to eject the cartridge, and when you ejected it would pop out like a toaster.
I had a particular trick at Christmas time for getting tips as a paperboy.
They then felt obliged to give me a cash tip.
I spent my money, wisely, on a SNES.
I bought a SNES which was packaged with Street Fighter 2.
Essentially Street Fighter 2 is a fighting game, a beat-em-up.
Whenever you get punched your power level goes down a bit until eventually your power level reaches zero and you get knocked out.
The key to the game was learning the particular fighting style for that character, learning all their special moves and mastering them so that you could do the special moves in an instant.
Other characters were ones like Ken and Ryu who were the principle characters in this game, and they had a kind of a … sort of a karate style.
One of their special moves was to throw fireballs. So they’d summon up some special energy and then release it as a burning blue ball of plasma of some kind, and if that hit you then it would take away a lot of energy from you. That was one of their special moves and whenever they did it they would say a special command “HA-DO-KEN!”
It was a very effective move.
The dragon punch could inflict multiple hits.
“HA-RYU-KEN”
These characters were so well drawn, so well rendered, they were like super heroes. They way they looked on screen, they were big tough guys, with rippling muscles. They were like Greek gods.
I always used to think that the characters were saying “HELLO KEN” “HOW ARE YOU KEN?”
When I read the instruction manual (I realised) that no, they were just speaking Japanese.
I was dedicated to Nintendo.
I used to hate Sega. I shouldn’t have done because they had some great games too.
SONY PLAYSTATION
One of the things they managed to do was aim their marketing at older gamers.
What SONY started to do was combine the gaming experience with the home entertainment experience.
You can play Blu-Ray discs.
Now we’ve also go the Nintendo Wii, which is strangely named, because a wee is something you do in the toilet, so now you can have a Wii in your living room!
It brought Nintendo back.
The thing about the Wii is that it’s got motion sensors.
Your body becomes the controller, as it were.
This is a huge step… a huge change.. a huge innovation for Nintendo.
You just replicate the action from the real world.
You swing your arms and the motion sensor in the controller knows what you’re doing and it replicates it on the screen. Wow, amazing!
As a result, loads of girls started playing Wii.
It also allowed people all over the world to smash their TV sets.
Nintendo decided that you had to wear a strap around your wrist.
You just have to take my word for it.
I probably shouldn’t have spent so much time playing games with my friends.
We had a game called Goldeneye.
It allowed you to run around in rooms, as different characters from the James Bond movies, trying to kill each other.
We spent a lot of time murdering each other in virtual reality.
Why didn’t you join the student union radio and become a DJ?
Ultimately, playing games doesn’t allow you to achieve anything, it’s just fun in itself.
After a while I start feeling guilty because I know that I should be using that time to do something important like organising my finances.
Those are all things I should be doing rather than playing Red Dead Redemption.
It’s just like a big Sergio Leone western, except that you’re in it.
They’re really exciting and exhilarating.
Very violent, very gruesome murder.
There are lots of very wholesome games, like farming simulators. (but why not just try farming in the real world??)
A game like Grand Theft Auto is generally considered to be great because it gives you lots of freedom.
You can mug someone, you can shoot someone but you can’t give someone a bunch of flowers.
Why is it that computer games focus so much on bloody violence?
Maybe we all really would love to go outside and blow things up, but obviously we can’t.
I don’t think there is more murder or more killing now than there was before games arrived. I’m sure that the world was a lot more savage, a lot more brutal hundreds of years ago before anyone even considered the idea of computer games.
I don’t think it’s fair to say there are more killings, considering the number of people who play games.
I don’t think the number of police shootings (shootings of policemen) has not significantly increased since the release of that game. (this just speculation of course)
I don’t think it’s as simple as that.
Maybe it’s cathartic. It allows you to release tension or aggression.
The violence is more realistic and artificial intelligence is evolving all the time.
At what point will it become genuinely immoral?
That opens up all sorts of questions which have already been dealt with in films like Blade Runner.
It’s not really anti-social, it’s just a different kind of socialising.
Online people abuse each other, because there’s that sense of anonymity.
Also it allows people to develop genuine kinds of team work.
It allows people to develop a very refined sense of team work skills.
It’s not really that much different to playing a board game like draughts or Monopoly.
Also, some people say that games allow you to develop quick reflexes and basic motor skills, and decision making skills.
Are they analytic decision making skills? Do they involve making really strategic decisions?
It depends on what kind of game you’re playing.
Games are not mindless, not by any means.
They’re on a similar level as a basic Hollywood B movie.
Normally it’s some sort of visceral feeling, like excitement or fear.
I very rarely experience genuine emotion, sadness, I’ve never cried during a game, except maybe during The Legend of Zelda.
I don’t think games really elicit emotions in the same way that watching the subtle ways in which actors’ faces can convey meanings. Movies can be like fine art, but I haven’t yet experienced a game that’s like fine art. Sure some of them are aesthetic, they’re beautiful, some games but they rarely make me feel emotional. And usually the acting in games is appalling. You get these cut-scenes in which the story line moves on, and they’re just like… awful acting, as I’ve said the story lines are predictable and dull, full of cliches, so sorry computer games have got a long way to go before they can reach the same kind of level of emotional complexity that you get from a film.
At best, they’re like exploitative Hollywood ‘B’ movies, horror movies, westerns, that kind of thing.
If you’ve played a game that genuinely moved you, or that you found emotional, then, again let me know.
I think that’s pretty much it for this episode.

CHECK OUT THESE VIDEOS ABOUT COMPUTER GAMES
Charlie Brooker’s “How Videogames Changed The World”. This is a BBC documentary about computer games. It is a satirical and humerous look at the history of computer games.

‘Videogame Nerd’ talks about PONG consoles. My Dad brought home a Pong console some time in the 1980s, and we played it for about 2 weeks, before it disappeared from our living room.

Nintendo Game & Watch – Parachute (This is the first game I had as a child)

A short review of the British home computer, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which we had in our home for about 1 day before it crashed and never worked again! It was a classic computer though, and although it was very basic, it was used by lots of British teenagers to write their own computer games. This review gets a bit boring and technical but it does clearly show you the computer and how it worked.

Super Mario Frustration
This is a funny commentary video with someone playing a very difficult level of Super Mario Brothers. He gets very angry and starts shouting at Mario. It always makes me laugh. There is some STRONG LANGUAGE and SWEARING in this video so watch out!

Street Fighter 2 on the SNES. This video makes me feel quite nostalgic. I used to play this quite a lot when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I still play it on my PS3 sometimes these days. “HA DOOO KEN!”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPj63Ms_q3M&w=400&h=300]

This is why you should take care when playing Nintendo Wii

Here’s a playthough of the classic western game Red Dead Redemption. The commentator is a game reviewer called Stan Burdman. Don’t take everything he says seriously, as he makes a lot of jokes while he talks. This video should show you how games have developed since they first arrived in the late 60s/early 70s. No real rabbits were harmed during the making of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5VL3h6XvAE&amp

125. The Pink Gorilla Story

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An improvised funny story about an encounter with a massive pink animal. Transcript available below.

Right-click here to download.
Listen to Luke tell you a rather bizarre story about an adventure involving a pink gorilla and a number of other characters. I recommend that you listen to the story several times as a way of enjoying and understanding it more. There is a full transcript to this episode below.

In this episode I decided to improvise a story. To improvise something means to just make it up on the spot, without planning or preparing in advance. It is quite challenging and fun for me to improvise stories like this. I hope you enjoy it and realise that it is great listening practice for you.

Do you Want to skip the introduction?

The story begins after 15mins. There is a long, rambling introduction and then the story begins at 16:20

I use a variety of expressions, accents and verb forms in the episode. As you listen, try to spot some English which might be useful for you.

***There is some SWEARING in the story. I apologise if you find that offensive. You should remember that swearing (using rude words) is VERY RUDE in the WRONG SITUATIONS! Don’t swear in English class, in job interviews, in front of priests, when you are in polite company or if you meet the Queen, etc. Swearing is ok with your close friends, in private or when you’re playing football. Aaaaalright? ;)

I hope you enjoy the story. Speak to you soon. Bye bye bye! (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

Language Extracts with Vocabulary (thanks to Jack) – TRANSCRIPT BELOW THIS LIST

Maybe it causes a rift in space time continuum.
Have you just woken up?
Get a grip !
I’d like to book a table for two please.
I’d like it to book a table for tomorrow evening.
That’s why now I can’t get my head together !
I’ll go to Burger King, nevermind !
We do burgers here.
You are incapable of dealing with the booking so I’m leaving.
To turn up
Lets say the police overheard you talking about puppies.
Can I make an inquiry as to the nature of this rendezvous?
I think you’ll find that that contravenes section 134 of the puppies act.
I’m going to have to put you under arrest.
Police are going to take them away.
It is kind of random bollocks.
In the light of the fact that I won this competition.
…..Academic director, Publishing director, who is checking out the public blog.
Let’s see some of the pedagogical techniques that he’s using in his podcast.
What new approaches to teaching methodologies are being used.
Maybe this is a new revolutionary method of teaching English as a foreign language.
Just sort of stream of consciousness – English jazz cakes.
One of the objectives….
The ‘Rotary sushi bar of English’….
It doesn’t mean that I can just give up my day job.
I still have to try and find windows of time in my otherwise busy life.
That’s kind of a bit of justification……
Improvised
I’m making it up as I go along.
I’ve been speaking for the last 15 mins.
I’m going to try and throw in some characters into the story.
It’s just completely made up (story)
I hit some hard times.
Can I have a word with you?
We are going to have to let you go.
Give them regular feedback
A general rule of thumb
I was devastated
It’s been a pleasure teaching you.
I’ve been fired.
How? On foot probably.
The Mafia
Gangsters
Screw this guy!
Moving one foot in front of the other.
Subtle movements…..
The corner of the Oxford Street.
London’s famous attractions.
I couldn’t afford to visit.
Walked along the street.
As far as I know, you can’t really eat anything with your eyes.
Mushrooms
Spaghetti
Walk out of the supermarket.
Nothing to see here.
Until eventually I was desperate.
I would sit on the streets.
Can you spare me 10p governor, for a cup of tea ?
May be a chimney sweep?
He had a monocle
He came up to me
He approached me.
You seem desperate and tired.
I think it’s good to be on first name terms with homeless people.
Come with me to my mansion.
Don’t misunderstand Luke.
Maybe we should introduce ourselves and get acquainted.
I wasn’t being rude.
Swear words.
Rude, aggressive communicative styles.
I was just adapting my teaching style for my class.
Moustache, monocle and a hat.
It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
I’m a collector of rare endangered animal species.
Let’s get in the taxi and let me show you my hairy animals.
Put your seatbelt on please.
Big mansion in north London, strap in !
I’ve been eating bananas….
We went past various sites in London.
As we drove past…..
I overhead all of this
This is a momentous moment in history.
I thought I didn’t have a chance.
We walked in the back of the studio…..
You must make two promises to me. Two promises which you must keep.
I can’t emphasize this point more seriously.
To be honest, I’m already getting curious about the animal at the end of the corridor.
Yes, I’m positive.
Are you certain?
Let’s move on with the story.
Leopard with no spots – I think it was a puma.
Zebra
Duck with a round head with no beak on the end.
What on earth could be behind this curtain !
I started to move the curtain back.
Sleeping upstairs in the loft.
I hadn’t seen one of those for donkey’s years.
Coin operated arcade machine
I put a coin in.
Never mind ! never mind ! Just google it.
The cages were so clean by the time I finished; you could see your own reflection on the floor.
There was this cage at the end of the corridor tempting me just by its presence.
I know you are fascinated.
But I resisted the temptation.
I wanted to move the curtains aside.
I didn’t do nothing.
I tip toed down the stair.
Tip toed through the basement.
I was absolutely stunned !
I couldn’t believe my eyes !
As pink as a lobster.
The fur of the gorilla looked so fine and so soft. I just really felt the urge to reach through the cage and touch its fur.
You have investigated enough.
I slept like a baby.
It doesn’t mean that I cried during the night and pissed myself – No.
Daniel was there whistling.
I’ve got to have another look.
Right there at the bars of the cage.
He held out his hand to me.
Gorilla was smiling at me with his big teeth.
To hell with the consequences !
I reached out my hand and touched the gorilla.
I touched him briefly on the back of the hand.
It was like a fur of the unicorn.
…….he did somersaults.
He started to pull / bend the bars open.
I ran out of the mansion.
I didn’t bother to get my stuff.
I could hear his steps pounding on the ground as he chased after me through the mansion.
I ran like my life depended on it.
I was sure this gorilla was gonna rip my head off !
I ran into the street.
I ran down the street.
May be I lost him
I took a left turn down an alleyway.
He was sprinting down the road after me.
I jumped on the bicycle.
I bombed down the hill.
Flying down the hill on the BMX bicycle.
I jumped onto the bus.
I acted all nonchalant.
He’ll lose me and wouldn’t notice.
He was smashing cars out of his way.
I nearly soiled my trousers.
I jumped out of the bus.
I dived into the underground.
I got up to the gates.
Couldn’t you have looked for your oyster card before you got here?
Managed to get down onto the platform.
Jumped on the train….
If I change at green park onto the Victoria line and I take the Victoria line sort of north bound and then go to Tottenham Hale. And from Tottenham hale I can jump on the overland which would take me to stansted airport.
Walked through the streets….
I kind of walked leisurely…..
On the tracks next to the train.
Train was going along the tracks.
He just mouthed – ” I’m gonna get you!”
Do you mind if I ask you what are you doing?
I’m mug him off !
I’m gonna get that geezer called Luke!
I went to the bank to borrow some money.
Would you like to take a seat?
How can I help you?
I’d like to borrow some money.
Well Luke, I’m sure you realize we can’t simply lend you all the money.
You are a humorous gentleman. You like to have a laugh.
If I wanted to I could make you say and do anything I wanted !
I think you are making it up.
You are gonna speak like a scouser.
All the money in 20 pound notes is a lot
How about a debit card?
He has nearly caught up with me now.
Out in the street again.
Got myself a coffee
I drank that.
Flying towards me on a skateboard.
I escaped down the street towards the airport on a scooter.
Got to the counter.
How did you know that I had all the money! Never mind that Luke! Never mind!
They don’t even let you bring water onto the plane.
Jumped onto the plane.
The plane taxied out on the run way.
I couldn’t be safer!
I’m flying to a new exotic location.
On the wing of airplane…..
The pink gorilla was holding onto the wing of the airplane.
Looking at me; staring at me; smiling with his big teeth.
He’s managed to catch up with me.
I managed to jump onto an iceberg.
Looked over my shoulder….
I jumped off the iceberg and jumped on another iceberg. And I kept jumping from iceberg to iceberg…..
He jumped over onto the iceberg and walked up towards me.
He extended his hand again…..
He just tapped me on the arm.
Tag ! You’re it !
Pink gorilla was just competitive, he just enjoyed playing games.
Why did I touch him in the first place!
I wish I had never done it in the first place.
So I stood up picked my self off the ground, brushed the snow off my trousers and I thought : Right ! I’m gonna get that gorilla !
I saw the pink gorilla getting onto the plane and so I leapt onto the wing. And the plane took off into the sunset.
And you’ve been listening to it ladies and gentleman.
May be there are aspects to the story I didn’t deal with. In which case…….
You have been listening to Luke’s English podcast.

TRANSCRIPT

The Pink Gorilla Story
by Luke Thompson
Transcript sent in by Andrzej from Poland – thank you Andrzej!
You’re listening Luke’s English Podcast. For more information visit teacherluke.podomatic.com. (now teacherluke.co.uk)
Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Luke’s English Podcast. I’m saying ‘Good morning’ because it’s the morning here where I am. While I’m recording this it’s the morning. Maybe it’s not the morning where you are. It could be, well, one of the other times of the day, maybe the afternoon or the evening or just the middle of the night. If it’s not the morning where you are then, you know, maybe, you know, you could just pause this and then wait until it is the morning and then just press play again so that when I say ‘Good morning’ to you at the beginning it makes sense. Okay? So, you could just do that because I don’t know what happens if someone says ‘good morning‘ to you when it’s not the morning. I don’t know what happens does…. Maybe the space time…, maybe it causes a rift in the space time continuum or something a bit like in ‘Back to the Future II’ and just all, everything kind of goes all wrong in space-time. If then that happens or just nothing happens at all. Perhaps someone just says to you ‘Good morning’ it’s not the morning. It’s the afternoon. We’ve just woken up, get a grip or something like that. But I think that’s probably the extend of it. I don’t think it’s more serious than that. Okay Luke, what are you talking about? Let me just say ‘Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night. Thank you very much for listening. I’m going to bed now. It’s been a pleasure, really has. Good night .’ No, no, no. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Of course, right, when you greet someone you can say ‘Good morning’, right? It’s like ‘Hello’. ‘Morning’. ‘Morning’. You can say ‘Good afternoon’. ‘Afternoon’. ‘Good afternoon’. ‘Good afternoon’. ‘How are you’. ‘I’m fine, thanks’. And you can say ‘Good evening’, right? So, ‘Good evening’. Would you say that… Would you say that to a friend? ‘Good evening’. Yes. If you went into a restaurant you might say
– Good evening. I’d like to book a table for two, please.
– Certainly sir. When would you like to book your table?
– Well, I’d like to book it for tomorrow evening, please.
– OK, how many people?
– Just, well, two. I did say two earlier on.
– That’s right, you did, didn’t you.
– Yes, so, can I just book the table please? I don’t have much time.
– Yes, certainly sir. How many people was it for?
– Two! Two! I’ve just said it! Twice now.
– OK. Sorry. You know, I’m very busy. I’ve had a very busy day. My brain isn’t working properly plus earlier on this afternoon someone said ‘Good morning’ to me and it confused me for the rest of the day. That’s why now I can’t get my head together but anyway, yes, you want to book a table. OK. How many people?
– Two people! For Christ’s sake. OK, look, I’ll go to Burger King. It’s all right. Never mind.
– Well, that’s, you know, that’s not necessary. We do burgers here.
– No, no, really, you are incapable of dealing with the booking so, I’m leaving.
– Well, sorry sir. You know, do come back. Come back another time perhaps.
…For example, OK? But you can say ‘Good morning’, ‘Good afternoon’, ‘Good evening’ but if you say ‘Good night’, that’s what you say before you go to bed, isn’t it, so, if you kind of meet someone at night ‘Good night’, then you have to immediately just turn around and go to bed, don’t you? Ha, ha, ha! Yes. So, don’t make that mistake listeners. Don’t, when you greet someone at night, don’t say ‘Good night’ as a way of saying hello. I don’t know why you’re meeting someone at night. What are you doing? What is this kind of secret meeting, secret night-time meeting you’re doing? I don’t know. Are you meeting someone to, maybe, I don’t know, maybe you’re, you know, buying something. You could be buying some illegal DVDs or something like that. You can imagine that sort of turning up
– All right. Yeah, all right. So, you’ve got the… You’ve got the stuff?
– Yeah, yeah, I’ve got the stuff. I’ve got it right here.
– Yeah, the stuff, right? You know, you know what I’m talking about, don’t you.
– Yeah, the stuff, of course, of course I know what you’re talking about… yeah.
– I just wanna make sure. What exactly do you mean by stuff here?
– What do we mean by stuff? We’re talking about… we’re talking about the puppies, right?
– Puppies? No, I’m not… I don’t wanna buy puppies. No, I wanna buy the DVDs.
– Oh right, yeah, of course! Well, of course, yes! I used ‘puppies’ as a code word for DVDs. You know, sometimes I call them ‘puppies’ because it seems a bit safer.
– Really? Are you sure? You’re sure that that’s a safe code word? Because if, let say, the police overheard you talking about dealing puppies I think they might be a bit concerned by that as well and then might follow you. In fact… in fact they have followed you and here they are. Great. Well done. You’re not very good at being secretive, are you?
So, then the police arrive (sirens, brakes)
– Excuse me gentlemen, can I enquire… can I make an enquiry as to the nature of this rendezvous in the middle of the night?
That’s a police officer.
– Yes officer. We were just meeting to… I was just buying some puppies from this guy.
– Buying puppies, oh I see. Well, I think you find that that contravenes section 134 of the Puppies Act which states that it is illegal to purchase or sell puppies after midnight. And so sir, I’m gonna have to put you under arrest. I can’t remember that phrase that I’m supposed to say. I think it goes something like ‘Please, remember that anything you do say can be taken against you in a court of law. You’re under arrest.’ Please, follow me down to the police station and bring the puppies because they’re cute. They might be quite nice to look at in the police station.
OK, right, so, that’s it. I’ve been arrested so, good night ladies and gentlemen. Thanks very much for listening and I’m now gonna go to jail or prison as you might say. Jail or prison. Let’s hope, let’s hope I’ve got a good lawyer and they can get me out of this mess. My dealer, my DVD dealer just ran away. They weren’t interested in him because I was the one who had the puppies. I didn’t even give him the money. He just gave me the puppies so, I guess I’ve got some puppies now but I think the police are gonna take them away. What are you talking about Luke?! I know you are thinking ‘What is happening in this episode? This is kind of random bollocks .’ Well, yeah, it is kind of random bollocks. Maybe that’s what I could call this episode ‘Luke’s Random Bollocks’. Although, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to name an episode after my bollocks. I just think that’s not a clever move especially, you know, in the light of the fact that recently I’ve won this competition so, I expect… I’m getting more traffic, more people are coming to the site than normal. Probably people who work for Macmillan dictionaries, Cambridge dictionaries maybe Oxford dictionaries they all…, they may be checking me out. You know, these kind of very important people from the world of teaching English as a foreign language. You know, you can imagine some sort of academic director or some publishing director from Cambridge University who, you know, is checking out the Macmillan blog and he says – I see that a some young gentleman named Luke Thompson has won the Macmillan Dictionary Award for Best Blog 2012. Well, I think I shall…, I think I shall investigate this up-and-coming, go-getting podcaster and see what it’s all about. So, let’s have a look at some of the pedagogical techniques that he is using in the podcast. Maybe I can learn what fresh new approaches to teaching methodology are being used here. Hmmm, let’s have a look…OK… teacherluke.podomatic.com… Click. Luke’s Random Bollocks? What’s this?’ Maybe this is a revolutionary new method of teaching English as a foreign language. English through shit. I don’t know. Maybe that’s possible. English through nonsense. It’s… I mean, it could be possible because, I don’t know, it’s new, alright? Actually, I’m sure it’s not new. I’m sure I’m not the first English teacher in the world to just sort of have fun and expect other people to join in and as a result learn a load of stuff that they wouldn’t normally learn from textbooks or from things like the BBC Podcast because they have to be the BBC and they have to do things in a certain way. It has to be correct, has to be sort of slightly unnatural maybe whereas here at Luke’s English Podcast you’re getting the real thing, you’re just getting English as it actually happens, English as it really is spoken, not really edited very much, just sort of stream of consciousness English jazz cakes. I don’t know what that is ‘English jazz cakes’, I just made that up. But that’s… I suppose that’s what you are getting so, I hope that you enjoy my English jazz cakes or my random bollocks.

Hmm… yes, so, there was a point to this podcast and the point, one of the points for this episode, one of my objectives was just to kind of talk randomly like this and see what happens. That’s one of the objectives of the episode but one of the other objectives was to tell you a story, okay, tell you a story.

OK, now, first of all let me get back to the first point talking sort of randomly, talking without preparation. I’ve done episodes like this before without any preparation and for example I did one called ‘The Ice Cream Episode’. I did one called ‘The Cheese Episode’. I did one called, I believe it was called, ‘The Rotary Sushi Bar of English’ and I did ‘The A-Z of Random Nonsense’ so, the advantage of doing episodes like this for me is I don’t have to spend a lot of time in advance preparing lists of vocabulary or preparing scripts or doing research or anything like that. I don’t need to spend time doing that. And that’s good for me because I don’t have a lot of time even though I did win the 2012 award for best blog, and that’s two awards I’ve won now, even though I’ve won two awards in a row it doesn’t mean that I can just give up my day job. It doesn’t mean that I can just move into a huge mansion with a recording studio in it somewhere. I still have to try to find windows of time in my otherwise busy life to record episodes of the podcast. And recently my life has just been really busy. I’ve just had loads of different things going on. I’ve got, obviously, my full-time job, etc., etc. I don’t need to go into its lots of detail because I’ve talked about it before and you’re probably like ‘Yeah, Luke, yeah (yawning). Same old story, yeah, you don’t have much time etc., etc. Just keep talking, please.’ So, okay. So, that’s kind of a bit of justification as to why for me, I like doing these episodes were I don’t prepare and I just talk.

Secondly, it’s kind of fun to have a challenge for me. I like the challenge of having to speak like this without, you know, preparing. For me it’s kind of a challenge. I like the opportunity just to talk and not really know where I’m going to go next. It’s quite fun because I can be creative and I can kind of improvise situations and hopefully create some entertaining stuff for you to listen to.

What else…? Also hopefully it’s kind of engaging to listen to. It should be quite interesting to listen to because, you know, if you…, I must say I’m guilty of this, if you write a script and then read the script it somehow becomes kind of dull and boring. Maybe it’s because English which is written is different to English which is spoken. So, written English, English that’s written in books or magazines or newspapers or blog articles, it has a certain rhythm or certain style to it, which is good for written English, right? But when you actually speak and try to get the attention of people it’s better when it’s just completely improvised because it’s somehow has a bit more drama in it, because you know that the speaker doesn’t really know what he’s gonna say next. So, it’s what’s just happening right now. It’s happening in real time and it makes it more natural sounding. So, that I think is good for you, in fact, for several reasons. One reason it’s good for you is because it sounds more natural so, it’s good practice for you to listen to. It’s just very good practice for you to train your ear to the rhythm and the sound of natural English as it comes out of a person’s mouth. In this case the person is me. And another reason why it is good for you is hopefully it’s just fun. It’s just more fun to listen to and it’s just a laugh, a bit of a laugh. You know what I mean. So, going back, what the other points I was making. My other objective for this episode. My other objective is just to tell you a story and I’m going to start telling the story in a moment. Just as an introduction to the story let me tell you a little bit about it.

OK, so this is a story I’m gonna tell you and I’m… It’s a kind of a challenge for me again. I’m gonna try to tell you a story which… I’ll tell you a story which I hope you will enjoy and basically I haven’t planned this story so I’m making it up as I go along. I hope that you’re gonna find it funny and I think I’m gonna start the story now. Oh yeah. I’m gonna try to make it as long as possible, that’s it. I’m gonna try to make the story as long as I can. Now I’ve been speaking for 15 minutes. Let’s see how long I can make this story. Okay. I’m gonna also try and throw in some characters into the story so you might hear some different accents and different characters but just bear in mind the fact that I’ve got no idea really where the story is going. I’m just making it all up as I go along. So, bear that in mind. If the story doesn’t make a lot of sense then I apologize. It’s because it’s just kind of random bollocks, OK? Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it and hopefully, it will be very good practice for your ears. Okay, so, let’s begin the story, shall we? Yes, let’s begin the story.

Alright. …take a couple of breaths. …to take a deep breath…okay. Are we ready? OK, I’ll start telling the story in just a moment. I hope that you’re sitting comfortably. Maybe you’re standing. Maybe you’re walking. Whatever it is you’re doing, whatever position your body is in I hope it’s comfortable because the story is gonna begin now. Maybe you’re in bed. Maybe you’re lying there and thinking ‘Come on Luke. Tell me some stuff. Make me fall asleep’. Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult because… Yes maybe what I’m gonna say.. well just be so dull and so boring that you’ll be asleep. Maybe you’ve already fallen asleep. That’s quite possible. If you’re driving a car than, you know, I suggest you open your eyes. That’s normally the way it’s done. It’s best generally to open your eyes when you’re in control of a huge metal killing machine. So, please, be careful when you’re driving, okay? If you’re in bed though, you know, you can close your eyes. That’s fine. That is fine unless you want to open them. Maybe you’re scared of the dark. I don’t know. Anyway the story, the story. Here we go. So, I’m going to tell you a story about my life. It’s not true. It’s just made up. OK? Just to be clear. This is completely made up. Right, so…

A few years ago, well, let’s see, a few years ago I was living in London and I hit some hard times. Life got a bit difficult for me. I lost my job because I was just too good at it. My boss said to me – Luke, can I have a word with you, please? – I was in the middle of a lesson at the time. I was teaching. I was saying – So, present perfect tense is a tense which is used when the action is finished possibly but the time period is not finished and also, but, there is an exception to that rule – and my boss just came into the room (knock, knock, knock) – Ehm… excuse me, Luke. Hello everyone, hello class, hello students – The students were like – Hello – because they were Spanish. – Hello Luke, can I have a word with you, please? – And so, I had to say – Sorry class, just, you know, do page 3 of English Grammar in Use. Just do it, OK? Do it! Shut up! Don’t give me any back-chat – Maybe that’s why I lost my job because I used to tell the students to ‘shut up’. Haha! Actually, you know what? I never ever tell my students to ‘shut up’ because as an English language teacher you can’t do that. That’s like one of the worst things you can do. It’s worse to tell the students to ‘shut up’ than it is to tell them to ‘fuck off’, actually. Because ‘shut up’ is just like the rudest thing you can say in a language classroom in my opinion. Anyway. So, I said – OK students. You know what? Just do some work, alright? I’ll be back in a minute. I’ve got to speak to the boss. Obviously he’s got something very important to say to me because I’m kind of big deal around here, OK? So, do some work. See you in a minute –

So, I went out and the boss said to me – Luke, listen, I’m really sorry but we’re gonna have to let you go – I said – What? You’re gonna have to let me go? Yeah, I’m afraid so. We’re gonna have to let you go because, well, quite frankly, you can’t just give students pages from English Grammar in Use and tell them to ‘shut up’ and ‘do it’. You can’t do that! OK? Because… Why not? Why can’t I do that? Well, because… I don’t really know why but I just… I just know, I just know that you can’t do that. I don’t know. My training, years ago told me something about the fact that yeah, ‘you should try to use communicative methods. You should try to engage students in speaking exercises. You should give them regular feedback and just don’t tell them to shut up or fuck off, OK? It’s just a general rule, a rule of thumb for, well, for life. Don’t tell people to shut up or to…, you know.’ So, you know, I’m afraid Luke, we’re gonna have to let you go. So, sorry. Pack your bags. Get out! You’re fired! – So, obviously I was devastated – Oh, my God, I’m fired! I love my job – And then I realised – Wait a minute. I can just do what the hell I want now. Sure, I won’t have money or food but I’ll have my freedom – And so, I went back into class and I said – OK everyone. Well, It’s been a pleasure teaching you. I’ve been Luke Thompson and I still am and I really hope that you learn this language effectively and you go out there and improve the economy, OK? Good luck! I’ve been fired. Don’t, you know, don’t, don’t act too upset about that. Hello!? Are you actually listening?! Hello!? Yeah, I’m going now, OK? I’m going, yeah? Fine. OK, if you don’t care, that’s fine – In fact, there were once the students understood the situation. They were like – What?! You’re going?! Where?! How?! Why?! How?! Well, on foot, probably. Why?! Why?! I’ve been fired. My boss just fired me because I told you to ‘shut up’, remember? Oh, but Luke, you didn’t mean it? It was… Hey, Luke! Hey! – For some reason my students were all from Brooklyn – But Luke, you didn’t mean it? Hey, come on! What’s the matter with you? – All my students were from New York, Brooklyn or the Bronx. They were all Italian Americans which is kinda strange, I know but this is a part of the mafia training programme that they have over there. They have like a special mafia training budget which they can spend on things like, you know, methods of threatening people or money counting techniques and also English lessons. And so, all my students were Latin Italian American gangsters – Hey Luke! What’re you talking about?! Come on! What’s the matter with you?! You’ve been fired? Screw this guy! Who’s this guy, huh?! Come on! – And so, I said – Look guys, I’m really sorry, you know. Good luck with all of the, you know, the assassinations and the robberies and the extortion. Good luck with that, but I’m out of here, OK? See you guys later – And they would like – Hey Luke! Come on! Get out of here! Go out! Go away! – And so, that’s it.

So, I went out into the street, took a breath of fresh air, started coughing because, you know, this was London and the Oxford street, it’s not exactly fresh air, is it. No, it’s not. It’s not really. And so, and that’s it. I had my freedom. So, I just started walking the streets. Just walking around, just walking around, you know, moving one foot in front of the other. Right foot first usually then the left foot and just repeating that motion and sort of… I don’t know quite how we change direction while we’re walking. I think there’s subtle movements of the legs to the left and the right which allows us to turn but I would basically do that a lot of that all over London walking around, looking at the sights, you know. I got to see some of the most amazing sights in London: McDonalds, Starbucks, just the corner of Oxford street, H&M. Just some of London’s most famous attractions. Let’s see what else was there? There was Boot’s the Chemist’s, Marks & Spencer and of course things like Buckingham Palace and Big Ben, the London Eye. All of these things that I just couldn’t afford to actually visit. But I looked at them and I thought ‘This, this Luke, this is London’ and it was because, because I was in London. Yes, now, moving the story on, OK, so, I would, I would move, I would walk around the streets all day and all night just thinking what’s gonna happen to me ‘I’m homeless, I’m hungry’. I would go into supermarkets and just stare at food because I didn’t have any money to buy the food, so, I would stare at all the food on the shelf and just eat, just eat sandwiches with my eyes, you know, I’d just eat them with my eyes. But it wasn’t very satisfying because as you probably know, as you probably have learnt in your life you can’t, you can’t eat sandwiches with your eyes. You can’t really eat anything with your eyes, I think. As far as I know, I think, you can’t eat anything with your eyes but I tried. Oh boy did I try! I tried to eat, you know, mushrooms, spaghetti. Pretty much all the food I tried to eat with my eyes but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t eat any of the food with my eyes, so sometimes I had to steal, I had to steal. You know, I admit it. I was desperate. I was hungry and so, I stole a banana and I would go to the supermarkets and steal bananas. I found the bananas one of the most effective fruit to steal because what you can do is you just take the banana and then as soon as you’ve got the banana in your hand and just pretend that you’re receiving a telephone call. So, you have a banana in your hand and just go (prr, prr) ‘Oh, looks like I’m getting a call here on my yellow mobile phone!’ And then you just sort of bring the banana up to your ear and just start talking ‘Yeah, hello. Yes, yes, yes it’s me. Yes, well, that’s right. How can I help you? This is the banana hot-line. How can I help you? Yes. Yes, I think so. Yes, you should. No. No, you shouldn’t really… No, you shouldn’t really do that with a banana. No. No. No. I know. I know the shape of the banana makes you think that you could do that but seriously you shouldn’t because, well, bananas are a bit too soft, actually, for that despite the shape. That’s too soft so, you shouldn’t do it. No. You shouldn’t put it in there. No. Because it’s too soft. You might not be able to get it out, right? OK. No. No. Put it in your mouth. That’s right. Eat it. Eat it. That’s what you’re supposed to do with the banana. OK? Good’ And then I’d just keep talking like this on the banana phone and walk out of the supermarket with the banana to my ear and all of the staff in the shop would look at me and they would like ‘What’s going on? What’s going on there? Oh, it’s just a man talking on the mobile phone. Nothing to see here’ And I would just walk out of the shop with the banana phone like that and then I would have the banana. But sometimes what I would do I’d forget that it was a banana and I would think that I was making a telephone call. I’d try to call, you know, I’d try to call my parents on the banana and then after half an hour of attempting to make a telephone call on the banana I would realise ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?!’ And then I’d eat the banana. And then I’d be OK. 28:20

So, that’s how I survived. I’d just move from supermarket to supermarket doing the banana phone trick until eventually, you know, I was desperate, you know, I just couldn’t eat bananas anymore. I was sick of them and didn’t matter how many times I tried to call the banana hot-line no one answered because it didn’t exist. It didn’t even exist! It was all in my imagination so, I’d started begging on the streets and I would sit on the street and I would say ‘Excuse me, excuse me sir. Can you spare ten p? I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, you know, I’m a Cockney for some reason now. Can you, can you spare me ten p, governor, for a cup of tea?’ For some reason the Cockney accent helped. People all were like ‘Ah! It’s just a poor young Cockney, maybe a chimney sweep or something and he needs some money because he is, he is hungry. So, excuse me squire, you couldn’t spare a couple of pounds for a dear old Cockney. He’s got nothing, no money to his name’ And they would like give me some money and I’d go down to Marks & Spencer and buy some quality sandwiches. OK, so that’s how I survived.

And one day, one day this strange looking gentleman approached me in the street, strange looking gentleman. He was dressed in, like, a suit. He was dressed in suit with a top hat. He had a monocle. That’s like a, you know, like a pair of glasses but with only one lens and you kind of hold it in your eye. So, he had one of those, he had a monocle and a moustache and a top hat and a suit and he was like a very posh gentleman. And he came up to me and said – Excuse me, young gentlemen. Young beggar – I was young at the time – Beggar, Mr beggar, I don’t know what your name is. I’m gonna call you Mr beggar. I’m using ‘Mr’ as a polite term of respect. Mr Beggar, how can I help you? You seem hungry. You seem desperate and tired. Would you like a job? – And I said to him – Wow! That’s amazing! First of all my name is Luke. – He said – Ah, Luke. Thank you. Thank you. It’s, it’s… You know, I always think that it is good to be on first name terms with homeless people – And so, I said – I’d love a job. What’s, what’s the job? – He said – Come with me to my mansion in North London and I’ll show you everything – And I said – You’re gonna show me everything?! Like everything?! No, no. Don’t misunderstand Luke. Please don’t misunderstand. I’m gonna show you everything related to this job offer. Ah! Right! OK! Great. Well, let’s go. Let’s go to North London.

So, we immediately… I don’t know… His name was… Let’s see… what was his name. I said to him – Excuse me, just before I agree to accompany you to your mansion maybe we should just introduce ourselves and get acquainted. And I’ll start: hello, my name’s Luke and I’m an English language teacher. I recently got fired because of a misunderstanding. My boss thought I was being rude to my students. Ridiculous! And so, he fired me. It was all a big misunderstanding. I wasn’t being rude. I wasn’t. It was… I don’t know how to explain it because it’s just improvisation. But, you know, I wasn’t being rude. Essentially, it’s because I was teaching Italian mafia bosses English and, you know, you’ve got to communicate them, you’ve got to communicate with them in the language that they understand and that’s often with a lot of swear words, sort of rude, aggressive communicative styles so, I was just, you know, adapting my teaching style for my class. But my boss overheard me telling my students to ‘shut up’ and he fired me. He fired me. He fired me from my job and so, I was on the street. So, that’s my position. I also do a podcast called ‘Luke’s English Podcast’ which won the MacMillan award for best blog in 2011 and in 2012(!) so, you know, I’m good, I’m a good person and I’m nice and… yeah. So, that’s me. My name’s Luke. It’s very nice to meet you. And what about you sir? What’s your name sir, with a moustache and a monocle and a hat? Sir! Please, sir! Please, sir. Sir! What’s your name, sir?! Can you tell me what’s your name is, please, sir?! – And he said – Just Luke please, just give me a chance to speak – Sorry, I forgot I have the posh accent – So, my name is Daniel Lazenby-Smythe, Daniel Lazenby-Smythe. That’s right and I’m very, very posh. I’m quite possibly the poshest man in London and it is a pleasure to make you acquaintance, Mr Luke. Actually, it’s Mr Thompson, Luke Thompson. Ah! I do apologize, Mr Thompson, it’s a pleasure to make you acquaintance.

So, wow, Daniel Lazenby-Smythe, what do you do if you don’t mind me asking? What do you do? Well, Luke, I am a collector. I’m a collector of rare endangered animal species. Wow! Wow! That sounds interesting. Rare endangered animal species. What’s that? What are they? What is it? What are you talking about, Daniel?! Help! Well, rare endangered animal species, what I do is I travel the globe with a huge truck and I travel around and I search for endangered animal species. These are animals which are very rare, animals which are in danger, animals which are under threat. And I collect them and I put them in the back of the van and I take them to London and then I keep them in my mansion. So, wait a minute, Daniel. So, basically, you steal rare animals from other countries? Yes, basically yes, Luke. That’s what I do. I just steal animals. But I’m not sure about the ethics of that. Isn’t that a little bit ethically questionable? Well, you know, you probably do have a point, Luke but… never mind that. Let’s just keep moving forward with the story, shall we? Yeah, good idea. OK. Right. So, let’s get in a taxi and let me show you my furry animals. OK. Great!

So, we got into a taxi (car’s noise) That’s… (car’s noise) got in the taxi (car’s noise) and, you know, I started doing this (car’s noise) and Daniel said to me – Luke, why, why are you making that strange noise? (car’s noise) Because, well, isn’t that what you do when you get into a taxi? You know, you sit down, you put your sit belt on, you tell the driver where you want to go ‘The mansion, please. The big mansion in North London’ and the driver goes Right you are, governor. Big mansion in North London. Here we go. Strap in’ and then you go (car’s noise), don’t you? – And Daniel said – No. No, Luke. No. That’s really… That’s not necessary to be honest with you. Not necessary at all – And I said – Well, Daniel, this is my story. I can do what the hell I want. It’s my story. Fine, fine, Luke. Yes, you go ahead. You sit there in a taxi, next to me making a noise like a crazy person and fine. You just do whatever you want to do. If you think that it’s right, go ahead. After all you did win those awards and everything so you must know what you’re doing. I do, Daniel, I do. I know what I’m doing even though I’ve got fired from my job and I’ve been eating bananas and pretended that they’re telephones and things like that, but I know what I’m doing, OK? Trust me, I’m an English teacher .

OK, so (car’s noise) off we went to the mansion and we went past various impressive sights in London, driving along the roads. We drove past Abbey Road Studios because that’s in North London and as we drove past I noticed there were The Beatles, The Beatles were just standing there outside the studio. All four of them! That’s right. Even John Lennon despite the fact he is actually dead, in this story he was there. He was actually there. So the four Beatles were there and… let’s see… Ringo was there. Ringo was saying – OK then Beatles, let’s go into the studio and record a new album – And Paul was like – OK, all right John, Ringo, George (Ooooh!) let’s go into the studio, shall we, and record a new album – And George was sort of saying, let’s see, George – OK, Paul, if you want us to go into the studio we’ll go into the studio. If you don’t want us to go in, we won’t go in – And Paul was – You know, actually, George, I think we should go into the studio because (Ooooh!) it’ll be, it’ll be great, you know, it’ll be like, you know, Sergeant Pepper – And then John said – OK, McCartney, I think you’ve got a good idea. Let’s go into the studio and record us another album – And, so, I overheard all of this as I went past Abbey Road Studios in the taxi and I just watched them walking into the studio and I thought ‘Oh my God, this is a momentous moment, if that’s possible. This is a momentous moment in history. The Beatles have got back together. John Lennon has come back from the dead. They’re going into the studio. They’re going to record a new album. This is amazing’ But I didn’t really have a chance to stop the taxi and go into the studio and listen to the music. I thought I didn’t have a chance. It turns out I did because I said to Daniel – Daniel! Daniel! Wait! Let’s turn around the taxi. I just saw The Beatles going into the studio to record a new album, a new Beatles album. We’ve got to go and listen – And Daniel said – Well, certainly Luke, after all this is your story. You can do whatever the hell you want and I’m sure you will – And so, we turned around the taxi. We went back to the studio and we walked in and… just… sort of walked into the back of the studio and sat down got ready to listen to genius in action and this is what we heard:

Singing, singing a song
Beatles, we’re the Beatles
And we’re geniuses
We haven’t lost our talent at all
Because we’re still The Beatles, genius

And then I thought ‘Is that it? Is that, is that what they’re recording? That is terrible! How on Earth, how on Earth could they expect that to be successful?’ – And so, we just left because it was so rubbish. Obviously, they’d just lost it. They’d lost all their talent somewhere along the line so… Anyway, we got back into the taxi, went to the mansion. So, we got to the mansion and Daniel Lazenby-Smythe said – OK Luke – in a posh voice – OK Luke, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to show you my collection of endangered animals. OK? But you must make two promises to me, two promises which you must keep. Promise number one is that you do not touch any of the animals and promise number two is you definitely don’t touch the animal in the cage at the end of the corridor. OK? Don’t touch the animal in the cage at the end of the corridor. I can’t emphasise this point more seriously. Please, don’t touch any of the animals especially the one in the cage at the end of the corridor – and I thought ‘OK’ – All right Daniel, I agree to your terms. I won’t touch any of the animals especially the animal at the end of the corridor. Now, to be honest, I’m already getting curious about the animal at the end of the corridor and I’m sure that the listeners are getting curious about it too. Listeners, Luke? What are you talking about? Listeners, there’re people listening to this. There’re People, People listening to this?! Are you sure? Yes, I’m positive. I get two to three thousand downloads every day. A lot of people in the world listen to this. Lots of people listen to this? Are you…, are you certain? It seems like absolute meaningless crap. Luke, are you sure? Yep, I’m sure. People love this stuff. OK? So, just, yeah. Anyway, people are listening so, please, let’s move on with the story. Yes, yes, OK. Don’t touch any of the animals especially… Yeah, I’ve got it. …the one at the end of the corridor. Fine!

OK – So, we went downstairs. We went into the mansion. We went downstairs into the basement and that’s where he kept his zoo, his zoo of endangered animals, and he showed me… He showed me all the animals. There was a kind of a three-headed zebra, three-headed zebra. That’s right. There was a leopard which had no spots. A leopard, of course, is a kind of a big cat. So, leopard with no spots. I think it was a puma to be honest. There was also a duck without a beak, a duck without a beak. Poor thing, but it looked strange. Who really did it. Was it like a duck? But just like a round head with no beak on the end. Pretty weird. All sorts of amazing animals and then finally we got to the end of the corridor and there was a cage at the end with black curtains covering the cage so I couldn’t see what was inside. I couldn’t see but I… I kind of approached the curtains and I listened and I could hear heavy breathing (breathing, snoring). Then that I thought ‘Oh my God, what is in there? I can’t wait to see it’ (breathing, snoring, whistling, mutter, singing “Love me do”) ‘What on Earth could be behind this curtain? This is amazing’ so, I started to move the curtain back, started to move the curtain back because I wanted to see what kind of weird animal was inside this cage. What kind of fantastic creature could there be in there? I started to move the curtain and Daniel Lazenby -Smyth noticed me, said – Luke! Stop! Stop! Do not move the curtain! Do not move the curtain! – So, I said – OK, Sorry Daniel, sorry – And he said – Right, with that I think we should go to bed – And I said – Really? We’re gonna go to bed? Yes, let’s go to bed – And I said – Well, I didn’t realise that that was a part of the deal. I didn’t realise that that’s what we’d have to do. No Luke, No, you misunderstand. I’ve… You’ve got your own bedroom. Oh God! Thanks God for that! No Luke, you’ve got your own bedroom. You’ll be sleeping upstairs in the loft. I’ll be sleeping in my bedroom, which is in another wing of the house. Nothing to worry about – So, with that we went to our bedrooms and everything. I went upstairs and there was my room. It was fantastic. It was great. There was like a big comfortable bed and an arcade machine in the corner, an old Street Fighter II arcade machine. I hadn’t seen one of those for donkey’s years. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a Street Fighter II arcade machine so, I went over and there on the side there was a pile of coins which Daniel had thoughtfully left for me and a note, a note written in Daniel’s handwriting. And it said
Luke,
I know that you’re a big fan of computer games and so I’ve left you this coin operated arcade machine of Street Fighter II Championship Edition and here’re some coins so you can play the game.
So, I put the coins in, I put a coin in and started playing, and I, you know, it asked me to choose my fighter. I chose Ken because he’s the best. And so, I started playing (game’s noises). If you don’t know what I’m talking about this is a… this is a computer game, a famous computer game called Street Fighter II. And I played Street Fighter II for ages. (Ha-Do Ken!) is what one of the characters says. Yes. I’m not gonna talk about that because it’s boring for most of you because I expect most of you have never played Street Fighter II. I think some of you have. Some of you probably know Street Fighter II and you love it and you’re going ‘Yes! Awesome! I can’t believe Luke is talking about Street Fighter II Championship Edition! Brilliant!’ But then the rest of you are going ‘What is Luke talking about? I’ve got no idea what Street Fighter II Championship Edition is. What does this thing keep saying (game’s noises) then never mind. OK? Never mind. Google it ‘Street Fighter II Championship Edition Ken’. Just google that then you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Right. So, I went to bed. I slept so well. Oh my God, I slept amazingly and I woke up in the morning all fresh and Daniel Lazenby-Smyth gave me some jobs to do. He got me to clean the cages of these animals. I cleaned them didn’t touch any of them, no, cleaned the cages. I was cleaning all day. He gave me a sandwich for lunch. Oh, I was happy, and a banana. And I cleaned the cages, cleaned the cages again, cleaned again. These cages was so clean by the time I finished that you could see your own reflection on the floor. That’s how clean they were. I cleaned them into like glass they were so clean. I mean these were wooden cages and I cleaned them so much that they became like glass. Yeah. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? And yeah, and there was that cage and the end of the corridor tempting me just by its presence. Just tempting me, asking me ‘Luke, why don’t you come and look inside the cage? I know you’re fascinated.’ But I, you know, I didn’t… I resisted the temptation. It was very difficult. I wanted to look. I wanted to move the curtains aside. I wanted to have a look inside. I wanted to see what this animal was but I could still hear the noises making (breathing, snoring, whistling, singing “Love me do”) It was very weird, very, very weird indeed. But I resisted the temptation I went back upstairs went to bed. That night I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about the animal in the cage downstairs. And you know what I did, listeners? You know what I did? I did nothing. No, I didn’t do nothing. I got up I got out of bed and I tiptoed very quietly, silently. I tiptoed down the stairs and tiptoed through the basement past all of these animals which were all sleeping. There was the zebra, you know, making a sort of zebra noise (zebra’s noise) That’s what zebras do when they’re sleeping but it had three heads so it was like (three genuine zebra’s noises) three heads. The duck with no beak just going (quack) because it couldn’t… can’t really quack properly, the duck, because it didn’t have a beak. It was like sort of going (quack) in its sleep. And the leopard and all that stuff, right? And I got to the end of the corridor and thought ‘Right, I don’t care what Daniel said. I don’t care anymore. I just want to see what is in this cage.’ So, I slowly moved the curtains to one side, slowly moved them to one side and there at the back of the cage was a huge, pink gorilla. Just a huge, pink gorilla sleeping and it had a radio as well listening to The Beatles, actually. So, there was a huge pink gorilla sleeping and I was stunned. I was absolutely stunned. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This massive gorilla. Pink! As pink as something is really pink. As pink as a lobster or as pink as just the colour pink. If you can imagine a page in a book and a child has coloured it pink with a pink pen? It was pink like that. Do you know like the way pink is pink? Well, this gorilla was really pink. OK? And I just thought ‘Oh my God! This is amazing’ and the fur of the gorilla looked so fine and so soft. I just really felt the urge to like reach through the cage and touch its fur. And then I suddenly realised ‘No! Daniel specifically asked me not to touch this animal. So, no, I’m not gonna touch it’ I really wanna touch it. I really wanna know how it feels like but I couldn’t. So, I decided ‘No, Luke. No. You’ve done enough tonight. You’ve investigated enough. It’s time to go to bed’ So, I closed the curtains. I tiptoed back upstairs, tiptoed up the stairs again and then went back to bed and I slept like a baby. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t… I slept like a baby. That means that I slept very well. It doesn’t mean that I kind of cried during my sleep and pissed myself, no. It just means that I had a very good night sleep. I slept like a baby. In the morning I was happy. I was happy. I cleaned the cages effectively, I cleaned them really well that all the animals were happy, that zebra with three heads, the duck without a beak, the leopard with no spots which could also be a puma. And I didn’t look inside the cage because Daniel was there, you know. Daniel was there, whistling (whistling). Because that’s what he does, Daniel. You probably don’t know but during the day he just whistles. He just sits there enjoying his animal collection and whistling (whistling) in a kind of 1950’s sort of way (whistling) Because no one whistles like that anymore, no one except Daniel Lazenby-Smythe because he is old fashioned and that’s just way he is. And so, I didn’t think about the pink gorilla, didn’t think about it at all until the end of the day, the end of the day. Suddenly when my work was done I remembered ‘Luke, what about that pink gorilla, though? What about the pink gorilla?’ And I thought ‘God, I’ve got to have another look’ because it was so amazing. So, after Daniel had gone to bed I went down the corridor and I, more confident this time, more confident because I knew what was inside, opened the curtains and the gorilla was right there in front of me, right there at the bars of the cage and he went – Hello – like that. And I went ‘Oh!’ like that, shocked. And he held out his hand to me. Held out his hand and I knew that he wanted me to touch his hand. Right? I thought ‘This, this doesn’t look so bad. It’s quite friendly’ The gorilla was smiling at me with these big teeth like that holding his hand out and I thought you know what? ‘I’m gonna… I’m gonna do it. I don’t care about Daniel Lazenby-Smythe. I just don’t care anymore, damn it! I’m gonna touch this gorilla. To hell with the consequences’ And so, I reached out my hand and I touched the gorilla. And his… just… I touched him briefly on the back of the hand and his fur was incredibly soft. It was like a fur of a unicorn. It was so soft. But this huge gorilla suddenly, soon as I touched him, suddenly started to go crazy. He started to shake the bars of the cage. He started to go round around, jump up and down. He did somersaults and I thought ‘Oh my God! What have I done? What have I done?’ And immediately the gorilla started to pull the bars open. He started to bend the bars open with this crazy look in his eyes, pull the bars open I thought ‘Oh my God! What have I done?! I’ve got to get out of here! I’ve got to get out of here!’ in an American accent. Suddenly I became like a kind of an American movie and I thought ‘Oh my God! Get out of there!’ So, I ran. I just ran. I ran out of the mansion. I didn’t bother to get any of my stuff. I couldn’t, I couldn’t because behind me the gorilla was running and I could hear his footsteps pounding on the ground as he chased after me through the mansion. So, I was running through the corridors of the mansion ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to run away. This gorilla’s gonna get me’ And I ran and ran. I could hear (footsteps) this gorilla coming towards me. So, I ran like my life depended on it because I w
as sure this gorilla was gonna rip my head off or something like that. So, I just kept running. I ran out into the street and I ran, ran down the street. I turned around ‘Maybe’ I thought ‘Maybe the gorilla… Maybe I lost him because I sort of took left turn there down an alleyway Maybe the gorilla, you know, has lost me…’ and I turned around but ‘…no. The gorilla hadn’t lost me’ In there it was sprinting down the road after me in a kind of gorilla style, you know, using his hands and his feet running after me and I… I just thought ‘Oh my God! What’s going on?!’ and then so, I ran. I ran for it and I found a bicycle on the side of the road. Just a bicycle had been left so I jumped on a bicycle and I accelerated. I bombed down the hill flying down the hill on this BMX bicycle and eventually I got down into the centre of the town an looked around and there was the pink gorilla. But he was on a bicycle too. I don’t know where he found it. He was flying down the road after me and so, I thought ‘Oh my God. I’m gonna neeed to find another form of transport.’ So, I quickly jumped onto a bus. I jumped onto one of those red London busses and I went upstairs and I kind of acted all nonchalant as if nothing was happening ‘So, I’m just… I’m just getting on a bus, nothing to worry about, just an ordinary passenger on this lovely red London bus. I’m just gonna sit here and act like nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine, everything’s absolutely fine. Maybe if I act normal the gorilla will sort of forget who I am and he’ll lose me, he won’t notice, right?’ So, I sat there and I started checking my emails on my phone and I kind of sat there for a while thinking ‘Ah, the gorilla probably doesn’t know where I am. I’m OK. After all I’m on a red London bus. It’s safe. Everything is OK.’ I looked out of the window and looked behind us down the street and immediately I saw the gorilla. And this gorilla was chasing the bus. He was chasing after the bus. He was smashing cars out of his way, just bang! Smashing these cars, taxies, black taxies, vans, trucks, just smashing them all out of his way in his mission to get me. And, you know, I nearly soiled my trousers, I’ll be honest, because I thought that everything was all right, but not. It wasn’t. The gorilla was more determined to get me than ever. He was just chasing after me. So, I just jumped out of the… jumped out of the bus and I thought ‘I’m gonna need to… I’m gonna need to get on another form of transport. So, I, sort of, dived into the Underground and I was in such a rush. I got up to the gates. I got up to the ticket gates but, of course, there was this woman in front of me. She couldn’t find her Oyster card. She was checking her pockets and I was like – Come on! Come on! For God sake, There’s a huge pink gorilla chasing after me! He’s gonna kill me. Can you just get through the gates, please? – And the woman was like – Excuse me, Excuse me, but I’m trying… I’m trying to find my Oyster card. I don’t need you. I don’t need you like telling me what to do, yeah? I don’t care if that pink gorilla chasing after you. I can’t find my Oyster card. Ah, look, sorry, but couldn’t you’ve looked for your Oyster card before you got here? This is the worst place to be. Didn’t you listen to my podcast about using the Underground? You shouldn’t, you know, you shouldn’t do this. You should be prepared when you get to the gates. You should have your Oyster card ready. No, look, Luke, you know, I know you… I know you’ve done a podcast about that but I don’t care right now. I don’t care, do I? I just don’t care, yeah? Yeah, I get the message. I think that you don’t really care. Fine. Never mind –

So, I went to the next gate and I got my Oyster card and I went through, managed to go down to the platform. The train came in. I jumped on the train and the train left and the announcement said – This is a Cockfosters… – No, the announcement said – This is a Piccadilly line train to Cockfosters calling at South Kensington and Piccadilly Circus – And so, I thought ‘Right. Good. I’m on a Piccadilly line going to Cockfosters. What am I gonna do? I guess I can go to… I can probably go to Stansted Airport if I change at Green Park onto a Victoria line and I take a Victoria line northbound and then go to Tottenham Hale. And from Tottenham Hale I can jump on the overland which would take me to Stansted Airport. And then I can just get a plane out of here and that pink gorilla is never gonna find me – So, I am, you know, I did that, took the Underground and I thought ‘This is fine. The gorilla can’t chase me on the Underground. This is fine. No problem’ And for a while I thought everything was all right. I thought ‘I’ve got a plan. Everything’s gonna be fine’ I changed onto the Victoria line. I went through to Tottenham Hale station, got out, walked through the streets ‘Nothing. No pink gorilla’ Everything was fine. Everything was calm ‘Nothing to worry about’ And so, I kind of walked leisurely in a relaxed way. I walked to the station to get the overland train, got the overland train, sat down, relaxed. I thought ‘This is gonna be nice. I’m gonna go on holiday somewhere. This is gonna be great’ I was just relaxing, sitting back in my seat. I looked to my right and there on the tracks next to the train, as the train was going along the tracks, then on the next set of tracks, there was the ****kin’ pink gorilla. There he was and he was on one of those like mechanical train things, you know those things, this is like a platform with a kind of metal handle, metal bar in the middle which you can lift up and down and it’s sort of… it’s a mechanical device which allows you to travel along the train tracks just by moving this bar up and down. So, he was on the one of those things moving it up and down, up and down, flying along next to the train. And I was so shocked. I just looked at him. I just couldn’t stop looking at him and the gorilla turned to me just there on the tracks, you know, flying along the tracks, moving the bar up and down. He turned to me and he just mouthed ‘I’m gonna get you. I’m gonna get you’ he mouthed. Understandably I was shocked and I was afraid. And… Hoooo! Dear, that was frightening so, what happened was I got out of the train near the airport and I realised ‘Oh my God, I don’t have any money’. While I was doing this I didn’t know what the pink gorilla was doing. He was probably putting the train platform mechanical device thing somewhere. Probably, maybe, maybe he had to deal with a member of train staff – Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me Mr Gorilla, Mr Pink Gorilla, do you mind if I ask you what you are doing? That is British Rail property. You’re not supposed to be touching that – And the gorilla probably went – I don’t care, squire. I don’t care what you think because I’m a bloody pink gorilla, yeah? I am on a mission to get that geezer over there called Luke Thompson. I’m gonna get him. Yeah, I’m gonna get him. I’m gonna… I’m gonna mug him right off. You will see, my friend – And so, that guy said – OK, sorry. You’re a bit frightening and a little bit scary and you’re huge pink gorilla. Im’ not gonna… I’m not gonna give you any trouble, in fact. I know, would you like a banana? I don’t eat any bananas, mate. I don’t eat. I’ve only got one mission and I that is to get that geezer over there called Luke Thompson and I’m gonna get him. Now, get out of my way! – So, the gorilla was involved in something which meant I had a little bit a time and I thought ‘Damn! I don’t have any money to pay for a ticket. What am I gonna do?’ And so, I went into the bank in order to borrow some money. I went to the bank to borrow some money, you know. I got an appointment with the bank manager in his office and so the bank manager said to me – OK Mr Thompson, would you like to take a seat? – So I said – Yeah. Great. Thanks. Thanks. Ooooo! Just sit down. Everything’s OK. Just sit down here. Oooo! That’s nice. Nice comfortable seats you have in a bank here, Mr manager. Yes, that’s right. We do have comfortable seats, Luke. Now, how can I help you? Well, I’d like to… I’d like to borrow some money, please. I’d like to take out a loan – And the bank manager said – OK. Fine. How much money would you like to borrow? – And I said – Well, I’d like to… if possible I’d like to borrow, well, as much, as much as you can… In fact, I’d like to borrow all… all the money, just all of it, all the money. Well Luke, I’m sure you realise that we can’t just simply lend you all the money, all the money in the bank. No, no, no, no. I don’t expect you lend me all the money in the bank, no. I just want you to lend me all the money, just all the money in the world. Ha, Luke! I understand you’re humorous gentleman. You like to have a laugh but seriously that’s impossible, that’s ridiculous. We… we could probably lend you about three thousand pounds with the interest rate, well, six per cent. Well, sorry Mr Bank Manager but I think you’ll find… I know that you’re the manager of this big bank which is all very important and all that kind of stuff. Well done. Congratulations. Clap, clap, clap. Good job. Yeah, you’re brilliant, but. I think you’ll find that this story and everything in it including you is basically the creation of my brain, OK? So, you can’t tell me ‘you can’t give me all the money’, OK? Because this is my story so basically, if I wanted to I could make you say and do anything I wanted – And the bank manager was like – Oh, really? Ehm… I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you. I think you’re making this up. Prove it – So, I said – OK. Fine. If you want me to prove it I’m gonna prove it. OK Mr Bank Manager, I’m going to make you speak like Sean Connery now. Ha! Don’t be ridiculous Luke. You can’t make speak me like Sean Connery… what the (hell)… Oh my God! You’ve made me speak like Sean Connery. This is… This is… This is strange. This is unbelievable. In fact, this is amazing. I’ve always wanted to speak like Sean Connery – To be honest he sounded a bit Dutch, really – Never mind, Luke. I don’t care if I sound Dutch. Essentially, this is a Sean Connery voice and you’ve made me speak like his. OK, never mind. Let’s say I don’t think you’ve convinced yet. Let’s say I want you to speak like Roger Moore. OK. Ha, you want me to speak like Roger Moore. That should be too much of a problem. OK, let’s say you’re gonna speak like a… you’re gonna speak like a Scouser. You’re gonna speak like someone from Liverpool now, Mr Bank Manager and then you’re gonna believe that I’m in control of this story and everything that happens in it. All right Luke. All right. So, you wanna… you wanna borrow some money? How much money do you wanna borrow? Oh yeah, you’ve told me that you wanna borrow all the money. Yes, that’s right. I do want to borrow all the money, Mr Bank Manager, who speaks with the Mancunian accent from Manchester. All right, Luke. All right. How’s it going? All right. Do you wanna borrow some money or something, yeah? You do … yeah? All right, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, yeah? I’ll give you a… I’ll give you a card, right? (gobbledygook) This accent’s gone wrong. Yes, that accent’s gone wrong. Let’s just say to speak normally, OK? And then I think you’ll agree that you can give me all the money, right? Because this is the story which I’ve created. Yes, OK Luke, you’ve convinced me. You’ve convinced me that you’re in control of the story. I’m gonna give you all the money. Would you like that in ten pound notes or twenty pound notes. Ah, well, can you give me twenties? C
ertainly, Luke. Have you got a container of some kind because all the money in twenty pound notes that’s a lot, that’s a lot of money? Ah, well, is there any way you could just give me like a credit card and then I don’t have to carry cash? Is that possible? Yes! Certainly, Luke. Yes, we can arrange for you to have a card. How about a debit card? Yes, debit card would be fantastic. Right. In fact, could you hurry up because, to be honest, I’m being chased by huge pink gorilla and I expect that it’s… it’s nearly caught up with me now. He’s probably outside the bank waiting for me so, please, can you hurry up and just get me the card and then I’ll be on my way, OK? Certainly, Luke, certainly. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you and I’m very glad that you’re our customer even though you’re going to take all the money. That’s right, all the money in the world. Yes, well, I’m gonna need it because I think this pink gorilla is a dangerous one and so I’m gonna need money. I’m gonna need some cash to help me get out of this difficult situation. I think you’ll agree – And the bank manager said – OK Luke, look, this… we’ve been in a bank too long in this part of the story so it’s time we moved on, isn’t it? Don’t you think? Yes, it is, bank manager. OK, thanks for your help. Great. Got the card. Great. Thank you. Bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye Mr. OK Luke, it’s really good doing business with you. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye – So, bang! Out onto the street again and I thought you know what? ‘I really love Starbucks. I love Starbucks. I wonder if there’s Starbucks nearby somewhere… Yes! There’s a Starbucks right there, right next to me, of course. So, I went into Starbucks and got myself a coffee, didn’t I? Yeah. Got myself a Skinny Gingerbread Latte Mocha Frappuccino on Ice. And I got that and I drank that and then I thought ‘What am I doing? What am I doing? I can’t remember. That it! I’m escaping from this pink gorilla which is gonna try kill me’ and with that I looked down the street and there was the pink gorilla, finally just flying down the street towards me on a skateboard. And I thought ‘Oh God! Oh my God, he’s on a skateboard! Oh God!’ So, what I did was I got a scooter. I just stole a scooter from a child. Sorry. I didn’t really. It’s just a story. I stole a scooter from a child. Said – Come on, Johnny. Give me a scooter. I don’t care if you’re a child. I don’t care if this is a criminal act. It’s just a story, OK Johnny?- In fact (sound effect), magic! There’s a… there’s a new scooter. So, you can have that one and I’ll take you old one, OK? OK, mister. OK, mister. You can take my scooter. Thanks a lot. Bye, bye, bye. So (sound effect), I escaped down street towards the airport on a scooter with the pink gorilla flying behind me on a skateboard. It was dramatic. We got to the airport. I got there first, flew into the airport on my scooter, got to the counter – Give me a ticket to… somewhere else, please, on an aeroplane. Give me an aeroplane ticket. I want to leave as soon as possible – and the women said – OK, sir. You can have this ticket here. There you go. That’ll be a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A hundred and fifty thousand pounds! Yes Luke, a hundred and fifty thousand pounds but after all you have got all the money and so, it’s not a problem, really. No, it’s not. How did you know that I had all the money? Never mind that, Luke. Never mind. I think that a… I think that a pink gorilla’s chasing you so you might wanna just, you know, keep moving? Yeah! You’re right. Thanks. Thanks very much- So, I took the ticket and I went through the airport, went through the security control. That was a bit annoying. I had to stand in a queue and I was standing in a queue waiting to go through the X-Ray machine. The pink gorilla was just standing behind me. He was like – This is a bit boring, isn’t it? This security control – and they don’t even let you bring water onto the plane. Oh, they don’t do they. Oh, oh. This is annoying. Anyway, that’s the modern world, bloody terrorists. I got through security and the pink gorilla was like – Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be chasing you, aren’t I? Yes, yes you are. So, I ran away from him and jumped onto a plane and I managed to jump on before the pink gorilla got there. The plane taxied down onto the runway and then (starting plane) flew off and took off and I thought ‘Ah! Finally! Finally, I’m in the air. I’m safe. Ironically, this is the safest place flying in a huge metal aeroplane. I couldn’t be safer and so, there I was in the sky, just sort of relaxing. I ordered a Martini shaken not stirred and drank it and I looked out the window and I thought ‘This is great. I’m flying to a new exotic destination. This is gonna be great. No problem at all. And I looked out the window and there on the wing, on the wing of the aeroplane, you guessed it, there was the engine but next to the engine there was a pink gorilla, the pink gorilla was holding onto the wing of the aeroplane as we were flying just holding on looking at me staring at me smiling with these big teeth and I thought ‘Oh my God! Oh Jesus! He’s managed to catch up with me and he’s even hanging onto the wing. This is terrible’ So, eventually, the aeroplane landed. We landed in the North Pole. That’s right in the North Pole. It was pretty cold at there, pretty cold on the North Pole. We landed and a… immediately I just ran. I just ran straight out the aeroplane. I just ran off into the snow. I just kept running through the snow. Running, running. Running, running, running. It was a bit cold but I was all right because I was running. So, I was running, running, running, kept running and I managed to jump onto an iceberg, jumped onto an iceberg. That’s like a big mountain of ice just floating in the water. I ran. I jumped onto the iceberg. I looked over my shoulder and the pink gorilla was running through the snow as well. He jumped onto the iceberg so I jumped off that iceberg and jumped onto another iceberg and the pink gorilla followed me and I kept jumping from iceberg to iceberg, iceberg to iceberg until eventually I was stuck on a little iceberg. Just stuck floating in the water at the North Pole and the gorilla was there and just walked up towards me. He just… he jumped over onto the iceberg and just walked up towards me and I thought ‘Oh God, this is it?! This is it?! Is this end of my life? Oh! Oh, dear! Not now, please! No, I’m not ready to go. Not yet.’ And the pink gorilla walked up to me and he extended his hand again. His huge pink arm extended towards me and I thought I he was gonna rip my head off but his hand slowly moved towards me and he just tapped me on the arm and he said – Tag, you’re it! – and I went – What? What do you mean? Tag! Tag, you’re it! What? Tag, mate, tag! You’re it! It’s a game, isn’t it? It’s a game. It’s just a… It’s a game – and I said – What about your accent? – Oh, yeah! Yeah! It’s a game! It’s a game, squire! It’s just a game! It’s a children’s game! What? Oh, yeah! Yeah. Yeah. I expect the listeners at this point have got no idea what’s going on but, yeah, you right, yeah. Tag! It’s a game. It’s like a game you play when you’re children in the playground at school. You touch someone. You say ‘Tag’ and then ‘You’re it’ and if you’re ‘it’ you have to chase other people and you touch them and then their ‘it’ and they have to chase you – So, I said – Yeah. Exactly. Tag, your it! – I said – What? Is that it? – He went – Yep. That’s it – and he just with that took around ran in the opposite direction and there I was just floating on this iceberg at the North Pole. I just thought ‘He didn’t wanna kill me. It was just a game of tag. What a disappointment this story is. That was it. That was a huge game of tag. So, the pink gorilla was just competitive. He just enjoyed playing games. Oh, I’m so stupid! Why did I even touch him in the first place? What an idio
t I am. I wish I’d never done it at the first place.’ But then I thought ‘Well, it is a game of tag after all so, I’d better chase him’ So, I sort of stood up picked myself up of the ground brushed the snow of my trousers. I thought ‘Right. I’m gonna get that gorilla and with that I jumped from iceberg to iceberg to iceberg back to the airport and I could see the pink gorilla getting on the plane and so I leapt onto the wing and the plane took off into the sunset and our game of tag continued forever.

And now as I tell you this story I’m just taking a break from the game of tag and I’m just sitting here managing to find time to record an episode of Luke’s English Podcast. And you’ve been listening to it ladies and gentlemen so, thanks very much for listening and I hope that somehow you enjoyed listening to this random story. I’m sure that you’ll find that listening to this has been an experience. It’s certainly been good for your English. It’s very important to listen to things like this in English from time to time.

Now, if you want to you can suggest additions to the story. What do you think happened next in the story of the Pink Gorilla? Maybe there were some aspects to the story which I didn’t deal with, in which case feel free to leave a comment underneath this podcast. You can leave comments on teacherluke.podomatic.com (now teacherluke.co.uk) or you can leave comments on teacherluke.wordpress.com. So, please, leave your comments and suggestions and ideas. If you have any questions, of course, you can leave comments again and you will hopefully get answers to those questions, eventually. So, please, keep visiting the websites and do write your questions and comments there but for now, for this episode of Luke’s English Podcast it’s goodbye, bye, bye, bye…

You’ve been listening to Luke’s English Podcast. For more information visit teacherluke.co.uk

Thank you very much to Andzrej for sending me this transcript. If you liked The Pink Gorilla Story, let me know and I will do more episodes like this in the future. Who knows, I might do The Pink Gorilla Story Part 2…

Is this the Pink Gorilla?

124. James Bond

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This episode is all about the history of James Bond. You can also learn how to speak like Sean Connery or Roger Moore :)

Right-click here to download this episode.

NEWS UPDATE: I won the Macmillan Dictionary Award for Best Blog 2012! Thank you very much for voting for me! I’m delighted to have won the award. I will record a podcast soon in order to thank you in person.

Also, you may have experienced some problems downloading the podcast recently. This was due to a technical difficulty by podomatic.com, my podcast host. Thankfully they have now fixed the problem and you should be able to download properly. In fact, since the problem was fixed I had over 5,000 downloads just yesterday!

ANYWAY! This episode is all about James Bond. You can read the blog post transcript below. Also, you can see the video of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon from the trip, below.
50 Years of James Bond

This year the James Bond franchise celebrates its 50 year anniversary with the release of the new Bond movie Skyfall, which is receiving some very positive reviews. Some people are calling it the best Bond movie ever, and it is likely to become the highest earning film of the franchise so far. In this blog post I’m going to give a brief overview of the history of the franchise and then tell you what I thought about Skyfall.

You can find definitions of the words in bold at the bottom of this post.

50 Years of James Bond
First, some background info on the Bond films, released by Eon Productions. The series kicked off in 1962 with Sean Connery as 007 in Dr No. This was followed by four other films with Connery as Bond. These first five films really established all the hallmarks of the James Bond franchise. A cool and handsome Bond, sudden violence, stunning international locations, beautiful women, casual sexism, ironic jokes (usually made by Bond just after killing someone), gadgets, side characters such as M, Q and Miss Moneypenny, insane bad-guys who want to destroy the world and other trademarks such as Bond’s Aston Martin sports car and his Walther PPK handgun. Sean Connery is still widely considered to be the best Bond. It was his combination of good looks, self-confidence and aggression that really defined how we see Bond today.

In 1969 after Connery quit, the role of Bond went to a largely unknown actor called George Lazenby in the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Lazenby didn’t enjoy playing Bond, complaining that the producers hadn’t treated him with enough respect as an actor and that the character was a “brute”. The film is widely regarded as a flop, with Lazenby an unconvincing Bond. Personally I like the film. It’s full of amazing action sequences and has quite an emotional ending, unlike most of the other Bond films. Lazenby’s Bond is more vulnerable and human than Connery’s, which makes him a more realistic and three-dimensional character.

Connery was persuaded to return as Bond for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971. In contrast to the previous film, this one was more humourous in tone. In fact, during the 70s the films became less serious, prone to moments of silliness and generally quite formulaic.

Then in 1973 Roger Moore took over as James Bond, and the silliness continued. Moore’s acting style was more suited to comedy than action and many of Moore’s films contain moments of camp humour which many critics believe lessen the seriousness and dramatic impact of the franchise. Still, Roger Moore is an entertaining James Bond, even if he was less aggressive and dynamic than Connery and Lazenby.

Roger Moore made seven Bond films, and the last one A View to a Kill was considered to be a financial failure. Moore was too old to continue as Bond. The producers decided it was time to find a new actor for the role. Initially the job was offered to Pierce Brosnan, but then withdrawn because of his contractual commitments to a popular TV show called Remington Steele, but Brosnan would return later. It was Timothy Dalton who got the role in the end, playing Bond in two films from 1987 to 1989.

Dalton was a classically-trained actor and decided he would play Bond as a dark, serious character. In a similar way to George Lazenby he interpreted Bond as a more vulnerable character who questions his orders from his boss, M. Critics praised his two performances as bringing more weight to the films, but they also criticised the lack of humour and playfulness which had become an essential part of the franchise.

In 1995, after 6 years without Bond, the film GoldenEye was released with Pierce Brosnan in the lead role. It was a big box-office success and was generally considered to be a modernisation of the series. Pierce Brosnan was praised for his performance as Bond. He seemed to combine aspects of both Sean Connery and Roger Moore. He had the looks, the charisma and the aggressive brutality of Connery but also the suave sophistication and humourous touch of Roger Moore. He also managed to include some of the depth and psychological realism of the Dalton performances. The film also included Judi Dench in the role of M (Bond’s boss). This was considered to be a positive move because it addressed some of the sexism of the previous films in the franchise. In one scene, M refers to Bond as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur”. Also, Judy Dench is just a great actress and she brought a new level of depth to the character of M. She remains a key character in the more recent Bond films, especially Skyfall.

Brosnan made five Bond films in total. They were all commercial successes but critical reactions were mixed. Goldeneye breathed new life into the Bond franchise, but the subsequent Brosnan Bond films quickly became formulaic and unoriginal, focusing on action rather than character and story.

Then in 2006 we were introduced to a new Bond, played by Daniel Craig. Casino Royale rebooted the Bond franchise, starting the whole storyline again from scratch. We see Bond doing his first assassination mission, earning his licence to kill and struggling with the psychological and physical pressure of being 007. The film was a massive commercial success, and was considered by critics to be a genuinely fresh version of Bond. Daniel Craig was considered the best Bond since Connery, perhaps even better than him. Casting Craig was a bold move. He doesn’t really look like the classic image of Bond. He is blond and doesn’t have the same classically handsome features as Connery, Moore or Brosnan. However, he has intensity, a sense of vulnerability and a very striking physical presence. Casino Royale showed us more than ever that James Bond is a human being. He gets hurt both physically and emotionally. We care about him and feel his pain.

Daniel Craig’s second James Bond film, Quantam of Solace is a bit of a confusing mess. The storyline is very hard to follow. The action sequences are bewildering. There is very little character development and the whole film is littered with product placement. The film damaged a lot of the achievements of Casino Royale, so with the third film, Skyfall, the producers were keen to fix those problems and put the Bond franchise back on track.

The result is that the latest Bond film is a big success. It’s already being described as possibly the best Bond film we’ve ever had, and it’s likely to make more money than any other Bond movie in the past. Most of the boxes are ticked. The film has a complex, serious storyline, yet it is also a lot of fun. There are plenty of exciting action. The bad-guy (played by Javier Bardem) is ridiculous, insane and funny. The story is involving. The character development is detailed and interesting. The film also pays homage to previous Bond films, and even reveals some new details about Bond’s history. It’s not perfect of course. While watching it I couldn’t help thinking “this is completely ridiculous!” but then I realised that it was a James Bond film and it’s supposed to be ridiculous, and then I started to enjoy it a lot more. Certainly, in Skyfall, Bond has become something of a superhero. Although he gets hurt and is clearly getting a bit old for the job, he still manages to do things which are completely impossible in the real world, but that’s all right because this is James Bond!

Daniel Craig is still contracted to appear in two more Bond films, and to be honest after this one I can’t imagine where they will go next with the franchise. Isn’t Daniel Craig getting a bit old to play Bond now? How will they move the franchise forward when Bond has already been deconstructed in these modern films? How can they do anything new? Will they just remake Dr No or Goldfinger? Will the Bond films just go back to being silly and misogynistic? I’m already looking forward to seeing the next film, just in order to find out what they do next.

If you’ve seen Skyfall, leave a comment below to tell us what you thought. Otherwise, why don’t you tell us what you think of James Bond in general? Feel free to share your thoughts below and thanks for reading this (rather long) blog post. Bye for now!

Luke

Vocabulary in this episode

franchise (n) – a series of films which have become a range of trademarked products including books, merchandise, toys etc. Other examples of a franchise are the Harry Potter films, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings.
kicked off (v) – started
hallmarks (n) – very typical features of something which allow you to recognise it. E.g. the hallmarks of a James Bond movie are the locations, the bond-girls, the violence, the gadgets etc.
gadgets (n) – little items of technology which are useful for specific things. E.g. an iPod, or a pen which shoots arrows.
trade marks (n) – similar to ‘hallmarks’ (above), these are symbols or features which represent something, or which allow you to recognise something easily. E.g. the 007 logo we see on James Bond posters is a kind of trade mark for the James Bond franchise.
brute (n) – a violent person who behaves like an animal
flop (n) – a commercial failure
unconvincing (adj) – unrealistic, looks fake
vulnerable (adj) – able to be easily physically or emotionally hurt
three dimensional (adj) – 3D, with depth, not just flat
tone (n) – feeling, atmosphere
prone to (v) – likely to suffer from
formulaic (adj) – consisting of fixed or repeated ideas
camp (adj) – deliberately exaggerated and theatrical
contractual commitments (n) – obligations that have to be met because of a contract
a classically-trained actor (n) – an actor who trained in a theature using classical techniques
interpreted (v) – decided what the intended meaning of something is
praise (v) – the opposite of ‘criticise’, to say good things about something
lack of (n) – not enough of something
suave (adj) – charming, pleasant and attractive, possibly insincere, slightly negative
addressed (v) – dealt with
misogynist (n) – a man who hates women, or who believes that women are inferior to men
mixed (adj) – inconsistent; some good some bad
breathed new life into (v phrase) – refreshed, revitalised
rebooted (v) – restarted
(from) scratch (n) – (from) the beginning, the starting point
a bold move (n) – a courageous decision/action
striking (adj) – very unusual or easily noticed and therefore attracting a lot of attention
mess (n) – something very untidy and disorganised
bewildering (adj) – confusing
littered (adj) – made untidy because of many things covering it. E.g. “The floor was littered with dirty clothes.” “The movie is littered with product placement.”
product placement (n) – a kind of advertising which involves putting products into a movie so the audience will see them.
(put something back) on track (phrase) – to return something to the correct way, to make something go back in the right direction again. E.g. “After a few problems, the project is now back on track.”
pays homage to (verb phrase) – to make reference to something as a way of showing respect to it. E.g. when a film makes a reference to a previous film.
contracted (adj) – obliged by contract
deconstructed (v) – to analyse something by taking it apart and looking at the elements that it is made of.

STEVE COOGAN AND ROB BRYDON “Come come Mr Bond…”

84. Luke’s English Braincast (with James)

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Why is it called Luke’s English Braincast? Listen to the episode until the end to find out.

Right-click here to download.

Contents
What’s been going on? What’s been happening? In this episode, Luke and James talk about recent news stories and current affairs including:
– The London Olympic Games
– The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee
– The Superbowl
– Charles Dickens 200th Anniversary
– The Oscars 2012
– Women drivers
and a number of other fascinating topics! You will find a list of some vocabulary used in the show below. Just scroll down the page, listen to the episode and learning will occur!

You can also hear Luke’s award acceptance speech. I’m now going to shut up about the award!

DICTIONARY UPDATE
Fans of my Facebook page have voted for The Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Dictionary as their prize. So, I will let Macmillan know and then they will send me that dictionary. When I have received it, I will organise some kind of competition so that YOU have a chance to win it from me.

VOCABULARY
Are you a learner of English? Do you like natural English vocabulary? Do you like games? Do you think the world would be a better place if we all stopped taking ourselves so seriously all the time? Well, here’s a great new game you can play to improve your English. It’s called VOCAB HUNTER (in 3D). It’s not actually in 3D but that sounds better than just VOCAB HUNTER! Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking – how do I play this fascinating game which is called VOCAB HUNTER (in 3D)? Well, simply look at the list of vocab + definitions below while you listen to this episode of Luke’s English Podcast. Whenever you hear a piece of vocab being used by Luke or his brother James, just SHOOT that item (mentally if you don’t have a laser gun or you don’t want to damage your computer) and move on to the next piece of vocab. That’s it. Could you be the best vocab hunter in the world? Can you identify and SHOOT (please don’t actually do any real shooting – just look at the vocab on the screen and say “OK” or “got it” or something) each piece of vocab as you see it? Are you ready to become the world’s greatest VOCAB HUNTER??? There’s only one way to find out, so listen to the conversation between Luke & James, and identify the vocab in this list: (please try to contain your excitement)

This list contains extracts from this podcast. I have typed these bits because I think they contain some phrases, expressions or words that I think you might not know. Use an online dictionary like the Macmillan Online Dictionary or The Cambridge Online Dictionary to get definitions.

James: You shouldn’t be so humble about these things
Luke: Sarcasm

Luke: I won a dictionary
James: We get that. Not that I’m putting that down, it’s a great achievement.

James: I think I’ve heard enough about the dictionary now. That’s all I’m saying. You might have milked that one a bit too much.
Luke: I might have over-egged the pudding

Luke: Which film did you see?
James: I saw ‘Young Adult’
Luke: ‘Young Adult’ – it sounds dodgy

James: Let’s talk about the news. That’s what I’m here for. To cast my expert eye over the week’s events across the media.
Luke: OK what have you come across? What news stories have you come across?

Luke: …the Olympic bid…

Luke: On one hand… all the countries in the world take part and it’s an amazing celebration, but on the other hand London is such a crowded place that it could become an absolute nightmare.

James: Also, during what’s becoming a recession, isn’t it just a massive waste of money? When there’s people having their benefits taken away from them, councils have less and less money to spend on basic services, and the poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, do you really need this pointless festival of sport?

Luke: Ooh let’s see who can run the fastest! In a way, that question is now redundant because we’ve got cars and bicycles.

James: If we had money coming out of our ears and we were very very rich and there was no problems with poverty in this country, which is never going to happen, but if we were living in a sort of utopia, then great, have a festival of sport, but otherwise I just think it’s a complete waste of money.

James: And also I thought the Olympics were supposed to be a very non-commercial event.

Luke: …they are promoting sport by making kids fat, allegedly.

Luke: …but it’s all revenue though isn’t it? It’s all revenue to the government.

James: There has been a lot of regeneration of East London because they want the area to look nice for international visitors, to show off to make London look nice. And in some ways that’s good, and they talk about the legacy, that’s kind of a catchphrase… …it’s not just about the event it’s about the legacy.

James: …a lone wolf terrorist…

James: Let’s move on to the next topic. We’ve cleared that one up.
Luke: We’ve done the Olympics.

James: The best one is when they get on the tube with a massive rucksack on and the tube doors close on their rucksack and they’re basically pinned to the door, trapped like a sort of scared animal and it’s very very funny. Tourists, keep doing that because it really brightens up my day.

Luke: I saw it the other day I saw a Japanese family dithering by the doors of a crowded underground train.

Luke: He was probably pleased because he probably thought “now I can go and get pissed” or something

Luke: Anyway let’s not be too down on the tourists because … we welcome tourists in London.

James: I found myself taking a photo of a van, just an ordinary van

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee

James: I’d want to stay in bed. I wouldn’t relish that thought.

James: No wonder she’s such a heavy drinker. It’s a well known fact. She hits the sherry by about half eleven most days, by midday she’s onto her second or third. By ,idnight she is hammered.

James: Queen Victoria used to take it.
Luke: She had period pains and arthritis pains

James: I just made that up. I’m lying.

Luke: Mick Jagger is Sir Mick Jagger. He’s a Knight of the Realm.
James: What, for ‘services to paedophilia’?
Luke: Woa there! Where are all these allegations coming from?
James: Sorry I’m just a bit bored today. I’m just trying to liven it up.

The Queen’s Honours; e.g. OBE, CBE, Knighthood

James: cheering on a bunch of knuckleheaded…
Luke: …knuckleheaded sportsmen in armour

James: All you need to play American football is a bloody massive pitch, these weird upside-down goal things
Luke: You can play American football in a park
James: Yeah but not the full game. Not the full contact sport game, because you’d break your neck wouldn’t you. They need all that padding just in order to have a little kick around. You can play touch football I suppose but that’s not the actual game.

James: I used to get into them in the 80s. They used to show them on channel 4.

James: It’s just quite easy to take the mick out of really isn’t it.
Luke: We like making fun
James: Mocking people
Luke: Mocking Americans

James: It’s the screaming and the pointlessness of it all, and the crushing depression
Luke: You’re really negative today. You need to lighten up. Be more positive.

They start talking about the performance at superbowl this year with Madonna and MIA.

James: (About MIA) Her Dad used to be a Tamil Tiger.
Luke: She’s a musician from Sri Lanka

James: “and halfway through the performance she flipped the bird”

James: Not that shocking you might think but apparently people are upset about it… pre-watershed, Christians and that…

James: We’re being a bit mean
Luke: …a bit crazy today
James: a bit crass

James: Co)incidentally her new single’s out today… it’s a publicity stunt… we’re clever enough to say “we don’t care” “we don’t give a toss”.

James: it was okay. Out of ten I’d give it a five.
Luke: She sampled The Clash in that song. That’s the best bit of the song.
James: Mmm, they should have just not sampled the clash and just played The Clash.
Luke: I can play a bit of that song
James: Let’s not bother
Luke: If you’re listening, it’s called “Paper Planes” by MIA

Dickens’ 200th Anniversary

Luke: He was quite a good person
James: He was quite into social reform

James: People talk about things being ‘Dickensian’

Luke: The cliche that London is very old, dark, grey, foggy, smokey, and with lots of gap-toothed urchins, chimney sweeps, basically Charles Dickens…
James: Put that into the popular consciousness

The Oscars:
Luke: The ladies love George (Clooney). He’s often voted the sexiest man in the world, even though he is going grey, he’s got a few grey hairs going on but the ladies still seem to think he’s wonderful. My girlfriend for example, rather annoyingly, still loves George Clooney
James: Bit of jealousy there

Luke: Basically, The Oscars is Hollywood’s way of promoting its assets (itself).

“George Clooney always looks like he’s in an advert for George Clooney” Geoff Dyer in The Times

James: Oh that reminds me, have you seen the trailer for the new Tom Hanks film?

Luke: We don’t really like that kind of cheese in England
James: I hate that kind of really over the top, sentimentality

James: We like understatement. Not everyone, I can’t speak for the whole bloody country
Luke: We do like understatement though, and we prefer it when people aren’t so earnest like that, “well gee Dad I sure love you!”, instead in England it’s a bit like ” you know Dad, you’re alright”
James: Yeah; we’d prefer that. I’d well up at that

Luke: We tend to hide behind jokes. We’re diseased, we’ve got a disease, it’s called a sense of humour. We use it to cover up our awkwardness

James: It’s like Ricky Gervais (said), you’ve got to do a movie about the holocaust,
Luke: A movie about an idiot or a movie about the holocaust is the best way to win an oscar
James: Play a disabled or a jew
Luke: Woa there!!!
James: That’s his words, not mine

Women Drivers
Luke: Women just use a car to go from A to B… They don’t value driving as a way of proving themselves

Luke: The cliche is that women can’t park a car… Surveillance of car parks around Britain, CCTV surveillance around Britain in car parks has revealed that while women take longer than men to get their cars into small spaces, they do it more skillfully. They actually do it more successfully. So all these security cameras all over the country have…
James: Well, the ones that are left and haven’t been crashed into by women
Luke: Ha ha very funny. These security cameras have revealed that women may park more slowly but they do it more successfully.

The stupidest thief
James: There are some very deranged people out there, very disturbed people out there. You should probably say you read that from The Week didn’t you.

Cold weather
James: What disturbed me is, the night of the cold snap, I can’t remember what country it was, like 40 homeless people died, or more, like loads and loads of homeless people died. It’s just such a horrible thought that people haven’t got a home to go to and when it gets that cold you just die.
That’s all I have time to do at the moment. Listeners – if you have some time to kill then please transcribe the last 10mins of this episode and send it to me at luketeacher@hotmail.com
For now, it’s good night.

Now it’s time to say good night
Good night Sleep tight
Now the sun turns out his light
Good night Sleep tight
Dream sweet dreams for me
Dream sweet dreams for you.
Close your eyes and I’ll close mine
Good night Sleep tight
Now the moon begins to shine
Good night Sleep tight
Dream sweet dreams for me
Dream sweet dreams for you.
Close your eyes and I’ll close mine
Good night Sleep tight
Now the sun turns out his light
Good night Sleep tight
Dream sweet dreams for me
Dream sweet dreams for you.
Good night Good night Everybody
Everybody everywhere
Good night.

75. Not a Distraction!

3 Replies

Unlike many things on the internet, Luke’s English Podcast is not a distraction! In this episode I tell you some news, share some comments from listeners, share an amusing audio clip about a driving instructor and eat some chocolate!

Right-click here to download this episode.
Tapescripts available below
Here’s the email from Bettina:

Hello Luke,

Actually I realize every single day that I’m living a veritable dream
thanks to your podcast. Poor me, it took me finally more than two
years to wake up !

As you might know I’ve always listened to each of your shows several
times but, and that makes the difference, I rarely got back to listen
to them again. It’s incredible how much I forgot about the precious

advice of each episode.

I even completely forgot most of it. Yah, I’ve to re-listen
intensively to the previous shows as well.

You’re motivating and such a brilliant English teacher and trust me I
don’t say that to flatter you !

Thanks to the Internet I can download your podcast. But
not only that, I can listen to it all the time contrary to your
students who can listen to each of your course only once.

Since I’m writing some transcripts I remember much better vocabulary,
expressions and so much more. I’m overjoyed and maybe you’ll laugh
but I’m not ashamed. Aren’t we so much used to use the

Internet that we forget how amazing it is to have this opportunity?

Well, I think that you’re right, the most important is, to use what
we’ve learnt but we aren’t English native speakers, right? We have to
revise all of the stuff we’ve learnt frequently and that’s the reason
why

from now on, I’ll listen to each episode again and again instead of
only focusing on the new one. It’s great time to revise the whole
interesting stuff. It’s up to us to make the best of it. Yah, it’s all
in

our hands ! Plus, that will not be boring because each of your shows
is different and quite funny. Learning English with fun is the most
important thing.

I could never make the effort to pay for a private English teacher who
helps me to improve but I found you, the best, the most terrific
English teacher who teaches the language. You even proofread my

transcripts and hold on a minute, it’s all for free ! ! ! Can you
believe that? I’m on cloud nine.

English has become my great passion. I’m in my ‘fake’
English world every day. No, I haven’t a great level yet, but is it
really that important? Hmm, I’m not sure! I’m guess my English will

progress, now I finally understand how to learn more efficiently . So,
it’s time to practice the rich material of your podcasts ! I’ve still
so much to learn and I would definitively reach my goal!

Thanks a million from the bottom of my heart.

Bettina

Here’s the Script for the Driving Instructor by Bob Newhart
As I said, there was a thing in the paper tonight about documentaries and I have had an idea for a long time for what I think is a wonderful documentary, which has everything. For instance, you go to work, you come home at night and you never really think about it. It’s mechanical, it’s routine. But there are a group of men who every day when they go to work never know if that night they will return, because they face death in one hundred different ways. And I am talking about America’s driving instructors. I would like to present the first episode in the new tv series called, “The Driving Instructor”. Now I would like to have you picture if you would, I’m the driving instructor and seated next to me is a woman driver.

How do you do?…
Erm, you’re Mrs. Webb, is that right?…
Oh, I see you’ve had one lesson already, who was the instructor on that Mrs. Webb?…
Mr. Adams…
I’m sorry, here it is. Mr. Adams. Just let me read ahead and kind of familiarize myself with the case…
Erm, how fast were you going when Mr. Adams jumped from the car?…
Sev…, Seventy-five. And, and where was that?…
In your driveway…
How far had Mr. Adams gotten in the lesson?…
Backing out…
I see, you were backing out at seventy-five and that’s, that’s when he jumped….
Did he cover starting the car?…
And the other way of stopping?…
What’s the other way of stopping?…
Throwing it in reverse…
that’s, that would do it, you’re right, that would do it…
Erm, alright you want to start the car?…
Uh, Mrs. Webb you just turned on the lights, you want to start the car…
They all look alike, don’t they?…
No, I don’t know why they design them that way…
Erm, alright let’s pull out into traffic…
Now, what’s the first thing we’re going to do before we pull out into traffic?…
What did Mr. Adams do before he let you pull out into traffic?…
Well, I mean besides praying…
No, what I had in mind was checking the rear view mirror…
You see we always want to check the rear…
DON’T PULL OUT !!!…
Erm, please don’t cry…
I’m sorry… but there was this bus, Mrs. Webb…
Oh, alright, the lane is clear is now, you want to pull out?…
Oh, now that wasn’t bad at all, you might try it a little slower next time….
Alright, let’s get up a bit more speed and gradually ease it into second…
Well, I didn’t want to cover reverse this early but as long as you have shifted into it…
Of course you’re nervous…
I’m nervous!…
I’m not just saying that, I’m really, I’m really very nervous…
Well, just don’t pay any attention to their honking….
You’re doing fine…
You’re not blocking anyone’s lane…
No, as long as you are here on the safety island, you are not blocking anyone’s lane…
Oh, alright you want to start the car?…
Oh, while you are turning the lights off, why don’t you turn off the heater?…
Alright, there we are, let’s get up a bit of speed…
That’s the way…
Now let’s practice some turns. Um, the important thing on turns is not to make them too sharp, just kind of make a gradual…
Now that was fine…
That was a wonderful turn…
It’s hard for me to believe you only had two lessons after you make a turn like…
Are you sure you haven’t had more now?…
I find that very difficult to believe…
One little thing…
This is a one way street…
Well, no, no, actually it was partially my fault, you see, but, uh, you were in the left hand lane and you were signaling left, and I just more or less assumed you were going to turn left.
SAME TO YOU, FELLA!!!…
No, no, I don’t know what he said Mrs. Webb…
Um, alright let’s pull into the alley up there, uh, and practice a little alley driving…
This is uh, this is something a lot of the schools leave out and we think it is pretty…
YOU’RE GOING TOO FAST MRS. WEBB!!!…
You were up around sixty and that’s kind of a sharp turn there…
Alright, just drive down the alley, that’s the way…
Oh, Mrs. Webb, maybe we better stop here…
Well, I don’t think you are going to make it between the truck and the building…
Mrs. Webb?…
Mrs. Webb…
I…
Mrs. Webb, I, I …
I don’t think you are going…
MRS. WEBB?…..
I real…
I…
I really didn’t think you were going to MAKE IT….
That just shows we can be wrong too…
No, no, I’ll get out on your side, that’s alright.
Oh, Mrs. Webb, uh, maybe it might be a good idea if we went over to the driving area. They have a student driver area over a few blocks away and maybe traffic throws you, maybe that’s the problem…
Well, turn here on the street…
Right…
And it’s only about a block up…
Alright, turn right here…
Well, now that was my fault again…
You see, I meant the next street. Not this man’s lawn…
Oh, sir, sir… sir, would you mind turning off the sprinkler?…
For just a…
Newly seeded?…
Is that right?…
That’s always the way, isn’t it? Ha! ha!…
I don’t suppose it is so funny!…
Oh, alright Mrs. Webb, you want to back out and get off the man’s…
Creeping bent, is that right…
Yea, just back out, Mrs. Webb…
Thank you very much, sir for…
Oh, now we’ve hit someone Mrs. Webb…
Oh, remember you’re going to watch the rear view mirror, remember we covered that…
The red light blinded you?…
The flashing red light blinded you?…
The flashing red light on the car you hit blinded you?…
Yes, officer, she was just telling me about it…
Um, alright…
Alright, erm, Mrs. Webb…
I am going to have to go with the officer to the police station…
Erm, they don’t believe it and they’d like, they’d like me to describe it…
And now the other officer is going to get into the car and he is going to drive you back to the driving school and then you are to meet us at the police station.
Erm, my name is Frank Dexter, Mrs Webb…
Why do you ask?…
You want to be sure and get me next time???

Buy Bob Newhart’s CD on Amazon.co.uk

Stay tuned for more useful and entertaining episodes soon ;)

67. Cockney / London Accent

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Listen to an interview with Ray Winstone who is a genuine Londoner with a ‘cockney’ accent. Pick up some new expressions and learn how to recognise a London accent.

Right-click here to download.

Tapescript of the interview:
Alright, I remember going on a date once, years ago, with a girl, a really good girl and I knew her brother and everything, right. And, I picked her up. And as I went to pick her up, I walked into the… this is a disaster, this is how things go wrong, right? I walked into the passageway and they lived round the back of the Limehouse, really nice people. And someone [had] left the telephone on the floor. And there was a glass door into the front room, the lounge. As I walked in, I was going “hello” and I kicked the telephone on the, it was like on the volley, on the half volley. It went straight through the glass window, right? No, that’s the first, right? Smashed the thing to pieces, right? I’m in bits, I’m like, like that. Mum and Dad were cool, I said I’m really sorry, like that. “who left the phone on the floor?” they’re going on and all that. “I’m really really sorry”. Kerry was upstairs getting ready and all that.

And then I sat down on the settee waiting for her, and Mum’s panning the glass up and it’s like… I’m in bits. And I leant on the side of the sofa, like that, and the whole sofa ripped down and fell off. Now you’re going to think I’m joking here, right? It fell off, and I’m up. It’s like You’ve Been Framed or something, right? I’m in bits now, right? I’m fucking sorry, right. And they’re getting the hump now. I’m smashing the house up! I’ve only been in there 5 minutes.

Done that. We’ve got a bus, from Limehouse. On the bus. Some Russian type sailor started digging us out. you know saying “you come with me, with your girlfriend” and all that. I’ve had a fight on the bus, with the geezer, right, within half an hour now, right? I’ve mullered him on the bus, right? It’s all gone pear shaped, right? So we’re still going out, we’ve gone to a pub, then we’ve gone to a party and the party’s in Cloudesley Square, in Islington, right?

Go up there, nice house, very nice house, one of those 3, kind of, tier houses, town houses things, really lovely, and the same thing. You know what I was just saying about this, what reminded me about, you know, keeping one eye on her and she’s alright and I’m talking to a couple of friends here like, boom boom boom. And as she’s walked across the room, right, to come and talk to me, I’ve noticed, you do with your girls, it’s something you, kind of, you look after them without making them feel they’re being looked after if you know what I mean, but you watch them. And she’s tripped on the carpet. And as I’ve caught her, I caught her, right? There’s a table behind me with a glass chandelier, right, thing on, right, and I don’t know how much this was worth, right, and I’ve hit it, and it smashed on the floor, on the fireplace and it’s gone everywhere. There’s glass everywhere. You couldn’t glue this back together. Right? And the woman whose house it was screamed. Right? And I remember saying to her, “I’m really sorry love, whatever it cost, I’ll… I was trying to catch her, whatever it cost, I’ll pay for it and I’ll put it all right, you know” it was obviously someone’s Mum we knew and “I’ll pay for that” and she went on and then you go “well fuck you then” and then it all goes pear shaped.

And, that was the date, and I got her home and that was that. Really nice girl, could’ve, you know, might have been really nice. That was it. I had a nightmare. So, by watching someone and trying to be so nice, it all went the other way.

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Luke’s ENGLISH Podcast

Learn British English with Luke Thompson

Category Archives: Entertainment

135. Raining Animals – “It’s raining cats and dogs”

Raining animals

Explanations

[38:11]

Occurrences

“Raining cats and dogs”

133. Hip-Hop Lyric Analysis

130. A Cup of Tea with… Sebastian Marx

128. Luke’s Stand-Up Comedy Show

127. Computer Games

125. The Pink Gorilla Story

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Language Extracts with Vocabulary (thanks to Jack) – TRANSCRIPT BELOW THIS LIST

TRANSCRIPT

124. James Bond

Vocabulary in this episode

84. Luke’s English Braincast (with James)

75. Not a Distraction!

67. Cockney / London Accent

Raining animals

Explanations

[38:11]

Occurrences

“Raining cats and dogs”

Do you Want to skip the introduction?

Language Extracts with Vocabulary (thanks to Jack) – TRANSCRIPT BELOW THIS LIST

TRANSCRIPT

Vocabulary in this episode

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