Ebaby! Blog

I’ve been sitting on this for a couple of days because I couldn’t decide what I think about it. Basically, a judge sentenced three Spanish-speaking men who were convicted of harassing and assaulting someone to come back in two years with a GED, a full-time job, and the ability to speak English, or he’ll send them to jail for two years.

Definitely amusing. The most compelling argument against this creative sentencing I’ve heard is that we don’t want language learning to seem like a punishment. But when I saw some people in orange vests picking up trash today, I thought, “That’s useful. Why shouldn’t convicted criminals always do useful things instead of sitting in jail, spending public money?”

And useful for society or useful for the criminal, it doesn’t really matter to me.  In fact, it would be kind of cool if you couldn’t leave jail until you learned a new language. We’d have all these ex-con translators instead of ex-con repeat offenders.

So I applaud the idea of sentencing someone to learn a language. I can only hope that I’ll be sentenced to learn Mandarin if I ever get busted for trespassing (my main hobby).

But in this case, the sentence might be a little light. Let’s think about what these guys did.

The four, ranging in age from 17 to 22, were in a group that police said accosted two men on a street in May. The two said they were asked if they had marijuana, told to empty their pockets, struck on the head, threatened with a gun and told to stay off the block.

I mean, that sounds pretty crazy. I’d like to think that some verb conjugations or some Ebaby! or some Shakespeare might set these guys straight, but I’m glad they’re going to be learning English in Pennsylvania and not on my street, you know?

Every month or so, the cast gets together to make lesson videos. We call this a cast session.

We had a session a couple of nights ago at a mellow and supposedly haunted pizza joint near the office. Amanda knows one of the owners and emailed to ask if we could film there. He didn’t reply, but we figured it would be cool.

But after about one video we got kicked out. I guess video cameras anger the ghosts. As we walked down the street looking for a new location, I suggested we stop outside another mellow local business so we could recreate a scene that happened in real life.

I commonly flip coins and roll dice to make decisions. Ever since Devan saw No Country for Old Men, this freaks her out, because apparently the killer in the movie does something similar (I am the only person in America who hasn’t seen it yet). We recorded a lesson on the movie a few months ago, but one of the microphones was accidentally off, so I figured we’d do it again.

We started setting up to film a quick video at an outdoor table. Now, this bar happens to be frequented by bike messengers. And bike messengers are usually good folk. I interviewed one the other day. Anyway, a stocky messenger came out of the bar and started looking at us a little funny. Mason asked him if we were blocking access to his bike. He said no and continued to stare.

“It’s not a joke, you know, this is what we do,” he said out of nowhere.

“Oh we’re just making videos that help people learn English. Nothing to do with bike messengers,” I said.

“This is bike messenger territory.”

I laughed.

“Oh you think that’s funny?”

I laughed some more. I mean, I expected him to say he was joking at any minute.
“Just keep laughing!” He yelled.

“I just don’t understand what we’re arguing about,” I laughed. ‘Cause, really, I didn’t, and it was quite silly.

“Why don’t you just go back where you came from?”

Now, noticing a Canadian flag patch on his jacket, and perhaps a hint of a Canadian accent, I dropped the wise-guy line, “OK, we’ll go back to Canada.”

“Say that again.” Dead serious.

“Um, we’re from Canada?” Then he mumbled some expletives and went back inside. We shot the scene, but I was in such a hurry to get out of there that I forgot to hit stop on the recorder at the end before I turned it off, which causes the audio to get erased. Mason’s going to check if the audio from the camera might be good enough, but my guess is that we’re going to have record a third lesson on No Country for Old Men. Oh well, that one was probably a little rushed for ESL students anyway.

Mason said if I had gotten in a fight he would have filmed it. I told him that was the right thing to do.

We’ve been very interested to see what the international community thinks about the upcoming U.S. presidential election. After years of watching global opinion of the U.S. slide, there seems to be a good amount of optimism for the future.

We ran our first U.S. Presidential election poll back in June of 2007 and saw that 55% of our members favored Hillary Clinton as the next president, with 22% favoring Obama, and 7% favoring Giuliani. The Clinton name is very recognizable around the world and it’s understandable that she would be the favorite among our members.

We posted our second U.S. Presidential election poll in February 2008 and the numbers flipped. We now see 55% of our members in favor of Obama, 35% for Clinton, and 7% for McCain. It seems as though there’s something about Obama’s message that’s resonating with the world.

I had the opportunity to see Obama speak in Portland the other day and was definitely impressed. Even got a nice handshake from the Illinois senator. Clinton is coming through town this weekend and I look forward to watching her as well.

We’re going to keep close tabs on our members’ opinions as the democratic race continues, and then follow the general election. It should be an interesting ride and with the world getting flatter, international opinion matters more than ever.

Check out the Ebaby! lesson about the election.

As I was combing the site for funny nuggets to include in the latest edition of Best Comments, I noticed something interesting in the discussion of our lesson on drunk performers.

When I read that, I thought, “Oh wow, that’s funny. How embarrassing.” Then I felt real bad.

Hey, I didn’t know the singer died. Wow. I couldn’t find anything about this anywhere on the Internet so I asked Jewel, the only member of the Ebaby! team who knows Chinese, if she knew anything about the singer who drunkenly fell to his death from a stage.

There’s a whole Chinese Wikipedia page about the incident, but Jewel says that this bit from the singer’s page pretty much sums it up:

While filming a gameshow for Fuji Television in Japan on June 24, 1993, Wong Ka-Kui fell off a 3 meter platform head first, and was hospitalized immediately. He died after spending several days in coma due to internal bleeding of head injuries.

What a bummer. Jewel couldn’t find anything confirming that he was drunk, but since two members brought it up it seems to be widely believed.

Interestingly, another Chinese member was reminded of the recent “fall” of another celebrity by the same English lesson.

This one has an English Wikipedia page. Basically, a very famous actor named Edison Chen took his laptop in to get it fixed. One of the techs grabbed the hundreds of photos in the computer’s hard drive, which included nude shots of Chen and 14 female celebrities.

In the US, this is the kind of thing that launches you into super stardom (see Paris Hilton), but following the scandal, Chen announced he will leave show biz.

I think he should just move to the US. C’mon, Edison, I’ll give you English lessons in exchange for dating tips. You’ll be a stateside star in no time.

Online romance is always a popular topic on English, baby!, so when the latest episode of the soap found Marni with a new online boyfriend, a lot of people chimed in to share their computer-enabled love stories. But in one case, it doesn’t sound like it went very well.

Another member had an almost nursery rhyme tale of failed love.

Of course, everything in romance, from spying to searching for your mate on an ESL website usually works better if you have a sense of subtlety. I’d be surprised if this direct approach drew many responses.

And don’t forget to pay attention to detail. A spammer stopped by the site this week but forgot to fill in the blank her spammy comment.

That’s the kind of mistake that can cost you a job or a date. Of course, it’s no better to make promises you can’t possibly keep. Check out this boast from our lesson on fear of heights.

If you find a “7000 flour” building, I will challenge you to climb it with me, buddy. I wouldn’t start your search in this member’s town though:

But hey, at least she got on the tallest building.