In just over a week, the greatest event in the world for spandex will begin. No, it’s not a professional wrestling championship, it’s the Winter Olympics, of course!

From bobsledders to skiers, Olympic athletes from every country wear lots of spandex. Here at English, baby!, the team we’re sending to Vancouver to bring back lessons on winter sports idioms is no different. Today we launched our official Ebaby! at the Vancouver Olympics page, and the most important element of our Olympic uniforms just arrived–the Ebaby! blue spandex body suit!

The photo is me in my speed skating pose, and as you can see, the theme of “something you’d be a little embarrassed to wear in public” carries over from our 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics uniforms. I think that wearing silly outfits helps encourage people we meet to participate in our videos. Even if you stumble on your words or lose at the game we’re playing, there’s no way you’ll dumber than us!

We stood out so much on the streets of Beijing that strangers stopped to take pictures of us. I wonder if we’ll be such a spectacle in Vancouver. We can’t get too distracted being ridiculous–we’ve been hard at work planning the best ways to create educational and memorable English lessons at the Olympics. We’re dedicated to bringing home even more gold (so to speak) than the videos made in Beijing. Take a look at our new Olympic banner and get ready!

Our most recent English lesson with an NBA player is Channing Frye teaching the term “breakthrough.” I watched Channing play for the last few years when he was a Portland Trailblazer. And like most people in Portland, I liked him a lot. He fit the city really well–he did public service announcements for green issues and blogged about how much he liked the restaurants. Channing met his wife in Portland and has kept his apartment here after moving to the Phoenix Suns this season.I remember when I first heard that Channing Frye had hit three threes in one game. I thought, “Good for him!” But then I heard the same thing about the next game. And the one after that. It appeared Channing had had a breakthrough!Although he didn’t see much playing time during his tenure with Portland, when Frye and Suns came to Portland to play the Trailblazers last month, Channing had become a starter. Blazer fans usually boo when the visiting team’s starting lineup is announced, but when Channing’s name was called everyone cheered. He went on to make 5 three-pointers that night! Maybe doing this interview earlier in the day helped him get ready.

There is a 44% chance this shot went in. That’s more than 10% better than ever before in Channing’s professional career!Channing on his balcony in Portland.

A strange dream came true for me when I found out I was going to get to interview a member of GWAR for an English lesson. First of all, I’m a big GWAR fan, but more importantly it would be the first time a character would be giving an English lesson on English, baby! I hope Bart Simpson can do one some day.

Of course, Bart Simpson is less of a real character than GWAR because Bart doesn’t cover you with goo. Filming the concert footage for this video was difficult because I had to duck and cover the camera each time the blood started spraying my way! Silvia Ruiz, who took the photos you see here, slipped on the slick concrete in front of the stage and hurt her elbow.

GWAR’s representation was really into the idea of one of them doing an English lesson. I got the idea to ask them from this video by Spin. Shortly after, I discovered this video that features the band in a classroom and knew it would be a perfect fit.

For a while, the plan was for me to interview Balsac, the guitarist. It would have been tricky. Look how tall he is!

Of course, interviewing Oderus wasn’t all that easy either. Since a lot of GWAR’s music is about sex and drugs, we had to throw out whole questions that were deemed inappropriate to the site. Our video editor Matt Miadich did a great job of cutting out an intelligible interview.

We only spent about three minutes with Oderus backstage at a show in Portland, Oregon, but just before he took off, I got my picture with him. Too bad I’m making a funny face!

This week English, baby! is featuring a really fun English lesson with Shane Battier from the Houston Rockets. I came across this blog which determined that Shane is (or at least was, not sure what the current numbers are) the best at buzzer beating (specifically shot clock buzzers). So we asked him to teach “buzzer beater” and other last-second vocab.

After we approached Shane, we learned he knows a little Mandarin. He gets lessons every year before he goes to China for a couple of weeks to promote his Peak signature shoe. He was shy about sharing his full Mandarin vocabulary in the video, but he dropped a “ni hao” for his fans in China.

And boy, does Shane have fans in China. This Chinese news clip, from which I pulled the shot of the t-shirt above, shows the welcome he got while getting off a plane. The Chinese aren’t just big fans smart basketball and stellar defense, Shane’s profile is boosted by frequent airing of TV commercials he stars in (you can see most of them on Battier’s MogoTXT site). This blog post even has a quote from an NBA player who spent some time in China and got really tired of seeing Shane on TV!

I think it’s great that Shane is so well-known in China. He’s such a well-rounded an unselfish player, he makes a great ambassador for the US and basketball. He has a reputation for being a smart guy, and, in fact, he saved me when we were taping this interview. I started talking to him and then completely blanked out. I had to wait in the media room for a while because the team was late to their shoot around that day and I let my mind get sleepy! Anyway, when he saw I had blanked out, Shane said, “buzzer beater, man,” and reminded me what we were supposed to be talking about. It was clear he had thought about the definition of the term in advance. No wonder his is the best celebrity English lesson we’ve done so far!

Americans who speak French love to hang out together. I’ve found myself out with a group who at some point realized they all spoke French and decided to speak it right then. Let me tell you, I wish I knew I French too, because they were having lots of fun!

So when after filming an English lesson with French star, Tété, I went to his only show in the US this fall, it was no surprise to find the front rows full of people singing along and whispering to one another in French. And by the end of the set, Tété, came down off the stage and sang along with them with no microphone. You can read more about the show in the review I wrote for the Oregonian newspaper here in Portland.

But unlike my night out with friends that took an unexpected turn for the French, Tété is an inclusive kind of guy. When we met him at the recording studio, he gave us a tour. We wished we could have hung out all day! And even though I don’t know what they mean, I get the words to “Fils de cham” stuck in my head all the time now.

Following Nicolas Batum and Sebastien Le Toux, this is the third French celebrity English lesson we’ve had on English, baby! in the last year, more than any other nationality. But you just wait…we’ve got a celebrity English teacher from outer space coming up soon!

For more info on Tété, visit his website.

This Friday, we are featuring our first English lesson with a professional soccer player! We were thrilled to learn we would have French player Sebastien Le Toux on the site, especially after learning how thrilled he is to be playing in the US. Take a peak at our lesson on “flick” with Sebastien Le Toux of Sounders FC.

I talked to Sebastien on the phone for a few minutes the day before I went up to the Sounders’ practice field in Tukwila, Washington. We discussed what slang term would be good for him to teach. I asked him if he uses any slang phrases frequently and he said he might, but he might not know they are slang! I hadn’t thought of that.

His teammates couldn’t think of any idioms he uses often, so I looked at a list of soccer slang and chose “flick” because it’s slang outside of soccer as well. Plus, a short high kick was something Sebastien could demonstrate easily. He was more than happy to demonstrate how it can be an effective way to pass a defender by kicking a ball over my head!

Needless to say, the interview was a lot of fun. It was wild seeing part of the Sounders practice as well. I wound up catching a header drill where each player took turns trying to score on the keeper with their heads.

Here’s a shot of Sounders practice. Sebastien (who is called “Seba” by his teammates) is in the long shorts and blue shirt.

The Sounders will finish a successful season at home against FC Dallas on Saturday and then head to the MLS playoffs!

Today’s music lesson is an interview with Inara George from electro jazz duo the Bird and the Bee. She spoke to me on the from her home in Los Angeles back in August. She teaches, (what else?) the phrase, “the birds and the bees” and she does such a good job. Her sexy, languid voice must be driving our teenage boy members crazy.

We were inspired to ask Inara to do a lesson when “Love Letter To Japan” started showing up on the charts in Asia. It’s such a catchy song. Take a look at the video and read the outtakes from the interview below.

The Bird & The Bee - Love Letter To Japan

Jason: When we emailed, you mentioned that you’re working from 10am to noon today. What job do you have where you work for 2 hours in the middle of the day like that?

Inara: Oh, I’m working with Greg, writing stuff.

Jason: Oh, do you take sort of a craftsperson approach to it where you do it at a particular time every day?

Inara: No. I mean we do it whenever we’re free. We just sort of fit it in when we can. Sometimes we do it, sometimes we don’t, it just depends.

Jason: Cool. You guys just played with Katy Perry in Hollywood. How was that?

Inara: It was fun. We haven’t been playing a ton lately, so it’s always fun to play a show.

Jason: How did you find her fans?

Inara: They were very sweet. It seemed like we had some fans of our own in the audience too which is always a nice thing. We haven’t opened up for anyone in a long time, I think since our first record came out. So, you know, it’s always a little bit different because you don’t have the whole crowd. But it seemed like the audience was into it, so that was cool.

Jason: The “Love Letter To Japan” video has sort of a video game theme. Is that something you experienced when you were in Japan?

Inara: No. The label chose that song as the single and they wanted to do a video and we had a bunch of different video directors submit their ideas for it and that was one that we thought would be fun.

Jason: So you didn’t know that would be the single?

Inara: You know, you just write songs…and we didn’t even think that song was going to make it on the record. But I guess it ended up being the single. And these days, singles aren’t really…it’s not like it’s getting on the radio. They call it a “focus track.” I guess that’s just what they focus their energy on.

Visit the Bird and the Bee’s website and their MySpace.

Today’s lesson is one of the best interview lessons we’ve ever featured on English, baby! As you can imagine, Violent J, one half of the brains behind Insane Clown Posse, is a hilarious guy. But who would have guessed he’d be so good at defining the term “posse” on the fly? Just goes to show that he’s at the top of his game. No wonder ICP’s new album, Bang! Pow! Boom! is one of the band’s most successful yet.

Portions of this interview were published first by the Oregonian as a preview for ICP’s upcoming show in Portland on September 23. Below is everything not included in the English lesson.

Jason: How has the Dark Carnival changed since you left it seven years ago?

Violent J: It hasn’t changed. It’s a very real magic going on here. I hope I don’t sound like every other band. I don’t know what every other band sounds like. But I’m telling you there is a very legit, very real magic going on within the Dark Carnival. It was there the whole time we were doing the Joker’s Cards and it’s there again. You can feel it in the audience. It’s the Dark Carnival! It’s like it’s there! And I could pass a lie detector test. I believe it’s a very real thing. I don’t think it exists to be called the Dark Carnival, I think that’s what we named it.

Jason: ICP is really the only band that I can think of that created an entire sub culture on it’s own. How did that happen? How did it get to be that you could be a Juggalo in the same way that could be a goth or a punk?

Violent J: I credit that to the Dark Carnival, to the magic, because it certainly wasn’t in our plans. It wasn’t anything we thought up, you know what I mean? Just as incredible as it is to somebody looking at it from the outside, you can imagine how incredible it is to us.

Jason: So it’s totally mysterious. It’s not something you could do again.

Violent J: No. And it’s not something we planned or manufactured. Even the name “Juggalo,” I’m not 100% sure where that came from. I have a hard time thinking of Juggalos as just another word for ICP fans. There are other bands they love and there are things we present to Juggalos that don’t work. Like, for example, at the Gathering of the Juggalos, me and Shaggy will bring a band that we love and we’ll tell the Juggalos, “We’ve loved them our whole life and we want you to see them,” and they’ll get booed offstage.

Jason: It’s not even within your control.

Violent J: Exactly. We love wrestling. At the gathering, we always present a huge wrestling show called Bloody Mania. We put thousands and thousands of dollars into it. And the thing is, Juggalos throw pop or beer into the ring and it makes the rope slippery and the wrestlers end up being not able to do half the moves. This year, we went out there and we asked the Juggalos, “Look, we worked really hard on this show,” we told them, “you can throw things if you want, but we’re just letting you know that it’s gonna take the value of the show down and we’d prefer if you didn’t.” But they didn’t give a f— about that. So that’s what I’m saying. They’re not just our fans, they’re their own entity. They could very easily move on from us one day. I hope they won’t.

Jason: Do you remember the first time you saw a clown as a child?

Violent J: Wow, I’ve never been asked that. I don’t think I remember. I just remember them always being creepy. I remember going to the state fair in Detroit back in the day where they actually had legitimate freak shows. They had this guy named Crab Boy who was this old man and his hands were actually deformed and they looked like crab pincers. I remember sneaking in under the tent and he had a hose for people who were sneaking in and he sprayed us with the hose! I remember that more than I remember seeing the clowns. I remember the whole carnival. And you know how now if you go to the circus, the ring master is the host of a local radio show or something? I remember when they had the real ringmaster who traveled with the circus. I was affected by that.

Jason: So ICP is meant to channel the broader freakshow and circus experience?

Violent J: Absolutely. I also remember I went to a freakshow and there was a guy outside a tent yelling, “Billy Reed is still alive! You’ve got to look at him! You’ve got to see him! He’s amazing! He’s still alive!” And when we went in there it was some kid with long hair putting nails up his nose. But what really got me was the guy yelling, “Billy Reed is still alive!” I remember being a kid and being mesmerized by that. You know, “Who is Billy Reed, and why is he still alive?” I couldn’t believe that people traveled around the country as a freak show. That was just so incredible to me. I also mentioned before that we’re huge wrestling fans and it’s so weird to know that professional wrestling also somehow evolved from carnivals and I didn’t know that until way later in my life.

Jason: Have you ever read Geek Love?

Violent J: No.

Jason: It’s a novel about a freakshow and part of it takes place in Portland. It’s good if you ever need something to read on the road.

Violent J: I’m all about reading!

Jason: So you just finished a new film, a western.

Violent J: That movie is done and when people would bring that up for the last ten years…sometimes I dreaded that question. Because ever since we did the first movie…We did the first movie in 1999. It was called Big Money Hustlas. We were funded by Island Def Jam. But we always knew that we would do a second movie. But it took us ten years to build our company up so that it was strong enough to do it by ourselves. Because we weren’t gonna do no bootleg-ass movie. We were gonna do one that was better than the first movie, you know? And it took us ten years to be able to finally do it and do it right. We did it this year. A lot of great things happened this year. This year we reached number 4 on Billboard which we also did 10 years ago. But 10 years ago, it was with Island Def Jam and now we did it on our own strictly on Psychopathic Records. It’s like we’ve learned how to do everything completely on our own and now we can shoot a multimillion dollar movie without going bankrupt. We can put a record out and work it and get it in the top 5 and we’re super proud of our own company. So, the movie is done and the only reason we’re not hurrying up and putting it out is we put so much into the movie that before we just release it on DVD or something, our guys are completely, totally studying the movie industry. We’re trying to learn so that when we release it, we can release it in China. We can release it in Sweden. We’re trying to learn how to get it into the movie festivals. We’re talking to distributors. We’re trying to learn anything we can about the movie industry so that it don’t just come out on DVD and it’s hot for a month and then it’s gone. We put way too much into this. We have a tentative release for February of next year, but we’re learning the ropes so that we can get maximum benefit out of it.

Jason: I first heard ICP on the radio in the mid-nineties and on your new album you compare listening to the radio to having a dick in your ear and I was just wondering what’s changed since the ’90s?

Violent J: Did you live in Portland when you heard us on the radio?

Jason: I lived in Albuquerque.

Violent J: See, that blows my mind. Because I didn’t know we had any radio play in Albuquerque.

Jason: Yeah, I was 13 and “The Great Milenko” was on the radio and that was the first time I heard it.

Violent J: Really? If it was being played in Albuquerque, I guarantee you, it was being played only in Albuquerque. Radio has never been a part of our history. Even when we were on Island and before that Jive Records, we never received any real radio play. We don’t have any hits. That’s one thing that’s unique about the band. There’s not that one song that everybody knows us for. But I think it’s better that way. If you’re on the radio, every time you make an album you have to hope they’ll play it on the radio. At least we succeed or fail based on what we do and not what somebody at a radio station thinks of us.

On Friday our latest celebrity lesson–and first with a female athlete–goes live on the home page on Friday (peek at it here). What an honor to get to interview one of the biggest names in the WNBA, Ticha Penicheiro of the Sacramento Monarchs (who was also named Sacramento’s most eligible bachelorette by Forbes).

Ticha studied communications in college and may go into broadcasting following her professional career, so the Portuguese athlete seems pretty much like a native speaker. The lesson is sort of a three-parter with explanations of the terms, “steal,” “assist,” and the phrase “the sky’s the limit.” There were some bits about learning English that got cut, so here’s the rest of the interview.

Jason: Your brother plays basketball, your dad’s a coach. Basketball runs in the family. Does English run in the family?

Ticha: My brother always had American players on his team, and they would always come over to my house, so at a very young age, I was very familiar with the English language. Just like here you take foreign languages in school, a lot of people take Spanish, in Portugal, the majority of the people take English. So it’s something that you learn in school. My mom speaks English and my dad understands more than he speaks, he’s a little shy, and my brother speaks fluently.

Jason: Was a time when you first got here and you were going to Old Dominion that you had to struggle to speak English?

Ticha: In classes it was going too fast at first and I was trying to write everything the professor would say and I quickly realized I couldn’t do that because I couldn’t catch up. A lot of times I would just use a dictionary if there were some words that I didn’t know. We always had tutors and people we could ask questions when we weren’t sure what was going on, but I was just paying a lot of attention in class. I would really focus on everything that the professor would say, I would try to write it down. It wasn’t as easy because, you know, my English was OK but, to be in class with somebody who spoke that fast, it was kind of tough.

And finally, a picture of me with Ticha.

With many sources of information blocked in Iran, englishbaby.com, a social network for people who are learning English,  offers a unique breadth of voices from the country’s English-speaking youth. Unlike Twitter and Facebook which are monitored by the state as well as the media and can so full of posts on Iran they are chaotic, English, baby! is home to unfettered and well-thoughout discussion among the site’s 10,000 Iranian members and the million more around the world.

This forum begins with a list made by a 16-year-old named Payam of all the good qualities of Iran, which he hopes are not forgotten during this time.

In this forum thread, the longest on the topic on Ebaby!, Tufan, a 24-year-old Iranian man, says that many people’s opinions of the current regime have changed since the election: “Now even people who voted to Ahmadinejad are regret for their decision when they see how he treats to demonstrators.”

But 19-year-old amirlashkari22 (pictured above) says he thinks the violence against protesters in his country was necessary to prevent further chaos: “If they don’t [shoot protesters] you ppl would fire much more stores, supermarkets, banks and buses.”

Many of the participants of the discussion are Iranian, but people from around the world frequently chime in and give their thoughts. Sali, a 27-year-old Algerian is disappointed to see Iran come undone, because she looks up to the nation. “We are prouvd of iran as mulim and devloped country,” she says

English, baby! is glad to provide a place where people from all countries can share their thoughts on this crisis in a common language. We hope our site continues to evade censorship in Iran.