Ebaby! Blog

It often comes up in lessons that Beren is in a band. (Check out this one about touring or this one about recording at home.) Her band plays really loud, broken garage rock and is called Eat Skull. Unless you’re into garage rock or live in Portland, you probably haven’t heard of them. But that might change soon.

A couple of months ago MTV came to our hometown of Portland, Oregon, to make a video about the music scene here. Beren and her band are featured in it. They’re playing at a house party which happens a lot in Portland.

Until this happened, Amanda was the most famous member of the English, baby! cast. She acts in commercials, but she’s going to have to step it up and get a role on a sitcom or something if she wants to compete.

Note the drunk person falling into Beren’s drums at around the 5 minute mark. Oh, and here’s a bit of interesting trivia. Beren is commonly mistaken for Kathy Foster of the Thermals when she goes out in Portland. Kathy’s featured in the video as well. Do you see a resemblance? I think it’s kind of a stretch. They used to have the same hair cut but it looks like Kathy cut hers.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to hear a high-level U.S. politician speak of our need as Americans to learn a second language. If you didn’t catch the clip of Obama’s speech that many people are talking about, watch it and see a man who understands how important it is for us to think beyond our borders and realize our world is much bigger than our one great nation. He gets it.

Immediately following his speech, a large group of people twisted his words and claimed that Obama thinks Americans should learn Spanish instead of immigrants living in our country learning English. They say how wrong he is and use it as political propaganda. He gets it again.

Today our country has walls on our borders, fingerprint machines in our airports, and people who still believe 9/11 was an attack by Iraq. The higher we build our fences, the further we distance ourselves from the other 6.3 billion people who share our planet. We’ve been fortunate to have a prosperous 200 or so years, but that won’t continue without joining the global party, something a number of other countries seem to understand so much better than we do.

Of course immigrants should learn English if they are living in the U.S. During my three years living in Japan I would have never assumed that people should be speaking my language. Obama is simply saying that the bigger issue here is that we should be learning languages ourselves.

While English, baby! won’t necessarily help Americans learn English, we hope it helps people see the importance of connecting with other cultures. Watching the millions of young people from around the world come to our site with their open minds and enthusiasm for a second, third or fourth language is inspiring. Their attitude is what will bring us together as a planet for a bright global future. They get it.

Almost every day I eat at the same Thai food cart a few blocks from the English, baby! office in downtown Portland. It’s called Thai Basil and they know me now and give me free spring rolls and tea.

As I wait for my food to be prepared, I often find myself staring at the menu between spacing out and sending text messages. The specials change daily on a white board next to the window, and for this reason, I always come back to the office with a black smudge on my forefinger.

I never realized how tricky it would be to figure out what foods you pluralize on a menu in English. But every day I erase the ’s’ on words like “pumpkins,” “brocolis,” and “shrimps.”

I’d mention it to the very nice woman who runs the cart (or her foxy granddaughter, but that’s another story), but I can’t figure out what the rule is for things like this. It seems arbitrary. I mean, “brocolis” is never correct, but “pumpkins” is a word if you’re talking about multiple pumpkins, but I seriously doubt there’s more than one pumpkin in their pumpkin curry. Then again, there probably isn’t more than a whole bell pepper in it either, but it is proper to say that a dish has “bell peppers” and not “bell pepper.”

If anyone can make any sense of out this and tell me what the rule is, I will relay it to Thai Basil.

Photos: Taken on my cell phone today, post erasure.