As part of our ongoing celebrity English lesson series, I recently got to interview Marcin Gortat of the Orlando Magic. He is the first Polish born player in the NBA and nicknamed “the Polish Hammer.” Actually, I’ve heard that he prefers “the Polish Machine,” but I just think the hammer is so much more unique and fitting. I hope he changes his mind.

Normally, I go into these interviews knowing what the lesson will be about. But in this case, I tried something different and asked Marcin to pick his favorite basketball slang on the spot just before we started shooting. He chose “beat a shot.” Watch it below or see the full lesson here. Or you can even read about it in Polish on Marcin’s official website.

That night after the interview, I went to the game and watched Marcin and the Magic fall to my Portland Trailblazers. Marcin had a great game though, and every time he dunked or blocked a shot I stood up and yelled “bring down the hammer!” Then I went back to cheering for the Blazers. I must have confused a lot people around me.

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!

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.