Ebaby! Blog

This Monday the music lesson will be about Lefty, a one-armed guitarist who performs on street corners near the English, baby! downtown Portland office.

This is definitely the best taking it to the streets video we’ve made so far. It’s not just a slice of life, it’s a whole story. Watch Lefty play and talk about how he thought his days as a musician were over when he lost his arm.

When I was learning Spanish, some of the hardest people to understand were older men with gravelly voices. But I think Lefty does a pretty good job of annunciating for a guy with a real whiskey voice. Hopefully our members can get some practice understanding people who sound like him from this video.

I also interviewed Lefty at length for an upcoming newspaper piece I’m going to write. We sat at his “office,” a table at the old town bar Captain Ankny’s Well, which also happens to be where we film lots of our lessons (like this one).

Every other person who walked by knew Lefty and said hello. He has a lot of fans around town. Some of them are even photographers. He let me scan in some photos people have given him over the last three years he’s been performing at the Saturday Market, an open air bazaar in Portland. The ones in this post are my favorites.

Our members are so smart. OK, they’re not smart all the time, like when we added the “report member” button to weed out spammers and everyone pressed it like crazy for no reason, but a lot of the forum posts are really intelligent.

Learning a language forces you to be creative. I remember when I got good enough at Spanish to speak fluidly but I didn’t have the vocab to be very straight forward. So I’d come up with interesting ways to get across what I was trying to say. I think that’s what’s going on in this comment on another soap opera episode about online dating in which Marni discovers her new boyfriend may not be as great as she thought.

Unless taxi-as-relationship is a common cliche in Viet Nam, that’s pretty original. Another member may have coined a clever phrase this week on our lesson about the phrase “ugly duckling”.

I can’t find that expression anywhere with Google and, although it may be an unintentional misspelling, I like “notty” for the double meaning of “not” and “naughty”.

For another member, “ugly duckling” is about more than looks.

Maybe she can meet up with this dejected countryman of hers, who doesn’t include a photo clear enough to determine if his sulking is justified.

As interesting as all that is, we’ll wrap things up with another common mistake on the site. A lot of times people mistake one of the English lessons for a member profile and comment on it like this:

So that wouldn’t be so strange…if it weren’t on our lesson about Alvin and the Chipmunks!

Until next time, stay beautiful like an animated rodent.

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.