The Olympic Games

"As in the daytime there is no star in the sky warmer and brighter than the sun, likewise there is no competition greater than the Olympic Games." Pindar, Greek lyric poet, 5th century BC

Origins

The ancient Greeks first had the idea of getting men together every four years to hold and witness sporting events (in those days women did not participate, though they had their own, independent, events). The idea was to have the best athletes from all over Greece gather in one field and compete every four years. All wars and fighting had to stop while the athletes and their supporters came together in the town of Olympia for a few days to compete in a few events, mostly related to warfare (throwing the javelin, running, wrestling, boxing and chariot racing).

The first written reference to the Games is 776 BC. They lasted until 389 AD. The idea of having the modern Games was suggested in the mid 19th century but they weren't a world event until 1896. Besides being postponed because of wars, they have been held since then every four years in different cities around the world.

Symbols

The Olympic Games have many important symbols that most people recognize. The five rings that appear on the Olympic flag (coloured yellow, green, blue, black and red) were introduced in 1914. They represent the five continents of Africa, the Americas, Australia, Asia and Europe. The flag is raised in the host city and then flown to the next one where it is kept until the next Games. The Olympic torch, a major part of the ancient Games, was brought back in 1928 and is carried with great fanfare and publicity to the host city where it lights the burning flame of the Games. It is kept burning until the close of the Games. The torch symbolizes purity, the drive for perfection and the struggle for victory.

Music

The rousing Olympic anthem is the simply named "Olympic Music" by John Williams, who wrote it for the 1984 Olympics, held in Los Angeles. What you hear first are the forty or so notes played on horns which form the "Bugler's Dream" (also called "Olympic Fanfare") by Leo Arnaud, first played in the 1968 Games.

The torch, fanfare and flag are clearly evident in the Opening Ceremony, when everyone formally welcomes the participants and the Games can begin. Here we find the dramatic and colourful March of Nations, in which all the athletes from each country go into the venue to the sound of their country's anthem and march behind their flags, thus becoming representatives of their countries.

Athlete's Oath

One part of the Opening Ceremony that tries to keep the spirit of the Games and sportsmanship alive is when one athlete, representing all those participating, takes the Athlete's Oath:

"In the name of all the competitors, I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules which govern them, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport, and the honour of our teams."

Medals

In the ancient Games, only the winner was celebrated. Each winner was given a simple crown of olive leaves to wear on his head. This was the only reward for his victory. Those who came in second or third got nothing. Interestingly, when the Games started again in 1896, silver medals were given to the first place winners. Later in 1904 in the St. Louis Games, gold was the top prize. Now, of course we have gold for first place, silver for second and bronze for third.

Motto

The Olympics' official motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius". This is Latin for "Swifter, Higher, Stronger". This is said to represent the Olympic spirit, supposed to be present throughout the Games and generally held to be a celebration of brotherhood, competition, sportsmanship, goodwill and peace. The Games help us see how similar we are, and help us celebrate our humanity.

People

As in ancient times, those who participate in the Games are famous for the rest of their lives. Today, it's estimated that some 100,000 people have competed in the Games. These athletes, all supposed to be amateurs (people who play and get no money for their play), have to qualify or win regional and national events. They often play on their countries' national teams. If they are ill or can't make it for an event, they have substitutes. When they start playing, they become competitors or opponents on the playing field.

Officials, referees, scorekeepers and umpires monitor their play, and judges score their performances. Spectators watch the events, and fans cheer the athletes on.

Helping the athletes in their chosen sports are their trainers and coaches. Helping the athletes in their business affairs are their agents and managers. Sometimes athletes have sponsors and after the Games are over the athletes become spokesmen for companies.

The Olympic Games also require people to take on the jobs of announcers, commentators and broadcasters. These people comment on, report and describe the events that are happening and tell us about the standings of the countries and the athletes who play the Games.

Unfortunate events in world history (the 1972 Munich Olympics and 9/11) mean that security is a major concern for the Games. Thus the Olympics also employs those who are responsible for the safe-being of the athletes and spectators, including police (city, provincial and federal) and even national troops or soldiers. They are pitted against 'common' criminals (thieves, pickpockets, vandals...) and terrorists.

In addition, the support staff get the fields, grounds and arenas ready and help to maintain the equipment and facilities.

The nationalities you hear of in the Olympics fall mostly into certain suffix groups, for example:

ish (mostly European): British, Irish,Polish, Spanish, Turkish,Finnish

ese(mostly Asian): Portuguese,Burmese,Chinese,Japanese,Taiwanese,Vietnamese

i (mostly Middle Eastern):Bahraini,Iraqi,Pakistani,Kuwaiti,Israeli, Saudi

an/ian ch other: American, Czech, Filipino,Australian,Dutch, Greek,Canadian, French Icelandic,German, Swiss,Indonesian, Thai ,Korean, Malagasy

Events

The ancient Games had only a few events. Foot racing was in every game and each race had a variety of lengths - the longest being the marathon named after the Greek city and famous battle. The pentathlon, supposedly developed by Jason of Golden Fleece fame, had five events (running, jumping, wrestling, discus throwing and javelin throwing) which were all scored together. Three pentathlon events were important and popular enough to have their own events. Wrestling, discus throwing and the javelin were all recorded in the Homeric poems and were seen as vital for all men to be skilled in. The javelin throw was separated into two categories: length and accuracy (aimed at a specific target). Boxing was one of the oldest events and was written about by Homer. Finally there was the pancration, a combination of boxing and wrestling and various events with horse racing.

Today, of course, there are many more events. The chart below lists the most popular modern events in the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Summer: kayaking, boxing, swimming, diving, gymnastics, track & field,volleyball basketball,tennis, wrestling

Winter:down hill skiing, snowboarding, hockey, speed skating, equestrian hurdles curling bobsledding, figure skating luge, biathlon, ski jumping, skeleton, cross skiing

NB. The following summer sports have been recently recognized and are now legitimate events: air sports; automobile; bandy; billiards; boules; bowling; bridge; chess; dancesport; golf; karate; korfball; life saving; motorcycle racing; mountaineering and climbing; netball; orienteering; pelote basque; polo; racquetball; roller sports; rugby; squash; surfing; tug of war; underwater sports; water skiing; wushu.

Competition

Athletes compete or play against each other in hopes of winning. That might mean crossing the finish line first or putting on a perfect performance. Throughout the Games, the contestants are supposed to play with a spirit of sportsmanship, which can be defined as the character and conduct worthy of a sportsman. This means that they are to play with honour, seeking only to do their very best in their sport, and not specifically to defeat the other players.

When the playing begins, the events have preliminaries, or official trials or contests, in which athletes have to meet specified minimum requirements. This is for the setting of standards and for athletes to gain the right to compete in the final contest.

Sometimes it seems that the spirit and the joy of the Games have been lost to commercialism and the overpowering desire to focus only on victory. When controversy and partisanship take over, it's good to remember what a churchman once said during the 1908 London Games, which is still true today:

"The important thing is not so much winning as taking part."

Unfortunately, some athletes and coaches have taken to cheating or doping, in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage. Steroids, drugs that encourage muscle strength and stamina, are one of the banned substances that give athletes an extra, and illegal, advantage.

In spite of the problems of cheating and doping, and nationalism which can be divisive, the Games carry on and remain popular. This is possibly because the Games show us what we as humans are capable of and that humanity is capable of engaging in friendly competition. We should keep in mind what the father of the modern Games, Baron Pierre de Courbertin, once said:

"Olympism is not a system, it is a state of mind."

© 2004 Keith Landry. Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana in the USA, Keith Landry has a Master's in Liberal Arts and has taught widely in the USA, Middle East and Asia.

Bill Bryson Quote´s

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. . . . They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.”

“I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.”

“The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.”

“What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.”

“He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.”

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”

“In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”

“Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”

“More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.”

“English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin -- a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established, grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies.”

“Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.”

“We have been chosen, ... by fate or providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.”

By: D F Dalton

For ESL Students or anyone who wants to learn English it's one of the most mongrel languages on planet earth. That's because over the course of time, English has taken up words from every other major language, and so its spelling and pronunciation rules are more complicated than many languages. But for those ESL students who want to master English pronunciation like ESL teachers tutors or other native speakers, it is not hard to take the learning process step by step.

The first step is to know the alphabet very well and always to be able to think of the primary or basic sound for each letter. Some letters have more sounds than just their primary sound, but these sounds can be learned separately. First, ESL students must practice reciting or singing the 26 letters of the English alphabet together with a fluent English teacher, ESL Tutor or native speaker.

(The phonetic transcriptions below the letters will be explained during the course of these articles. Remember to recite or sing the second line faster, and to pause during the third line, so as to say all the letters in the same period of time as in the other lines. The traditional music of the alphabet song is well-known and has even been used by composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a piano melody.)

A, B, C, D, E, F, G,

H, I, J, K, L M N O P,

Q, R, S, [pause,] T, U, V,

W, X, Y, and Z.

"ey, bee, see, dee, ee, ehf, dzhee,

eytsh, aee, dzhey, keh-ee, ehl ehm ehn oh pee,

kyoo, ahr, ehss ..., tee, yoo, vee,

duhbuhlyoo, ehks, waee, aand zee"

The Primary Sounds

The five letters in English that are always vowels are A, E, I, O, U; and sometimes Y and other combinations serve the function of vowels. For speakers of Oriental or Romance languages, it will be easier at the beginning to think of or associate the pure vowels as the primary sounds for these letters.

When the letters appear by themselves, the pure vowels, called the long vowels in some systems, are not as frequent in English as the short vowels; but because the pure vowels will be easier to associate, they are given as the primary sounds below. (And even if someone finds it harder to learn the distinction between long and short vowels, this does not make a big difference, because blurring this distinction is often accepted by English speakers as merely a slight Spanish accent.)

Now then, here are the primary sounds for each letter, as they appear in international words and geographical places, and the way each letter can be written in phonetic transcriptions. Letters without notes are transcribed the same way as they are spelled.

A as in father, Washington, Osaka (written as "ah")

B as in baby, ikebana, Lisbon

C as in cook, camel, Caracas (written as, and the same as, "k")

D as in did, mikado, London

E as in peso, melee, Reykjavik (written as "ey")

F as in fifty, fugu, France

G as in go, origami, Togo

H as in ahead, haiku, Holland

I as in paprika, Fiji, Nippon (written as "ee")

J as in judge, kanji, Java (written as "dzh")

K as in kids, karaoke, Kyoto

L as in left, Clinton, Lebanon

M as in mom, anime, Lima

N as in no, katakana, Ghana

O as in hope, noh, Tokyo (written as "oh")

P as in pop, pepper, Poland

Q as in qwerty, sheqel, Iraq (written as, and the same as, "k")

R as in right, Reagan, York

S as in less, sake, Spain

T as in tie, tofu, Tibet

U as in rule, you, Jerusalem (written as "oo")

V as in give, flavor, Venezuela

W as in we, wasabi, Wellington

X as in box, mixup, Lexington (written as "ks")

Y as in yard, teriyaki, Yemen

Z as in zone, puzzle, Zambia

Classical Vowels

The classical long vowels are those which correspond to the vowel sounds in Romance languages: for example, the first syllables of the Spanish words taco, bueno, pita, loco, mucho, or of the Japanese words kana, geta, miso, tofu, fugu. These are also called pure vowels because they are not mixed or diphthongal vowels.

Good transcriptions of the long vowels, in terms of the most recognizable way to pronounce the sounds reliably, are given above: A as "ah", E as "ey", I as "ee", O as "oh", and U as "oo". (Incidentally, in other systems, instead of the vowels just given, the "long vowels" are those sounds which the vowels make in their English names, and when accompanied by silent E; but this naming method is not used in the present article.)

Well, to all the ESL Students, or ESL teachers who happened to come across this, I hope you've found it both enjoyable and helpful. Pronunciation for ESL students is important to building comfort and confidence. Please feel free to drop by ESL Toronto Network and say hi to me, Mr. D.

Mr. D is the founder of ESL Toronto Network

Connecting ESL Students to ESL Schools,

ESL Teachers and ESL Tutors.

It's a Friendly and Fun Social Environment sort of like an ESL Facebook...

So Drop by Today...http://esltoronto.net

Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

by Robert Krulwich


Later today you are going to do something, something you don't know about yet.

Yet somehow, it's already happened. Somehow, it's already affected you.

Huh?

One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell, has just published an article that suggests that people — ordinary people — can be altered by experiences they haven't had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the Present. And he thinks he can prove it.


Already critics are jumping up and down, saying this can't be, time is not porous, the experiments are flawed. But because this is the Professor Daryl Bem (he's in your high school textbook for his work on self perception) and because the journal publishing his article is top-of-the-line rigorous, all over the world psychologists are trying to duplicate what Dr. Bem has done. If serious scientists can repeat his results, this story is going to be big.

Two Very Queer Experiments

But while we're waiting, let me tell you what he did. (Or at least what I think he did. I'm not a psychology buff, so I hope I get this right) The details are fascinating.

Dr. Bem has been quietly testing extrasensory perception claims for 8 years. His paper reports a series of 9 different experiments, but two especially caught my eye.

Experiment Number 1: Who's Got the Porn?

The first is a computer quiz. 100 Cornell students, 50 males, 50 females, were invited to sit in front of some computers. Here are Bem's instructions:

This is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all. Several of the pictures contain explicit erotic images (e.g., couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts). If you object to seeing such images, you should not participate in this experiment.

OK, that's two curtains. One is hiding nothing. The other hides a picture, often a hot picture with much nakedness.

Since a computer randomly chooses what's behind each curtain, one would expect the students to choose correctly half the time. Fifty-fifty.

But that is not how it turned out. In the 100 sessions, the hit rate for those shown erotic stimuli was 53.1 percent. Why? It could have been a fluke, but with the results session after session consistently better than random, one explanation might be that the subjects somehow 'knew' that a particular choice would be especially arousing. How did they know? One possibility is that the tasty reward of "hot action" somehow got passed backwards through time more effectively. (Don’t laugh: The hit rate of those shown non-erotic picures, at 49.8 percent, did not deviate from chance. Curious.)

Sexual Arousal Going Backwards in Time?

Weirder still, Bem reports that the news appeared to arrive at the brain before the computer made its choice. "The remarkable finding [we made] is that their physiological responses are observed to occur about 2-3 seconds prior to the appearance of the picture, even before the computer has decided whether to present a non-arousing or an arousing picture," Bem told the Cornell Daily Sun.

Here's the second study.

Everybody knows practice improves performance. If you study a list of words, if you try to memorize them, you should be able to remember them better later. But suppose you reverse the process? Suppose you study the words after the test? Your friends will smirk. "After the test is too late, loser. People who study after tests don't graduate."

Well, let's see.

In one of Bem's studies, 100 college students were shown a list of 48 common nouns flashed on a computer, one at a time, for three seconds each. The instructions said: Look at the word, try to visualize it (see "tree;" imagine "tree") and then go on to the next word.

Afterward, they were told, Surprise! We're going to give you a quick memory quiz. How many of the words we just showed you can you recall?

Students typed in the words they remembered.

Then a computer went through the same list of words and chose 24 — totally randomly; no human was involved.

Before you leave, the students were told, we still want you to scan and then type the words the computer selected. As they typed, the students were, of course, committing those randomly selected words to memory. But who cares? The test was over.

Did The Future Whisper The Answers?

Now comes the surprise. When Dr. Bem checked the original surprise recall test, a weird pattern emerged. He noticed the students for some reason turned out to be better at recalling the words they had scanned and retyped after the test.

A second group of 24 words served as a control. The computer never asked students to retype them. Those words weren't recalled as often.

Then Bem drops his bomb: "The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words."

The results show that [this test] does, in fact, reach back in time...

- Professor Daryl Bem
What? Apparently, scanning and retyping those words later somehow improved recall earlier. Cue the Twilight Zone music.

You can well understand why this paper is raising hackles all over psychology-ville. This is not the first time a prominent psychology professor has found statistical evidence of extrasensory perception, but in these experiments, the methods are classical, simple, well known and repeatable. Already one attempt to repeat Bem's work has failed.

For me (untrained in these matters) the niggling question is Bem's numbers: 53.1 percent is slightly better than chance. It's not 50-50, but is this really significant? The effect shows up across nine different experiments, involving more than a thousand subjects. So the effect in cumulative. But is that enough?

Here's what Melissa Burkley writes in her blog at Psychology Today:

...small effect sizes are not that uncommon in psychology (and other sciences). For example, on average, the Bem studies showed an effect size of .20 (out of a possible range of 0-1). Although that is fairly small, it is as large as or larger than some well-established effects, including the link between aspirin and heart attack prevention, calcium intake and bone mass, second hand smoke and lung cancer, and condom use and HIV prevention (Bushman & Anderson, 2001). And as Cohen has pointed out, such small effect sizes are most likely to occur in the early stages of exploring a topic, when scientists are just starting to discover why the effect occurs and when it is most likely to occur.

So who knows? Maybe psychologists, like quantum physicists, will have to deal with the deep strangeness of our universe. Maybe time doesn't behave properly. Maybe it makes little leaps, suddenly appears uninvited when porn is in the air. Or maybe not.

It's not like we've never thought about this before. In his paper Bem recalls that in "Through the Looking Glass," the White Queen casually mentions to Alice that in her realm, "memory works both ways."

Not only does the Queen remember past events, she can also remember "things that happened the week after next."

Alice, always puzzled, says "I'm sure mine only works one way...I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen seems a little sorry for Alice. "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," she says.

In a year or so, Bem coolly suggests, we may have to agree with the Queen

Source:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/01/04/132622672/could-it-be-spooky-experiments-that-see-the-future

OZ FLOOD SNAKES AND CROCS

Source: The Sun
http://www.thesun.co.uk


VICTIMS of the devastating Australian floods were last night facing a new threat from killer snakes, spiders and crocodiles.

Emergency supplies of snakebite anti-venom were being flown into Queensland as the rising water cut off 20 towns in the state — affecting 200,000 people.
The deadly reptiles have been moving to higher ground to seek refuge from the flood water.
And snakes six and a half feet long have been spotted in the major town of Rockhampton.
Highly venomous taipans, brown snakes and red-bellied blacks are climbing trees and hiding in houses for shelter.
Officials have warned the beasts are even more dangerous than usual because they are in their mating season, which makes them 'cranky'.
There is no end in sight to the "biblical" floods which are expected to last for weeks — with water levels set to peak at 30ft.
State premier Anna Bligh warned: "We will have major issues through January."
A third person died yesterday. A driver drowned after his car was washed away in Aramac.
More than 1,000 homes have been abandoned after days of driving rain last week caused river banks to burst.
More Australians fled their homes today and sandbagged properties.
In Rockhampton tens of thousands of people were bracing themselves for complete isolation.
So far flood waters have swamped an area bigger than France and Germany and closed the town's airport and railway.
Rumours of crocodile sightings have been rife in the cattle farming hub.
Emergency officials warned crocs pushed out of rivers could easily be mistaken for floating debris.
Pioneer Hotel pub owner Suzanne Miller added: "The snakes are a massive problem. I've shut all the doors because they're coming in."
State Emergency Service (SES) operations director Scott Mahaffey said: "Snakes are in their mating season and they've been flushed out of their environment.

"Snakes are very, very cranky right now.
"And the problem with crocodiles now is it's very, very hard to pick them out with the amount of debris."

Thousands of poisonous cane toads were also spotted around Rockhampton while authorities say the town will also be hit by sandflies and disease-carrying mosquitoes breeding in the standing water.

Meanwhile bridges have been washed away, coal mines forced to close, farms washed out and towns forced to undergo military evacuations by helicopter.
The worst is yet to hit the southern Queensland town of St George, which has begun evacuating residents and strengthening levees to keep out waters expected to peak on Sunday or Monday.

How To Learn Any Accent - Amy Walker

Part 2

http://www.AmyWalkerOnline.com

A masterclass with Amy Walker (of "21 Accents") to empower You to teach yourself any accent on the planet. Learn the way Amy learned -with the world as your classroom.

http://www.21Accents.com Amy's current feature film project: http://www.ConnectedFilm.com

Amy's personal website: http://www.AmyWalkerOnline.com

Vibes to You in all you do!

The English Language In 24 Accents

Me attempting to do 24 different accents from my own country and from other countries around the world. Hopefully I got most of them right but I may have made mistakes and I can do some better than others. However, I made this video for my friends because I promised them I would do an accent video. I mean no offence to anyone and please don't be upset if I have not included your specific accent or got it wrong.