Monday, December 18, 2006

Show 229 Monday 18 December


Watch today’s show at YouTube or BlipTV.

Hi, I’m Sarah. Welcome to The Daily English Show.
I went to the Mexican Ping Pong night. And it was great.
I ended up playing ping pong too ... funnily enough. Actually I wasn’t planning on playing because I imagined it would be a kind of serious. But it wasn’t.
It turns out Mexican Ping Pong is a lot of fun.
It was a tournament and to enter you had to pay 300 yen and then you drew a piece of paper out of a hat and on that piece of paper it was written what you had to play with.
You either had to play with a racket, a magazine, a small jandal or a fan.
Oh and the Mexican thing was ... sometimes you pulled out a piece of paper which said tequila shot – and you had to drink a shot of tequila. And the referee was wearing a Mexican hat.
And as for the 420th bit ... well, I asked the owner and he had a perfectly reasonable explanation. You see they’d counted all the Mexican ping pong nights in the world. That’s why it was the 420th.



STICK NEWS

Kia ora in Stick News today the person of 2006 is you.

Time is a weekly American news magazine.
It was created 1923 and was the first weekly news magazine in the United States.
Time’s most famous feature is the annual "Person of the Year" story.
Person of the Year is the man, woman, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year."
The title used to be called Man of the Year but was changed in 1999 to avoid sexism.
This year, Time’s Person of the Year is You.
Time said the popularity of YouTube, Wikipedia, and MySpace was a story about
“the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”
You won the award “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game”.


The article in TIME says there was now an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding. But it says we shouldn’t get too excited because some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, let alone the obscenity and the naked hatred. And that was Stick News for Monday the 18th of December. Kia Ora.



the snow report

Last week it didn’t snow at all for a couple of days – then it started snowing balls ... which is cool, but not great for snowboarding.
On Saturday we decided to park at Hanazono – but then we got stuck because they close Hanazono at 3:30.
Luckily the staff at Hirafu were nice and they let us take the staff bus to go to back to the car.
Today the snow was really good and we had a great day snowboarding.



conversations with sarah
#137 How far did you get in the tournament?

Step 1: Repeat Sam’s lines.
Step 2: Read Sam’s lines and talk to Sarah.

Sam Did you end up playing ping pong?

Sarah Yeah, I did.

Sam How far did you get in the tournament?

Sarah I think I got to the semi-finals.

Sam Did you play with a racket?

Sarah Only once. First I played with a jandal, then a racket, then a magazine.

Sam Which was the best?

Sarah I had the best luck with the jandal actually. And the magazine was the hardest.