slamboard

I have actually taken a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I chose my title based on my experience. People who are learning English as adults generally love idioms. This post is mostly a shout out to a school with a very cool advertising campaign. I first saw this video on something called The Pop Culture Translator. This thing is a promotional tool for the Canadian College of English Language.

The above video is best presented without commentary.

I want to make a short post about how I recently found a VISA card that had been left in an ATM. I approached the machine that was outside on a main street. It was beeping frantically and displaying in a language that I cannot read. I pressed a random button and the card came out. I looked at the name and then looked around for possible card owners. I didn’t see any, but I saw a police officer and I showed the card to her. She pointed way up the hill at an old man walking with a cane and told me to run after him. He responded to the name on the card and I gave it to him with a pat on the shoulder. He thanked me.

The image above has been transformed for the purposes of satire (I put the text version of air quotes in all by myself).

Scientology is paying for advertisement on YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google. Google has been criticized in the past for its cooperation with China. Tom Cruise pumped money into China while making Mission Impossible III. Supposedly scientology is committed to making human rights a reality around the World. That must be why their most famous member injected $10 million into a totalitarian country that is the most famous human rights abuser.

Seafood like Gulf oysters are a great way to make a low carb diet interesting. Six raw oysters add up to about 57 calories. They contain 5.9 grams of protein, 2.1 grams of fat and 3.3 grams of carbohydrate. They are also an excellent source of Zinc (76mcg), as well as Vitamin B12 (16.3mcg).

So what is stopping us from enjoying these slippery dudes on a regular basis? Well, some of us may be in the at risk groups for exposure to the food borne bacteria that is commonly in oysters. The bacteria that we are talking about is called Vibrio vulnificus and it does not make healthy people sick. However, people who suffer from conditions such as liver disease (from hepatitis, cirrhosis, alcoholism, or cancer), iron overload disease (hemochromatosis), diabetes, cancer (including lymphoma, leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease), stomach disorders or any condition that results in a weakened immune system are at risk. Go to BeOysterAware.com for more details.

If you want to minimize the risk, you have options. The easiest thing is to opt for fully cooking your oysters. If you prefer the raw experience, you can buy oysters that have been processed in such a way as to reduce the bacteria to non detectable levels. The industry has developed a few ways of doing this. Individual quick freezing works and so does a heating and cooling pasteurization method. They can also use a heat and pressure pasteurization method. I have to assume that there is a detectable difference in taste. Roughly 10% of the oysters sold in the USA are subjected to either individual quick-freezing (IQF), low heat pasteurization or heat-cool pasteurization (HCP), or high-hydrostatic pressure (HPP). I have purchased IQF seafood before and I was satisfied with the product.

I occasionally see text on websites that is so badly written that I want to reach out to those responsible. I have decided to start quoting the offending text and getting on with my life instead of pondering the best correction and considering a correspondence with the webmaster. If any of my readers want to correct this passage in my comments section, feel free. If you wish to correct my less than perfect spelling and grammar at any time, please be my guest. Without further ado, here is today’s example:

Broken Chair is a group of film makers based in Michigan whom love making, watching and staring in films of there own. It was these people who formed Broken Chair Productions.

Livescribe has an amazing new product. It is a smart pen. It is so powerful that I can barely understand what exactly it is supposed to do. It records audio and when you take notes on special dot position system paper, you end up with synced files. When you review notes, you can tap the pen on your paper and review the audio that was recorded when you were writing. I can see how this gadget might look useful to a university student. Other targeted niches include your CSI types.

This mulleted mannequin and these fiberglass dinosaurs live together in a museum display in Kentucky. Creationists built the museum to illustrate their interpretation of the natural history of the Earth. All 6,000 to 10,000 years of it.

There is an overwhelming consensus among REAL scientists that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. I personally think that the inception and construction of this museum was a way for some people to scam other people out of some money. I don’t have any hard evidence, I just BELIEVE it.

I have an old school memory involving an elderly substitute teacher who was hopelessy out of his depth when it came to operating the film projector. I really felt sorry for him. The episode made him appear incompetent in front of the students, but I think that part of the problem was that the projector was poorly maintained and didn’t work right to begin with.

Presentationmart.com is a website that can help you get the right projector lamp bulbs and other supplies needed to maintain a dependable AV supply for you business. The standard equipment has changed a lot since I was involved in academics. Overhead projectors using transparencies are still used by some people but DLP and LCP projectors are becoming more commonplace all the time. This economical projector model costs about $550. Replacement lamps cost over $200, so you certainly want to be sure that you are ordering the right model. The price range of projectors is amazing, I am quite curious as to what kind of differences there are in quality, performance and features between a $559 projector and a $27,000 projector.

My title is probably not a question that business executives ask themselves very frequently.

I was inspired to use this title for two reasons. I figured that I might get some accidental search engine traffic (not that ethical, probably something that Jesus would not do). The main inspiration for the title is this succinct and well produced short educational video that introduces the topic of business ethics. It is presented by Jesuits.

Most sites that were hyping the toxic toy that is a big story today have already made changes. Right at this moment, this site is still selling them in the UK. If the text is still unchanged when you visit, you will get to see how people convinced parents and kids that little beads ‘that magically join with water.’

This just in…THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MAGIC!!!

Here is a US site that has a big RECALL notice up, but still has the promotional copy saying that they are MAGIC!!!

Just because the reactive agent that caused the chemically coated beads to stick together was water, consumers could be lulled into thinking that it was an innocuous toy. Wake up you idiots!!!

Here is the CNN Story on the Toxic Beads: Bindeez / Aqua Dots.