Finished a painting over the weekend. Well, It’s not quite finished; I’m having Mr Ford over tomorrow for advice on how to make the background a little more interesting in a backgroundish way.
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I was walking with a ghost
I said please, please don’t insist

Here’s a nice bit on About.com dealing with using connectors to make your writing style. Let’s face it: we all have room for improvement and pie.
We’ve covered these all over the course of two semesters, you’ll surely recall. But here they are in a nice little bundle.

Ha-cha-cha-cha.

It is the 299th birthday of Benjamin Franklin, a most remarkable dude. He invented the Franklin stove, which he never patented because he designed it for the good of the people. What a sport.

Of cotton, hemp, spice and holocaust
One of my other favorite films of all times is David Lynch’s Dune. Although he later denounced it, I liked it well enough to read all six books. Sadly, Frank Herbert had his meeting with Shai-Halud back in ’86, leaving the series lacking in closure.

And with this I begin a lengthy ramble…
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AT the VoKi tonight we viewed Polanski’s Chinatown from 1974. It’s as clever, nuanced and intriguing as one might expect from a thirty-year-old.
Jack, Faye, and the whole dang cast do a real bangup performance. It is beautifully shot. And while the story thrives on wheels within wheels and the protagonists hard-boiled PI chic, it all comes crashing down at the end in a beautiful, muddled tragedy one might expect in the real world.
After that one long shot of the escaping white car that far in the distance down the street in Chinatown never makes the turn, we land in a world of needless death, a rush of chaos where we know longer no who was good and bad. The credits rolled and we wondered where justice and resolution were to be found.
We were full of questions that, thankfully, never were answered in a sequel. All we could tell ourselves was to forget it; it’s Chinatown.

ERRATA: Sorry. They did plan a trilogy, which is why Jack refused other PI roles other than that of Jake Gittes. A sequel was filmed in 1990, The Two Jakes and directed by jack himself.

Sample reading comprehension test
Here is a test from a coupla years back. scroll on down to see the text, and then on down again to see the questions and answers.

Note that my handwritten answers are not what your answers should look like; it was hastily written so that I can read it, not that others can read it. Please write more neatly than I did.

Son of a proverbial gun. That dude in class today was absolutely right.

Social Engineering is basically the art of compromising systems not by slick hacks, but rather by acting and playing off the gullibility of personel. here here and here.

Like I said today, who could have thought such an innocuous sounding term could mean something so insidious and nefarious?

I should write a word or two about end o’ semester tests. So here goes.

L1: You have a reading comprehension test. You’ll get a text–probably an article from the internet–related somehow to computers and around 1,000 words in length. You’ll have to answer around a dozen questions in English. I changed my mind and now I would like to give the test on the second to last day so that you can get your Teilnahmeschein on the last day. Okay?

L2: You guys will have both reading and listening tests. Listening involves a recorded text of around 8 minutes length, then around a dozen questions.
Testing takes place in the last two lessons.

Z1: Okay, this is different than what I said last week, so pay attention. The writing test will not be “take home”, but rather you will be given one of three tasks. A) You will need to write a cover letter for a job application where I give you the needed info, B) you will be given a topic and then you will need to write a couple hundred words over it, C) the wildcard task, which is so secret not even I know what it is.
Secondly, you’ll have an oral test. Next week, we’ll pick out about eight topics. Next, we’ll set up appointment times for the students to come in on the last day in groups of three. On the day of the test, each student will draw a topic, then he or she will need to speak about that topic coherently for five to ten minutes. The other two students are also to join in on the discussion.

Refresher: I already have your test ready. We’ll do it on the second to last day. We’ll grade it and hand out Teilnahmesheine on the last day.

China and India both know about underground UFO base in the Himalayan border area deep into the tectonic plates. Now so do we.

According to the few locals people on the Indian and Chinese side, this is where the UFOs are seen coming out of the ground, According to many, the UFO underground bases are in this region and both the Indian and Chinese Government know this very well..

Personally, I feel suspicious when reading a news article that employs a Schulzian double full stop..