Thursday, 25 October 2007

Can you guess this one?

Brandon, Lauren, Kylie, Robert, and Ashley went trick or treating together. They each wore a different costume (a ghost, a pirate, Spiderman, a witch, and a ghost). At the end of the day, each of them counted the number of pieces of candy they collected. They each collected a different amount of candy (63, 77, 83, 54, and 84).Figure out the costume worn by each person and the amount of candy each person collected.
1. Brandon was not a pirate.
2.The boys (Robert and Brandon) costumes included a pirate and Spiderman.
3. Lauren and Kylie collected a total of 161 pieces of candy.
4. The ghost collected 77 pieces of candy.
5. The pirate collected 83 pieces of candy.
6. Ashley and Lauren collected a total of 140 pieces of candy.
7. The witch collected the most pieces of candy.
Get a treat if you guess!

This is Halloween!

Monday, 15 October 2007

Katie Melua


Ketevan "Katie" Melua is a British-Georgian singer, songwriter and musician. She was born in the country of Georgia, but moved to Northern Ireland at the age of eight and then relocated to England at the age of 14.
In November 2003, at the age of 19, Melua released her first album, Call off the Search, which reached the top of the United Kingdom album charts and sold 1.8 million copies in its first five months of release. Her second album, Piece by Piece, was released in September 2005 and to date has gone platinum four times.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Melua abridged and adapted)

We are reading



Metro Stop Dostoevsky - Travels in Russian Time by Ingrid Bengis


Ingrid Bengis was born in 1944. Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants that travelled to the United States. She is well known by her feminist book Combat in the Erogenous Zone and by her novel Metro Stop Dostoevsky - Travels in Russian Time (2003).

Metro Stop Dostoevsky – Excerpt

It was two o'clock in the morning of February 3, 1990, when the phone rang next to my bed. "I can talk for only two minutes," B said, shouting over the crackling line to make herself heard. "I'm calling from Siberia. I have my passport, and they just gave me an exit visa. There's a ticket available to America from Leningrad this Saturday, or else one for next August. Those are the only two dates available. I have to decide now. Do you still want me to come?"
I didn't have time to ask her why she was calling from Siberia instead of Leningrad, but she probably wouldn't have been able to answer anyway, with the Russian operator listening in. Nor had anything been said about how long she planned to stay. This was her first trip outside of Russia, and I knew from her last letter that she and her husband had just separated. Under those circumstances anything could happen.
By then, of course, I already knew about invitations, knew that you can't just say to someone in Russia, "I'd love to have you come visit me in America," and then forget about it. An invitation is an official gesture, requiring official documents, not just an invitation, but an Invitation, a Priglashenie, presented to the local Russian-government passport office as a request for an external passport, which, if granted, then becomes a request to the American government for a visa to enter the United States, and is followed by another request to the Russian government for an exit visa. Invitations are coveted trophies, particularly since Russians can receive permission to travel to the West only if they have a notarized invitation. People forge invitations, or buy them for astronomical sums, or agree to rent their apartments to people who are willing to give them invitations. Invitations are to Russians what green cards are to foreigners in America. This was true then, and it is still true now. Although many things have changed in Russia, the invitation has not, and Westerners who offer invitations in a general sort of way often have little idea of the leaps of heart produced by the gesture, nor do they have any idea of what they are potentially getting into.

Bengis, Ingrid (2003) Metro Stop Dostoevsky - Travels in Russian Time; North Point Press, pp3-4.

Katie Melua - Crawlin up a hill

Katie Melua - Crawlin up a hill