I wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!

Bruce Springsteen - Blue Christmas - Song from 'The Promise'

Tony Hawk on Following Your Passion

'Follow your passion' is Tony Hawk's unspoken motto, but the entrepreneur and skateboard icon also realized that it takes more than that to find success.

In this 'Trep Talk Extra, Hawk shares insight on what following a passion really meant to him when it came to starting a business.

Tony Hawk's adventure sports empire includes skateboard company Birdhouse Projects, the Hawk Clothing line, a wildly popular video game series, and his production company 900 Films that teamed with YouTube this year to launch the Ride Channel. He has also donated more than $4 million to nearly 500 skatepark projects throughout the country through the Tony Hawk Foundation.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/video/223509#ixzz2lZG8XpVt

Johnson: Don't fear the Tweeter

PUBLIC discussions about language often include worried questions about the role of technology on "kids these days". After observing the rampant rise of texting, e-chatting and whatnot, the questioner will then wonder whether the youths of today are forgetting how to write properly.

Johnson has seen a lot of moral panic around this concern, but little hard evidence. This is because most people have an innate sense of occasion with language. Just as you would not use the word "ain't" in a job interview, most pupils know not to write about Hamlet's "2B or not 2B" soliloquy in term papers. Johnson suspects that, once again, the kids are going to be all right.

But this is not to say that technology isn't changing the language. One of the most obvious ways is of course the presence of new vocabulary. (Nobody needed to say "e-mail" 30 years ago or "tweet" ten years ago.) Another change is the proliferation of acronyms. These are nothing new, but chat-speak has lead to a proliferation of LOL, WTF, BRB, G2G and so on. Indeed they are being coined and spread faster than ever before.

Such acronyms rise so fast that they can cause confusion. "LOL" originally meant "laughing out loud", but now it merely conveys a quick, world-weary smirk. Acronyms are also making the jump to speech. Sarah Palin, briefly an American political celebrity, used "WTF" on television. This also helps illustrate the acronym's subtle change in meaning, as Ms Palin, a family-values conservative, would never have said "what the fuck" on the air.

But this is hardly the debasement of the language. When words and phrases mutate, they do so in order to fill some niche that needs filling. Often, that change involves taking a formerly powerful word or phrase ("awesome", "oh my god", "what the fuck") and turning it into a wry comment ("If you could stop tapping your foot, that would be awesome"; "My boss was in a weird mood all morning and I was like WTF?" "OMG this cheesecake is amazing.") This is why people actually speak "OMG" and "LOL" out loud, though they are no shorter than the phrases they replace. ("WTF" takes even longer to say than "what the fuck".) As organisms adapt to ecological niches, so do new bits of language.

What are the long-term effects of all this? We might see language littered with ever more phrases born of keyboard brevity. Another intriguing possibility involves the rise and spread of speech-to-text technology. One quirk of these systems is that they require speakers to enunciate punctuation and other typographical manoeuvres. (Eg: "Are you coming tonight question mark; New paragraph on another point, I'd like to mention that...") As speech recognition software improves, we might go from language designed for a tiny keyboards entering our speech (people speaking "OMG" out loud), to language designed for speech recognition software entering our speech (people speaking "new paragraph" out loud to signal a change in topic). Such spoken punctuation would probably find the same special niche function as "WTF" and "LOL" have today. "Wow, I can't wait to read your screenplay exclamation point" would mean something quite different from "Wow, I can't wait to read your screenplay!"—namely, semi-ironic detachment.

Long-term language change is inevitable. People need to convey a wide range of emotions, and they will always find the words to do so, even if formerly powerful words ("awesome") and phrases ("oh my God") are debased. Technology may speed up this process (in ways that can be unsettling to some), but it also allows people (and not just the young) to be inventive and experimental, perhaps more than ever before. Only dead languages never change.

http://www.economist.com/blogs

The Sartorialist fashion blog by Scott Schuman

La entrada de hoy es una entrevista corta en la que Scott Schuman habla de su trabajo, de cómo empezó su interés por la fotografía, la moda y sobre su blog.

Espero que la disfrutéis, sobre todo mi alumnos que trabajan en empresas de moda.

¡Un saludo a todos!

10 Tips to improve your English

1- Don’t translate into English from your own language. Think in English to improve your fluency.

2- Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Be confident. People can only correct your mistakes when they hear you make them.

3- Surround yourself in English. Put yourself in an all English speaking environment where you can learn passively. The best way to learn is through speaking.

4- Practise every day. Make yourself a study plan. Decide how much time a week you are going to spend studying and stick to it. Establish a routine.

5- Practise the 4 core skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. They all need to be worked on for you to improve.

6- Give yourself a long term goal. Focus on working towards it.

7- Give yourself short term goals too and reward yourself when you achieve each one.

8- Watch DVDs rather than TV. It’s better to use something that you can watch over again to catch information you might have missed the first time.

9- Use your intuition. Go with your gut feeling, you’ll be surprised how often your first guess is the right guess. Like we said before, be confident.

10- Enjoy it! We learn more when we are having fun!

Changing lifestyle/Finding Balance by Garance Doré

Oh, of course it’s nice to eat everything you want.

In all my “Feel Good Books” and in tons of magazines I come across, I’m realizing it’s totally in right now to think that… Diets are in the past. Now you have to satiate your senses and eat until you’re full, that’s it, and that’s what’s most important.

All in all, I think it’s a good start.

It helped me to stop blaming myself in the months that followed my “crisis”. It helped me to stop blaming myself, but it also helped me a lot to continue not being able to button my jeans.

But really, the problem is that curves don’t come evenly. We’re not all like Crystal Renn, and gaining weight harmoniously… That’s luck that I just don’t have.

Life’s a bitch.

So, June arrived and I was in Paris at the Café de Flore with Sophie. We were drinking a glass of rosé and I’m watching her munch down chip after chip. She was loving each one as she always does and just as it always is, her silhouette was perfect.

And as always, I was telling her my whole life story, including my adventures with weight.

I asked her how she stays so perfect even after 40 years old rolled on by. She told me her trick.

And something clicked.

It’s not what she ate that inspired me… No, what got me was that she figured out how to really nourish herself. With her tastes, her desires, and even her lifestyle. For example, she has lunch all the time at Flore, so she’s integrated their menu into how she eats.

And right after she finished telling me all about that, she told me something that just cracked me up…

“And of course, you forget that the word dessert ever existed.”

No, no. That’s so impossible for me. No, no no no. I have my rules. And my rules, they’re as hard as iron… They’re stuff like :

• Every breakfast has to consist of toast with butter. Real salted butter. And honey, of course.
• And bread. Every meal has to have bread. My Papa taught me that just by teaching me to set the table (“Where’s the water? And the bread? Where’s the bread!?”)
• Life is not worth living without a glass of wine and 12 cups of coffee a day.
• Life isn’t worth living without snacks. And a snack is defined as a treat you can dunk in your tea.
• Every meal has to finish with something sweet, otherwise it’s not a real meal, and therefore not real life.

Oh yeah, I’ve got some other words to live by:

• Every cool self-respecting chick doesn’t exercise, because exercise is not cool. Have you ever seen Charlotte Gainsbourg exercising ? No !

And yet when Sophie talked to me about the way she feeds herself, her simplicity and groundedness inspired me.

I took a nice hard look at my “rules” and realized they were all pretty stupid.

So right then, I started changing things.

I started with giving up bread. Not completely, mind you, but in the past, I was the girl in the restaurant who finished the entire basket of bread before the appetizers arrived… And I eat out all the time.

I stopped eating desserts. Not all desserts, just mainly cakes and ice cream. I wanted to see what it felt like to end a meal without something sweet.

And the two were the same. It’s a little tough in the beginning, then you get used to it, and then you end up completely forgetting to look at the dessert menu.

After a few weeks, that’s what I did. But there would always be exceptions, because exceptions are part of life. I stayed cool about them.

I right away felt positive effects. And not only on my waistline but also with my self-image. I could eat differently without being totally frustrated. Realizing my “rules” weren’t anything more but bad habits to hide behind, not really understanding why I needed to change a system that worked up until then – even a system as chaotic as the one I had.

And I think I finally understood that if I gained some weight, it was my body telling me that it was tired of absorbing my excesses. I had to see it coming…. I’ve always eaten whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. After 30 hit, the machine got a little cranky. Metabolism just doesn’t deal with your chocolate pudding or your 3rd glass of wine the way it used to.

It made me actually stop and think about my health. Gaining weight, for me, it was never just a cosmetic problem or about pride or fashion.

There is a lot of type II diabetes in my family. And with my dumb rules, it was dangling right in front of my face.

Finding encouragement in my progress, I read a whole bunch of books on nutrition and applied some new principles that seemed to work for me. I revamped my entire way of eating.

No, it wasn’t following some diet. No, not counting calories. And it wasn’t stopping eating what I love to eat.

It was just harmonizing my way of eating with my tastes and my lifestyle. And that’s really personal. No one else can do that for you, and it would serve no purpose whatsoever if I told you what I’ve been eating. It suits no one but myself.

It’s been three months since this has clicked for me. Three months isn’t a long time, and I’m still fumbling around with how to feed myself. I’m changing slowly, one thing at a time.

I’m slowly adapting to where I live : if New York is hell to start with, you can quickly realize that there are tons of delicious healthy options on every corner.

I have a giant Whole Foods just down the street and an awesome Farmer’s Market every other day.

This weekend, locked in the house because the not so hurricane, I cooked. It’d been months since I’d fired up the stove. I forgot how nice it is.

I don’t eat toast and butter every morning anymore. That said, it’d be dumb to try to eat like a Frenchie here. Nothing tastes the same. Not even the French wine, it’s somehow too sweet… If you want a good red, you really have to go looking.

By the way, I still drink a glass of wine every day. Just one, except, you know, exceptions.

And I lost weight.

I’m far from being New York Skinny and that’s not at all my goal, but I got back to the weight I knew and the weight I feel most myself.

Now my friends ask me to be their weight-loss coach, that they’re inspired by me… And it just cracks me up.

Seriously? Me?

It’s funny… I never thought myself capable of change. And still, I wonder if I’m just dreaming here. I feel such a strong sense of balance and I hope to continue this way the rest of my life.

—-

But the craziest thing that I found, I’ll tell you about next time!

Top English Learning Sites

Newsy

• Multi-source online video news

• 
  
• BBC Learning English
  Easily the best online English learning site
• 
  
• Bell English Online
• 
  
• About.com
• 
  
• Australia Network - Learning English
• 
  
• British Council - LearnEnglish
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• EnglishCentral
• 
  
• EnglishClub.com
• 
  
• ESL Resources by Michelle Henry
  Fantastic collection of resources
• 
  
• Lyrics Training
• Learn English through songs
• 
  
• Espresso English
• Free 10-minute English lessons
• 
  
• Road to Grammar
  Excellent resource for teachers and students
• 
  
• VOA News Learning English: The Classroom