Incredible Amazing Awesome Fantastic Super Great

One of the most challenging things in teaching a foreign language is to widen a student's vocabulary, especially to get them to use a bigger variety of adjectives. Once they have learned 'good', 'nice' and 'interesting' they seem to be absolutely satisfied with the choice of adjectives they have. Sometimes I 'ban' these words for one or two lessons to make my students leave the comfort and ease of the 'nice-good-interesting' territory. An advanced student of mine (no doubt remembering this struggle for synonyms) has recently showed me a video and asked me if this was what I had meant by using as many synonyms as possible. What could I have said? Well, it seems overdoing it a bit, but yes, the message gets delivered here. You could even say that it gets hammered in, I suppose. Especially if you use each of them ten times.

What is the punch line?

Autumn tree (picture from here)

November. The crows are gathering on the yellow-leaved or barren trees. There is still a bit of sunshine occasionally but the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer. It is easier to be depressed at this time of year so a good joke can come in handy . I came across this one in a collection of Scottish Jokes. Read the joke and find out a good punch line for it. Feel free to post it as a comment if you want to share your ideas. The original punch line will be published among the comments of this entry, early next week.













A dram of whisky (picture from here)

The joke: Duncan McSporran, the barman in a small village, had a new customer who was very regular in his habits. Every day he would come into the pub and order three drams of whisky. After a while, Duncan asked him why he did it that way.
The man said: -"I have two brothers. One of them lives in Canada, the other in Australia. We never see each other so we have a special way of drinking: we each have one for ourselves and one for each of the other two. That way we feel that we are still in touch."
One day, the man came in and ordered only two whiskies. He drank them in the usual way and was about to go when Duncan stopped him with the words: -"I hope nothing has happened to one of your brothers."
The man turned and said: -"No, no. They are both fine."
-"But you only had two whiskies," said Duncan.
-"Oh, that! ( --- PUNCH LINE HERE --- ) " said the man.

Strange and Beautiful Pictures of Mars

This might as well be taken as another picture puzzle, if you wish. Only this time the solution will be given instantly.













( picture from here )

At first glance, I thought this was a tattoo on somebody's ...well... something. Then the more I looked at it the less I knew what I was actually looking at. I was quite relieved to find out that I was actually staring at another planet. That should explain this feeling of uncertainty and bewilderment, shouldn't it?
The picture shows a Martian dune and the dark lines (which I took for the tattoo) were left by the passages of dust devils.

So, who took this picture and why? In 2005, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was sent to Mars to study the history of water on the planet. According to NASA's overview of the MRO, the orbiter has a camera which can identify objects as big as a dinner table from the orbiting distance of 300 kilometers. Last week, a photography site called 'The Big Picture' published 35 spellbinding pictures that the HiRISE (MRO's high resolution camera) had taken of the Martian surface. Below the pictures you can see the explanations of the different formations and a direct link to Google Mars in case you feel like tagging the location for your next holiday. If you would like to see how the boundaries of art and science are washed away by these superb pictures visit their picture series here.

And now I wanted to embed the David Bowie song, 'Life on Mars?' here. However, the best version is not possible to embed. You can still listen to it and watch it following the link. What I am going to put up here instead is the (in my opinion:) best cover of that song by Seu Jorge. It is in Portuguese but writing of Mars and other strange things I thought once I can make an exception. You can find an English translation here.

Two Sisters in the Shed

Here is the new puzzle for you to think about:

On a nice spring day, two sisters decided to clean out the old shed in their garden. It was full of old, unused bikes, yellow newspapers, big, wooden boxes, roller skates, ragged clothes, worn-out shoes, rubber boots, dried bats, spider webs... so when they had finished the work they were totally exhausted. However, one of the sisters had been more willing to do the dusty and dirty jobs than the other one so she ended up with a dirty face while the other's face remained more or less clean. The sister with the clean face went and washed her face but the girl with the dirty face did not go to have a wash. Why?















The shed after the cleaning (picture from here)




------- Don't read on if you don't need help with the puzzle ------


Clue: How can you tell normally that your face needs washing if nobody tells you so? What if the two girls couldn't find the everyday tool for that? What would they think if they looked at each other?