I've been airbnb-ing for a couple months now. My current guest, Dean, is an HPER guy who's in town to work with John and Janet on a grant proposal. For those of you who are wondering, HPER looks the same but it's said "Haych P. E. R." The h's are bigger down here.
Wednesday night Dean introduced me to an Australian TV series called "Offspring." It's filmed here in Melbourne and the promo ads for last week's season premiere have been running nonstop for a month already. I quite liked it even thought I didn't catch all the dialogue - he had to translate a few expressions for me. Some he refused to translate; I suspect those were the best ones. We were about halfway through the episode in a long commercial break (they are just as long here as they are in the US - maybe even longer) when Dean asked if I'd seen the John Stewart series on gun control in Australia and the US. I hadn't. He started to describe it, then grabbed his laptop and pulled up the YouTube clips. What proceeded from there was a multicultural media barrage: Offspring, then during the commercial breaks, John Stewart's English pal John Oliver interviewing Americans and Aussies. (Dean stopped the John Stewart bits IMMEDIATELY when Offspring came back on. I think he may have some Gullickson genes.) The John Stewart bit was fantastic - it will take about 20 minutes to watch all three bits if you haven't seen it. Definitely worth the time. Here are the links, in order:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOiOhxujsE
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYbY45rHj8w
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVuspKSjfgA
The next night, I was teaching my last session of a face to face class on "Recent Approaches in Research and Evaluation." Somehow this video series came up. Those of us who had seen it started talking about it, and then someone said - "Put it on the screen!" Since we have projectors, internet and two video screens in the classroom, that's just what I did. In this particular class I've got students from Singapore, the Philippines, Chile, and Australia, from all different professional sectors and ranging in age from probably early 30s to early 50s. They were all hooting with laughter watching these videos. After each segment I'd say, "You're sure it's ok to keep watching?" "YES!" I managed to bring it back to evaluation at the end by talking about the whole series as a way of presenting evaluative findings - I was pretty pleased that I pulled that out of my hat as a way to justify 20 minutes of John Stewart.
Today I got an email from one of the non-Aussies in that class, who is a lovely, very serious student, and speaks precise English. This was her post script: "P.S. Many thanks for sending us the group photo for our RARE class! Whoop dee do!" (Whoop de do appears in Part 2, if I remember correctly.) Some things are funny no matter what your first language is.
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