We're just a few days ahead the beginning of the school year! Let's get started each day of this week with a different flavour, so as to prepare all the back to school activities in a much more pleasant British like ambience!
Doctor Who is a British science fiction TV show, aired for the first time in 1963, starring William Hartnell as the first Doctor. This show is a “must watch” for all the sci-fi addicts! I haven’t watched any episodes from the “Classic Era” of Who. I started watching the show from the series aired in 2005, starring Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor. The main character, the Doctor, is a many hundred years old Time Lord from Gallifrey.
There was a great war, The Time War, between the Time Lords and the Daleks. In order to protect the universe from the Daleks and his own people, the Doctor ran away in the TARDIS and time-locked the war, leaving his home and travelling through time and space, saving civilizations.
Until now, the Doctor has regenerated ten times, each regeneration meaning a change in his appearance and consequently meaning a change in the cast. From William Hartnell, going through Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant, to Matt Smith (currently performing the part), eleven people have played the same character in the show.
The TARDIS (he stole it, but we don’t talk about that, shhh) is the most important object the Doctor owns, along with his sonic screwdriver. The TARDIS, Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, is a spaceship that looks like a blue phone box and it’s “bigger and the inside” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvnKXOGYKM8 ). The TARDIS has a soul and it has been shown a human equivalent of her.
Well, now it’s time to talk about the companions! Whilst travelling, the Doctor makes friends who usually end up travelling with him for a while. He has had several companions, some being left behind, other leaving him or even dying. He tries to keep them safe, as he does with everyone one he meets, but as referred by one of his companions, he “can’t save everyone”.
My favourite companions are Rose, Captain Jack Harkness, The Ponds (Amy and Rory) and River Song. Rose is a lovely girl from Cardiff that is saved by the Doctor from living mannequins. She falls in love with the Doctor and the Doctor falls in love with her, but she ends stuck in a parallel universe, away from him. Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman, is an impossible person! He died in one episode, but Rose brought him back to life and somehow, from that moment, he became immortal. Amy and Rory: the girl who waited and the Roman. They meet the Doctor the day before their wedding and travel with him for a long time. Amy becomes the Doctor’s best friend. They were caught by the Weeping Angels and sent back in time, leaving the Doctor. River Song, well, she’s a tricky one! River is Amy and Rory’s daughter, trained to kill the Doctor, married to him and named after herself. Well, never apply logic to Doctor Who! I could tell everything thing about the companions, but that’d take a long time!
It’s time to talk about the Doctor’s foes: The Daleks. They are the greatest enemies of the Doctor. They were made to hate and destroy, but, personally, I think they’re adorable! He has other enemies, like the Cybermen and the Master, but the Daleks are the most important ones.
And so, I’m a big fan of Doctor Who which means that I could talk forever about it, instead, here’s a fan made video that everyone should watch:
London, sucj a spellbound city, has only one flaw to me: RAIN! Apart from
the typical 'lovely weather for ducks', it is a fascinating place to
visit and, eventually, live. Yet, the Brits, with their unique sense
of humour, have come up with a way to control the rain. If you visit the
Barbican Centre, you'll figure out what I'm talking about. A place not to miss, next time I fly to the city Samuel Johnson once quoted as:'When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life'.
"Visitors walk through an art installation called the Rain Room in The Curve gallery at the Barbican Centre in London. The Rain Room is a 100 square metre field of falling water which visitors are invited to walk into. Sensors detect where visitors are standing, and the rain stops around them, giving them an experience of how it might feel to control the rain.The installation opened to the public in The Curve gallery at the Barbican Centre in London on October 4, and is free." In, telegraph.co.uk
Berners Lee is the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. Timothy John Berners Lee was born on 8 June 1955 and grew up in London. He studied physics at Oxford University and became a software engineer. In 1980, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, he first described the concept of a global system, based on the concept of 'hypertext', that would allow researchers anywhere to share information. He also built a prototype called 'Enquire'. In 1984, Berners Lee's returned to CERN, which was also home to a major European Internet node. In 1989, Berners Lee published a paper called 'Information Management: A Proposal' in which he married up hypertext with the Internet, to create a system for sharing and distributing information not just within a company, but globally. He named it the World Wide Web. He also created the first web browser and editor. The world's first website, http://info.cern.ch, was launched on 6 August 1991. It explained the World Wide Web concept and gave users an introduction to getting started with their own websites. In 1994, Berners Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. He has served as director of the consortium since then. He also works as a senior research scientist at LCS which has now become the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In spite of being the WWW inventor, Berners Lee is not a pop star of the technology. In his own words: 'I don't need to be a celebrity!' Watch the VIDEO, in which he talks with BBC commentator Dave Lee about the NBC journalists who don't know who he is, when he appears in the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. 'This is for everyone', Berners-Lee says in a tweet as London 2012 organisers honour the inventor of the web in the Olympic Games opening extravaganza. Read the newsreport HERE, as well as the VIDEO of him live-tweeting during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, with a NeXT Cube by his side. In case you're interested, you can follow Berners Lee on twitter: https://twitter.com/timberners_lee.
In spite of speaking the same language, there's an ongoing rivalry between the two nationalities, which has its roots in the timeline of History. I found a very interesting text in the Urban Dictionary that reports what's going on between the Brits and the Yankees. By the way, the Brits, also referred to as the British, Britons, or informally as Brits or Britishers, are citizens or natives of the United Kingdom; whereas the term Yankee, sometimes shortened to Yank, has several interrelated meanings, referring to people from the United States. I must add that outside the United States, Yankee is slang for anyone from the United States. The truncated form 'Yank' is especially popular among Britons, and may sometimes be considered offensive or disapproving.
Alright people. I am getting sick and tired of this whole 'England vs America' thing. The English need to stop insulting Americans. And Americans need to stop insulting the English.
1. England is not full of gay, posh, snobby, tea-drinking people with awful teeth. Many of us are perfectly normal. And not all Americans are fat, mcdonalds guzzling, greedy, lazy slobs.
2. If you try, you CAN get along. I'm English, my boyfriend is American, and I love him a lot.
3. Don't have a go at each other because of wars, sports or anything like that. America beat England, England beat America. You're supposed to be allies?
4. Stop calling me 'British, European or Eastern' And I'll stop calling you a 'Yank.' England, is not Britain. Britain consists of Northern Ireland (not the Republic), Wales, Scotland and England. I am British, but I am not technically from Britain, I am from England.
5. I may sound like I'm bashing America here. But I'm not. Please, please, please. Don't correct me when I spell color 'colour', don't tell me 'It's mom, not mum' Don't tell me that it's 'Soccer, not football.' And don't, don't, don't tell me 'You have a weird accent.' Because you are speaking ENGLISH, folks, and I'm afraid you have a much stranger accent to me. Although many English accents are strange, most of ours are normal enough. (...) Read more @England vs America
I couldn't finish this post without publishing the video 'Englishman in New York'. This is a song by Sting, from his 1987 album 'Nothing Like the Sun'. The 'Englishman' in question is the famous eccentric and gay icon Quentin Crisp. Sting wrote the song not long after Crisp moved from London to an apartment in New York's Bowery. Crisp had remarked jokingly to the musician '...that he looked forward to receiving his naturalization papers so that he could commit a crime and not be deported.' The song illustrates many of the contrasts between the British and the American: 'Ooh, I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien, I'm an Englishman in New York. You drink coffee, I take tea, my dear...'
'Keep Calm and Carry On' is a well-known public safety poster issued by the British government during World War II. On the web, the poster has inspired a series of image macros centered around the phrasal template 'Keep Calm and X'.
found pic @knowyourmeme.com
The following video is a short film that tells the story behind the iconic 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster. From its creation to its rediscovery and meteoric rise to global icon.
found pic @telegraph.co.uk
SO, 'KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON', NEVERTHELESS IT'S MONDAY!...
