Julian Barnes

Sunday, 23 October 2011

The Sense of an Ending
Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize



Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.

Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm on 15 April 1931. His mother Helmy was a schoolteacher and his father Gösta Tranströmer a journalist. After graduating in 1950 from Södra Latin grammar school he studied literature history and poetics, the history of religion, and psychology at Stockholm University – subjects he took for his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956. After completed academic studies, he was employed as an assistant at the Institution for Psychometrics at Stockholm University in 1957. In the following year, he married Monica Bladh. Between 1960 and 1966, he worked as a psychologist at Roxtuna, a youth correctional facility near Linköping. In 1980 he took a position at the Labour Market Institute (Arbetsmarknadsinstitutet) in Västerås. In 1990 Tranströmer suffered a stroke that left him largely unable to speak.


I leave here one of his poems, where music plays an important role, for you to enjoy.

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

Origin And Evolution Of Life

Friday, 7 October 2011

Prof. Luisa Sousa would like one of our students to translate this interesting video. I leave the challenge here.

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Thursday, 6 October 2011

All that live must die, passing through nature to eternity.(William Shakespeare)

The United kingdom, Great Britain and England

Monday, 3 October 2011

Watch the video to learn about the differences between England and Great Britain or Great Britain and the United Kingdom.

What’s wrong with wearing wool?

Wednesday, 28 September 2011

As with other industries where animals are raised for a profit, the interests of the animals used in the wool industry are rarely considered. Flocks usually consist of thousands of sheep, and individual attention to their needs is virtually impossible. Many people believe that shearing sheep helps animals who might otherwise be burdened with too much wool, but without human interference, sheep grow just enough wool to protect themselves from temperature extremes.

Australia produces about a quarter of all wool used worldwide. Within weeks of birth, lambs' ears are hole-punched, their tails are chopped off, and the males are castrated without anesthetics. Shearers are usually paid by volume, not by the hour, which encourages fast work without regard for the welfare of the sheep. Says one eyewitness: "[T]he shearing shed must be one of the worst places in the world for cruelty to animals … I have seen shearers punch sheep with their shears or their fists until the sheep's nose bled. I have seen sheep with half their faces shorn off …"

In Australia, the most commonly raised sheep are merinos, specifically bred to have wrinkly skin, which means more wool per animal. This unnatural overload of wool causes animals to die of heat exhaustion during hot months, and the wrinkles also collect urine and moisture. Attracted to the moisture, flies lay eggs in the folds of skin, and the hatched maggots can eat the sheep alive. To prevent this so-called "flystrike," Australian ranchers perform a barbaric operation—mulesing—or carving huge strips of flesh off the backs of lambs' legs and around their tails. This is done to cause smooth, scarred skin that won't harbor fly eggs, yet the bloody wounds often get flystrike before they heal. Every year, hundreds of lambs die before the age of 8 weeks from exposure or starvation, and mature sheep die every year from disease, lack of shelter, and neglect. To learn more, visit PETA.org.

Posted by teacher Luisa Sousa

9/11 Tribute

Sunday, 11 September 2011

Today is September 11th and to most of us just another regular Sunday... But for some a day that will be remembered for ever! A decade ago around 8:46 a.m. (PST) a plane crashed into the North Tower of the well-known World Trade Centre, in New York City... People just couldn't believe their eyes... The chaos settled immediately.. There was people running in the streets, running away from the wreckage caused by the plane crash, the fire fighters rushing towards the WTC and people leaping from the higher section of the tower... When it was thought that it couldn't get any worse, 17 minutes later a second plane crashes into the South Tower and the nightmare gets even worse! I don't care about the reasons why this happened, all that matters to me is that people died... a lot of people died, even more people were desolated by the lost of their loved ones. Some died fighting for their lives, others trying to save the human lives that, in that time, seemed so fragile... Just watch this video.. It kind of makes us think about life...

Tiago Ribeiro