Have we got ourselves to blame?

An odd question, I know. Blame for what, you are probably thinking. Well, lights the blue touch paper (UK people will understand this) and prepares to stand back, for all this Islamic stuff. Why would I make such a suggestion? Well, today I was doing a class with a whole bunch of budding media relations people and we were examining the origins of the new media relations profession. It transpires, from the article we were reading, that a wise old PR expert considers that the corporate arrogance of the 1990's could well have lit the fuse which led to the attacks on the twin towers. Enron and all the subsequent corporate blunders have also demonstrated that all these mission and vision statements lacked, er, vision. They all said 'we'll do it our way and you'll all be fine'. Not exactly, the 'our way' got certain elements rather annoyed, very annoyed in fact. Certain people felt that progress was destroying their power and culture, fast. Hence the radical reactions and the, shall we call them, 'damage limitation' exercises undertaken by the brainwashed extremists. Like it or not, terrorists often have reasons and, like it or not, they believe in what they are doing and something got them thinking that way.

Could it be that the new 'wild' west has pushed rather too hard in its attempt to globalize the worlds' population and that certain other economies have also progressed so fast that they have scared the wits out of traditionalists? I wonder.

Economic analysts; the ones who say that the market is developing fine; are all well and good, however, I predict that a new type of analyst will appear on the scene in the not too distant future. They will go by the name of 'social analyst' and they will attempt to predict the social consequences of our actions and these people may well suggest that the drive for profits and profitability should perhaps be slowed down a little at times in order to allow a little more integration to take place, to get people used to their new found wealth and to allow more poor people to drag themselves out of poverty, educate themselves and their children and thus reduce the tendency towards extremism.

You tend to notice that the richer a population is, the less religious it tends to be. Bearing this in mind, perhaps if the wealth created by globalization had been distributed a little more efficiently and over a longer space of time we would not have as many willing bomb carriers as we have today. Perhaps.

Hindsight, is, as always, rather useless, it does not save lives or change past opinions. What we need is rather more foresight. Once we, as a race, are able to understand the consequences of our actions we will become a real civilisation. For the moment, we are a bunch of 'short termists' who are in it for a quick buck. The trouble is, this buck is unable to buck traditional trends and prevent situations from literally blowing up in our faces.

Podcast your way to English perfection

You may think from the title of this post that I've finally gone mad. Well, I assure you that this is not the case and that I'm no madder than usual. I digress.

Most of my students here in Milan do not know what a Podcast is. Shock horror. Well, I was rather surprised to find this out anyway, seeing as they are all bright young things and I'm not. They knew what a blog was, but had no idea what Podcasts were. At least, that is, until I told them all about the things.

Now, why would I go about telling my students about Podcasts? Well, simple really. What many students of the English language lack is good comprehension and this makes good communication rather troublesome, as you may imagine. To overcome this slight problem, one needs to up one's exposure to the 'spoken' word. Radio would be good, but it's all in Italian here, as you would expect seeing as I'm in Italy. Internet radio would be good too, only you need to have some form of permanent connection to the world wide web for it to be useful and, unless you happen to be able to afford the cost of keeping your mobile phone hooked up to the web for two hours or so, there is not much you can do to stay connected away from your house/office. Enter the Podcast.

Many of my charges have iPods or similar thingies which will play mp3 files. This means they can listen to Podcasts! Anywhere and everywhere (except in my lessons, please). This means they can develop their comprehension skills. And, the more they understand, the more chance they will have of being able to formulate some reply and thus start communicating. Podcasts also happen to come in a zillion different flavours, so it is easy to find a subject which is personally interesting and you can keep on listening until you find someone you can more or less understand, which may be the only negative aspect of the whole process, as I see it. They are free too – which is a major attraction for about 99.9 percent of the world's population.

All in all they are a wonderful way of getting people to listen to real English and, if they can do it regularly, one can almost guarantee that their English will improve as a result.

Oh, the wonders of the world wide web.

The perils of preparing pasta

Yesterday we had friends round for lunch and being in Italy, we kicked off with pasta. Nothing unusual there, you may think. Well, there was something unusual.

Up to now, I have never really appreciated fresh pasta. If you cook it for the recommended time it often comes out rather leathery, if you try to cook it some more, more often than not it disintegrates, or worse it goes all slimy. Yuck!  But this sticky situation can be avoided. Read more

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