by Kevin Burton My career as an English as a Second Language teacher came to an abrupt early end one night under the streetlights outside a small taco shop in Puebla. To tell you how and why that happened, I first turn to BBC writer Nicole Chang, who recently wrote about what speaking …
Category Archives: humor
K&J Points: Our Mercurial, Floating Currency
by Kevin Burton I was born in the heyday of S&H Green Stamps. By God’s grace I have lasted into the era of bitcoin. I learned barter by baseball cards before I ever heard the word barter. I used to get fistfuls of Pesos for teaching Mexican nationals how to speak idiomatic American …
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Belgian Pigs Get Their Groove On
by Kevin Burton Animal lovers, music lovers, rejoice and unite! Scientists in Belgium are investigating a farmer’s claim that different styles of music affect the behavior of his pigs. “Piet Paesmans first noticed the phenomenon when his son started singing a tune in the barn during a sluggish insemination session his sows …
This Is One Plan I Can Execute For Sure
by Kevin Burton Not today, baby. Nope. Not feelin’ it. Yes the clock is tick-tick-ticking just like on 60 Minutes. Yes, I hear it. The winds of progress are whipping as usual, making the pages of my calendar flutter seductively. “Got to get a move on,” both clock and calendar …
These Guys Were Really Into Chocolate
by Kevin Burton More than once I’ve gotten myself into a sticky situation and needed rescuing, but never like this. Two workers were rescued by firefighters after falling into a vat of chocolate at the Mars-Wrigley plant in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania June 9. “It’s a real life Willy Wonka story,” wrote http://www.entrepreneur.com. “At …
Words For Real Life Or For Scrabble
by Kevin Burton “Scrabble” is not a German word meaning “one letter off,” that’s just my little joke. Scrabble also at its essence is not a word game as commonly supposed, but a game of mathematics and strategic placement of little tile soldiers. For the words used in scrabble aren’t words so …
Quibbles And Bits: Lawyers Under Oath?
by Kevin Burton Who’s hungry for some quibbles and bits?!… The cat litter my cats use is called Vibrant Life, which strikes me as funny. Vibrant Life sounds more like a megachurch. Vibrant Life a kind of paper litter, which at first did not strike me as funny. It’s more expensive than …
Loud Arguments About Silent Letters
by Kevin Burton When my parents issued me flash cards before kindergarten, I wondered why the work “knife” had a K in it when it didn’t do anything. All these years later I hear from Merriam-Webster that not just e’s and k’s but all the letters of the English alphabet are silent at …
All The Letters Can Be Silent? Shut Up!
by Kevin Burton Silent E is so famous it has a song, we all know about that one. We know how the letter e at the end of man, changes the word to mane, for example. The silent e turns the a from short to long. But did you know all the …
Quibbles And Bits: Shame On Starbucks?
by Kevin Burton Got some things to say. Don’t want to make a federal, 700-word case of them, just want to have my say as they say in England. Just some things I need to get off my chest. I’ll call them Quibbles And Bits. I’ll serve them up on Page 7 …
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