GOD SAVE OUR AMAZING NICE QUEEN, VICTORIA WINSOR

Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have visited Buckingham Palace. They have been invited to celebrate Victoria Winsor's birthday, and they have spent a nice afternoon in one of the most popular English places.

Happy Birthday, Victoria!

God save our Winsor Queen!

Before the party, the family has studied some English grammar with the Adverbs of Frequency. They have been talking about Victorian age and serial killers like Jack The Ripper and the controversial Enriqueta Martí.

More information: Adverbs of Frequency

Download Medicine & Parts of the Body

Play Who is Who (Star Wars Version)

Buckingham Palace is a London royal residence and the administrative headquarters of the monarch of the United Kingdom. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is often at the centre of state occasions and royal hospitality. It has been a focal point for the British people at times of national rejoicing and mourning.

Originally known as Buckingham House, the building at the core of today's palace was a large townhouse built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703 on a site that had been in private ownership for at least 150 years. 

It was acquired by King George III in 1761 as a private residence for Queen Charlotte and became known as The Queen's House. During the 19th century it was enlarged by architects John Nash and Edward Blore, who constructed three wings around a central courtyard. 

Buckingham Palace became the London residence of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the East Front, which contains the well-known balcony on which the royal family traditionally appears to greet crowds. A German bomb destroyed the palace chapel during the Second World War; the Queen's Gallery was built on the site and opened to the public in 1962 to exhibit works of art from the Royal Collection.

The original early-19th-century interior designs, many of which survive, include widespread use of brightly coloured scagliola and blue and pink lapis, on the advice of Sir Charles Long. King Edward VII oversaw a partial redecoration in a Belle Époque cream and gold colour scheme. Many smaller reception rooms are furnished in the Chinese regency style with furniture and fittings brought from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and from Carlton House. The palace has 775 rooms, and the garden is the largest private garden in London. The state rooms, used for official and state entertaining, are open to the public each year for most of August and September and on some days in winter and spring.

In the Middle Ages, the site of the future palace formed part of the Manor of Ebury (also called Eia). The marshy ground was watered by the river Tyburn, which still flows below the courtyard and south wing of the palace. Where the river was fordable (at Cow Ford), the village of Eye Cross grew. Ownership of the site changed hands many times; owners included Edward the Confessor and Edith of Wessex in late Saxon times, and, after the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror. William gave the site to Geoffrey de Mandeville, who bequeathed it to the monks of Westminster Abbey.

In 1531, Henry VIII acquired the Hospital of St James, which became St James's Palace, from Eton College, and in 1536 he took the Manor of Ebury from Westminster Abbey. These transfers brought the site of Buckingham Palace back into royal hands for the first time since William the Conqueror had given it away almost 500 years earlier.

Various owners leased it from royal landlords, and the freehold was the subject of frenzied speculation during the 17th century. By then, the old village of Eye Cross had long since fallen into decay, and the area was mostly wasteland. Needing money, James VI and I sold off part of the Crown freehold but retained part of the site on which he established 1.6 ha mulberry garden for the production of silk. 

Clement Walker in Anarchia Anglicana (1649) refers to new-erected sodoms and spintries at the Mulberry Garden at S. James's; this suggests it may have been a place of debauchery. Eventually, in the late 17th century, the freehold was inherited from the property tycoon Sir Hugh Audley by the great heiress Mary Davies.

More information: Buckingham Palace

The palace is not safe 
when the cottage is not happy.

Benjamin Disraeli

ENJOYING THE BRITISH MUSEUM WITH THE WEASLEYS

Today, The Weasleys & The Grandma have visited the British Museum, a must in this city. They have spent a wonderful day between masterpieces of all time.

Before visiting this amazing place, the family has been practising Present Simple and the Adverbs of Frequency.

More information: AoF

The British Museum is a public institution dedicated to human history, art and culture and it is considered one of the most important museums of the world thanks to its more than two hundred thirty million objects.

The British Museum opened on a day like today in 1759 and The Grandma wants to commemorate this event talking about the Museum and its history.

The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury area of London, United Kingdom, is a public institution dedicated to human history, art and culture. Its permanent collection of some eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence, having been widely sourced during the era of the British Empire. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. It was the first public national museum in the world.

More information: British Musem

The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane.

It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. Its expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of expanding British colonisation and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881.

In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions.

Its ownership of some of its most famous objects originating in other countries is disputed and remains the subject of international controversy, most notably in the case of the Parthenon Marbles.

Although today principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities, the British Museum was founded as a universal museum. Its foundations lie in the will of the Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), a London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster.

During the course of his lifetime, and particularly after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter, Sloane gathered a large collection of curiosities and, not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II, for the nation, for a sum of £20,000. At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.

On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his Royal Assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum. The British Museum Act 1753 also added two other libraries to the Sloane collection, namely the Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton, dating back to Elizabethan times, and the Harleian Library, the collection of the Earls of Oxford. They were joined in 1757 by the Old Royal Library, now the Royal manuscripts, assembled by various British monarchs. Together these four foundation collections included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf.

More information: British Museum-Youtube

The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum -national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public and aiming to collect everything.

Sloane's collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests. The addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element and meant that the British Museum now became both National Museum and library.

By the last years of the 19th century, The British Museum's collections had increased to the extent that its building was no longer large enough. In 1895 the trustees purchased the 69 houses surrounding the museum with the intention of demolishing them and building around the west, north and east sides of the museum. The first stage was the construction of the northern wing beginning 1906.

All the while, the collections kept growing. Emil Torday collected in Central Africa, Aurel Stein in Central Asia, D.G. Hogarth, Leonard Woolley and T. E. Lawrence excavated at Carchemish.

Around this time, the American collector and philanthropist J Pierpont Morgan donated a substantial number of objects to the museum, including William Greenwell's collection of prehistoric artefacts from across Europe which he had purchased for £10,000 in 1908. Morgan had also acquired a major part of Sir John Evans's coin collection, which was later sold to the museum by his son John Pierpont Morgan Junior in 1915.

In 1918, because of the threat of wartime bombing, some objects were evacuated via the London Post Office Railway to Holborn, the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) and a country house near Malvern.

On the return of antiquities from wartime storage in 1919 some objects were found to have deteriorated. A conservation laboratory was set up in May 1920 and became a permanent department in 1931. It is today the oldest in continuous existence. In 1923, the British Museum welcomed over one million visitors.

Today the museum no longer houses collections of natural history, and the books and manuscripts it once held now form part of the independent British Library.

More information: Smithsonian

The museum nevertheless preserves its universality in its collections of artefacts representing the cultures of the world, ancient and modern. The original 1753 collection has grown to over 13 million objects at the British Museum, 70 million at the Natural History Museum and 150 million at the British Library.

The Round Reading Room, which was designed by the architect Sydney Smirke, opened in 1857. For almost 150 years researchers came here to consult the museum's vast library. The Reading Room closed in 1997 when the national library (the British Library) moved to a new building at St Pancras. Today it has been transformed into the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Centre.

This department covers all levels of education, from casual visitors, schools, degree level and beyond. The museum's various libraries hold in excess of 350,000 books, journals and pamphlets covering all areas of the museum's collection.

Also the general museum archives which date from its foundation in 1753 are overseen by this department; the individual departments have their own separate archives and libraries covering their various areas of responsibility, which can be consulted by the public on application.

The Anthropology Library is especially large, with 120,000 volumes. However, the Paul Hamlyn Library, which had become the central reference library of the British Museum and the only library there freely open to the general public, closed permanently in August 2011. The website and online database of the collection also provide increasing amounts of information.

It is a point of controversy whether museums should be allowed to possess artefacts taken from other countries, and the British Museum is a notable target for criticism.

The Elgin Marbles, Benin Bronzes, Ethiopian Tabots and the Rosetta Stone are among the most disputed objects in its collections, and organisations have been formed demanding the return of these artefacts to their native countries of Greece, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt respectively. Parthenon Marbles claimed by Greece were also claimed by UNESCO among others for restitution. From 1801 to 1812, Elgin's agents took about half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from the Propylaea and Erechtheum.

In recent years, controversies pertaining to reparation of artefacts taken from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing during the Anglo-French invasion of China in 1860 have also begun to surface. Victor Hugo condemned the French and British for their plundering.

More information: The Culture Trip

The British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others, have been asked since 2009 to open their archives for investigation by a team of Chinese investigators as a part of an international mission to document lost national treasures. However, there have been fears that the United Kingdom may be asked to return these treasures.

The British Museum has refused to return these artefacts, stating that the restitutionist premise, that whatever was made in a country must return to an original geographical site, would empty both the British Museum and the other great museums of the world.

The museum has also argued that the British Museum Act of 1963 legally prevents any object from leaving its collection once it has entered it. Nevertheless, it has returned items such as the Tasmanian Ashes after a 20-year-long battle with Australia.

The British Museum continues to assert that it is an appropriate custodian and has an inalienable right to its disputed artefacts under British law.

In 2016, the British Museum moved its bag searches to marquees in the front courtyard and beside the rear entrance. This has been criticised by heritage groups as out-of-character with the historic building. The British Museum clarified that the change was purely logistical to save space in the main museum entrance and did not reflect any escalation in threat.

More information: My Modern Met

 

 

 It is a standing source of astonishment

and amusement to visitors that the British Museum

has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about

the world as seen from Britain rather than a history

focused on these islands.

Neil MacGregor

MONOPOLY, SOME PROPERTIES FOR PERLA GRANGER

Another day in New York and The Grangers and The Grandma have continued their formation in English.

They have studied the Adverbs of Frequency, and they have been buying some properties for Perla, who is going to start a new project as a prospector working for Lady Gaga.

Finally, they have continuing reading Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost.

 

+Info: Adverbs of Frequency

Monopoly is a multi-player economics-themed board game. In the game, players roll two dice to move around the game board, buying and trading properties, and developing them with houses and hotels. Players collect rent from their opponents, with the goal being to drive them into bankruptcy.

Money can also be gained or lost through Chance and Community Chest cards, and tax squares. Players receive a stipend every time they pass Go, and can end up in jail, from which they cannot move until they have met one of three conditions.

The game has numerous house rules, and hundreds of different editions exist, as well as many spin-offs and related media. 

Monopoly has become a part of international popular culture, having been licensed locally in more than 103 countries and printed in more than 37 languages.

Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game created by Lizzie Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth, and to promote the economic theories of Henry George -in particular his ideas about taxation.

The Landlord's Game had two sets of rules originally, one with taxation and another on which the current rules are mainly based. When Monopoly was first published by Parker Brothers in 1935, it did not include the less capitalistic taxation rule, which resulted in a more aggressive game.

Parker Brothers bought the game's copyrights from Darrow. When the company learned Darrow was not the sole inventor of the game, it bought the rights to Magie's patent for $500.

Parker Brothers began marketing the game on November 5, 1935. Cartoonist F. O. Alexander contributed the design. U. S. patent number US 2026082 A was issued to Charles Darrow on December 31, 1935, for the game board design and was assigned to Parker Brothers Inc. 

The original version of the game in this format was based on the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Parker Brothers was eventually absorbed into Hasbro in 1991. The game is named after the economic concept of monopoly -the domination of a market by a single entity.

More information: The Guardian

 I get more upset at losing at other things than chess.
I always get upset when I lose at Monopoly.

Magnus Carlsen

MEET THE BISHOPS, NEW ADVENTURES IN CASTELLDEFELS

Today, The Grandma has started a new adventure in Castelldefels.

 

Castelldefels is a Catalan municipality in the Baix Llobregat comarca, in the province of Barcelona, and a suburban town of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona.

She has met new partners, The Bishops, a small group with a lot of interest in Commercial English.

After the introductions, they have done a little test to know their level and they have reviewed concepts like Numbers and Letters, Present Simple vs Present Continuous, Adverbs of Frequency and Adverbs of Manner.

Welcome Bishops to this new adventure. Enjoy and participate!

More information: Numbers & Letters

More information: Present Simple vs Present Continuous

More information: Adverbs of Frequency

More information: Adverbs of Manner

A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution.

In traditional Christianity, bishops claim apostolic succession, a direct historical lineage dating back to the original Twelve Apostles or Saint Paul.

The bishops are by doctrine understood as those who possess the full priesthood given by Jesus Christ, and therefore may ordain other clergy, including other bishops. A person ordained as a deacon, priest, and then bishop is understood to hold the fullness of the (ministerial) priesthood, given responsibility by Christ to govern, teach, and sanctify the Body of Christ. Priests, deacons and lay ministers co-operate and assist their bishops in pastoral ministry.

Some Pentecostal and other protestant churches have bishops who oversee congregations, though they do not claim apostolic succession.

The English term bishop derives from the Greek word ἐπίσκοπος epískopos, meaning overseer in Greek, the early language of the Christian Church. However, the term epískopos did not originate in Christianity. In Greek literature, the term had been used for several centuries before the advent of Christianity. It later transformed into the Latin episcopus, Old English biscop, Middle English bisshop and lastly bishop.

In the early Christian era the term was not always clearly distinguished from presbýteros, literally elder or senior, origin of the modern English word priest, but is used in the sense of the order or office of bishop, distinct from that of presbyter, in the writings attributed to Ignatius of Antioch.

More information: Britannica

English language is the most universal language in history,
way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar.
It's the most punderful language
because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass
that makes a lingo good for punning.

Richard Lederer

'THE CANTERVILLE GHOST', A CRITICISM OF A WAY OF LIFE

Old memories of Sant Boi

Today, The Stones and The Grandma have continued with their English classes.

Firstly, they have learnt how to create question tags using Present Simple and where and how to use the Adverbs of Frequency. They have also reviewed modal verbs with Should and Shouldn't.

Next, they have started to read The Canterville Ghost, an amazing short story written by Oscar Wilde that represents a great criticism of the American way of life during the last decades of the 19th C. Ghost stories are anything but a contemporary phenomenon. They have been passed down from generation to generation for centuries, either orally or through the written word.

Later, The Grandma has been talking about the importance of trade and commerce in Sant Boi along the history and its connections with Occitan merchants, especially when Sant Boi was opened to the sea and the Llobregat River was navigable. Nowadays, the influence of these cultural ties is seen in the names of the streets (Alou, Raurich...) in the architecture and with the recognition of great figures in the history of the city. Names like the Santboian Baldiri Aleu, the founder of U.E. Santboiana, the local rugby team, or Frederic Mistral, the Occitan poet and a great admirer of the city, are two good examples.

Finally, with the arrival of the last of the members of the family, they have returned to their normal life, then travelling, enjoying and learning more English. They have decided to prepare a new travel, a long travel with different stops: Manchester-Hawaii-Buenos Aires and Tierra del Fuego to start.

Prepare your baggage Stones. We are going to enjoy together of this new experience. Next stop: Manchester.

More info: Adverbs of Frequency, Question Tags & Should/Shouldn't

More information: Writeexpress

A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them.

The ghost may appear of its own accord or be summoned by magic. Linked to the ghost is the idea of hauntings, where a supernatural entity is tied to a place, object or person. Ghost stories are commonly examples of ghostlore.

Colloquially, the term ghost story can refer to any kind of scary story. In a narrower sense, the ghost story has been developed as a short story format, within genre fiction. It is a form of supernatural fiction and specifically of weird fiction, and is often a horror story.

While ghost stories are often explicitly meant to be scary, they have been written to serve all sorts of purposes, from comedy to morality tales. Ghosts often appear in the narrative as sentinels or prophets of things to come. Belief in ghosts is found in all cultures around the world, and thus ghost stories may be passed down orally or in written form.

The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde

What we understand as a ghost today has its roots in the myths and beliefs of ancient cultures.

Ghosts were and sometimes still are believed to be the spirit of a person that exists after the body has died.

It is because of these beliefs that funeral rituals initially took place and were practised as a passage of rights to the next world, a way to say goodbye, and to prevent the spirit from remaining on Earth and haunting the living.

Further to this, the existence of ghosts is believed because of the human experience of feeling haunted or being in the presence of a spirit. This can range from hearing, seeing or other unexplainable spooky happenings.

More information: Arapahoe Libraries

The Canterville Ghost is a humorous short story by Oscar Wilde. It was the first of Wilde's stories to be published, appearing in two parts in The Court and Society Review, 23 February and 2 March 1887.

The story is about an American family who move to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead English nobleman, who killed his wife and was then walled in and starved to death by his wife's brothers. It has been adapted for the stage and screen several times.

The home of the Canterville Ghost was the ancient Canterville Chase, which has all the accoutrements of a traditional haunted house. Descriptions of the wainscoting, the library panelled in black oak, and the armour in the hallway characterise the setting.

Wilde mixes the macabre with comedy, juxtaposing devices from traditional English ghost stories such as creaking floorboards, clanking chains, and ancient prophecies.

More information: BBC & The New York Times

We have really everything in common with America nowadays,
except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

THE WATSONS STUDY THE ADVERBS OF FREQUENCY

Time

Today, The Watsons and The Grandma have continued studying English with Google Applications. 

The Grandma has explained them how to create a meet with Google Meet and they have been talking about the importance of Google Calendar. After this, they have been practising the Adverbs of Frequency.

Time is something essential in our lives and it is important to know how to organise it to work and enjoy.

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.

It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.

More information: Adverbs of Frequency

Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.

Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.

More information: Adverbs of Frequency

Time in physics is operationally defined as what a clock reads. Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units (SI) and International System of Quantities. The SI base unit of time is the second. Time is used to define other quantities -such as velocity- so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition.

An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event, such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum, constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life. To describe observations of an event, a location -position in space- and time are typically noted.

Time

The operational definition of time does not address what the fundamental nature of it is.

It does not address why events can happen forward and backwards in space, whereas events only happen in the forward progress of time.

Investigations into the relationship between space and time led physicists to define the spacetime continuum.

General Relativity is the primary framework for understanding how spacetime works. Through advances in both theoretical and experimental investigations of space-time, it has been shown that time can be distorted, particularly at the edges of black holes.

Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in navigation and astronomy. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart.

Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of caesium atoms. Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value, time is money, as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human life spans.

More information: ThoughtCo

Generally speaking, methods of temporal measurement, or chronometry, take two distinct forms: the calendar, a mathematical tool for organising intervals of time, and the clock, a physical mechanism that counts the passage of time. In day-to-day life, the clock is consulted for periods less than a day whereas the calendar is consulted for periods longer than a day.

Increasingly, personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously. The number, as on a clock dial or calendar, that marks the occurrence of a specified event as to hour or date is obtained by counting from a fiducial epoch -a central reference point.

Artifacts from the Paleolithic suggest that the moon was used to reckon time as early as 6,000 years ago.

Time

Lunar calendars were among the first to appear, with years of either 12 or 13 lunar months, either 354 or 384 days. Without intercalation to add days or months to some years, seasons quickly drift in a calendar based solely on twelve lunar months.

Lunisolar calendars have a thirteenth month added to some years to make up for the difference between a full year, now known to be about 365.24 days, and a year of just twelve lunar months. The numbers twelve and thirteen came to feature prominently in many cultures, at least partly due to this relationship of months to years.

Other early forms of calendars originated in Mesoamerica, particularly in ancient Mayan civilization. These calendars were religiously and astronomically based, with 18 months in a year and 20 days in a month, plus five epagomenal days at the end of the year.

The reforms of Julius Caesar in 45 BC put the Roman world on a solar calendar. This Julian calendar was faulty in that its intercalation still allowed the astronomical solstices and equinoxes to advance against it by about 11 minutes per year.

More information: Quanta Magazine

Pope Gregory XIII introduced a correction in 1582; the Gregorian calendar was only slowly adopted by different nations over a period of centuries, but it is now by far the most commonly used calendar around the world.

During the French Revolution, a new clock and calendar were invented in an attempt to de-Christianize time and create a more rational system in order to replace the Gregorian calendar. The French Republican Calendar's days consisted of ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds, which marked a deviation from the base 12, duodecimal, system used in many other devices by many cultures. The system was abolished in 1806.

Another form of time measurement consists of studying the past. Events in the past can be ordered in a sequence, creating a chronology, and can be put into chronological groups, periodization.

One of the most important systems of periodization is the geologic time scale, which is a system of periodizing the events that shaped the Earth and its life. Chronology, periodization, and interpretation of the past are together known as the study of history.

More information: Wired

Time and space are modes by which we think

and not conditions in which we live.

Albert Einstein

HOW TO CREATE A NEW IDENTITY FOR YOLANDA WATSON

Yolanda Watson aka Reinette

Today, The Grandma has been talking with The Watsons by Skype. She is still in Ithaca with The Stones but she continues working very hard with The Watsons and their English classes. After doing an exam, they have studied Present Simple and Adverbs of Frequency.

Finally, The Watsons have started to prepare their big project: how to help Yolanda Watson to be a popular person and win the Eurovision Song Contest that is going to be celebrated next May in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Yolanda wants to be the new France Gall and win the Contest representing her country, France.

They have done a brainstorming with lots of ideas and they are going to create different profiles in the social networks. Every member of the family is going to help Yolanda to achieve her dream of becoming a great star.

More information: Present Simple

More information: Adverbs of Frequency

More information: Imperial

More information: Ionos

More information: Word Templates On Line

The Eurovision Song Contest, in French Concours Eurovision de la chanson, is an annual international song competition, arranged since 1956 by the Eurovision broadcasting organisation, with participants representing primarily European countries. Each participating country submits an original song to be performed on live television and radio, then casts votes for the other countries' songs to determine the winner. At least 50 countries are eligible to compete as of 2019; since 2015, Australia has been allowed as a contestant.

Based on the Sanremo Music Festival held in Italy since 1951, Eurovision has been broadcasting every year since its inauguration in 1956, making it the longest-running annual international television contest and one of the world's longest-running television programmes. It is also one of the most watched non-sporting events, with audience figures of between 100 million and 600 million internationally. It has been broadcast in several countries that do not compete, such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and China. Since 2000, it has been broadcast online via the Eurovision website.

Ireland holds the record for most victories, with seven wins, including four times in five years in 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1996. Under the current voting system, in place since 2016, the highest-scoring winner is Salvador Sobral of Portugal who won the 2017 contest in Kiev, Ukraine, with 758 points; under the previous system, the highest-scoring winner was Alexander Rybak of Norway with 387 points in 2009.

France Gall

The most recent winner is Duncan Laurence from the Netherlands who won the 2019 event with the song Arcade. Winning the Eurovision Song Contest provides artists with a local career boost and sometimes long-lasting international success. Some of them include ABBA (winners for Sweden), Bucks Fizz & Lulu (winners for the United Kingdom), Celine Dion (winner for Switzerland), Johnny Logan (who won the contest twice for Ireland), Dana International (for Israel) and Lena (who won for Germany).

As a war-torn Europe was rebuilding itself in the 1950s, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) -based in Switzerland- set up an ad hoc committee to search for ways of bringing together the countries of the EBU around a light entertainment programme. At a committee meeting held in Monaco in January 1955 with Marcel Bezençon of the Swiss television as chairman, the committee conceived the idea, initially proposed by Sergio Pugliese of the Italian television RAI, of an international song contest where countries would participate in one television programme to be transmitted simultaneously across all countries of the union.

The competition was based upon the existing Sanremo Music Festival held in Italy and was seen as a technological experiment in live television. In those days it was a very ambitious project to join many countries together in a wide-area international network. Satellite television did not exist and the Eurovision Network comprised a terrestrial microwave network.

More information: Eurovision

The concept, then known as Eurovision Grand Prix, was approved by the EBU General Assembly in a meeting held in Rome on 19 October 1955, and it was decided that the first contest would take place in spring 1956 in Lugano, Switzerland. The name Eurovision was first used in relation to the EBU's network by British journalist George Campey in the London Evening Standard in 1951.

The first contest was held in the town of Lugano, Switzerland, on 24 May 1956. Seven countries participated -each submitting two songs, for a total of 14. This was the only contest in which more than one song per country was performed: since 1957 all contests have allowed one entry per country. The 1956 contest was won by the host nation, Switzerland.

The contest was first known as the Eurovision Grand Prix in English. This Grand Prix name was adopted by Germany, Denmark, Norway and the Francophone countries, with the French designation being Le Grand-Prix Eurovision de la Chanson Européenne.

The Grand Prix was dropped in 1973 and replaced with Concours (contest) in French and in 2001 with the English name in German, but not in Danish or Norwegian. The Eurovision network is used to carry many news and sports programmes internationally, among other specialised events organised by the EBU. However, in the minds of the public, the name Eurovision is most closely associated with the Song Contest.

More information: British Council

To the best of my knowledge there's nothing

quite like the Eurovision song contest for offering up

a must-watch mix of good old state-funded

entertainment and high camp.

Tyler Brûlé

"APERI MURUM QUAE INIT AUTUMNALIS QUA!"

Minerva & The Jones in the Sorting Cerimony

Open the wall,

that arrives in fall!

The Jones are welcome in Hogwarts. In their first day in the school, they have been received by the masters, Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall and Severus Snape. 

They have been talking about rules and imperatives  inside Hogwarts and about the routines in their day by day using the Adverbs of Frequency. They have also talked about Prepositions of Time, something very important when you are living in a place where space and time are not determined.

More information: Adverbs of Frequency

The family has revised Present Simple and written a common plot about the first book of the saga, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (or Sorcerer's Stone in the USA version). They have also created some spells to knock down walls, something very interesting if you want to enter in a place and the door is closed.

After participating in a Bingo Contest, where Merche Addams-Holmes-Jones and Ana Bean-Jones have been the winners and Carla Bean a fantastic speaker, the family has worked the auxiliaries in Present Simple, the structures in questions and the W's: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? which are very necessary to create good compositions.

More information: Prepositions of Time

Finally, The Jones have assisted to 'The Sorting Cerimony' with Minerva McGonagall to know which is going to be their school during their staying in Hogwarts.

It's a dark street. Two old people carry a baby. Some years after, the baby is a boy who loves snakes and speaks with them. Once, he receives a letter. Lots and lots of letters arrive under a terrible storm.

A giant visits a couple in the middle of the night. Two gentlemen talk to a boy named Harry Potter. The giant shows several places to the boy, until he reaches the magic shop where he gets his first wand. Then he remembers his parents. He begins his adventure. He crosses the platform and shows his scar to his new friends in the train destination to Hogwarts, a prestigious school of magic.

Ron Weasley, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger

Harry Potter and two friends look a picture. The cat, suddenly, leaps up and transfigures into a professor. Harry Potter puts a magic hat. During the dinner, the head of a ghost appears on the plate. A man waits the arrival of the train. All students listen like the teacher talks about the nest competition. Harry Potter and his friends have dinner while hundreds of candles float in the air.

There are some boys at school. Draco Malfoy finds a clear ball. Harry and his friends are looking for something throughout the school. Behind the door, there is a dog with three heads. They find a trunk. Suddenly, appears a troll at the school.

Harry and his friends wear scarf while they are talking. They put the uniforms to play a quidditch match. Harry receives a kind of clock at Christmas. Harry and Ron rescue Hermione in the bathroom because Ron uses his wand. Harry walks across the corridor with a light. Harry receives a broom for Christmas.

In the dark night, the man observes a little dinosaur. Meanwhile, harry Potter is looking for something in Hogwarts. At the same time, the blond boy sees a big centaur through the window. Finally, Harry Potter finds the object that he was searching. This object is a shiny mirror. In the next morning, he walks with his friends to magic class and the teacher shows them the place where people can see the magic potions. Last, they read the secret recipe of Nicolas Flamel about how to make a Sorcerer's Stone.

The four intrepid boys enter into a cave and discover three dark monsters. When they try to leave, they find magic flying beings which guide them to a large chess board and become a game. When they make the movement, the boy enters into another room with a mirror that through time takes him to see his ancestors.

He fights against a sorcerer. He's wounded in combat. He recovers in the infirmary. A few days after recovering, there is an event in the dining room of Hogwarts. In his farewell, for returning to his home, he receives a gift but not really...

More information: Word Order I, II and III

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, 

our most inexhaustible source of magic.

Albus Dumbledore

'ELEVATOR PITCH': CREATING AN ALIBI IN 2 MINUTES

The Beans on the top of the Empire State

Today, The Beans have lived an intensive day. The family is still in New York City enjoying the city and its sights and working to improve their English. 

They have talked about the Adverbs of Frequency and the Prepositions of Place and Direction.

More info: Adverbs of Frequency

Firstly, the family has been involved in a terrible scandal when a local newspaper has accused them of being the main suspects of the fire in Trump's Tower. Without time to call the best lawyers, the family has demonstrated that if you work together you have more possibilities of success and they have been preparing their alibis. After being interrogated by the Metropolitan Police, all of them have returned to the hotel free of charges and without any doubt about their innocence. It's always better to have a good relationship with the Police.

Download Furniture Vocabulary

Next, The Beans have decided to visit the Empire State, a 102-story Art Deco skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the building has a roof height of 380 m and stands a total of 443.2 m tall, including its antenna.

Eli Bond-Bean and King Kong

The site of the Empire State Building, located on the west side of Fifth Avenue between West 33rd and 34th Streets, was originally part of an early 18th century farm. In the late 1820s, it came into the possession of the prominent Astor family, with John Jacob Astor's descendants building the Waldorf–Astoria Hotel on the site in the 1890s. By the 1920s, the family had sold the outdated hotel and the site indirectly ended up under the ownership of Empire State Inc., a business venture that included businessman John J. Raskob and former New York governor Al Smith. 

Download Transport Vocabulary

The original design of the Empire State Building was a for a 50-story office building. However, after fifteen revisions, the final design was for a 86-story building, with an airship mast on top. This ensured it would be the world's tallest building, beating the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street, two other Manhattan skyscrapers under construction at the time that were also vying for that distinction.

The Beans and their rescue plan

When they were leaving the building, they have been astonished to see that Eli Bond-Bean was on the top of it kidnapped by King Kong. Quickly, they have thought a rescue plan to liberate Eli from King Kong's hands. The plan has been a total success.

Then, the family has decided to go to the zoo and talk with the bosses about a King Kong's adoption. They had got another point here. The zookeepers have never thought about this possibility but they have accepted The Beans' proposal.

The Prospect Park Zoo is a 4.9 ha zoo located off Flatbush Avenue on the eastern side of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York City. Its precursor, the Menagerie, opened in 1890. The present facility first opened as a city zoo on July 3, 1935, and was part of a larger revitalization program of city parks, playgrounds and zoos initiated in 1934 by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. It was built, in large part, through Civil Works Administration and Works Project Administration (WPA) labour and funding.

More information: Transports

The Beans with Barbra in her apartment

Finally, the family was exhausted. They have lived too many emotions in a day. The Grandma has received an incredible phone call.  

Barbra Streisand was on the other side of the line and she has invited all the family to a private concert in her apartment to relax and charge batteries.

Hold the line, Barbra! I'm going to talk with my family about your invitation. 

Barbra? Are you there? It's an enormous pleasure for us to come to your home and assist to your private concert. Taking profit of your trust, I would like to listen to "If you go way". 

See you later, my friend.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, 

and that's an alibi for my ignorance. 

Will Rogers