MR. MONK: DISORDER AND CONFUSION EVERYWHERE

Paqui Bean and her Polish sweets

This morning, The Beans have continued their English classes. Today, they have revised Past Continuous vs. Past Simple using While and When and they have been working how to create questions, paying attention to the syntactic order.

While Paqui Bean was offering some Polish sweets to her family to celebrate the world day of mother tongues, The Beans talked about famous characters like Harry Potter, Mary Poppins, Werewolf, Snowhite, Count Dracula or Levi Strauss. 

More information: Past Continuous vs. Past Simple

The Grandma has also commented some gossips about Enriqueta Martí, a serial killer who had a direct relationship with Jack the Ripper or Vlad Tepes, aka Count Dracula: the need of blood.

Finally, the family has been playing to liberate stress and to be preparated to visit Adrian Monk, a clever detective from San Francisco who has a special obsession for order and cleaning.

More information: Questions exercises

 

Adrian Monk & The Grandma

This afternoon, The Beans have visited Alamo Square with the company of Mr. Monk who has enjoyed with the architectural order of the houses and with the impressive cleaning of its streets and the well-cut grass of its gardens. All is in order, Mr.Monk!

Alamo Square is a residential neighborhood and park in San Francisco, California, in the Western Addition. Its boundaries are not well-defined, but are generally considered to be Webster Street on the east, Golden Gate Avenue on the north, Divisadero Street on the west, and Fell Street on the south.

More information: Levi Strauss

Alamo Square Park, the neighborhood's focal point and namesake, consists of four city blocks at the top of a hill overlooking much of downtown San Francisco, with a number of large and architecturally distinctive mansions along the perimeter, including the Painted Ladies, a well-known postcard motif. 

Óscar Bean's selfie in Alamo Square

The park is bordered by Hayes Street to the south, Steiner Street to the east, Fulton Street to the north, and Scott Street to the west. Named after the lone cottonwood tree, alamo in Spanish, Alamo Hill, was a watering hole on the horseback trail from Mission Dolores to the Presidio in the 1800s. 

In 1856, Mayor James Van Ness created a park surrounding the watering hole, creating Alamo Square.

The Alamo Square neighborhood is characterized by Victorian architecture that was left largely untouched by the urban renewal projects in other parts of the Western Addition. The Alamo Square area contains the second largest concentration of homes over 930 metres square in San Francisco, after the Pacific Heights neighborhood.

More information: Alamo Square, San Francisco

The Grandma remembers the effects of The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. 

The California earthquake of April 18, 1906 ranks as one of the most significant earthquakes of all time. Today, its importance comes more from the wealth of scientific knowledge derived from it than from its sheer size. Rupturing the northernmost 477 kilometers of the San Andreas fault from northwest of San Juan Bautista to the triple junction at Cape Mendocino, the earthquake confounded contemporary geologists with its large, horizontal displacements and great rupture length. Indeed, the significance of the fault and recognition of its large cumulative offset would not be fully appreciated until the advent of plate tectonics more than half a century later. 

Grandma's memories. Alamo Square, 1906.

Analysis of the 1906 displacements and strain in the surrounding crust led Reid (1910) to formulate his elastic-rebound theory of the earthquake source, which remains today the principal model of the earthquake cycle.

At almost precisely 5:12 a.m., local time, a foreshock occurred with sufficient force to be felt widely throughout the San Francisco Bay area. The great earthquake broke loose some 20 to 25 seconds later, with an epicenter near San Francisco. Violent shocks punctuated the strong shaking which lasted some 45 to 60 seconds. 

More information: National Archives

In the public's mind, this earthquake is perhaps remembered most for the fire it spawned in San Francisco, giving it the somewhat misleading appellation of the San Francisco earthquake. Shaking damage, however, was equally severe in many other places along the fault rupture. The frequently quoted value of 700 deaths caused by the earthquake and fire is now believed to underestimate the total loss of life by a factor of 3 or 4. Most of the fatalities occurred in San Francisco, and 189 were reported elsewhere.

 

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings. 

Levi Strauss