AURY, CATI & PERLA'S ARRIVAL, THE GRANGERS GROW

Today, The Grangers and The Grandma have rested at hotel after finding their lost member, Johnny Granger. Johnny, who is a great surfer, survived and swam to the shore of the bay, where he was found yesterday.

 

Three new members have joined the family: Aury, Cati and Perla. Welcome girls!

They have chosen the Carlyle Hotel, a luxury complex on the Upper East Side. 

 

They have been planning their trip and working with the Article 'The' and the Prepositions of Time.

 

More information: Article 'The'

 

More information: Prepositions of Time

More information: Download Prepositions of Time

The Carlyle Hotel, known formally as The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel, is a combination luxury apartment hotel located at 35 East 76th Street on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 76th Street, on the Upper East Side of New York City.

Opened in 1930, the hotel was designed in Art Deco style and was named after Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle.

Owned since 2001 by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, the Carlyle is a cooperative with 190 rental rooms and suites, and 60 privately owned residences.

The Carlyle was built by Moses Ginsberg, maternal grandfather of Rona Jaffe. Designed by architects Sylvan Bien and Harry M. Prince, it opened as an apartment hotel, with apartments costing up to $1 million a year.

Apartment hotels had become increasingly popular since World War I. As the economy boomed and skyscrapers rose, New York was transforming so quickly that owning a townhouse began to fall out of fashion. The new thirty-five floor hotel was to be a masterpiece in the modern idiom, in which shops and restaurants on the lower floors would give residents the convenience and comforts of a community skyscraper.

However, by the time the Carlyle was ready to open its doors in 1930, the 1929 stock market crash had started the Great Depression. The new hotel struggled, went into receivership in 1931, and was sold to the Lyleson Corporation in 1932.

More information: The Carlyle Hotel

The new owners kept the original management, which was able to dramatically improve the property's financial situation through maintaining high occupancy and rates favorable to the hotel's costs. However, the hotel's reputation at this time was staid rather than ritzy.

The next postwar boom allowed the hotel to take on new high-society prominence. 

In 1948, New York businessman Robert Whittle Dowling purchased the Carlyle and began to transform it from a respectable address to a downright fashionable one, frequented by elegant Europeans. 

That year, Harry S. Truman became the first president to visit the Carlyle; each of his successors through Bill Clinton followed.

The Carlyle became known as the New York White House during the administration of President John F. Kennedy, who maintained an apartment on the 34th floor for the last ten years of his life. He stayed at the apartment in a well-publicized visit for a few days just prior to his inauguration in January 1961.

Marilyn Monroe was snuck in through the service entrance on East 77th Street. After famously singing Happy Birthday, Mr. President at Kennedy's birthday gala at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, Monroe reportedly used a warren of tunnels to enter the Carlyle secretly with Kennedy and friends.

The New York Post reported a Mob smear campaign plot on Robert F. Kennedy planned as an informant passed on information that a Mrs. Jacqueline Hammond had information on the sex-capade; however, the Post article stated An FBI summary of the documents released yesterday said the bureau didn't consider the Milwaukee and Hammond information 'solid'. Years later, longtime bellman Michael O'Connell recalled, Those tunnels. President Kennedy knew more about the tunnels than I did.

More information: Hospitality Net

The Carlyle was the last place John F. Kennedy Jr. ate breakfast before departing on his ill-fated plane trip to Martha's Vineyard with his wife and her sister.

The Council for United Civil Rights Leadership (CUCRL) was organized in a meeting held at the Carlyle. Malcolm X expressed his concerns with having a white man in charge of this new fundraising organization during a November 10, 1963, speech, Message to the Grass Roots. He described the hotel (rather than just one suite) as being owned by the Kennedy family.

In 1967, the hotel was purchased by a partnership of Jerome L. Greene, Norman L. Peck, and Peter Jay Sharp. The hotel is the source of the name for The Carlyle Group, as it was the location where that firm's founders first met in the mid-1980s.

Despite its brushes with history, the hotel retained a reputation for discretion. In June 2000, The New York Times called it a Palace of Secrets. The hotel was the subject of a 2018 documentary film by writer-director Matthew Miele, Always at The Carlyle.

The hotel's Café Carlyle has featured a number of well-known jazz performers -notably George Feyer from 1955 to 1968, and Bobby Short from 1968 to 2004. Woody Allen and his jazz band have played weekly at the café since 1996. According to New York Times writer Joe Heller, Mick Jagger maintains a residence at the Carlyle to use when he visits New York.

Alan Cumming gave a series of concerts at the Café Carlyle in June 2015; the album of the performance, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs features a photograph of a nude Cumming flanked by a male and a female model, also nude, shot in the doorway of the cafe.

The Bemelmans Bar is decorated with murals depicting Madeline in Central Park painted by Ludwig Bemelmans. Bemelmans is the namesake of the bar, and his murals there are his only artwork on display to the public. Instead of accepting payment for his work, Bemelmans received a year and a half of accommodations at the Carlyle for himself and his family.

More information: Tatler

My definition of a good hotel is a place I'd sty at.

Robert De Niro

A TRIP TO NEW YORK, THE BIG CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

Today, The Grangers and The Grandma have arrived at New York City, where they wanted to spend some days. The arrival has been a little difficult because their ferry has suffered an accident and they have lost Joan 'Johnny' Granger.

The family is very sad and worried and they offer a reward if anyone can offer news about Johnny.

New York City is a multicultural city and the best destination for a family where every member of it has a different nationality and was born in a different part of the planet.

More information: Download Nationalities

New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over 778.2 km2, New York City is the most densely populated major city in the United States and more than twice as populous as Los Angeles, the nation's second largest city.

New York City is located at the southern tip of New York State. It constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. by both population and urban landmass.

With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous megacities, and over 58 million people live within 400 km of the city.

New York City is a global cultural, financial, entertainment, and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care and life sciences, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, dining, art, fashion, and sports. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and is sometimes described as the capital of the world.

Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors and extending into the Atlantic Ocean, New York City comprises five boroughs, each of which is coextensive with a respective county of the state of New York. The five boroughs, which were created in 1898 when local governments were consolidated into a single municipal entity, are: Brooklyn (in Kings County), Queens (in Queens County), Manhattan (in New York County), The Bronx (in Bronx County), and Staten Island (in Richmond County).

The city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the U.S., the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world as of 2016.

New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded on the southern tip of Manhattan Island by Dutch colonists in approximately 1624. The settlement was named New Amsterdam (Dutch: Nieuw Amsterdam) in 1626 and was chartered as a city in 1653.

The city came under British control in 1664 and was renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. The city was regained by the Dutch in July 1673 and was renamed New Orange for one year and three months; the city has been continuously named New York since November 1674.

New York City was the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, and has been the largest U.S. city since 1790. 

The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U.S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is a symbol of the U.S. and its ideals of liberty and peace.

In the 21st century, New York City has emerged as a global node of creativity, entrepreneurship, and as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity.

More information: Download The Family

 And New York is the most beautiful city in the world?
It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there...
Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether.
Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

Ezra Pound

THE ORDER OF ADJECTIVES, HOW TO DESCRIBE CORRECTLY

Today, The Grangers and The Grandma have been studying descriptions and the order of adjectives.

An adjective is a word that describes a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Adjectives were considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns.

Here are some examples:

-That's a funny idea. (attributive)

-That idea is funny. (predicative)

-Tell me something funny. (postpositive)

-The good, the bad, and the funny. (substantive)

More information: Download Adjectives

Adjective comes from Latin nōmen adjectīvum, a calque of Ancient Greek ἐπίθετον ὄνομα, romanized epítheton ónoma, literally additional noun (whence also English epithet).

In the grammatical tradition of Latin and Greek, because adjectives were inflected for gender, number, and case like nouns (a process called declension), they were considered a type of noun.

The words that are today typically called nouns were then called substantive nouns (nōmen substantīvum). The terms noun substantive and noun adjective were formerly used in English but are now obsolete.

In many languages, attributive adjectives usually occur in a specific order.

In general, the adjective order in English can be summarised as: opinion, size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, purpose.

More information: Password

Determiners and postdeterminers -articles, numerals, and other limiters- come before attributive adjectives in English. Although certain combinations of determiners can appear before a noun, they are far more circumscribed than adjectives in their use -typically, only a single determiner would appear before a noun or noun.

-Opinion. Limiter adjectives (e.g. a real hero, a perfect idiot) and adjectives of subjective measure (e.g. beautiful, interesting) or value (e.g. good, bad, costly).

-Size. Adjectives denoting physical size (e.g. tiny, big, extensive).

-Shape or physical quality. Adjectives describing more detailed physical attributes than overall size (e.g. round, sharp, swollen, thin).

-Age. Adjectives denoting age (e.g. young, old, new, ancient, six-year-old).

-Colour. Adjectives denoting colour or pattern (e.g. white, black, pale, spotted).

-Origin. Denominal adjectives denoting source (e.g. Japanese, volcanic, extraterrestrial).

-Material. Denominal adjectives denoting what something is made of (e.g., woollen, metallic, wooden).

-Qualifier/purpose. Final limiter, which sometimes forms part of the (compound) noun (e.g., rocking chair, hunting cabin, passenger car, book cover).

More information: Cambridge Dictionary

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives
which he habitually uses in conversation.

Mark Twain

WELCOME GRANGERS! A NEW FAMILY TO LEARN ENGLISH

Today, The Grandma has started a new adventure with a new family, The Grangers, in Sant Boi de Llobregat.

They are going to spend some months together learning English and preparing their new goal -the A2 Cambridge Exam.

Welcome Grangers! Roll of the dice!

Hermione Jean Granger is a fictional character in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. She first appears in the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997), on the Hogwarts express as a first year student on her way to Hogwarts.

After Harry and Ron save her from a mountain troll in the girls' restroom, she becomes best friends with them and often uses her quick wit, deft recall, and encyclopaedic knowledge to lend aid in dire situations.

Hermione is a Muggle-born Gryffindor, who becomes best friends with Harry Potter and Ron Weasley.

She was born on 19 September 1979 and she was nearly twelve when she first attended Hogwarts. She is an overachiever who excels academically and is described as a very logical, upright and good character.

Hermione's parents, two Muggle dentists, are a bit bemused by their odd daughter but quite proud of her all the same. They are well aware of the wizard world and have visited Diagon Alley with her.

Hermione is an only child whose first name is taken from a character in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

More information: Wizarding World

English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England.

It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots and then most closely related to the Low German and Frisian languages, English is genealogically Germanic. However, its vocabulary also shows major influences from French (about 28% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 28%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones.

The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of North Sea Germanic dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Middle English began in the late 11th century after the Norman Conquest of England, when considerable Old French (especially Old Norman French) and Latin-derived vocabulary was incorporated into English over some three hundred years.

Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the start of the Great Vowel Shift and the Renaissance trend of borrowing further Latin and Greek words and roots into English, concurrent with the introduction of the printing press to London. This era notably culminated in the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.

Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent-marking pattern with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection and a fairly fixed subject-verb-object word order.

Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspects and moods, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives, and some negation.

More information: Oxford International English

Books! And cleverness! There are more important things!
-Friendship! And Bravery!

Hermione Granger

CHRISTINA RICCI, MUSE OF INDEPENDENT PRODUCTIONS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Christina Ricci, the American actress who was born on a day like today in 1980.

Christina Ricci (born February 12, 1980) is an American actress. Known for playing unusual characters with a dark edge, Ricci predominantly works in independent productions, but has also appeared in numerous box office hits. She has received nominations for a Golden Globe and for two Primetime Emmy Awards.

Ricci made her film debut at the age of nine in Mermaids (1990), and as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and its sequel, Addams Family Values (1993). Subsequent appearances in Casper and Now and Then (both 1995) established her as a teen idol.

At 17, she moved into adult-oriented roles with The Ice Storm (1997), which led to parts in several independent films, such as Pecker (1998), The Opposite of Sex (1998), and Monster (2003). She has also starred in Sleepy Hollow (1999), 200 Cigarettes (1999), Penelope (2006), and Speed Racer (2008), and had a supporting role in The Matrix Resurrections (2021).

On television, Ricci appeared in the final season of Ally McBeal (2002), and had a guest role on Grey's Anatomy in 2006. She also starred in the ABC series Pan Am (2011–12), and produced and starred in the series The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (2015) and Z: The Beginning of Everything (2017).

In 2021, she began starring in the critically acclaimed Showtime series Yellowjackets, and in 2022, she appeared in the comedy horror series Wednesday.

In 2010, Ricci made her Broadway debut in Time Stands Still. She is the national spokesperson for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). She is married and has two children.

Christina Ricci was born in Santa Monica, California, the youngest of four children of Sarah (née Murdoch) and Ralph Ricci. Her mother worked as a Ford Agency model during the 1960s and later became a real estate agent. Her father had a varied career, including jobs as a gym teacher, lawyer, drug counsellor, and primal scream therapist. Regarding her surname, Ricci has stated that she has Italian, Irish, and Scottish ancestry.

At the age of eight, Ricci was discovered by a local theater critic when she starred in a school production of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

Ricci's big-screen debut was in the 1990 film Mermaids, as Cher's character's youngest daughter, Kate. She also appeared -alongside Cher and co-star Winona Ryder- in the music video for The Shoop Shoop Song, which featured on the film's soundtrack. The following year, she starred as the morbidly precocious Wednesday Addams in Barry Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family, based on the cartoon of the same name. She reprised the role for the 1993 sequel, Addams Family Values. Both films were a commercial success, and critics singled out Ricci's performances as highlights.

More information: Instagram-Christina Ricci

 I don't think I like characters
who are afraid and ashamed of who they are.

Christina Ricci

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON (UCL) IS FOUNDED IN 1826

Today, The Grandma has been reading about University College London, the public research university, that was established on a day like today in 1826.

University College London, which operates as UCL, is a public research university in London, United Kingdom.

 

It is a member institution of the federal University of London, and is the second-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and the largest by postgraduate enrolment.

Established in 1826, as London University (though without university degree-awarding powers), by founders inspired by the radical ideas of Jeremy Bentham, UCL was the first university institution to be established in London, and the first in England to be entirely secular and to admit students regardless of their religion.

It was also among the first university colleges to admit women alongside men in 1878, two years after University College, Bristol. Intended by its founders to be England's third university, politics forced it to accept the status of a college in 1836, when it received a royal charter and became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London, although it achieved de facto recognition as a university in the 1990s.

It has grown through mergers, including with the Institute of Ophthalmology (in 1995), the Institute of Neurology (in 1997), the Royal Free Hospital Medical School (in 1998), the Eastman Dental Institute (in 1999), the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (in 1999), the School of Pharmacy (in 2012) and the Institute of Education (in 2014).

More information: UCL

UCL has its main campus in the Bloomsbury area of central London, with a number of institutes and teaching hospitals elsewhere in central London and has a second campus, UCL East, at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, East London. 

UCL is organised into 11 constituent faculties, within which there are over 100 departments, institutes and research centres.

UCL operates several museums and collections in a wide range of fields, including the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, and administers the annual Orwell Prize in political writing.

In 2021/22, UCL had a total income of £1.75 billion, of which £525 million was from research grants and contracts. The university generates around £10 billion annually for the UK economy, primarily through the spread of its research and knowledge (£4 billion) and the impact of its own spending (£3 billion).

UCL is a member of numerous academic organisations, including the Russell Group and the League of European Research Universities, and is part of UCL Partners, the world's largest academic health science centre. It is considered part of the golden triangle of research-intensive universities in southeast England.

UCL has publishing and commercial activities including UCL Press, UCL Business and UCL Consultants.

UCL has many notable alumni, including the founder of Mauritius, the first Prime Minister of Japan, and one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA.  

UCL academics discovered five of the naturally occurring noble gases, discovered hormones, invented the vacuum tube, and made several foundational advances in modern statistics. 

As of 2022, 30 Nobel Prize winners and three Fields medallists have been affiliated with UCL as alumni or academic staff.

UCL was founded on 11 February 1826 as an alternative to the Anglican universities of Oxford and Cambridge. 

It took the form of a joint stock company, with shares sold for £100 (equivalent to $8,900 in 2021) to proprietors, under the name of London University, although without legal recognition as a university or the associated right to award degrees. London University's first warden was Leonard Horner, who was the first scientist to head a British university.

UCL is primarily based in the Bloomsbury area of the London Borough of Camden, in Central London. 

The main campus is located around Gower Street and includes the UCL Faculty of Engineering Sciences, economics, geography, history, languages, mathematics, management, philosophy and physics departments, the preclinical facilities of the UCL Medical School, the London Centre for Nanotechnology, the Slade School of Fine Art, the UCL Union, the main UCL Library, the UCL Science Library, the Bloomsbury Theatre, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, the Grant Museum of Zoology and the affiliated University College Hospital.

Close by in Bloomsbury are the UCL Cancer Institute, the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, the UCL Faculty of the Built Environment (The Bartlett), the UCL Faculty of Laws, the UCL Institute of Archaeology, the UCL Institute of Education, the UCL School of Pharmacy, the UCL School of Public Policy and the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

In 2014, it was announced that UCL would be building an additional campus at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, referred to as UCL East, as part of the development of the so-called Olympicopolis site at the southern edge of the park. UCL master planners were appointed in spring 2015, and the first University building was, at that time, estimated to be completed in time for academic year 2019/20.

Elsewhere in Central London are the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology adjacent to Moorfields Eye Hospital in Clerkenwell, the UCL Institute of Child Health adjacent to Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital and the Whittington Hospital campuses of the UCL Medical School, and a number of other associated teaching hospitals.

The UCL School of Management is on levels 38 and 50 (penthouse) of One Canada Square in the financial district of Canary Wharf. The UCL Observatory is in Mill Hill and the Mullard Space Science Laboratory is based in Holmbury St Mary, Surrey. The UCL Athletics Ground is in Shenley, Hertfordshire.

More information: University of London

A man who has never gone to school
may steal from a freight car;
but if he has a university education,
he may steal the whole railroad.

Theodore Roosevelt

ROBERTA C. FLACK, 'KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG'

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Roberta Cleopatra Flack, the American singer, who was born on a day like today in 1937.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack (born February 10, 1937) is an American singer who topped the Billboard charts with the No. 1 singles The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Killing Me Softly with His Song, Feel Like Makin' Love, Where Is the Love and The Closer I Get to You, the latter two duets with Donny Hathaway. Flack influenced the subgenre of contemporary R&B called quiet storm, and interpreted songs by songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and members of the Beatles.

Flack was the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in two consecutive years: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face won in 1973 and Killing Me Softly with His Song won in 1974.

More information: Roberta Flack

Flack was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, to parents Laron Flack, a Veterans Administration draftsman, and Irene (née Council) Flack a church organist, on February 10, 1937 (some sources have cited 1939 but the 1940 Census gives Roberta's age as 3 years old). She grew up in Arlington, Virginia.

Growing up in a large, musical family, she often accompanied the choir of Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church by playing hymns and spirituals on piano, but she also enjoyed going to the Baptist church down the street to listen to contemporary gospel music including songs performed by Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke.

When Flack was nine, she started taking an interest in playing the piano. During her early teens, Flack excelled at classical piano and Howard University awarded her a full music scholarship.

By age 15, she entered Howard University, making her one of the youngest students ever to enroll there. She eventually changed her major from piano to voice and became an assistant conductor of the university choir. Her direction of a production of Aida received a standing ovation from the Howard University faculty.

Flack became a student teacher at a school near Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University at 19 and began graduate studies in music, but the sudden death of her father forced her to take a job teaching music and English in Farmville, North Carolina.

Before becoming a professional singer-songwriter, Flack returned to Washington, D.C. and taught at Banneker, Browne, and Rabaut Junior High Schools. She also taught private piano lessons out of her home on Euclid Street, NW in the city. During that time, her music career began to take shape on evenings and weekends in D.C. area night spots.

Les McCann discovered Flack singing and playing jazz in a D.C. nightclub. He later said on the liner notes of what would be her first album First Take noted below, Her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I've ever known. I laughed, cried, and screamed for more... she alone had the voice.

On her own Flack scored her second No. 1 hit in 1973, Killing Me Softly with His Song written by Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel and Lori Lieberman. It was awarded both Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female at the 1974 Grammy Awards.

In 1999, a star with Flack's name was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In the same year, she gave a concert tour in South Africa; the final performance was attended by President Nelson Mandela.

In 2010, she appeared on the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, singing a duet of Where Is The Love with Maxwell.

Flack's minimalist, classically trained approach to her songs was seen by a number of critics as lacking in grit and uncharacteristic of soul music. According to music scholar Jason King, her work was regularly described with the adjectives boring, depressing, lifeless, studied, and calculated; in contrast, AllMusic's Steve Huey said it has been called classy, urbane, reserved, smooth, and sophisticated.

More information: Twitter-Roberta Flack

 As musicians, and as people
who sell material for people to hear and absorb,
it's important that we use that voice wisely.

Roberta Flack