Play With Words

Hadley Freeman 八卦麦当娜和盖·里奇的离婚新闻。

Split that is end of an era – and tragedy for Pilates

Hadley Freeman
The Guardian,
Thursday October 16 2008

Madonna has elevated many unlikely items into cultural signifiers: conical bras, yoga teachers and Kabbalah centres, to take a brief and Proustian tour through the singer’s career. But few would have predicted that British director Guy Ritchie would join that eclectic roll call. This coupling was, for a moment, as exciting as it was unexpected. A cult(ish) British director and an American superstar? To a country so fond of self-deprecation, and for so long in the grumbling, intimidated shadow of its bigger and brasher transatlantic neighbour, it was as though the hometown boy had pulled the prom queen.

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今天的每日英语是刚刚获得布克奖的印度作家阿迪加的小说《白虎》(The White Tiger)节选。

Extract from The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga

Now, I no longer watch Hindi films – on principle – but back in the days when I used to, just before the movie got started, either the number 786 would flash against the black screen – the Muslims think this is a magic number that represents their god – or else you would see the picture of a woman in a white sari with gold sovereigns dripping down to her feet, which is the goddess Lakhshmi, of the Hindus.

It is an ancient and veneratedcustom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power. I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god’s arse.

Which god’s arse, though? There are so many choices.

See the Muslims have one god. The Christians have three gods. And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods.

Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to choose from.

Now there are some, and I don’t just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist.

Some believe that none of them exist. There’s just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I’m no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It’s true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work – much like our politicians – and yet keep winning re-election to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year.

越来越流行的开放式办公室真的会提高工作效率吗？这篇文章比较简短和清晰。

Do open plan offices work?
Leo Benedictus
The Guardian,
Tuesday October 14 2008

Gordon Brown certainly thinks so. Yesterday it was reported that the prime minister will shortly be moving his team into 12 Downing Street, where there is room to create a large shared space that will reflect his famously relaxed personality and laid-back working style.

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Hadley Freeman 的周一时尚答问专栏。

Copycats
Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain
Hadley Freeman
Monday October 13 2008

On a recent documentary Kate Moss seemed to design her collection for Topshop by just getting things out of her wardrobe or finding vintage pieces and telling Topshop to copy them. Is this how designers work these days?

Sarah Morris, London

Oh, you picky, picky public people! What do you want from the poor, hard-working, straining-by-the-grit-o’-their-teeth fashion designers? Donatella, Karl Lagerfeld, Miuccia Prada – honestly, most of the time, they look as if they work down mines. Especially Karl, when he wears that little Chanel hard hat (quilted, obviously) – faaaaabulous.

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Eamonn McCabe 对《W》杂志封面照片的评述，在调侃中带出观点。

Brad Pitt has made Angelina Jolie look like she’s on the cover of Woman’s Realm
As private photos Brad Pitt’s snaps of his wife might be quite nice. But in the public realm they seem creepy, phoney and hypocritical

Eamonn McCabe

In many ways this is a beautiful picture of a mother and child, taken by a besotted father. In other ways it’s highly disturbing.

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Andrew Brown 的文章说什么样的数码相机才是最好的相机－－并不是像素越多越好。

At last, technology is making photography better, not worse
Andrew Brown
The Guardian,
Thursday October 9 2008

The phone I bought last month has a camera supposedly better than the camera I bought four years ago. That’s to say it has a 5MP camera instead of a 4MP one. I could have bought a Samsung phone with 8MP, the same as my second digital camera. And the phone does take perfectly usable pictures and recognisable videos. That it functions as well as a mapping device and a recorder is astonishing, but irrelevant to this argument. My cameras will do none of those other things. When I want to take a close-up with the most recent, and expensive, DSLR, I have to go to the trouble of changing the lens first. The phone – and the previous camera – do it all in software.

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动作片《死亡赛车》(Death Race)正在英国公映，电影中的男主角，一位汽车拉力赛车手不得不参加一场”死亡赛车”游戏。2007年英国汽车拉力赛冠军 Guy Wilks 从职业角度评述这部电影的可信性。

Another view
Rally driver Guy Wilks on Death Race

Interview by Paul Arendt
Wednesday October 8 2008

Funnily enough, I’m not really into car movies. When I come home after a week’s rallying, I don’t even want to talk about driving – it’s my day job, and sometimes you’ve got to chill. So I found Death Race a bit lacklustre. It starts out well, with a mysterious murder, but as soon as the racing begins the film turns into a sadistic, live-action version of Mario Kart.

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How to be a student 是 Harriet Swain 在《卫报》教育版为大学新生撰写的一个系列，今天说的是如何在作业中如何避免无意中剽窃他人劳动。

The art of avoiding plagiarism
How to be student
Harriet Swain
Tuesday October 7 2008

The best way to avoid plagiarism is to avoid reading anything written by somebody else. Unfortunately, this is not really what higher education is supposed to be about. While university teachers prize originality, they are not so keen on students relying entirely on imagination. By original thought, they tend to mean thinking something new about the thoughts of lots of other people, rather than just making it up.

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Hadley Freeman 是《卫报》时尚编辑，Vogue 杂志撰稿编辑。Ask Hadley 是她每周一的栏目，名为回答时尚问题，其实是调侃现代生活男女关系等等。文笔风趣幽默，所以即使象我这样对时尚所知甚少的人也爱看。

今天专栏第二个问题中提到的 Lynx Touch 广告：
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmro1AchBVo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkp37zN3inY

Ask Hadley
Hadley Freeman can ease your fashion pain
Monday October 6 2008

Whenever I put on my golfing outfit (striped shirt, smart trousers) my girlfriend laughs at me. How can I make her stop?
Bruce Lane, Cornwall

Whether it’s an indictment on this page or the nature of fashion in general, it is remarkable how many of the questions that arrive by winged courier to this hallowed desk of academia contain their own answer within. To whit, last week L Grant wanted to know why it was so hard to find smart long-sleeved dresses for the over-30s (because you’re over 30. Duh! Designers don’t care about you. Go float yourself out on an iceberg or something!)