Tomorrow, November 25 (the fourth Thursday each November), is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. Learn more about the holiday here and here.
Once again, it is time for us to give thanks for the support of our fantastic ESL Podcast listeners, members, and donors. The song below is a parody (funny song based on another song) of the popular 1970’s Gloria Gaynor hit song “I Will Survive.” Happy Thanksgiving!
~ Lucy
“I Will Survive” – Thanksgiving Version
At first I was an egg, I was petrified* (very scared; very frightened)
Kept thinking I’d be lost or I’d get cracked (for something hard to be broken so that a line appears on the surface) and fried
But you took me to your nest (bird’s home) before it was too late
and kept me warm and you helped me incubate (for an egg to be kept warm until a bird is hatched or born).
And now you’re back, think you’re the boss
Wanna put me on a plate next to your wife’s cranberry sauce (a sweet jelly sauce made from cranberries, eaten at Thanksgiving)
I should have known this day would come
I should have known not to relax
If I thought for just a second that you’d come in here with an ax (tool for cutting wood).
Go on now go, walk out the door
Just turn around now
Ain’t chopping (using a sharp tool to cut) my head to the floor.
Weren’t you the one who prized (highly valued) this dark meat on my thighs (upper part of a leg)?
Do you think I’d gobble (make the noise that a turkey makes)?
Did you think I’d lay down and die?
Oh on, not I.
I will survive.
Oh as long as I know how to peck (for a bird to use its hard mouth (beak) to hit or bite), I know I’ll stay alive.
Got my wings so I won’t fall,
Ain’t selling me to Butterball (popular U.S. company that sells turkeys).
I will survive.
I will survive.
…
* “Petrified” can also mean for a living thing to turn into something very, very hard because it is very old, like a fossil.
Hi! To the entire ESL Podcast , a very pleasant holiday ! Happy Thanksgiving!
And all the best for you all,
Tania
Happy Thanksgiving Day for all ESL staff.
Great song!
You get that we improve our English in a fun way.
Thanks.
I loved this video. So funny! Here in Brazil we don’t have Thanksgiving Day, but I wish you a Supreme and Happy Thanksgiving.
Hi, Lucy
Thanksgiving Day is here again already, so quick.
It is a perfect time for me to say a BIG ‘THANK YOU’ to you and everyone in ESLPOD. I truly enjoy everything in this website, and I wish you all the success.
The song ‘I Will Survive’ was supposed to be a serious song, this Turkey Lady made it into such a funny song. But, poor Turkey Lady, I hope people do not have to serve Turkey on Thanksgiving Day, then she will say thank you to us all.
Hi Folk!
I’d love to eat a Turkey in U.S., but as I can’t I wish you Happy Thanksgiving Day.
I’m learning English so well with you! You can’t figure out!
Thanks for everthing!
Eduardo
You are a blast Lucy,
Like the parody,
How about travesty?
How do you for travesty here?
I mean ,If you compare the two term
They are some how related
Travesty is on the fake side I believe
Parody weighs more on the funny side though
Could you give us a means to tell them part
Beautifuly done Lucy.
Thanks
Every day if we wake up with a grateful attitude toward a new day as a new opportunity for us to experience what life has in store for us, we will sail through the day with joy and happiness.
Last week, I just happened to hear my three year- old daughter counting her graces, “Thanks God for my house, thanks God for my food, thanks God for my stuffed animals, thanks God for my….” Everything is “my” but that’s ok. It’s one of the ways to show that we value what we have, isn’t it?
Today is a special Thanks Giving day. I want to say thanks Jeff and Lucy for your wonderful teaching to all of us. I rarely have time to go on the internet, but whenever I do, I’ll check out ESL podcast first since I believe that I’ll get a good lesson and a good laugh always.
Thanks,
Thanks to all of you, Jeff, Lucy and all ESL Team.
Thanks also to all the blog´s friends, here we don´t have this Thanksgiving day, but it would be beatiful to have
this nice day and just can say thankyou for all what we have, first of all life, friends and even love to some fortunate
of us.
All the best to all and have a very good day and not a too expesive Black Friday.
The vido clip is funny,
Time for you guys to stuff your faces.
It is a sort of family reunion.
See faces that you vet to see once a year in such occasions.
What happens to poor lad like me who does not a family.
I m not going for pitty attention
Seriously,
It is a happy family day
How a bout a happy single day!
To me ,thanksgiving is overrated
How about you Lucy?
Are you single of like Me?
You are very privet about yourself
No mean to poke my noise. But, I don’t know
As you know,I am a big fan of yours and Jeff’s
It is sad that I know little about you.
I know u r saying:quite enough came out of you. Knock it off
Ok! Your wish is my command?
Lucy Tse is our Lucy Tse in USA, not the Lucy Tse that we all found in Canada.
She is the one, who gives us all the fun.
Peter you must know a lot about Lucy, you are given all the hints from her scripts, and all the parodies.
She is not private at all, she has all the English power which she is willing to share with us all.
Thank you again, Lucy
Hi Betty ,
You are are some how pen friends.
I really apriciate that you go out of your way and read my comments. And sometimes , give me a sort of feed back.
No dobt that Lucy has an innate( born with it) ability. What ever we collectively say about Jeff and Lucy is not gushing. ( exaggeration about something and it sounds insincere) It is truth that Lucy is genuine.Her eclectic style in making some meaningful parody, pun, or something to that effect is exemplary. She has been doing it for 5 years. It is amazing!
I agree with you on all if these. But , please tell me something ; you don’t wanna know who is behind of all these literary art work ?
Who is our dear prof who teaches us all this. What is she like? What does she look like? And so on.
To me Lucy is like God:)) she is ubiquitous( present everywhere) on Eslpod. I mean she is everywhere , still she is nowhere. We know Lucy. we respect her , we love her, but we have never seen a sign of her:))))
Do you feel me
Jeff is more open
I just wanna know Lucy Better ,so I can relate to her better.
That is all my dear pen friend
Kind regards,
Morning Edlpod,
The track of winter began today with the temperature doped to below freezing point.
You don’t wanna know how brutal is outside.
The winter is here a bit late ,but finally , she cracked her way in.
I bundled up. Literally , I am wearing 4 Layers ,yet the cold is penetrating in every bit of me.
In this freezing temperature even Eslpod is cold comfort( no comfort at all:)))
Joking Eslpod.
The wind child is crazy in Here
I have sheltered in a Starbucks.
How is weather like down there Eslpod. Polluted ,sell,lazy and worm . Then,Eslpod you have it all:)))
Betty,
What do you mean by Lucy in Toronto
You lost me there
I m under a pile of misery. I mean ,I m on a rough patch. Chewing fat with you guys works like an ego trip for me.
Nice to have cyber friends.
Eslpod is fun to be around!
Lucy,
How is the black Friday coming along?
With all the shopping and everything
Thanks Peter for reading my little poem for Lucy, I thought it was not very good and I was waiting for some suggestions how to improve on it.
I read everyone’s comment here. I have learned a lot of new words just reading your comments alone. You can imagine how many new words I learned everyday by the time I finished reading everyone’s comments.
Lucy said in her blog I am Not Lucy Tse on TUESDAY – JUNE 15, 2010
“A couple of weeks ago, we received a listener email message about the podcast. In the message, the listener said that he was glad to see a picture of me on the Internet and to know what I looked like. Curious to know what I looked like, too, I did an image (picture) search and found a few of my Googlegangers.
I found this woman who works as a community coordinator (organizer) in Canada, but sadly, I’m not Canadian.”
That’s why I said our Lucy Tse is “not the Lucy Tse that we all found in Canada”.
Anyway, I could feel your eagerness to see Lucy being more open like Jeff, but there is a difference between a man and a woman.
Jeff is not camera shy whereas Lucy is. Of course I want to see Lucy. She is incredible in being so generous in her contribution to language development. I spent a lot of my limited time and energy on trying to find her face from the internet, all in vain.
My energies were not all lost when I finally found something as stated below:
An interview with Lucy Tse about her book “Why Don’t They Learn English?”
Multicultural Education, Summer 2002 by Fischman, Gustavo E
In their widely debated book about the “Manufactured Crisis” David Berliner and Bruce Biddle noted that “Hardly a week passes without one or more inflammatory press accounts detailing the “rotten” state of America’s schools…. Given that the press regularly trumpets ‘evidence’ purporting to confirm the failures of American education, is it any wonder that many Americans have accepted this message? And given such incessant media irresponsibility, who would be surprised if some readers had difficulty believing us?” (emphasis in original) (Berliner & Biddle, 1995, p. 11).
The “us” in the previous sentence refers to educational researchers, and while agreeing with these two noted researchers in their criticisms of the media, it is also important to note that very often “us” the researchers are not undertaking enough effort in communicating with the public. In that way we are not helping families, policymakers, and especially many teachers in the complicated task of separating facts from fallacies in educational debates.
Fortunately, some researchers and teacher educators are paying attention to this situation, and have began to provide high quality research in very comprehensible language. One of these researchers is Lucy Tse, an associate professor at the California State University, Los Angeles who has written a slim yet most comprehensive book on the language debate in the United States, perhaps one of the most heated educational debates of the last few years.
In these language debates, whether involving bilingual education, English as the official language, education for immigrants, language preservation, phonics and other reading strategies, or the training of a competitive global workforce, understanding the facts and perspectives on such issues is especially important for anybody concerned with the present and future of educational policies in the United States.
Also:
Lucy Tse is currently Associate Professor of Education at California State University, Los Angeles. She has published widely in the fields of bilingual education, biliteracy, and second language acquisition.
***********************
Lucy has told us how she looks like in the same blog I am Not Lucy Tse on TUESDAY – JUNE 15, 2010
“Finally, after a lot of searching (looking), I spotted (found) a video of me. I’ve told people for years that I’ve started to age backwards (starting with the end and going to the beginning), much like Benjamin Button. Now, maybe they’ll believe me.”
She showed us a little girl’s video clip “tecktonik-killer – Lucy Tse” to tell us how she looked like when she was little.
I want to borrow emiliano’s words:
emiliano Says:
June 17th, 2010 at 12:52 am
Listening to your voice reading the text guides and all the scrips, also knowing Jeff´s oppinion about you, all of us love our dear teacher Dr. Lucy Tse.
I think this is enough for the moment, and who knows?.. may be in future our dear Lucy would be in good disposition to let us know her just a little more.
I´m sure she is a nice wonderful girl that makes happy everyone round her, the same way she makes us day after day better listening all her teaching and knowing her good humor.
Thank you Lucy, we really love you.
Today it´s very cold here too, at least we have winter time in Madrid, but I think it´s not so cold that in the North of Europe, EEUU, or Canada.
My daughter Laura who is in Denmark, Copenhaguen, told me yesterday by mail that over there they have the first big snow.
She is happy finishing her degree in biology and knowing new friends and a beutiful country like Denmark.
We don´t have a Black Friday at all, it´s not a custom here, but now it would be the same as people haven´t any money to spend
as they had before when we were living up our posibilities.
How long do we have to support this so bad goverment as we have now in Spain?
Nobody knows, but even the alternative to it isn´t good either.
I think was Winston Churchill who said “every country has the government system it deserves” and I think we do not
deserve anything better that the one we have.
Politicians now are here in so low level that the “electoral campaign in Catalonia” is a sample of it.
One of the tv. spots was a sense of explicit sexual nature in the act of inserting the ballot in the box, it was a girl who feel it.
Other was a man wrapped in a flag of Spain who steals the portfolio to a Catalan citizen in front of an ATM.
Another one was a woman kiling martians who looks like inmigrants……
and so on.
The last worse than the previous, but today is the last day of campaing, puff it would be a relax till the next elections.
Are there so silly elections campaings in your countries, friends?
I am really ashamed seeing that kind of political messages.
By the way, I am with you Betty and I like the way you said us your feelings, politely, friendly and with good manners.
I would like to say things just your way.
Thank you.
emiliano
The more I write the more faults I can see after posting the comments in the Blog.
I think that doing so it´s just the best exercise we can do, writing and reading
afterward our comment.
So, we can see all our mistakes.
This morning I recommend another time ESL to a girl who wanted to learn English.
She was working in the one of the biggest shops of Madrid.
I was doing a shopping and we started to talk about English, she wanted to speak better and
I told her that listening ESL is the best way of improving her English.
She couldn´t belive it was for free if she couldn´t pay anything for the guides, but I said to
her, try and if you like it (what it´s sure) you may contribute to support the site suscribing
the marvellous guides.
Regards,
As always Jeff surprises us with a parody with the best humor. This is how a person can do things that make everybody laugh and feel good. Congratulations to Jeff and Lucy, the perfect couple, made for us come from the heaven. I am looking forward for the next episode.
Aecio from beautiful green and yellow Brazil
Mesmerizing Lucy,
Done artistically ,
I just get a moment to crack the turkey’s egg you brought Home( Eslpod)
Hilarious!!
Good job Lucy
How on earth you found the video clip. Talk about being relevant.
Good show Lucy
Boy
I should send it to my friend.
U cracked me up
There you go , now , I lached on Turkey. Must go have some turkey some place nice!
happy belated thanks giving, I’m just fashionably late just to keep prolonging the celebration 😉
well i can’t add more pal Emiliano, corruption is in every nook and cranny, even here in Algeria there’s no credibility and as for the election it’s only what-so-called a foregone conclusion, so the preparation for the election is merely a charade to delude people.
( Allah “God” does not change a people’s lot unless they change what is in their hearts)
happy thanks giving to all of our ESL podcast members, especially our own Dr. Lucy and Dr.Jeff MeQuillin and our friends here in the blog.
hahahahhahaha ….. I like this song especially the beat of the song, its hilarious indeed, especially the beat of the song. thank u guys .
Good, very good work Betty.
It is incredible to see all the information you have given us about our dear teacher Lucy, and the links are really very interesting.
I knew already that Lucy was a writer with books of her own, the same with Jeff, but I didn´t konw anything about her interview
what I think it´s quite clear and wise.
Reading my note in your post is something absolutely unforseen but it has been incredible nice to me, and yes, I think
it´s just my feelings about our dear teacher, and I know it´s the real truth she is just what I said that´s for sure.
Sincerely I appreciate your work Betty, congratulations.
emiliano
I read your post Betty, but Do you think we can purchase any of the books out there that you provided in the link??? I am particularly interested in a book called “Foreign Language Education the easy way “
“Pressure makes diamonds”
It is a baloney.
Pressure makes us shatter into pieces,and that is adopt it
Life ,for most occasions, is Too much to take ,too much to digest.
Indeed my dear friend : Emiliano
It is so true.
We are here to make mistakes ,and learn from them.
In fact, the way I see it, the blog is the self-study portion of Eslpod designed to show us the error of our ways,and more importantly give us the edge for writing ,not put us on the edge for our mistakes.
So ,take your mistakes light-heartedly ( just made up) that they are lounching platforms for future improvements
It not the point that you make mistakes ,but the point is that you learn from them
And the blog meant to serve the purpose.Eslpod is perfect on so many levels.
I am not shooting from hip.I have done my fair share of searching for a reliable source.Eslpod is the one!
Infect, Eslpod is one of a kind!
My friend Emiliano,
At the Blog station, we all are a bunch of English language enthusiast gathering to learn from our dear profs ,and to learn from one another. Here is the only place on earth that nobody judge anybody else. So, I , myself, always put down my thoughts here without fearing that my friend Emiliano or my other friends never judge me for my all-the-time silly mistakes.
So,it goes without saying that I make mistakes ,and I venture out again to make those mistakes over and over till I get them all streigth.
Do you fell me Emiliono
So brave out and put down on this cyber page what makes you feel right.
Fearless of mistakes
Encounter them pal.
We r not here to judge
Hi, Talal, a Belated Happy Birthday to you. I tried to find out which country you are based in in order that I can search the internet to see whether any book seller will sell the book ‘Foreign Language Education the easy way’ to your country. I then found that you said you would turn 19 on 26th November, which was yesterday. So I must take this opportunity to congratulate you. I hope you had lots of fun yesterday.
About the book Foreign Language Education the easy way by Krashen, Stephen D. If you type in the book name in one of the search engines, you may be able to find a book seller which can ship the book to Greece.
The price on the link I posted ie $5.95, Distributed by: ALTA Book Center is no longer available.
Since the book is very old, a lot of ‘used’ items are for sale, so be careful to check carefully if you only want to buy a brand new book. All those described as ‘as new’ etc are not new, and they are not cheap neither.
amazon.co.uk, and abebooks.co.uk (might be slightly cheaper) sell this book and will ship to Greece.
I am not sure how easy it is to buy English books in Greece. We can order most English books from good book shops in Hong Kong, we do not have to pay for shipping cost but we have to wait for the book to be shipped from overseas to Hong Kong which can take a few weeks.
Do you think your local library have a copy of the book for you to borrow? If not, I hope good book shops in Greece can order for you.
In any case, I wish you good luck in finding the book. Very expensive! I must say.
Hi Talal, you have this book in Amazon
and also you may find Lucy´s books and Jeff´s in Amazon too.
The prize of the book you are looking for is:
4 new from $30.00 / 12 used from $4.75
You have to pay the charges of sending them by mail, but it´s possible to ask for any kind of book
in this site Amazon.
To me is the best place to look for a book and buy it afterward, in fact I have bought a lot of books without any
problem.
Also I bought the kindle, just the best electronic book under my particular point of view.
It´s the cheaper one you may find as all the others are more expensive here in Spain.
The kindle has a very good dictionary so you may look for the words you don´t know while reading the book.
Having the kindle, it´s possible also to have it in the pc. or mac., ipod touch or iphone, you may have the electronic books you may buy and there are also lot of them by free.
——–
Peter, you are right, this site is the best site to write as we do not judge our own bro who takes the will to write and
express themselves, ourselves, sincerely and without restrictions. Of course, all of us made mistakes and it´s so funny to see them once the writing is in the blog.
Sometimes I would hit my head when I see some of my big mistakes, but we need to think that “no body is perfect” as it is
said in the movie “Some Like It Hot” one of my favorites movies and a genial phrase once the millionary discovers, Tonny Curtis told him, that the girl he was in love wasn´t a girl but a man…..and he was in love with her?……not, with him.
The real thing is that nobody is perfect about anything, but we would try to be as good as possible along our lifes.
Regards.
emiliano
You may see Peter, another mistake:
In the movie “Some Like it Hot” it is not Tony Curtis the personnage of whom the millionary is in love with, of course, it´s Jack Lemmon.
Reading the post I have seen my mistake, but as this one is not of grammar or typing, it´s about information, I have to correct it.
Jack Lemmon had one of his incredible good works, also my lovely Marylin Monroe and Tony Curtis……just a very good movie
from the immense Billy Wilder.
See it if you coud and have a good evening.
emiliano
Thank you Betty, thank you very much ,hahahaha, I had a wonderful time with my friends in a restaurant, it was one of my happiest times in the 19 years that i lived . about the book , I will check it out , Emiliano , you have been so helpful as well. thank you guys .
just in case you wonder , I am originally from Libya , but I have been here for almost one year(Greece). so my native language is Arabic
Hi emiliano, it was very naughty of me to borrow the contents from your blog in order to answer Peter without asking for your permission first.
I thought your comment about Lucy was exactly how I felt, so I ‘borrowed’ it and submitted the comment in a hurry. I then realised I probably should not do something like that in a haste.
I hope you forgive me for such an absent-minded action.
I think you are right about not wanting to make any mistakes even though it is only a comment in the blog.
This website is about learning English, and a lot of people are trying to learn some English from each other here. If we make a mistake here, some people may not know it is a mistake, and they learn all the mistakes which is not what we want.
Peter’s English is very good, so he will know it when anyone of us make a mistake, and he will not learn any mistake from us. So he is right to say that it does not matter if we make a mistake here, no one will judge us.
So, no one is wrong in the arguments about making mistakes in this blog.
In fact Lucy and Jeff might want to ‘borrow’ some of our ‘mistakes’ here for their research works. So we better not to make it too perfect, it is better if we start from a lot of mistakes and then progress to making almost no mistake.
I don’t know whether it ever happens to any of you here, if I spend a long long time typing a comment and then submit it, I get a message come up saying the system cannot read the ‘captcha’ and asked me to go back to the previous page to try again. When I returned to the previous page, everything I typed before disappeared and I had to start all over again.
Then means I almost cannot submit anything, because I can never finish typing very quickly.
Now I use the ‘Microsoft Word’ to type, and use it to check all the spelling mistakes etc first before submitting, then I was successful in submitting.
I guess a lot of readers here were put off by the CAPTCHA ERROR message and gave up submitting a message here. I hope that they will try again, use a ‘word’ software to type first and then use the ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ functions to enter their comment here, and then submit. Look forward to seeing more people contributing.
***************************************
You are welcome, Talal, so happy for you that you had a nice time with your friends for your birthday.
I looked up ‘Arabic’ from the internet to learn a bit about this language, very interesting, thank you.
I will give it a shot, Emiliano
Sounds like a good movie
Thanks bro
And,Emiliano
You are as perfect as it gets!
Believe you me ,my friend.
Hi, Peter, I found the following comment which you posted two year’s ago, I liked it so much that I could stop myself in wanting to share it with everyone again here (please forgive me for not seeking permission from you first, I know you are very kind and will not scold me for it):
***********************
Peter Says:
November 27th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
And all the best to you all ,and to you all a good night.
My dearest friends at the podcast program,
I opened my wallet and I found it empty…reached into my pocket and found a few coins (this is real… believe me) Searched my heart and I found You… then I realized; how rich am I having a friend like you.
Thanks for making an impossible , possible
***********************
The message is beautifully done, very touching, thank you Peter.
Hi! Happy Birthday to you, Talal !
It was very nice to see my comment in the blog again, thank you Betty, do it as often as you want it would be always a pleasure to be mentioned and designated in the way you do it, so nice and politely.
Now the snow is falling here in Madrid, what is very odd this date of the year, but being in-doors it´s beatifully.
By the way today is also my birthday, a Sagittarius, and I am happy receiving lot of calls from my friends and family.
One of the calls has been the most incredible nice to me as it was from my father who is 96 years old.
His mind is clear and his voice is strong, a good sign of health for the moment.
Thank you Peter, you are really a nice bro.
Regards.
emiliano
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILIANO, MANY HAPPY RETURNS!
It is amazing we can celebrate two birthdays in one go.
I am so glad for you that you are feeling very happy. It is very nice to receive a lot of calls from your friends and family to say Happy Birthday to you.
It is wonderful that your father remains so bright and sharp even when he is 96 years of age.
The uk.news.yahoo.com a few days ago said: Balwan Singh who was India’s coach for Kabaddi said he knew the secret to good health, long life and happiness — take up the obscure and little-understood sport of kabaddi.
It is very similar to a game little children play in Hong Kong (or at least in the southern part of China?).
May be your father has his own secret to good health, long life and happiness.
My father has a very clear mind as well, he insists on using his brain everyday to keep it active.
well, I think, this song is some sad. Poor turkeys!
I will never eat you, Turkey lady, I swear.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of ESL !
Hi! Our dear Emiliano, Happy Birthday to You! Much, much health and many, many posts on ESL blog.
Last year you offered me a plum cake. And now…are you a stingy man? I don’t think so.
Best wishes,
Tania
Thank you very much Tania, yesterday a good friend of us, Meli, who is another fan of ESL but never writes here….????
brought me a wonderful “apple cake” cooked by her.
It was a nice surprise, she is like heaven, and the apple cake was delicious.
Thanks Meli, the apple cake was so good that we have finished it already, so I am so sorry Tania
if you are going please tell me, I have to look for another delicious dessert.
My daughter Fátima was at home last sunday to celebrate also my birthday, we have a nice dinner cooked by
another good friends Isabel and Cesar.
She cooked a Peruvian meal, she is Peruvian, and the dish was delicious too.
Come home whichever time you want Tania, you´ll be welcome.
emiliano
Thank you very much Betty, yes it was so nice to listen to my father by the phone telling me happy birth day.
He is the kind of man you mentioned, he is be off from sorrows, pains, and obscure feelings and try to take the
best of every situation.
He never complains, always said he is O.K., and he is not scared to die as he tells us he is going to heaven, so
he is not afraid.
Just incredible faith what he has, I would like to be like him.
Thanks Betty, all the best four you and your family.
emiliano