John Winston Ono Lennon MBE 8 December 1980
John Winston Ono Lennon MBE (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer and songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as a co-founder of the band the Beatles, the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. With fellow member Paul McCartney, he formed a celebrated songwriting partnership.
Born and raised in Liverpool, as a teenager Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze; his first band, the Quarrymen, evolved into the Beatles in 1960.
When the group disbanded in 1970, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as “Give Peace a Chance”, “Working Class Hero”, and “Imagine”. After his marriage to Yoko Ono in 1969, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to raise his infant son Sean, but re-emerged with Ono in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy.
He was murdered three weeks after its release.
Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, writing, drawings, on film and in interviews. Controversial through his political and peace activism, he moved to Manhattan in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon’s administration to deport him, while some of his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture.
As of 2012, Lennon’s solo album sales in the United States exceeded 14 million and, as writer, co-writer, or performer, he is responsible for 25 number-one singles on the US Hot 100 chart.
In 2002, a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted him eighth and, in 2008, Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer of all time.
He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994.
8 December 1980: Death
At around 10:50 pm on 8 December 1980, as Lennon and Ono returned to their New York apartment in the Dakota, Mark David Chapman shot Lennon in the back four times at the entrance to the building.
Lennon was taken to the emergency room of nearby Roosevelt Hospital and was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:00 pm. Earlier that evening, Lennon had autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for Chapman.
Ono issued a statement the next day, saying “There is no funeral for John”, ending it with the words, “John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him.”
His body was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York’s Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created.
Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life.
As of 2015, he remains in prison, having been denied parole eight times.
Source Wikipedia
Show someone they’re loved this Christmas
The two-minute clip shows a six-year-old called Lily trying to reach an old man who lives alone in a hut on the moon.
She spies him through the family telescope.
Lily watches on as our man goes about his chores, all alone up there.
She becomes determined to get something to the moon, to send him a message and show him that someone down here is thinking of him.
But nothing – bow and arrow, paper aeroplane or snail mail – can reach him.
When Christmas Day comes around, a tree is plonked in the living room, presents are promptly unwrapped, and Lily is surrounded by family.
The old man gets a gift of his own: a classic telescope, delivered to him in a cloud of colourful helium balloons.
There are tears when they finally lock eyes.
The music is ‘Half the World Away’ performed by Aurora, the original song was by Oasis.
The advert is a bit of a tear-jerker, the company has teamed up with the charity Age UK to raise awareness of loneliness and the aged at Christmas in particular – this is the reason we are showing it here.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1u9Lid9E3E[/embedyt]
Modern communication problems
I guess there is quite a lot of irony in sharing a video that damns modern communication on mediums which are being criticised for the isolation of people and modern communication problems.
The thing is, we all have these excellent tools, but just how good are they?
Well, the tools are excellent, as most would agree, but what about the way we use them?
You, reading this post, wherever in the world you are, is proof that the tools are fantastic – opening up avenues that only a generation ago, people would never have dreamed of existing.
When Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “Global village” in the 1960s there was little indication of the plethora of technologies that would, three decades later, make the world a “global city”.
The main issue is that many have substituted these marvelous technologies for any real human contact and communication, to varying degrees.
Have you ever tried to speak to your Internet or mobile phone provider, just to iron out an issue?
I don’t mean by email or instant messaging or chat – I mean actually talking to a human being.
Have you ever been on a car journey with teenagers?
Communication isn’t just about words.
I wonder if these tools contribute to the decline in writing and reading skills, of memory and attention spans.
Vincent Mosco argued that there are problems with the “death-of-distance” and “end-of geography” metaphors in modern communication technology – we can send multiple messages all over the world, quicker than ever.
Although social and cultural values and connections cannot be completely recreated through virtual reality.
We can [almost] certainly say that the utopia promised by new technologies comes with significant and interrelated physical and cultural challenges that need further investigation – maybe only time will tell, as the great Bob Marley so aptly put it.
Although, I’m sure that a lot of us will agree that not all is bad.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tyJUCYSFE8[/embedyt]
Should you trust your first impressions?
You can’t help it; sometimes, you just get a bad feeling about someone that’s hard to shake.
So, what’s happening in your brain when you make that critical (and often lasting) first judgment?
Peter Mende-Siedlecki shares the social psychology of first impressions — and why they may indicate that, deep down, people are basically good.
After watching the video, have a look at this activity that you can do with other learners or with friends. Primacy and Recency Memory activity.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK0NzsGRceg[/embedyt]
Phrasal Verbs with Across, down and get
A phrasal verb is an idiomatic phrase consisting of a verb and another element, typically either an adverb, as in break down, or a preposition, for example see to, or a combination of both, such as look down upon.
They are notoriously difficult for foreign language learners to grasp and to learn, usually because second language learners do one of two things, both of which are futile :
- They try to translate the phrasal ver back into their own language.
- They try to look for some form of logic or pattern in phrasal verbs.
The term phrasal verb is commonly applied to two or three distinct but related constructions in English: a verb and a particle and/or a preposition co-occur forming a single semantic unit.
This semantic unit cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts in isolation, but rather it can be taken as a whole.
In other words, the meaning is non-compositional and thus unpredictable.
Phrasal verbs that include a preposition are known as prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs that include a particle are also known as particle verbs.
Additional alternative terms for phrasal verb are compound verb, verb-adverb combination, verb-particle construction, two-part word/verb, and three-part word/verb (depending on the number of particles), and multi-word verb.
In this crossword, we will be looking at Phrasal Verbs with Across, down and get – you may also find some alternative meaning to some of the phrasal verbs in the crossword – if you do, why not post your definitions in the comments?
