The Salton Sea is my favorite environmental disaster, because it's entire history AND future is a disaster. Historically it was known that the Colorado River would flood over it's banks in some years, and water from the flooding would head towards the Salton Basin. But in 1905 an exceptional flood caused the river to overflow the headgates of the Alama Canal, an irrigation canal for farmland in the Imperial Valley. A levy breached, and the resulting torrent eroded a new channel so quickly that the entire flow of the Colorado River diverted into the dry basin. The rate of erosion was so fast that an 80 foot waterfall developed along the former canal path.
The river flowed into the basin for TWO YEARS before engineers were finally able to close the breach. After it was all over the sea had grown in size to cover over 525 square miles of former desert, including submerging the town of Salton. People said it would evaporate, but after 100 years it is still the largest lake in California. This accident, and subsequent flooding episodes in the Imperial Valley were major reasons for building the Hoover Dam decades later.
Everybody knew there should not be a big lake there, and with no source of replenishment, the lake would eventually dry up. But that didn't stop land prospectors from building several townsites and resorts all around the shoreline. The lake was stocked with fish, and soon massive numbers of birds started hanging out, to the point that the area was declared a national wildlife refuge.
The lake continued to dry up, becoming saltier all the time. The fish became locked in a crazy cycle of explosive reproduction followed by mass die offs due to algae blooms. The resorts failed, the towns were abandoned, and government spending was required to preserve all of that new wildlife that shouldn't have been around in the first place.
A few years ago i saw a great documentary on the place called "Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea". The documentary was filmed in 2004 and showed surreal scenes of salt encrusted, half submerged towns and glassy water right up to the highway. I visited the lake in the spring of 2011.
In the 7 years between seeing the film on tv and seeing the lake in person great quantities of water had disappeared. The lake is far from the road now, and i certainly didn't see any submerged towns, although i did find ruins that obviously had been flooded in the past. Water levels aside, the whole area is still very surreal.
The ironic thing about the lake is that for all the fuss about how to preserve it and how much money it will cost, there really isn't any thing to worry about. Even if it dries up completely will still be a lake in the future as it has in the past. In fact, it will be the actual ocean sometime in the future.
When i walked up to one of the smaller buildings here a big angry owl flew out the door and buzzed my head.
In one of the formerly flooded structures.
The sea sits directly on the San Andreas Fault, and the surface of the lake is 225 feet below sea level. In the distant past the whole basin was part of the Sea of Cortez. Over a few million years, the nearby Colorado River deposited so much sediment in it's ever growing delta (from it's excavation of the Grand Canyon), that it eventually damned up the whole width of the Sea of Cortez, creating what was then called Lake Cahuilla. But the basin, like the Sea of Cortez, is part of a rift valley system.
As California slowly shears by the rest of the country the valley is likely to once again be part of the nearby ocean (just as Africa's rift valleys will be part of the Indian Ocean). Even now, the area separating the basin from the ocean is just 30 feet above sea level. When it happens, the Sea of Cortez will reach all the way to Inyo California, not far from Palm Springs!
The water is brownish, foamy, and smells bad. Toxic stuff seems to be everywhere, yet, while we were here a family in a minivan pulled up and their daughters waded into the lake to play. The parents didn't seem to think anything of it. It was very unnerving.
The beach "sand" is literally made of fish bones.
I spent a couple of hours driving around the lake, but that was not enough time at all to see the multitude of strange things scattered throughout the area. We really only had time for two stops on our way to Anza Borrego, but those were full of things to look at.
Here is a youtube video that does a good job describing the place with good photography in just a few minutes:
Goodbye Salton Sea, i dont' know why but i hope to see you again.
Goldilocks and the three bears is a well known children's story in English speaking countries and when I first began using it in Portugal in the early 90's very few Portuguese pre-school educators knew it, it's more well known now I think. It's a story we use in ELT for numbers and family (mummy, daddy and baby); every thing comes in threes (three bears, three bowls, three chairs, three beds) , and there are some nice adjectives (hot and cold, hard and soft and just right!). We assume , if we think about it at all, that Goldilocks is a spoilt little brat, going where she has not been invited, doing what she's not meant to do and generally well deserving of the fright she gets when the bears find her in their bedroom. Anthony Browne, takes us on quite a different visual journey in his picturebook Me and You. In an interview about his picturebook, he says:
"I always thought that Goldilocks got a rough deal in the original and I'm trying to redress the balance. How do we know that she was a greedy, selfish little girl? Perhaps there was a reason for her to enter the bears' house? I'm trying to tell the story from two different points of view: the baby bear's story shown in warm, reassuring coloured pencils, and Goldilock's harsher existence painted like a graphic novel, in sepia tones." The result is a perfect picturebook, to be contemplated from front to back cover, with nothing missed out.
Back and front covers
The front and back covers of the hard back edition are one whole image, a grassy area in front of a long row of terraced houses. The bear family are presented on the cover, looking out as us, as though we are taking a photo of them all, a happy little family. In the background, by chance we've also photographed a solitary figure, walking head down, hands in pockets.
Front endpapers
The endpapers are plain with no illustrations, however the baby blue and orange are prominent in the two narratives we find in the picturebook. The blue belongs to the bear and his family and the orange to the sepia illustrations of the little girl.
Title page
The title page contains two illustrations which are copies from later in the book. They are fittingly inside frames, two very different characters in different worlds, and placed under the three title words, "Me and You", for the story that follows is told in the voice of the little boy bear. The two illustrations are different in both tone and style, the bear is drawn with coloured crayon, the bright colours contrast the duller, darker sepia tones of the watercolour illustration of the little girl, who has a tiny piece of auburn hair sticking out from under her hood, (it almost connects her to the bear). The title uses different fonts which emphasise the difference between the two characters as well. The dedication on the facing page reads, "For all the underdogs".
Opening 1
The little boy bear introduces us to his house, a warm yellow home, number 3 (of course!) in a spot of bright green, in the background the rest of the city appears to be big and industrial-like, (but those chimneys and towers could also be tall tree trunks). There's a menacing looking wolf-like dog entering the illustration, but everything else looks serene and peaceful. The three bears are each seen from separate windows, in different parts of the house and a solitary red ball bounces alone in the garden outside.
Opening 2
The book continues in double page format, verso in sepia showing us the little girl's story and recto in bright, picturebook-like colours showing and telling us the little boy bear's story. The little girl's world is daddy-less, it's cold and drab, they live in a small house in the city, and when we see mummy pause in front of the butcher there is confirmation that there may not be much money to spare either. Now the recto, and if you look carefully at the pencil crayon illustrations, you will see everything is outlined in the orangey brown of the bears, uniting the images within their world. Daddy is tall and wide, behind a more fragile mummy and their cute little son, they ooze affluence - I love mummy bear's skinny ankles, all rich mother's have skinny ankles!
Opening 3
As little boy bear tells us his story, the story we know so well about porridge that's too hot to eat, the little girl's story visually unfolds - a story we don't know at all, about a little girl who sees a balloon, tries to catch it and gets lost. We see her face properly for the first time and she is frightened.
Opening 4
The bears walk in their very posh neighbourhood - three together, yet very seperate, little boy bear describing the events. "Daddy talked about his work and Mummy talked about her work. I just messed about." (Look carefully at the background trees, notice anything odd?) We see the little girl walking, getting more and more lost and suddenly coming upon the bears' lovely yellow house in the middle of the greyness she has been runing from. It is glowing, enticing her with its warmth and she pushes the front door open. As she moves around the table trying the porridge, the bears walk back home. As she tries the three chairs (and breaks the little one), they walk through their open front door, mummy and daddy accusing each other of leaving it open. As the little girl walks up the stairs, we see the three bears begin the someone's-been-eating-my-porridge-routine. She tries the beds as the bears find the three chairs...'"We'd better take a look upstairs", whispered Daddy. "After you, Mummy." '
Opening 9
The little girl is asleep, comfy in little boy bear's bed, her auburn hair flowing as though it's part of the wood grain in the headboard. The bears are quietly climbing the stairs, '"Do be careful dear," said Daddy.'
Opening 10
And there they are! We see the same scene from both perspectives. The little girl in her sepia watercolour illustration is suddenly confronted by three scarey bears. Browne has skillfully painted their fur to make them look prickly and mean, the background is dark, a darkness which seems to radiate from the bears. We are feeling so sorry for the little girl whose red hair is reflected in the bears' eyes. We see her terror in the little boy bear's version, as he continues with his well known monolgue ... "Someone's in my bed,"I said, "and they're STILL THERE." Even the bears carved into the head board are surprised.
Opening 11
The little girl flees. As the little boy bear describes her actions, we see her leave the bedroom, go down the stairs, out through the front door and into the street. As she runs into the rain we can just make out the bear family peering through their windows at her, the little boy bear upstairs, the adults downstairs. The graphic novel frames take the girl back into the grey city, past railings, walls topped with barbed wire and others covered in graffiti. We see this as well as glance across at the little boy bear. In his colorful picture he is deadpan looking through his window. At first we are uncertain if he is in or out, the reflection of a wooded landscape looks like it is behind him... the forest that belongs to the original story maybe? "I wonder what happened to her?" he says to himself. The ending is a hopeful one, I say this as Anthony Browne has described it so himself. And of course it is, the illustrations in the final spread are full of hope, at least the final frames are ...
Opening 12
Janet Evans interviewed Anthony Browne in her latest collection of chapters Talking beyond the page and he explained how the story wasn't originally in its present form. He had thought of telling two stories, first the bear's then the girl's, but it was the editor who suggested telling two stories simultaneously, in parallel, with a hopeful ending. It works wonderfully and we all sigh a deep sigh as we see the girl reunited with her mum. Do we think about the bear again? A lonely little chap, in his pretty house with a lovely garden.
Anthony Browne is a genius - this picturebook is challenging on many levels. It needs to be read and re-read, and the children/teens/young adults you are showing this picturebook to, need to be encouarged to talk through what they see and think about as they piece the puzzles together. When Browne was the UK Children's Laureate (2009 - 2011) he said the following: " ... Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book."Me and You does just that and can be used with children and teenagers as a spring board for discussion.
If you go to the CKG website here, you can download some excellent visual literacy activity sheets for a number of picturebooks, including Me and You.
Cordova has a dark side. I suppose any small town would that has existed under four different nationalities. At least some people may see it that way. To the people who live there it's just history or a part of their heritage. But like a freaky family heirloom you may spot in a friends house, some of the scattered remains of Cordova's past emanate an eery atmosphere for visitors.
Abandoned long ago on a hill in a dark mossy forest, the old elementary school
is permanently haunted.
A few miles from the abandoned school is an old timer graveyard on the shores of Eyak Lake. This cemetary is larger than it first seems. Trails lead of into the woods and up the hills. The deeper you explore the more you find, even well after you're sure you must be beyond the boundaries. We arrived shortly after the snow melted away, when the plants had just started to poke out of the ground. The sign reads "Pioneers of Alaska" but i suspect it may be old enough that some of the residents were buried in Russia.
Many of the graves, like these, must be completely invisible most of the year, either covered in snow or covered by vegetation that grows very quickly in the long summer days. At this point the plants have just started to come out of the ground.
"You may think you know the story of The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf - but only one person knows the real story. And that person is A. Wolf. His tale starts with a birthday cake for his dear old granny, a bad head cold and a bad reputation. The rest (as they say) is history."
This is the blurb on the inside of the front cover of The true story of the 3 little pigs!It's all about perspective really. This picturebook shows us the story we know and love from Wolf's perspective, and he's certain he was framed!
I've already featured a picturebook that takes this traditional story and gives it a twist, The three little wolves and the big bad pig, making it very appropriate for older learners. This too is a great title for the teenage ELT classroom.
The true story of the 3 little pigs was written by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith, who together, with Molly Leach as designer, create incredible picturebooks.
As with all these adaptations of traditional stories, the humour comes from the reader's previous knowledge and understanding of the original story. This picturebook is particularly special and has been written about quite extensively by academics. It's considered an example of a postmodern picturebook due to the way the illustrations subvert the words. Probably one of the reasons it's not used much in ELT. I hope that by talking about it here, someone will have a go and do great things!
So let's take a look at this example of a postmodern picturebook!
The font cover is the front page of the Daily Wolf - naturally the perfect tabloid to cover this kind of story: headline is the title of our story and the journalist is A. Wolf (though we are also told that there is a real author "As told by Jon Scieszka") The wolf in the photo is depicted as a well dressed gentleman with a polka dot bow tie and wearing studious glasses. The pigs he is supposedly blowing (huffing?) are pink and shiny. Our reader is also pig, can you see his trotter holding the bottom right corner of the newspaper?
Back cover
The back cover is a collage illustration of a page of a newspaper - strips of columns of text, interrupted by a miniature illustration in the centre, showing the scenes of the crimes. So not only does the newspaper represent sensationalism, but there's a hint of the courtroom here, of judgement day.
Title page
As usual I have the paperback edition of this picturebook. So it opens immediately onto the title page. A sepia tone to the title page illustration gives an air of time past. There are four objects placed together in the centre of the aged background, some tufts of straw and a twig set in a measuring jug, all placed on a brick. Could these be pieces of evidence? And so the Wolf's side of the story begins ... He introduces himself.
Opening 2
The words are matter of fact, in the first person (for it is the Wolf who is telling the story). He asks us to call him Al, "I don't know how this whole Big Bad Wold thing got started ...". The illustration is dark, but you can just make out the prison stripes in the Wolf's sleeves. He's looking out at the reader quite innocently, and adjusting his glasses. "Maybe it's because of our diet.", he says. The Wolf is peering up from behind the table top, "Hey, it's not my fault wolves eat cute little animals like bunnies and sheep and pigs. That's just the way we are. If cheeseburgers were cute, folks would probably think you were Big and Bad, too." An enormous hamburger shines out at us from the illustration, Lane Smith has used a photo of a real bun, and filled it with all sorts of delicacies. Can you see the different animals sticking out of the filling?
Before I go on, just a note about the illustrations: on most openings they are shown in frames. There's a photograph like feel to them, as though they have been kept in an album, those wiggly edges remind me of the photos my Mum has of her family in the 50's. Frames around illustrations are supposed to make us feel detached - we look at these illustrations with very little sympathy.
Opening 3
Even the illustration of long-ago-school-day slate, here in opening 3, is a framed image. "The real story is about a sneeze and a cup of sugar." But the introduction has been made, and we are now ready to hear the real story, Wolf's story. The verso in this opening is a wonderful collection of letters, representing elements from within the story we know so well. There are references to the three houses made of brick, sticks and straw. We can see a piggy tail and a snout. A big mouth with a sticky out tongue (E) and the wolf's bushy tail. And the pair of ears at the bottom of the page, encourage the story along ... go on then, I'm all ears!
Opening 4
"Way back in Once upon a time ..." A mixture of real and fantasy in one breath! Here is Wolf making a cake for his "dear old granny" - her picture is on the wall, and if you look closely you will see two rabbit ears sticking out of the mixture. What a mixture it is too! Whole eggs, shells and all. Lane Smith has used collage quite minimally here, the eggs, the butter in the bottom right corner and the picture frame. Wolf tells us he ran out of sugar for the cake, so he went next door to borrow some.
Opening 5
The next door we are shown is miles away! And as we all suspect it's a house of straw, which the Wolf is most derogatory about, "... who in his right mind would build a house of straw?" Upon knocking on the door, it fell in and that's when his nose started itching! He huffed and he snuffed...
Opening 7
And we all know what happened next!
Opening 8
The words continue to describe the incident in a dead pan sort of tone... "And you know what? The whole darn straw house fell down. ..." The illustrations in verso look like the aftermath of a huge explosion, and the dead little piggy's bottom is visible in the middle of the straw strewn ground. Wolf looks visibly perplexed in the verso "... such a shame to leave a perfectly good ham dinner lying there in the straw. So I ate it up." This happens once again with the pig who lived in the stick house, the Wolf's nose tickles, he huffed and he snuffed, and the little pig ended up dead and ... "Think of it as a second helping", said Wolf! There's a small vignette, showing us a fat Wolf, holding his stomach! At the brick house the Wolf is very upset: not only did the pig tell him to go away, a pig who looks big and mean through the small window in the illustration, but he also yelled, "And your old granny can sit on a pin!" The straw that broke the camel's back ... the Wolf admitted to going nuts. That's when the cops arrived, to find Wolf "huffing and puffing and making a real scene." Funnily enough they were all pink pigs! And "The rest they say is history."
Opening 14
The newspaper in this illustration harks back to the front cover, only this time, it's The Daily Pig, and the headlines read "BIG BAD WOLF!", "Wolf: I'll huff and I'll puff ..., "A.T. Wolf big and bad", Red Riding Hood settles dispute out of court", "Canis Lupus - seen as menace". The hand holding the paper looks like it could belong to Wolf this time. The final page shows us Wolf as he is today, the after-the-story-Wolf, the one who's been framed! He looks feeble alongside the mean looking pig in prison uniform!
Opening 15
It's a brilliant picturebook, using words and pictures to create an entertaining, clever version of the well-known story. And of course it makes you wonder about all the other underdogs in traditional stories. What about the wicked step-mother? The two ugly sisters? The giant at the top of the bean stalk? Maybe they were all framed? Great extension activities for students to write alternative narratives based on the underdog.
As usual there are a number of Youtube films but I like this one in particular, the narrator's voice is so matter of fact and jolly, it's great!
And there are some interesting resource pages on the net if that's what you like: Scholastic resources; LitGuidesand other stuff.
More and more I just love the sharing of a good picturebook, and this one is sooo good. Giggling and laughing together in class, sharing the visual verbal jokes - there's nothing more motivating for a language learner.
Maree found out there was a haunted house in Sand Diego, and so she nagged me about it for days. Finally, on our last morning we were ready early and i couldn't find an excuse not to go. The Whaley House is in old town San Diego and is purported to be "the most haunted house in America". Of course, if you google that you'll find a dozen other candidates that claim the same status.
After going inside, i have to admit it's a pretty weird house, with bizarre wall treatments, creaky floors and dark rooms. In the 1800's it not only was the home of the Whaley family, it also contains a courthouse, theater, and a small store. At least 5 people have died on the site. James Robinson was hung on the site before the house was built in 1852 and one of the Whaley's committed suicide in 1885. Others died of natural causes.
Even aside from being haunted, the house is full of preserved furnishings, amenities, and even toys of the times, making it very interesting historical museum.
You should not stay in here for too long.
The babies room is especially haunted.
In the front lobby the house has a cool book of ghost photography. It's jam packed full of images of inept camera users, like slow shutter speeds, light flares on dirty lenses, and malfunctioning red eye reduction reflections (mysterious floating red orbs!) are a few of the culprits.
Ghosts typically do horribly frightening things like, uh, walking around. Since most ghosts died long ago and are not familiar with modern technology so they spend much of their time opening and closing drawers and cupboards, most likely searching for nacho cheese or some other valuable substance that can only be enjoyed by the living, like beer, not realizing that these days those items are kept in a refrigerator.
The museum offers a night time ghost hunting tour, where you can roam around here in the dark with a flashlight.
The creepy theater was sort of stuffed into an attic like room, with about a dozen chairs for spectators.
