It has been a dangerous few days here in Los Angeles and the larger Southern California area. The Santa Ana winds–a warm, dry wind that comes through Southern California in the the fall and early winter seasons–are causing wildfires (large, uncontrolled fires).

As the Los Angeles Times reports, over 700 homes have been destroyed (damaged completely). Firefighters who are working to put out the fires have told over 500,000 people to evacuate (leave) their homes. One person has died and about 50 people are injured or hurt, including about 20 firefighters.

We’re very fortunately here at ESL Podcast that everyone is safe. Thank you to all of our listeners who have emailed us to express their concern, or thought of us as they read the news.

~ Lucy

I came across a new word this week in the newsmagazine Newsweek:

Googlegänger = another person with your name, whose search results are mixed with yours when you “google” yourself, or search for information about yourself on the Internet.

This new term comes from the German word “doppelgänger,” which is a double or another version of a person.

My googlegänger: A Chinese opera singer in San Francisco!

~ Lucy

Americans are not the world’s biggest soccer fans, as everyone knows. Soccer is very popular as a sport in school, but the best athletes in the US usually become (American) football, basketball, or baseball players (with a few hockey players as well). So when England’s superstar soccer player David Beckham signed a contract for $250 million dollars with the Los Angeles Galaxy professional soccer team, most Americans asked, “David who?”

Beckham has been in the news here in Los Angeles, not just because of the large contract he received, but because his wife, Victoria, was part of the famous “girl band” the Spice Girls, popular in the 1990s. Soon after Beckham arrived, however, he injured (hurt) himself, and only yesterday returned to the team to play.

Some people (like me) had heard of David Beckham before he came to Los Angeles, mostly from a well-liked movie, Bend it Like Beckham, about a girl from an Indian immigrant family in London who loved to play girl’s soccer. If you haven’t seen this movie, I think you will really like it. This was also the first big movie for the British actress Keira Knightly, although she wasn’t the star of the movie.

~ Jeff

There is an old joke that people at work sometimes say to each other: Are you working hard or hardly working? To work hard means to work with seriousness, to work a great deal, to work a lot. To hardly do something is to barely do something, to do very little of something. Hardly as an adverb means something different than hard as a noun. So the joke is basically: Are you working a lot (working hard) or a little (hardly working)?

I was reminded of this expression when I read a recent article in The Economist. (The Economist is a news magazines from Great Britain. It is published in the US as well.) The article was called “An Idle Proposal” (to be idle means not to work). The story had a chart of how many national public holidays different countries had each year. The country with the highest number was Spain, with 16; the lowest country was Romania, with five. The United States was in the middle: we have ten holidays celebrated by most states. (Each state determines its own public holidays.) Some of our national holidays are shared by other countries – Christmas and New Year’s Day, for example. Most of our holidays are unique to the US: Independence Day (4th of July), Thanksgiving, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Washington’s Birthday (also called President’s Day), Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Veteran’s Day, and Columbus Day. In addition, some states have their own holidays. In California, we celebrate Cesar Chavez Day, in honor of a famous Mexican American civil rights hero in the 1960s.

I’m looking forward to another holiday!

~Jeff