Times are hard. Charles and Big Jim are sitting down to eat. But what are they eating? Can you guess the missing words?

Big Jim is sitting at a table in the middle of the room, waiting to be fed. Charles is standing beside a steaming pot. He is holding a spoon in one hand and a fork in the other. He puts the spoon into the pot and takes out a boiled ______ (a). He decides that it still needs another couple of minutes and puts it back into the pot. But Big Jim is impatient and hands Charles a plate. Charles notices a spot of dirt on the plate and cleans it with his sleeve. He puts the ______ (a) onto the plate along with 4 spoonfuls of stock.

Charles puts the plate on the table, sharpens his knife and sits down with Big Jim. He removes the ______ (b) and puts it on a side plate. He carefully dissects the ______ (a) and keeps the upper part for himself and gives Big Jim the ______ (c). But Big Jim isn’t happy about this and swaps plates.

Charles puts down his knife and fork, picks up his ______ (c) and takes a bite. He nods to Big Jim to say that it is good. Big Jim is sceptical and takes his bite tentatively. He doesn’t seem to share Charles’ enthusiasm for this meal.

Click [HERE] for the answer.

This scene is taken from the 1925 film The Gold Rush. Charlie Chaplin and his companion are sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner. Later, Big Jim, who is delirious with hunger, imagines that Charlie is a giant chicken and starts to chase him around the cabin.

The lesson plan can be downloaded on pdf below. In the activity, students are asked to read the narrative and guess what the two men are eating (this is a similar task to the one that was used with Unusual Recipe). They then watch the film before attempting to reconstruct the text using a Word Cloud for support.

credit-crunch-lunch.pdf

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The boiled boot clip can also be seen at dailymotion.com. It is in French but that isn’t a problem. It is more difficult to capture (download) videos from Dailymotion than videos from YouTube but it can be done using zamzar.com. Here is how:

1. Find the clip that you want on Dailymotion and copy the URL from the top of the screen (i.e. the adress in the window that will look something like this: http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/rush%2Bchaplin
2. Go to: www.zamzar.com
3. Click on ‘Download Videos‘
4. Underneath ‘Step 1‘ you will see a window. Make sure you have deleted all text from this window and then paste the URL address that you copied from Dailymotion.
5. Underneath ‘Step 2‘ you will see a drop down menu which will allow you to select the file format that you want to save your YouTube clip as. Mp4 is probably the most common choice.
6. Enter your email address in the window under ‘Step 3‘ and then click ‘Convert‘ (I used to use this site a lot and they never sent me any promotional stuff).
7. Zamzar will send you an email which will allow you to click on a link and download the file which will contain your YouTube clip. Be patient - it may take a whole day for this to be sent to you.

Posted by admin on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 11:01 am.