Fun with English (Choral Speaking Script)

FUN WITH ENGLISH 
SK Kopok's Choral Speaking Script -- English Carnival 2012

ALL:
Good morning everybody,
Here we are,
A million, billion, willion miles from home,
Among strangers,
Who would like to know,

SOLO 1 (Girl):
Who are we?

SOLO 2 (Boy):
Where do we come from?

SOLO 3 (Girl:)
What are we going to do?

ALL:
Just like always,
We are going to tell you,
We are just children ,
Trying to have fun with English,
Making our voices heard,
Ringing voices, all in chorus,
Speaking English words,
Experimenting with English!
Playing with what we say,
Since English isn't easy,
We are having fun along the way,


GIRLS:
We can speak out loudly,

BOYS:
SPEAK THOSE WORDS OUT LOUD! (Spoken loudly)

GIRLS:
Stop!
Speaking out that loudly,
Just shouldn't be allowed.

GIRLS:
And we can speak out softly,
Or whisper in your ears,
(Girls turn and whisper in their friends' ear)

THIRD ROW:
No!
When you speak that softly,
No one else can hear,

BOYS:
We can speak quite rapidly,

GIRLS:
Just like a speeding train. (Spoken rapidly)
(Chuss! Chuss!)

BOYS:
Or say the words quite slowly,

ALL:
Just-like-a-clogged-up-drain

SOLO 4 (Boy):
Still wondering who are we?

ALL:
Just like always,
We are going to tell you,
We are just like you ,
Trying to have fun with English,
Making our voices heard,
Ringing voices, all in chorus,
Speaking English words,
Experimenting with English!
Playing with what we say,
Since English isn't easy,
We are having fun along the way,

HALF OF THE GIRLS:
And when the mood is right,

OTHER HALF OF GIRLS:
We'll speak up high!

BOYS:
Or-oh-so-low..

GIRLS:
Or water every word and..

ALL:
watch them grow!




BOYS:
Or say the words,
In such a way,
You want to sway,

GIRLS:
Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow, (swaying)
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, (swaying)

BOYS:
(Pointing at the girls)
Look at them,
Quoting Shakespeare,
Like they know better,

GIRLS:
Oh well!
Maybe we do,
The rain in Spain, (swaying)
Stays mainly in the plain, (swaying)

BOYS:
My Fair Lady!

GIRLS:
We can also,
Twist our tongues.

SOLO 5 (Boy):
Twist what?

GIRLS:
Sit back, relax,
And let us ask you a question,

SOLO 6 (Girl):
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

BOYS:
Hmmm... (thinking gesture)

SOLO 7 (Boy):
A woodchuck could chuck wood,
As fast as a woodchuck could chuck wood!
And, if a woodchuck could chuck wood...

GIRLS:
Stop! Stop! Stop!

SOLO 8 (Girl):
What are you doing?

BOYS:
Attempting to recite a tricky rhyme,
As fast as possible,
Without tripping over,
Difficult words!

GIRLS:
English words are fun to learn,

HALF OF THE GIRLS:
Some are short...

OTHER HALF OF THE GIRLS:
..and some are long.

GIRLS:
Ladies and gentlemen,
Lend us your ears,
For we know a very long word,

It is super...

SOLO 9 (Boy):
I know! I know!
It is superman!

GIRLS:
NO!

SOLO 10 (Boy):
Supernatural?

GIRLS:
NO!

SOLO 11 (Boy):
Super Junior?

GIRLS:
NO! NO! NO!

BOYS:
Then tell us what it is.

GIRLS:
It is...supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,
Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious,
If you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious,
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

BOYS:
Wow!
That surely is the..

PAIR 1 (Boys):
..longest!

PAIR 2 (Boys):
..biggest!

PAIR 3 (Boys):
..strongest!

PAIR 4 (Boys):
..cleverest!

BOYS:
... word we have ever heard!

GIRLS:
Then you definitely,
have never heard,
Mary Poppins sings!

ALL:
YOU, YOU and YOU!
Take a good look at us,
Having fun with English,
Making our voices heard,
Ringing voices, all in chorus,
Speaking English words,
Experimenting with English!
Playing with what we say,
Since English isn't easy,
We are having fun along the way,

SOLO 12 (Boy):
Look at the audience!

BOYS:
All curious and restless,

GIRLS:
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock (clock gesture)

BOYS:
All waiting and thinking,

GIRLS:
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock (clock gesture)

ALL:
Who are we?
Yes, we are your children!

GIRLS:
We are...

BOYS:
...seeds of today!

GIRLS:
We are...

BOYS:
...flowers of the future!

GIRLS:
We are...

ALL:
...voices of tomorrow!

BOYS:
And yes!
We are...

ALL:
...SK Kopok!
AUM! AUM! AUM!

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Competitor's Scripts (Choral Speaking)

Selected choral speaking scripts among schools, districts and states. These scripts maybe adopted and adopted to accommodate one's need, taking into consideration: suitability of the content, language level, and length of the text.

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Fort Knox: The Most Secure Vault in the World

I wouldn't know about Fort Knox if I hadn't been staying up late at night watching History Channel. Well, I'm not really a big fan of History as a subject in school, but I just love learning about anything at all just for general knowledge. As a teacher, a vast fund of general knowledge could come in handy. It has proven so in many occasions for me.

What is Fort Knox?
Fort Know is the name commonly used to refer to the US Bullion Depository located south of Loiusville, Kentucky, next to a 109,000 acre US army base. The vault is said to hold 147.3 million ounces of gold. Based on a price of $1833 per ounce, the approximate value of those gold bars is $270 billion.

Internal Defenses

First of all, the walls of the depository  are 4-foot-thick granite, which many believe is lined with cement, steel and fire-proof material. It is said that the depository could withstand a direct hit from an atomic bomb. The front door weighs about 22 tons and is made of blast-proof material. No single person can enter the vault. Several members of the depository staff must dial separate combinations, changed daily. The staff operate on a random time schedule. The windows are sealed from the inside and out. The glass is fire-proof, bullet-proof and blackened so that no eyes can peek through. The foundation of the building is composed of multiple layers of cement, with 10 feet of solid granite on top. The granite supports the weight of the vault structures and prevents underground infiltration. At every corner of the depository are multi-focus surveillance systems.They allow for every inch of the depository to be under surveillance at all times. There are also four armed sentinel stations located on the ground level. At each station are security personnel and Thompson submachine guns. Additional sentinel stations are placed on upper levels as well. The vaults are said to be 27 inches thick, made of steel and concrete and are impermeable to atomic bombs.

External Defenses

In addition of its internal defenses, Fort Knox has a system of barriers and external defenses that make it virtually impenetrable. The first barrier is a seemingly simple wire fence surrounds the outermost perimeter that touches the highway and roads. There are several motion sensors along this fence. The second barrier is a 10-foot electrical  fence with additional concrete supports. The final electric fence encloses a rectangular area. There are several secured doorways along this fence for patrolling guards. Next, the original fence, built in 1937, is a black wrought-iron barrier forming an octagonal defense around the building. In addition to these, the depository is within sight of Fort Knox, a large US army post home to the 16th Cavalry Regiment, 19th Engineer Battalion, US Army Armor School, and the 3rd Brigade Combat Team. In total, nearly 30,000 soldiers and 300 tanks, armed personnel carriers, attack helicopters and artillery are available for protection. Last but not least, the depository is also placed far enough inland to avoid sea assaults and is protected to the east by the Appalachian mountains.

Speculated Defenses

The defenses described above are only a small fraction of what is known to defend Fort Knox. Its greatest defense is its secrecy. It is speculated that the depository has a system of virtual trip wires that can alert security personnel of an object nearly 15,000 feet away. They are intelligent enough to distinguish between a moving car an a loitering person. The depository is said to use stereo camera identification and fingerprint analysis as standard methods of identification. The stereo camera is so precise, it can point out features altered by plastic surgery. Original builders of the depository have stated that many features were modeled on the Bank of France. Most corridors are said to instantly flood the moment an intruder is detected. It is widely believed that between the second and third barricades there is a system of land mines, surface-to-air missiles and motion-sensored automatic rifles. In addition to these terrestrial defense system, the vaults are said to be protected from above by a satellite defense system. It can identify potential intruders and attack remotely.

What Are They Protecting?

Here comes the big question. With such defenses, it is only logical that whatever hidden inside the vault should be something of tremendous value - or a secret so sinister it can destroy the world as we know it if let loose. Here is a list of things rumored to be kept inside Fort Knox:

1. $270 billion worth of gold bars
2. The Crown Jewels
3. Declaration of Independence
4. Morphine and other drugs
5. Anthrax powder
6. Bodies of assasinated world leaders and criminals
7. Roswell aliens

I don't want to speculate things even further but I do hope they store aliens in there.

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Google Me, Google You

Have you ever googled yourself? Chances are that most of us, technologically-literate people have, at least once, in our free-est hours, gone to Google, type our names and clicked "search".

Meet Jim Killeen, who like us has googled himself on the net and found a list of other people around the world who all share his name. But unlike the majority of us, he film a documentary and wrote a book about it. You can watch his movie here:

As far I know, only one person shares my name. Her name is Nur Ainul Farina Roslan. I even had a conversation with her through IM, but just once. That was back in 2008 I think.

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The Brilliant Mind of Nikola Tesla

Today (Jan 7, 2013), 70 years ago, a man died alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, penniless and in debt. His name was Nikola Tesla. Perhaps some of you have never heard of him, so in honor of the anniversary of his death today, let me tell you who this man was. 

First off, Nikola Tesla was brilliant. He spoke eight languages, almost single-handedly developed technology that harnessed the power of electricity for household use, and invented things like electrical generators, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights, and  machines that shoot enormous lightning bolts. He had an unyielding, steel-trap photographic memory and an insane ability to visualize even the most complex pieces of machinery – the guy did advanced calculus and physics equations in his head, memorized entire books at a time, and successfully pulled off scientific experiments that modern-day technology still can't replicate. For instance, in 2007 a group of lesser geniuses at MIT got all pumped up out of their minds because they wirelessly transmitted energy a distance seven feet through the air. Nikola Tesla once lit 200 lightbulbs from a power source 26 miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of a desert. To this day, nobody can really figure out how did he manage that, because two-thirds of the schematics only existed in the darkest recesses of Tesla's incredible brain.

Of course, much like many other eccentric giga-geniuses and diabolical masterminds, Tesla was also completely insane.  He was prone to nervous breakdowns, claimed to receive weird visions in the middle of the night, spoke to pigeons, and occasionally thought he was receiving electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrials on Mars.  He was also obsessive-compulsive and hated round objects, human hair, jewelry, and anything that wasn't divisible by three. He was also asexual and celibate for his entire life. Basically, Nikola Tesla was the ultimate mad scientist, which is seriously awesome.

Another sweet thing about Tesla is that he conducted the sort of crazy experiments that generally result in hordes of angry villagers breaking down the door to your lab with torches and pitchforks. One time, while he was working on magnetic resonance, he discovered the resonant frequency of the Earth and caused an earthquake so powerful that it almost obliterated the 5th Avenue New York building that housed his Frankenstein Castle of a laboratory.  Stuff was flying off the walls, the drywall was breaking apart, the cops were coming after him, and Tesla had to smash his device with a sledge hammer to keep it from demolishing an entire city block.  Later, he boasted that he could have built a device powerful enough to split the Earth in two. Nobody dared him to prove it.

Tesla also ordered the construction of the Wardenclyffe Tesla Tower. The massive structure, ostensibly designed to wirelessly transmit power, has been cited as a potential cause of the mysterious 1908 Tunguska Event – a ten-megaton blast that detonated in the wastelands above central Russia that completely obliterated and deforested everything unlucky enough to be located within a several hundred mile radius.  While nothing has ever successfully proven Tesla's involvement in the huge explosion, it's pretty awesome that this guy could potentially have detonated a weapon 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and have done it back before they'd even invented the submachine gun.

Tesla in his lab.

During his adventures blinding half of the world with science, Nikola Tesla harnessed the power of Niagara Falls into the first hydroelectric power plant, constructed a bath designed to cleanse the human body of germs using nothing but electricity, and created a 130-foot long bolt of lightning from one of his massive coils (a feat which to this day remains the world record for man-made lightning), but perhaps his most badass invention was his face-melting, tank-destroying, super-secret Atomic Death Ray.  In the 1920s he claimed to be working on a tower that could potentially have spewed forth a gigantic beam of ionized particles capable of disintegrating aircraft from 200 miles away and blinking most men out of existence like something out of a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers comic. His weapon, known as the "Teleforce Beam", allegedly shot ball lightning at 60 million volts, liquefying its targets with enough power to vaporize steel, and, while it could shoot further than 200 miles, its effectiveness beyond that range was limited only by the curvature of the Earth. Luckily for all humans, this crazy insanity never came to fruition – most of the schematics and plans existed only in Tesla's head, and when he died of heart failure in 1943, little hard data on the project existed.  Still, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI confiscated all his personal stuff and locked it away anyways, just to be safe.

Despite being incredibly popular during his day, now Tesla remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of the modern era. Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the lightbulb, but it was his one-time assistant and life-long arch-nemesis, Nikola Tesla, who made the breakthroughs in alternating-current technology that allowed for people to cheaply use electricity to power appliances and lighting in their homes. They constantly fought about whether to use alternating or direct-currents, but ultimately Tesla was the one who ended the battle – at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, his AC generators illuminated the entire experience, marking the first time that an event of that magnitude had ever taken place under the glow of artificial light. Today, all homes and appliances run on Tesla's AC current.

Nikola Tesla was one of those super-genius whose intellect placed him dangerously on the precipice between "great scientific mind" and "utter madness". He held 700 patents at the time of his death, made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, robotics, steam turbine engineering, and magnetism, and once melted one of his assistants' hands by overloading it with X-rays - which isn't really scientific, but is still pretty cool. And honestly, if there were one man on this planet who was ever capable of single-handedly destroying the entire planet through his insane scientific discoveries, it was Tesla. That alone should qualify him as the greatest geek who ever lived.

Nikola Tesla holding in his hands balls of flame.

See also: The Oatmeal: Why Nikola Tesla Was the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived, Wikipedia: Nikola Tesla

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The Origin of Sandwich

The sandwich, which is most popular with world-wide eaters, functions as a noun or a verb. Besides the more obvious occupation of being something edible between two or more slices of bread, metaphorically speaking, it also likes to squeeze in between two other people, places, things, materials, etc. For example, "he is willing to sandwich in an appointment between two other meetings" or "her car was sandwiched between two other cars in the parking lot". 

The word sandwich that we use today was born in London during the very late hours one night in 1762 when an English nobleman, John Montagu (1718-1792), the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, was too busy gambling to stop for a meal even though he was hungry. The legend goes that he ordered a waiter to bring him roast-beef between two slices of bread. The Earl was able to continue his gambling while eating his snack; and from that incident, we have inherited that quick-food product that we now know as the sandwich. He apparently had the meat put on slices of bread so he would not get his fingers greasy while he was playing cards. Now I wonder why it has not been called "montagu" instead. Imagine "Cheesy Chicken Montagu" and "I have my diary montagued between the two books". 

Perhaps people of that time just love to name their food based on a place or town. Several other food also has their names derived from places. Contrary to some people's belief, burger does not originate from England. "Burger" or "hamburger" (as it is originally called), originates from Hamburg, Germany. "Frankfurter" originates from Frankfurt, Germany. Also called "wiener" which means the people of Vienna (Wien), Austria. 

Apparently, the First Earl of Sandwich, Edward Montagu, originally intended to take the title of the Earl of Portsmouth. A sandwich could just as easily have been called a “portsmouth” if he had not changed his mind. "I'm thinking of making some tuna portsmouth for breakfast". Well, why not?

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Anak Melayu Manja

Here I would like to share a meaningful poem. My father once recited this poem on RTM1.

ANAK MELAYU MANJA

Anak Melayu Manja

Anak Melayu manja,

Anak Melayu manja,

Anak Melayu manja.

Dari kecil dijaga dengan petua

jadi budak selalu leka

hidup senang berada

ibu bapa tempat meminta-minta

anak Melayu manja

pergi belajar sambil lewa

negaranya makmur nak dijadikan neraka

mudah lupa pengorbanan bangsanya.

Anak Melayu manja.

Bila tegas katanya dera

bila lembut dipijaknya kepala

tak takut bangsanya hilang kuasa

hendak berkuasa songsang pula caranya.

Anak Melayu manja.

Siang malam suka pesta

bohjan bohsia sudah melata

logam hitam puja-puja

cerita porno dijaja-jaja

lupa waktu dah senja

tapi masih lagi mahu terkinja-kinja.

Anak Melayu manja.

Ketuanya kata merit

mereka pening kepala duka nestapa

baru sedar susahnya tanpa kuota

anak Melayu jangan lagi manja-manja

nanti kita hilang kuasa

hilang negara.

- IBRAHIM DEEN, Sarawak

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