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Commentary Lesson

Welcome Flow English listeners

This is the commentary for Lemon Dog’s lucky day

A little background on Lemon Dog’s lucky day and Lemon Dog

I lived in Korea in 1997-1998, and I lived in Seoul actually the north side of Seoul. I was living up on the northern part of Seoul, on a place called “Impian Goo” and I was teaching at a place called “Kids college teaching English”, taught Kindergarteners to 8 graders for the most part and we did whatever we needed to, to keep things interesting. One of the things we liked to do were to tell stories and draw cartoons. I used to draw different cartoons and stories to make things interesting, and one of the characters I came up with while I was there was a character, a cartoon called Lemon Dog.

Lemon Dog was a character who loved lemons. He loved everything with lemons. He loved to cook with lemons, he loved to sleep on lemons, he loved to make pillows and food and clothing, whatever he could out of lemons, and lemon’s skins, lemon products. He loved lemons. And my students loved Lemon Dog too. They thought he was fun to get to know, a fun way to learn English. So I used to draw different cartoons, different days about the adventures of Lemon Dog. Lemon Dog going around town again to the movies or the grocery store, going on trips, that kind of thing. So this story is inspired by Lemon Dog. It’s a new story that I wrote for Flow English, and I think we’ll talk a little bit about the story as well. We begin talking about, a little background in the story, about Lemon Dog. He’d loving food that’s made for lemons, his mother is a bulldog, he’s father is a sheepdog, so they got together and they had him as a son.

We also talk about different fruit, different fruit and vegetables in the story. We also talk about the idea of being vegetarian. We talk about the idea of being vegan. So I’ve been vegetarian for 17 years and my good friend A.J that you all know also has been vegetarian for a number of years and he’s currently vegan so we wanted to include some talk about food, food idioms, also about eating practices, dietary practice, including being vegetarian and benign vegan. Being vegetarian means you don’t eat any meat or flesh, no fish as well. Being vegan, being vegan means avoiding all animal products, including milk and dairy products

So being vegetarian, being vegan, that’s a health practice that both A.J and I, stick to and its also we believe good for the environment, good for the animals. That’s an animal welfare issue and we both have concerns about the environment and the way animals are treated in factory farming so that’s a little bit of a background about us and a little bit of a background about the story.

So in the story Lemon Dog’s father is a sheepdog, and a sheepdog is a dog that should protect sheep, but he doesn’t protect sheep, he eats sheep. So he’s supposed to protect them but he eats them, so we say he’s crazy, we say he’s as nutty as a fruitcake. He’s crazy so nutty means crazy and then another expression, nutty as a fruitcake also means crazy. There are a lot of nuts in a fruit cake so that’s where that comes from.

Later in story talks about Lemon Dog before he liked lemons, he liked pumpkin. In fact, he only ate things made pumpkin when he was a puppy. So we talk about vegan cream of pumpkin popsicles, so that’s sort of a silly idea but we thought that might be funny and so the vegan cream of pumpkin popsicles, vegans don’t eat creams, they don’t eat milk or cheese or cream so in the story it’s vegan cream of pumpkin popsicles. The cream is actually made from soy milk, it’s not actually milk it’s a, we say instead of using cream he uses soy milk for the popsicles.

The popsicles are a frozen tree, you may or may not know what a popsicle is, but it’s usually a frozen juice tree, made out of orange juice or grape juice, something like that, also call them icicle but usually call them popsicle, flavored popsicle. Later in story, Lemon Dog decides he wants to throw a party and again he decides that everything will be made from lemon. So he’s gonna make lemon soup, lemon sandwiches, lemon salad. He wants to make lemon cake and lemon pie, but it’s going to take a lot of lemons to make all this from so he needs to buy 36000 lemons. So in the first part of the story he decides that everybody is gonna love his party, as long as he makes everything from lemons, so everything for the party will be made from lemons. And

in the first part of the story, it ends with him finding he’s keys and driving away and then it’s a to be, its a to be continued story, so you have to wait to see what happens in the next part of the story. So as the suspends builds and you can’t resist, you go and start studying part 2 of Lemon Dog’s lucky day and it begins again with him getting into his car and driving off. He has to make his way through traffic so we get to talk about a number of different idioms on his way, getting through a long line of traffic. We also talk about his car being souped-up, which means he has a high powered car. He made changes to he’s car to soup it up.

When he gets to the grocery store he goes straight to the fruit and vegetable aisle. Aisle is a word we use for line or lane. So he goes straight to the part of the store where the fruit and vegetables are. And then he has a great experience there because he looks at the shelf and he sees beautiful, sexy, delicious lemons. So this helps us understand how much Lemon Dog loves lemons because he thinks they’re beautiful. He thinks they’re sexy. He thinks they’re delicious. So he couldn’t feel any better, stronger feeling towards lemons. He loves them, he thinks they’re beautiful, sexy and delicious. He can see that they’re loaded with lots of juice, it means they’re full of lots juice and he loads his shopping card up, with 36001 plump juicy lemons. So he takes his card, he takes his lemons, up to the checkout line, and the cashier knows him, she knows that he likes to buy lemons but she’s not used to him buying so many lemons.

She rings up his bill, that means she totals his bill and the bill is 53 million dollars. So it’s a huge bill, and Lemon Dog is very upset because he only has 40 million dollars with him. So he doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know how to deal with it. But its Lemon Dog’s lucky day so it’s a lucky day for Lemon Dog, it’s a good day, because the cashier likes Lemon Dog. In fact, she has strong feelings for Lemon Dog. She thinks he is beautiful, sexy and delicious. So this is a parallel in the story, Lemon Dog loves lemons, the cashier loves Lemon Dog. So just like Lemon Dog thinks that the lemons are beautiful and sexy and delicious, the cashier thinks that Lemon Dog is beautiful, sexy and delicious. So she makes a deal. She makes a deal with Lemon Dog, she says that she’ll pay for the rest of the lemons if Lemon Dog invites her to the party. And he thinks that’s a great deal too. He agrees and he says great so he pays the 40 million and the cashier pays the 13 million and everything gets paid for. Lemon Dog leaves the store and he gives the cashiers his telephone number so the cashier can call him later about the party. And as he’s leaving, Lemon Dog says call me. And he sorts of leaves the store with a smile and that’s were the end of the story is. That’s the last part the story. But it sorts of has a to be continued feel with the “dah dah dah” after the store, so you can imagine that there will be later lessons at some point, involving Lemon Dog for Flow English.

Okay so that’s the brief commentary on Lemon Dog, little bit of a background about myself, the time I spent in Korea, where Lemon Dog came from, the idea for Lemon Dog and a little bit about Lemon Dog and his love of lemons.

Okay, thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you again soon on Flow English.