(11)+November+27

**__Background of the show__**
How I Met Your Mother is an American sitcom that premiered on CBS on September 19, 2005. The 2013–14 season is the show's ninth and final season. The series follows the main character, Ted Mosby, and his group of friends in Manhattan. How I Met Your Mother is a comedy about Ted and how he fell in love. When Ted's best friend, Marshall, decides to propose to his long-time girlfriend, Lily, Ted realizes that time may be running out on finding the love of his life. His friend Barney is the anti-Marshall, a guy who thinks he knows everything about meeting women and isn't afraid to tell you. Ted first meets Robin, and he believes that she is the woman for him. Soon he realizes that he may not be right after all. Bob Saget narrates the story with voice overs as we follow along flashbacks from the future when he is telling his children the story of how he met their mother.

**__Today’ s episode__**
We are going to watch Episode 1, season 7 today. As Ted’s friend, Barney, prepares for his wedding, he and Ted reminisce about Punchy's wedding, which was ruined due to Marshall's drunk antics.

At the beginning of the episode, Lily is pregnant and tells her husband, Marshall, to keep the secret. To protect the baby’s health, Marshall helps Lily to drink the toasts she is expected to drink and gets very drunk eventually. That’s the reason why he screws up the wedding.

In another arc, during this episode, Robin considers telling Barney she has feelings for him until Barney receives a call from Nora, Barney's ex-girlfriend. Robin is depressed and tells Ted how bad her mood is. However, although the wedding is not that perfect, they don’t care about that because they are going to have a sixth member of their family.

__**Characters**__
1. [|Josh Radnor] as [|Ted Mosby]. The series revolves around this character. Ted was born April 25, 1978 in [|Ohio] (like show creator [|Carter Bays] ), and is a graduate of [|Wesleyan University] (like Bays and show co-creator [|Craig Thomas] ). He is an architect by profession. The show is about the relationships between Ted and his friends [|Marshall Eriksen], [|Lily Aldrin] , [|Robin Scherbatsky] , and [|Barney Stinson]. Among them, he is the most pretentious of the group, preferring more elegant and high class interests than the ones his friends prefer. He is also an avid [|Star Wars] fan and is often heard quoting the films, and frequently mentions his favorite poet, the [|Chilean] [|Pablo Neruda]. He does eventually meet the love of his life who is first seen in the season finale of season 8

2. [|Jason Segel] as [|Marshall Eriksen]. Ted's best friend. Marshall is married to Lily, with whom he has been in love since his freshman year of college. His dream is to be an environmental lawyer, but it was halted when he did not have enough cash to pay for his wedding to Lily, so he worked with Barney at GNB (Goliath National Bank), an evil bank, and regretted every moment of it.

3. [|Cobie Smulders] as [|Robin Scherbatsky]. Ted's ex-girlfriend. She works at a job in a news station. Her relationship with Ted did not work out, but they continue to remain close friends. Her Canadian background is a source of many jokes from her friends, particularly from Barney. She and Barney later embark on a tumultuous relationship.

4. [|Neil Patrick Harris] as [|Barney Stinson]. He is a serial playboy, using his relative wealth and an array of outrageous strategies to seduce women for sex with no intention of engaging in a relationship. Barney is one of the two members of the group who was originally from New York (Lily being the second). He falls for Robin and the pair have a tumultuous relationship.

5. [|Alyson Hannigan] as [|Lily Aldrin]. A kindergarten teacher and Marshall's wife. Lily is the group's moderator, always there to resolve a conflict or to offer a shoulder to cry on. Barney goes to her as a confidante, though she is terrible at keeping secrets. She met Marshall in college and they have been together ever since, breaking up only once. Though coming off as sweet and cute, Lily is quite fierce and sexually ravenous, and has desires similar to those of Barney.

6. Nora: [|Barney Stinson]'s ex-girlfriend.

Here is the link for today's episode:
http://my.tv.sohu.com/us/52878542/20544911.shtml

**__vocabulary__**
1. **Jitters**: It means nervousness, or overaction to something.

2. **Train wreck**:Train wreck is a disaster that brings many people into death. In this episode, it means something really bad happened in his life. 3. **Brag**: talking about how great you are to show off



4. **Hot wing**:It’s a food that made from chicken’s wing. Generally it’s made by frying the wings and mixing in some spicy sauce.

5. **Jinx**: something that brings bad luck. 6. **Slaughtere**r: Someone who kills a lot of people. 7. **Turd-faces**: It’s an insult but can be a friendly joke when you call your friends this. turd=feces=poop 8. **Meticulously**: It means to do something extremely carefully, noticing every details. 9. **Sloshed**: It’s a synonym for drunk. 10 .**Dull**: It has many meanings, including boring, stupid, unsharp, dim. In this episode, when he said my life is pretty dull, it means boring. 11. **Groove**:Groove is made up of the tempo, feeling, and rhythm. Simply speaking, groove can make your body swing and feel very active at the same time.

12. **Bastard** :It means two meanings. First is that someone’s parents didn’t get married when having the baby. In today’s episode, it means  a synonym for asshole. 13. **Dimple**: It usually appears on the smiling face.

14. **T** **ruth voice:** A unique or unusually sounding voice that people use when they act like something doesn't matter to them but it really does. 15. ** cut one: **It means someone breaks wind.

**__phrases or idioms__**
1.**Take a two flusher on that one**: It means screw something up. Two flusher means that you have to flush the toilet two times because one flush isn't enough to get the toilet clean. This means that Marshall created such a big mess that one flush can't clean it up. Similar term for creating a similar but smaller mess: He took a dump on that one. Alternate poop related terms: "Get your crap/shit out of here!" "Don't think you can come in here and crap/shit all over me!" "I'm not going to take any more crap from you!" 2.**Break ground**: <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"> Someone does something that is creative and original. To break ground is to make the first dig into the ground when you are going to build a new building, so the term can mean to do something new. <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">3.**Root for**: If you say you are really, really rooting for someone (or something), it means that you want to encourage or cheer someone up and hope they do well.

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">4.**I'm in**: Someone <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">agrees to join the activity proposed when someone else asks, "Who wants to participate?"

<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">5.**Chicken out**: someone doesn’t have guts to do something. chicken = cowardice <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">6 <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">.**Lick the plane**: It is a superstition that you will use your tongue to lick the plane before you board, and after you do that you’ll believe that it is impossible for the plane to crash. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">7.**Get laid**: It means having sexual relations with someone else. <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">8.**Let's get hammered**: Usually use this phrase to invite people to drink. “Get hammered” means that you get really drunk. <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">9.**Hakuna matata** :The phrase is from Swahili language and it’s similar to English phrase “No problem.” It was made popular by the Lion King movie. 10.**Screw something up**: It means that you destroy something badly and make it even worse. 11. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**But from the ashes of your statistically probable divorce, hope can rise anew:** It's a phoenix metaphor. It means that after bad things happen, there are still hopes,just like a phoenix gets incinerated (burned up) and reborn after death. 12. ** Belch the proposal: ** It means that Punchy proposed to his fiancee when he hiccoughed. It's not romantic at all. <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">13. **<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Here come the waterworks: **<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">It means that someone 's cring.

=
1.**Wedding expenditure:** In eastern countries, it’s normal for the bridegroom’s family to pay for wedding expenditures. But, In most // American weddings //, the bride's family // pays // for the majority of the cost. That is the reason why the bridegroom in the wedding asked the bride’s father: You're still gonna pay for all this, right? ======

[]


<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">3.**Super Bowl** :The Super Bowl is the championship game for American professional football. It is usually held in late January or early February. [|Bowl refers to the bowl-shaped stadium] that football games are often played in.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">4.**Trapper keeper**: Trapper Keeper is a brand of loose-leaf binder created by Mead. Popular with students in the United States and parts of Latin America from the 1970s to the 1990s. It featured sliding plastic rings (instead of standard snap-closed metal binder rings), folders, and pockets to keep schoolwork and papers.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">5.**AFC**:The **<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">American Football Conference ** ( **<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">AFC **) is one of the two <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">[|conferences] of the [|National Football League] (NFL). This conference and its counterpart, the [|National Football Conference] (NFC), currently contain 16 teams each, making up the 32 teams of the NFL.



6.**LeBron James**: nicknamed **"King James"**, is an American professional [|basketball] player for the [|Miami Heat] of the [|National Basketball Association] (NBA) After graduating from high school, he was selected with the [|first overall pick] in the [|2003 NBA Draft] by the Cleveland Cavaliers. James led the [|Cavaliers] to the franchise's first [|NBA Finals] appearance in [|2007]

7.Guinness World Record: known until 2000 as **//The Guinness Book of Records//** (and in previous U.S. editions as **//The Guinness Book of World Records//**), is a [|reference book] published annually, containing a collection of [|world records], both human achievements and the extremes of the natural world. The book itself holds a world record, as the best-selling copyrighted book of all time.[|[2]] It is also one of the most frequently stolen books from public libraries in the United States.



8.**Go browns**: Cleveland Browns, a member of AFC(**American Football Conference** )

9. **Sports bigamy**: Sports bigamy is the act of being a fan of two teams in the same sport.

**__Listening comprehension activities__**

 * 1) Who ruined Punchy's wedding?
 * 2) What occupation did Ted take before?
 * 3) In this episode, Which magazine did they mention many times?
 * 4) Why did they decided to tell everyone that Lily is pregnant?
 * 5) How many babies appeared in the episode?
 * 6) Why did Barney decide to change the tie eventually?
 * 7) Who called Barney during the wedding?
 * 8) How did Robin feel when Barney got a phone call?

**__Discussion activity__**

 * 1) How do you make fun of names?
 * 2) How do you do a wedding toast? [|The Art of the Wedding Toast]
 * 3) Will you have a 40 deal if you are not married when you are 40?
 * 4) Do you believe that there is a one for you?
 * 5) Have you ever heard any special wedding that impressed you?
 * 6) Did you have any embarrassing experience that was filmed by a friend? How would you react?
 * 7) How did you meet your girlfriend (boyfriend)? If you are single, how would you like to meet you future girlfriend (boyfriend)?
 * 8) Did your know your parents’ love story? Please share it with others.
 * 9) If your favorite player leaves the team you root for, will you continue supporting the team?
 * 10) During the episode, Robin shared a sagely perspective with Ted during a friend’s wedding. She suggested any relationship requires two essential ingredients: “chemistry” and “timing”. Which one is important for you? Why?