了解今日课堂：

1、请问Henry老师: pore over books和 heads down　in　books意思一样吗?非常感谢!

2、请问Henry老师: everything 和 every thing, everywhere 和every where 类似这样的词傻傻分不清，也不会用，请老师解答下，谢谢老师。

3、请问Henry老师: avatar　和 incarnation都有化身的意思，具体有什么区别呢?谢谢老师。

【听力文段】mp3

This is a recent comic strip from the Los Angeles Times. The punch line?

"On the other hand, I don't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my Labrador." This is a recent cover of New York Magazine. Best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment, births, strokes, heart disease, hip replacements, 4 a.m. emergencies. And this is a song medley I put together --

(Music)

Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand? It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour.

A time for inconveniences, mishaps, yearnings. A time for plotting to whack the chief of police, like in this classic scene from "The Godfather."

Coppola's script describes these guys as, "exhausted in shirt sleeves. It is four in the morning."

A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits."

After the breathtaking green-haired Rosa is murdered, the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians' paste. They worked until four o'clock in the morning.

A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like in last April's New Yorker magazine. This short fiction piece by Martin Amis starts out,

"On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland, Maine, and Mohamed Atta's last day began."

For a time that I find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day, four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press --across a lot of different media from a lot of big names.

And it made me suspicious. I figured, surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world, really, aren't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it, right?

Could it be there is something more going on here? Something deliberate, something secret, and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway?

I say this guy -- Alberto Giacometti, shown here with some of his sculptures on the Swiss 100 franc note. He did it with this famous piece from the New York Museum of Modern Art. Its title -- The Palace at Four in the Morning --1932.

Not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning I can find. I believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it. I call this The Giacometti Code, a TED exclusive. No, feel free to follow along on your Blackberries or your iPhones if you've got them.

It works a little something like -- this is a recent Google search for four in the morning. Results vary, of course. This is pretty typical. The top 10 results yield you four hits for Faron Young's song, "It's Four in the Morning,"three hits for Judi Dench's film, "Four in the Morning,"one hit for Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "Four in the Morning." But what, you may ask, do a Polish poet, a British Dame, a country music hall-of-famer all have in common besides this totally excellent Google ranking?

Well, let's start with Faron Young -- who was born incidentally in 1932. In 1996, he shot himself in the head on December ninth -- which incidentally is Judi Dench's birthday. But he didn't die on Dench's birthday. He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 --which incidentally is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died. Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this? She has the world's most absolutely watertight alibi. On that very day, December 10, 1996 while Mr. Four in the Morning, Faron Young, was giving up the ghost in Nashville, Tennessee, Ms. Four in the Morning -- or one of them anyway -- Wislawa Szymborska was in Stockholm, Sweden, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. 100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself. Coincidence? No, it's creepy.

【单词短语】

1. meme

2. shorthand

3. placid

4. uneventful

5. bad press

6. trope

7. bad rap

8. hits

9. hall-of-famer

10. 100 years to the day

【地道美语，长句精练】

1. Four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press.

2. Could it be there is something more going on here?

3. Feel free to follow along on your phones.

【课堂纠音，上节连读】

1. It was something I was reluctant to do.

2. Women are particularly prone to this.

3. We're heads down in the books