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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
Several years ago, when I was running a Men’s Group at our church - the intention was to help the men in the church get to know each other better by providing social occasions - we organised a night watching the rugby. It was one of the best attended of all the events we organised, in fact.
Unfortunately.
We’d arranged to have the event in a local pub which set aside a room (with its own bar) for us specially. There was plenty of room for the guys, and there would have been plenty for them to drink if they were of the drinking kind. Most of them might have had one drink, maybe two, but many of them don’t drink alcohol much anymore, so I don’t suppose the pub made much money out of that side of things
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I was writing to someone today about Alfred Hitchcock and how, in his early years, he directed films to order. It was only later in his career that he made films for himself rather than for a studio or a producer. Some of his made-to-order movies from the thirties aren’t top quality, have little of the Hitchcock innovation and have long stretches lacking in audience interest. But when a story grabs him, Hitchcock’s imagination brightens up and all sorts of innovations are seen.
Writing to order is a bit the same. When a topic grabs you, you can write a decent and interesting post. When the topic isn’t something you have much interest in, it’s a bit hard to rouse up the imaginative muse.
Thus when the topic is Bears tickets, about which I know nothing, then I can’t sit down and write what you’d call a post of interest. To be honest, I didn’t even know if the Bears were a baseball team or a football team (they’re the latter
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We have a tv at the Valencia apartment we’re staying in, but of course the programmes are all in Spanish. Briefly, at one point last night, we found what appeared to be an American movie which had Spanish closed captioning (or subtitles for those who know them under that name). However, after a short patch in English the film reverted to Spanish, so we gave up trying to figure it out. It’s all right if you’ve seen the film before - you have an idea of what’s going on. Seeing an unfamiliar film in another language is a bit confusing, to say the least.
Fortunately our host has provided us with several DVDs in English, from Finding Neverland to Monsters Inc, from This is Spinal Tap to Taxi Driver. They’re a bit of a mixed-bag, but at least there’s something to watch in English. While it’s fun trying to figure out things in another language - and in general we
get on okay in this respect - there are times when you just long to be able to say the words without a puzzled look on the face of the shopkeeper. As when, last night, we had to buy toilet paper, and couldn’t see it anywhere. While you can mime some things, that was one we didn’t want to try! Sometimes you have you're work cut out communicating in a different language.
While we were travelling from Barcelona to Valencia on the train yesterday, we were treated to a movie via the innumerable monitors, each hung from a tv mount fitted to the ceiling of the train. Every two rows or so there was a monitor, some with good colour, some not. Unfortunately the movie was Elizabethtown, one of my least favourite movies. In spite of its cast, Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst and Susan Sarandon, to name just a few, it never quite gets off the ground. (And even less so when it’s broadcast with Spanish dubbing!)
Bloom, Dunst and Sarandon work their butts off to no avail. The script just doesn’t cut it, and there are two long stretches in the movie when you wonder what the heck the director thought he was making. One section seems to be an ad for the use of cellphones and the other seems to be a travelogue in disguise.
When you think of the amount of work that a director - and all the other people involved - must put into a movie, you have to wonder why they’d spend so much time on something that fails to come off. If you know the movie is a piece of fluff, then don’t fill it up with big names; treat it off-handedly and get some people in who won’t cost you much. That way at least you’ll make something out of it. Fill it up with people whose pay packets will be one of the more substantial parts of the budget, and you’ve got problems
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At home in New Zealand, mostly because of the social welfare system, it’s rare to see anyone begging in the streets. But in the equally well-off countries of Germany, Switzerland and Italy, we’ve continually seen beggars. It’s hard to know what to make of a system in which they still feature, and it’s hard to ignore them too, knowing that we’ll probably always be better off than they are. We’ve given to some and not others, not because we know some are deserving, but because we sometimes don’t have the cash on us, or because we have a feeling that the beggaring is more street theatre than genuine need. But of course that’s probably just us judging and not really knowing anything for a fact.
The prime candidate for the Beggar’s Academy Awards, though, was a woman on the Metro in Rome the other day. She suddenly appeared in the midst of a not very crowded carriage, spoke with great passion, pointed to the child (literally) at her breast, and held her hand out. The speech was so well-prepared, and even though it was in Italian, sounded so polished, that our instinct was to ignore her pleas. She may have been saying something utterly genuine, of course, though the rest of the people in the carriage refused to give to her as well, but she may equally have been saying: My child will starve if you people in your wealth do not give to help her. She will become an orphan, a child of the streets, because her mother will be forced to throw herself like Tosca from the Castel San Angelo. Can you bear to such suffering?
And so on. Not knowing enough Italian, it was hard to gauge the situation
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While we've been in Italy travelling around we've noticed a huge number of hawkers on the streets. Not Italians, of course. These guys are either Asian or African. The Asians seem to do the underground or Metro; the Africans go for the tourist spots.
The Asians sell quantities of toys, especially toys with a kind of adult interest to them. Or else they'll have several different sizes of camera stands, and that will be the entire stock. Some of them (in Milan, anyway) carry their stock round in cardboard cases, ready to folded up at a moment's notice if the police come by. We saw a group of Asians in the Metro one day ready to go on the train when the police found them. The police confiscated their entire stock, and sent them on their way.
The Africans seem to sell nothing but leather goods: belts and bags, things that again can be quickly lifted up and moved if the police turn up. What's strange is that there will be half a dozen men all selling the same thing all at the same tourist spot. You wonder how any of them can make any money, since leather bags and belts are hardly difficult to find on the streets of Italian cities. There are already stalls full of them, run by Italians
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My wife and I are travelling in Europe for about a month which explains for those who have wondered why there haven't been any posts on here for a week or more. And there won't be for another couple of weeks at least.
Sorry to disappoint all my fans, but it's difficult getting enough Internet access to do blogging at the moment. Plus I need to visit museums, art galleries, ancient ruins and the like.
My wife and I have been in two German cities in the last few days, as part of our month-long (roughly) train travel around five European countries.
On both occasions we’ve had good reason to go to the main railway stations (one in Hamburg and one in Köln), not just to book tickets, but also to enjoy the bustle and constant coming and going. There’s something about an endless traipse of humans across your sightline that’s appealing. People-watching is something my wife and I both find interesting.
As well as plenty of people, the stations both have a large number of shops and food places: and are they busy! I look at the bookshops in these
places with their dozens of customers and think back to my days in the bookshop I ran, where we’d be lucky ever to get more than two people in the shop at once. Certainly it takes a lot more work - and staff - to run a shop that’s perpetually busy, but it’s also an exciting way to work. Even though I was always busy enough in my shop, we often lacked the excitement of having several people to attend to at once, and the juggling of different demands
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Doesn’t this device in the picture remind you of some weird robot, or even alien, out of a long-lost B movie – or a Saturday morning serial? Maybe it’s the way the photo’s been taken, but I can see it crawling along on its two rather shapely legs ready to blast anything that gets in its way.
It’s actually a form of utility cart, the sort people use for hanging an LCD projector from. (This particular cart is hung from the ceiling, usually.) In fact it has four legs, not two (it’s the angle the picture’s been taken at) and it can tilt its head at an angle so that the picture fits better on your screen.
But that’s a rather boring version of what it looks like. Let’s stick with the monster from outer space. (Okay, it’s a fairly small monster
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245 Posts dating from December 2006
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