Monday 14 May 2007

Mercury Rising

The swift turnaround day, although looking at my diary for the next couple of weeks, there could be a few of these. I have to leave in an hour.

Clerical and admin staff can be seriously underrated. Our admin officer came back today after an absence of almost three weeks. Her replacement was fun, full of energy and ideas, and I wish she were still able to come in as well. But having our own person back is brilliant. She can be fierce when fierce is what is needed, she knows everything, she has a system for everything, at last, everything makes sense again. The answerer of questions rather than the asker.

I didn't sleep well. The temperature, tolerable yesterday, started to push the mercury up last night. Today there's a breeze, but the disembodied voice on the radio this morning threatened us with 25°.

I was however amused that The Wall Street Journal reported that Hollywood is having to find actresses capable of registering emotions on their faces from Canada and Britain, since Americans in the industry have botoxed themselves out of that part of their job. Bizarre. Perhaps that's why we are seeing so many Brits having to do an American accent, although it doesn't explain why so many Americans are being asked to attempt English accents. Perhaps the British acting profession is short on expressionless masks.

Something we all knew was that sitting through Power Point presentations where the speaker clicks a page onto the screen and then reads it to us, turns us right off. Well now it has been scientifically proven by the University of New South Wales, to literally turn our brains off. Far better to have a stimulus and then talk around it, than to read to a bunch of literate adults, what is written in front of them. The only place this is a reasonable thing to do is in Church.

Who the hell was it that said,
'Grab 'em by the balls and their hearts and minds will surely follow,' ? Dunno, can't remember but whoever it was knew their stuff.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It looks like Lyndon B Johnson is getting credit for saying, "Grab 'em by the balls and their hearts and minds will surely follow."

Sleepy said...

INSET days were the occasions that I remember having something on a screen read to me.
This led to my disruptive behaviour that used to get me sent home!
I was bollocked for running a book on who would fall asleep first or an how many times the Head would use the hand movement we called,'Stroking The Setter'.

LentenStuffe said...

That's an amazing coincidence: I was just reading about Charlie Chaplin who had an absolutely astonishing range of facial expressions. Not only was he one of the most handsome actors who ever lived, he was also perhaps one of the most gifted. Apparently, as a child, he used to watch his mother standing by the window mimicing people on the street below, and he took to copying her gestures. All his life he stored the gestures of those he met.

I was reading about him because one of my favourite poets, Hart Crane, once met him. Crane was enchanted by Chaplin and went on to write the great poem, "Chaplinesque".

There are very few actors alive today who could match his range, let alone act in silent movies.