Should we write grandad or granddad?
July 4th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
I’m off to Nairobi tomorrow to see my son, his wife and my two adorable granddaughters: Catrin (aged six a half) and Kara (aged 10 and a half months).
Now to Catrin I have always been “Granddad Roger” as contrasted with “Grandpa David”. But, while I spell it granddad, most people spell it grandad. I agree that the first option looks a little odd, but I feel that it is grammatically correct. After all, we write granddaughter and not grandaughter.
I was interested see that the Mumsnet website actually has a discussion on this theme here.
Posted in Cultural issues, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
How many countries have you visited?
July 3rd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Top of my bucket list is – for as long as I have the health and wealth – to have visited as many countries as my age. I recently became 69 and I have currently visited 70 countries.
You can see a map and a list of the relevant countries countries here.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
My Thought For The Week reaches No 900 – would you like to join the circulation list?
July 2nd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Around 18 years ago, I sent out an e-mail to the 12 members of the Research Department of the Communications Workers Union which I then headed. It was a quote from a newspaper article which I found interesting and I jokingly titled the e-mail Thought For The Week.
Almost two decades later, that Thought For The Week missive goes out every Sunday to about 2,000 people all around the globe and today I have reached the new landmark number of 900. You can check them all out here.
If you would like to receive it, e-mail me.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (2)
A review of this summer’s smash movie “Baby Driver”
July 2nd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
“Drive” meets “La La Land” in this smash success of summer 2017 both written and directed with great panache by the British Edgar Wright. Is this a car-chase heist movie disguised as a romantic musical or the other way round? No, it’s a genuinely fresh and original mash-up of genres with a plethora of tropes from other cinematic work.
Like “La La Land’, the opening sequence grabs the attention and sets the tone. The eponymous young man at the wheel, played with a mixture of innocence and brutality by Ansel Elgort, is revealed to be someone with brilliant driving skills that enable bank robbers to escape any number of Atlanta’s police vehicles but somebody who needs to overcome his tinnitus by playing loud rock music into his ear pods.
Following the opening titles, a stroll to a coffee shop has all the cleverness of other parts of “La la Land”. However, the story-line – a laconic loner who discovers a woman who might be his escape from a life of crime – is straight out of “Drive” which, as a thriller, is actually the better movie.
There is lots of action in this film, with cars and guns in scene after scene, but what really makes the movie is the acting. This is a work where so many of the support roles are filled by actors who can and have top-lined movies: Kevin Spacey as Doc, the mastermind behind the heists; Jamie Foxx as Bats who is the wrong side of crazy; and Jon Hamm as Buddy who exhibits an almost “Terminator”-like ability to keep coming back.
The female roles – notably Baby’s love interest Debora (Lily James) and Buddy’s partner Darling (Eliza González) are not so well-drawn. And the ending might be viewed as a little too sweet. But, heh, this is quality movie-making that is going to be a classic.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the 2015 bio-pic “Steve Jobs”
July 1st, 2017 by Roger Darlington
In the past few years, there have been two major movies about the life of tech entrepreneur Steve Jobs, the creative genius behind Apple.
The first in 2013 was called simply “Jobs” and starred Ashton Kutcher in the title role. The second in 2015 went for the title “Steve Jobs” and Michael Fassbender filled the eponymous role. Both films have at their emotional core the expulsion of Jobs from Apple in 1985 and his triumphant return in 1996, but the later work builds the narrative around three pressured product launches – the Apple Mac in 1984, the NeXT computer in 1988, and the iMac in 1998- with flash-backs to seminal moments in the man’s turbulent career.
The second film is much the better one. It has a more accomplished director in the British Danny Boyle rather than Joshua Michael Stern. It has a much more creative writer in Aaron Sorlkin – the man behind “The West Wing” and the writer of “The Social Network” – compared to first-timer Matt Whitely. And the Irish Fassbender is just so much more impressive than Kutcher.
Indeed there are some excellent performances in support roles too, including Seth Rogen (as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak), Jeff Daniels (as Apple chairman John Sculley), and Michael Stuhlbarg (as senior team member Andy Hertzfeld). Another thespian strength of the movie is that it has a pivotal role for a woman, the wonderful Kate Winslet, as long-suffering – but loyal yet defiant – marketing executive Joanna Hoffman, plus a support role for Katherine Watertown as the mother of Jobs’ daughter whom he originally treated appallingly.
Like “The Social Network”, “Steve Jobs” is a wordy work but Sorkin is a master craftsman of dialogue with fast and furious exchanges that communicate so much about events and character. And the actors revel in the kinetic energy of the script and direction with Fassbender rarely off the screen in one bruising encounter after another. Fassbender may not look as similar to Jobs as Kutcher but he totally occupies the role and makes the movie.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the book “Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991” by Orlando Figes
June 30th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This is a work that covers a century of revolutionary history in a main text of just over 400 pages written by the well-known British academic Orlando Figes who teaches at Birkbeck University in London. It has the strengths and weaknesses of any non-fiction book that seeks to cover so much ground in such concise fashion. It puts the Russian Revolution in context by describing how it came about and what the consequences were so long as the Communist regime survived and it is written in a very readable and accessible style. But necessarily it races through the decades and is quite light on detailed facts, dates, and quotes.
Figes believes that the seeds of the Russian revolution are to be found in the famine of 1891 which, together with cholera and typhus, killed half a million people by the end of 1892 and then the ‘Dress Rehearsal’ of 1905 when there was a wave of strikes and demonstrations following the massacres of ‘Bloody Sunday’. But he explains the weakness of Tsar Alexander II and the powerful personality of Vladimir Lenin, plus the catastrophy of the First World War, as further vital ingredients in the success of the two revolutions of 1917 – the first, a social democratic revolt against the monarchy, in February and the second, a Bolshevik assault on the Provisional Government, in October.
Figes writes that “Few historical events have been more distorted by myth than those of 25 October 1917” and argues that “The Great October Socialist Revolution, as it became known in the Soviet Union, was in fact such a small-scale action, being in reality no more than a coup, that it passed unnoticed by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Petrograd”. Meanwhile the result of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans was that Russia lost territories occupied by 34% of its population (55 million people).
When covering the following civil war, Figes notes that “The totalitarian state had its origins in War Communism, which attempted to control every aspect of the economy and society” and he argues that “This was not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy”. In chapters titled “The Revolution’s Golden Age?” and “The Great Break” respectively, Figes writes favourably of Lenin’s reformist New Economic Policy (NEP) and critically of Stalin’s Five Year Plan. Dark days followed with a widespread famine in 1932-33, in which up to 8.5 million died of starvation or disease, and the Great Terror of 1937-38, in which around 1.5 million were arrested and some 680,000 executed.
The Second World War and specifically Operation Barbarossa could have finished the Communist experiment and Figes underlines that “The invasion was the gravest threat to the revolution”, but at the last moment Stalin held his nerve and then a mixture of terror, coercion, patriotism and the cult of sacrifice enabled the USSR to defeat the Nazi war machine, although at staggering human cost (8.6 million in uniform alone). Figes records that “Stalin presented the military victory as a triumph for the Soviet system rather than the people’s achievement”.
The death of Stalin and his denunciation by Krushchev is narrated in a chapter titled “The Beginning Of The End”, the post-Krushchev era is covered in a chapter titled “Mature Socialism”, and the efforts of Gorbachev to renew the Leninist revolution leads to him being dubbed “the last Bolshevik”. Figes notes that “Nobody expected the Soviet regime to come to an end so suddenly. Most revolutions die with a whimper rather than a bang.”
In a downbeat summary, Figges opines that: “The collapse of the Soviet system did not democratize the distribution of wealth or power in Russia. After 1991, the Russians could have been forgiven for thinking nothing much had changed, at least for the better. No doubt many of them had thought much the same after 1917.”
Posted in History | Comments (0)
Word of the day: unicorn
June 28th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This week, I chaired part of a seminar discussing the impact of Brexit on the UK tech sector. A speaker referred to unicorns and I could not see any and did not know what he was talking about. As always, Google came to the rescue.
It seems that he term unicorn has different meanings in the business world:
In the venture capital industry, a unicorn refers to any tech startup company that reaches a $1 billion dollar market value as determined by private or public investment. The term was originally coined by Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures. It is an odd term in this context because unicorns are supposed to be non-existent, not exceptional or special. Clearly it was this use of the term that I encountered at my seminar.
In the human resources world, unicorn refers to a phenomenon that occurs when those who are responsible for hiring candidates have impossible expectations. This stems from a mismatch between the expectations of the employers and who is available for hire. In other words, human resources is looking for a mythical candidate (i.e. a unicorn), rather than facing reality.
Posted in Cultural issues, Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
How much does it cost to elect one member of the US House of Representatives?
June 24th, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This week, Jon Ossoff for the Democrats and Karen Handel for the Republicans faced each other in an electoral contest in what became the most expensive House of Representatives race in history. The candidates, their parties and super Political Action Committees (PACs) poured more than $50 million (£39 million) combined into the effort to win a single House seat in the northern Atlanta suburbs of the state of Georgia (the state’s sixth congressional district).
Of that sum, more than $40 million was spent on television and radio advertising alone, smashing past House election records. Just think how much good one could do for poor Americans in Atlanta with $50 million. This race just underlines that effectively there are no limits on expenditure in American political campaigns. In the UK, political candidates and parties cannot buy broadcasting time.
So who won? It was a much closer race than the 20-plus percentage point wins typically posted by former Representative Tom Price whose departure to become Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary created the vacancy. Republican Handel defeated Democrat Ossoff by just 51.9% to 48.1%.
More information here.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the newly-released film “Churchill”
June 23rd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
Winston Churchill had a long and complex military and political career but this film – it could just as easily have been a play – concerns a mere few days in that rich life: the last five days of preparation for Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings in June 1944.
As a young minister, Churchill had been involved with the disastrous Gallipoli landings of 1915 and, from the opening scenes (involving a rather lurid imagining of the English Channel turning red), he is seen to be fearing that the Second World War invasion of France could be a repeat of the abortive First World War landing in Turkey.
So this is an unconventional portrait of Churchill in that he is seen to be opposing what turned out to be a successful if bloody landing in Normandy and to be overruled when he decides that, if it is going ahead anyway, he wants to be physically present in a British warship. But it is a very conventional representation of Churchill in that we see him constantly smoking a big fat cigar and shouting – almost all his lines are at volume – at everyone from military leaders to secretaries and his wife.
Brian Cox does well in his portrayal of the eponymous great man, although he does not always totally disguise his native Scottish accent and a prayer scene is delivered in over-the-top theatrics (I did say it could have been a play). Miranda Richardson is excellent as the long-suffering Clementine (I liked the endearing “woof woof” between husband and wife).
And many of the support roles are well-played, especially John Slattery as General Eisenhower and James Purefoy as King George VI, although one of Churchill’s secretaries is given a certain prominence in a sub-plot that I found unconvincing. Every line of dialogue is delivered with great portentousness, either very quietly or – much more usually – at great volume so that there are no normal conversations (did I mention that this might have been a play?).
At first sight, it may seem strange that a film about arguably the most famous British man, whose greatest achievement was to stand against Hitler, should be written by someone called Alex von Tunzelmann, but this historian and author is neither male nor German as one might imagine but female and British which is perhaps why we have a more rounded profile of Churchill than is often the case with acknowledgement of his vulnerabilities and depression. Equally the choice of director is interesting: Jonathan Teplitzky is Australian and there were many Anzac casualties at Gallipoli.
So, in short, an honourable attempt to show fresh insight into a very familiar character but a work that would have benefited from a bit more subtlety and less shouting.
I once read a book contrasting Churchill with Hitler in terms of leadership styles and you can read my review of that work here.
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
Thoughts on life from an American friend as he becomes 80
June 22nd, 2017 by Roger Darlington
This is from my good friend Arthur Shostak:
From the vantage point of my 80 years I like to think I have learned six lessons worth pondering by others of all ages:
First, recognize time passes faster than anything save perhaps the speed of light (and I am not so sure about that calculation anymore). None of it ought be under-valued or wasted. Treasure as much of it as possible, as it enables earning and storing memories worth visiting with when the Light begins to first flicker, and later dim.
Second, clarify and then hold fast to Sacred Priorities. Top candidates include preserving your dignity, your honor, and what you understand of your “soul.” Take the study of yourself as a Sacred Priority, and do not spare yourself doubt and recrimination, albeit promotion of the “better angels of our nature” should show the way.
Third, value giving and getting love as highly as possible. Understand it as the sum of appreciation you have for the unique help a soul mate can provide as you try to complete yourself. Love can put “poetry” into mere biological existence, as it makes it possible for us to help another in their effort to complete themself.
Fourth, take a stand! Join with others in projects that help improve the state of affairs, or at least help keep them from worsening. Be persistent, and yet also patient; steadfast, and yet also flexible; strong, and yet also sensitive. Choose ennobling Causes, and assist them in inching toward their highest potential. Make a worthy difference.
Fifth, live with an eye to your legacy. Take to heart the sage Latin contention – Non Omnis Moriar (I shall not wholly die). Much (even if not all) of your lasting influence is yours to consciously shape. You are always on stage; write the script and act out the finest character of which you are capable.
Finally, do not fear to dare. Take calculated chances, and make the most of them! Savor the miracle of consciousness. Of creativity. Of empathy. Of morality, and of love. Live with gusto, finesse, and style. Have good reasons at the end to exit with the satisfaction of having given it (life) your best … and then some.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)