Angels and Demons - movie comments

I would have put 'spoiler' on this but really you can't spoil this movie, that would be the equivalent of rotting plastic fruit.

I watched this movie last night - it was on and I was in front of the TV. 

Knowing very little about the fabled Illuminati turned out to be far too much to watch this film.

The movie makers (as Dan Brown's book has different events) want us to believe, among many other things, that:

1)  a man branded with hot irons, on his chest, could half an hour later run, fly a helicopter and then parachute onto a square in an urban area.

2)  an elderly man branded on his chest with hot irons then weighted down underwater for a minute could appear on a balcony and talk to 200,000 people within 12 hours.

3) the College of Cardinals could have 4 votes for a new Pope within 12 hours.

And to quote a line in the movie: May God have mercy on all our souls.

 

 

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Nothing to do with work - SamNZed's peanut chews

 

115gm (4oz butter)

60 gms (2+ oz ) cocoa powder

2 eggs

230 gm (8+oz) caster sugar (Maybe use some brown?)

1 tsb vanilla essence

Cup of cornflakes

Tablespoon milk

4 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter

55gms (1 and 3/5ths ounces) plain flour

 

Cream butter and sugar – add eggs, cocoa vanilla, cornflakes, milk and peanut butter. Beat. Add flour. Use milk if mixture too dry – should be sloppy not solid.

Bake @180 C for 20 minutes (or until fork comes out clean from centre)  in a square tray.  Tray should have greaseproof paper

 

When cooked take out of tray and leave to cool.  Ice when cool

 

ICING

 

175 gms (6 ozs) Butter

500 g (1 lb) Icing sugar

3 Tspoons (or more!) cocoa or melted chocolate

2 teaspoons vanilla essence

2 Tablespoons peanut butter

 

Cream butter with icing sugar add vanilla and chocolate or cocoa mix, add peanut butter. Beat well. Icing will keep in fridge.

 

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Why I don't talk endlessly about my work - but just on communication without the s

I quite enjoy a lot of the perspectives I get on Twitter, Facebook, the news and blogs I read covering PR, internal communication, corporate communication, social media yada yada yada. BUT it's the industry I work in and I like to think about other things, many related, tangentially, and directly and others because they're funny.

I could try and write here everything I've learnt and experienced about communication but it would bore me, and if I'm bored it doesn't seem fair to bore you as well.

 Today though; trapped in my own pedantic enclosure: PR it's communication not communications.  Communications are phones, messages and computers and perhaps tactics of communication. Communication is strategic and about the art of communicating.  I have no sympathy for a PR marketing business who call themselves communications and get rung about computers or telephones. It might be they are only a communications company who wordsmith communiques and create design but really mostly people think they're in communication from a strategic perspective (whether they are or not).

Anyway if nothing else it is important to understand the language you're using because in thinking about it you can achieve greater clarity and generate work with more value.

Communications

Communication

and stolen from Nasa

askmagazine.nasa.gov/.../25s_communicating.html

 

 

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And now for something completely dissonant

I'm getting old.

The hold music on business phones is getting very noisy and particularly ugly.  I'd tell you what I had to listen to most recently IF I knew what it was.  I know it was rap. I spose if they idea is to get the customer all riled up for a good fight leaving you on hold and playing rap at you is a pretty good way to set it up.  'hey arsehole - wat's ur dis?'

Worse still now when I ring Telstra Clear they'll answer in Manilla. So bad music AND people who don't understand how I talk.  Digressing, an 018 call (Telecom) I had some weeks ago the woman corrected my pronunciation of the word science (I was ringing the Science Media Centre).

Business phone answering music is hardly ever right.  I didn't mind the National Bank in the 90s playing the Four Seasons over and over but I got tired of Orinoco Flow with the power company I had at the same time and all were  better than the clunky bells version of Greensleeves which is destined to become a classic cellular ring. Today it's sort of bad modern grunge and rap on the utilities I have to wait for.

You know a nice quiet buzz and the occasional  "i'm sorry you really are important to us, but not enough to hire local staff and support the local econony or to hire enough people to answer your call, please just sit there doing nothing till we find a serf to not understand your accent," would be better than having music.  And it would be more honest.

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No regrets? Really?!! - do you live in a bubble?

Every now and again I see or hear an interview where someone says they have 'no regrets' in their life.

I think I'm supposed to admire them for their steely determination or Ayn Rand-ish self-assuredness, but actually I either shiver or do an intellectual double-take.

In my mind the only people with a right to have no regrets died as infants. It seems to me at best people who claim this are confusing self-forgiveness with having no regrets and they run the gamut from stupid, through unaware to narcissistic.  I'm sure Gandhi and Mother Theresa had good reason to have fewer regrets but I'm sure they would have a lot more than the rest of us. 

In my mind it comes back to the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  I know there is a very strong new-age thing about 'you can't emotionally hurt people; they do it in themselves via their reaction to what you do to them', and while there is some truth in that, it is horsefeathers to suggest it allows impunity to bad behaviour.

While I might understand why I have done certain things in my life, because I was young, unaware, hurt, misguided, drunk etc....but there are many things I regret. Things I've said, done, and condoned. And to get specific: I mean times where I have insulted people, undermined them with other people, lied, stolen things, done things I knew were wrong, including getting involved in relationships and situations that I knew were not right, cheated, manipulated and misrepresented things.  Almost always for some reason related to my ego; being liked, putting myself above others, getting something, and so on. And while I may have done some pretty bad things I doubt anyone I will ever come across has done nothing bad.

Sure I can forgive myself but really, it's not about me. It's about the world I create around me, the effect I have on people.  If I behave like a jerk, for whatever reason, no matter how others take it, it's not making the world a better place; for them or (to reflect my 70s upbringing) me.

When someone says they have 'no regrets' anything else they say disappears in my listening, what I hear is "I behaved badly to maximise things for me and stuff everyone else". Which isn't what they think; probably, but I really decide they are have low self or social awareness or are arrogant.

And I don't care the last person I heard say this on the radio was a sweet sounding 100 year old woman.

 

This post brought to you to preserve words like gamut and horsefeathers and trying to use more ';''s rather than dashes.

 

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