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Random Thoughts on the Week
Jul. 12th, 2014 06:03 pmWork may be best attempted on drugs
I’m thinking of changing my job title to professional Cat Herder and Tilter at Windmills. Don’t think the bosses will go for it though. Part of my job is corralling incredibly creative, free spirited technophobes and teaching them to use our company’s technology. On the up side, I am dealing with absolutely lovely people most of the time. On the down side, it’s a challenge, an impossible dream of sorts, in fact.
I gave Thursday’s training sessions completely loopy on migraine meds, a fact I confessed going in – honest, I’m not usually this spacey, I’m just a bit drugged, you see – and they were very sweet about it. In fact, as it turns out, I didn’t do that badly. And, hey, there is an unexpected benefit to running a training session a wee bit drugged out: I didn’t get twitchy afterwards, not that I intend to make this a regular thing. Ugh.
My medicinal situation did me no favors later when the Education team began loudly going over a new product they’re teaching in the salon end of our business – express facials. At my best, part of my humor will always be about 13 years old and any innuendo, no matter how juvenile is no end of hilarious. So, oh yes, by the time they got to the discussion of the salt scrub and making sure our students received specific instructions on proper application, I was on the verge of dying. Thank Bob for high cubicle walls.
Unclear on the concept of tease
I’m a bit of a connoisseur of TV and movie trailers, which is weird I realize, but I love the puzzle of how to tease a story to draw an audience in without mischaracterizing the story or giving too much away. Some do this exceptionally well, others quite terribly and, yes, sometimes the terrible ones are the most interesting.
BBCA’s trailer choices for Musketeers, however, are just on the bad end of strange. I’m in the odd position of having watched the series on DVD before watching for a second time on BBCA (Thank you, thank you, no end of thank you, for airing each episode uncut at least the one time.) and they give away entirely too much in the trailers. The trailer for Commodities, for example (last week’s episode, and I’m just quoting the trailer, so no additional spoilers here), shows Porthos growling, “He’s a slaver!” 9 seconds in and Aramis summing things up, “You were the Comte de la Fère, a son of the nobility?” 15 seconds in and there’s still 15 more seconds of trailer. I believe they are unclear on the concept of tease.
It all started with dime novels…
It was doubly funny for me when Tom Burke mentioned Lonesome Dove (the mini series) fondly in an interview. I’ve been thinking about another of my favorite McMurtry books all week, Anything for Billy. The imaginative version of Billy the Kid’s adventures is narrated by Ben Sippy, a wealthy ‘Back East’ dandy in search of the real ‘Wild West’. The impetus for this search is an addiction to dime novel westerns, which he read so voraciously that he tore through the publishing companies’ entire back catalogs and then swiftly outpaced their publishing schedule. When his favorite writers couldn’t possibly feed his habit quickly enough, he started to write his own…
My own relationship with fanfiction, much? Why, yes, as a matter of fact it is, though I tend to stop writing for a bit whenever someone posts something new. It’s usually more relaxing to just curl up and read someone else’s better written creation…but then what I read is inspiring and there isn’t any more for a while, and the whole cycle starts all over again… *grins* Oh well, there are far worseobsessions hobbies? Nah, I got it right the first time.
I’m thinking of changing my job title to professional Cat Herder and Tilter at Windmills. Don’t think the bosses will go for it though. Part of my job is corralling incredibly creative, free spirited technophobes and teaching them to use our company’s technology. On the up side, I am dealing with absolutely lovely people most of the time. On the down side, it’s a challenge, an impossible dream of sorts, in fact.
I gave Thursday’s training sessions completely loopy on migraine meds, a fact I confessed going in – honest, I’m not usually this spacey, I’m just a bit drugged, you see – and they were very sweet about it. In fact, as it turns out, I didn’t do that badly. And, hey, there is an unexpected benefit to running a training session a wee bit drugged out: I didn’t get twitchy afterwards, not that I intend to make this a regular thing. Ugh.
My medicinal situation did me no favors later when the Education team began loudly going over a new product they’re teaching in the salon end of our business – express facials. At my best, part of my humor will always be about 13 years old and any innuendo, no matter how juvenile is no end of hilarious. So, oh yes, by the time they got to the discussion of the salt scrub and making sure our students received specific instructions on proper application, I was on the verge of dying. Thank Bob for high cubicle walls.
Unclear on the concept of tease
I’m a bit of a connoisseur of TV and movie trailers, which is weird I realize, but I love the puzzle of how to tease a story to draw an audience in without mischaracterizing the story or giving too much away. Some do this exceptionally well, others quite terribly and, yes, sometimes the terrible ones are the most interesting.
BBCA’s trailer choices for Musketeers, however, are just on the bad end of strange. I’m in the odd position of having watched the series on DVD before watching for a second time on BBCA (Thank you, thank you, no end of thank you, for airing each episode uncut at least the one time.) and they give away entirely too much in the trailers. The trailer for Commodities, for example (last week’s episode, and I’m just quoting the trailer, so no additional spoilers here), shows Porthos growling, “He’s a slaver!” 9 seconds in and Aramis summing things up, “You were the Comte de la Fère, a son of the nobility?” 15 seconds in and there’s still 15 more seconds of trailer. I believe they are unclear on the concept of tease.
It all started with dime novels…
It was doubly funny for me when Tom Burke mentioned Lonesome Dove (the mini series) fondly in an interview. I’ve been thinking about another of my favorite McMurtry books all week, Anything for Billy. The imaginative version of Billy the Kid’s adventures is narrated by Ben Sippy, a wealthy ‘Back East’ dandy in search of the real ‘Wild West’. The impetus for this search is an addiction to dime novel westerns, which he read so voraciously that he tore through the publishing companies’ entire back catalogs and then swiftly outpaced their publishing schedule. When his favorite writers couldn’t possibly feed his habit quickly enough, he started to write his own…
My own relationship with fanfiction, much? Why, yes, as a matter of fact it is, though I tend to stop writing for a bit whenever someone posts something new. It’s usually more relaxing to just curl up and read someone else’s better written creation…but then what I read is inspiring and there isn’t any more for a while, and the whole cycle starts all over again… *grins* Oh well, there are far worse
