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Recently, authors Benjamin Hoff and Ernest Shepard have explored the philosophy of Winnie the Pooh. In similar vein, interesting concepts can be discerned behind the storyline of Monsters Inc. I have notched up a good few viewings with my three year old daughter! So without taking away the fun, here goes..
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Cool Hand Luke (Deluxe Edition) [DVD] [1967]
Paul Newman stars as the loner who will not conform to the arbitrary, oppressive rules of his prison captivity. As the film opens, Luke is using a pipe cutter to cut the tops off of parking meters. He is drinking, but not violent. When the police arrive, he is arrested. He is tried, and sentenced to two years in prison.
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The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (1957)
Vance Packard was a ground-breaking social critic best known for `The Hidden Persuaders’, which detailed how behavioural scientists recruited by the American advertising industry were increasingly using psychological techniques to increase sales. Continue reading The Hidden Persuaders
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Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973) by E F Schumacher
“It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation, but the attachment to wealth, not the enjoyment of pleasurable things, but the craving for them…”
What is wrong with our world? Can one short book contribute a meaningful answer to this question? By looking at the major historical themes in economics, i.e. land, scarcity, man and education, goods, production and energy, housing and development, and looking at the thinking behind our present view, the answer is yes. The book advocates a shift in lifestyle, one that accords material goods a secondary place after a oneness with our planet, putting people ahead of profits, and ensuring a future for both..
Continue reading Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered
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This is an awe inspiring book, not simply for the time and effort that went into researching it. Twenty-two pages of close-typed sources, plus an additional seven page bibliography give a small indication of the through contribution to the cause of truth contained herein. The writers have sifted fact from fiction to provide the answers to some interesting questions..
Continue reading Nazi Gold: The Sensational Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery
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Tichborne Claimant 1998 [DVD] John Kani, Robert Pugh, Stephen Fry, Robert Hardy and Sir John Gielgud
“Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.” – Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
The Tichborne Claimant affair was the celebrated 19th-century legal case of Arthur Orton, who claimed to be the missing heir Sir Roger Tichborne. In April 1854, Sir Roger Charles Tichborne was homeward bound from South America, when his ship was lost at sea. When the news reached her, Roger’s mother refused to believe he was dead. She inquired all over the world, and in November 1865, heard from a Sydney lawyer claiming that a man fitting the description of her son was living in Australia.
The supposed Sir Roger was actually Arthur Orton ( Note: there is some evidence he could have been the illegitimate son of Roger’s father James). Aside from a superficial resemblance to Tichborne, he did not fit the description well; however Lady Tichborne was desperate enough to accept him as her son and sent him money to come to her.
Orton was seemingly reluctant to go at first, however, a former family servant, Andrew Bogle, accompanied him on his trip to Britain. He arrived in London, December 1866 and visited the Tichborne estates. When he travelled to the Paris hotel where Lady Tichborne was living, she recognised him as her son. She even handed him Roger’s letters from South America, and she gave him an allowance of £1,000 a year.
After Lady Tichborne’s acceptance, other members of the Tichborne family were outraged, and unsurprisingly declared him an impostor. They found many discrepancies when Orton tried to fit his own South American experiences to those of Sir Roger.
When Lady Tichborne died in March 1868, Orton lost his most prominent supporter. It was unfortunate also for the cause of truth, for she died before she could testify in the witness box. By this time, Orton owed a significant amount of money. (He sold “Tichborne Bonds” in music halls to pay the legal costs when he tried to claim the inheritance.) The rightful heir at the time, Henry Doughty-Tichborne, was only two years old. The claimant, in the eyes of the public, had become a `cause’..
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The oldest historical mention of ancient Israel occurs in the Merneptah stele, an Egyptian monument dated to 1208 B.C. But mention of Israel’s God, Yahweh, occurs even earlier in Egyptian inscriptions in conjunction with a group of people called the Shasu.
Continue reading The Name Yahweh in Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts
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Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) has all the odds stacked against him. His career is heading nowhere fast, a wrecked personal life, his legal partner (Jack Warden) has had enough, and a whisky habit that could kickstart an economy. He is sinking into a hole near impossible to climb out of. Stanley Ellin in The New York Times Book Review wrote that “the book, by David Mamet, by digging deep into the mysteries of medical, legal and clerical practice, has everything going for it, and makes dramatically potent use of each element.“..
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This edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ has much to recommend it, not simply for students. Accompanying each page of text is a study section explaining the language and context, but also engaging the reader in a series of questions about their own feelings of what is happening, or what Shakespeare might have intended?
Differing opinion on these questions is inevitable. The play of course, deserves the reputation of the ultimate expression of romantic love in western literature, and we are forced to look for credible reasons for its tragic conclusion. It addresses timeless issues that matter to all humanity.
Continue reading Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge School Shakespeare)
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From the outset, I had better say, this is not a story with universal appeal. It is a comedy of the old, slapstick style, with prehaps limits for today’s sophisticated CGI audiences. That said, it packs a few laughs in between the cringe moments. However, I write this in memory not just of Marty Feldman’s Brother Ambrose, but Andy Kaufman’s Amageddon T Thunderbird.
This character sends up to perfection those Fundamentalist TV evangelists who cynically prey on whoever listens to their version of the Gospel, but for whoever actually picks up the original, would see their counterparts denounced by Christ and the Apostles.
Two quotes from Armageddon’s TV show (as a taster) ‘Money can’t buy happiness. Only Power can do that!’..’You can fool some of the people some of the time, but some of the people all of the time- and the’re the ones we’re goin’ to get!’ Continue reading In God We Trust -1980 DVD
