Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The flip side of adventure An exercise in compare and contrast: the thoroughly prepared and practiced Amundsen's successful race to the South Pole; the insanely poor preparation and decisions of Scott; and then there's Shackelton. He was experienced, prepared, and ambitious. And when disaster struck, he saved every single one of the men in his party. "WANTED: People to undertake hazardous journey; small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success." - Advertisement placed in the London Times in 1907 by Sir Shackelton, as he looked for people to accompany him on an expedition to the South Pole. No one expected that Shackelton would get takers, but he was swamped with replies. Inspirational Daily Quote for January 30, 2007.   [Corporate Learning Institute's Inspirational Daily Quote] The quotation has the quality of one of those apocryphal stories that someone eventually debunks, finding no evidence that it actually occurred. I keep expecting to read that no such advertisement was ever placed. Even if that's the case, it's a damned good story. 8:51:03 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Too cool I've become a big fan of Neil Gaiman's work: I read American Gods and Anansi Boys last summer, then picked up Neverwhere and Stardust. And it only just recently registered that one of the films being made of Neil's work is Stardust. Now (perhaps only temporarily) you can get a taste of the film, and drool over the cast: Claire Danes, Sienna Miller, Michelle Pfeiffer, plus De Niro and O'Toole. Wow. Now I'm looking forward to the summer movie season: Not quite authorised, not quite not. . . . the early website ready to go for some weeks, containing a few video interviews with me, some answers to Stardust questions, Stardust wallpaper and even a do it yourself Charles Vess colouring thing (which is much too much fun). So we talked to them and they talked to us, and the webelf did webmagic, and if you just happened to click on http://neilgaiman.com/stardust/ ; you might find yourself somewhere that looks very different and has Paramount copyright notices and things all over it, but is actually here on www.Neilgaiman.com. I'm not sure how long we're going to be allowed to keep this up, so if you're interested you should probably go and play with it now, and tell anyone who might be interested that it's here. By Neil. [Neil Gaiman's Journal] What fun! 8:28:12 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

© Copyright 2002-2007 Fred Sampson. Last update: 2/11/07; 6:55:10 PM.