I am tempted to call this writing 'playing with fire', continuing a theme from yesterday, as the film, The Freshman, involves a dragon in nice funny 1990 comical caper. The novelty of the film is that it features Marlon Brando looking exactly like the Godfather of twenty years earlier when padding was needed. It is The story of an out of state Freshman comes to the New York University Film school, leaving his detached mother and maniacal step father who belongs/leads a fundamentalist protection of all wildlife group, and personally hates all other humans. Such is the love of these parents that they abandon their son to travel on his own by train to the Big Apple with all his belongings, and to use the New York central station subway system which appears to be over run by hooligans, so that he is then picked up by an obvious rogue who offers to protect him and take him to college for a fee, but then leaves him destitute and without his college required books. As he tries to explain this stupidity to his course tutor, he spots the same individual in the street with some of his possessions, and he is able to give chase, and this lead to the man's home, where he admits that the available cash has used been used on a failed bet, but to make recompense offers to introduce him to his relative who has a job available.
This is Marlon Brando Corleone who appears to control everyone and everything from his table in a small restaurant bar but without the usual armoury of men and weapons associated with New York gangsterism whose films, the course tutor is obsessed. The job which pays $1000 dollars a week is for two trips to the airport to collect packages and convey them to a facility in the middle of nowhere. The nice but stupid young man is told to collect a car for the trip from Corleone's home the night before the first trip, where he meets the seductive daughter who acts like Marta Hari one minute and a chaste convent school girl the next, and who decides to marry him with paternal blessing after one brief encounter. Obviously nothing like real life so the humour is in the script and the way the action is staged.
The first package is the dragon like creature, but without fiery nostrils, one of eight remaining in the world and which he subsequently learns is to be the main course at a meal where the menu comprises only endangered species, in this instance the price $350000 cash for the dish of the day. However nothing in this film, about going to a film school, is quite what is seems, and a good memory for scenes and scripts from filmland will improve enjoyment but is not essential. While the whole situation appears far fetched and all the non human creatures are treated with loving care, I suspect the film is closer to reality than many documentaries about use of endangered species for gourmet food and natural medicines. Another way of showing the subtle humour is when Marlon offers to help the young man when he finishes college as he has couple of contacts in Hollywood who might be able to help.
I now need to introduce an important spoiler in that in reality the guests pay astronomical prices to be fed high quality well prepared dishes where the animal flesh is plentiful and factory farmed. I have to reveal this fraud, because the second serious event of the day was a second documentary of Fakes, but appeared to me to be more about big brand companies trying to stop competitive price under cutting, although many of the concerns expressed in the programme are important, with worker exploitation and where some of the organisers of production and distribution are part of dangerous criminal enterprises. The focus this week was on look alike popular medication, centred Viagra and more essential medications upon which many lives depend. According to the Chinese government figures nearly 200000 of their population have perished because of fake medication and the programme mentions that the head of the national agency concerned with regulation had been executed after a court established his corruption. While the Americas were said to be the main recipients of the brand perfect look a likes and there was only 9 known instances in the previous year in the UK the total pills was said to total 900000.
My concern was the admission that in the UK there has been no proof yet that the look a likes are different in content and effectiveness than the Brand produced because it was said the industry in the UK was not geared up to checking. I apologise if I have got this wrong, as my attention wavered so I may have missed our government's health spokesman on the issue or the evidence that anyone had been harmed in the UK from medically prescribed drugs which proved to be not of he make they seemed What I am sure is that the programme overlooked the extent to which the official producing companies have inappropriately tried new products on the people of the third world. in addition to those admitted situations where there has been harmful side effects on prescribed drugs within the UK and elsewhere, or the astronomical profits made by companies from selling to the NHS system, or the extent to which medical people are wined and dined and given gifts to prescribe particular brands to their patients. It is also known that the administering health bodies do encourage the use of cheaper medication which is as the main brand producers, and that there is a whole raft of international companies and others who understandably fear the competition from China with its economies of scale and cheap labour. This is where public broadcast government statements and government supported investigative programmes and the BBC is particularly important. I just keep in mind that the killer link between tobacco and cancer has been known for 50 years and that only over the past decade has action been taken to reduce production, sales and advertising and to begin to provide the level of help required to enable existing users to stop before it is too late.
I have a little personal experience of the world of selling as in 1959 I was one about forty who commenced a month at a sales school for a major international Italian supplier of office equipment involving standard and portable typewriters and the simplest of manual adding machines in the days before electronics and the digital. There were written exams at the end of each week and some did not make it to the subsequent week, returning to new job searching or to their dealerships. I not only survived but my name was at the top of the final course list and I was therefore offered the pick of available territories in central London and which required a car. I had a car and had passed he test but was then inexperienced and a little terrified of using the vehicle into central London. I was given the vehicle by my care mother for my eighteenth birthday, using funds she had obtained after losing one eye in an industrial accident, and had passed the road test at my first attempt after a few private lessons and little other experience, because as we set off an old lady suddenly moved in front of the vehicle and I brought the vehicle to an instant full stop. The rest of the test was not very good and I made a hash of the Highway code questions but I was passed because of reacting quickly when it mattered.
The individual who had come second in the course, seeing my hesitancy, had chopped in and said he would take the territory as he was confident about driving. He claimed to also have a vehicle. I was excellent in my first month persuading the individual young women who often manned the one man import and export firms and other small office businesses that inhabited the warren like office tenements around Bishopsgate in the City of London, placing an average of over two of the latest typewriters for a trial a day over 70 that first month if I remember and my team leader of six and supervisor tried desperately to help me sell the machines to bemused bosses where we able to find them at home. Some of the stunts my supervisor pulled were funny while others were embarrassing and not one machine was sold because the users disliked the machines so much as the touch was too soft for British tastes and the machine was eventually replaced.
During the course I had learnt the weak points of competitors and the selling point of our machines and the techniques of selling from getting a foot in the door to closing a sale. The problem was that having once gone round the 400 small businesses on my list with less than five machines in the two month allocated to the round, the number of possibilities rapidly reduced so that by the end of the second cycle I had only a handful of prospects perhaps one a day. For about two months I would arrive at the office depressed and went through motions of planning my day as there were no appointments to make by phone or orders to place. Before 10 am if I remember correctly, we officially set off to make way to our territories, but in fact went separately to one of a handful of cafes for a bacon roll and coffee and which were unknown to the supervisors. The supervisors were required to spend a day with each of their team once a fortnight and were taken to other cafes where at least one other member of the team would visit to keep up appearances. I was usually the last one to leave and would make one visit, occasionally two and that was that for the rest off the day. If the weather was fine there were a few public seating places, or I would make a soft drink last for over an hour at some hostelry, but then I was told the practice of buying a three penny ticket fort he Underground circle line taking one station to the next between office and patch but continuing to make the full circle in just under one hour. If one wanted to meet up with other sales personnel from the firm you had to take the last coach travelling in opposite direction every other day. I would avoid colleagues such was my sense of growing failure and hopelessness and use other compartments where with experience one learnt to spot the two other groups of circumnavigating travellers, truanting school children and old people, and of course the people like me in sales with an hour or two to kill.
It could have all worked out different if I had taken the hint from the older office girls who told me their bosses bought them dresses or took them out to nice lunches or if I had more savvy and back up funds and found ways of making sufficient sales to be moved to the second stage of offices with from five to twenty five machines some of whom were satisfied customers of the company till that time. But the machine failed and even when I discovered I had a few larger offices on my list instead of working them I advised management and they were transferred to the higher section. Eventually I resigned, without another job to go to, and much to the horror of management because I had been the course star pupil. About five years later during my last practical work placement before qualifying as a child care officer, I bumped into the man who had been second on the course and who now held a senior position with the company. He admitted that when I was given the option of the best patch and hesitated, he had lied when he said he had a car. He had telephoned a relative and been given the funds and then gone out and bought a car that day and the rest they say is history. He also mentioned that a photograph of me from a national newspaper in which I was being carried away by four police men from the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere except that it led to a little known establishment producing weapons of mass destruction, had been pinned to the main notice board under which was the notice, look what happens if you fail to sell. Neither of us regretted the choice we had that first day and subsequently.
This experience has shaped my understanding of the reality of trying to make a living selling products where demand has to be created, where almost everyone is trying to get the best possible deal and where if you are strictly honest and rigidly apply standards you will quickly become dependent on state benefits and blind alley jobs. In my instance the car was sold while I worked out what I really wanted to do and which was only possible because of the support from my biological and care mothers over the following years.
I am a fan of the antique programmes, especially the one where two teams of two are given an amount of cash and have an hour to buy three items which are then sold at auction with the help of experts. Sometimes they make a substantial gain on one item and overall a profit of £100 on £300 and where for this programme the auctioneers commission is not deducted, and sometimes they will lose a similar amount. The programmes are great fun but the underlying principle is immoral. It is considered acceptable to buy something from someone and then make a major profit because the seller did not know its market value, and conversely it is Ok to sell an item at inflated value because the purchaser cannot recognise a fake or an unrealistic price. It is often in another of this type of programme where items have been marketed on the internet and in catalogues that the trading is conducted by telephone and individual will pay double and treble the expert's valuation because more than two people want something and have the cash to pay over the odds. This is different because the individuals either want an item badly because it is unique but more often because they know the value will increase and therefore they know they are paying over the odds. However where it is being bought at he inflated price to be resold at even greater inflation than its worth because of demand for the old across the Atlantic, then such trade is also questionable.
But if so then what of the trading in shares, commodities, currencies, loans etc where fortunes can be gained and therefore lost, lost and therefore gained, with various middle people take their share sufficient to live at a higher level than the majority of fellow citizens. This is the nature of capitalism and which leads to the question what is fake and what is real. I wish I was able to tell.
The uplifting event of the day was a film which I think is called Gift of Love, shown on a true movie channel in which a young man gave up playing American football in order that his grandmother would live longer through the donation and transplant of a kidney. As a consequence he was given a sports scholarship which enabled him to work with his favourite college team as a future coach. Because I was not able to confirm the name of the film and the name of young man, I could not look him up on the internet and try and find out the extent to which the film did portray the essential facts of his life and if there is updated information on his subsequent career as the film was made around a decade ago. The main point made in the film is that life does consist of having to make choices, trying to make the right decisions for yourself and for those who are dependent on you, or where you have responsibilities, and who you care about, and then accepting the consequences of your decisions, learning from them and striving to make better decisions in the future. The film is also about the need to match donors with the demand. This is where there is a link with Fake and with the Freshman. The most important point made in Fake and not given enough emphasis is that during the past 175 years we have moved from uncontrolled capitalist exploitation of workers and consumers to a situation where there is some state intervention to prevent its excesses within Western Europe and North America and some self control within the industries and producers. The collapse of Northern Rock, and the ability of individual traders and those who manage them to lose a billion of other people's funds in speculations which go wrong, (although we sometimes forget that the money does not vanish, it goes to others who make windfall profits), are but two major examples which emphasise that government and self regulation and supervision is still limited when powerful and wealthy individuals and organisations set their mind to having their own way.
This is Marlon Brando Corleone who appears to control everyone and everything from his table in a small restaurant bar but without the usual armoury of men and weapons associated with New York gangsterism whose films, the course tutor is obsessed. The job which pays $1000 dollars a week is for two trips to the airport to collect packages and convey them to a facility in the middle of nowhere. The nice but stupid young man is told to collect a car for the trip from Corleone's home the night before the first trip, where he meets the seductive daughter who acts like Marta Hari one minute and a chaste convent school girl the next, and who decides to marry him with paternal blessing after one brief encounter. Obviously nothing like real life so the humour is in the script and the way the action is staged.
The first package is the dragon like creature, but without fiery nostrils, one of eight remaining in the world and which he subsequently learns is to be the main course at a meal where the menu comprises only endangered species, in this instance the price $350000 cash for the dish of the day. However nothing in this film, about going to a film school, is quite what is seems, and a good memory for scenes and scripts from filmland will improve enjoyment but is not essential. While the whole situation appears far fetched and all the non human creatures are treated with loving care, I suspect the film is closer to reality than many documentaries about use of endangered species for gourmet food and natural medicines. Another way of showing the subtle humour is when Marlon offers to help the young man when he finishes college as he has couple of contacts in Hollywood who might be able to help.
I now need to introduce an important spoiler in that in reality the guests pay astronomical prices to be fed high quality well prepared dishes where the animal flesh is plentiful and factory farmed. I have to reveal this fraud, because the second serious event of the day was a second documentary of Fakes, but appeared to me to be more about big brand companies trying to stop competitive price under cutting, although many of the concerns expressed in the programme are important, with worker exploitation and where some of the organisers of production and distribution are part of dangerous criminal enterprises. The focus this week was on look alike popular medication, centred Viagra and more essential medications upon which many lives depend. According to the Chinese government figures nearly 200000 of their population have perished because of fake medication and the programme mentions that the head of the national agency concerned with regulation had been executed after a court established his corruption. While the Americas were said to be the main recipients of the brand perfect look a likes and there was only 9 known instances in the previous year in the UK the total pills was said to total 900000.
My concern was the admission that in the UK there has been no proof yet that the look a likes are different in content and effectiveness than the Brand produced because it was said the industry in the UK was not geared up to checking. I apologise if I have got this wrong, as my attention wavered so I may have missed our government's health spokesman on the issue or the evidence that anyone had been harmed in the UK from medically prescribed drugs which proved to be not of he make they seemed What I am sure is that the programme overlooked the extent to which the official producing companies have inappropriately tried new products on the people of the third world. in addition to those admitted situations where there has been harmful side effects on prescribed drugs within the UK and elsewhere, or the astronomical profits made by companies from selling to the NHS system, or the extent to which medical people are wined and dined and given gifts to prescribe particular brands to their patients. It is also known that the administering health bodies do encourage the use of cheaper medication which is as the main brand producers, and that there is a whole raft of international companies and others who understandably fear the competition from China with its economies of scale and cheap labour. This is where public broadcast government statements and government supported investigative programmes and the BBC is particularly important. I just keep in mind that the killer link between tobacco and cancer has been known for 50 years and that only over the past decade has action been taken to reduce production, sales and advertising and to begin to provide the level of help required to enable existing users to stop before it is too late.
I have a little personal experience of the world of selling as in 1959 I was one about forty who commenced a month at a sales school for a major international Italian supplier of office equipment involving standard and portable typewriters and the simplest of manual adding machines in the days before electronics and the digital. There were written exams at the end of each week and some did not make it to the subsequent week, returning to new job searching or to their dealerships. I not only survived but my name was at the top of the final course list and I was therefore offered the pick of available territories in central London and which required a car. I had a car and had passed he test but was then inexperienced and a little terrified of using the vehicle into central London. I was given the vehicle by my care mother for my eighteenth birthday, using funds she had obtained after losing one eye in an industrial accident, and had passed the road test at my first attempt after a few private lessons and little other experience, because as we set off an old lady suddenly moved in front of the vehicle and I brought the vehicle to an instant full stop. The rest of the test was not very good and I made a hash of the Highway code questions but I was passed because of reacting quickly when it mattered.
The individual who had come second in the course, seeing my hesitancy, had chopped in and said he would take the territory as he was confident about driving. He claimed to also have a vehicle. I was excellent in my first month persuading the individual young women who often manned the one man import and export firms and other small office businesses that inhabited the warren like office tenements around Bishopsgate in the City of London, placing an average of over two of the latest typewriters for a trial a day over 70 that first month if I remember and my team leader of six and supervisor tried desperately to help me sell the machines to bemused bosses where we able to find them at home. Some of the stunts my supervisor pulled were funny while others were embarrassing and not one machine was sold because the users disliked the machines so much as the touch was too soft for British tastes and the machine was eventually replaced.
During the course I had learnt the weak points of competitors and the selling point of our machines and the techniques of selling from getting a foot in the door to closing a sale. The problem was that having once gone round the 400 small businesses on my list with less than five machines in the two month allocated to the round, the number of possibilities rapidly reduced so that by the end of the second cycle I had only a handful of prospects perhaps one a day. For about two months I would arrive at the office depressed and went through motions of planning my day as there were no appointments to make by phone or orders to place. Before 10 am if I remember correctly, we officially set off to make way to our territories, but in fact went separately to one of a handful of cafes for a bacon roll and coffee and which were unknown to the supervisors. The supervisors were required to spend a day with each of their team once a fortnight and were taken to other cafes where at least one other member of the team would visit to keep up appearances. I was usually the last one to leave and would make one visit, occasionally two and that was that for the rest off the day. If the weather was fine there were a few public seating places, or I would make a soft drink last for over an hour at some hostelry, but then I was told the practice of buying a three penny ticket fort he Underground circle line taking one station to the next between office and patch but continuing to make the full circle in just under one hour. If one wanted to meet up with other sales personnel from the firm you had to take the last coach travelling in opposite direction every other day. I would avoid colleagues such was my sense of growing failure and hopelessness and use other compartments where with experience one learnt to spot the two other groups of circumnavigating travellers, truanting school children and old people, and of course the people like me in sales with an hour or two to kill.
It could have all worked out different if I had taken the hint from the older office girls who told me their bosses bought them dresses or took them out to nice lunches or if I had more savvy and back up funds and found ways of making sufficient sales to be moved to the second stage of offices with from five to twenty five machines some of whom were satisfied customers of the company till that time. But the machine failed and even when I discovered I had a few larger offices on my list instead of working them I advised management and they were transferred to the higher section. Eventually I resigned, without another job to go to, and much to the horror of management because I had been the course star pupil. About five years later during my last practical work placement before qualifying as a child care officer, I bumped into the man who had been second on the course and who now held a senior position with the company. He admitted that when I was given the option of the best patch and hesitated, he had lied when he said he had a car. He had telephoned a relative and been given the funds and then gone out and bought a car that day and the rest they say is history. He also mentioned that a photograph of me from a national newspaper in which I was being carried away by four police men from the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere except that it led to a little known establishment producing weapons of mass destruction, had been pinned to the main notice board under which was the notice, look what happens if you fail to sell. Neither of us regretted the choice we had that first day and subsequently.
This experience has shaped my understanding of the reality of trying to make a living selling products where demand has to be created, where almost everyone is trying to get the best possible deal and where if you are strictly honest and rigidly apply standards you will quickly become dependent on state benefits and blind alley jobs. In my instance the car was sold while I worked out what I really wanted to do and which was only possible because of the support from my biological and care mothers over the following years.
I am a fan of the antique programmes, especially the one where two teams of two are given an amount of cash and have an hour to buy three items which are then sold at auction with the help of experts. Sometimes they make a substantial gain on one item and overall a profit of £100 on £300 and where for this programme the auctioneers commission is not deducted, and sometimes they will lose a similar amount. The programmes are great fun but the underlying principle is immoral. It is considered acceptable to buy something from someone and then make a major profit because the seller did not know its market value, and conversely it is Ok to sell an item at inflated value because the purchaser cannot recognise a fake or an unrealistic price. It is often in another of this type of programme where items have been marketed on the internet and in catalogues that the trading is conducted by telephone and individual will pay double and treble the expert's valuation because more than two people want something and have the cash to pay over the odds. This is different because the individuals either want an item badly because it is unique but more often because they know the value will increase and therefore they know they are paying over the odds. However where it is being bought at he inflated price to be resold at even greater inflation than its worth because of demand for the old across the Atlantic, then such trade is also questionable.
But if so then what of the trading in shares, commodities, currencies, loans etc where fortunes can be gained and therefore lost, lost and therefore gained, with various middle people take their share sufficient to live at a higher level than the majority of fellow citizens. This is the nature of capitalism and which leads to the question what is fake and what is real. I wish I was able to tell.
The uplifting event of the day was a film which I think is called Gift of Love, shown on a true movie channel in which a young man gave up playing American football in order that his grandmother would live longer through the donation and transplant of a kidney. As a consequence he was given a sports scholarship which enabled him to work with his favourite college team as a future coach. Because I was not able to confirm the name of the film and the name of young man, I could not look him up on the internet and try and find out the extent to which the film did portray the essential facts of his life and if there is updated information on his subsequent career as the film was made around a decade ago. The main point made in the film is that life does consist of having to make choices, trying to make the right decisions for yourself and for those who are dependent on you, or where you have responsibilities, and who you care about, and then accepting the consequences of your decisions, learning from them and striving to make better decisions in the future. The film is also about the need to match donors with the demand. This is where there is a link with Fake and with the Freshman. The most important point made in Fake and not given enough emphasis is that during the past 175 years we have moved from uncontrolled capitalist exploitation of workers and consumers to a situation where there is some state intervention to prevent its excesses within Western Europe and North America and some self control within the industries and producers. The collapse of Northern Rock, and the ability of individual traders and those who manage them to lose a billion of other people's funds in speculations which go wrong, (although we sometimes forget that the money does not vanish, it goes to others who make windfall profits), are but two major examples which emphasise that government and self regulation and supervision is still limited when powerful and wealthy individuals and organisations set their mind to having their own way.
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