General Musings for the week February 6th 2011

I had a discussion this week with a friend of mine about some of the obscene amounts of money being paid to footballers (soccer players) This was prompted by a Twitter message that someone wrote which said "I live in a world where £35 million is paid for a footballer yet 60 disabled people lose their day centre because it costs £200,000 a year" My friend quite rightly reminded me that the main culprit in this is the TV broadcasters who routinely pay billions of pounds for the rights to broadcast the matches. This then results in advertisers being charged a lot of money for slots and they expect large audiences to compensate for that. If we were to not renew our satellite TV subscriptions then the audience figures would drop and the rights would not be renewed. However I'm not sure this is the whole story. It means that the satellite broadcasters might not renew them, but surely somebody would. And that somebody would pay an exorbitant amount which would be passed down to the players. £35million for one person is a huge amount - especially when that person will probably end up being paid £200,000 or £250,000 per week to play! Now don't get me wrong: as Elizabeth Taylor said when she was offered £1m to play Cleopatra in the 60's 'If they're stupid enough to offer me $1m to play the part, I'm stupid enough to accept it', but surely there has to be some sort of balance.

And don't get me started on the bankers....

As of this week I have split my Twitter streams. Those of you who follow me on @gaz4695 will know that it is primarily focused on Business Process work with the occasional off-topic item thrown in. As I started to produce more and more off-topic items these ended up going into my Facebook feed and cluttering that up. I decided I wanted the ability to tweet some of the links I was finding without alienating my core BPM followers. So I've split the Twitter stream. If you want to follow my thoughts on BPM then @gaz4695 is the user to follow. For anything else (including posts like this) @TheRealGaryC is the user. Over the next two or three weeks I will be rejigging my following list and transferring some of the folks that I follow as @gaz4695 over to @TheRealGaryC to keep the information flow in the right place. Of course it does mean that I go from having almost 1000 followers as @gaz4695 to having about 40 as @TheRealGaryC. But it's a start.

Enjoy!

In other news it's the Superbowl tonight (Sunday evening UK time). My prophecy is that the Green Bay Packers will win it for no reason other than the fact that in the few years I've been watching the NFL regularly the Steelers have won it at least twice - knocking out my beloved Colts to get there on at least one occasion - so I feel it's time for the Pack to get back on top. We'll discuss my SuperBowl prediction next week.

Been doing some filming this week. Last Saturday I went to a rather underwhelming 'office' location - which was actually a set of Portakabins off the A3 in Surrey, to shoot the start of a short movie I'm appearing in. The movie will be entered  into a particular competition by the director who is hoping - ironically enough - to not win. Winning this competition comes with the added burden of having to organise the same competition for the following year. I'm in two minds about whether this is good or not. We'll see

This week is also the last week of rehearsals for 'An Inspector Calls'. We have our Dress Rehearsal on Monday 7th a Trail Performance on Tuesday 8th and we open on Wednesday 10th - which is, incidentally - my father's birthday. For those of you who want to see what I look like in rehearsal (albeit heavily post produced) here is a short clip taken by our media expert Gary Wales

I mentioned the  3 mates movie madcast last week and the guys have now produced episode two as well as a shorter Oscar  nominations special. Well worth a few minutes of your time to listen to. Drop them some feedback as well.

Also repeated from last week:
For those of you on Facebook: Sometime this week the New FB Privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-FB sites & it is automatically set to "Enabled". Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Website>Instant Personalization>edit settings and uncheck "Enable". If your friends don't do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. Feel free to copy this paragraph to your Facebook status update and let all your FB friends know.


The video of the week this week is a great little advert for Volkswagen. Hat top to Olivier McGraw for this. Darth Vader and the Passat. Very funny.