I broke a cardinal rule yesterday. I only went to the store to get milk and I came back with milk and a newspaper. I was standing in the queue for so long, I'd started to read the front page and figured I might as well pick it up for a closer look. Back home, I opened up the package of supplements, TV guides and fashion specials only to find nothing going on in the world that I hadn't already learned by osmosis and certainly nothing written with any style worth paying attention to.
So I guess I learned something yesterday.
Now and again, you might see something pretty neat happen in the world and think to yourself, ‘I’m going to take that on board.’
Such a thing looked me in the eye today when I read this news story about J.K. Rowling turning up (relatively) unannounced at a book reading at Orkney library. That’s called giving a damn right?
I forwarded the story to a friend who said “That’s easy to do when you’ve got £90 million sitting in the bank.” To be fair, at this point he was quick to follow it up with: “Then again, it’s pretty easy to do if you’ve got £900 sitting in the bank.”
And that dear readers, is the whole point. It’s also relatively easy to do with £90 in the bank (well maybe not all the way to Orkney), but the point is she could be bothered at all.
She could have sat at home watching the TV, gone out to dinner, hell… she could have spent the day having a wonderful time on a beach in Florida but she didn’t - she was engaged enough with people who were interested in her to be interested in return. That’s what I call a ‘class act’. That’s how you effortlessly paraglide yourself to being a legend without even trying. More people should be like this but they won’t be - I know people too well.
Shit, you could even be that person with £9 if you chose to be.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, this story has been Noted for all the right reasons - and I guess I learned something today as well.
Meanwhile, if you have a couple of hours spare in your life well lived and you like movies that are a little off the beaten track, Yosemite is a great watch.
James Franco is fantastic in it but the kids involved are even better. I'm liking Franco a lot lately, I even like his book - Palo Alto - a lot, that the critics seem to have panned into the ground since it was released:
There have been a lot of spiteful snowballs thrown over the fact that Palo Alto would never have got published if Franco didn't have a celebrity status, but hey... you can level that accusation at a lot of people - and you can also say that a lot of books by people with no celebrity status shouldn't have been published also. Regardless, I liked it and if you're here, I think you will too. The movie adaptation of Palo Alto is also kicking around on Netflix or Amazon... one of the two. I've not watched it yet, but I spotted it on there and I'll get around to it eventually.
Franco is a good role model if you're looking for somebody to admire who does his own thing regardless of what people say after the event.
And that's something else I learned today...
...which is quite enough education for one day don't you think.