Monkey Thieves is a documentary about the Gulta Gang, a gang of monkeys in India wreaking havoc. What I love about this documentary is that it’s a great topic in HD. You see all the details. You see the faces, you see how they eat a grape but throw away the skin for example. You see wide shots of the city and you see other animals.
It’s all about the visual wealth that documentaries can offer you. It’s just a well shot and humorous look at monkey behaviour. You see smiling faces in the background. The scene is monkeys stealing ice creams and eating them. They hold it with the stick, take little bites and more.
For the second time in a little over a year the video card on my macbook pro has failed and I am left with the black screen of death. As a result of this I will have to send the machine off for repair for a second time. Luckily the machine is still under warranty so the only challenge is finding a day off and bringing it for maintenance.
It had to fail this weekend, on Saturday afternoon only once all the shops had closed. It means that getting the machine maintained will be a little more of a challenge. The second challenge of course is that I’m meant to do two days of editing on Tuesday and Wednesday and I may not have a computer.
You’ve got to love trade unionists for making sure shops are closed on a Sunday.
Now the question is what to do next. Do I buy a new macbook pro as the new version of finalcut pro came out or do I invest in a far cheaper computer running linux. In fact do I forget about PC and Apple and go Linux all the way.
It could be quite fun, once winter comes back to build a linux based video editing system where I understand the hardware. You know I’m not going to get far with that project.
On the positive end of the spectrum I’m in full time employment with three different types of work I’m asked to do so buying a new machine is no problem. It’s just a matter of whether I have the necessity right now.
Last night I was reading and began seeing the pandemic as a journey. The pandemic has been a journey for everyone, but especially for those in solitude. For those of us in solitude, it has required that we completely change how we consume the media and how we interact with the world. We go for weeks without hugs, without kisses, without meals with other people. For weeks, we may exchange a few words at a shop or petrol station but without ever having in person conversations.
This changes us. I believe that this is why I walked two to three kilometres further, sometimes, to avoid being within meters of others. Solitude is painful when we are reminded that others are not solitary. Bizarrely, with time, the pain of pandemic solitude diminishes as we give up on some aspects of life.
Giving up on those aspects does mean avoiding most films, television series, current affairs podcasts. Instead of listening to the usual content, I ended up with podcasts about journeys, whether the American thru-hikes or other forms of journeys. I am currently reading “Le Camino Seule, enfin presque” and this is what made me think of the pandemic as a journey, where we work on ourselves, on our inner journey, while waiting impatiently for normality to return.
It isn’t easy to turn fourty in solitude during a pandemic. It wouldn’t be easy out of pandemic either, because we know that doors are closing. The energy to be lively around toddlers, of not going on road trips and sitting in cafés alone. Of never speaking about “we” because of the never-ending I of solitude.
I am fine with solitude. What bothers me is ageing and theoretically running out of time to experience certain chapters in the standard model life, as I like to call it.
The pandemic has forced us to accept two years of solitude, and to cope with it, to be fine with it. I refuse to accept the fatalism of married people, and people who have a home life. I want society to do what it can to end this pandemic. Teenagers, children and single people are forced to grow old without being able to enjoy a “normal” life because those who are not alone make excuses for not self-isolating.
I like solitude because I am not expected to feel sorry for people who have more than me, emotionally. I am not forced to hear things that make me miserable. Whether we are miserable or not, during this pandemic, depends on what we are subjected to. Solitude is pleasant. Fatalism about the pandemic being out of control is soul-destroying.
Pandemic life is absurd, so the sooner it ends, the sooner people who are not in solitude, do what they can to end the pandemic, the sooner people in solitude, can start experiencing social lives again.
I want the pandemic to end, and I want people in power to stop making excuses for why this evergreen pandemic can’t end. The pandemic could end within two or three months, if we had ambitious optimists in power, rather than corrupt individuals. For clarity, I mean corrupt in the sense that people are too afraid to lose their job, than to fight for human rights. The right to health, the right to live out of pandemic.
If you have one and a half hours of free time I recommend watching this documentary. It discusses the anti-whaling work by the Sea Shepherd, the work it did to combat long lining around the Galapagos and it touches on the shark finning mafia and corruption.
The documentary also looks at the public perception of sharks. It shows that they are not the dangerous animal that they were thought to be until recent history. The film ends with a shot of the narrator free-diving with sharks and being perfectly relaxed. At one point he says “sharks are so sensitive that they can feel your heart beat, if you are calm they will stay but if you panic they will flee”. I paraphrased his exact words.
Another theme that is explored in this documentary is the food chain. He mentions that plankton absorb a lot of Carbon dioxide and that with the overfishing of sharks the ecological balance will be ruined as the apex predators are lost. He pushes strongly for the conservation of shark numbers. We are familiar with the current Save our Sharks movement.
This is an interesting investigative documentary about the economy surrounding shark finning and why it has a negative impact on the food chain. If the documentary was updated it could look at the economic viability of shark tourism that has grown in recent years. Sharks, in some places are more valuable alive than dead. If you don’t have time to watch the entire documentary then I recommend that you watch the last thirty to fourty minutes.
Working at the Global Humanitarian Forum today, providing the live streams, was fun as some interesting conversations took place.
Among the people present we had Micheline Calmy Rey, Kofi Annan, the writer of the wikonomics book (which I have as an audio book and haven’t finished yet), Nik Gowing, and a few more interesting people.
Whilst I was working I didn’t have time to listen to the discussions that were taking place but they ranged from new media and communication to providing funds for organisations and the aspects to be taken into account, managing displacement, demographic dynamics and many more topics.
We’ll be streaming quite a few more lives during the course of tomorrow so if you’re interested in humanitarian subjects visit Global Humanitarian Forum for more information. The live streams can be found by following the Launch Live video link provided on the site.
This year I am replacing Social Media with Book Reading because social media is no longer a conversational place. It has become a place for sensationalism and the spreading of fake news and emotional news. As a result of these factors the potential gain of new friendships and interesting conversations has declined. For this reason you might as well find some interesting books and broaden your horizons.
I currently have hundreds of books on Kindle and Audible and my collection on the Kobo reader is bound to grow. Recently I read Too Loud A Solitude. This is a book I came across by accident. I was browsing through Goodreads recommendations and it came up. The book is interesting because it tells the story of a person who worked compacting books for 35 years. Every chapter begins with the phrase “For 35 years…”. The journey is an interesting one because we see how someone with a passion for books rescues some before they are destroyed. It is worth reading when you have the interest and motivation.
Another interesting book I read is Tartarin Sur Les Alpes. This book is interesting because of its age. It is about the early days of Alpinism. It speaks of various mountains and locations that are easy to get to today but that were accessed by horse and carriage at the time. It also explores the early days of tourism.
Books require an investment of time of several hours in the same way that television series require. You can read a chapter or “episode” a day or you can binge through them reading several chapters in a single day. They usually require from seven to 21 hours to get through just like television series seasons. It’s easy to lose entire days.
I like e-books and I like audible books. As a result of this I can walk around with hundreds of books at a time and read from one book and then another. It transports me to different time periods and places. For a moment I stop living in the present. With audio books I can drive, hike or walk at the same time. I can be a bookworm without being stuck in a building.
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Did a quick search and I found this link for videos: http://natgeowild.co.uk/programmes/monkey-thiev…. Hope you find some of what you were looking for.