You may wonder how an ageing library worker spends his time. Well, one way involves learning how online education works. Of course, as part of the job, he has to roll out staff training, etc – but the best way always seems (to me) to experience the role of student – so currently I find myself doing this course on Chapel Perilous.
Week 4 involves (among other mixed media) the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven (the first piece of recommended Beethoven I recognised). Of course, with no decorum, I aimed other students at the Beaker version from the Muppets.
Extraordinary to think I got to work with these comedy geniuses just as they decided to work on a ‘serious movie’ like The Dark Crystal – but I actually had Beaker on my hand for a brief sequence in Muppets Take Manhattan (part of my training period) leaning out of a bus going around Trafalgar Square.
That’s when you find out the power of the movies (filming late at night when there is little traffic, they had to negotiate to keep the fountains lit).
Following the link out on YouTube I then remembered us doing a memorial for Robert Anton Wilson at a Maybe Logic get-together in Amsterdam, when we ‘kept the lasagne flying” over the lake in Vondel Park.
And watching that took me to another YouTube upload – a film clip of some of us Star Wars buddies in a bar in Japan – the staff heard we were Star Wars ‘stars’ and that I worked as a puppeteer (on Jabba) so they brought me a rat puppet from behind the bar, to challenge me to bring it to life...
PS: no I didn't write my own Wikipedia entry (or the Wookiepedia entry, where it came from) .
