Protest and Survive! The Closing AtoS Ceremony

Me being an old socialist an' all, I consider it a sworn duty to protest at the cuts now being levied against those who can least bare them, so I went along to the Closing AtoS Ceremony demo in London.

AtoS are contracted by the government to assess the fitness of people with disabilities to be able to work. All well and good, you may think, but private companies notorious for having very little accountability or transparency. You don't know how they make the decisions and you have very little room for appeal if you don't like it. Ordinary benefits claims are bad enough, but you're talking some of the most vulnerable people in society here, and there are an increasing number of deaths resulting from claims being wrongfully withdrawn. It is said that Doctors bury their mistakes and it's looking like AtoS does too.

Here's an interesting thought, though. If they are trying to outsource benefits assessment, why don't they do the same with tax evasion? It would be far more profitable: millions of pounds as opposed to thousands at most. Maybe it's because those who are likely to suffer contribute to the major political parties, and those on benefits don't. Nah, that can't be it, surely!

Coda: I've just had a look at the Department of Work and Pensions web site and there's an interesting case of doublethink. There's a phrase used, "... help people break the cycle of benefit dependency". It's the same phrase used to describe the help given to people on class A drugs. Use the word "heroin" instead of "benefit" and you can see that they are equating people claiming with smack-heads. Nice. People are also dependent on the wages given to them by their employer, so lets see how that works: "... help people break the cycle of wage dependency". Suits me. Try governments and taxes: "... help the government break the cycle of tax dependency". Something for the Financial Times reader there. Howabout a certain political party and contributions: "... help the Conservatives break cycle of dependency on donations by corporate fat cats". That's more like it.

Coco Before Chanel: Fashion and Fascism

Wandering outside my comfort zone again, I picked this up at the shop:



It's all very glitzy and glamorous, "She defied convention!", blah, blah, and she's been lauded as the epitome of a sophisticated, independent woman. I got the impression that there wasn't much warmth in her childhood, though. Bit of a sad kid.

It's also very sanitised, given the controversy surrounding her, but they've picked a part of her life that was that wasn't controversial. There is no mention of her later habitual drug use (she was a daily intravenous morphine addict throughout most of her life), coke parties or bisexuality, but you get the impression that this is the way the Chanel company (and even Coco herself) would want her to be remembered. Having a founder portrayed as being smacked off her tits might not be good for sales. Then again...

It has occurred to me that she might have suffered from one of the mental illnesses that we now know as eating disorders, for example, bulimia or anorexia. I made a bit of a study of this after I read Microserfs a few months back (two of the characters, Karla and Dusty, suffered from eating disorders: Dusty from bulimia and Karla from an unspecified illness). Coco was noted for being very thin, was promiscuous (eating disorders can affect sexual appetite as well as for food, drugs and alcohol), and had no children, despite affairs with numerous men (infertility can also be an effect of the illness). It's an interesting theory and, if she did have the illness, what would things have been like had she got treatment for it? She might have been less wild, and a lot happier, but her parties would have been a bit dull.

As a coda, this all seems very sad, pathetic or scandalous depending on how you feel about her, but relatively harmless, until you read about her supposed collaboration with the occupying Nazis. How much, and to what effect, is the subject of much conjecture. She did live in the Paris Ritz hotel during the war, which was used by the German High Command to billet it's senior officers, plus supplying her drugs would have given them leverage. She also supported the family of Walter Schellenberg, head of SS foreign intelligence, while he was in prison after the war, as well as paying for his funeral. Maybe they were bridge partners or something? The allies did clear her of any collaboration, so it's possible that she might have been a double agent of some kind. Espionage is a murky world, no less then as now.

As with a lot of things, I found that the reality was more complex and contradictory, and sadder, than the movies.

Avatar

My subscription to LoveFilm brought me this the other day:



A lot of fuss was made at the time. Technically it's unbelievable and it's a visual feast. The floating islands are straight out of Roger Dean's Yes albums.

The plot is not bad, noble savages vs. corporate bad guys, but it goes on a bit too long. It also struck me that what the bad guys were after didn't require life on the planet, so the humans could have just simply left, come back later and wiped out the planet with atomic, chemical or biological weapons, leaving the minerals intact. Obviously wanted a feel good ending. Good pizza movie, though.

Oxfam Tuesday: GiftAid Mayhem

A bit of a tough day at the shop. I was doing downstairs, which is usually busy, and a load of donations came in, so I was running around sorting out GiftAid. This is a system whereby Oxfam can claim a percentage of the money earned by selling the donation back off HMRC. At about 20% it's very profitable.

While I was serving, I noticed someone graffitting the boadings of the old Nat West bank opposite:

When they left, it was all boarded up again, but it looks like one of those cartoon doors that gets used in the old Looney Tunes cartoons where somebody draws it and then opens it up to escape!

I didn't get to play any music, which was a bit disappointing, but I'm in on Saturday so you never know. In the meantime, here's some Daedelus which I quite like (the video's a bit naughty!)

An Afternoon at The Old Star

I joined a boardgames group on Meetup that meets at a pub near The Houses of Parliament, called The Old Star:

It's a very popular group, with nearly forty people. What's nice is that it fairly mixed, husbands/boyfriends bringing wives/girlfriends, making less of a "forty-year-old geezer" feel to it (careful!).

This week I played Notre Dame:

It's a resource building game of a fixed number of turns, the aim to aquire victory points. It's not bad and I held my own, despite coming last (the winner got 50-something while I got 39). My attitude with a new game is that I'm going to lose anyway as the winner is usually the one who knows the rules the best, so I just play to have a bit of fun, enjoy it and gain some experience.

The second game was Frag!

Basically it's Quake Deathmatch as a boardgame. The game's a bit brutal and you don't have much time to enjoy success before being fragged yourself, but it's good fun when you get going.

James Bond Films

With going to the exhibition I've been thinking about Bond films. There's been quite a few by now and  everyone has their opinion, mostly based on which one they saw first, so I thought I'd put mine down.

• Best film: You Only Live Twice. It's based in Japan and it's got lots of helicopters and Little Nellie and Sumo! and it's a Connery film (see below) and it's got spaceships and ninjas and samurai swords and Donald Pleasence as Blofeld and a pool full of piranhas and... It ticks a lot of boxes.




• Runner Up: Difficult. Any Connery (even Diamonds Are Forever at a pinch) apart from Never Say Never Again, or any Brosnan apart from the last.


• Best Bond. Sean Connery. The original and still the best.
• Runner Up: Pierce Brosnan. Not as iconic as Connery, but understood the role better than the others.


• Best Villain: Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), but only just (see below), and he set the mould really. Fröbe couldn't speak very good English, so he was dubbed! Bet you didn't know that.
• Runner Up: Dr. Julius No (Joseph Wiseman). I know Blofeld is a more obvious choice, but he got played out pretty quickly. A more recent alternative would be Electra King (Sophie Marceau), the ultimate bad girlfriend!

Oooo, pop quiz. Which Bond villain was played by Royalty? (see answer below)


• Best Henchman: Oddjob (Harold Sakata), no question. Jaws was just too silly.
• Runner Up: Tee Hee Johnson (Julius Harris), from Live and Let Die, but I thought Richard Stamper (Götz Otto) from Tomorrow Never Dies was good.


• Best Girl: If I had to choose, it would be Solitaire (Jane Seymour) in Live and Let Die, first impressions being the best.
• Runner Up: Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi, but voiced by Barbara Jefford) from From Russia with Love or, more recently, Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) in Quantum of Solace or Colonel Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) in Tomorrow Never Dies. She's got to be a lot more than eye candy.


• First film: Diamonds Are Forever (1971). I was about eight.

Fun Bond fact: "The World is Not Enough" (Orbis non sufficit, in Latin) was actually the family motto of Sir Thomas Bond (ca. 1620–1685), James Bond's supposed ancestor.

I've not been convinced of recent Bond films. Brosnan's era ended with a damp squib (far too self referential) and the last two films have been a bit tame. Maybe it's the Bourne thing, but Daniel Craig doesn't convince either: Bond has style and charm, "a man that shakes the hands that shake the world" (Dean Motter's expression, not mine, sadly), while Craig just looks like a scary nightclub bouncer who's been hit in the face once too often. Maybe third time lucky with Skyfall:



Another reason for my lack of conviction is that I read Greg Rucka's Queen and Country.

His heroine, Tara Chace, makes Bond look like a part-timer. The dialogue's pretty good too. When she and a contact are in a corner, she asks how fast he can run. He replies, "When someones shooting at me, I'm bloody Carl Lewis!"

...and another thing, when Grosse Point Blank has a better two-blokes-trying-to-kill-each-other (John Cusack and Benny Urquidez, the former's kick boxing trainer) fight scene than many a Bond movie, you've got to wonder!



Pop quiz answer: Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big in Live and Let Die was played by Yaphet Kotto, who's father was a Crown Prince of Cameroon.

Oxfam Saturday: Mr. Scruff

Mark asked me to do a Saturday afternoon shift as he was short. When I turned up there were a few people browsing, but no-one on the tills! Mark had been let down completely and was doing it all by himself. He'd been caught short and disappeared down to the basement to answer the call. I covered while he got back and did downstairs while he did up. He was playing Frank Zappa's jazz album and I think everyone was relieved when Heather turned up and I went upstairs to replace him. I played Mr. Scruff!!!

Copper

There's a new show started over in the 'states about a police officer in New York in the 1860's (about the time of the Civil War).



It's a pretty tough show, with the cops being almost as bad as the robbers, and it doesn't pull any punches either: backhanders were practically a way of life.

It's treading the path of Scorsese's Gangs of New York, but with a lower budget. It looks like it could be pretty good, though, and may make an antidote to the CSI's and Sherlocks.

Oxfam Friday: Portishead, Supergrass and U2

An uneventful, if frustrating, day at the shop for what looks like my last Friday shift. I'm moving to Tuesdays as I won't be able to do the afternoons for the forseeable. I had hoped to do the mornings, but Simon wants to shift to mornings (he doesn't get on with Judith, apparently), so Tuesday afternoon it is.

I did get to listen to U2, Supergrass and Portishead! The album wasn't Dummy, but the eponimous, but it has my favourite all time track, Humming!



You can't get more Portishead than a Theramin! I thought I'd throw in Only You as well, as the video's by Chris Cunningham and pretty damn good.



I know U2 is not to everyone's taste but this has been going through my head recently and I played it in the shop today as well.

Starter for 10

Another film I got from the shop, this one is about a young man going to University during the 1980's.



I don't know if it's a post-modern thing, but it didn't look in the least bit 1980's to me. It just looked like now. Remember, this was immediately after the 1970's, but there was almost no reference to punk or two-tone, nor the miner's strike either, which was very prominent at the time.

Anyone who knows the Southend-on-Sea area will know that it wasn't set there, but probably somewhere like Frinton further on up the coast. Southend doesn't have sea defenses like that and, anyway, is on the estuary, not the coast itself. (Yeah, yeah: picky, picky, picky)

The story was okay, if a little weak, but the characters were engaging. I liked Catherine Tate as his Mum. She's got quite a good line near the end. He's feeling a bit sorry for himself and she says, "It's not the mistake that you made, but what you do afterwards that matters", which I thought was quite good.

Designing 007 and A Day in the City

I went to see some former colleagues today who've moved into new offices in 30 St. Mary Axe, a.k.a. the Gherkin. It was good to catch up with current developments in the team and I did the obvious joke, "who's got the corner office?" I'd worked with them two years ago, but with all that's happened since then, it feels half a lifetime ago. After much gossip, we parted and I continued on to The Barbican to see the James Bond exhibition.

Designing 007 at The Barbican

I couldn't take any photos in the exhibition itself, but I took one of the Aston Martin outside the front entrance:

Even if you're not a Bond fan, I'd recommend the exhibition, certainly to those who are interested in films generally. The sheer quantity of things on display is astounding: gadgets (Oddjob's hat!, Scaramanga's golden gun), costumes (a LOT of tuxedos and amazing outfits for the ladies), plus lots of film clips, original storyboards and models used for both planning and filming.

Afterwards, I took a walk through London from the Barbican to The V&A, through Holborn, Picadilly and Knightsbridge:


View Larger Map

These are the ornaments in Chinatown.

At the V&A, they have these giant "tops" which people sit in and roll around.

It seems to be addictive as I've never seen any unused.

Avé

Every so often, I like to go out of my comfort zone and watch something I wouldn't normally. This is a Bulgarian romance/road movie whose theme is lying; peoples' motives for doing it and the benefits, not just to the lier but to those being lied to.



It's a bit slow in places, not helped by the language barrier as it's a wordy film, but it's a bittersweet romance, which appeals to me, and I did find myself empathising with the couple. What the director had to say was quite interesting too.

Fiasco in the Park

Today, I went up to Regents Park for a game of Fiasco:

It was fun! Fiasco uses playsets, which are pre-defined options to generate stories in a particular context. We had the Los Angeles, 1936 playset. The City of Angels, gangsters and Femme Fatale's with 45's.

I played a gangland boss who gets ripped off one last time, gets blackmailed and dies in a shootout in a burning building. So a bit like work, then.

Drokk!! Judge Dredd in 3D

On the back of the latest SFX magazine, delivered today, there's an advert for the new Judge Dredd movie, which is in 3D:



It's out on the 7th September and I think it's going to be my first movie in 3D.

Stander

Having worked with a few white South Africans, including one who's an authority on the works of George Orwell, they seem to think of themselves as decent, honest, hardworking, upright members of the community. There are exceptions, though:



It's all pretty true: Andre Stander robbed over 30 banks, often on his lunch break, and then turned up as one of the investigating police officers. As in the UK, sometimes the Police aren't as bad as the criminals: sometimes they are the criminals.

I found the DVD at the shop. The movie is pretty good, even if it drags a little towards the end, and is a good pizza movie. The hair styles are amazing and, considering the number of car chases, I'm surprised it's not called Drive.

Oxfam Friday: Blood, Radio Moscow and Music for the Bride

When I got into the shop this afternoon, Mark said to me "You've missed all the excitement! There was blood everywhere!". Apparently, some pensioner had fallen down the little step on the first floor, obviously wondering what step was being referred to by the sign saying "Mind the Step", and had landed nose first. There was quite a bit of blood, but luckily no worse than that.

I did slightly longer than my normal shift upstairs as my mate Simon was doing Saturday. Suits me as I got to play a new compilation which has Joan as Police Woman and Radio Moscow:



Rock On!

About halfway through the shift, a rather well dressed chap in a real hurry asked me where the love songs were. We don't have any specific stuff, but I pointed him in the direction of Classical instead. He said that he wanted something for a wedding and he grabbed a CD, saying, "You'll just have to trust me: I haven't got any money!". I just shrugged and said that he could pay us later.

Just before we closed, a similarly attired lady came to the counter, with a little bridesmaid in tow, to pay for the CD. It turns out they'd been waiting for a hour or so, but the music had been fine. "What's an hour when you've got the rest of your life". A nice philosophy.

Riff Raff

I've started going to the Southend-on-Sea Boardgame Club. This week, we played Riff Raff, which is a balancing game and ages of fun for all:

You have a load of cargo each and you have to load them all onto the ship, which is gimbaled at the base, and thus unstable. The numbers correspond to cards that you hold. When the ship unbalances, the cargo falls off and if you can't catch them, you have to keep them. The one who gets rid of all his cargo wins.

Adeptus Mechanicus

Of interest only to the minority, I know, but Fantasy Flight Games are planning to publish an addition to their Dark Heresy W40K RPG range:

Called Lathe Worlds, it promises to cover the Mechanicum, the engineers and technicians for the Imperium, something only hinted at from other sources (The Black Library, mainly), and not at all from Games Workshop. Yum!

John Carter (A Princess of Mars)

I never manage to get all the way through A Princess of Mars, the beginning of the Barsoom series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.



The film is really good, a superior pizza movie, with the tribal Tharks in particular being very well done. I don't know why it didn't do well at the box office, because it's a good romp, with a decent romance thrown in, but maybe The Avengers coming out at the same time, plus the ambiguous title didn't help.

The dog's great, though.

Arn - The Knight Templar

Apparently, this is the largest Swedish film production in history:



I can't say I really warmed to it. The acting is good, but there's a mix of languages which can be a little confusing. It's epic in length, but it feels more like a joined together TV series, rather than a truly epic film. It doesn't compare well to Kingdom of Heaven.

Unknown

Unknown is a not-half bad spy thriller starring Liam Neeson and Bruno Gantz. Dr. Martin Harris (Neeson) awakes from a coma in Berlin only to find that his life has been taken by someone else.



It's has more than a few twists and turns and, for a film not called Drive, it's got quite a good car chase.

Coffee

My relationship with drugs of any kind has always been a bit patchy. I do smoke on odd occasions (and they are odd), and my alcohol intake is low and very specific (alcoholic ginger beer is my favourite tipple at the moment). Coffee I do like, although I've noticed that if I drink in the afternoons, I don't sleep so easily that night. Recently, my Father gave me a percolator:

It's an old fashioned way of making it; percolation steams the coffee grains and it makes a strong brew that has a smoky quality I rather like. This model is a one from Asda and it doesn't have an element, so you have to use a hob, but it's simple construction means it is reliable.

Parkour

'Sall supposed to be a bit passe now, but I was looking for a Youtube of Professor Longhair's Mardi Gras in New Orleans when I found this:



The music is Big Chief and I felt a bit ripped off until I started watching it. I'd forgotten how good Parkour is to watch, and these guys are good! Plus it's a good backing track. I don't know why we don't have this stuff in the Olympics.

G'won. Treat yourself, but don't tell your Mum or I won't hear the end of it.

Duck Hunting With Dad

As it was his 70th birthday, I took Dad into London for a little trip:

It's a DUKW amphibious vehicle, made in WW2, essentially a floating truck, or bus in this case. It was really fun, especially when we hit the water:

It's run by London Duck Tours and is a great way to see the city:

Cloud Atlas Movie

I've recently finished the book that I thought to be unfilmable, at least from a plot perspective, but someone's done it:



This might be a rare case of the movie being better than the book, but it does have Tom Hanks in it. But with a ridiculous wig, so dunno.

Mel Gibson's Fahrenheit 451

I've just been reading this:

http://io9.com/5932803/100-wonderful-and-terrible-movies-that-never-existed

It's a list of might-have-been (or even might be made) sci-fi movies. Included at 46 is Mel Gibson's idea to remake François Truffaut's adaption of the Ray Bradbury novel. I'd pay to make this NOT happen.

Oxfam Friday: The Go! Team and The Black Keys

I was playing The Secretary Song in the shop today, but the video for that is a bit underwhelming, so I thought I'd post you Junior Kickstart, which is still a good song, but a much funnier video:




I was also playing The Black Keys "Grown So Ugly", so which this is quite a good version, if more laid back than the original.



Rock on!

Gravitas

While I was in the shop, Mark, John and I were having our usual giggle-fest. John was feeling extremely chipper for some reason, singing and whistling ("Where the Streets Have No Name", by U2 was being destroyed at one point, it was that bad), so Mark and I tried to bring him down a bit by discussing his rival Michelle and how successful her fiction section was. Fiction is a larger category than John's literature and she shifts a lot more books, to which we suggested that John have a handicap (a positive one, like in golf) to give him a fighting chance and to enable those that are interested to see how successful he is on his own terms. To this John said, in a mock forlorn tone, "... but a literature section adds gravitas". To which me and Mark fell about giggling and snorting again.

It's nice to be home, at long last.

Drive

I've been waiting a while to watch this film.



It's a pretty tough (i.e. bloody) crime drama. Ryan Gosling plays a getaway driver who gets too involved in a robbery gone bad. There's lots of double crossings and one decent car chase (the above is not it, although that is clever).

Although it's a pretty good movie, it's not as good as it thinks it is. It's too long, more complex than it needs to be and a bit too arty. The players are under-used (Gosling's not bad, but he's no Pacino) and for a film called Drive it needs more car chases.

New Blog Title

I thought I'd change the name of the blog for a while as I noticed that when I searched the name, there were a few sites with a similar name, including a restaurant. Obviously, I didn't want to use theirs, so I thought of a new blog name. Let's see how it goes.

Olympic Fever/Farce

Yes, folks, I went to the Olympics. A former colleague of mine asked me if I wanted to meet up with him and his family to watch the Triathlon in Hyde Park. When I got there, I couldn't contact him directly, so I just joined a flood of people heading for a cordoned off area called the BT Live area.

I got searched and had to surrender a pen-knife and multi-tool which I always carry. The security was absolutely abysmal (what Schneier has called "security theatre") because the person completely forgot to search the coat and bag I was carrying. I even got frisked while carrying it. Also, no drinks and food were allowed in, which meant that food and drink were to be bought inside (£5 a pint!), so you can see who the security was meant for.

The area itself was covered in wood chippings, just in case it rained, and it was just giant TV screens. Everyone parked themselves in front of the big one:

but around the corner on the left was another screen which had tables and chairs, so I sat there for a while. There was also a better bar, and while I bought an orange juice, I asked the barman about a band that were forlornly playing in the corner.

He said that they were a band of a mate of his brother's (or maybe a brother of his mate's). They are called Jaimie Thorn and the Mystery Pacific and what a damned good band they were! I'm not saying that they were worth the price of admission, but WOW! Sort of Alt-country, like Calexico. At least some good came out of the debacle.

Afterwards, I walked down to the V&A museum to sit in the courtyard and relax:

Kids paddling in the pool, everyone mellow. A total contrast to the crap earlier.

I went around the Japanese room afterwards and saw these:

They are called "Netsuke". The Japanese at the time had no pockets in their Kimono's and so used pouches or lacquered boxes tied with cord that were then looped through a belt. To prevent the cord slipping, these toggles were then used and became very decorative. Each one of these is about the size of my thumb, so you can appreciate the skill!

Mona Lisa (1986)

There weren't many films of note that came out of Britain in the 1980's. We didn't do blockbusters, and there wasn't much CGI. Handmade Films, owned in part by George Harrison, made one or two notable ones, in particular this:

It's a Film Noire. The protagonist is an ex-con called George, played by Bob Hoskins, who is hired by his old boss Mortwell, played by Michael Caine, as a driver for an expensive escort Simone, played by Kathy Tyson. Mortwell's motive is to get George to find any blackmail material on Simone's clients, but Simone manages to turn the tables on Mortwell and she and George form a bond while she uses him to look for a friend who's embroiled in the seedy world of London vice.

They do find the friend, but instead of a happy ever after, the gangsters catch up with the trio and there's a gun fight, Simone and Mortwell being killed. George confides in a friend Tom, played by Robbie Coltrane, who's supplied him with detective novels while he was in jail. At the end, George is forlorn at the death of Simone and they discuss what has happened, ponder on the nature of love and whether George had made any real difference to Simone's fate.

The film won a host of awards, but missed out at the Oscars, and it's a film worth watching even now.

Oxfam Saturday

I've been doing a few shifts in the shop of late: I usually do Friday afternoons anyway but the manager, Anne, had asked me to do the Saturday afternoon as well, downstairs. Upstairs is pretty quiet, but downstairs is where the action is, so I was fairly busy.

We were winding down to shut-up the shop when I got Angry Customer of the Day. He picked a book that, in retrospect, he must have had his eye on for a while. It was an old Penguin paperback that was priced at £6.99, which, I agree, was steep. What I didn't like was that he wanted to pick an argument and I wasn't in the mood. It went something like this:

Mr. Angry: "The price of this paperback is £6.99"
Me: "It is, sir"
A: "All the other paperbacks are £1 - £2, so do you think this is a fair price?"
Me: "I can't possibly comment on the pricing, sir"
A: "Is the person who does the pricing available to discuss this?"
Me: "Not today, sir"

There was a few more equally frustrating moments of conversation (for him: I was having fun), but it had to end.

A: "If I come back in a few days time, will the prices have changed?!!"
Me: "I couldn't possibly say, sir, but, in my opinion, the odds would not be good"
A: "Should I put this back on the shelf then?!!!!"
Me: "If you would, sir"

At which point he stormed off in, what I took to be, an air of frustrated self-righteous indignation. One of the student volunteers was watching all of this and she seemed a little awestruck by what had happened, which gave me a bit of a lift. The Great British Public: always there when you need them.

A Complete Person

Back in the steam age, there was a job on the railways known as a wheeltapper. This guys job was to go around the locomotives in the shed and tap the wheels, listening to the sound that they made to see if there were any defects, which would make a discordant sound. A perfect wheel would ring like a bell.

There have been some people that I have met that can also described in the same way: they ring true. I did a psychology course a few years back and one of the theories of the development of human personality was Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the concept of a self-actualised personality. They seem to be really "together" and you get the feeling that whatever they wanted to do or achieve they would. They have ambition, but it doesn't unduly affect their personality. They are not achieving in order to be happy, but are already happy and are achieving in order to satisfy a sort of curiosity. To see how far they can go, what can be achieved.