March 13, 2007

My PowerPoint presentations

Special offer to readers of this blog! E-mail me and I'll send you copies of the PowerPoint presentations I gave at the "Native American Portrayals in Comics" program:

A History of Natives in Comics  (5 MB)
Hercules vs. Coyote:  Native and American Comics  (1.5 MB)

These presentations were well received at the event. Someone even said, "You could give them anywhere in the country."

8 comments:

Rob said...

No, because that's not in the country.

Are you on a South Orkney kick or something?

Rob said...

I thought they were off Scotland, but I was thinking of the Orkney Islands.

I've been to Third Mesa on the Hopi reservation, so I know where it is.

I'd expect educated people to know Fargo, ND, and Truth or Consequences, NM. I wouldn't expect them to know the other places.

Heck, I'd expect educated people to be able to name the 50 states without missing any. But I doubt most of them could do it.

Rob said...

I was at a party once where people tried to name the 50 states in three minutes. I think I was the only one to get them all.

If you think you know more people with advanced degrees than I do, try this party game on them. Let us know the results.

Anonymous said...

"I was at a party once where people tried to name the 50 states in three minutes. I think I was the only one to get them all."

I wonder how many of them missed Delaware, the "Is that still a state?" state. Probably one of the "I" states gets forgotten, too.

Rob said...

Advanced degrees are a common method of measuring people's education. Other common methods include IQ scores, number of books read, and knowledge of trivia--such as the location of the South Orkney Islands.

Test your graduates of "The University of the Open Road" on their ability to name the 50 states in three minutes. Let us know how much their street smarts help them with the challenge. I'll bet that my friends with advanced degrees would do better than your friends without them.

Meanwhile, does anyone have anything to say about my PowerPoint presentations, the subject of this posting?

Rob said...

I said to e-mail me if you want a copy of my presentations. They're too big to post online.

Your excerpt from Anasazi is fine, although it seems a little long. Condense it a bit and you'll be ready to film it.

Of course, Indians fought among themselves before the white man came. Does that mean they forfeited their land before the white man came?

Rob said...

I've never heard any Natives say that defending their lands caused them to lose honor. If BigHawk believes this, he's far outside the mainstream of Native thought.

Samantha's character must be ignorant if she thinks the Mandan are "extinct." No one who knows anything about Indians would say that.

If Samantha is supposed to be a naive white person, her dialog is totally in character. But she supposedly has an MA and PhD in "Ice Age Man in North American and subsequent cultures." I don't have an advanced degree in anthropology, but several of her naive-sounding comments made me cringe.

You might want to check your screenplay format again. In 12-point Times Roman, double-spaced, this passage is at least seven pages of prose (I checked). It would be more in standard screenplay format; I'm guessing 10 pages or more.

As one website noted, "The average feature screenplay, traditionally, is between 95 and 125 pages long. In Hollywood these days scripts generally don't run longer than 114 pages." If I were producing this 130-page script, I doubt I'd have trouble finding lines to throw away. ;-)

Rob said...

Do you always tells producers and directors they can't edit your scripts? Sounds like a recipe for not getting your scripts made into movies.

You apparently haven't read David Gerrold's book on the making of The Trouble with Tribbles. If you had, you'd know that Gene Coon coaxed Gerrold to edit his script extensively.

And do you really not know about the most famous screenwriting contretemps in Star Trek history? Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon rejected Harlan Ellison's screenplay for The City on the Edge of Forever and rewrote it completely. Ellison was so mad that he didn't speak to the two Genes for years. So much for Trek's protecting the integrity of the written word.

I see you couldn't touch my specific comments. As usual, you seem out of your depth when confronted with criticism.

As for this posting rolling over to the archive, don't be stupid. How many postings do you want on the main page: all 1,190 (as of this morning)? It's accepted practice to keep postings active for a finite time--usually about a week. That they eventually scroll off the screen has nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the space.

Have you actually viewed this blog's archives? You don't seem to understand how they work.

FYI, all comments are preserved in the archives and you can even post new comments there. Therefore, feel free to continue the debate as long as you want. Stop inventing excuses for your refusal to debate and start debating.