How Not to Talk to Clients

Recently I have been utterly shocked by how some business communication is done in Britain.

When starting a company, you obviously need to setup a bank account at some point. And of course you want to make an informed decision at which bank you are going to open it, etc.

Considering I have my personal account at Barclays, I have decided to check them out first. Typically the website information leaves plenty of questions to be asked, so I arranged an appointment. So far so good you might think… However by this point only I had to deal with several phone calls during work hours, telling me on some occasions that I cannot request to be contacted after 5, or on other occasions, that they will try to arrange that.

Confusing? I would say yes. Not everyone who intends to start a business has whole days to spare and chit chat with sales people on the phone. Especially when it is just a simple enquiry, and the website claims that lines are open to 6pm. Some people actually work at work, you know…

In the end I got someone to call at a later hour and after a brief discussion we arranged a meeting, which we initially agreed to split into two consecutive days, as my lunchtime would not allow for one and a half hour brake. I was asked to pass my details via text message at the end of the conversation. And so i did. And imagine might slight surprise when I got back the reply:

“Thanku john local business managr”

I’ve changed the guys name, but kept original spelling, including lowercase on his own name. OK, admittedly he had an Indian accent, I though, sounded reasonably young, and obviously it was after his work hours so maybe he was in a hurry. I decided not to jump to conclusions too fast and give the guy a chance.

The meeting was quite some time away, as it was the time of the Christmas break, so I was bound to get a reminder after getting back from my holidays in Poland. And so I did:

“Hi dnt 4get our business appt @ 127 HIgh st slough @ barclays @ 12.30pm ne problems call me john”

Again all original spelling, I double checked that I haven’t made any typos… By now you have probably realised I’m not a big fan of text speak. I do tolerate it if it comes from a friend or colleague, especially if they are still under twenty. However as a potential client I find things like the above appalling.

You do not have to resort to text speak in order to be understandable. It’s not like it’s either legal talk or text speak. I think there is plenty of good English in between those two.

Secondly I am here to do business, not to find friends. It is nice to see such institutions like banks using text messages to communicate with people, but language standards have been created for a reason. Yes, if you are wondering, I am equally petty about Polish, as I am about English. Finally it is one things to make mistakes, and another to butcher the language on purpose…

How a Business Manager Becomes a Sales Person

The day of the meeting came and I finally met my soon-to-be business manager in person. Surprisingly he wasn’t as young as I expected, considering all the texts (yes, there were more than the two above).

As my business is going to be an online venture, concentrated rather on micro-payments rather and alternative income sources, rather than direct interaction with clients, I do not need most of the typical business tools for “normal” startups. And I made sure I outlined that just at the start of our conversation. No employees, and no income for a certain period of time.

Everything seemd to go fine, I got answers to most of my questions, however I had to constantly repeat myself. I won’t need this, no, I won’t need that. I don’t want a program to store my clients details, as I won’t be having clients per se. At some point the discussion turned into him constantly trying to push their “free” software and me repeatedly saying I don’t need 90% of it’s features, and the stuff I need I can either do on paper, or find a free solution.

I’m saying “free” software, because although it did not cost you as such, there was a monthly fee for the account that came with it. Half way through the conversation it looked more like a hard sell, than an advice session. It made me wonder what kind of commission they get for pushing the software on unaware beginning business owners.

Another thing I noticed, was that he was taking an awful lot of formal details about me and my business, and weaving forms after forms to fill. Before I go any further let me just say I made it perfectly clear, I am looking to evaluate the banks offer and get my questions answered. I never mentioned opening the account right then and there. And in fact I was never openly asked whether I wanted to do so.

Near the end of the meeting I asked if he realizes I am not opening an account today. The guy looked at me a bit surprised and started saying, that I should have said so earlier, as we wouldn’t have filled all these forms etc.

Well I’ll say one thing: what a load of rubbish (not to use a harsher expression). It seems to be an annoying trend among sales people, to start signing you up, while they discuss the product or service. I guess a lot of people will feel pressured into joining, even though they were only checking out their options.

I’m still checking out mine, and Barclays right now is pretty low on the list of my bank choices.

Addicted to feeds – the power of RSS

Usually I’m quite a stubborn donkey when it comes to taking on new technology or ideas. A curious donkey, but a donkey nevertheless.

When I first heard about this whole RSS business I was suspicious. Wasn’t quite sure how to use it, and why would I need it in the first place. A few years passed by and now it’s one of my indispensable tools.

The benefits of RSS

So what is it about Really Simple Syndication that makes it such a necessity?

One of the main advantages of RSS is the fact that it notifies you about changes, rather than you having to periodically check a website for updates.

This might not seem like such a big deal. What’s the problem with checking a few websites every day, or every week. Well I don’t know about you, but I have a memory like Swiss cheese. This means that unless the content is updated almost daily, I’m bound to forget to check a few times, and eventually forget the url even.

It becomes especially prominent when instead of checking 5 websites you follow 500. It’s a bit of an exaggeration but allows you to see the point clearly. Some of your feeds might have new content daily, some weekly and some even monthly.

Not every author is extremely prolific, or you might be just following the release information for some software. You definitely want to know when it comes out but if the news comes about every 5 months, but at the same time you do not want to waste your time every single day checking for it.

Secondly you might not be interested in every single article from one author. If someone writes about apples and oranges, and you hate apples, why would you want to waste your time checking out an article about them? This is why RSS can act as a great information filter. Because you see the article titles, you can quickly decided whether it is something that might interest you or not.

This also leads to my next point. By using an RSS reader you can aggregate and consolidate your many information sources in one place.

Also as the reader only presents you with the text content of the article itself (or a summary, depending on the publishers settings) you save on loading many different websites with all their graphics and other unrelated page elements. This saves bandwidth as well as time.

Why should you provide RSS feeds?

Considering all the above arguments it should be clear that it is of great benefit to your readers as well as you as a writer to supply RSS feeds of your content.

Some people do worry that it takes away visitors from the site. However this is not entirely true. Readers will come to comment, or to just check out your other articles from the archive. So if your content is good enough to attract a response from a reader, you have nothing to fear.

If this still does not convince you, there is another way of getting people onto your website, while still providing feeds. You could always create RSS feeds with just your article summary and a “read more” link. This way your followers get a nudge that there is fresh content, they can see the title and an intro that gives them an idea of what the content is about, and you still get your traffic. Simple, and everyone is happy.

Websites without RSS

All the above ranting is due to my recent web browsing. I have been checking out a couple of sites and blogs, and found a few that looked like they might be worth following. Unfortunately to my surprise an RSS feed was nowhere to be found. And in my book this is a definite no-no. The content would have to be truly outstanding  and often updated for me to be able to keep coming back to a site like that. And I do not think I am alone in such attitude.

The Great Spam Attack

I have a lot of email addresses. Plenty of accounts that I have accumulated over the years, by signing up to this or that service. For convenience reasons nowadays I actually forward practically all of them to my main gmail account (Yes, I am a bit of a Google fan-girl). This has various advantages – like for starters not having to remember a plethora of logins and passwords, however from time to time it can cause a major havoc.

And this is exactly what happened the other day. One of my Polish accounts suffered from configuration issues, which meant that a supposedly one way mailing list email, allowed any person to send a message to that address and it would have been delivered to quite a hefty amount of recipients.

What made it even worse was that it was not an active mailing group. It has been used for some survey purposes ages ago, and thus most users didn’t even know (myself included) that such a list existed. Once the information leaked out you can clearly imagine what had happened. In short spam was arriving long after the issue has actually been fixed…

But this is just a little background information. What I found fascinating is how the whole matter developed over time.

It all started with a single message asking if it is true, that if you send an email to ankieta@gazeta.pl it gets sent to all of its subscribers. Personally I thought it was just a single  random spam, and I ignored it. Especially as for a while there was no response.

After some time several more messages popped-up, like shy little monsters poking their heads out of a hole. Most of these were simply “test” or “it’s really true!” emails.

Later the momentum quickly grew and the messages got less curious, and more offensive. Making fun of the admin or sending nasty messages about other mailing list users. Also this prompted more requests for someone investigating the issue, being removed from the list or just saying “hello, have a good day”.

Next finally came the messages with links. I was genuinely surprised how long it took for those to appear. At first the initial process was repeated. A few personal websites, some even with an apologetic note like “sorry for the spam, but this is just a too good occasion to be missed”. And I must say I even checked out some of the first links, and as such I can say they were not offensive or scamy.

Unfortunately this did not last long. And once the links started pouring through they quickly escalated to full blown spam, shop advertisments, etc. Often no message at all, just a link slapped in an email.

This in turn provoked a bigger number of pleads to the admins for fixing the issue or to remove the poor soul from the list, threats against the company breaking privacy laws and surprisingly quite a few humorous responses.

Amazingly some people just ignored all the junk and sent greetings to other anonymous users, or even personal ads. Which really does show that even faced with a disaster (yes, my finger still hurts from sieving through all those run-away messages and clicking delete…) people can still take life quite lightly and smile.

Book inspiration

Birdy nesting on the ground

I have an idea for a short story. As a sort of a teaser I drew this little birdie…

Writing Online for Money

Staying on the topic of writing, I would like to share a few experiences with making money online using the pen.

Being a person who likes exploring different opportunities and simply enjoying writing, I decided to give it a try. After doing some extensive (a bit about that later…) research I found several places that looked reasonably reliable and established.

How Much Can You Earn?

I guess this is the most pressing question people might ask. And to disappoint all those hoping for riches straight away, most of the time the answer would be not that much.

Unless you have A LOT of time on your hands (like some of the mommy-bloggers seem to) and are willing to almost mass produce shallow, short articles spiked with keywords to attract the search engines rather than human readers, and possibly include what most would consider spam, than your outlook is pretty bleak.

However it is not as grim as it looks at first sight, and there are several established communities that are confirmed to pay regularly and on time. Another thing to bare in mind is that non-Americans seem to be at a big disadvantage, as the sites that offer payment up-front are mostly available only to US citizens. The difference is between gaining a minimum of about $20 for the article plus the traffic revenue, against just the later, which in most cases is fairly small and slowly growing.

Gain Authority and Readership

Most of these online writing communities advertise themselves as (apart from a means to earning some extra money…) a way to establish authority in the writing community and boost your readership. This would be quite a just cause were they true writing communities.

Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate using Triond as an example, the communities are mostly self absorbed and plagued by spammers. Despite claiming to be all about gaining authority each of Triond’s domains remains exclusive and the only place you can see all the articles written by one person is the main Triond website.

This would not be that strange if not for the fact that the themed websites have separate user profiles with not even a mention or a link to the main Triond one. This means if you write two articles under domain X, three articles under domain Y, and twenty under domain Z, someone who stumbles upon one of your X articles will have no clue that you have written so much more. Unless of course they are part of the Triond community already, and have the time to look you up (which also isn’t as straightforward as you might think).

You could argue that readers looking for gaming texts will not be interested in articles about make-up. However when one article is about diet, and the second about exercising there might be a connection. Even worse, you might be writing a series but due to the editors whim the first and third article land under domain X while the second goes onto Z. It happened to me so it’s not just theory.

That said, there are good writers and great articles on the website, however usually they are swamped by mediocre or even worse ones. And before someone jumps to conclusions, I don’t meant my own work, which is pretty lame writing for obvious reasons.

Generate the Traffic Yourself

So how about that aforementioned readership boost? Well as you have probably realized by now most of the users are trying to earn money themselves, as such they might wonder around every know and then, especially when presented with a catchy title.

Secondly you could create “friendships” and exchange article views in the typical I read your, you read mine agreement. Some go even further and create groups that not only read each other’s work but also superficially increase their article’s score in social bookmarking services like for example Stumble, or Digg, etc.

Other than that you could always master some ass kicking SEO skills, as the only alternative to cliques seems to be search engine traffic. Or even better just go around spamming loads of places with links, as well as sending them to your family and friends.

One of the reasons I even started considering these writing websites was that I wanted a place to just post my random articles. You know one day I would write about cats, the other day about diets, and on the third I might comment on the property market. Also to have the freedom of getting my writing exposed to the world without the need for doing much SEO. I wanted to concentrate on my writing and if anything maybe learn what seems to work and what does not by means of experimentation.

And that was one of the biggest annoyances I had with BrightHub. The other communities seem to be a lot more relaxed about how your content is doing. It obviously has it’s downsides, but means if you have a heart for an article it doesn’t matter it’s not going to be at the top of the charts.

BrightHub interested me for two reasons. Firstly it had mostly topic related to computers, technology and gaming, which was nice. Secondly it offers up-front payments for articles plus revanue share later on as well. And not only for Americans at that.

What I did not foresee was how much of a keyword Nazi they are. They give you a selection of topics, and if you don’t fancy anything from there of course you can write on your own, but you are obliged to provide a keyword research along with your proposal. Well if I wanted to do all that, I’d start a blog, duh…

Article guidelines

Many of these websites provide rules for user submissions. Usually a minimum number of words (commonly 350-400 and up), as well as content guidelines. Often officially you are not allowed to do marketing and spamming, some allow fiction and creative writing, others do not. Some do not mind controversial opinions, others will ban anything that doesn’t look politically correct.

Shouldn’t this promote good quality content, you might ask? Sadly not always. Many articles just grab an interesting idea, or news item and regurgitate it in about 400-500 words. Or even worse start of mentioning something interesting, but finish before stating anything substantial.

Before I got severely disillusioned, I sometimes browsed the latest, and hottest topics. However with a few outstanding exceptions (like this article about mad scientists, or some of the photo based ones can be great) most just had a catchy title, that got me interested and in the end didn’t deliver. It often seems like it’s just about hitting that word limit while sticking a good number of keywords for SEO purposes.

The World Of Spam

Also the no marketing or spam rule seems to be applied quite randomly. One of my enthusiastic reviews of a fancy brush I found, which I didn’t even have an affiliate link for got rejected as being a marketing article. It was quite a turn off considering I rarely get excited enough about any product to right a review of any kind in the first place. And to find one that really does what it boasts is even more of an occasion. (If anyone is interested the Tangle Teezer brush really does magic for curly hair…).

However at the same time texts about services for “making money online” – guess why the quotes yourself – are all over the place. The editors of some of the communities seem to not mind pay per click site advertising, offer and survey site promotion, etc.

Same topics over and over

Now to why the research actually took quite a while. Not only do the users of any single writing website fry in their own sauce, but they also tend to capitalize on more than one of these communities. This leads to either straight re-posting of the same content in multiple places (if the sites policies allow that, or even worse if you can plainly get away with it). Or alternatively the text gets slightly rewritten, which might help avoid plagiarism accusations, though does not really provide any additional value to the text itself.

A good example are the reviews of the writing websites themselves, usually written in positives, maybe with a few glitches mentioned for balance. Funny enough it often doesn’t matter on which website the review actually is presented. It usually is a case of all sites have reviews of all the other sites and themselves.

So when you reach the 50th review that mentions the same five things you already know and nothing more it can get really frustrating. This also means that most of the information is quite biased. And don’t even get me started when the community offers incentives based on referrals – getting an honest opinion is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Should I Write Articles Online?

So do I regret wasting my time with this affair? It hasn’t exactly been a moneymaker, not even for so called pocket money. But it did teach me a few lessons.

First of all I gained a bit more focus. Although I still feel that pushing for the word limit just for the sake of it is stupid, I found it to be an interesting guideline. After choosing a topic, if I run out of things to say after before 400-500 words and it is obvious there could be said much more it just signals to me I should go back to the drawing board and do my research again.

This does not mean every post has to be massive. There is place for short and sweet. But if you are trying to provide people with some useful information on a vast topic you cannot just skim over it. It’s a bit like reviewing a product by stating: I liked it, it worked. Or like a movie review with no personal insight, just listing of the people involved, a bit about the plot and that’s it.

Often the Internet gurus will say you should not write long posts. That people do not want to read. And sadly I even noticed this about myself, how I started to skim most of the content. Then I’ve noticed that there are things that I do read, front to cover even, and definitely longer than 400-500 words.

The reality was I would read and spend that extra time on articles that provided real value, real content. Not some regurgitated news with an opinion slapped at the front, middle or end, but an insightful story, personal experience, something truly new or just plain funny, something you can learn from or that gets you thinking or reflecting on your own about different topics. I’ve noticed that lists of “10 best this” or “20 greatest that” are good for skimming only.

Secondly getting disillusioned in itself has not been a good thing. It made me look a bit more realistically at certain aspects of writing. A bit less of happy-go-lucky approach, and a bit more research. Also some extra consideration of what people might be interested in reading.

This is not to say that writing should be done only with the reader in mind. But the truth is if you were writing just for yourself, you would just keep it in a drawer, wouldn’t you?

New Year Resolutions

New year, new month, a time to start over. Typically people make resolutions for the coming year, which they typically do not hold for long. I guess I am not much different, and again promised myself to eat less and exercise more. Hopefully this year will prove to be a bit more successful in that department.

Other than such down to earth commitments, I hope to find this year very busy. My partner and I currently have two little projects in the works, which hopefully will be launching in the coming months. Finally I promised myself to make one more commitment: stop talking about writing a book, and write one instead.

More Than a Promise

Going through other people’s resolutions I stumbled upon the following at David Rogers blog:

I finish today, and this year, with a question I have recently read onFreetheDiva:-

A bank credits your account each morning with £86,400. It carries over no balance to tomorrow. Every evening you lose the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do?(I converted the $ to £ as the pound needs all the help it can get at the moment!)

Well most people would withdraw every penny they could before they disappeared, and invest them as best they could. Yet everyday we are credited with 86,400 seconds, which disappear when the day is over. Most of us squander those seconds, let them slip by as if we have a limitless supply. Remember, if you fail to “invest” them, its your loss.

I wanted to become a writer since I was a little kid. Even before I dreamt to be a programmer, and just after the ideas of becoming a singer (that idea quickly got trashed by anyone in range of my vocals…). Maybe this is a good year to try to make one of my dreams come true. As the example above shows, time is precious, and is not a renewable resource.

One thing I have not foreseen in my childhood aspirations was that I would end up abroad. This obviously does widen the target audience, however makes the task a lot more challenging on so many levels.

Just to start with my grammar and spelling that needs constant checking. Moreover vocabulary diversity and appropriate register might require more research, and conscious effort, than a native English-speaker would have to put in.

Despite all that I still would like to give it a go. I do like having a bit of a challange and who knows maybe something good will come out of it. The worst thing that could happen is me improving my overall language skills while failing horribly at producing an interesting novel…

12 Dishes at a Polish Christmas Eve

In Poland Christmas starts early. We celebrate something called Christmas Eve, which is a Catholic tradition that involves a very elaborate supper, though entails refraining from certain foods. The whole family gathers on the 24th of December to celebrate. These can often involve a great many of people including extended relatives.

The Big Preparations

Despite the Church renouncing the “no meat” rule, most people still consider it as tradition and in general if you are vegetarian you would feel at home. The day starts with a light breakfast and often nothing more until the evening, as it is supposed to be a fast. Some of the dishes would be prepared beforehand, while others are done during the course of the day.

Christmas table setting

There are different stories about the traditional number of dishes Christmas Eve should consist of – 6, 9 or 12, with the explanation for 12 being that it is the number of Apostles. However what Apostles have to do with the birth of Jesus is beyond me. When it comes to what the dishes are it can vary greatly based on the region.

My own family’s course choice seems to mix up several regions, however considering we live in Wielkopolska, its customs have probably influenced us the most. Also as for us Christmas is more of a tradition, and a cultural event, rather than a religious one, we do not really abide all the rules. Here is the list of our 12 courses:

1. Opłatek
2. Barszcz – beetroot soup
3. Mushroom soup
4. Carp – fried fish
5. Herring – fish in sauce
6. Mushrooms – fried with onion
7. Sauerkraut
8. Bread
9. Pierogi – small dumplings with filling
10. Noodles with poppy seeds
11. Peas
12. Compot – from different dried fruit

Extra plate

The Unannounced Stranger

One typical custom in Poland related to Christmas is leaving one extra setting at the table. The tradition states that any guest is welcome, and if someone knocks on our door you should welcome them in and sit them at your table and share your food with them.

Symbolically we are showing to be more hospitable than the people of Bethlehem. Unfortunately it is more of a symbol as a tv undercover survey has shown a couple of years ago. Most people they asked were not willing to guest a true stranger in their home.

So much for the hospitality I guess.

Polish Opłatek

It All Starts With Oplatek

Traditionally children are employed to stare through the frosty windows into the sky to spot the first star. This would mark a sign to begin Christmas Eve. Unfortunately often it would just be done in theory as a sky full of snow clouds prevents any stars from being seen.

Before everyone sits down to the meal we all share a symbolic “bread” called opłatek. Each person gets there own piece which they then go on to break with others while exchanging wishes of good luck and prosperity.

Soup of Choice

Our Christmas Eve favourites are Mushroom soup and Barszcz (beatroot soup). The later being a great match for pierogi (dumplings). Often my mother would also bake her own bread sticks with sesame or poppy seeds.

There are many ways to serve Barszcz, however in my house we use neither cream nor beans. This broth based soup is created by adding beetroot, marjoram, and a carefuly measured amount of vinager. The final product is similar in consistency to broth with the vegetables sieved out for use as filling for the dumplings.

Carp – Yes, It Is Edible

Fried Carp

Most Poles cannot imagine a Christmas Eve without carp. British newspapers seem to love to exploit this fact to produce sensational news about immigrants fishing straight out of local ponds and rivers. It generally is a bizarre concept in the UK to eat fresh water fish.

However as I have a British survivor as my witness, yes, carp is not only edible, but quite nice when fried and served with bread and sauerkraut.

There is one downside though, you do need to watch out for the tiny bones as they are easy to choke on.

The Many Faces of Pierogi

Pierogi

As mentioned before we do not adhere to the tradition a 100% and the more customary dumplings with sauerkraut and mushrooms have been swapped for meat filled ones. Pierogi do come in a myriad of varieties from cream cheese with salt or sugar, through fruit filled (commonly strawberries), or sauerkraut and mushrooms filled, to meat ones.

Our version is a handy way of getting rid of leftovers and utilising the stock from broth and barszcz. The filling is vegetables and different types of meat mixed into a pulp and then placed inside the dough for cooking.

Old Fashioned Desert

Barszcz And Noodles With Poppy Seeds

Most Christmas Eve dishes are quite savory, however there is one exception. An old fashioned desert consists of noodles mixed together with poppy seeds and other ingredients such as in this year’s case: raisins, almonds, nuts, and orange peel. All this together makes for an intresting treat, standing out against the masses of chocolates available everywhere.

Christmas Compot

Secondly this Christmas we also had compot. The Christmas variation was based on dried fruit like plums, pears, apples, and cranberries. Served cold, this soup like drink again was not too sweet and sat well with the taste pallet of the rest of the supper.

Modern Polish Christmas Deserts

Traditional Christmas Deserts

The three cakes rulling my family’s table every Christmas are: cheesecake, gingerbread cake and cookies, and poppyseed cake.

The first one is not really a seasonal thing. The cheesecake is more of a family tradition, as my grandmother makes the best one in the whole world. Because of that every time I come home I get treated to a delicious gift.

The other two cakes are a lot less of a personal preference and can be found in many more Polish homes during Christmas time.

Gift Unwrapping

Lots of Presents

As everywhere else in the world we do indulge ourselves in the gift giving tradition. Unlike the UK or the States however we open presents on the 24th of December just after supper. As my family has no small kids there wasn’t any Santa Claus visit, instead one of the younger members gets designated to hand out presents to everyone else.

Christmas sweets

Many of the gifts are various kinds of sweets, and the cakes mentioned above are served while people open their presents. Often gifted sweets are shared out among the guests together with the home made cakes.

Christmas Decorations

In Poland people have not yet gone as far as in the USA when it comes to decorating their homes, however we do like to pretty things up. At my home we usually have many twigs and pine like decorations, including pine cones. Moreover there is an abundance of things like gold and red elements, stars, bows, bells, baubles and angels.

Window Christmas Decorations

As the table is the main focal point of Christmas Eve, the table obviously gets a lot of attention. In our case the table is just next to the big bay window, which is also a prominent feature in the living room.

White Christmas outside

Outside the house we also hang Christmas ornaments, again not as impressive as some of their American counterparts. However thanks to the lovely climate as you can see in the picture above we are often gifted with a stereotypical white Christmas.

Review of The day the Earth stood still movie

I love movies and I believe that before you criticize something you should try it out yourself. That’s why I haven’t been put off by the nasty reviews all over the papers for “The day the Earth stood still”. I guess also being a big fan of s-f  and alien themes helps a lot.

Yes, Keanu Reeves does play a very emotionless extraterrestrial being. However everyone seems to forget he comes with a mission, a very big part of which is to make an objective decision. Also many little things in his behaviour do show that he is not devoid of compassion for lesser creatures.

It is like modern men making decision for a tribal village – people take into account the greater good, rather than individual feelings of each of the tribe’s members. Especially as their opinions will be hugely biased by their inferior knowledge.

Kids and Animals are the hardest to work with

There are annoyances in the movie – one of the biggest being the kid. He admittedly is young, but the amount of stupid things and misbehaviour is just irritating. Although there was one interesting scene where Jacob talks to Klaatu:

“I told Helen we should kill you…”
“Did you mean it?”
“Before….”

This is one place where the kid is actually useful and exposes a certain mentality. In a way he is exactly like the alien. Before he got to know more, he was quick to jump to conclusions and kill the threat. However after some time, he changes his mind.

All through the movie, we are shown more and more reasons that justify the extraterrestrial’s decision. Humans are selfish, aggressive, destructive in their attempts to understand the things around them, deceitful and parasitic. There is not much counterweight to show of the good side of humanity, which supposedly in the end enchants the alien visitors.

The SF in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Personally I liked the special effects, and they were worth viewing on the big screen. Especially the nano-bot cloud of destruction. It reminded me of the concept that I read about some time ago related to space colonization. It stated that space exploration by means of self replicating machines supersedes exploration in person. And as such they also are an extremely more efficient way of eradicating the planet of humans and technology.

Not Green Enough

Some reviews claimed that the ecological message was not presented clearly enough. I would have to disagree. We experience the “green” nagging ever single day, and it is good we are made aware of things, however in a movie a subtle message works better. “The day the Earth stood still” is not a documentary about the Earth’s withering, at the end of the day it is Hollywood entertainment, and when you look at it from this perspective not making the environmental issue the focal point will make the message reach a wider audience.