Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Art Imitates Art

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Quite a few years ago, here in the San Francisco Bay Area, there was a news story in which a woman was heading back to Oakland (one of the three larger cities here) from somewhere else in the United States. As the story is told, an announcement came over the airport loudspeaker stating that the flight to “Auckland” (that is, in New Zealand) was boarding at such-and-so a gate, and, misunderstanding the city’s name, she got on board that aircraft and took a much longer flight than expected. (Perhaps that is why, these days, the airline crew is emphatic about WHERE that particular aircraft is going…….)

Anyway, the article also mentioned that someone had already bought the rights to the story in case they wanted to do a movie about it. I was quite puzzled at this, because I wondered to myself: how is this any more interesting than a two-minute story one might share at a cocktail party and have a couple of laughs about? You can’t make a MOVIE out of this little anecdote, can you?

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