Pat's Blog
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Friday, January 3, 2014
memoir of an ancient Lady Writer
MEMOIR OF AN ANCIENT LADY WRITER
By Anonymous
I used to be fastidious
Now I'm just slow, and tedious.
Outside I'm plump – I'm slim within
And when I speak my voice is thin.
My hair is red with greying roots
And men who cared don't give two hoots.
My friends are old, or else they're dead
The rest of them all lie abed.
My hands no longer open jars.
My feet don't wander into bars.
I cannot race and win the cup
I've too much trouble keeping up.
It's the race itself that is the prize
not winning, like those other guys.
So I'll keep running till I drop
And hope my last book's not a flop.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Scripwriters, Please Note
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Thanks to Frank Nugent, a pioneer script writer, for a few of these suggestions, which come naturally, when you've written a few dozen TV scripts.
To all would-be screenwriters: To any script, there's always a beginning, middle and an end. Here are some considerations:
1.Beginning: Make it physically move.
2. Middle:Upset the status quo. Create excitement.
Something goes wrong. Fix. it.
But you didn’t quite fix it. Fix it again.
OOPs! Still a problem.
3 End: This time you really fix it and....
As Nugent put it: Write a good last line.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Hi, everyone. I'm moving my blog to my official website. Click here to visit my new blog and meet me on my website.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
A Brit and a
Half Lost in OC by Pat & Peter
Betts
A Journey of
Discovery, Memories and Comparisons
THE
BITCH IN THE BOX ©
I’ve always considered
myself able to find my way around the UK with the aid of a fairly recent map
and a first-class memory. Even my highly
critical wife, Pat says I must have studied ‘the knowledge’ because I dodge my
way around London corners like a taxi driver.
It’s a talent. But Pat, who
admits to being geographically impaired, insisted that once we arrived in sunny
Orange County, California I must buy a SatNav so we wouldn’t get lost. It was only when we went to Palm Springs to
visit a friend and I chose to take Highway 74, that she talked me into it. How was I to know it wound through the
mountains for stomach churning hours?
So with my human SatNav
wife, we headed to the store where the satellite delight was duly purchased and
installed in our car. Because the surface of the dashboard was pebbled, we had
to fasten it to Pat’s overhead mirror. This technological wonder came with a
somewhat human woman’s voice. She
sounded extraordinarily like my schoolteacher in the fourth form at Noel Park
Primary. Pat’s daughter Lisa calls her the bitch in the box.
In preparation, I’d read
up on the various products and learned that several road accidents have been
attributed to SatNav misdirection. One
dark night in Exton, Hampshire in 2007 a woman driver following the bitch’s
commands went through a railroad crossing not indicated in her system and was
hit by a train. After that, the County
Council erected a sign warning drivers to ignore their SatNav system and take
another route. But on the bright side,
that same year a man in Australia successfully overturned a speeding conviction
when evidence from a GPS navigational track proved that he didn’t exceed the
speed limit. These days even some Golf Carts
may have integrated GPS units tailored to certain golf courses, providing
interactive course maps and instant readings of distance measurements to the
green. Pat, who never likes it if I
exceed 60mph, told me with a hint of triumph in her voice that the system would
alert me if I were driving above the speed limit - or in the direction to be
'caught' by radar detectors. Was it a
threat or a promise?
One system even gives
you a choice of voices, mostly humorous but after listening to what sounded
like an out-of-work actor lucky to get a voice-over doing a take-off on Woody
Allen - I mean, would you really want him to get you where you were going? Now Penelope Cruz would be different. But I’m stuck with the bitch I’ve got, though
she may not be able to pronounce some words such as Niguel (Nigell) and calls it Niggle, or Jeronimo Road, which she calls Jerro-Nimmo.
Mission Viejo (veeayeho) fares
no better as Vee-Joe. I thought we were doing all right and it
wasn’t her fault that we got side-swiped on Golden Lantern at Pacific Coast
Highway by an Aston Martin. Did the
driver’s SatNav tell her to run a red light?
Our friend Ray has a
friend who lives in Irvine. “You’ve got
to look for a house there,” he advised from his multi-million pound home in
Kensington, without suggesting an introduction to this fabled friend. Not sure how rich Ray’s friend was or if
Irvine had modestly priced properties, we decided to give it a look and then to
take in nearby Costa Mesa. Pat, eager to
get her fingers into the act, punched in the directions for our trip with the
bitch. The route took us up the freeway
to Irvine, side-swiped Costa Mesa and somehow ended up in San Clemente twenty
miles away without ever getting off the freeway. “You have reached your
destination,” came the cool report.
It seemed Pat had stabbed in a multi-freeway
trip with no stops. I decided to turn to a map for the rest of the journey,
which thankfully brought us straight back to our little hotel in Dana
Point. We never did see Irvine.
The bitch and I were
finally getting used to each other until the night she had a nervous
breakdown. “No, no!” she thundered out
of her box. “I said riiight on Jaeger Drive! Now
get ready for a U Turn. Do a Uiee! A Uiee...!” The voice began to
panic and I
was about to attempt it when I saw it would take me over a cliff!
As I screeched my brakes, the bitch yelled,
“Turn right in 200 yards. Left in a
third of a mile! Straight ahead! U turn!
You turn!” Her voice rose as the
instructions came faster and faster.
“Three hundred yards turn Left!
Turn right! Straight ahead! Are you listening? I said a Youeeee!” shrieked the bitch. I was
in a cold sweat.
Then I woke up.
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