FEAST OR FAMINE

    The 2024 Paris Fire Brigade is out on the streets of Paris – by donation.  The 2024 edition of the calendar celebrates the 2024 Paralympic and Olympic Games. The athletes present in this calendar (in alphabetical order) are: Hakim Arezki (football), Axel Bourlon (para weightlifting), Pauline Deroulede (armchair tennis), Yohan Peter (wheelchair fencing), Alex Portal (para swimming), and Gael Riviere (football).   Participating in the development of the 2024 calendar are the French Paralympic and Sports Committee, the BSPP communications office and the Nativity and Boulogne barracks, the Billancourt stadium, the Bailly-Romainvilliers sports complex, the National Center for Training as well as all the actors who contributed to the realization of this calendar.   The history of the Paris Fire Brigade ( Brigade de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris ) begins in 1699 with the introduction of water pumps. The Brigade de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris is known as BSPP or the Sappe...

 

  The Sundowners (1953) is set in rural Australia in the 1920s. In 1960,    the movie was released starring Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, Chips Rafferty, and Peter Ustinov.   Paddy Carmody is an itinerant sheep shearer and drover, wandering from town to town to find work – he likes the newness of each town. He doesn’t care that the towns are not on any map. It seems to him that the whole countryside is his own backyard. ‘All he wanted was Ida and the boy, and to keep moving’ – and to keep pitching a tent when the sun goes down.   His wife Ida, and their 14-year old son, Sean, are tired of the nomadic life. At first it was different, exciting, but now they want to settle down. Make a home, make a life. Ida left England 30 years ago – the last place she called home. Ida and Sean strike up a friendship, and communicate through letters, with Mac, who owns a farm that they like. Of course, they can’t afford to buy it, but it’s nice to have a dream.   The work i...

 

The International Workplace Group (IWG), a British organization, conducted a global workplace survey in January 2019, releasing the results in March 2019. IWG canvassed the opinion of more than 15,000 people across 80 nations.  The study’s respondents define flexibility as work options outside 9:00-5:00 working hours, combinations of in-and-out of main office locations, workers being able to manage their own workloads, and being able to choose the type of work location. Eighty percent (80%) of survey respondents said that, given two similar job offers, they would reject the job that did not offer flexible work options.  IWG found that 62% of businesses worldwide currently have a flexible workplace policy, with 85% of respondents indicating that productivity has increased in their business as a result of greater flexibility.  IWG lists the following countries with flexible workplace policies, in order of responding businesses: Germany (80%), Netherla...