Piaf

Over the past few days we have been watching 'La Vie en Rose', a film about Édith Piaf, another offering from our Prime subscription. A lady of whom I had previously heard but knew nothing about.

An interesting film about a star singer from the middle of the last century, a street girl from Paris who made good, but who died young - from a combination of booze, morphine and cancer. This despite the continual jumping around in time, which I found confusing and thought made rather too much of her last years. We shall try and find a more rose-tinted version - hopefully free with Prime. Or more accurately, part of the Prime package, which is not, of course, free.

Given that she looks to have been a bit of a collaborator, one that more or less got away with it, the film is a bit light on that chunk of her life. Maybe a French film was not going to stir up that part of the life of a National Treasure.

From where I associated to Simenon, someone else with a taste for both high and low lives, someone else who was a bit of a collaborator, but one who fled to the US at the end of the second war and who never, as I recall, actually lived in France again, although he did end up in next door Switzerland. But Piaf does not appear in the index of my Simenon biography, which I found odd.

But an absence which Gemini confirms. They might have been stars in the same night sky, but there was never a conjunction, at least not a recorded one. With the same being true of Agatha Christie, which I find less puzzling, given their very different temperaments and styles.

Gemini has also told me something of how he works, how he deals with questions by generating searches of his own, then synthesising the results of those searches into the nice neat stories he passes on to me. Which is not the same as hoovering up some huge library of knowledge into a single, monolithic knowledge base and then using that static knowledge base to answer every question.  Something to be poked a bit harder in slower time.

Does asking 'did Simenon ever meet Piaf' result in a different sort of process to that from 'what does the record say about whether Simenon ever met Piaf'? On the face of it at least, the second might be construed as a second order question, inviting comment on the record as much as on any meeting. With first order logic being a much simpler kettle of fish than second order logic.

PS 1: the film makes space for a another famous but dodgy character, also French, one Gérard Depardieu. He turns in a perfectly serviceable performance.

PS 2: maybe reference 4 will help to find another film.

Personnel

On another matter, some young people seem to spend serious time writing CVs, for which they are said to increasingly resort to AI to speed things up a bit. I imagine that it won't be long before personnel departments respond, having their AI assistants read the piles of incoming CVs. Maybe they will train their assistants to recognise those CVs which have been written by humans.

So while writing and reading CVs has always been a bit of a game, testing who-knows-what employment relevant skills, it is now becoming a game played by proxy, so where does that leave us?

I associate to the Allen Institute of reference 2 which I came across the other day, a large training organisation which I believe exists to service the aspirations of the large number of Indians who want to do well in the competitive examinations barring their way to decent occupations. All this stuff which barely existed when I was in the market - during which time I may have penned two or three CVs.

Also to personnel departments of old, offering safe jobs in times of high unemployment, getting hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for every lowly job. They were quite honest about taking a straightforward random sample of maybe one in ten (depending on the numbers) to get the number of applicants down to something manageable.

And to the Pentagon of old which spent a lot of money on machine translation back in the 1970s and 1980s because they thought it would be jolly good to be able to read 'Pravda' without having to bother to actually read it, as it were.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89dith_Piaf.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vie_en_Rose_(film).

Reference 3: https://allen.in/neet/biology/t4-bacteriophage.

Reference 4: https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/paris/the-4-best-movies-about-edith-piaf/. A bit advertisement infested, but: 'Molli is a writer who lives and breathes Paris. When not writing, you can find her in a cafe with a coffee in her hand and her nose in a book. She also enjoys reading and long walks on the beach as she actually grew up on the seaside'.