'Gorgonzola' is not the saddest word

It takes a lot of effort to talk for the length of a feature length moving picture, even with company for the occasion. As a veteran of one fan commentary now it seems both impossible and still somehow fun. That's right... fun! I don't understand it but it was.

Let's do some random words.

Typecast: to always give an actor the same type of character to play
Defuse: to stop a bomb from exploding by removing its fuse
Umber: yellow or reddish brown in colour

What do those words bring to mind? Being typecast is not a problem that only occurs to actors and performers of other types. It happens to us all. If I say tomorrow that I don't feel like scrambled eggs for breakfast it's entirely possible that people will think I'm unlikely to ever want scrambled eggs and it will be worse the more I do it. However it could just mean I have a dicky stomach and don't want to tempt fate. Umber itself is rather a typecast colour, in that it's perceived be me at least to be rather dull or even nauseating colour to look at. Even the name is rather reddy brown: Umber. Ugh. Brown is a colour that's never appealed to me at all outside of the human pigmentations of course. (No racial issues here, people).

Somehow we all suffer from typecasting, but it comes from the internal rather than the external and is a form of self-limiting. At least half of the things we stop ourselves from doing are things we could do and probably easily, but we typecast ourselves. `Oh, I couldn't do that. I'm a terrible climber!' said in a jovial voice to defuse the question before it explodes into doing something we haven't done before. Sometimes we just go for it though and surprise ourselves and maybe those times aren't frequent enough.

Having mentioned 'defuse' once it now strikes me as the most useful word of the three, and a vital human skill in those who possess it: The ability to stop a human situation from escalating to the point of danger. Mediators, lots of policemen, some politicians and diplomats and probably far more professions who didn't spring instantly to mind. These are incredibly vital people who somehow end up in the jobs they were meant to do, and they do share a quality with the people who defuse bombs of the more literal kind: They go in and do it at the risk of their own skins.

Hmm, that was rather nice.
Oliver.