Thursday, 2 November 2017

Batman is not available at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep. -バットマンはただ今電話に出ることができません。発信音のあとにメッセージをお話しください。-


Indiana Jones has never given out his phone number in a movie.  Nor has Batman, nor Princess Leia.
Okay, Princess Leia didn’t have a mobile phone.  They don’t seem to have been invented in the galaxy far, far away in Star Wars.  Maybe you can’t get a good signal on the death star.
But Batman could have a mobile phone, couldn’t he?  It would be very useful as a way of keeping in touch with Robin.  But you never see him giving out his number.
And in fact no character in a Hollywood movie ever tells another character their phone number.  In order to be realistic, the phone number would have to have the correct number of digits.  So a real person might have that phone number.  And after the movie finishes... suddenly the poor person would get thousands of calls from people asking, “Hello, is Indiana Jones there?”
Sadly for one rickshaw driver, the Bangladeshi movie industry doesn’t seem to have realised this.
According to a news article I read today, a real phone number was accidentally used in a Bangladeshi movie.  The most famous and popular actor in Bangladesh was playing the romantic lead, and his character gave the number to his girlfriend.
In the real world, a rickshaw driver suddenly got 500 calls in five days from female fans of the actor.  The rickshaw driver said that he couldn’t change his phone number in case his customers were unable to contact him.  And he is suing the actor, hoping to get £45,000 in damages.
I just wonder if the rickshaw driver, instead of complaining about the calls, could have gotten some benefit from them?  He got 500 calls from women obsessed with this actor.  And let’s face it – they can’t be very smart.  I mean, they don’t seem to have been able to tell the difference between movies and the real world.  “What do you mean that this isn’t the number of Indiana Jones?  I heard Indiana say it in the movie!”
Couldn’t the rickshaw driver have said something like, “Yes, this is Indiana Jones.  But I’m always being bothered by my fans so I have disguised myself as a humble rickshaw driver.  I would love to go on a date with you.  But don’t be surprised if I look and sound nothing like I do in the movies.  And you’ll have to pay for the dinner, too.  If a poor rickshaw driver was seen paying for a gorgeous meal, it would break the disguise.”
Time to hang up.

Vocabulary:
a galaxy – a group of many stars and planets
to keep in touch with someone – to stay in contact with someone
a digit – as several letters together can make a word, several digits (0, 1, 2 etc.) can make a larger number
a rickshaw – a vehicle pulled by a person
to be obsessed – to like or think about something so much that it becomes an illness
to be bothered – to be inconvenienced; to be made to suffer slightly
to disguise oneself – to change one’s appearance in order not to be recognised
humble – in this sentence, humble means of low social rank or low importance


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