27 ms·

When the Steve Jobs movie came calling

110 points by timdierks 11y ago

adricnet 11y ago
This was an interesting and enjoyable quick read. Thanks for posting the link!
gorena 11y ago
Am I correct to assume this movie makes no mention of his systematic illegal wage suppression?
- seiji 11y ago
  The axe grinding machine is in another castle.
  - pen2l 11y ago
    I don't think 'gorena's point should be rebuffed just like that, Steve Jobs was not the friend of us engineers, after all it was him who said things like: “If you hire a single one of these people, that means war”. Many of us might be getting paid were it not for him and his actions. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491016/it-personnel/steve-jobs-was--central-figure--in-silicon-valley-hiring-case--judge-says.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491016/it-personnel/st... I do wish this was touched in the movie somehow. (I'm presuming it wasn't, as that's what it seems like... I haven't seen it yet so can't say for sure) edit: I'm getting down-voted. Indeed, I think I went over the top. Steve Jobs did go on to create exceptional products that have heightened a lot of people's productivity, so he was net good. Sorry for the comment - I'll leave it there anyway though.
    - seiji 11y ago
      Also: the movie is real time across three scenes and those three scenes are just behind the curtain at "pivotal" keynotes. It's not a life story. It's not an epic tale. It's three set pieces each operating in 30 minutes of character time in sync with 30 minutes of screen time per episode.
  - gorena 11y ago
    If American laborers (yes, engineers, you are laborers) still remembered how to sharpen axes, maybe that would happen less. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-workers-storm-meeting-protest-executives-job-losses-paris http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-work...
    - vvanders 11y ago
      Haha wow, taking the shirt off their back to its literal conclusion.
    - r0naa 11y ago
      What a terrible example to support a very valid point. What those union workers have done was unacceptable, and made me sick to my stomach. Also, I felt greatly ashamed - like many other french citizens - by the french government's weak response to this public humiliation. Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore, France is a modern democracy and allowing Unions to grow unchecked was a histoical mistake. There are a balance to strike between workers' rights and corporations' prerogatives. France is the very situation you want to avoid, one where an actor has such tremendous power that any attack to the status quo is impossible regardless of its benefit for society as a whole.
      - coldtea 11y ago
        >Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore It's still an era of neo-liberalism and employees return workplaces to medieval work practices (down to child labor and 14 hour workday) whenever they can get away with it.
        r0naa 11y ago
        And they can get away with it only because their unions have created precedents where they create avoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time. This is sickening really. I am always dumb-founded when I read people who would like this kind of dystopia for their countries. Don't you see how fucked up this is for everyone?
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  Maybe they include anecdotes like this one: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Handicapped.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... >Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building. >As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Wasn't that Steve's building in the first place to do anything he wanted with? If he didn't take the last available such space or actually cut off some handicapped Apple employee wanting to park there, then it's more about "playing by the rules" than actually hurting anyone...
    - gorena 11y ago
      No, because handicap laws are for the benefit of society. Rich men shouldn't get to skip out on them because they're rich.
      - realquick81 11y ago
        > No, because handicap laws are for the benefit of society. Only if by "benefit" you mean "detriment". Many a handicapped person are against these "laws" (opinions with guns).
      - larrys 11y ago
        Well the parent comment doesn't say how many handicap spots were open. Giving Jobs the benefit of the doubt, he may have seen a pattern where there were always multiple spots available. And the spot locations don't come down from God either. They are decided (at least in the state where I live and have worked on this subject (a work parking lot)) in an arbitrary fashion in order to meet certain requirements. It's (once again where I am) a loose specification for placement. And you can always exceed the number required. For all we know Apple could have put in more spaces than required and Steve was simply taking advantage of that knowing that nothing would happen. And that he further didn't care about any fine he received assuming the Police even had normal access to that part of the parking lot when they were on patrol. Edit: Further to my point it's easy to assume "arrogant big shot rich guy" just hearing a story like this.
- MCRed 11y ago
  There's a huge difference between not having internal recruiters call up employees in a company directory to try and poach them, and preventing those same employees from choosing to apply. The former doesn't affect wages, but the latter would. The latter didn't happen.
  - morganw 11y ago
    How do you know that employee-initiated applications & interviews weren't stopped by recruiters calling back & forth "OK to hire this guy?". The only reason the "no cold calling" agreement was made public was Ed Colligan spilling the beans & the D.O.J. making a half-assed attempt to investigate. Plenty of the disclosure docs are still sealed.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  The practical answer to this is that the movie ends with the iMac introduction in May 1998, and Google was not founded as a company until September 1998, so the movie is not likely to cover the illegal "anti-poaching" deal between Apple and Google. edit: intro'd in May, not August
peter303 11y ago
I was at two seminal Steve Jobs events- the introduction of the Apple I and the introduction of the NeXT. The 2nd is in the movie and I have to see if it is accurate. From videos, he was more polished in the 2000s than 1980s.
- dang 11y ago
  Wow, can you tell us more? How did you come to be there and what do you remember? I'm sure many people here would love to read about this.
  - peter303 11y ago
    I was a science grad student at Stanford and had some undergrad digital electronics labs and digital breadboarding summer jobs. So I read about build-it-yourself computer club that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Auditorium. I think I read it in some mimeographed computer newsletter the Stanford Math Library received which was a predecessor to Byte Magazine. Getting to SLAC by bicycle was nasty because it was up a challenging hill. People demoed their projects there, often Rasberry-PI-type contraptions that did this and that. I remember one group managed to get their hands on a cast-off mini-computer and would code it through front panel dip-switches to make music and light designs. A bare mini-computer in those days cost a couple of annual salaries. Well the two Steves were demoing and almost-turnkey micro-computer board. You had to add a power supply, television and keyboard. And it was in a wooden case. Plastic computer cases were another year or two in the future. I thought a turnkey PC was boring. All the fun was soldering together your own contraption in my view then. Several other groups were selling turnkey computer boards too. One was called CroMemCo named after a Stanford dorm. which they operated from. Apple didnt really distinguish itself until the next product the Apple II which was a "designed" product, not a boring metal case.
  - peter303 11y ago
    The NeXT introduction was classic Steve. I had a post-graduate Stanford job 11 years later. And had been a certified Mac Developer using ObjectPascal and all that stuff in the meantime. Steve was targeting the NeXT for the academic world, so I got an invite. Steve rented the fanciest auditorium in San Francisco- Symphony Hall (though NeXT was just off the Stanford campus). No one had seen the NeXT computer yet. Most PCs up until then were some kind of off-white plastic slabs. When the NeXT was unveiled it was a dark-gray magnesium cube. (The Borg were still three years in the future.) The presentation began in a darkened auditorium. Then a computer screen started talking. It displayed something that looked like a Mac screen. PC multi-media was still crude then, so audience erupted at the high quality computer speech. The speech said something about how the new NeXT woud supercede all previous PCs. Then the light came on with NeXT cube unveiled and Steve launching into a product speech. Besides the high multimedia capabilities of the NeXT hardware, Steve also promoted the NeXTSTeP operating system and software-development kit. It was object-oriented top to bottom, pretty rare then, save for a few things at Xerox. This was supposed to make writing educational applications a "piece of cake". The NeXT never really panned out at universities becasue it was expensive and slow. I became a certified Objectve-C developer for them too. I remember the first models taking forever to compile code, because it swapped files onto a an optical disk. The NeXT became a hit a financial services firms due its advanced software. Eventually the hardware itself was discontinued and they just sold the OS and SDKs, which Apple purchases to get into the 32-bit world.
lostgame 11y ago
I recently found a NeXTCube in the warehouse I live in. Blew my mind.
- declan 11y ago
  The NeXT cube was often faster in perceived UI speed than my 2.3GHz MacBook Pro (this was after the 68040 upgrade). And the dock was more intuitive because it could be dragged into your desired position. And application menus were more useful because they could be detached. 27 years after its original introduction--color came maybe 25 years ago--and NeXTstep is still looking pretty good. Ah, nostalgia! I still have a NeXT cube and monitor in my home office.
  - mentos 11y ago
    A bit off topic but sometimes I wonder what span of time will have been the most exciting for humanity. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the silicon age turned out to be it.
    - scott_karana 11y ago
      I bet a thousand years ago, people will look at our era and be nostalgic, like they're nostalgic right now for knights in armor, the Renaissance, the age of exploration, privateers, explorers, and all that. And just like now, I bet they're nostalgia will be completely misplaced because they fail to realize how much better their own time is, and how damaged their recollection of our time is. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60BjkUtqxPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60BjkUtqxPE
    - davnicwil 11y ago
      Veering a little further off-topic: In general I think the rule must be that for the average human (however you determine that) excitement and enjoyment levels over a given time window rise monotonically as you slide that window forwards in time, of course over some minimum size, probably 5-10 years, to smooth over catastrophic dips such as the most recent global recession. People (my past self included) always instinctively think that periods in the past must have been better, freer, more exciting than the boredom and drudgery of today (all the ideas have been taken, all the frontiers explored, all theories examined) but in fact this is a line of thought that has persisted throughout human history (there's a famous quote about Physics being 'done' from the 1920s which is obviously amusing to think about almost 100 years on) and even when we think of the people who had it best in history, the kings of nations even, the average working person in the first world is vastly, vastly wealthier in many more ways and has more options on what to do with their time than those individuals could have dreamed of. tl;dr - life for the average person only gets better, more exciting and more enjoyable as time goes on! Try to remind yourself of that often, when it seems like it's not the case, and never take it fore granted.
wfhorn 11y ago
Great read! Take a peek too at The Hollywood Reporter's cover story today on 'Steve Jobs' movie and crazy saga to get to premiere: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-widows-threats-high-powered-829925?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=THR%20Breaking%20News_2015-10-07%2009:00:00_nstone&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_breakingnews http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-widows-threats-h...
6stringmerc 11y ago
Excellent behind the scenes write-up and I really appreciated the tone of elaborating on all the movie staff/crew doing their bits. Big productions are big! The fact checking and world making is something I'm also studious about when working on fictionalization of actual events or trying to establish a believable world. For instance, my projects include origin of the 14 Los Zetas, the Enron scandal, rigging the lottery, and others. That noted, I really wish he'd had a chance to read the script. I'm...not a fan of Aaron Sorkin's approach to writing, to put it mildly. Time will tell, but if there's one "Oh, this could've been so much better" potential criticism, I get the feeling it'll be with Sorkin's material. Hipster cred claim: I was into Danny Boyle before it was cool.
smackfu 11y ago
It's interesting to think about how a period piece can be very accurate at a micro-level, which takes a ton of effort by a lot of craftspeople, but inaccurate at a macro-level due to a poor screenplay.
m-i-l 11y ago
Danny Boyle sounds great. A friend of mine actually saw him on the tube a few weeks back. She had been one of the performers in the London Olympics opening ceremony which he directed, and saw that he didn't look busy, so went up to him to thank him for the experience. She said he was really nice, and was on his way to a film festival[0]. After the Olympics opening ceremony I remember thinking that he deserved a knighthood for it. And apparently he was offered one but turned it down[1]. [0] http://www.shufflefestival.com/shuffle-festival-2014 http://www.shufflefestival.com/shuffle-festival-2014 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declining_a_British_honour#Knighthood_.28Knight_Bachelor.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declining_a_British_honour#Kni...

110 points by timdierks 11y ago

adricnet 11y ago

This was an interesting and enjoyable quick read. Thanks for posting the link!

gorena 11y ago

Am I correct to assume this movie makes no mention of his systematic illegal wage suppression?

seiji 11y ago
The axe grinding machine is in another castle.
- pen2l 11y ago
  I don't think 'gorena's point should be rebuffed just like that, Steve Jobs was not the friend of us engineers, after all it was him who said things like: “If you hire a single one of these people, that means war”. Many of us might be getting paid were it not for him and his actions. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491016/it-personnel/steve-jobs-was--central-figure--in-silicon-valley-hiring-case--judge-says.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491016/it-personnel/st... I do wish this was touched in the movie somehow. (I'm presuming it wasn't, as that's what it seems like... I haven't seen it yet so can't say for sure) edit: I'm getting down-voted. Indeed, I think I went over the top. Steve Jobs did go on to create exceptional products that have heightened a lot of people's productivity, so he was net good. Sorry for the comment - I'll leave it there anyway though.
  - seiji 11y ago
    Also: the movie is real time across three scenes and those three scenes are just behind the curtain at "pivotal" keynotes. It's not a life story. It's not an epic tale. It's three set pieces each operating in 30 minutes of character time in sync with 30 minutes of screen time per episode.
- gorena 11y ago
  If American laborers (yes, engineers, you are laborers) still remembered how to sharpen axes, maybe that would happen less. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-workers-storm-meeting-protest-executives-job-losses-paris http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-work...
  - vvanders 11y ago
    Haha wow, taking the shirt off their back to its literal conclusion.
  - r0naa 11y ago
    What a terrible example to support a very valid point. What those union workers have done was unacceptable, and made me sick to my stomach. Also, I felt greatly ashamed - like many other french citizens - by the french government's weak response to this public humiliation. Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore, France is a modern democracy and allowing Unions to grow unchecked was a histoical mistake. There are a balance to strike between workers' rights and corporations' prerogatives. France is the very situation you want to avoid, one where an actor has such tremendous power that any attack to the status quo is impossible regardless of its benefit for society as a whole.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore It's still an era of neo-liberalism and employees return workplaces to medieval work practices (down to child labor and 14 hour workday) whenever they can get away with it.
      - r0naa 11y ago
        And they can get away with it only because their unions have created precedents where they create avoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time. This is sickening really. I am always dumb-founded when I read people who would like this kind of dystopia for their countries. Don't you see how fucked up this is for everyone?
Kristine1975 11y ago
Maybe they include anecdotes like this one: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Handicapped.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... >Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building. >As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".
- coldtea 11y ago
  Wasn't that Steve's building in the first place to do anything he wanted with? If he didn't take the last available such space or actually cut off some handicapped Apple employee wanting to park there, then it's more about "playing by the rules" than actually hurting anyone...
  - gorena 11y ago
    No, because handicap laws are for the benefit of society. Rich men shouldn't get to skip out on them because they're rich.
    - realquick81 11y ago
      > No, because handicap laws are for the benefit of society. Only if by "benefit" you mean "detriment". Many a handicapped person are against these "laws" (opinions with guns).
    - larrys 11y ago
      Well the parent comment doesn't say how many handicap spots were open. Giving Jobs the benefit of the doubt, he may have seen a pattern where there were always multiple spots available. And the spot locations don't come down from God either. They are decided (at least in the state where I live and have worked on this subject (a work parking lot)) in an arbitrary fashion in order to meet certain requirements. It's (once again where I am) a loose specification for placement. And you can always exceed the number required. For all we know Apple could have put in more spaces than required and Steve was simply taking advantage of that knowing that nothing would happen. And that he further didn't care about any fine he received assuming the Police even had normal access to that part of the parking lot when they were on patrol. Edit: Further to my point it's easy to assume "arrogant big shot rich guy" just hearing a story like this.
MCRed 11y ago
There's a huge difference between not having internal recruiters call up employees in a company directory to try and poach them, and preventing those same employees from choosing to apply. The former doesn't affect wages, but the latter would. The latter didn't happen.
- morganw 11y ago
  How do you know that employee-initiated applications & interviews weren't stopped by recruiters calling back & forth "OK to hire this guy?". The only reason the "no cold calling" agreement was made public was Ed Colligan spilling the beans & the D.O.J. making a half-assed attempt to investigate. Plenty of the disclosure docs are still sealed.
snowwrestler 11y ago
The practical answer to this is that the movie ends with the iMac introduction in May 1998, and Google was not founded as a company until September 1998, so the movie is not likely to cover the illegal "anti-poaching" deal between Apple and Google. edit: intro'd in May, not August

peter303 11y ago

I was at two seminal Steve Jobs events- the introduction of the Apple I and the introduction of the NeXT. The 2nd is in the movie and I have to see if it is accurate. From videos, he was more polished in the 2000s than 1980s.

dang 11y ago
Wow, can you tell us more? How did you come to be there and what do you remember? I'm sure many people here would love to read about this.
- peter303 11y ago
  I was a science grad student at Stanford and had some undergrad digital electronics labs and digital breadboarding summer jobs. So I read about build-it-yourself computer club that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Auditorium. I think I read it in some mimeographed computer newsletter the Stanford Math Library received which was a predecessor to Byte Magazine. Getting to SLAC by bicycle was nasty because it was up a challenging hill. People demoed their projects there, often Rasberry-PI-type contraptions that did this and that. I remember one group managed to get their hands on a cast-off mini-computer and would code it through front panel dip-switches to make music and light designs. A bare mini-computer in those days cost a couple of annual salaries. Well the two Steves were demoing and almost-turnkey micro-computer board. You had to add a power supply, television and keyboard. And it was in a wooden case. Plastic computer cases were another year or two in the future. I thought a turnkey PC was boring. All the fun was soldering together your own contraption in my view then. Several other groups were selling turnkey computer boards too. One was called CroMemCo named after a Stanford dorm. which they operated from. Apple didnt really distinguish itself until the next product the Apple II which was a "designed" product, not a boring metal case.
- peter303 11y ago
  The NeXT introduction was classic Steve. I had a post-graduate Stanford job 11 years later. And had been a certified Mac Developer using ObjectPascal and all that stuff in the meantime. Steve was targeting the NeXT for the academic world, so I got an invite. Steve rented the fanciest auditorium in San Francisco- Symphony Hall (though NeXT was just off the Stanford campus). No one had seen the NeXT computer yet. Most PCs up until then were some kind of off-white plastic slabs. When the NeXT was unveiled it was a dark-gray magnesium cube. (The Borg were still three years in the future.) The presentation began in a darkened auditorium. Then a computer screen started talking. It displayed something that looked like a Mac screen. PC multi-media was still crude then, so audience erupted at the high quality computer speech. The speech said something about how the new NeXT woud supercede all previous PCs. Then the light came on with NeXT cube unveiled and Steve launching into a product speech. Besides the high multimedia capabilities of the NeXT hardware, Steve also promoted the NeXTSTeP operating system and software-development kit. It was object-oriented top to bottom, pretty rare then, save for a few things at Xerox. This was supposed to make writing educational applications a "piece of cake". The NeXT never really panned out at universities becasue it was expensive and slow. I became a certified Objectve-C developer for them too. I remember the first models taking forever to compile code, because it swapped files onto a an optical disk. The NeXT became a hit a financial services firms due its advanced software. Eventually the hardware itself was discontinued and they just sold the OS and SDKs, which Apple purchases to get into the 32-bit world.

lostgame 11y ago

I recently found a NeXTCube in the warehouse I live in. Blew my mind.

declan 11y ago
The NeXT cube was often faster in perceived UI speed than my 2.3GHz MacBook Pro (this was after the 68040 upgrade). And the dock was more intuitive because it could be dragged into your desired position. And application menus were more useful because they could be detached. 27 years after its original introduction--color came maybe 25 years ago--and NeXTstep is still looking pretty good. Ah, nostalgia! I still have a NeXT cube and monitor in my home office.
- mentos 11y ago
  A bit off topic but sometimes I wonder what span of time will have been the most exciting for humanity. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the silicon age turned out to be it.
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    I bet a thousand years ago, people will look at our era and be nostalgic, like they're nostalgic right now for knights in armor, the Renaissance, the age of exploration, privateers, explorers, and all that. And just like now, I bet they're nostalgia will be completely misplaced because they fail to realize how much better their own time is, and how damaged their recollection of our time is. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60BjkUtqxPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60BjkUtqxPE
  - davnicwil 11y ago
    Veering a little further off-topic: In general I think the rule must be that for the average human (however you determine that) excitement and enjoyment levels over a given time window rise monotonically as you slide that window forwards in time, of course over some minimum size, probably 5-10 years, to smooth over catastrophic dips such as the most recent global recession. People (my past self included) always instinctively think that periods in the past must have been better, freer, more exciting than the boredom and drudgery of today (all the ideas have been taken, all the frontiers explored, all theories examined) but in fact this is a line of thought that has persisted throughout human history (there's a famous quote about Physics being 'done' from the 1920s which is obviously amusing to think about almost 100 years on) and even when we think of the people who had it best in history, the kings of nations even, the average working person in the first world is vastly, vastly wealthier in many more ways and has more options on what to do with their time than those individuals could have dreamed of. tl;dr - life for the average person only gets better, more exciting and more enjoyable as time goes on! Try to remind yourself of that often, when it seems like it's not the case, and never take it fore granted.

wfhorn 11y ago

Great read! Take a peek too at The Hollywood Reporter's cover story today on 'Steve Jobs' movie and crazy saga to get to premiere: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-widows-threats-high-powered-829925?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=THR%20Breaking%20News_2015-10-07%2009:00:00_nstone&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_breakingnews http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-widows-threats-h...

6stringmerc 11y ago

Excellent behind the scenes write-up and I really appreciated the tone of elaborating on all the movie staff/crew doing their bits. Big productions are big! The fact checking and world making is something I'm also studious about when working on fictionalization of actual events or trying to establish a believable world. For instance, my projects include origin of the 14 Los Zetas, the Enron scandal, rigging the lottery, and others. That noted, I really wish he'd had a chance to read the script. I'm...not a fan of Aaron Sorkin's approach to writing, to put it mildly. Time will tell, but if there's one "Oh, this could've been so much better" potential criticism, I get the feeling it'll be with Sorkin's material. Hipster cred claim: I was into Danny Boyle before it was cool.

smackfu 11y ago

It's interesting to think about how a period piece can be very accurate at a micro-level, which takes a ton of effort by a lot of craftspeople, but inaccurate at a macro-level due to a poor screenplay.

m-i-l 11y ago

Danny Boyle sounds great. A friend of mine actually saw him on the tube a few weeks back. She had been one of the performers in the London Olympics opening ceremony which he directed, and saw that he didn't look busy, so went up to him to thank him for the experience. She said he was really nice, and was on his way to a film festival[0]. After the Olympics opening ceremony I remember thinking that he deserved a knighthood for it. And apparently he was offered one but turned it down[1]. [0] http://www.shufflefestival.com/shuffle-festival-2014 http://www.shufflefestival.com/shuffle-festival-2014 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declining_a_British_honour#Knighthood_.28Knight_Bachelor.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declining_a_British_honour#Kni...