Funeral celebrant out for commentary two celebrants he considered outstanding, Brian McInerney and Rick Barclay. International acknowledgment was provided by a comprehensive article in Time Magazine (September 2004) reporting that in the "liberal" cities of Melbourne (Australia) and Auckland (New Zealand) civil celebrants "conduct substantially more than half of the funerals." It reported that before 1973 only clergy funerals were available to the general public in Australia and New Zealand. The article describes celebrant funerals as "intimate and personalised". But it also cited an alternative point of view by atheist sociologist Mira Crouch who stated that celebrant funerals were "mawkish and sentimental".
Modern Times (film) Modern Times (film) Modern Times is a 1936 American comedy film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin in which his iconic Little Tramp character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and financial conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie stars Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford and Chester Conklin. "Modern Times" was deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress in 1989, and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Fourteen