So that's what a project manager does?

Interesting piece on one of the Japanese shows last night. They had tracked down a professional project manager who works in Saudi Arabia - I think oil refineries, but I'm not sure. BIG projects, anyway.
( Action Item Log and A Big Picture Stories behind the cut )

Interesting - the daily grind of details, and the big picture of the bosses all agreeing on the the key dates. Sort of two ends of the spectrum that he manages.

How many characters can you keep separate?

That's amusing. Apparently one of the fine points of rakugo presentations concerns how many characters are being juggled. These are comic monologues, and the basic stories are pretty much set. But in Manju Kowai, for example, one of the challenges that the teacher may give the student is to increase the number of characters - the base story is usually five, but try it with ten. How do you keep them individual, give them individual likes and fears, and make the audience enjoy the crowd?

Might make a good writer's exercise, too? Take a basic story, and redo it - with more characters. What happens when the love triangle turns into a polygon? How many angles can you handle?