{"id":111,"date":"2010-09-13T03:23:25","date_gmt":"2010-09-13T03:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/recent-fings-an-that-innit\/"},"modified":"2010-09-13T03:23:25","modified_gmt":"2010-09-13T03:23:25","slug":"recent-fings-an-that-innit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/recent-fings-an-that-innit\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent fings an that innit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here is a list of recent things that a decent blogger would have made into something interesting and worthwhile to read:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Part of M&#8217;s job is to perform in front of strangers &#8211; her only props being a bizarrely random selection of wildlife including a snake, a <strike>raccoon<\/strike>possum, assorted turtles, a screech owl, baby birds and a black vulture. This is for the purposes of education. I know she&#8217;s a great teacher, but I&#8217;d never seen her perform until last week, when we both attended a 7 year-old&#8217;s birthday party. They had decided to host it within the wildlife center and had requested a turn. I was so impressed, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/veghead\/4980439299\/\" title=\"Michele and wildlife impressing children\">kids were captivated<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The Roku has provided me with a seemingly endless collection of classic films and so I&#8217;ve been on a mission to watch all of the spy films that have eluded me thus far. There are so many spy films worth watching. No time for a list now. Later, later.<\/li>\n<li>Together with classic spy films, I&#8217;ve been indulging in Sci-Fi. And the problems in that genre seem to be a constant from the beginning. For example, in 1968 Stanley Kubrick directed a film version of an Arthur C Clarke classic, and produced a beautiful, moving, thought-provoking yet baffling film called &#8220;2001: A Space Odyssey&#8221;. A few years later, the Soviets attempted to rival it by producing a film version of another classic Sci-Fi book: Solaris. Everyone I&#8217;ve ever talked to about Solaris heralds the movie as a true classic of cinema. It scores highly on all of the Internet Movie sites worth considering and finding dissenters is not easy. So I have tried to watch it on Netflix, and repeatedly failed. Thus far I&#8217;m around 2 hours in, out of 2 hours 40, and the thought of going back depresses me. It&#8217;s awful. Really, really awful. It&#8217;s the sort of film that would come about by giving a great big talentless ponce a bunch of cash and telling him to make a film better than 2001. And that seems to be what happened. One comment on the IMDB message board said that &#8220;it was a film I&#8217;d watch when I was bored. &#8216;Maybe I&#8217;ll watch another 20 minutes of Solaris'&#8221;. At the time this struck a chord, but now I dread leaving it on for a few minutes. If there&#8217;s another still shot of something that doesn&#8217;t move for more than 50 seconds, I&#8217;m going to set fire to the TV. If you&#8217;ve seen the film, then you will empathise with me when I say &#8220;the car ride&#8221;. If anyone knows why this is popular with anyone outside the USSR in the 1970&#8217;s, please get in touch. I need to know what I&#8217;m missing.<\/li>\n<li>Can you spot <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qsp2f7BspTo\" title=\"\">David Brent<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li>A week or so ago I bought a garden hoe &#8211; it&#8217;s my new favorite thing. The dude from &#8220;You bet your garden&#8221; (on NPR) is always on about hoes being the original way of dealing with weeds, and whether it works in the long-run or not, I&#8217;m enjoying slicing the little buggers into pieces with mighty-hoe. What a cool thing.<\/li>\n<li>What&#8217;s more irritating than a dude on the bus jawing on and on into his mobile for the whole journey?<br \/>\nA dude <i>with a diabolical stutter<\/i> on the bus jawing on and on into his mobile for the whole journey. I was so stressed it nearly caused a coronary.<\/li>\n<li>A recent thought: people frequently poo-poo (huhuh) ideological ideas by claiming &#8220;human nature&#8221; will stop them from working. This concept has always struck me as utter bullshit, and this week the true culprit became apparent: ignorance. America&#8217;s current problems seem to stem from a (significant) minority of people who believe in fairies. Obviously, most of them don&#8217;t call them &#8220;fairies&#8221;, they use euphemisms like &#8220;Astrology&#8221; or &#8220;God&#8221; or &#8220;The Free Market&#8221;, but in reality, it&#8217;s all about fairies. So it&#8217;s gratifying to see that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rallytorestoresanity.com\/\">the sane majority is mobilising at last<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;ve booked flights back to London! This is massively exciting. I still haven&#8217;t met my new niece Lily!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is a list of recent things that a decent blogger would have made into something interesting and worthwhile to read: Part of M&#8217;s job is to perform in front of strangers &#8211; her only props being a bizarrely random selection of wildlife including a snake, a raccoonpossum, assorted turtles, a screech owl, baby birds [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}