What should i watch? [You decide]

So assuming i got the right aircraft and these aren’t just for the first class toffs [so fine if anyone wants to bucketlist bump us up to a different class for fun] this is the selection of movies i have available for our first flight to Washington D.C. in which i can watch 2 to 3 movies if i work it right. What would you watch? Hoping to get enough votes so that i can compose a top 3 out of movies i have not seen yet so try and factor that in if you can… What would your top five be from this list… excuse the squinting – this is the best i could do… and GO!

 

Minus 200 points for even suggesting Anchorman 2 – STOPPIT!

UPDATE: So this was kind of a non-starter with the list NOT being the list of movies available on our first flight where we got a sum total of ZERO movies offered and no food and then on the big international flight i watched MILLION DOLLAR ARM [So Great!] and NOAH [What a load of bollockses] and half of Monuments Men [yawn!] before we landed in Dakar to refuel after which, for the longest section [8 hours] of our flight, tbV and myself and maybe two other people had no working tvs/movies at all so SAD FACE United/SAA – thumbs down… have been looking forward to the movie part of the transition for a while now and you let me down completely [and still have one of my bags, but that’s another post]

 

Faith like [mashed] potatoes.

ACID

i always get slightly nervous when i look at the back of a food product – like this Idahoan Mashed Potatoes packet i am looking at right now – and read citric ACID…

now i’m no scientist [clearly] but i have vague memories of school days where acids were demonstrated mostly burning through things, like metal for example [you remember metal? the substance my stomach is made of a weaker material than]

to really rub it in, they add in brackets, [to maintain freshness], which incidentally on this same packet it declares that sodium ACID pyrophosphate, sodium bisulfate and mixed tocopherals are already contained in this product for the purpose of maintaining freshness so how much does the citric acid actually add [and how freshness-losing is this packet of powder – that i need to just add water to – in the first place?]

FLYING

this is something i actively try to regularly keep in mind. i just climbed into a giant metal hulk of a thing with hundreds of other people. it took on the force o gravity and won convincingly [except for a few little hiccups along the way when gravity thought it fun to remind us all via a little turbulence that she was still very much out there and ready for a round two any time]. it lifted off the ground [with me in it] and flew me half way around the world.

like really, take a moment EVERY TIME YOU FLY and just think about what is happening. you are being flown from one place to another in a thing made out of that really heavy substance that sometimes you can’t even lift when there is enough of it together. mind-blowing. every time.

FAITH

And somehow people still claim to live without faith.

Let me tell you this: if you can eat, without thinking too much about it, a product containing the word ACID in its ingredients, then you have some kind of faith.

If you can get into an airplane with as little understanding as i have of how anything works together to make the plane fly, then you are exerting a tremendous amount of faith.

Every single time i fly, i am literally putting my life into the hands of a person i have never met, assuming that they know how to pilot a plane and that they passed the airplane-not-crashing test and that the airplane is airworthy and going to make this next trip.

When i hit the ‘on’ button on my laptop, things happen. I don’t understand personally how a series of 1’s and 0’s allows me to communicate with people halfway around the world or how my cellphone has the ability to bring your voice clearly into my ear. But I believe they do. Because in my experience they always have.

GOD

And then there is God. Do i understand Him? Absolutely not. [which i take great heart in, by the way. a God that i could wrap my brain around would be a tiny God indeed]

But i do have faith in Him. Because i understand enough about Him to believe that it will be safe [and certainly there will be turbulence along the way, my journey has taught me that much]. And i have witnessed the effects of God too many times for it to be merely contributed to “coincidence”. To me, anyways. I do have atheist friends who attribute my whole faith journey to the fact that i was born into a family who had Christian faith, despite mine looking a lot different from a lot of aspects of theirs [same faith though] as if i merely robot-accepted everything i was fed as a child and am clinging desperately to those things, because i am not as wise and brain-empowered as these specific atheist friends [i do have other atheist friends who celebrate my belief and are a lot less arrogant in theirs].

But the point is that we all have faith. In some thing. In many things. Every day we demonstrate it – the belief that this thing that i don’t fully understand or know how it works will work in the way that it always has or that i have been led to believe that it will.

We all have faith. The only question is what do you place your faith in?

 

I can Learn you a Thing

Sometimes in the present context of the life in which i live, there are moments where i need to just be incredibly silly for a few minutes just to remain sane.

This started me on a journey with my alter ego, Brad Fish, who embarked on a series of Public Awareness video clips with the series titled ‘Dangerous Things You Can Least Expect’ in which each episode Brad would look at something you might not consider dangerful like Paper or Birthdays, Flying, or my own personal favourite Violins, and he would uncover the hidden dangers lurking behind their mist.

There are something like 22 videos in that series and you can see them here and subscribe to the channel for such a time as when he might make some more.

But it was after the ‘Dangerous Things You Can Least Expect’ video on Punctuation was used in at least five different schools in South Africa’s English Departments that our Brad thought he might be on to something and so he started dreaming of a new series that was more educational in nature and so ‘I can Learn you a Thing’ was invented [although at the time of it going to press, Brad forgot the brilliant name he came up with and so episode one is tagged with ‘I’m going to Learn you a Thing’ – seems all of us have something to learn]. This first episode is an aid to Maths teachers worldwide who are wanting to explain the basic concepts of Addition to their students and don’t be surprised if the South African Education Department doesn’t officially endorse them as compulsory learning for grade 11 students in years to come [they might just be THAT bad]

Click here for episode one of the series that in the future will be known as ‘I can Learn you a Thing.’