An amusingly fitting pair of not really related things from today:
First, I finally got my scythe and a decent sharpening stone together for an attack on the waist-high finger-thick weeds of our garden. In this situation I can't recommend a scythe highly enough - a weedwhacker/strimmer makes almost no progress at the cost of a lot of noise and aggravation and shooting foliage crap up into your face and needing its stupid wire changed constantly. A lawnmower jams and chokes if you can even get it to go into the weed stack at all. A scythe, appropriately sharpened, does about three hours of weedwhacker work in about twenty minutes, quietly and cleanly, and instead of feeling like fighting against a frustrating contraption it feels like a free trip to the gym. On the down side, it does cost about twice as much as a decent weedwhacker.
And thing two, I watched Machete, which was surprisingly fun. Afterwards, in recommending it to someone, I went to say "it's like a cross between Robocop and..." before realising that it is actually almost identical to Robocop. The characters and relationships are all the same, the over the top comedy gore is the same, the thinly veiled political commentary is the same. The only differences are trivial things necessary to remove the sci-fi setting, eg. in Robocop the hero dies in the opening scene, to create the superhero. In Machete, since that wouldn't work, it's the hero's partner that dies. Also trivially different, there are two female companions in Machete to Robocop's one. But basically, if you like Robocop, and that isn't solely based on the sci-fi-ness of it, then you'll like Machete.
[02:58]
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