Good Heavens - a Monday Missive again after all this time - who'd of thunk it? Here it is :

During the filming of Werner Herzhog's 'Aguirre - The Wrath Of God' one of the carpenters working on the sets in the middle of the jungle was bitten twice on the left foot by an extremely poisonous snake. He only had a few minutes left to live. He stared at the bite for a scant five seconds, decisively started up his chainsaw and cut right through his leg just above the ankle. The poison stayed in his foot and he stayed alive - phew.

I'm fairly certain that I could never make that kind of decision. I'd probably just look at the foot, then look at the snake and then look at the foot and then look up at the sky and scream 'Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me!' or something else just as histrionic as that - I'd hazard a guess and say that there'd probably be a few swear words in there as well.

However, I did feel like cutting my feet off yesterday after a hard days walking around city streets as part of 'Sydney Open 2000'. We saw the insides of lots of lovely buildings ending at the glorious State Theatre built in 1929. Maybe I was delirious with the beauty of it all or maybe I was just dog tired but the myriad statues and paintings that adorn this majestic old thing had very prominent protuberances at the base of the leg. This hallucination was only exacerbated when they were viewed from a comfy, old chair.

Surprisingly, this wasn't the case for the bust of Napoleon! In any case, I'm sure he never needed feet whilst conquering Europe.