{"id":2683,"date":"2007-11-30T18:13:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-30T23:13:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-03-27T21:27:35","modified_gmt":"2020-03-28T02:27:35","slug":"african-queen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2007\/11\/30\/african-queen\/","title":{"rendered":"The African Queen"},"content":{"rendered":"

With my knee injury I’ve been working at more home-bound type of activities lately, catching up on all the little chores that get ignored when you’re out traveling the world. One of the long-term chores that’s been getting some attention is the task of getting rid of a large cubic volume of old video tapes. With hard disk capacity and video conversion gadgets getting cheap enough, I am moving everything into a mirrored media library that I could actually pick up and carry out of the house in one hand.<\/p>\n

The old Beta tapes, starting on the day Debra was born back in 1983, were the highest priority, and I went on eBay and purchased a Beta machine to play them. Converting the home movies went smoothly and I believe I’ve almost gotten them all done. All I really lack is a large box of Hi-8 videos of Thomas playing highschool football.<\/p>\n

But there are many, many other tapes that I need to convert as well. Old movies, TV specials, and an erratic selection of tape-now, view-whenever TV shows. One of the one’s I converted was The African Queen, with Bogart and Hepburn. It’s a great movie, and having just come back from Africa myself, I was fascinated to watch it again. I could see the crocodiles and hippos from my own experience as they came on the screen, and I knew just what kind of rivers there were on that continent.<\/p>\n

But not everything was warm and fuzzy. That missionary church in the movie was just wrong<\/span>. \u00a0Get this, they were set up in a bush village where the only access was via river and jungle trails, and they had a church organ? \u00a0While I believe it could happen, I can just imagine how far down on the priority list an organ must have been.<\/p>\n

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And the church service itself — it was horrible. \u00a0I’ve been in a bush church. \u00a0They can out-sing us in spirit and enthusiasm. \u00a0It was nothing at all like the off-key painful singing shown in the movie. \u00a0The Zambians I met are natural singers, and while their Tonga songs were by far the best, they learn and sing English hymns for fun. \u00a0Even when they’re struggling with a new English song, they do a good job at it.<\/div>\n
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Of course the movie wasn’t set in Zambia, but I have to believe that the whole movie church service scene was more about the missionaries than about the people.<\/div>\n
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That’s the thing about travel. \u00a0You get to experience things for yourself, and realize just how artificial a movie can be.<\/div>\n
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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With my knee injury I’ve been working at more home-bound type of activities lately, catching up on all the little chores that get ignored when you’re out traveling the world. One of the long-term chores that’s been getting some attention is the task of getting rid of a large cubic volume of old video tapes.… Continue reading The African Queen<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-Hh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2683\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}