Beyond Reason

I was watching an Imagine... documentary last night called Werner Herzog: Beyond Reason, which was about the famous German film director Werner Herzog. Herzog was quite notorious for the insanity that tended to prevail on a lot of his sets, which included jumping into a cactus patch stark naked while making Even Dwarves Started Small (he claimed that even nearly forty years later some of the cactus spines are still embedded in his body), threatening to shoot the famously "tempremental" actor Klaus Kinski when Kinski threatened to walk off one of Herzog's films, pulling a full-size steamboat over a mountain in the middle of the South American rainforest for the movie Fitzcarraldo, eating one of his own shoes for a bet, walking from Munich to Paris because he thought it would help his friend recover from an illness and being arrested, tortured and falling victim to an almost fatal illness in the African desert while making a documentary about mirages. The show last night also featured footage of Herzog being shot with an airgun by a random maniac while giving an interview a couple of years ago (Herzog didn't really seem too bothered by it). It was an interesting documentary, with lots of good clips from his movies and, as with anything about Herzog, full of no end of entertaining stories.

It was another quiet day at work, as it almost always is. I was still struggling with the hayfever. It doesn't seem to have gone away at all.