Funfiltered Episode #056 - "120 Days of Bolognese Sodom"

Sam "speaking". I had a book called Children’s Miscellany as a child, appropriately. Saturated with trivia, it nurtured the glazomaniac (list junkie) and pub quiz aficionado in me. It forever equipped me with the ability to recite the seven deadly sins at will and a theoretical understanding of how to milk a cow. Doubtless a result of my increasingly ruinous nostalgia, the extract that unfailingly springs to mind is the following forecast - by the year 2010, we will have firefighting robots. 2010. As we move into ’22, I continue to await news footage of an aesthetically affable android - think I, Robot minus uncanny valley - marching into a burning apartment complex, its (I won’t say “his” or “her”, we can’t afford to humanise these implements; I refer you to all relevant science fiction) metallic arms outfitted with industrial Super Soakers. I await. In 2020, a so-called “firefighting robot” was unveiled. Just Google it. Less smiley Terminator, more Robot Wars reject. It simply won’t do. I want human-sized, human-shaped (anthropomorphised, if you will, as long as we maintain that mandatory detachment - THEY ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS) Extinguishers. And that’s what we’d call them. Extinguishers. I’ve thought about this for a long time. I’m happy to cede any copyright as long as the powers that be make it a reality pronto. It ticks three fundamental boxes: It does what it says on the tin. It benefits from brand awareness - consider the comparably twee “fire extinguisher”. And when you remove the noun “fire” from the equation, it sounds rather bad-arse. Why am I saying all this? I don’t know. Something about unfulfilled promises and foolish, hope-baiting conjecture. So we here at Funfiltered make no resolutions. No promises. We will keep trying our best or a reasonable estimation thereof. On this here episode, Jordan and I review The French Dispatch, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Matrix Resurrections and other stuff. FF has now existed IN four years and two decades. Ugh. Here’s to, with a bit of luck, a better fucking year for all of us.