Random bits and bobs

I went and saw Fly Me To The Moon last night with Ben, who is 5. It was much better than I thought it was going to be. He was entranced. He may have played it cool when he talked to his dad (Stephen) later, but he spent the whole movie with his eyes glued to the screen. It is in 3-d but doesn't rely too heavily on those stupid 3-d tricks. There are definitely some effects but it is not as much as it could have been. The story was good and I really enjoyed it. There's a Russian substory where the Russians are trying to sabotage the reentry of the Apollo 11 shuttle, which I thought was unnecessary, but I think the creators thought it necessary because otherwise I just paid $9.00 for a kid to watch a movie that was only an hour long. (With the Russian story it was an hour and 25 minutes.) I really enjoyed the animation of the moon and the earth and what it would be like to travel in space. (Although I think with space being a vacuum and all, the flies wouldn't have been able to use their wings to move about the way they could because there'd be no air resistance, although I could be wrong about that.)

I spent yesterday evening wondering about how birds and reptiles procreate. I read this article on Yahoo about a turtle who could now mate because she had been attached to a skateboard after her back end was paralyzed and then I was obsessed with figuring out how birds and reptiles reproduced.... I know I know they lay eggs but how do the eggs get fertalized? I then became curious about chicken pen1ses only to discover that's not what they do at all. They and reptiles reproduce through the cloaca. I had no idea. I feel so much smarter now. :) (Also how did I miss this in biology or science or whatever I took??!!) (Ok rereading the article, some birds do have a pen1s. How weird is that?! Also, clearly I'm a 12 year old boy because now I'm laughing about swan pen1ses.)