Quote:
Originally Posted by Bilbo1967
I did enjoy The Martian, but maybe not as much as some. I just couldn't get past the fact that he was just too ingenious. I know I should have been suspending my disbelief, but after about the fifth "horrible thing happens, Mark finds a way of getting around it" I was starting to get a bit bored of it. I guess it was fun finding out what the ingenious solutions were, but I'm not sure I'd ever believe one person would come up with them all.
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I guess you've never been in the Peace Corps or lived the expat life in a Third World country. While our 'fixes' don't usually repair life-or-death problems, we're constantly working out ingenious solutions to every-day problem situations that would never arise were we still living back in the First World. Little things like figuring out how to make Italian sausages (because we couldn't buy them where we were living,) or filtering water and mud out of a bottle of gasoline bought in a jungle 'general store' because we're too far from a real gas station. A few days ago we helped a friend build a portable 'air conditioner' for his van, so that he could travel south with his dogs without too much heat build up when stopping. A Styrofoam cooler chest, two 3" PVC elbows leading out and a 12v-powered fan blowing in did the trick. A chestload of ice lasted almost 8 hours of constant cold air blowing out into the back of the van! He could leave the dogs in the van when he and the family got out for sight seeing or meals without worry that they'd be too hot! Yesterday another friend wanted help building a still to make distilled water for a hydrogen generator he's working on. It's hard to find a place that sells it here. Easy enough to rig up... Any moonshiner can tell ya how! Such is the life in Third World Countries... or Mars.
Stitchawl