{"id":267,"date":"2006-09-06T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2006-09-06T19:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/?p=267"},"modified":"2015-09-25T09:14:34","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T16:14:34","slug":"what-would-she-say-about-howard-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/what-would-she-say-about-howard-fans\/","title":{"rendered":"What Would She Say About Howard Fans?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"greer_germaine.jpg\" id=\"image271\" src=\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/09\/greer_germaine.jpg\" \/><br \/>\nMe, I&#8217;ve never had any strong opinion about <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Steve_Irwin\">the late Steve Irwin<\/a>, although I agree with him that &#8220;Crocs rule!&#8221; (While watching the old Tarzan films on TV as a child, I used to pray for a riled-up river dragon to play catch-and-non-release with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0919321\/\">Johnny Weissmuller<\/a>, holding him underwater and thereby sparing us <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0047747\/\"><em>Jungle Jim<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>So if I mention that militant-enough-to-give-harridans-a-bad-name academic Germaine Greer <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/australia\/story\/0,,1865124,00.html\">crashed the wake all of Australia seems to be staging<\/a> for Irwin to fault him for &#8220;massive insensitivity&#8221; and &#8220;jumping all over crocodiles&#8221; like the worst kind of whip-cracking, chair-prodding lion-tamer, it&#8217;s only because it affords me an excuse to trot out my favorite Greer-bite. The success of the Peter Jackson <em>Lord of the Rings<\/em> films and the tendency of the Tolkien source material to top readers&#8217; poll after readers&#8217; poll in the U.K. for Book of the (20th) Century caused her no end of distress, and in 2003 she finally let fly at the <em>LOTR<\/em> readership as consisting of &#8220;spaced-out hippies, environmentalists, free-market libertarians, social conservatives, pacifists, new-age theosophists, sexists and racists the world over.&#8221; It is to be hoped that such strange bedfellows have been taking advantage of the opportunity, and the bed, to make many more Tolkien (and even some Howard) fans&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>LEO ADDS:<\/strong> My favorite Greer moment: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/articles\/2005\/01\/12\/1105423530266.html\">vomiting over &#8220;a cesspool of garbage&#8221;<\/a> on Celebrity Big Brother, in the processes metaphorically summing up her formidable cultural influence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Me, I&#8217;ve never had any strong opinion about the late Steve Irwin, although I agree with him that &#8220;Crocs rule!&#8221; (While watching the old Tarzan films on TV as a child, I used to pray for a riled-up river dragon to play catch-and-non-release with Johnny Weissmuller, holding him underwater and thereby sparing us Jungle Jim). [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-reputation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16305,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions\/16305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}