Fed by Birds

This slightly stunned lull between Christmas and New Year is the perfect time to watch old films - I suggest Capra's You Can't Take It With You. It's uplifting, but also topical, featuring a greedy banker getting his comeuppance during the Depression.

The family of eccentrics that you're supposed to prefer to the capitalists are actually quite wearing - see below. Personally it makes me want to go and get stuck into some serious paperwork at the bank. But there are lots of good little scenes - as above, where James Stewart demonstrates how to embarrass your stenographer-fiancee in a posh restaurant.

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It's easy to fall behind with modern poetry. Apparently, Flarf is dead. Didn't know it was alive? Keep up, please. It's all lemur poetry now.

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These days, it's heartening to see a change in the google searches that end up at Fed by Birds. Once search phrases ranged from the baffling to the frankly horrifying, but now they are generally for much more appealing things, including, last month, "lovely monkey" and "healthy old man". I think lovely monkeys are already well represented here, but what could be more cheering than a picture of a really healthy old man? So much so that I think I'll make it a regular feature.

We start with Jack Beers, whose amazing life was the subject of a documentary called Holes in my Shoes. Jack was once famous as New York's Strongest Boy, and hasn't lost it: YouTube features a clip of him tearing a phone book in half at the age of 94. He's now 98, and seems to have joined a band.

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