It was 60 years ago today...

To mark a friend's 60th birthday, and because why the hell not, I'm taking a quick step 60 years back in time. 

It's Wednesday 22 February 1961, and Rubber Ball by Marty Wilde is at the top of the UK singles chart. Wilde (born Reginald Leonard Smith), is one of Britain's foremost American-inspired rockers, along with those other young Turks, Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.  Here's a vido of Marty performing his hit with Cliff Richard on the 23rd of February 1961 (look out for the Buddy Holly-inspired vocal stylings):

As of now, Marty, like his more famous partner in that duet, is still with us. As his Wikipedia entry notes:

On 9 October 2020, Wilde entered the UK Albums Chart at number 75 with Running Together. It was released on his own Pushka label, and featured his daughters Kim and Roxanne Wilde, with input from son Ricky. Wilde thus has the distinction of UK chart success, as either a singer or songwriter, across eight consecutive decades.

Hint: it's never too late...

The UK's Conservative, old Etonian Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan has just completed four years in office, having taken over from Anthony Eden as a result of Eden's failing health and fatally damaged reputation after the national humiliation of Suez. 

As in February 2021, the USA has a new Democract with Irish ancestry in the White House, although JFK is a sprightly 43 years old when taking office, a contrast with Jo Biden's venerable 78 years. The world didn't know it on February 22nd, but the new Kennedy administration already had a mini Suez-style fiasco of its own in the planning stage, as Kennedy and his advisors weigh up the options for the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion (spoiler; none of the options are good).

 Also in the States, February 22nd sees the release of the biopic The Great Impostor, starring Tony Curtis as the serial impostor Ferdinand Waldo Demara, whose career of deception ncluded faking the identities of a doctor of psychology, a civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a teacher, a monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a naval surgeon.

The real (?) Demara had some interesting tips for aspiring rogues:

"...if you come into a new situation (there's a nice word for it) don't join some other professor's committee and try to make your mark by moving up in that committee. You'll, one, have a long haul and two, make an enemy."

Why try to rise up through the existing committee structure, Demara reasoned, when you can start your own committee?

"That way there's no competition, no past standards to measure you by. How can anyone tell you aren't running a top outfit? And then there's no past laws or rules or precedents to hold you down or limit you. Make your own rules and interpretations. Nothing like it. Remember it, expand into the power vacuum!"

Which is quite an interesting take from a couple of angles. Firstly, the notion of moving into vacant ecological niches clearly has wider applications than just con artistry; from starting a business venture to chosing an area of academic research, to your chosen form of artistic expression, it's a legitimate strategy.

Secondly, it's interesting to look back at the career of a genuine outsider from 2021, a historical moment where even our impostors are fake. Demara came from a formerly prosperous family which had fallen on hard times due to the Great Depression by the time he ran away from home aged 16 to become a Cistercian monk. To succeed as an impostor, Demara had to use his wits to practice his deceptions.

In contrast, our highest-profile contemporary rogues, from Donald J Trump, to Nigel Farage (currently running an investment grift which recycles his old "take back control" schtick), to pro-virus activist and professional whiner, Laurence Fox, tend to come from firmly establishment, often elite, backgrounds.

Caveat emptor.

Our most notorious contemporary deceivers aren't outsiders, shrewdly taking advantage of gaps in the hierarchy which others weren't smart enough to spot. They're insiders, born to privilege, leveraging their connections within existing power structures, rather than adroitly spotting and exploiting gaps in those structures. Their biggest, and most successful, con is to convince their dupes that they're the plucky outsiders taking on the establishment, when they are the establishment.

Perhaps the most egregious example is Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson, a man who couldn't be more part of the establishment furniture if he was one of the leather armchairs in White's of St James's. The problem with these fake impostors, as opposed to real rogues like Demara, is that there's no selective pressure on them to have any actual talent. Where your deceptions succeed or fail purely on the basis of your own sharpness of wit, you gotta be good to be at the game. 

Whatever his morals, or lack thereof, Demara was smart, and not just at being an impostor. For example, while pretending to be a naval surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy he actually managed to be a pretty competent naval surgeon:

What Demara did possess was a strong intellect, plus a phenomenal memory. Posing as [Dr Joseph] Cyr, he performed numerous minor surgeries, including dental work on the infected tooth of CAYUGA’s commander, Captain James Plomer. Demara apparently studied up on the necessary techniques by reading text books and relying on the help of his Sick Berth Attendant, plus generous supplies of anesthetic and antibiotics.

Following a commando-style raid off the west coast of Korea, three seriously wounded casualties — all South Korean guerillas – were brought aboard CAYUGA. Cyr aka Demara is said to have removed a bullet from a man’s chest and amputated a foot. His patients not only survived, but Cyr’s fellow officers were so impressed with his coolness that they planned to put his name forward for a medal. Talk of such an award, and the attention surrounding his Korean exploits, was probably Demara’s undoing.

The Canadian Navy apparently discovered Demara was using a false identity after the real Dr. Cyr’s mother spotted a news report in her local paper. War correspondents had picked up the story of the CAYUGA medic and broadcast it far and wide.

Source: The Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum web site.

You can fake a lot, but you can't fake that level of basic competence. 

But fake impostors like Boris "not really my first name" Johnson don't have to keep it real, relying on contacts, wealth & more general social capital, rather than quickness of wit. When a fake impostor buys his way into power, what you can end up with is someone without the basic competence or work ethic to carry out the role he's blagged his way into. 

It would be a stretch to imagine Boris Johnson rising to the occasion, as Ferdinand Demara did in the medical bay of HMCS Cayuga, when Johnson, even with the combined resources of the Prime Ministers' office, the Conservative Party and mostly compliant meda behind him, struggles to rise to the level of impersonating a guy who can successfully operate a mop:

Mop top in mop flop.

That's not to say that Demara was some kind of hero,  a Robin Hood figure. He described his own motivation as being "Rascality, pure rascality." But most of us have a sneaking regard for the exploits of the cheeky rascal, hence the box office draw of Tony Curtis, or Leonardo de Caprio retelling the stories of real-life tricksters like Demara, or Frank Abagnale. 

But it still stings to see not-very bright establishment insiders fraudulently appropriating the persona of the clever rogue and visiting the fruits of their incompetence on the rest of us.

tl;dr: inequality of opportunity tends inevitably towards kakistocracy. Grow your talent pools, people.

In 1961, in the UK, the talent pool was on the shallow side in other senses. After being recuruited into a wide range of responsible and challenging jobs in the war, the 1950s was somthing of a low point where either low-status work or low-status housewifery was seen as the default social position for half of the population. 

The introduction of the birth control pill with its upside of greater reproductive autonomy (and downside of assumed sexual availability) was still the best part of a year away in early 1961. It wouldn't be until 1964 that a revision to the Married Women's Property Act gave married women the right keep half of any savings they'd made from the allowance paid to them by their husbands (bear in mind that, in many workplaces, it was still the norm for women to be forced give up work on marriage at this time). And, as for abortion this wasn't legalised until 1967 and, in Northern Ireland, abortion rights are still a high profile battleground in 2021. 

As in sexual politics, racial politics was also a story of systematic exclusion for a whole section of society. 1961 was the year when Mahesh Upadhyaya arrived from Aden (now south Yemen) to a UK where minority citizens looking for lodgings were still routinely greeted by signs reading "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish." 

There was nothing particularly remarkable about Mahesh when he arrived in the UK, but he would go on play his part in the history of his adopted nation in 1968, when he became the first person to bring a racial discrimination case under the newly-introduced Race Relations Act. Mahesh related the following story:

After I found a job with a regular salary I set about searching for a suitable home for my family. We found one on Penistone Road, at the edge of Huddersfield, close to my employer’s transport routes.

 I arranged an appointment and everyone, my parents, brother, my wife and myself, went along. We found no problems at all with the house, a spacious three-bedroom semi, and wanted to make an offer. So I rang the developers, George Haigh & Sons, later that day.

The person on the phone said, “Are you the coloured family who had a look around earlier?”

I said that we were.

The person on the phone said, “Our policy is not to sell to coloured people because that will jeopardise the sales of our other properties.”

Sadly for Mahesh, he had to face hostiity at work for having the temerity to bring his case to court at all and the outcome of his case was to be dismissed on a technicality. But Mahesh remains proud of his decision to speak out, saying "I’m proud to have been a part of such an important milestone in the UK’s evolution towards being a fairer society."

For LGBTQ citizens it was a similar time of limbo, with equality still a distant dream, but with hints of the first stirrings of a move away from automatic prejudice and exclusion. At least it was for gay men, still suffering from the effects of Nineteenth legislation which their lesbian peers had been spared, thanks to Victorian prudery (the prudery didn't come from Victoria herself, contary to popular belief):

The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report, was published in 1957, three years after the committee first met in September 1954. It was commissioned in response to evidence that homosexuality could not legitimately be regarded as a disease and aimed to bring about change in the current law by making recommendations to the Government. Central to the report findings was that the state should focus on protecting the public, rather than scrutinising people’s private lives.

It took 10 years for the Government to implement the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Backed by the Church of England and the House of Lords, the Sexual Offences Act partially legalised same-sex acts in the UK between men over the age of 21 conducted in private.  Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit over a decade later, in 1980 and 1981 respectively. The Sexual Offences Act represented a stepping stone towards equality, but there was still a long way to go.

 From A Short History of LGBT rights in the UK by Steven Dryden.

Over the last sixty years, the general direction of travel in terms of equality in terms of gender, race and sexuality has been clear and encouraging. Which is a cause for modest celebration, rather than the noisy wailing coming from those noisy, well-connected fake outsiders:

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

 I don't go for nostalgia in a big way. Sometimes the familiarity of the past can feel reassuring, but it's always worth remembering that there are bits that were bad, have got better and can continue to get better if we live in the present, not the past. 

But, when it comes to pretenders, the modern ones really are rubbish and some of the old ones really were great...

 

 

*Update: Now I've seen it and cannot unsee it, it would be remiss of me not to add this clip of Boris Johnson disinfecting a chair, set to one Richard Attenborough's wildlife narrations, to that picture of him ineffectually moving a mop around:

Can’t stop watching Boris Johnson being narrated by David Attenboroughpic.twitter.com/CcQr9U1WHr

— Gregory Bufithis 🇬🇷 🌊 (@GregBufithis) February 20, 2021

Alien archaeology (with spoilers)

I've been watching the old BBC series, Quatermass and the Pit on BBC iPlayer recently, and enjoying it a lot. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend it (or the film version), especially if you're planning to read the rest of this post (spoilers ahoy!).

I was struck was how unexpectedly similar some of the underlying ideas, themes and major plot elements were to a very different Sci Fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Namely:

• Both involve the discovery and excavation of an ancient alien artifact: the Martian spacecraft buried under London in Quatermass, the lunar monolith in 2001.
• In both stories, the authorities try to keep the discovery a secret with cover stories. In Quatermass, the alien spacecraft is explained away as an unidentified German V weapon that had fallen on London in World War 2. In 2001, the moon base is quarantined on the pretext of an outbreak of some unidentified disease.
• In both cases, the aliens who left the artifact behind altered the minds of our ancient hominid ancestors, pushing them towards greater intelligence and putting them on to the path to being human.
• In both cases the seemingly inert alien artifact is activated by being exposed to a power source, leading to the climax of the story.
• The human propensity for violence and its origin hangs over both stories. The Quatermass Martians bequeath intelligence to the hominids, but also their own propensity for violence, which we are told, stems form the insect-like Martians' instinct carry out periodic eugenic purges of their hives, in order to exterminate the unfit. In 2001, the aliens are presented as inscrutable, rather than evil, but it's also clear that, along with the gift of intelligence, their intervention also gifted our ancestors with the weapons, and perhaps the desire, to kill one another.
• Quatemass and the Pit ends with a warning that the human race may destroy itself if it fails to curb the drive towards violence and weapon-making abilities that came, along with our intelligence from the aliens. This theme isn't made so explicit in the film version of 2001, (in the famous jump cut from bone club to orbiting satellite, it's never made clear that the first few spacecraft are orbiting weapons of mass destruction) but the novel is a lot less coy about the continuity of human violence.

At first sight, it seems as if Clarke might have been, perhaps unconsciously, influenced by this 1950s TV series. But, despite the striking similarities, it's probably not that simple. Quatermass and the Pit was first broadcast on the BBC in the winter of 1958-9, after Arthur C Clarke had moved permanently to Sri Lanka, and the film version didn't come out until 1967, (filming of 2001 had already started in 1965).

Also, the two elements (the discovery of an ancient alien artifact and aliens encountering ancient humans) had been explored in two of Arthur C Clarke's earlier short stories, The Sentinel (1951) and Encounter in the Dawn (1953), so it could even be that Nigel Kneale was influenced by Clarke's short stories when writing this Quatermass tale, rather than the other way round. Or maybe the parallels are just coincidence, but they've intriguing enough to be worth a bit more digging when I've got the time/inclination. Who knows what I might uncover...

This is why we call it our "war cabinet."

"May splits up squabbling Brexit war cabinet as customs deal solution continues to elude her"

"Gentlemen. You can't fight in here. This is a war room!"

Nuts!

... is the title of a summer blockbuster I'd pay good money to see:

Can technology save us from shark attacks? BBC (David L). You are more likely to die from a coconut falling on your head. Seriously. Even after allowing for debate over how far you could generalize from the original study and cutting the extrapolation by a full order of magnitude. But no one makes movies about falling coconuts.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back under the tree...

"Goodbye, Mr Bond"

After Steve Mnuchin and his wife posed with a sheet of newly printed money for that photo, a few people commented that the couple looked like Bond villains. Was the multimillionaire former banker and hedgie embarrassed?  Of course not:

“I guess I should take that as a compliment that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie,” the treasury secretary told Fox News on Sunday.

Two things:

1. Who said anything about all Bond films being "great" or "successful"? Clearly, somebody's never seen Octopussy.

2. Talking of "successful", even the dimmest movie goer should have worked out by now that the salient feature of Bond villains is their total lack of success. Ever since Dr No in 1962, Bond villains have been reliably failing to realise their fiendish plots and coming to sticky ends, generally a few minutes before or after 007 destroys their life's work in a series of massive explosions.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld is the closest thing to not-a-complete-failure in the Bond-villain-verse, having at least survived several defeats. In his eight film incarnations to date, he has, however, lost comprehensively to Bond on at least seven occasions.

If you were being insanely generous, you could could call the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, when Blofeld manages to assassinate Bond's new wife, a score draw. But, as Bond has just comprehensively destroyed Blofeld's world domination plan, along with his supervillain base, this looks less like a draw to me and more like some sore loser knocking over the Scrabble table in a fit of pique.

I guess that when you've worked in a Wall Street that crashed the global economy, then for a guy who couldn't successfully make a profit out of the suckers queueing up to lose their money at casinos, your idea of a "successful" role model must be a little bit odd.

Independence day

That old popcorn blockbuster Independence Day was was an unoriginal, but popular, take on a well-worn Sci-Fi trope where squabbling humanity finally learns how to work together and forget its differences in the face of a looming alien menace. And just in time for Independence Day 2017, somebody's noticed an inhuman menace that makes me want to make common cause with humans everywhere - even the person leading the charge, a self-proclaimed American neocon:

...a phenomenon that’s grown more and more frequent over time: the stupendously annoying coercive forced-choice. It is presented by the pop-up window that offers you something you don’t want and didn’t ask for—be it an update or a service or a product or a website link—and then gives you a choice of responses. But the responses aren’t a simple “yes” or “no.” And definitely you never get to choose “go away and leave me alone forever.”

Instead, you get a variant of something snide and sarcastic, where the supposed “no” response reads something like “I don’t want this wonderful free service because I’m a moron.” Or you get a response that isn’t “no” at all but “later.”

I'm a liberal-minded lefty and even I approve this message.

If you really want to unite all humanity, harnessing our shared hatred of patronising nagware is clearly the way to go.

Whoa ... "No thanks, I'm not interested in saving money" it says here. Right, that does it. I am so going to nuke you, you condescending assholes ...*

via




*Image © 20th/21st Century Fox, I guess. Fair use, whatever...

"...they may take our lives..."

"...but they'll never take our freedom (terms and conditions may apply)..."

I once had a conversation with a Libertarian friend who insisted that freedom was the answer to everything — ironic since he was getting married the following week.

“Freedom to have sex with others while married?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he said.
“Freedom for your children to do whatever they want?”
“No, that’s different,” he said.
“Freedom for everyone to have a nuclear bomb?”
“No, that wouldn’t be good.”
“Freedom for people to steal?”
“No, that has to be controlled.”

“You don’t really think that freedom is the answer to everything,” I said. “The real question is what to constrain and what to let go free. The question in social engineering is the question in all engineering. It’s a question of tolerances: What to constrain with tight tolerances and what to let run free with loose tolerances. That question is built right into the paradoxical declarations that we should all, “be intolerant of all intolerance,” or “tolerate all intolerance.”

Jeremy Sherman, writing for AlterNet.

If you stop to think about if for any longer than it takes to slap on half a face-full of anachronistic woad, it turns out that "Freedom!" as a rallying cry is as problematic in the 21st Century as it was back in the feudal 13th Century.

"He died a much richer man than you'll ever be..."

Time, I think, for a festive addition to the growing subgenre of filmography which I'll call The Donald - A Warning from [Movie] History. Through the workaday parts of the year we've seen auguries of the coming of The Orange One in Citizen Kane, Back to the Future II and Goldfinger, among others.  But at this special time of celebration and goodwill, perhaps some Americans will wake up on Christmas morning and realise that they've slipped into the alternative timeline from that all-American seasonal favourite It's A Wonderful Life - the one where kindly, public-spirited George Baily was never born and the whole town has become the plaything of Mr Potter, the greedy, bullying, mean-spirited businessman and his rich cronies.

You'd have hoped that most people of voting age would have understood the film's not-exactly-subtle message about what constitutes a wonderful life by now:
But apparently not. Welcome to Trumpsville, USA.

Golden words he will pour in your ear...

...but his lies can't disguise what you fear...

Respectable movie buffs say that Citizen Kane predicted Trump. But if old action movies are your guilty pleasure, we've got you covered, too. Look no further than the villain of the third (and best, IMO) movie in the James Bond franchise, the eponymous Auric Goldfinger:

• A dubious plutocrat, with ties to the Mob
• Loves gold
• Loves golf
• Cheats at golf 
• Objectifies and abuses women
• Thin-skinned grudge-holder, who'll stop at nothing to get even
• Double-crosses his business associates
• Napoleon complex
• Scary henchman
• Harbours grandiose schemes for a big, beautiful heist/wall 

Watching the Trump generation of post-truth authoritarian nationalists gleefully kerb-stomp what's left of liberal democracy won't be pretty, but the sound track will be awesome:

Sublime, improbable Martian engineering

 *Spoiler alert- if you've not already read H G Wells's The War of the Worlds, do so immediately, or read on at your own peril...*

I've just been re-reading the first alien invasion novel, H G Wells's The War of the Worlds, and I can see again why it created a genre all of its own and why it immediately grabbed me as a child. Mainly because it's such a cracking yarn - the alien visitation starts off as an intriguing curiosity, but escalates to being, ominous, threatening, awe-inspiring and terrifying at an unstoppable pace that mirrors the relentless advance of Well's iconic Martian tripods, seen here in  one of the novel's big reveals:

And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer. Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand... Seen nearer, the Thing was incredibly strange, for it was no mere insensate machine driving on its way. Machine it was, with a ringing metallic pace, and long, flexible, glittering tentacles (one of which gripped a young pine tree) swinging and rattling about its strange body. It picked its road as it went striding along, and the brazen hood that surmounted it moved to and fro with the inevitable suggestion of a head looking about.

That's a fantastic piece of writing and there are lots more like it. The book also has its expository digressions, where the action stops and Wells explains things rather than just showing you awesome stuff, but these aren't too long (at least by the standards of the time when Wells was writing) and by this stage he's already created enough momentum to keep you gripped and reading on. Compare and contrast with that other piece of proto-sci-fi, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which also starts with strange, ominous events, building up to an exciting reveal and some great set pieces, but is so weighted down with the ballast of endless pages of over-long explanation that Verne almost sinks the cracking yarn he created.*

If the The War of the Worlds looks forward to every alien invasion yarn that followed, it also looks back to an aesthetic trope that's probably been around for ever, but was largely formalised in the Eighteenth Century and peaked with early Nineteenth Century Romanticism - the sublime. That's the idea that humans don't just appreciate things which are beautiful in an ordered, harmonious way, but also dig stuff that's wild, inhuman in scale and frankly terrifying - as the Tate Britain put it, in the blurb to an exhibition dedicated to "Art and the Sublime":

The best-known theory published in Britain is Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke’s definition of the sublime focuses on such terms as darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of pleasurable terror.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sublime was associated in particular with the immensity or turbulence of Nature and human responses to it. Consequently, in Western art, ‘sublime’ landscapes and seascapes, especially those from the Romantic period, often represent towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms and seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches which, if actually experienced, would be life threatening.

Compare Wells's description of the towering Martian tripod with William Wordsworth describing his youthful memory of stealing a boat and rowing out onto Ullswater at night, in The Prelude. As young Wordsworth looks back guiltily at a peak overlooking the lake, the huge, shadowy, inhuman form seems, by an unsettling trick of perspective, to be pursuing his boat:

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me...

Wordsworth's looming peak only looked threatening, but extreme fans of the sublime had access to far more hardcore material than that. Wells's Martians may have wreaked terrible destruction on the South East of England, but even they would have had a hard time competing with acts of God. The Almighty's awesome destructive capacity was given the sublime treatment by popular Nineteenth Century painter John Martin, in a series of massive, full-frontal disaster porn canvasses like The Great Day of His Wrath:

It's the end of the World as we know it (and I feel fine).

Sublimely terrifying and imaginative though Well's Martian tripods are, it's probably best not to think too hard about how they work. According to Wells's description, the unearthly three-legged machines move like "a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground" and elsewhere he writes of their swiftness and "rolling" motion, which is vivid enough.

But if the whole machine is whirling around to pivot from one leg to the next, surely the Martian pilot within is also being whirled around, unable to stay facing the machine's direction of travel (or any other fixed direction) and getting horribly dizzy, (assuming that the Martian vestibular system can suffer from dizziness).

Maybe the tripod legs whirl around, but the cowl housing the Martian pilot doesn't. But that would imply that controlling part of the machine is mounted on some sort of axle or pivot, which, according to Wells, isn't the way the Martians, with their biomimetic technology, do things:

And of their appliances, perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism is absent--the wheel is absent; among all the things they brought to earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One would have at least expected it in locomotion...

 ...And not only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained.

Of course, this might just be one of the singularly rare occasions when the Martians did make use of the fixed pivot, but it definitely goes against the Martians' overriding design ethos. Or maybe the cowl isn't on a pivot, just hyper-mobile, like an owl's head:
But this would present difficulties of its own - if the tripod rolled around in only one direction, the head would eventually have to snap back round, even if it could stay pointing in one direction for a while. If the tripod alternated its direction of roll, a hyper-mobile head would work, but the change from whirling in one direction to another would would be inefficient, robbing the machine of momentum, just as it was getting onto a roll.

Movie versions of the novel have struggled (or not tried) to reproduce the motion of the Martian tripods, as described by Wells. In the 1953 film adaptation, the special effects people decided that they just wouldn't be able to create a convincing walking tripod and opted to redesign the Martian fighting machines as floating manta ray-shaped craft, topped with a heat ray on a flexible mounting that looked like a striking cobra. In a nod to the original novel, the film's hero scientist explains that the seemingly unsupported Martian craft are actually held up in mid air and moved by means of three invisible "electromagnetic legs."

With the advent of CGI, a later generation of special effects wizards were finally able to produce a plausible-looking version of the Wellsian tripods for Steven Spielberg's 2005 film adaptation - sort of. In some ways the CGI works well and the tripod machines have some of the Wellsian details right. For example, the limbs are flexible, just as Wells described, looking more like a supple living thing than a stiff, jointed mechanism

.
But the motion is distinctly un-Wellsian - Spielberg's tripods don't whirl forwards with an unstoppable rolling gait, but pick their three-legged way through the ruins like a dog with an injured paw, or a human walking with one good leg, a plaster cast and a crutch. I don't think this really catches the essence of Wells's vision, where the tripods signified two things. First, alienness - no creature on our planet has evolved to walk on three legs. Second, implacable swiftness - it's clear from the original novel that the Martian machines move fast and efficiently on their three legs, bearing down like express trains on the puny humans in their path, pursuing and outflanking them with ease.

To date, nobody (AFAIK) has been able to represent, or reproduce the sort of tripod locomotion Wells described so vividly. Whether this is a failure of imagination, technical skill, or just a reflection of the fact that it's impossible to translate Wells's vision into actual engineering, I don't know (although the fact that terrestrial biology has taken millions of years not to come up with a working three-legged creature might point to three legs just being an inefficient number for a walker).



An impossible form of locomotion, or just one nobody's figured out yet? You decide.


*To be fair, I've only read it in translation and it probably sounds better in French, but the endless pauses in the action when Verne just stops everything to list species of fish, or whatever, must be just as boring in any language.

(A better) life on Mars

I haven't seen The Martian, but here's one good reason for giving it a look:

The Martian sets its face against the contemporary wave of dystopian sci-fi that delights in creating misanthropic situations to subject our descendants to. Much harder is to produce a compelling, successful, believable film that ignores the zeitgeist. It shows we have the tools and know how to fix seemingly intractable problems, and that our efforts can be successful. In a world haunted by social problems and looming environmental disaster, give me that message over fashionable fatalism any day.

After all, endless dystopias which look disturbingly like the world we live in now can lead to despair fatigue.

Zeppelin versus camels

Just look at this magnificent thing. A poster for one of the most insanely ludicrous movies never made, Hammer Films' unmade classic, Zeppelin V. Pterodactyls.* As a pre-pubescent kid, I thrilled to One Million Years B.C. and The Blue Max at an age when the heaving embonpoints of Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress were nothing but boring interruptions to the far more exciting business of stop-motion dino action and death-defying stunts in replica Fokker triplanes. My little head would have exploded at the sheer awesomeness of a planned film about dinosaurs** and daredevil flying aces ... AND Zeppelins, had I known of such a thing.*** It would have taken more than a few heaving embonpoints to rain on that parade.

This poster briefly popped into my head on holiday this summer, as I was enjoying a coffee and a waffle in a pavement cafe in Tønder, in the south of Denmark. Why? I'd seen a sign for a Zeppelin museum and was wondering, vaguely, what such a thing was doing in Denmark (albeit very close to the German border). We had other things to do that day and a long-ish drive back to where we were staying, so I never investigated at the time and forgot all about it. But just the other day, the thought popped back into my head and I googled it. It turns out that there was a very good reason for such a museum being there. Not only was Tønder once a home to Zeppelins, but  Tønder's Zeppelins were themselves the target of the world's first ever successful attack by aircraft flown from an aircraft carrier, carried out some 23 years before Pearl Harbour.

What were Zeppelins doing in Denmark? Well, that goes back to the interminable dynastic/territorial squabble between the Danish crown and the German Confederation, which Brits remember chiefly for launching Lord Palmerston's most quotable quip ("Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it"). Anyway, the Schleswig part of the business was settled - for more than half a century, anyway - by the Second Schleswig War of 1864, when Prussian and Austrian troops occupied the disputed territory. The subsequent Treaty of Vienna designated Schleswig as part of the German Confederation.

So Tønder, in North Schleswig became part of the German Confederation, then, from 1871, part of the new nation of Germany. And that's how it stayed until after the German defeat in World War One. Then, after centuries of people having their identity determined by the outcome of inhertance disputes between various monarchs and aristocrats, the people**** who lived there got a say. A plebiscite was held in 1920 and the locals of North Schleswig (or South Jutland, as the Danes call it), voted to return to Denmark (South Schleswig voted to remain German).

Anyhow, in 1918, the then German town of Tønder (Tondern in German) was doing its small bit for pan-European carnage by hosting a Zeppelin base with three airship hangers, run by the Imperial German Navy. By that stage in the war Zeppelins had been superseded as bombers by heavier-than-air R-planes, but were still being used for naval patrols. On the other side of the North Sea, the Brits had been doing their bit by adding a flight deck to the battlecruiser HMS Furious, so creating the world's first aircraft carrier. The Royal Navy chose the Tondern Zeppelin base as Furious's first target.

HMS Furious, complete with flight deck and U-boat-confusing dazzle camouflage

A first attempt to attack the Tondern Zeppelins, in June 1918, had to be called off due to bad weather. Furious and her escort set sail for the German North Sea coast again on July 17th. She was carrying a small contingent of Sopwith Camels, fitted with bomb racks.

Ship's Camels on board Furious

In the early morning of July 19th, seven Camels flew off Furious's flight deck, in two waves of three and four aircraft, bound for Tondern. Bombs from the first wave of three aircraft hit the largest airship hanger, setting Zeppelins L.54 and L.60 on fire. The second wave's bombs destroyed a captive balloon in another hanger.

Zeppelin L 54, outside its hanger in Tondern/Tønder

Although this was a hazardous operation which destroyed two Zeppelins, casualties on both sides were light, especially when compared with the numbers being routinely slaughtered in this conflict. Total casualties consisted of four Germans injured and one British pilot dead. None of the planes was able to return to Furious and land (the ship had an aft flight deck for landings, but these hadn't been perfected and pilots were expected to ditch in the sea and await rescue); one pilot experienced engine trouble and never made it to Tondern, but was recovered after ditching his plane near the fleet. Three pilots judged that they hadn't enough fuel to make it back and landed in neutral Denmark. The other three headed back for the fleet. Two of them ditched near the fleet and were recovered but one, Lieutenant Walter A "Toby" Yuelett, DFC, was never seen again and probably drowned after running out of fuel and being forced to ditch early.

It all sounds terribly primitive and quaint now, but it was deadly serious and high-tech at the time. A modern equivalent would be killer drones with Hellfire missiles (although your modern drone operator doesn't face the same physical dangers that killed Lieutenant Yuelett). In fact, the Tondern raid would have seemed even more cutting-edge - in 2015, the military has been using armed drones for nearly a decade and a half, but the Tondern raid came less than year after the first ever successful flight of an aircraft from the deck of a moving ship (the Furious). Rather than old-hat killer drones, the modern analogue would be something really novel, like the drone-based biryani delivery system currently being trialled in Milton Keynes (or its weaponised equivalent), which may, coincidentally, be the wierdest high-concept idea since Zeppelins V. Pterodactyls.

*First seen (by me, at least) here. Bless you, Internet.

**Yes, I know pterodactyls and dinosaurs are different things. OK, were different things. Shut up.

***Easy with the nostalgia, though - having just taken the Offspring to see Inside Out, I have to admit that the sort of family entertainment that got me going at his age was a good deal less nuanced, sophisticated and thought-provoking than some of the stuff that's being specifically made for kids today.

****I presume that people of both genders got a say, as - according to Wikipedia - Danish women got the vote in 1915 and their German sisters were enfranchised on the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1919.

Forbidden ex-planet

The latest batch of Pluto images downloaded from the New Horizons probe look alien and stunning, sure enough. But to me, they also look both unreal and strangely familiar. They remind me of the artwork from some vintage science fiction film, an alien world as imagined by a visual effects artist from the 1950s.

To see what I mean, compare Pluto with the planet Altair IV, as visualised for the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet - the desolate plains, punctuated by towering mountain ranges, the hazy, layered atmosphere. The only thing missing from the New Horizons download is Louis and Bebe Barron's unearthly electronic film score.

Science fact is finally starting to look like science fiction.

The Forbidden Planet image was nicked from NZ Pete's Matte Shot blog, a highly-recommended wunderkammer of cinematic visual effects artistry, in what I hope is an act of fair use.

Toxic horsemeat and Trekkies

I've nothing in particular against Liberal Democrat councillors. They didn't sign the coalition agreement and they may well be lovely people, doing good things in local communities. According to our latest local Lib Dem flyer, our lot have successfully 'fought the Conservative run Council's proposals to scrap grit bins', had a pedestrian crossing built at a sensible place in our road (check - I can see it from where I'm writing) and, following complaints from residents in one of the roads coming off ours, they've had a new "no through road" sign put up. Maybe councillors with different affiliations would have done similar things, but I'm happy to give them the credit for actually having got them done.

And then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like 'I love you':

It's a 2 horse race on 22nd May. The local election on 22nd May is between the local Lib Dem Focus Team candidates and the Conservatives. Labour has come third in this area for many years. A vote for any candidate other than the Lib Dems could let the Conservatives in.

This may be true in terms of the local electoral arithmetic and tactical voting, but if you actually wanted to toxify your own brand in one short message, then that message would be 'why not vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out?' [long pause to let the bitter laughter subside]:
Apologies for including another party political broadcast, especially a negative attack ad, but this one does hit the nail on the head (even if it doesn't seem to be doing Labour much good - maybe they should have saved it up for the general election).

It must be terribly depressing to be a progressive Lib Dem at the moment, whether you're looking down at the grit bins, or up at the stars:

In order to be certain, we then ran an analysis of the 100 TV programmes that are most particularly favoured by supporters of each of the three main parties. Sure enough, while only 2 of Conservative voters’ and 6 of Labour voters’ top 100 TV shows are related to science, science fiction or the supernatural, it is 17 of the Lib Dem top 100. The full results will be published next week, but in case you’re wondering the list includes Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Futurama, Being Human, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tomorrow’s World.

Is this evidence of the Liberal Democrat ability to think big, and imagine a better world in the future? Is it true that “Science Fiction is a crutch for people who can’t handle reality”? Or is it the other way round...

Freddie Sayers of YouGov

My take on this is that a preference for science, SF and fantasy is evidence of an enquiring mind and a welcome ability to imagine alternatives to the tyranny of the zeitgeist (even if a lot of science fiction and fantasy is really about current issues, rather than distant planets and dragons, it's still an analysis or critique of the present, rather than mere dumb acceptance of the status quo). Of course, not all Sci Fi and fantasy has a progressive agenda, but Freddie Sayers has evidence that Lib Dems like the stuff that does:

It all started in May last year, when we ran a survey on Star Wars and Star Trek. Asked which series they prefer, the country as a whole narrowly prefers Star Wars (29% to 27%). But Liberal Democrat supporters buck the trend, with 36% preferring Star Trek and 20% preferring Star Wars.

As commentator Martin points out:

That Star Wars and Star Trek poll is interesting. Star Trek is basically a manifesto of progressivism. It is an idealistic world of diversity, open borders and no religion where money and capitalism are bad while government and science is good. I would have thought the conservatives would absolutely adore Star Wars, which is basically a gang of old school heroes (Han Solo the cowboy, Leia the Princess, and our hero, the quite Jesus-like Luke) going up against big government with nothing but spiritual faith and a great sense of missing the good old days of the Old Republic. It seems to me like Star Trek is explores the same world John Lennon dreamed about in 'Imagine', while there is really no wonder Reagan embraced Star Wars imagery and mythology in combatting the evil Soviet Empire.
But yeah, this basically is no surprise when you consider that much of sci-fi fits in with the Lib Dem attitude and psyche.

It must be an enormous bummer to be a progressive in a party with leaders who have abandoned the dream of boldly going where no one has gone before by joining the Dark Side and propping up a party for people who'd rather live a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

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Update - if you didn't like the two party political broadcasts I've embedded, I suggest you feast your eyes and ears on the Worst Party Political Broadcast Ever. It's by the English Democrats, (a sort of cut-price, Celt-free version of UKIP) and looks like something slapped together by the English Tourist Board on an off day, intercut with shots of a bloke in a field holding up cards with various xenophobic slogans and statues of  the great and good from the Michael Gove list of approved English heroes, all set to an acoustic dirge, apparently performed by Billy Bragg's evil right-wing twin that goes:

Build a pride,
Hear the call,
From Land's End to Hadrian's Wall,
This is England,
The land of Saint George 

Hat tip to Tom Pride, who embeds the whole atrocity here.

Update 2 -Interestingly, the local Conservatives have just delivered their leaflet, in which they also claim credit for the local grit bin/pedestrian crossing triumph. I might be tempted to try and find out which of the twio parties is lying to me,* if there was a snowball in hell's chance of me voting for either of the above. Which there isn't.

*Of course, there's a third possibility, namely that both parties had a hand in delivering these things, in which case, they're both telling half-truths (or half-lies, if you're a glass half empty person), by claiming all the credit. If this is the true scenario, then the Lib Dems come out as slightly bigger liars than the Conservatives, by virtue of not only claiming all the credit for the grit bins, but claiming that the nasty Conservatives would have taken them away. But I'm way too swiched off by both parties to care which one is telling the biggest fibs in this case.

Hutton Buscel, mon amour

You learn some interesting things from obituaries. For instance, I never knew that the late film director Alain Resnais, was a friend of that chronicler of bourgeois desperation, Alan Ayckbourn, or that he'd made a film, based on an Ayckbourn play, set in North Yorkshire. Called Aimer, boire et chanter (Love, drink and sing), it sounds like a reet treat for fans of quirky cross-cultural hybrids, at least according to this description by Emma Wilson:

There is an identical preface at the start of each film where actor Peter Hudson introduces us to the setting, a fictional village, Hutton Buscel 'dans le Yorkshire'. Resnais's image of Yorkshire is deliberately stylised. French is spoken in Resnais's Yorkshire. This effect is enhanced where each scene is demarcated by a brightly coloured drawing by the artist Floc'h; indeed, as Philip Strick comments, 'its inhabitants all appear to be strikingly overdressed French immigrants engaged in a subtly Anglophobic charade.'

It may have lacked a strikingly overdressed French immigrant population and have been stylised out of all recognition for its film debut, but I can confirm that, far from being fictional, Hutton Buscel is a very real place,* about fifteen miles from where I grew up.

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* Afterthought - come to think of it, a lot of the stuff on the Parish Council website is straight out of a wistful comedy of bourgeois manners (although slightly more Alan Bennett than Alan Ayckbourn). Viz:

• Cllr Carruthers had purchased replacement bulbs to plant.

• The Community Service had brought the tete a tete bulbs to Hutton Buscel.

• The Emergency Plan Working group had had an initial meeting, another is to follow at the end of January.

• There had been no reply in regards to the status of the bridle way.

• Cllr Carruthers reported that 3 residents had died in the war and that 24 had served. The Vicar intends to hold a joint Wykeham and Hutton Buscel memorial service. An update is to follow.

• Cllr Barnett is to investigate grant funding to clean the war memorial...

...COMMEMORATION OF CLLR JEFFELS (40 YEARS)
Cllr Jeffels had previously offered to plant a tree, however this was declined by Council. A new suggestion of a stone trough to be placed on Vicars Walk (which Cllr Jeffels would maintain) was passed by all present.

RESOLVED: That Cllr Jeffels is to place a stone trough on Vicars Walk at his discretion, and maintain said trough for as long as is reasonably practical...


...TO RECEIVE ITEMS FOR THE NEXT AGENDA

• Paving stones at Vicars walk.
• Report on wooden gate site visit findings.
• Solution to loose Guinea Fowl in the area.

Can Hutton Buscel survive the menace of loose Guinea Fowl in the area?  Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of The Minutes of Hutton Buscel Parish Council...

Le Yorkshire, c'est charmant, n'est pas?

The palpability of the real

 Until this week, I more or less agreed with this:

To my eye, no matter how lifelike it may become, CG still has an eerie, weightless, plastic quality...

The ships, like the Millennium Falcon, had heft, and the light and shadow cast upon them looked right, because they were real. As longtime Industrial Light and Magic technician Paul Huston has said, all those "mechanical systems, plumbing, landing gear, laser blasters, vents, injectors, ducts, fuel tanks" were made of plastic. Some were "scratch-built and some were scavenged from plastic model kits."

The palpability of the real. I lament and mourn the scale model.

This week, I found myself channel-hopping and caught a bit of the BBC mini-series Ice Age Giants, featuring a selection ice age megafauna recreated in CGI. OK, it was on telly, not the big screen, and I wasn't watching in HD, but there were moments where the computer graphics almost captured 'The palpability of the real.'

Up to now, I'd found that even the most sophisticated, seamless and well-executed digital effects had a certain almost indefinably unreal quality. There was something missing, a lack of the real presence that those old-time models had, for all their jerkiness and matte lines.

That was last week. But there were a few sequences in Ice Age Giants that looked as real as any nature programme filmed using real animals. There were some other sequences which, though impressive, retained that elusive mass-less airbrushed quality of earlier CGI, but it looked to me as if the effects wizards are on the cusp of being able to reliably take pixels and conjure up that elusive illusion of solidity.

Ray Harryhausen and his most talented peers are rightly remembered for their pre-digital craft and artisty, but we do tend to remember the best and forget the rest. The creatures in Ice Age Giants were created by the team who do the digital effects for Dr Who - and you've only got to cast your mind back to some of the model effects from the pre-digital Dr Who to realise that a lot of the work people get nostalgic about was distinctly sub-Harryhausen.

Ant Man rises

As Batman: The Dark Knight Rises busts blocks  in multiplexes everywhere this summer, the Offsping's reception year class have taken "superheroes" as their topic for the last half term of the school year. As you can see, this has involved the Offspring creating his own superhero character, Ant Man™, and storyboarding the adventures of Ant Man™ on the school PC. The basic premise - dragon sets fire to houses, everybody shouts 'help!' then Ant Man™ saves everybody - is high concept enough to be worth a few million to the canny movie executive who never lost any money underestimating the sophistication of fifteen year old boys, but I think we may have to flesh out the Ant Man™ character a bit before we can pitch this idea in Hollywood.

I'm thinking Ant Man™ probably acquires his super powers (lifting many times his own body weight, squirting formic acid, whatever) in the traditional manner (innocent picnic near a nuclear power/bioweapons plant, spoilt by mutant insect bite) but, ants being a social species, he soon discovers that he's not alone. As he becomes aware of his super powers, he also discovers that he belongs to a (telepathic?) swarm of gifted mutants who could use their powers to help and protect humanity, but face prejudice and rejection in "normal" society (and I'm totally not ripping off the X-Men here, because the X-Men can't squirt formic acid). It's blue skies thinking at the moment, but the Ant Man™ ("A-Men™"? "Human Swarm™"?) franchise could be massive.

Interestingly, the Offspring's very clear about one thing. He needs no prompting or questioning to declare that superheroes aren't real. Neither are dragons. Which got me thinking about our attitude to escapist fantasy. There's a subculture of people who get a lot of flack for allegedly taking comic books, or sci-fi/fantasy films, TV shows and books way too seriously. Grown men and women who go to conventions called things like Comic Con to buy action figures, or teach-yourself-Klingon DVDs and to dress up as their favourite characters.

Such people are figures of fun in mainstream society, stereotyped as emotionally retarded, socially maladroit geeks with nonexistent interpersonal skills, obsessing about things that "normal" people have grown out of. Like Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons. Or the Daily Mash's idea of the sort of people who are heavily into the "steampunk" fantasy sub genre.

It's probably political kryptonite, too. The revelation that former Labour MP Barbara Follett and her husband, the novelist Ken Follett, were trekkies was inevitably spun to make Babs look like some sort of weird space cadet (I've no idea whether the couple really dressed up in starfleet uniforms, but as the claim appeared in that well known fantasy comic the Sun, I wouldn't vouch for it being literally true, at least in our universe).*

What a bunch of weirdos, huh? Well, yes, but ... I'm also pretty sure that, except in a tiny minority of rather sad cases, the people who are into this stuff are like the Offspring. They know it isn't real. They're just doing what the rest of us do when we go to the pictures, or read a novel - temporarily suspending their disbelief to immerse themselves in a world which they know isn't real, but which entertains them. And by getting together to share and elaborate on the experience with a bunch of other like-minded people, you could argue that they're being a lot more sociable about it than a "normal" person who watches a mainstream TV programme or reads a popular book and doesn't share the experience with other fans.

Which has prompted some people to compare the world of fandom with religion. You've got a bunch of people, some of them in funny clothes, getting together to share a devotion that looks, at best, pretty odd to outsiders.With the important difference that the people at Comic Con, Wonder Con, the Doctor Who Convention and so on, know, like a bright five year old, that some stuff just isn't real. As Bob Seidensticker says:

 Society insulates Christians from reality as if they were Klingons at a convention.  I just wish that, like the Klingons, they realized that it’s all just pretend. 

Score one for fandom, which is well on the way to deserving as much societal respect as any organised religion - perhaps a tad more, since the dudes in the wookie costumes seem to have a rather firmer grasp of the difference between reality and fantasy than  the ones in cassocks and stoles. OK, fan events can be heavily commercialised and branded but, when it comes to the ruthless pursuit of material wealth, the churches have a centuries-long head start on them.

If I wanted to play God's advocate for a moment, there is one thing that organised religions have that gives them an edge over fandom - the collection plate. That is one positive aspect of the faith business - giving to good causes. It might not be the best way of helping others - 'Religion is a very inefficient route to charitable giving (imagine a charity with 90% overhead)' - but I reckon that it's only the lack of a modest bit of social philanthropy that stands in the way of Trekkies and Twilight fans seizing the moral and intellectual high ground from the clerics of various faiths. That and the fact that the fans are probably too busy having their own niche version of a good time to want to lecture everybody else about how to live their lives.

_______________________________________________

Update

Apparently, if I was up to speed with popular culture, I'd have known that somebody's already bagged the idea of a supehero called Ant Man. Back to the drawing board...



* Even if they did have a pair of starfleet uniforms in their wardrobe, I'd have been relatively cool with that. I'm considerably less cool with the fact that Barbara was found to have overclaimed £42,458 in parliamentary expenses.

The Happiest Days of Your Life

Fond memories of school days from MMT in MK:

But in reminiscing fondly about my own experiences growing up going to a school with no uniform, I am suddenly struck by the memory of the only time someone in our class was ‘censored’ for their clothes.

There was a kid who came in one day wearing a Samantha Fox t-shirt – and this was Sam Fox in all her Page 3 glory, fully breastically nuded. Quite rightly, our “Shared Time” teacher ordered him to turn it inside-out for the remainder of the day – I’m not sure how he thought he was ever going to get away with that, even at Stantonbury.

It only strikes me now that this was a t-shirt in a child’s size (he wasn’t the tallest or broadest of 13 year olds), begging the questions a) who would buy / allow their kid to buy t-shirts like that, and b) who made them?  Page Three t-shirts for young ‘uns – for what better example of British life in 1988 could you ask?

 For the benefit of any younger readers, I should point out that "Samantha Fox" was a formerly popular geographical location, akin to Paris, Jordan or Silicone Valley.  For the benefit of older readers, do yourself a favour and get hold of a copy of The Happiest Days of Your Life. It's got Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford, not to mention Joyce Grenfell, as the insanely chipper Miss Gossage ('call me sauasage ... good egg, there's our croc!'). Lovely.

_________________

Update: if I'd wanted to be a tedious pedant, I'd have taken issue with the phrase 'begs the question' which doesn't mean what many people seem to think it means, but I liked the rest of this post so much that I'm disinclined to quibble.

2011 - A Design Oddity

Until now, the most disappointing thing about the 21st Century has been that nothing looks the way it was supposed to in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Massimo Iosa Ghini has rectified this deficiency (at least for IBM Software Executives) in his design for IBM's Software Executive Briefing Center in Rome.

No CGI, just the awesome reality

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

Via