Sensible children! I have no power over them.

Here's a bit of nightmarish childhood nostalgia from the 1970's. A sinister, black-robed figure lies in wait to trap unwary children (link provided here for anybody looking at the preview on Facebook).. Whether you're old enough to remember public information films like this, or young enough to find them quaint or bizarre, it's well worth visiting the National Archives' extensive on-line collection of British public information films from 1945 to 2006.

If you're my age, you'll remember a lot of these - the clueless holiday makers, Joe and Petunia who used to promote the coastguard service, Rolf Harris on the benefits of teaching your kids to swim, Jimmy Savile clunk clicking, Tufty the road-safety squirrel, Charley the cat, reminding kids to beware of strange men bearing puppies, Patrick Allen, the voice of authority, urging people to save power during the 1973 fuel crisis and the stern warning about putting a rug on your polished floor - you might as well set a man trap... It all looks a bit quaint, patrician and nanny state-ish now, but at least then you could maintain the illusion that there was a benevolent, if stuffy, authority that actually cared whether ordinary people lived or died, an illusion that's looking increasingly questionable.

Mind you, that illusion would have collapsed a hell of a lot sooner if the Protect and Survive films had ever gone out for real. It would have taken more than Patrick Allen's authoritative delivery to persuade the survivors of nuclear Armageddon to keep calm and carry on with neatly wrapping and labelling the dead people in their houses, rather than just screaming 'You Maniacs! You blew it up!'

The whole comedy smelled of the slaughterhouse

You may remember this summer's top story of weird animal cruelty, when an unfortunate Russian donkey found itself being towed through the air on a parasail as an advertising stunt. Well, to top that, here's a parachuting sheep.

This sheep was the victim of warfare, not advertising. During Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in the  mid 1930's Italian troops crossing Ethiopia's Danakil Desert were supplied by air drops. The rations dropped included fresh meat, in the form of live animals on parachutes. In all, seventy-two sheep and two bulls were parachuted to keep the hungry Fascist legions on the march.

There's an undeniable element of cruel comedy here although, as operation sheep drop was devised by evil Fascists, the whole comedy smelled of the slaughterhouse.* Even if you don't care about the fate of a terrified creature in what was not a naturally tenable position for a sheep, some of the other stuff the Fascists were dropping wasn't remotely funny - not unless you were Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator's son, who thought dropping bombs on people was hilarious:

We arrived upon them unobserved and immediately dropped our load of explosives. I remember that one group of horsemen gave me the impression of a budding rose as the bombs fell in their midst. It was exceptionally good fun and they were easy to hit as we were not too high up. They offered a perfect target.

Quick biographical note - Vittorio Mussolini scuttled off to Argentina after World War Two, returning to Italy after the all the fuss died down. He lived on until 1997, dying in Rome at the ripe old age of 81. His niece, Alessandra Mussolini, is currently a member of the European Parliament, and leads an Italian neo-fascist party. Memorials to the Fascist war criminals survive to this day.

By accident or design, the Fascist aviators also managed to bomb ambulances belinging to the Swedish Red Cross.
Not content with dropping convectional bombs, Fascist planes also dropped mustard gas bombs and powdered chemicals which blinded, choked and caused skin burns. About 15,000 people are estimated to have been victims of this chemical warfare.


In between dropping sheep, high-explosive bombs and poison gas, the ever-busy Fascists also found time to throw live human beings out of flying planes - unlike sheep, these human beings didn't have the benefit of parachutes. This was General Graziani's novel way of executing captured guerrillas.


 Parachuting sheep article from The Atlantic, via.

* phrase stolen from Josef Škvorecký's magnificent novel, "The Engineer of Human Souls".

Cocoa, art and irony

From the nation that brought you spherical houses comes another tasty slice of strangeness in the shape of the Droste Effect:

The Droste effect is a Dutch term for a specific type of recursive picture.

An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of the image within itself in a recursive manner.

In theory, the picture in picture effect continues deeper into the picture ad infinitum, but it really only goes as far as the image resolution will allow while still being visible, but it still has the feeling of being never ending....

The effect is named after a particular image that appeared in various forms on the tins and boxes of Droste cocoa powder, one of the main Dutch brands.

It displays a nurse carrying a serving tray with a cup of hot chocolate and a box of Droste cocoa depicting the same image...

The brand’s effect, maintained for decades, became a household notion. Reportedly, poet and columnist Nico Scheepmaker introduced wider usage of the term in the late 1970’s

In the 1950’s, one of the famous graphic artisits Maurits Cornelis Escher.C. Escher took the Droste effect to another level with his incredible drawings, and mapped images to a spiral.

Click here for images of the Droste Effect in action.

Meanwhile, breaking news from the World Memory Championships, being held in London. According to a report overheard on the BBC World Service, one of the British contenders for the title of World Memory Champion always wears a lucky hat during memory competitions. Sadly, he forgot to bring it along this year...