The Past Is Another Country

 - They Did Things Differently There
And that's as poetic and reflective as your flinty-hearted (yet gifted) author is going to get tonight.
     I'm aware that it's almost a quote from a poem by someone or other but, frankly, I can't be bothered to find out whom.  I give you permission to trawl the internet if you so wish.  Me, I've got a lot of beer to get through; dangerous poisonous exploding beer that has to be disposed of in a safe and responsible manner, thank you very much.

Conrad's interesting angle on drinking*

     "What brought this on?" I hear you say.  Also "Get on with it, we've got Sunday night telly to watch."
     Really!  Audiences nowadays.  Okay, I was minded by mentioning matte painting yesterday as used in films of yesteryear, where incredibly talented painters would create a background on glass that would be used by the film-makers; usually where the real thing would be too difficult or expensive or time-consuming or all three.  Therefore frequently used in science fiction films; creating a life-size Death Star would probably tax a studio's resources a bit too much.
     Anyway!

There you go.

     Sticking with the Star Wars theme, here's a bit from one of the films, can't remember which, and this whole thing is actually a painting on glass.  The blacked-out section bottom left is where the filmed insert would go - IIRC an exotic local life-form gobbling up another slightly-less exotic life-form.
     The level of detail that the painters went to is shown by this take:

Painstaking

     That chap is using a loupe to get the accuracy correct.  We'll come back to that!
     I can't leave without leaving a link to the Star Wars Matte Painting site that I copied these pictures from:

http://oneperfectshotdb.com/news/the-matte-paintings-of-the-star-wars-universe/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tarantinos_advice_to_get_the_best_performance_from_actors_the_tool_every_filmmaker_should_use_dealing_with_non_events_in_the_producer_log_and_more

     Well worth a glimpse.  Thank you Isaac Bashevis Singer.
     Now, since I don't have a lot of notes to work off tonight, I shall also include a couple of other matte shots, from "The Thing", where a trio of our American heroes discover the crashed alien saucer:

The studio shot

With the matte added-in

     A little cheaper than building the thing*!

May The Lord Spare Us From Revisionists
Currently your humble scribe is watching "You Only Live Twice" and waiting for Nick Hughes to come up with an interesting, subtle twist on the plot and/or characters.  Come on, Nick, I'm back in work tomorrow!
     "What is the old sponge on about now?" I hear you ask, also "Gosh, isn't "Broadchurch" more entertaining that hearing Conrad waffle on!"  YES THANK YOU! I can find out who your ISP is, you know, and -
     Enough tangential matter.  Let us get back to YOLT**.  The film was made and released in 1967, making it nearly 50 years old, and a good twenty years before the VCR market arrived.  We are now in the digital age, however, which immediately gives licence to an army of people out there who have sufficient time to look over a film on DVD and remark on what they see as MAJOR FLAWS IN THE FILM!!!

Nobody pointed out that Sigmund Freud would have LOVED this film.

     What they perhaps fail to realise is that these films were seen on the cinema screen at the time, and a few years later on television.  Strange as it may seem to you out there now, with access to Youtube and Netflix and <ahem> not-very-legal Torrent websites, we of the public did not purchase private copies of these films that we could run in our home cinema camera system, a frame at a time, making over Ten Million Frames for YOLT, in order to pick on vanishingly short scenes or discrepancies.

"The buttons on his jacket have been buffed with - THE WRONG POLISH!"

     Not only that, as Conrad discovered in his analysis of the Goofs for "Where Eagles Dare", a third of the time these baffoons are completely wrong.
     "The Bell 47 helicopter had a top speed of only 105 miles per hour", crows one commentator.  "Whereas the Wallis autogyro had a top speed of 125 m.p.h. so James Bond could have outrun the hostile helicopters -"
     A ten second search on Google reveals the Wallis (a.k.a. "Little Nellie") had a top speed of 100 m.p.h.
     Bah!

Little Nellie.
This girl can look after herself.

Hubris: The Sin Of Pride
I think this has Greek roots.  Once again, I can't be bothered to check.  If I recall my Greek literature of ancient times, if you as a human exhibited an excess of pride, it was bound to call down retribution from the gods.  They were quite snide about this, to be honest; when they could have let well alone they just had to get a bit of cutting-down-to-size in.  Olympian gods, eh?
     "Greek? Pride?  Where are you going with this, Conrad?" I hear you call.  

The stuff on the right, ta very much

     Take a look at that picture on the right, as the caption above very sensibly recommends.  "Legendary"?  I have never heard of them.  Conrad does not claim to be omniscient, yet if these people were so legendary surely he would have an inkling about them?  A smidgeon?  A tad? A <Mister Hand declares too many silly synonyms used>

That's Not All
Conrad, displaying hubris himself, decided to tackle The Times crossword, fondly believing that a couple of weeks mental exercise on The Metro's version had befitted him for this, the Rolls Royce of crosswords.

Enlarged for your viewing clarity

     Sadly untrue!  I had to resort to - er - basically cheating by looking stuff up on the internet.  For 10 clues, meaning I got 19 on my own.
     Hubris (4 Down "Bases planted around state in arrogance" 6 letters) meant I had forgotten that you need a couple of weeks to find out how the crossword-compiler's mind worked.


* Do you get it?  Do you?  Do - oh you do.
** Which would be a great name for an energy drink.  If it ever gets marketed, I want a percentage!