I Thought I'd Lead With A Pun
It relates to that earlier post about how I was re-watching "The Longest Day", because it's not the real thing, but it is illustrative of what happened. I suppose the two things absent that might jar with a modern audience are that there's so little blood (have to watch your ratings) and tracers (can't have the real thing or you risk killing your cast). Conrad thinks the only black and white film he's ever seen that managed tracers effectively was "The Dambusters". Which has Richard Todd in it -
| They bust dams! |
- as does TLD.
Okay! Your Humble Scribe has been taking photographs of the film and would like to begin with one that would have been impossible to take in real life. Art?
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| Those wooden poles might be beech. |
In the foreground you can see one of the Beach Control Teams, tasked with directing the landings. These were big organisations, numbering in the thousands. In the background to starboard there is a Ford truck, a Canadian Military Pattern one that the British Americans churned out by the thousands. Behind it is a tank and nerd alert nerd alert! the hideous truth courtesy Mister Hand it's the WRONG KIND! From the shape of the turret it's a South Canadian M4 Sherman, with the upgunned 76mm gun (sorry about the metric nonsense).
This represents piper Bill Millin, piper to Lord 'Shimi' Lovatt, leader of the 4th Special Service Brigade. As is obvious, Bill was armed only with a set of bagpipes and came under the sights of several Teuton snipers, who forbore to open fire on what was apparently a raving lunatic, creating the most appalling sonic horror* on the battlefield. Maybe apocryphal, yet a great story.
Shall we continue? Yes we shall. Art?
That above shows Teuton reinforcements heading towards the beaches. Tellingly, you can see they move by foot as their levels of motorisation tended to nil, unless they could steal French vehicles. They have also not yet encountered Allied air-power, or they'd be a lot more circumspect about moving so close together in daylight. Again, this is not a picture that could be taken in real life, given the vantage point and Herr Goebbels wish to have Teuton propaganda big them up.
One last photo. Art!
Here we see David Campbell, RAF pilot, shot down and badly injured. The reason he's grinning like a loon is because 1) he's about to get a fag ("Cigarette" for our South Canadian readers) 2) he's off his box on morphine and 3) wielding that formidable Webley Mk. VI, he's just slain an interfering Teuton officer who came to finish him off.
I think we've about covered everything - hang on, hang on - those trees the Teutons are marching towards - surely some of them must be beeches?
Motley! Bring me my British Book Of Trees, and quickly. I do not wish to have to bark again.
Smashing It
As per usual, Conrad has no idea why the memory of competitive piano smashing popped up in his mind, just that it did. I seem to recall that it got mentioned in some educational childhood magazine I used to get, and I have never recalled it in the 49 years since. The mind, hmmmm? a peculiar thing. Art?
As you can see, several pianos were seriously damaged in the making of this video. The idea was to smash the upright so thoroughly that the remnants could be passed through a letter box. Sounds like nihilistic fun!
It seems to have been a phenomenon of the Sixties, when radio and television had utterly usurped the place of the humble upright in people's homes, with one person asserting that central heating was the culprit for ousting the piano from it's entertainment throne; central heating caused their frames to warp and they became unplayable. I wonder - does beech play any part in piano construction?
So thousands of helpless pianos were destroyed in competitions, until they were all gone. The end. Art?
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| RIPiano |
O Marketa!
Once more we venture into the subtleties of the Czech language, with our favourite Angry Young Czech, though she has hopefully improved in spirit since Monday (everyone is more cheerful after Monday). What unusual yet useful Czech word do you have for us today, Marketa?
"Batuzkar": someone who goes hiking or camping with a backpack.
I see. Your Humble Scribe has been unable to add the salting of diacritical marks that the original Czech possesses, though the concept comes across enough. In This Sceptred Isle not only do hikers and campers use these accessories, so do spotty males with questionable hygiene whom you encounter at wargames conventions**.
| "Hey, this isn't Salute!" |
"Salute", as you are probably entirely innocent of information about it, is one of, if not the, largest wargame conventions in the UK. It was postponed this year thanks to Covid-19, but expects to be back in 2021. Art?
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| Battles and Batuzkar |
Finally -
Once again we don't need a lot to hit the Compositional Ton. I'm not going to do another horror film spoof; they always over-run and I've only got 15 minutes of lunchtime left. I will let you know that, once again, I've been re-watching "Forbidden Planet" for the who-knows-how-many-times (certainly in the dozens and dozens) and a couple of things occurred to me.
Firstly, Morbius proclaims that the Krell's Great Machine is a cube twenty miles on each side, with 7,800 levels. That means it covers 156,000 square miles. So in order to explore the whole thing, Ol' Morby would have to cover 22 square miles per day to have sussed the whole thing out by the time Captain Adams arrived.
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| "Feet - hurt ..." |
This is quite besides the problems of covering distance to reach the more remote parts of the Great Machine, nor of having to carry food and drink.
Secondly, when trapped in the Krell laboratory by the Id Monster, why didn't our protagonists simply hop in the Krell shuttle and zip to safety?
| Or you could hang around and get toasted. |
And with that, we are done!
* To Teuton ears. Conrad loves loves loves the pipes.
** A truism. And for Conrad, with his utter lack of smell, to notice - I shall let you draw your own conclusions.
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