I Was Having Trouble Coming Up With A Title
You see, this Intro is going to move away from the world of manglement, alien invaders, comics and suchlike to the much more grounded theme of Japanese kaiju films, which feature enormous hostile beasts generally knocking the stuffing out of Tokyo and the Japanese Self-Defence Forces. Their get-out clause for the existence of these unlikely monsters is that they're 'Prehistoric', because that way you can't prove that they didn't exist back in the late Paleozoic. Art!
GAMMERA!
Yes yes yes, I know the convention is that it's spelt 'Gamera' but we're going with that South Canadian-dubbed version for reasons you will see. Gammera is a prehistoric turtle of at least 100 tons mass, so Conrad's face pales at the ghastly intestinal convolutions that create sufficient methane to propel a 100 ton creature through the air. Art!
 |
| Dateline 1966 |
Also capable of walking upright. To Conrad, it more closely resembles an Ankylosaurus. Might just be me.
No, it was not a product of Toho Studios. Rather, it was from Daiei Studios, whom you may not have heard of, as they went bust in 1971. Their finances were apparently utterly chaotic, even with 'Gammera' proving a big and consistent hit. As with any kaiju that had a long production run, it got more sympathetic over time, moving away from being a mere brawler and more an ally of Hom. Sap. Art!
Studio logo
For those of you wincing in anticipation of a detailed breakdown of all 12 'Gammera' films, rejoice! because that's not happening. At least not today.
Because, of course - obviously! - all that preamble is not what this Intro is about. For today we are looking at another ancient mystery from '70*'. I skipped over 'Moses and the Exodus' as it sounds deadly dull, whereas 'Sodom and Gommorah' sounds a lot more lively. Now you know why that choice of title, because if you slur your words - gin or too much sun will do that - the two words do sound similar.
First, a little background information. Art!
This is 'fire and brimstone' NOT a HIMARS strike. Just to be clear.
Consulting my trusty 'Brewer's', these were two cities of antiquity, renowned for their wickedness and immorality, especially Sodom, whose male folk were addicted to the vice of a<redacted to remain SFW>ex, and from where the terms 'Sodomy' and 'Sodomite' are derived. Art!
Only the twisted mind of Eric Powell could create such brilliance
Gomorrah seems to have sinned against the laws of hospitality and good taste, being a boiling-bed - like a hot-bed except worse - of adultery, pride and greed. So! Both were destroyed in true Old Testament style, by being hit with fire and brimstone from the skies and thoroughly wiped out.
Rather than debate the morals of either city, '70' concentrates on whether they actually existed back in 3500 BC or not. There is extensive archaeological evidence for cities being present in the locations where they were supposed to have been. Art!
The Dead Sea itself is situated on a continental rift, meaning that tectonic activity has been relatively common over the eons, causing earthquake damage, which might well obliterate a city and be thought of at the time as the actions of a wrathful deity. To date, no excavations have revealed any ruins that would match the age of either Sodom or Gomorrah, not even, as has been suggested, at the bottom of the Dead Sea.
However - a word you might expect to crop up at this point - the story isn't complete yet. In the Biblical re-telling, Abraham's nephew Lot and his family escaped from Sodom before the brimstone bombardment, heading for the immediate sanctuary of Zoar. That's Lot and his two daughters fleeing from the night bombing attack on Sodom, as his wife very unwisely turns to look back. Wifey, if an ANGEL tells you not to look back AT ALL EVER EVER EVER, it is wise to follow their advice, not take it with a pinch of salt. Art!
You might complain that this is only a mosaic, not the city itself. Sorry, ancient Zoar has left little of it's earlier self intact. Art!
 |
| Fixer-upper |
The modern Jordanian city of Ghor al-Safi has grown up where Zoar used to be. Hot ticket visiting sites are the excavations of the 11th-century sugar factory THANK YOU DIABETES cross that one off the bucket list, and, appropriately enough for an Intro about two of the wickedest places on the planet, the 'Museum At The Lowest Place On Earth'. It may not mean the same in Arabic as in English is all I can say. Art!
And that's your Lot.
A Quick Way To Boost The Count
Wheel on the Commentary about that ballfoot game between the teams I don't care about in a sport I don't follow and matches that I mock.
Noisy Neighbour
18:25 17 Aug
£2.287 billion spent since Fergie, £202 million this season, and yet same old same Utd! Devoid of any footballing nous! Arsenal didn’t even get out of First gear!
By 'Fergie' they do not mean Sarah Ferguson, whom I'm unsure is anything any longer associated with Kingie et al. They mean Sir Alec Ferguson, the dour Scottish manager nicknamed 'Bacon-chops' for his florid yet teetotal complexion - these facts courtesy Gavin, my old manager at Connexions, not thanks to any insight I have into the game.
£2,287,000,000 is an awful lot of money by anyone's standards!
Also, I just had to stick this one in here.
MrMojoRisin
18:25 17 Aug
"The more things change, the more they stay the same".
Sean
18:26 17 Aug
"The War Illustrated Edition 211 22nd July 1945"
I had to check and see if we had any more photographs left from this edition, and we did. Art!
Conrad is unsure why these photos are in this edition, unless the editor was short of items, as they are from March 1945 and Europe, where the war had been over for two months by the time this edition was published. They illustrate the monstrous British 'Grand Slam' ten-ton bomb, designed to really, absolutely, finally, totally destroy your target whether you hit it spot on or miss by half a mile. The picture at top shows one of the specially-adapted Lancaster bombers at the moment of release, as by the next frame it would be out of shot; this is because once they shed their 22,000 pound payload, they leapt into the air.
Middle shot is of the strike on the Arnsberg Viaduct, where you can see all the craters from prior unsuccessful attacks. Art!
A bit beyond a fixer-upper
The bottom picture shows puny humans in relation to the Slam.
From This Angle -
Yesteryon we commented on the most inaptly-named missile ever, the Ukrainian 'Flamingo', which I neglected to say was stuffed to bursting with electronic countermeasures, and electronic counter-countermeasures, and probably a whole lot of other electronic trickery. Art!
Aha. The 'Flamingo' name comes from an incorrectly painted batch of pre-production units, which were pink. The aim is to ramp up production in October - only five weeks away shock horror! - to seven missiles per day.
The kicker here is that these are home-produced weapons that Ukraine can direct wherever the Hades it wants - no foreign permission or refusal needed. Yes, I'm looking at you, Jake 'The Brake' Sullivan.
There you go. Saturday's blog done by Thursday. What a busy little beaver I am.
* "The 70 Great Mysteries Of The Ancient World" which I am typing out only once.
No comments:
Post a Comment