It may be bigger than Sutton Hoo, but presumably it is qualitatively different, in that this is a hoard comprising various pieces of plunder gathered piecemeal from hither and yon, whereas Sutton Hoo was a careful burial of presumably meaningful (to the buryee) selected artefacts, complete with outline of ship.
@87 - "boiling a kid (baby goat kind) in its mother's milk" - for some reason I long ago heard or got the idea that this was some sort of metaphor along the lines of not asking a mother to testify against her child. Why mention the mother otherwise - is it the boiling-in-goatmilk or boiling in something from-the-mother that is important?
@97 and others - "Nicholas was less than perfectly correct"
Yes, I didn't mean to start a subthread with my sloppy lack of research. What I was getting at was essentially that an airframe design (with the engines in the wings) that first flew in 1949 and suffered some bad crashes in the early 50s is still going 60 years later, albeit much developed, and in some high-end military capacity, not simply as an old heritage DC-3 (a type my father also flew, in the 50s).
Nimrods have been doing non-submarine stuff in Afghanistan, which is where one of them blew up and crashed a few years ago.
Blimps were also thought to be fairly fragile in the face of nuclear weapons, as indicated by this series of tests.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has the Hindenburg III docking at the Empire State Building.
@20 "highly flammable doped-fabric skin"
I saw a TV documentary that said it was material similar to what's in a shuttle solid rocket booster.
As a literary footnote, Nevil Shute was Deputy Chief Engineer of the R100 airship project under Sir Barnes "Dambusters Bouncing Bomb" Wallis. The private R100 was cancelled when the government-funded R101 crashed in 1930.
Shute became a fixed-wing aircraft designer in the 30s and later a novelist and his No Highway (filmed with James Stewart) involved a metal-fatigue-downs-new-airliner story that prefigured by a few years what happened in real life to the first jet airliner, the Comet, in the early 50s. His post-nuclear-apocalypse On The Beach was also filmed.
The Comet recovered, after a fashion (my father flew them in the mid-60s) and a development of it is still going in the form of the Nimrod, the British version of AWACs.
Ellen Asher @ 150: The London bookstore that used to shelve books by publisher was Foyle's on Charing Cross Road.
I remember that - I used to be a publisher's rep in there in the early 80s, with Prentice Hall. Originally, as I recall, most books were shelved by subject with a few big publishers also able to buy a bookshelf with a name headboard; so McGraw Hill and Wiley and so on got one. We also had a dedicated window we hand to change every month. Also, we had to stock-check the shelves ourselves; not just our dedicated shelves, but all over the shop wherever our books might get to. So I spent a couple of days a week in Foyles, but it was a bigger territory as a single shop than all of Scotland put together.
After a while, and seeing it as some kind of money-earner, more and more shelves were turned over to publishers' shelving. One effect was to clear out one of the charms of Foyles; that poor stock control (I remember a set of volumes that had obviously been sitting around for at least 10 years because they were priced in pre-decimal currency) which meant people liked to browse for odd forgotten stuff. With publishers' shelving, the publishers had more reason to clear out old stock.
On the Ballard front, BBC Radio 4's obit programme, Last Word, has just done him (though it isn't on Listen Again, at least not yet). Contributions from Brian Aldiss, Beatrice Ballard (herself a BBC TV exec producer) and David Cronenberg. Plus Ballard himself saying he was perfectly happy with being called an sf writer, as he also says in his autobiography.
Serge @5 - Michael Collins's autobiographical account of his time in Apollo, Carrying the Fire, is well worth reading. Apparently written by him unghosted (though presumably with some editor's involvement). He comes across as having a dry sense of humour; also, I remember the LIFE issue for Apollo II at the time, with a pic of him at home with his wife reading a big fat history of something.
The command module pilots of 8 (Lovell), 9 (Scott) and 10 (Young) all led missions to the moon (13, 15 and 16 respectively) - I gather Collins in his turn was offered the command of 17 but decided to pack it in (so instead the lunar module pilot from 10, Cernan, got the job).
@95 - my gateway SF book was Arthur C Clarke's "Islands in the Sky", spotted when I was about 7 or 8 in the shelves at the house of one of my father's colleagues when my parents were round there for a drink sometime in 1965 or so. I can remember kneeling on the floor reading the first few pages.
My father (and his colleague) were airline pilots. How my father got into flying was a bit of a butterfly moment.
In early 1940 he joined the British army in the Somerset Light Infantry and became a corporal. In time he applied for an officer training course; he also applied for a transfer to the RAF, aiming to go on whatever came up first. One evening he went to get his platoon's post. The warrant officer (or whoever) said, ah, while you're here, here's your weekend pass, which was valid only from 7am the next day.
As my father was going to spend the w/e with his aunts, who lived nearby, he delivered the mail and then naughtily left the camp. That night there was a flap on - either some kind of invasion scare or just a drill, I forget. The whole base turned out to man roadblocks - but of course my father was AWOL.
When he showed up again he was put on some kind of charge. His army OTC application was then accepted, and he would have gone on it but because of the charge he couldn't. Then the RAF acceptance came in too. So when his period of disgrace was up, he had a choice, and he plumped for the RAF.
He went to Canada in 1941 and learned to fly, then stayed till 1944 as an instructor - so he had a relatively safe war, finally seeing action (in Coastal Command) only in the last 6 months. Who knows what would have happened to him in the army for 5 years, and whatever, I'd never have been born. (As a coincidence, Arthur C Clarke was born in Somerset too, and in the same week as my father. And joined the RAF.)
Xopher @ 98 - "If any foreign head of government did what he has done, they would be afraid to leave their own country, as Robert Mugabe quite justifiably is"
I don't know if you're aware, but several years ago Peter Tatchell, a gay rights activist, tried to make a citizen's arrest on Mugabe in London while he, Mugabe, was there on a private shopping trip. The police arrested Tatchell and escorted Mugabe to his destination. Tatchell tried again in Brussels, and this time was beaten up by Mugabe's bodyguards in front of some cameras.
Double entendres-cum-puns have a long history. The 17thC play The Country Wife was not about a married woman living respectably in a rural environment.
One of the rudest double-entendre generators in modern British broadcasting available to all ages is the antidote to panel games I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, where each week presenter Humphrey Lyttleton would pass on some reason why his nubile (and fictional) assistant Samantha had to leave early - one one occasion to see a gentleman friend who kept birds: "He keeps a young chicken, but Samantha says there are also wild breeds there, and she can't wait to see his Woodcock, Pullet and Swallow."
http://www.ivorysky.com/isihac/index.php for more. Some, as the man says, need to be read out loud for full effect.
I'm British and I too had never heard of "box" in terms of female genitalia before. However, we do have the term "lunchbox" to refer to male genitalia, usually deployed - and on one occasion in a libel court - as Linford Christie's lunchbox, Christie being a well-fit sprinter who wore skintight running gear.
Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres is a strip in grown-up comic book Viz, wherein young Finbarr mishears all sorts of innocent terms and phrases as double entendres until the last frame of the strip, generally showing his mother having sex with someone and commenting enthusiastically on it, at which point the eavesdropping Finbarr finds some perfectly innocent meaning for the genuinely sex-dripping terms in use.
Andy Brazil @ 149 - "took steps to cover up the conspiracy they thought existed. This has the advantage of not requiring an actual conspiracy, while explaining the oddity of some of the actions of the players after the event."
This, though it is not about conspiracies per se, reminds me a bit of the Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple", where people take dangerously daft courses of action because they're got the wrong end of various sticks.
dolloch @ 75 - I think the match-move/animator you are looking for is Dale Myers; see his website esp the http://www.jfkfiles.com/jfk/html/intro.htm page.
The TV programme his work features in may be Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination - Beyond Conspiracy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387490/ which has Dale Myers appearing; I guess it could be some other recut version. I remember seeing this in the UK.
Janetl @ 46 - I'm British and I think I only hear "knoll" deployed in terms of JFK in normal speech. However, a few miles away from me is an offical one, a 450 ft high hill calledBrent Knoll, a one-time Iron Age fort that the Romans built on as well.
And I've met Photoshop and ILM chap John Knoll a couple of times.
novaolis @ #14 "But is that really where you were? reminds me of a cartoon I saw around about the 20th anniversary. The guy is in his armchair in his living room watching the anniversary programmes on TV and says "I remember where I was when I heard about JFK being shot. I was right here in this chair watching TV".
I read William Manchester's "The Death of a President" a few years ago, which I found detailed, relentless and gripping. Presumably it is dismissed by the conspiracy crowd as it has no wacky ideas that I recall.
Daniel Klein at #75 -
Has anyone ever tried to explain *how* this Great War was to end all wars?
I think HG Wells was the one who first came up with the idea, in The War That Will End War (downloadable text available), a book first published in October 1914 and so written early in the war: "At the moment of writing the war has not lasted many days, great battles by land and sea alike impend".
His notion was repeated later by Woodrow Wilson. HG Wells' idea was that, since the war has now started, we need to make sure an absolute final and irrevocable resolution is made and the world is remade, and there will be no need for wars in the future - "we face these horrors to make an end of them". Lloyd George was supposed to have said 'this war will end all war, until the next war to end all war', or something like that.
But back to HG -
"This is already the vastest war in history. It
is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a
war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age."
And he says we know what is coming, we have no delusions -
"Through this war we have to march, through
pain, through agonies of the spirit worse than
pain, through seas of blood and filth. We
English have not had things kept from us. We
know what war is ; we have no delusions. We have
read books that tell us of the stench of battlefields,
and the nature of wounds, books that Germany
suppressed and hid from her people. And we face
these horrors to make an end of them.
"There shall be no more Kaisers, there shall be
no more Krupps, we are resolved. That foolery
shall end! And not simply the present belligerents
must come into the settlement.
"All America, Italy, China, the Scandinavian
Powers, must have a voice in the final readjust-
ment, and set their hands to the ultimate guarantees.
I do not mean that they need fire a
single shot or load a single gun. But they must
come in. And in particular to the United States
do we look to play a part in that pacification of
the world for which our whole nation is working,
and for which, by the thousand, men are now
laying down their lives."
Wells' last book was Mind At The End Of Its Tether and came out in 1945; apparently he thought it might be a good idea if humanity was succeeded by some other species.
#58 Jon Baker - "The old man [...] slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one". That Owen poem is read out over the ending of the movie Regeneration, based on the first of Pat Barker's trio of novels about WWI.
Regeneration is set in Craiglockhart Hospital, where shell-shocked and otherwise mentally damaged officers were sent to be treated. One of those was Wilfred Owen, who went back to the front and was killed by a machine-gun crossing a canal a week before the Armistice (his mother famously receiving the telegram as the bells were ringing out for the end of the war).
Another poet there and in the novel & movie was #68's Siegfried Sassoon, who had already won a Military Cross but publicly denounced the war as now being a war of aggression, not liberation. Instead of court-martialling him his superiors declared him ill and packed him off to be "cured". He too went back to the front, eventually, and was physically wounded and died in 1967 instead of 1918.
It's a relatively low-key and non-dramatic movie, which suits me. There's a fair amount of talking and the all-encompassing war environment is there in the uniforms and off stage and in everyone's thoughts (and the occasional flashback). Worth seeing.
On some MSS of Owen's poems - which he only started to write at the hospital - you can see some of Sassoon's pencil comments and suggestions.
Robert "I, Claudius" Graves, a friend of Sassoon's who collaborated in sending him to hospital, also makes an appearance; his autobiography
Goodbye To All That written at 33 is well worth reading.
Wendy Bradley #53 - I saw it on TV only, I'm afraid; I was in London 10 days ago but not today. You and they were lucky with the sunlight! Henry Allingham (112) wanted to stand and lay his own wreath. He wouldn't let go of it so his minder could place it for him, as the other two had done, but it was too much and eventually four people including a clergyman got it off him and laid just before 11 o'clock.
Being as I live in Somerset and Harry Patch (110) is a local chap, tonight we had a half hour programme on the local BBC1 about his trip a few weeks ago back to his stamping grounds in Flanders, presumably his last. He unveiled a small marker at the point he and his comrades crossed a river 91 years ago on an attack, and then went to the nightly 8pm service at the Menin Gate, where everyone clapped him. There he made a point of saying that we should remember the dead from both sides of the line, and he visited a German war cemetery as well as a British one. The Beeb programme also showed the Poet Laureate's poem for him, the Five Acts of Harry Patch, being set to music by the Master of the Queen's Music.
Although he didn't speak about the war to anyone, including his wife, until a historian (who helped him write his autobiography last year) contacted him at age 100, he has talked a lot more recently, I suppose realising his de facto responsibility to represent the soldiers of the Western Front, all of whom are now dead apart from him.
His life is a bit surreal now, I should think, what with TV and poets and books. He earned enough from his autobiography to fund an RNLI inshore lifeboat! And he is often at events and on telly. But WWI was not where he made his first TV appearance - that was about 20 years ago, when he guided engineers round the underground quarries of Combe Down, near Bath, which he had played in as a boy in the 1900s and about which most information - including the existence of one of them - had been lost.
"War is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings" he says in this Points West YouTube from his previous trip to Flanders in 2007 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=j7peTBVprtY
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