Oh my God, there's an episode guest-hosted by Brian Blessed.

When you think about it, he was pretty much born to host a show about current headlines, because, as he demonstrates during his HIGNFY appearance, he's the only person in the UK who can pronounce the ones in really big type correctly:

"Newspapers have been doing their bit to calm motorists with headlines like PETROL: WE'RE RUNNING OUT!"

"This week, a very stupid posh boy attempted to re-create a scene from The Italian Job by driving his brand new Mini up some stairs at Bristol University. According to the Sun, he caused the radiator to blow up, the two front tyres to burst, and both airbags to explode. Whereas anyone knows, he was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off."
- Tom Baker, later in that same episode

"Good evening, and welcome to Have I Got News For You. I used to be Jon Pertwee."
- guest host Tom Baker, series 36, episode 3

I don't know who sent me the poster reading TELL IT TO MY GIANT ROBOT, but whoever you are, give yourself five points. That's very funny.

Current Mood: amused

Thirteen years ago... right around now, I was having a really bad time.

Although, admittedly, not as bad a time as the dear friend who had just died, unless you look at death as a gateway to some kind of sublime experience that beats being alive all hollow, which I don't.

That's probably why I'm not asleep, even though I really should be.

It's not funny, but, every year I tell myself, No, I'm not going to observe the anniversary of Derek's death. That's morbid and lame and he wouldn't approve. I'm going to do something to mark his birthday instead. And then every year I manage to omit the latter - which is especially sad when you consider it's only six days after my own - and pretty much every year I'm vividly aware of today. Or rather tonight, since my part of it happened on the part of the night of the 15th that's technically the morning of the 16th. Maybe this particular year it's because I've never been more keenly aware, in general, of how badly the world still needs him than I've been for the last few months. The bleak desperation of life in this dreadful year of somebody else's Lord two thousand and nine would've been very much eased for me, at least, if he were still among us.

Mainly because he'd be President.

When I came in after clearing away some snow in the yard yesterday, I took off my gloves and sort of casually discarded them into a box that happens to be standing on the corner of the couch out on my front porch. One of them stayed in the box; the other fell out and onto the arm of the couch. The next time I went out onto the porch, I noticed it sitting there and... well...

( Largish photo behind here. )

It occurred to me last night that someone somewhere in this great country (a cell phone customer in Louisiana, apparently, according to a quick search carried out via the miracle of the Internet) has the telephone number (504) 292-4450. I wonder who that person is, and whether he or she realizes how awesome that phone number is.

"And finally tonight, a suicide bomber had a lucky escape when his device failed to detonate. Apparently he shouted 'Death to the infidel,' and when nothing happened he began punching passers-by, shouting, 'This will have to do.' Looks like this suicide bomber will be around for some time to come. And now here's Tracy with the murders."
- from Bill Bailey's theoretical inverted newscast in which the whimsical stories are told with deadly seriousness at the beginning, and the dark and violent news is handled with the lighter touch at the end, Tinselworm

"Goddammit, Tesla, people are going to stop believing these cockamamie cover stories eventually."

Is there anything funnier, in a motorsporting context, than a bendy bus in an uncontrollable oscillation? I don't think there is.

"Net result: misery."
- Richard Hammond, after enumerating a long list of airport service vehicles and the different, often stacking ways in which each one can delay a flight

"It's dawn here at Stonehenge. A sense of mystery prevails. And a light drizzle. I want to know why they went to the trouble of putting a pile of rocks in an empty field in Wiltshire. And why it still attracts over a million visitors every year. And why did they build it next to the A303?"
- Bill Bailey, Bill Bailey's Stonehenge

"Now I know what you're thinking: Bill's got done for speeding again, and I'm having to do a bit of community service. Well, no, I'm doing this willingly. I mean, how often do you get to mow the lawn round Stonehenge?"

( It's a late-fall afternoon in a supermarket in rural Maine...  )

Current Music: Electric Light Orchestra - Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor

Current Mood: no shit, Sherlock
Current Music: Bad Religion - Los Angeles Is Burning

I saw something today that reminded me, indirectly, of one of my favorite bits of information about the history of war at sea. Oddly enough, it's not from World War II, which is sort of my war of choice in terms of studying history, but rather from the first World War (1914-1918, known at the time, since no one knew there would be a sequel, as the Great War).

WWI saw a lot of innovations make their first appearance in warfare, including quite a few things that would return in improved form the second time around. The airplane had been around for only a little more than ten years when the war began, and hadn't seen extensive military use before. The machine gun saw truly widespread deployment, and proved wrong all those starry-eyed military strategists who thought they would somehow make war more humane(!) and reduce casualties(!). The tank was actually invented during the war. And, at sea, there were submarines.

The submarine was considered a dirty, underhanded, ungentlemanly weapon at the time, so naturally the Germans used the hell out of them and the British were very annoyed. With their country utterly dependent on seaborne trade to survive, much less prosecute the war, the British found themselves at the forefront of antisubmarine warfare development almost from the get-go. Eventually, in the Second World War, this would result in seminal British inventions like ASDIC (known to the Americans as "sonar" and still very much in use today) and the hedgehog. During World War I, however, things were a bit... simpler.

How much simpler?

One of the strategies devised by the people in charge of defending the coast of the UK against the Kaiser's submarines was to station pensioners in rowboats all around the coast of Britain. These men would be equipped with the following items:

1) A sack; and
2) A hammer.

When they sighted a periscope, indicating that a Boche submarine was eyeballing the coast, perhaps planning a dastardly raid on one of the King's seaports, they were instructed to row over to it, throw the sack over the head (thus blinding the periscope), then belabor it with the hammer in hopes of damaging the delicate optics within and putting the 'scope permanently out of action before the Krauts could submerge. The submarine would then be obliged to return to Germany for repairs, putting it out of action (it was to be hoped) for many weeks. Oddly, no one seemed to consider it likely that the crew of a German submarine thus assaulted might be moved to, let us say, surface and riddle the chap in the rowboat with bullets for his effrontery.

I am not making this up, nor did I get it from some dodgy website. I read it many years ago in a genuine work of naval scholarship (Stealth at Sea: The History of the Submarine by Dan van der Vat, if you're curious). This was their actual plan.

There is no evidence that anyone in a rowboat off the British coast ever actually sighted a German submarine, much less put the sack-and-hammer technique into action, but that was genuinely the gear with which they were issued and seriously what they were told to do with it.

Having thought about it for a couple-three days, I think I've put my finger on what the problem is with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. It's not that some of the cast are less expressive and have narrower dramatic ranges than the original cartoon characters. It's not that the weird Cobra superweapon doesn't make any sense (hell, that's one of the things they got right). It's not that the costumes are lame. It's not that G.I. Joe is a Multinational Special Force. It's not the completely unnecessary long-lost-love subplot or the utterly stupid villain reveal. It's not that Cobra Commander's voice is totally wrong. It's not that Destro sounds like he's from the part of Scotland that's actually in Manchester. (Lots of Scotlands have a south.) It's not the weird conflation of Scarlett and Lady Jaye into a single character. It's not even the utter lack of Shipwreck.

It's that Cobra isn't supposed to be even slightly competent. These guys are supposed to be the boxed wine of international terrorist groups, capable of giving you a nasty headache but not much else. They aren't supposed to have terrifyingly effective nanotechnology. They aren't supposed to have nigh-unbeatable brainwiped super-soldiers. And Cobra Commander is certainly not supposed to be the brains of the operation. I mean, what?

So there it is. It's actually a pretty decent mindless action movie; I even rather like the silly powered armor suits. It's clear that the people making the movie did not, for the most part, fall into the trap of taking their licensed toy property too seriously. So why, given that, did they then go and make the bad guys genuinely sinister and creepy? Cobra's supposed to be the comic relief. Well, them and Shipwreck. And this movie didn't have either one!

Also, no one yelled "Cobraaaaaa!" at any point. Very disappointing.

Earlier I came across the first series of a BBC Radio 4 program called The Museum of Curiosity while searching for more Bill Bailey stuff. It was a panel show in which celebrity guests talked about weird items or concepts that they wanted to recommend for inclusion in this notional museum, and one of the guests in the first episode was the great Brian Blessed. At one point he got to talking about the Tarzan movie he appeared in, and, well... hear it for yourself. I clipped the anecdote out because I knew some of my friends would want to make a ringtone out of it.

This is especially extraordinary if you keep in mind that the classic Tarzan yell from the Johnny Weismuller movies was done by the sound department in post. It was never a sound that an actual human throat was expected to be able to produce.

Current Mood: quite impressed

I've long felt that "Rite Aid" would be a good name for a chain of stores in an urban fantasy/horror setting, only they'd obviously sell stuff that witches and mages need to make ritual summonings and whatnot work properly, rather than cold medicine and Tic Tacs.

Last week I went up to my grandparents' place for Thanksgiving dinner. It's about a two-hour drive, and along the way (if you go by the most obvious route) you pass through Houlton. Which isn't much, but as the last stop on I-95 before the Canadian border it has a largish retail cluster right at the I-95/US 1 interchange, including a *Walmart (as their new signs spell it), a Tim Hortons (naturally, within 1 parsec of Canada), one of those miniature Sears stores that aren't part of a mall and sell car batteries and whatnot, and so forth. And there's a Rite Aid pharmacy.

On Thanksgiving, everything in the vicinity appeared to be closed - even McDonald's - but Rite Aid was open, so I stopped in on the off chance that they had Worcestershire sauce. (They didn't, but never mind.) The sign on the door noted that they were only open until 5 PM on the holiday itself, and inside, it was... forlorn. There was one person working there, and when I arrived she was swamped...

... with a vanload of angry Canadians who wanted to know what the hell was going on with *Walmart and McDonald's and so forth being closed on a Thursday.

"Well, it's Thanksgiving."

"No it isn't! Thanksgiving was in October."

"What?"

That was clearly going to take a while to get resolved, so I roamed out among the shelves, didn't find the condiment I sought, picked up a couple of other small items and a can of iced tea, and then went back to see about getting checked out. While I was shopping, I noticed a man wandering about the aisles with a cellphone to his ear; he was doing that the entire time I was there, and every time he passed within earshot, he was having some variation on exactly the same conversation:

"No, they're closed. Walmart's closed. No. No, they're closed too. Everyplace is closed. I'm at Rite Aid. Walmart's closed. It's Thanksgiving, they're closed."

When I got back to the register, the Canadians had apparently been placated, or at least had surrendered to the inevitability of the situation... and they had apparently decided that, since they'd made a special trip across the border to shop, and had told the Customs people they were going to be shopping, then they were by God not going to leave without doing some shopping - so they had a cart, the only time I've ever seen anyone use a cart at a Rite Aid, full of stuff, heaped up to the level where you would normally see a cart filled to by someone doing a hardcore grocery shop at a supermarket. It was like they'd simply concluded that if they couldn't get to *Walmart and buy what they really wanted, they'd just have to settle for one of everything they carried at Rite Aid. Just completely random-seeming stuff, playing cards, Vagisil, five-dollar DVDs of the kind of kung fu movies where the box says "starring Jackie Chan" when the truth is that he has an 11-second cameo near the end, Xbox games based on games no one in this country plays (wow, that's a great price on EA Sports Madden Super Test Cricket 2005)... it genuinely looked like they'd just gone around scooping things into the basket to make a pile big enough that they wouldn't feel like they'd wasted the trip. Naturally, it took them most of a geological age to check out, since there was only one checkout artist available and she was much more accustomed to the usual sort of two-rolls-of-film-and-a-pack-of-Tic Tacs Rite Aid transaction. And twice while I was standing there waiting the guy with the cellphone drifted by in the background ("no, I'm at Rite Aid, Walmart's closed"). When I finally got to the register myself, a small line had formed behind me, and as I was putting my things on the counter the woman directly behind me leaned in over my shoulder in a deeply impolite manner and asked the cashier, "Why is Walmart closed today?"

World War II ended more than 60 years ago (if you leave aside the administrative quibble about how England and a unified Germany couldn't actually conclude a peace arrangement until there was a unified Germany again, in 1989), and much has been written about the reasons why the Allies won in Europe. Historians say that Germany was ultimately outproduced by the Allied nations' industrial capacity (particularly that of the United States), outmaneuvered by their military leaders, and outfought by their soldiers.

The truth, as always, is far simpler than the professionals would have you believe. I wouldn't know about it myself if I hadn't run across it by accident, but the photographic evidence is there, plain as day, completely irrefutable. It only took someone finally putting together the pieces that were there in plain sight the whole time to make it clear that the gigantic struggle of good versus evil that was the war in Europe ultimately came down to a lone contest of skill and daring, a single combat between two extraordinary men.

This, then, is the story, told in two stark and simple photographs, of the battle that truly decided the Second World War.

( Here they are; one arguably NSFW, so, a cut. )

And there it is. Now you know the truth. Now you know how close the world came to utter disaster... and what a great and courageous leader Winston Churchill truly was. Not for nothing was he voted the greatest Briton in history a few years ago.

Current Mood: scholarly