Looked up to see a Lancaster, a Spitfire, and a Hurricane in formation fly straight overhead. They then proceeded to land at Coventry airport. Quite a surprise as there didn't appear to be any kind of air show on.. pretty magical!
Must have been the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. Now those guys have cool jobs. I'm learning to fly at Biggin Hill and one day last weekend I arrived for a flying lesson just after they'd landed. The Hurricane was being pushed into a hangar, but there wasn't a hangar big enough for the Lancaster, so it had been parked at the 29 end of Runway 11/29. So as I'm taxiing out to the holding point for runway 21, I cross 11/29 and there to my right, maybe ten yards away is a Lancaster, just dwarfing the plane I'm in. I'd never seen one that close to before. Pretty impressive.
It was just a visit a month or so prior to the Biggin Hill Air Fair, so they do travel around to places when there aren't any air shows. Also they sometimes use airports if the place having an air show doesn't have a suitable runway.
One time I had a lesson cancelled because the BBMF, together with a Tucano, Hawk, and a Tornado, were taking off from Biggin Hill to do a flyby at the Eastbourne air show, so there was some serious historic and modern military hardware landing and taking off that day.
A Matter of Life Or Death (known as Stairway to Heaven in the US) is one of my all time favourite movies.
David Niven plays Peter, a poet and RAF Lancaster Bomber pilot who is returning from a raid on Germany. He's making a last radio call to relate his hopeless position. the plane is on fire, everyone has bailed out except him and his dead copilot. He doesn't have a parachute, but has decided to jump anyway rather than burn. He speaks to June, a young American woman (Kim Hunter), giving his last message before he falls to his death. Except he doesn't die, and meets June the next day on the beach where he was washed up, and she's already in love with him after hearing his voice the previous night. Meanwhile, in the monochrome afterlife, the conductor sent to escort Peter to his place in heaven lost him in the fog, and is sent to persuade Peter to take up his rightful place in the afterlife. (this afterlife appears to be run by the civil service.) Peter is having severe headaches, and so June persuades him to see a doctor friend, who diagnoses a brain injury which needs surgery. Will Peter live or die, and is the Conductor real or just a figment of his imagination?
It all depends on his earthly surgery and his heavenly appeal. Look very closely at the judge and the doctor performing his operation....
The ending is beautiful and has me close to tears.
It has some great quotes, too.
"This is the universe. Big, isn't it."
(when Conductor 71, played by Marius Goring as a ccamp French aristocrat killed in the Revolution, arrives from the monochrome afterlife to colourful Earth): "Ahhh. One is so starved of technicolour up zere..."
The Italian Job (majorly appreciated in the UK, hardly anyone knows of it here in the states)
Not available on Region 1 DVD, and to add insult to injury, being remade with Mark Wahlberg and set in LA....
What IS it about Hollywood and their insane desire to make shit cover versions of classic Michael Caine movies? Did they not learn anything from Stallone's dismal fuckup of Get Carter?
Talking of Get Carter (the proper one, of course), that's a classic film as well.
"You're a big man, but you're out of shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself."
And there's the great story of how, on becoming President, Ronald Reagan was disappointed there wasn't a war room just like the one in Dr. Strangelove.
The Swimmer is one of my obscure favourites, as it's quite surreal.
Burt Lancaster seeing that practically everyone in the neighbourhood has a swimming pool, decides he's going to swim home. So he sets off in nothing but his swimming trunks and does a length of all the pools in all the gardens of all the houses he calls on, spending some time with all the people he meets and even having a small romance along the way. At first he's treated as an eccentric friend, but as the film goes on things start to fall apart and people become increasingly hostile towards him until... But that would be telling. Go watch this movie.
It's a very very strange movie which is pretty much an allegory for the death of the 50s' American Dream. It's pre-Lynchian. In some ways it's kind of related to Falling Down except without the guns and most of the violence. Lancaster's swimmer and Douglas' D-FENS are both undergoing breakdowns for similar reasons.
Classic movie, I recommend you watch it. Oh, and see if you can spot Joan Rivers...
Forbidden Planet is a classic of its day, and in my opinion quite influential. It's always been my theory that Gene Rodenberry watched that film and took notes, as some of the similarities to Star Trek are uncanny.
Actually, Leslie Nielsen in the starring role wasn't at all ironic at the time, as for the first half of his career he played straight roles in dramas. He only started doing comedy when Airplane! came along and pretty much restarted his career.
Oh yeah, that's an amazing movie. One of my favourites.
For people who are wondering what the hell we're talking about, the film (based on a novel by Nevil Shute) is about the aftermath of nuclear war, where the last US Submarine takes shelter in Australia which has been untouched by the war... It's about people, hope, and how they cope with the end of civilisation. It's a very polite end - but chilling none the less.
What do you bet that when the new "inspectors" are done they will uncover paper trails of lots of dirty deals that were underway with the 'coalition of the unwilling': France, Germany, Russia, and China.
Besides the dirty deals done by the US and the UK? Saddam gassed his own people. Who sold him the gas? WE DID...
Microsoft never needed Corel to port.NET to Linux. They already have it running on Linux internally in their labs. Not only that, but MS has *all* of their major apps running on Linux in their labs.
Really? And your reputable source for this information is?
But when it comes to making an Operating System or even choosing one for their schools, they simply turn to America and say, "Give us Microsoft". Amazing.
It was not always the way. After all, business computing began here with the Lyons Electronic Office, and in the 80's schools used the BBC Micro, developed by Acorn in Cambridge.
The rot didn't set in until the 90s, and a once thriving British computer industry went down the pan. For shame.
I blame the government. It doesn't help when we have a PM keen to lick arse, whether that arse be Bill Gates' or Dubya Bush's.
I suspect the Chinese may not be so fussy about launching a reactor as the Americans are. Or as fussy about how many people die in pursuing this idea - after all, anyone who dies during China's space exploration will be a glorious hero of the people...
Steam is an adequate fuel for going to and from mars in fact, and for taxiing around in low earth orbit.
I want to see that. Giant brass steam-powered spaceships plying the spacelanes like something out of a Victorian steampunk alternate history! The Flying Scotsman refitted as a spaceship...!
But, seriously, has anyone really considered anything like Stephen Baxter wrote of in Manifold: Time?
As long as we don't consider what he wrote of in Moonseed. Actually, the scary Baxter comparison here is Titan which starts with the destruction of the Shuttle Columbia and the launch of the first Chinese astronaut...
The problem with the Delta Clipper is that it has to be able to carry enough fuel up so that it has enough fuel on the way down to stop it becoming a hole in the ground. Extra fuel means more weight so you need extra fuel, which means more weight etc..
No no, you're both wrong. It's a misprint, right? It should be The Right To Bare Arms meaning you can wear T shirts or short sleeved shirts as much as you like...
I'd actually like to see NASA have a decent budget. As it stands the NASA budget is less than a twentieth of the US Defence budget, and Dubya wants to increase the Defence budget by the equivalent of one NASA budget per annum for the rest of his reign (assuming he's elected). What could NASA do with a quarter of the US Defence Budget? You can send people to the moon for the cost of one B2 stealth bomber...
That said, I'd like to see the Russians do better too. After all, they were first, and their 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy means they're currently the only spacefaring nation.
Slashdot Mirror
So why is Poindexter running Total Information Awareness?
Because the Bush administration is fundamentally corrupt and the sooner you guys kick that fucker out of the White House the better.
Looked up to see a Lancaster, a Spitfire, and a Hurricane in formation fly straight overhead. They then proceeded to land at Coventry airport.
Quite a surprise as there didn't appear to be any kind of air show on.. pretty magical!
Must have been the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. Now those guys have cool jobs.
I'm learning to fly at Biggin Hill and one day last weekend I arrived for a flying lesson just after they'd landed. The Hurricane was being pushed into a hangar, but there wasn't a hangar big enough for the Lancaster, so it had been parked at the 29 end of Runway 11/29. So as I'm taxiing out to the holding point for runway 21, I cross 11/29 and there to my right, maybe ten yards away is a Lancaster, just dwarfing the plane I'm in. I'd never seen one that close to before. Pretty impressive.
It was just a visit a month or so prior to the Biggin Hill Air Fair, so they do travel around to places when there aren't any air shows. Also they sometimes use airports if the place having an air show doesn't have a suitable runway.
One time I had a lesson cancelled because the BBMF, together with a Tucano, Hawk, and a Tornado, were taking off from Biggin Hill to do a flyby at the Eastbourne air show, so there was some serious historic and modern military hardware landing and taking off that day.
A Matter of Life Or Death (known as Stairway to Heaven in the US) is one of my all time favourite movies.
David Niven plays Peter, a poet and RAF Lancaster Bomber pilot who is returning from a raid on Germany. He's making a last radio call to relate his hopeless position. the plane is on fire, everyone has bailed out except him and his dead copilot. He doesn't have a parachute, but has decided to jump anyway rather than burn.
He speaks to June, a young American woman (Kim Hunter), giving his last message before he falls to his death.
Except he doesn't die, and meets June the next day on the beach where he was washed up, and she's already in love with him after hearing his voice the previous night.
Meanwhile, in the monochrome afterlife, the conductor sent to escort Peter to his place in heaven lost him in the fog, and is sent to persuade Peter to take up his rightful place in the afterlife.
(this afterlife appears to be run by the civil service.)
Peter is having severe headaches, and so June persuades him to see a doctor friend, who diagnoses a brain injury which needs surgery.
Will Peter live or die, and is the Conductor real or just a figment of his imagination?
It all depends on his earthly surgery and his heavenly appeal. Look very closely at the judge and the doctor performing his operation....
The ending is beautiful and has me close to tears.
It has some great quotes, too.
"This is the universe. Big, isn't it."
(when Conductor 71, played by Marius Goring as a ccamp French aristocrat killed in the Revolution, arrives from the monochrome afterlife to colourful Earth):
"Ahhh. One is so starved of technicolour up zere..."
What IS it about Hollywood and their insane desire to make shit cover versions of classic Michael Caine movies? Did they not learn anything from Stallone's dismal fuckup of Get Carter?
Talking of Get Carter (the proper one, of course), that's a classic film as well.
"You're a big man, but you're out of shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself."
And there's the great story of how, on becoming President, Ronald Reagan was disappointed there wasn't a war room just like the one in Dr. Strangelove.
Then again, he was an idiot.
The Swimmer is one of my obscure favourites, as it's quite surreal.
Burt Lancaster seeing that practically everyone in the neighbourhood has a swimming pool, decides he's going to swim home. So he sets off in nothing but his swimming trunks and does a length of all the pools in all the gardens of all the houses he calls on, spending some time with all the people he meets and even having a small romance along the way.
At first he's treated as an eccentric friend, but as the film goes on things start to fall apart and people become increasingly hostile towards him until... But that would be telling. Go watch this movie.
It's a very very strange movie which is pretty much an allegory for the death of the 50s' American Dream. It's pre-Lynchian.
In some ways it's kind of related to Falling Down except without the guns and most of the violence. Lancaster's swimmer and Douglas' D-FENS are both undergoing breakdowns for similar reasons.
Classic movie, I recommend you watch it.
Oh, and see if you can spot Joan Rivers...
Forbidden Planet is a classic of its day, and in my opinion quite influential. It's always been my theory that Gene Rodenberry watched that film and took notes, as some of the similarities to Star Trek are uncanny.
Actually, Leslie Nielsen in the starring role wasn't at all ironic at the time, as for the first half of his career he played straight roles in dramas.
He only started doing comedy when Airplane! came along and pretty much restarted his career.
A great fun movie. Mike Jittlov is a talented and very nice bloke who deserves more, really.
I'd really like to see a DVD cut of this with him doing a commentary. Given the rights issue, this is probably never going to happen. It's sad.
Return of the Killer Tomatoes!!
Featuring George Clooney as the hero's goofy sidekick...!
Really. I kid you not.
Night of the Comet!!!
Wonderful movie. Best quotes:-
"Daddy would have brought us Uzis"
and
"You're crazy!"
"I'm not crazy,I just don't give a fuck!"
Oh yeah, that's an amazing movie. One of my favourites.
For people who are wondering what the hell we're talking about, the film (based on a novel by Nevil Shute) is about the aftermath of nuclear war, where the last US Submarine takes shelter in Australia which has been untouched by the war...
It's about people, hope, and how they cope with the end of civilisation.
It's a very polite end - but chilling none the less.
Love to get that on DVD...
But I loved the helper robots (I think they were chimps fitted into boxes)
Huey, Dewey and Louie (what Bruce Dern's character named the robots) were, as far as I remember, played by amputees using their hands to walk around.
What do you bet that when the new "inspectors" are done they will uncover paper trails of lots of dirty deals that were underway with the 'coalition of the unwilling': France, Germany, Russia, and China.
Besides the dirty deals done by the US and the UK?
Saddam gassed his own people. Who sold him the gas? WE DID...
Microsoft never needed Corel to port .NET to Linux. They already have it running on Linux internally in their labs. Not only that, but MS has *all* of their major apps running on Linux in their labs.
Really? And your reputable source for this information is?
Die, bullshitters, die...
But when it comes to making an Operating System or even choosing one for their schools, they simply turn to America and say, "Give us Microsoft". Amazing.
It was not always the way. After all, business computing began here with the Lyons Electronic Office, and in the 80's schools used the BBC Micro, developed by Acorn in Cambridge.
The rot didn't set in until the 90s, and a once thriving British computer industry went down the pan. For shame.
I blame the government. It doesn't help when we have a PM keen to lick arse, whether that arse be Bill Gates' or Dubya Bush's.
I suspect the Chinese may not be so fussy about launching a reactor as the Americans are. Or as fussy about how many people die in pursuing this idea - after all, anyone who dies during China's space exploration will be a glorious hero of the people...
Steam is an adequate fuel for going to and from mars in fact, and for taxiing around in low earth orbit.
I want to see that. Giant brass steam-powered spaceships plying the spacelanes like something out of a Victorian steampunk alternate history!
The Flying Scotsman refitted as a spaceship...!
But, seriously, has anyone really considered anything like Stephen Baxter wrote of in Manifold: Time?
As long as we don't consider what he wrote of in Moonseed. Actually, the scary Baxter comparison here is Titan which starts with the destruction of the Shuttle Columbia and the launch of the first Chinese astronaut...
>>The current life expectancy of them leaves a bit to be desired,
>But don't worry, your camera will be lost, stolen, or broken before that happens.
Actually, if it's a Digital Camera, it'll be obsolete long before the OLED conks out...
The problem with the Delta Clipper is that it has to be able to carry enough fuel up so that it has enough fuel on the way down to stop it becoming a hole in the ground.
Extra fuel means more weight so you need extra fuel, which means more weight etc..
look good but embarrass anyone who actually reads SF rather than consuming TV sci-fi.
So it's just as good as the original Battlestar Galactica then.
How do we develop the tech to 'do it right' without trial and experimentation?
Oh right. So the Wright brothers shouldn't have bothered with that 'Wright Flyer' shit, they should have waited until they could build a 747.
You, sir, are a blithering idiot.
No no, you're both wrong. It's a misprint, right? It should be The Right To Bare Arms meaning you can wear T shirts or short sleeved shirts as much as you like...
Black goes with everything. Especially black.
Just wear black all the time. Case closed.
I'd actually like to see NASA have a decent budget. As it stands the NASA budget is less than a twentieth of the US Defence budget, and Dubya wants to increase the Defence budget by the equivalent of one NASA budget per annum for the rest of his reign (assuming he's elected).
What could NASA do with a quarter of the US Defence Budget? You can send people to the moon for the cost of one B2 stealth bomber...
That said, I'd like to see the Russians do better too. After all, they were first, and their 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy means they're currently the only spacefaring nation.