Hooptedoodle #263 - The Airline and the Krell

I was not personally impacted by the dreadful systems failure which hit British Airways and their customers a few days ago - my heartfelt sympathy is extended to anyone whose holiday was destroyed, or who suffered personal discomfort or inconvenience - all of that goes without saying. I am interested to see that there will be an independent enquiry into what went wrong - I fear that there might just be a whitewash job, or that some poor department head somewhere will be the subject of a token beheading, but in principle I look forward to seeing what they come up with. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. Certainly the current official explanation that it was all due to a power surge of some sort seems so laughable that it is equivalent to the old catch-all, "the dog ate my homework", though, naturally, it would be unwise to pre-judge. Already, there is sinister mention of software support having been outsourced to India - erm - right...

There was a professor from Glasgow University on BBC Radio 4 this morning, talking about the boring but rather essential matter of system resilience. He talked a lot of sense - there is not much sense around on the radio at the moment (don't get me started on the Election).

If you will forgive me, I'll plead for two quick timeouts at this point; the first is a link to a post I wrote here almost 5 years ago - The Banks and the Krell - about the increasing scope for catastrophic system failures in business, and the implications for society in general. If you care to check that out, it will save me saying a lot of the same things again. If you do not care to, that's fine too.

The Krell's computer installation in The Forbidden Planet

The second is a short story about a car I used to own. It was a 1995 Mercedes - only Mercedes I ever owned, and it was a great car - not very exciting, but dependable, and built to last. The date is significant, because it was a period when cars were starting to be equipped with automatic sensors and systems which were intended to make life simpler for the motorist, but also meant that the family car was becoming more and more of a mystery to both the owner and the supposed mechanics at his local dealership.

After a while, my Mercedes suddenly started suffering frequently from a flat battery - eventually it was every morning. The dealer replaced the battery (at Mercedes prices, of course), and checked the car over - no problems. Well - not so fast. The battery was flat again the following morning - that's the new battery with the clean new labels on it. The car went back to the dealer, who kept it for two days and returned it with a clean bill of health. Battery was flat again the next day. A terse phone call prompted the offer of another replacement battery under the terms of the warranty.

In desperation I took the car to a proper automotive electrical engineer somewhere near Prestonpans, and within an hour he had identified the problem. The car was fitted with a special sensor, the entire purpose of which was to detect if the electric windows had been left open when the vehicle was locked with the remote key. If it found that any one was open, it automatically switched in the motors which closed the windows. Great idea, eh? Unfortunately, the sensor had become faulty, so that when the car was locked the system incorrectly detected an open window, and attempted to shut it. Since the sensor was faulty, of course, the car was never satisfied that the windows were now closed, and it continued to try to close them continuously until next time it was unlocked. This doesn't mean that the motors were grinding away - the motor would not actually run if there was any resistance (another safety feature), but it would keep checking and trying - silently - and by the next morning this would have consumed enough power to flatten the battery.

The engineer rang the workshop at the Mercedes dealer and discussed the options with them; I could pay £370 + VAT for a replacement system - no other possibilities. In fact there was one other possibility, but I'll get to that.

I talked it through with the engineer. I was probably going to sell the car within a year anyway, and I had never left - nor was I likely to leave - the windows open when I locked the car. If I did, the worst result would be an open window - without the keys, the immobiliser system (Ha!) would prevent anyone pinching the vehicle.

Thus my £370 + VAT would provide a complete solution to a problem which I was unlikely to have. The alternative was simply to remove the fuse from the bit of the system wiring which supplied power to the Windows-Open-When-Locked sensor - the cost of this would be zero, of course, though I might be at risk, however unlikely, of leaving the windows open by mistake. No brainer - I went for the cheaper solution.

There are many lessons like this, but that one stuck in my mind - someone had provided a costly, over-the-top, luxurious solution to a problem which did not seem terribly serious, and - after it became defective - had thereby generated a much more significant operational problem in my use of the car. Something wrong there?

This whole industry expanded at a crazy rate - huge cleverness being applied to provide solutions to problems which might or might not exist, in the holy names of convenience and (the ultimate trump card) safety. My wife's current car knows when it's raining, knows when you need to change gear, knows when it needs to switch on the lights, knows the numbers in the phonebook on her mobile, will give you running statistics on things you never even thought of, has a built-in satellite navigation system, has an intelligent cruise control system which can be set to maintain a minimum distance to the car in front and - of course - can park itself without your assistance. It's wonderful that a piece of everyday technology can do all these things, and some of them are definitely useful, but what's going on here? If my wife's car suddenly stops running, or if the doors decide they are not going to let her get in, she is well and truly stuck. There is no question of opening the bonnet and spraying WD40 on the plug leads, or improvising a temporary fanbelt replacement. She is stuck. All she can do is phone up on her mobile, and get a mechanic with a laptop to come when he can, and diagnose what the problem is.

Righto - our cars are very unlikely to conk out, compared with cars we've had in the past - this is the power of technological progress - but if they do then the degree of well-and-truly-stuckness may be of a different order from what we have seen in the past. Not only has our vehicle let us down, an event which we will not have expected and for which we will not have a back-up plan, but our greatly diminished residual experience of coping with emergencies, of applying flexibility and adaptability, of having contingency margins built into our Plan for Today, the unfamiliarity of having to switch on our own lights and wipers, of getting to Lancaster without having a robot tell us what to do - none of these things is going to be a big help.

To sum up - the technology looks after us wonderfully well, but if anything fails we can be more desperately exposed than we used to be.

Consider the mobile phone networks. Presumably your local (or national) service could be impacted by a power surge (surely not?), or a malware attack - it is even possible for natural events like unaccustomed levels of sunspot activity to cause technology headaches. It could happen. If it does, how many kids will be out of touch - lost somewhere on the way home from school? - how many mothers are going to be running around screaming OMG? - how many calls will not be made to rescue sevices in response to genuine emergencies? - how many online banking transactions will fail because the text message to the mobile with the passcode will not work? - how clever is your Apple Pay app going to be in the supermarket? Does any of us have any idea what we could do, in the event of what might be a fairly routine and low-level failure?

Well - you might, quite possibly - but I know that I don't, and I've thought about it - I used to have to think about things like this in my old job. My 2012 post about the Krell was mostly about the fact that we take these advances for granted, and we very quickly forget what it is they are  doing for us, and what it was that we used to do for ourselves before they arrived. We do not understand how the business which employs us works, because normally we do not need to; we do not know how to spell "laughs out loud" in full, nor how to read a map, because we no longer do things like that - there's no demand for that sort of knowledge.

If your airline of choice has a major systems collapse, and they do not seem even to know what it is, or what caused it, you may not find this reassuring. One day, aircraft may be so complex that only the onboard flight systems know how to fly them - with who knows what level of outside communication with global systems. In a world where, to save money, we are trying to achieve UK passenger trains manned by a single individual, how long will it be before the flight crew on a plane are just there to serve the coffee and make sure the computer is happy? At what stage will progress mean that they are no longer able to land the stupid thing without the technology?

Do you feel lucky, punk?

Hooptedoodle #262 - Owls of Derision - plus one more from the Small World Dept

Topic 1: Lately we've been puzzled to hear owls hooting during the day in the wood behind our house - even experienced countrymen like Dod the Gardener are puzzled by such behaviour. Well, we've now seen one in the garden - a couple of visits. The Contesse is still working to get a better photo - this is what she's managed to date.

Online experts suggest that it is a Little Owl, though we had thought it might be a Short-Eared Owl, more renowned for their daylight hunting. In the upper picture, you will notice that the blackbird sitting close by does not appear to feel at all threatened.

Topic 2: I only relate this story because it involves a couple of surprising coincidences - the subject matter may be of little interest, so I shall deal with it as quickly as might be decent.

My view on coincidences is boringly downbeat - they interest me, but I believe that the proportion of truly unlikely events in our lives is about as small as you would expect; when something unusual happens, however, we remember it clearly, so that our perception is distorted - we think remarkable things happen more often than they do. Get to the story, Foy...

Well, I've recently been trying to sort out my mp3 collection of the old BBC radio Goon Shows from the 1950s - many of the official published compilations of these shows were edited to drop the musical interludes, but most of mine are intact - sometimes a bit frayed, admittedly, but all the shows are complete. The Goon Shows had music of a good standard - apart from Wally Stott and the BBC's own orchestra, they also featured Ray Ellington's Quartet, and then there was Max Geldray, the virtuoso jazz harmonica player. All a bit dated now, maybe, but good stuff - and, anyway, nothing could be more dated than the Goons, dear boy.

Ray Ellington had a hot little band - on hearing them again, I was interested to note that his electric guitarist was exceptionally good - in fact he sounded most un-British, to be unkind about it. A little research revealed that he was Lauderic Caton, a Trinidadian, one of the leading pioneers of electric guitar on the English jazz scene in the years after WW2. He was friendly with, and a major influence on, a couple of the other lads of note of the day - especially Dave Goldberg and Pete Chilver. He was also noted for being a skilled luthier, and produced good-quality converted electric guitars in the days when it was impossible to obtain modern American instruments in the UK.

Pete Chilver circa 1948 - with electric guitar produced by Lauderic Caton

Goldberg I knew of - a Liverpudlian - but Chilver was a new name, so I read on. He shared a flat in London with Goldberg for a while, was very highly regarded - even by visiting American players - and played with (amongst others) the Ted Heath band and, for a while, Ray Ellington. Then, it seems, he married the sister of the girl singer in Heath's band (are you taking careful notes here? - there will be a test at the end), moved to North Berwick (which is where I live!) in 1950, retired from playing professionally, and thereafter managed his wife's family's hotel, the Westerdunes (now long gone). He also opened the West End Jazz Club, in Shandwick Place, Edinburgh - a place which I vaguely remember, though it was no longer a jazz club by the time I went there. Pete died in 2008, in Edinburgh.

Remarkable - so here's an important English jazz guitarist from the 1940s that I had never heard of, and he even became a prominent resident in my own neck of the woods! Only thing to do was email my old chum and former associate Hamish, for many years a hero and stalwart of the Scottish jazz scene, who has now also retired to the North Berwick area. Sorry to bother him, but did he know anything about Pete Chilver? - and I included some background details.

Hamish mailed back to say yes, he did know Pete a little - latterly Pete and his wife Norma retired and moved to Barnton Avenue, in Edinburgh. Hamish had been to his house there.

It seems that the handyman who now helps Hamish's wife around the house and garden used to work for Mrs Chilver - who is now in a care home, I understand - and only recently he had to dump a load of old acetate 78rpm masters of recordings from Pete's professional days [ah - drat]. Furthermore, the very night before he replied to my mail, Hamish had been a dinner guest at Westerdunes House - for many years converted into apartments, but now restored to its original state. Prior to this he had never heard of the place, never been there, and until my note was unaware of the connection with Chilver.

Westerdunes House

Now that is a bit of a long shot, I think. It looks a nice place - must have been a swanky hotel - healthier than the London clubs - a smart move by Old Pete? In passing, his friend Goldberg died of a drug overdose in the 1960s, when he was only 43. The Devil's music, your Honour.

Paint Accident - a small vote of thanks to Citadel

In-Between

One of my battalions of Spanish grenadiers has reached the stage of painting muskets. Since my brand new pot of Foundry Musket Stock Brown is thin and horrid (is it just me?), no matter what kind of stirring procedures I use, I resorted to an old pot of Citadel Scorched Brown. This is one of the Citadel pots from what I call their "in-between" period - i.e. after the old hexagonal pots which I used to like very much, and before the current pots, which have a captive plastic cap which will lock into an open position. The In-Betweens had a captive round cap, but it had no locking mechanism, and they absolutely refuse to stay open in a position that you can use for (let us say, for example) painting.

For in-betweens on which I have relied in the past, I have tended to cut the lid free, so that it may be removed, complete with paint sample, and used as a little palette. Thus what happened today is all my own fault.

I can claim nothing, really, beyond my own ineptitude, but there are certain, ergonomically unhelpful devices which can encourage my ineptitude to blossom, and - you guessed it - my wrestling with one of these stupid cut caps resulted in its popping off at some speed, and applying a spot of Scorched Brown to the living room carpet, just in front of my painting bureau. To my recollection, this is the first such paint accident I have had in many decades of model painting - and we are talking here of periods which included frequent removal of Humbrol enamel tinlet-lids with a screwdriver. I guess I should be grateful that my luck held for so long.

Having exhausted my supply of more easily-remembered terms of appropriate profanity, I have now committed all sorts of effort and cleaning materials to the scene of the accident. It is water-based paint, there was very little spilled, and the carpet is a light brown/beige colour anyway, so I am confident that it should come up pretty well - if necessary, I am sure that the Contesse's trusty steam cleaner, or even a little professional help, will get things back to normal. Thus I am currently in a period of cooling-down, while the rescue scene dries out a little, ready for the next phase. This has not helped painting progress at all, of course.

Normally, you will realise, I bear no malice to anyone - well, maybe there are a very few exceptions, come to think of it, but generally life is too short to bear grudges. Today, though, I should like to single out Citadel paints for special mention. I sincerely wish that the hero who designed the pre-locking, in-between period cap for their paint pots might have one of his splendid caps inserted, rectally - ideally, to a position just below his tonsils.

Hooptedoodle #257 - Noddy and the Demon

Yesterday I put on an old sweatshirt - I'm doing some exercise bike sessions to get the old fitness worked up a bit before we start going cycling and hillwalking as the weather improves. I have a silly collection of old teeshirts and sweatshirts, mostly souvenirs of my days touring with jazz bands, which are useful for sweaty workouts. Yesterday's specimen is one of the few surviving long-sleeve jobs - this one from the Riverboat Jazz Festival, Silkeborg, in Denmark's Lake District, from 1994.

That was the trip on which I shared a hotel room with Noddy, the trombonist. Noddy was a gentleman, really - unusually correct for a muso. No trouble at all. He was married to a very loud lady who had been a professional singer of some note (as it were), and he tended to fade into insignificance when she was around. At that time we had some pretty wild drinkers in the band. The jazz festival in Silkeborg was based around a huge marquee venue in the centre of the old town, and there were some very late shows. One night we played a set starting at midnight, by which time a couple of the more seasoned members of the band were already unfit for duty (it's a funny thing, but it was always the supposed professionals who let themselves down in this way...). In particular, Jack Duff, the tenor sax man (an absolute monster of a player, by the way), was staggering drunk - he couldn't stand up but he could still play like an angel - maybe he'd have lived longer if that hadn't been a common situation.

We got through that set by the expedient of lashing Duffo to one of the big tent poles that supported the marquee - he was OK. We released him during the break, and carted him home after we had finished. There were a few characters like that - I found much of this rather unnerving, to be honest.

Anyway, back to Noddy. He was from Kent, originally - he had served as a bandsman in the army, and after that he got a job as a music teacher. I'm not suggesting that there was anything wrong with guys like Noddy, nor with the teaching system at that time, but the entrance criteria for instrument teachers in the schools seemed less rigorously based on academic qualifications than you might expect. I hadn't spent much time with Noddy, so sharing a room with him was a new experience. During off-duty spells we went out for a few trips to local attractions - we went to see Tollund Man (the prehistoric chap they pulled out of a local peat bog), we walked around the big lake, we had some good chats about music and films, and I learned that Noddy was another boozer. Not a raving drunk, like some of them, just a rather sad, quiet alcoholic, who did his drinking in private.

Tollund Man

When we went out for our walks around Silkeborg, Noddy would always excuse himself just as we left the room, claim that he had forgotten something, and go back. When he joined me downstairs, he smelled of whisky.

In his wardrobe he had a secret bottle of Canadian Club. As the week went on there were a series of successors to this bottle. I only knew the whisky was there because his wardrobe door swung open on the first day (by itself!), and there it was. I was fascinated, because Noddy obviously carried a chinagraph (wax) pencil, with which he recorded the level in the bottle each time he took a slug.

I was sorry that he had to keep his drinking a secret, and slightly miffed that he kept a check to make sure that outsiders (such as myself) were not pinching his booze. If he had simply told me that he liked a drink when on tour then I wouldn't have cared - would not have disapproved, and certainly would not have raided his supply. I mentioned this to Fergie, the trumpet player, and he came up with what we considered a great prank. He and I jointly purchased a half-bottle of Canadian Club of our own, which I kept hidden away, and for a few days I used to sneak a bit extra into Noddy's current bottle, so that the level was appreciably above the latest chinagraph mark. We were interested to see what happened - it seemed unlikely that he would accuse me of putting whisky into a bottle of whose existence I was supposed to be unaware. He would, in any case, have to out himself as a secret boozer to do this. We didn't go crazy - there were just a few days when the whisky level definitely went up instead of down.

If Noddy noticed then he didn't say anything. Disappointing, really. When the half bottle ran out I stopped, and presumably he just assumed he had made a mistake with his pencil. Ultimately it wasn't as much of a laugh as we had hoped, but since it would not have been a very kind sort of laugh maybe that's right and proper.

All long ago - Noddy, like so many others in that band, is no longer around. He died, quietly and politely, of early-onset dementia a few years ago. I hasten to add that I was very much a relative youngster in that company!

Hooptedoodle #254 - Accidental Science Project

Today the Contesse visited her elderly mother (la Duchesse Veuve de Culdechat, who has graced these pages before) in a seaside town not too far from here, on the way to Ingerland. Alas, the poor old lady is not keeping very well these days; one result of this is that she has a house in this seaside town which she does not get to visit very often. In consequence, today my dear Contesse had to meet with an engineer, who was to service the heating system, and - as ever on these visits - a few oddities came to light, all connected with the strange, twilit world which surrounds houses which are mostly unoccupied.

[At night, they say, the stones do not sit peacefully with one another; the customary laws of Nature only apply sometimes, and grudgingly...]

For a start, it seems that the telephone at Maison Culdechat had not only disconnected itself, but may even have changed its number without outside encouragement. This may seem odd to the casual outsider, but to those of us who are more familiar with this twilit world it is just another example of the sort of thing for which we have to shrug and suspend judgement.

However, today's pièce de résistance (or "fixed impedance" as Marconi would have termed it - and, yes, that's Marconi Cheese) turned out to be a pork pie which had been in the fridge since some time before Christmas, we think. If you have ever wondered what such a thing might look like, here it is...

The Contesse was understandably aghast. With rubber gloves and anti-bacterial cleaner she removed the offensive object. The next twilit snag, of course, is that the Duchesse's dustbin almost never gets emptied, so the normal arrangements for domestic waste disposal in this case would fail to cope with an item of such toxicity. We shall draw a discreet veil over the actual steps which the Contesse took to get rid of it - let us simply say that we trust that Nature will, in fact, look after her own and reclaim the pie in the traditional way.

As a potentially useful byproduct, we may have unintentionally helped a local problem with excessive numbers of marauding seagulls - some herring gull is going to have a mighty sore gut by tomorrow. Or else he may have become resistant to all known viruses.

Mixed Fortune on eBay

How about this then? Just happened to see it on eBay, so decided to indulge myself (all right, indulge myself yet again). This is an old cigar box, not awfully glamorous, but the embossed copper lid makes it just the thing to keep my ECW wargame dice and cards in, so I am really rather pleased.

eBay hasn't been working for me recently - I've had a load of books listed for sale, and had hardly any success - eventually the starting prices were so low that I'd rather give them away, so I've put most of them back in the storage boxes until the market picks up again.

One book I did manage to sell was a near-mint copy of the Esposito & Elting Napoleonic Atlas. At the third attempt, I eventually sold it for about £40, which is a snip by any standards, but I regret that it was bought by a London bookshop, who had it on sale in their online shop for over £120 the same day they received it. Oh well.

Anyway - never mind that. Just look at my tacky cigar box - good, eh?

Hooptedoodle #252 - Hair, or Why I Never Made It in the Movies

This is not me

When I was five I had never thought about my hair. It was curly and a bit lumpy, I guess, but it was just something that my mother fussed over and brushed into shape. Then I went to school and there was a boy in my class named Alan Pashley. Alan had flat, shiny, black hair – it never moved, and you could almost see your reflection in it. This was my introduction to the world of Brylcreem, the world where some men just had it and other men just didn’t.

I wanted hair like Alan’s – more than anything in the world. I was so envious it hurt.

Denis Compton

At five I was not interested in girls, obviously, but even at that age I was sufficiently aware of the power of advertising to know that they would chase you down the street if you put some branded gloop on your hair. From that time on I always wished I could look like someone else – almost anyone else, in fact. I once tried a secret experiment with a blob of my dad’s Brylcreem, but it just produced a greasier version of the same chaotic, lumpy mess, so I then knew for sure that in my case this was not just a matter of grooming, it was simply that the raw material was hopeless.

Robert Beatty

Things were not helped by the fact that my dad devoutly believed that boys should part their hair on the left, same as they buttoned their coats left-over-right, without regard to which direction the hair grew in. It was a manhood thing.

Johnny Haynes

Like everyone else, I spent my youth agonising about my unattractive appearance – things improved very slightly when I was nineteen and I dared to change my hair, and get it parted on the natural (girl’s?) side. I’ve never been a big fan of the way I look, but you sort of get used to it as the years pass, there are other things to fret about, and you probably reach a stage where girls chasing you down the street would be a nuisance. And, of course, eventually the damn stuff starts to fall out, so the problem will be replaced by another…

Good Grief

Time passes.

My youngest son is now fourteen, and he doesn’t like his hair. It makes him miserable. Now there’s a surprise. Nothing is new. He was horrified by a recent photograph of himself, and when we reassured him that it was actually a good photo, and he looked fine in it, he was furious – our naïve approval of his hated appearance was the final straw. There is almost no limit to the things he has to put up with. No-one has ever been this wretched.

Maybe, come to think of it, some things have changed a little. When I was five, or even nineteen, there were very few actual film stars around – the rest of us did not expect to look like that – we all had crooked teeth, dodgy hair, moles, all that. Now the world is run by viral photos on social media – “products” are available to sort out your hair, everyone is expected to have good teeth, wear the right labels, cover themselves in tattoos, circulate hopeful selfies of themselves. If you do not look like a film star, pal, you are not trying. Maybe failure is more absolute, less excusable than it was in my day. Do not be ugly, have a pimple on your nose, etc, because not only will you feel bad about it, but your friends will crucify you on Instagram.

So we are trying to come up with a supportive, workable strategy to help our son. The first, and maybe most obvious idea is that he should get his hair cut rather more frequently, and keep it a little shorter. It might help – at the very least, you would think, he will have less of it to be offended by. He could try to get it re-styled, or set up some heavyweight grooming programme involving gloop and conditioner (and cost, and crap, and frustration, and effort, and wasted time in front of the mirror), but that is unlikely to work out well in the longer run, and merely adds layers of paranoia and hopeless struggle to the existing problem. We need to identify a calm moment, and try to form some sort of plan. Feasible would be good.

I fear that the grooming/gloop approach has become a colossal industry – the default way of life – many and vast are the fortunes made by exploiting personal inadequacy. The world is filled with pictures of kids who miss the point – selfies of 300-pound clones of Paris Hilton abound, daft photos of boys with a poor copy of someone else’s beard stuck on the front – just have a look at your Facebook friends’ friends’ friends…

Prayer for a fine Monday morning: Please send us a little peace. Let us remember that there are people in the world who have far worse problems than untidy hair – let us try to focus, just a little, on things that actually matter. Let us see heartless, exploitational advertising for what it is.

Scenery Scales - Quick Sanity Check...

Different period, same problem - the troops look OK with buildings in a slightly
compressed vertical scale, but the greatly compressed horizontal scale means that
they are always crammed into far too little space. 

While I was constructing my representation of Newcastle, on Wednesday, I observed that the number of towers on the contemporary map is far higher than in my simplified model. Of course, I would expect this, but my attention was caught by a comment in one of my books - it refers to the medieval walls being built in accordance with "best practice of the pre-gunpowder age" - in particular, adjacent towers should be within bowshot of each other, to provide adequate cover.

This reminded me that I had previously run a ruler over my "15mm" Vauban defensive pieces (different period, same idea, similar logic) and been delighted to observe that the lengths of the bastion faces, the straight walls and all that matched up well with the official best-practice numbers out of Chris Duffy's Fire & Stone, which is most convenient, yet a little puzzling in view of the fact that my wargames, like most people's, are a mish-mash of different scales. In short, I'm pleased it works out, but by rights it probably shouldn't, so I had another think about it. There is something conceptually different about grouping representative clusters of buildings into a given area (the area is correct, but the number of houses is not) and placing a wall or a gate (the wall, or the gate - there was only one) in its correct place.

Let's see now - my soldiers are roughly 1/72 scale - what in a more innocent age we used to refer to as "true 25mm" (a phrase as smug as it was meaningless). To help a little with the look of the thing, I use 15mm scale buildings - 15mm is about 1/100 scale, which is the old TT model railway gauge, so the buildings are deliberately undersized compared with the men, but the distortion in the vertical scale is not too bad, and the saving in footprint size (and cost of the buildings!) more than compensates. As I've said before, a small cluster of small houses, to me, looks more convincingly like a village than a single 1/72 scale building. Whatever, I am comfortable with it, though it doesn't suit everyone.

When we speak of scale distortions, of course, all this fades into insignificance against the appalling liberties we take with horizontal distances. My ground scale - the one against which my Vauban bits and my medieval fortifications all fit tolerably well - is one 7-inch hex represents 200 paces. A bit of finger-in-the-air rounding gets us to something like 1/900 scale. So I use 1/72 men, 1/100 buildings and a 1/900 ground scale. Hmmm.

I was looking at the PaperTerrain website, and they offer pdf files of groundplan templates for (for example) a Vauban fort. Scaled appropriately to make the heights fit with 15mm, these templates are massive compared with my little fortification models. This is not a surprise, really, but it always takes me aback when I see it. It's OK - I understand it - the models of town walls and bastions and so on are not the sort of objects you "cluster" to represent a more numerous group. There was a wall, and there was a bastion, and they were here, and they are expected to fit the map and the tabletop - the matter of how many towers, of course, is not quite the same thing, but to get some version of the town of Newcastle to sit sensibly in a realistic footprint requires some cheating. The walls are the right height for 15mm (1/100 - which is not too unreasonable for 1/72 scale toy soldiers), but they are the right length for 1/900 - and yet it looks all right. I am forced to assume that, by luck or accident, the manufacturers have used the same numbers as I do, and their compromise works for me. If I used proper, proportional 1/900 scale walls then the soldiers would be in danger of tripping over them, and that really would be laughable.

So I've thought about it, yet again, and it works out all right - yet again. I knew it would, yet it is reassuring. I'll have to remember to check it all again in a few weeks. We all need all the reassurance we can get.

***************************

Late Edit, following Archduke Piccolo's comment:

This is an alternative map, an extract from a sketch plan prepared by Sir Jacob Astley in 1639. I have reproduced this by photographing it from Charles Sanford Terry's The Life and Campaigns of Alexander Leslie - a book which I have enjoyed immensely and which I was terrified I would wreck if I opened it wide enough to put it on the scanner! It shows the suburbs outside the Newgate and Pilgrim Street Gate, and also at Sandgate on the river, and gives a fascinating key to how it was proposed to place the artillery to defend the place. Note that Astley's 1000 foot scale is a bit different from the 200 pace scale shown in the William Mathew map I included in my previous post. I do not claim that one map is more accurate than the other - Mathew's is derived from John Speed's map, while Astley was the man who had to prepare Newcastle for defence against the Scots during the Bishop's War(s).

Wails of Torpor - non-review

Within the last year or two I've started picking up cheap DVDs of old war movies - I've thoroughly enjoyed Sink the Bismarck, Bridge over the River Kwai, The Desert Fox and a pile of others - some I'd seen before, back in the day, some are new to me - just the thing on odd rainy afternoons, or on the 3am insomnia shift when the depression bites. I can accept them and enjoy them for what they are, with all their dated values and outmoded politics.

I still have a few that I keep an eye open for - Battle of the Bulge (the one with Robert Shaw) is on my list, but I also get occasional recommendations from friends, or people whose taste I know to be about on a par (good or bad) with my own. Someone very kindly sent me an Amazon voucher for Christmas, so I took the opportunity to buy a few things I would not otherwise have treated myself to. I bought the new, 4-disc set of Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927?) - digitally restored, includes a pile of additional material which had become detached from the original movie, and a new musical soundtrack (derivative, but very good) by Carl Davis. At 8½ hours (or whatever it is) it still requires a major commitment in coffee and devotion, but I have started on the first disc, and have given up and determined that I shall start it again very soon when I am more relaxed.

To make up the package (and benefit from shipping savings) I got a few other things - notably Cross of Iron (which was recommended by a mate and which stars James Coburn as the famous blogger, Sgt Steiner - the film is OK - I'll watch that again, too, but mostly for Coburn) and Wheels of Terror, aka The Misfit Brigade, which was also recommended, and which might just be the worst film I've ever seen.

Wheels of Terror was made in 1987, I think (certainly the haircuts would confirm it was around that time), and it is based on one of the many works of Sven Hassel, a Dane who served in the German army in WW2. Now there may be a great many Hassel fans out there - all due respect to you all, I was never one. I recall WH Smith and station bookshops everywhere stocking best-selling pulp paperbooks by Hassel, all very popular, all with lurid covers, and all, reportedly, crammed with extreme violence and sweary words. I never bought or read any - not a matter of snobbery or prejudice - I seem to have been very busy in those days, and books of sweary words were not a high priority.

Anyway, I read the description of the DVD version of Wheels of Terror, shrugged, and decided it was probably worth £2.45 or whatever it was, if only to fill the gap in my education and see what all the fuss had been about.

Wow. The whole thing is buried under a lot of anachronistic American slang and mannerisms, the German soldiers behave like a comedy version of the US Marines (lots of "Yes - SUH!" in unison). The story line is silly, and pretty much irrelevant anyway, the bangs are bigger and brighter than you would credit, and the dialogue is something else. I kept finding myself shaking my head, and reminding myself, not only that someone had actually written this crap, but also had thought fit to include it in the movie. The acting is unbelievable in more than one sense, but in the end it is not so much bad as unnecessary - presentable actors such as David Carradine and Oliver Reed (not sure if Reed actually speaks, come to think of it) offer up their lines in very obvious disbelief - perhaps hoping it will all be over soon.

Maybe the style has dated - maybe they were trying to cash in on Hassel's success, or on the takings of some other film they wished this could have been. I was, you will have gathered, disappointed. I'm relieved that I did not read any of the books when they were around, but it's always a shame when you revisit some faintly naughty indulgence and find it was not worth the bus fare.

Why am I writing this up? Not sure, really - maybe it fits into a recurrent theme of nostalgia not being what it used to be - maybe it is just a public-service warning for non-Hassel-fans to avoid this film at all costs. It is without a single redeeming feature (though the unit markings on the tanks may be accurate - I wouldn't know) - you would be far better spending an hour and a half sweeping up leaves, or washing the car.

Hooptedoodle #248 - an Organisation and Methods approach to the Music Hall

I’m not sure why I was thinking about this. Having thought about it, I reminded my wife about it, and I had a good laugh (again) – there is a faint risk that I have mentioned this story here before, since I am fond of it, but I don’t think so.

The underlying theme is the ancient world of the English music hall theatre – and especially of the seaside variety show. The significance of the seaside thing is simply that it was always a tradition that audiences when on their holidays would laugh at or applaud anything, even if

(1) It was rubbish

(2) They hadn’t understood it

(3) They hadn’t heard it properly

(4) They had heard it – last year, same theatre, same act

Hence the longevity of all those tap-dancing children, idiot ventriloquists and performing seals – and so on. Life forms which could not have survived for an instant in any other environment.

The focus of our study tonight, my friends, is the 2-man comedy act. Everything was very formalised – you might say formulaic. There will be a Funny Man and there will be a Stooge (who is even less funny than the Funny Man), and there is a classic form of (terrible) joke which has a very strict format. The following well-known examples will serve:

Funny Man: I say, my wife has gone to the West Indies.

Stooge: Gone to the West Indies? Jamaica?

FM: No – she went OF HER OWN ACCORD….

FM: I say, my dog has no nose.

Stooge: No nose? How does he smell?

FM: TERRIBLE….

FM: I say, there’s a man outside, stealing your gate.

Stooge: Stealing my gate? Did you try to stop him?

FM: No – I DIDN’T WANT HIM TO TAKE OFFENCE….

And that’s quite enough – you will certainly know other examples, and they will all be funnier than the chosen three.

To get to the point, my musician friend The Hat and I got to discussing this form of joke, over a beer. We felt that, though it might be traditional, it was due a bit of a makeover. First of all, we considered simply changing the expected punchline, since no-one would notice and they would laugh anyway, since the joke form has a kind of rhythm which makes it obvious in which gap the laughter is required. If, we reasoned, the first example (the Jamaica one) ended with the FM saying, “No – she went to Trinidad” then it completely defeats any last trace of humour, since the wretched pun is cancelled, but we were pretty sure the laughter would be undiminished – in fact, we ourselves would laugh along quite loudly, so it might actually be increased a little.

However, we realised we were really just playing around with the idea, and that it would make more sense if we set ourselves some serious objectives – made our improvement more worthwhile in some way. Well, most English seaside resorts these days are a bit short of money, so we thought that if somehow we could simplify the jokes a bit – shorten them – it would get them over quicker. Since they weren’t funny to start with, the cash saving of not having the janitor hanging around for quite so long (waiting to sweep up), might be very welcome. We quickly became aware that our new, streamlined versions of the jokes were not funny at all, but the originals were not noticeably funny either, so we persevered.

The first modification was to cut out a line – this meant that the Stooge now delivered what served as a punchline (or at least the last line in the exchange, even if it lacked punch). Thus, with some change in job titles, the first example now reads:

FM1: I say, my wife has gone to the West Indies.

FM2: Gone to the West Indies? I bet she went of her own accord.

You may debate whether this ranks as an improvement – certainly the cost accountants on the council are very pleased – the comedy act now only lasts 4 minutes in total.

We think the new format will become accepted, though it may take a little while to bed in with the more conservative audiences, but we have not been idly resting on our laurels – we have an even shorter version in the laboratory – the most efficient joke form yet developed:

FM: I say, my wife has gone to the West Indies of her own accord.

Or, another of our examples:

FM: I say, my dog smells terrible.

Good, eh? You getting the hang of this? The council will love it, because we’ve actually got rid of one complete employee, and the delivery time is even shorter. Fantastic. We think it still needs a little work, but maybe you could all do a little offline testing for us – convert some jokes of your own to this new, efficient format, and try them on your friends. In the pub, if you like. I’d be delighted to know how you get on – The Hat and I are dedicated to continuous improvement, and we appreciate any help we can get.