Category: Uncategorised

Landships

The British government, to keep the development of their new weapon a secret, told the North British Locomotive Company – the ladies who were doing the actual iron and grease work on the Allies’ new landships – that they were constructing water carriers intended for the middle east.

The women simply called the things “Tanks”, and for better or worse, that’s how we all know them today.

Landship development, originally conducted by the Royal Navy under the auspices of the Landships Committee, was sponsored by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and proceeded through a number of prototypes, importantly among them the Little Willie, designed byWilliam Ashbee Tritton and Walter Gordon Wilson, as the first-ever completed tracked tank prototype vehicle, culminating in the Mark I tankprototype, named Mother.

The descriptor “tank” is reputed to have evolved from the construction of the early batches by North British Locomotive Company in Glasgow. The order was coded as “special tanks”, and much of the work was undertaken in the NBLC Tank shops and the name stuck. – wikipedia

Mother

Saturdays

A scan from World at War #35, from 1982:

My Tantrum Mat

You can click the ad page to see a larger version – I’m going to insist any future advice I give is endorsed by “The Head Psychiatrist”.

I wonder how many Saturdays I’ve spent setting up the various versions of the Windows operating system.

Beemer

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-DiWJ9TzNw]

BMW Marketing people, please don’t show me a lightsaber and then try to sell me a ginsu – it may be a fine knife, but no amount of transposition is going to make me think it’s a lightsaber.

Crazy Station

It’s tough to get a crazy organization off the ground these days.

During the evenings we watch Letterman from a station out on the coast, one of the last bastions of broadcast crazy. It has no commercials, just loud bouncy music videos that I’ve long suspected were chosen by the owner’s 14 year old niece.

More interestingly however, the station is one of the few in Canada that maintains a 24 hour broadcast without playing paid infomercials. This is like a blank canvas to crazy.

Nowadays the hours may be filled with “specials” featuring, among other things, Stirling’s metaphysical thoughts, his interviews with likes of the late Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and conspiracy theorist David Icke, a “Computer Animation Festival”, various features or animations starring Stirling-created superheroes such as Captain Atlantis and Captain Canada, extended (sometimes all-night) tributes to the late Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, and other programs that are truly miscellanea. Stirling once stated during a “fireside chat” that he’s against abortion in China because those aborted babies could have grown up to become NTV viewers.

Other topics seen on the late night NTV programming schedule relate to Stirling’s interests in eastern mysticism, as well as intestinal health, Unidentified Flying Objects, crop circles and the pyramids. Mr. Sterling has been known to telephone master control from a remote location and order that a particular favorite program immediately preempt current programming, or that a particular effect be applied to the screen by the technician. Often multiple videos would be “layered” over each other, with unusual results. While things like this tend to anger viewers, Geoff Stirling’s eclectic programming has its cult following. – Wikipedia

Mr Stirling does have a website, but it doesn’t see much updating.

Captain Canada

Now In 3D

Bwana Devil in 3D

Until the technology reaches a level that doesn’t require socially awkward glasses, or cause migraines, it’s my personal belief that 3D TV and movies will continue to be a fad with re-occurring interest. This hasn’t stopped the current hype behind 3D televisions however, as the market is still jacked up on the high of successfully forcing everyone in America onto HD.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjqMX6OueA]

Still, last week I was poking around for info about Legend Films, the company that released the colourization of House On Haunted Hill. Colourization is a bit of a tough & seedy business – colourizers are sort of seen as the grave robbers of the entertainment industry – and maybe that’s why Legend decided it needed a new business plan: 3Derizing, er, 3Dimensioning, uh, Depthing…

They’ve decided they’re going to take old films and make them 3D.

Seriously, that’s a business now.

Friday The 13th Part 3 in 3DSomewhere, Ted Turner is cackling.