The Flowers of War

Flowers Of War | trailer US (2012) Christian Bale
We watched The Flowers of War on Amazon Prime last night. I wasn't impressed. There were too many people being stupid, but I suppose that is probably more realistic than the action-adventure movies were the hero always knows exactly what to do and then does it without any hesitation. My wife thoroughly enjoyed it.

The story revolves around a Westerner protecting some Chinese who have taken refuge in a western church compound during the Rape of Nanking. We saw another movie with a very similar storyline a while back. I suppose I can't blame the movie people for fixating on this one story. Outside of this one enclave it was pretty much just murder and mayhem and it wouldn't take long to get your fill of that. Unless you're demented. We'll get back to that.

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (Nanjing)

There is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Nanking (see above photo), but there is no Winchester Cathedral, which is where the movie is set.

Saving Private Ryan Private Jackson Sniper Scene

There were a couple of bits that stood out for me. One was the view through the Chinese sharpshooter's rifle scope. Usually these views in movies just have the bare visual cues to indicate that you are looking through the shooters scope, that is, the view is restricted in a circle in the center of an otherwise black screen, and there will be reticle overlay (see above photo).  In this movie they showed the image going from a blur and then into focus along with some distortion. This is more what it's like with rifle scopes. You need to have your head in the proper position, not just in line with scope, but also at the proper distance. It takes some getting used to.

This happened during the one action-adventure scene. The Chinese sharpshooter strews some grenades around an area, lures the bad guys in and then proceeds to decimate them by detonating the grenades with well placed rifle bullets. He dies a heroes death because there is only one of him and there is an endless supply of bad guys.

Another part that was (unpleasantly) well done was the portrayal of the Japanese troops as crazed with blood lust, bent on raping the women and killing everyone. Real horror show stuff. Don't see that on the screen very often, at least not in shows involving recent history.

Christian Bale portrays a mortician who has come to Nanking to prepare a recently deceased priest for burial. Makes you wonder what kind of idiot he is. Who would come to a city that has been turned into a war zone? But churches have their own agenda. There may be a war going on, but we have our rituals and we are going to observe them. And our mortician is not the brightest guy. His only interests money, booze and, when the harlots show up, women.

Harlots performing an ancient song

Oh yes, the harlots. A band of whores seeks refuge in the church and in spite of the whole world going to shit all around them spend their time as if everything was normal, i.e. squabbling about clothes and jewelry and who is being bitchy. A couple of them even sneak out to fetch some earrings and guitar strings from their old home which gets them, unsurprisingly, killed. I suspect logical thinking
might be difficult when you under stress, but gee-willickers, that was really stupid.

China still holds a grudge against the Japanese for WW2 while the Japanese would pretty much like to forget it ever happened.

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WW2 eliminated most of the culture of mass-murder from Japan and Germany, but it is still going on in other parts of the world, notably Southeast Asia and Africa, though it is not quite as organized or on the same scale. But it still pops up on a semi-regular basis all over the world. Some demented jerk gets hold of a powerful device (gun, car or bomb) and proceeds to lay to waste all those around him. The news media has a field day with every instance of aberrant behavior. Mass murder gives them a chance to spout off about something different than who's-fucking-who. Sex, drugs and / or violence, it's all the same to them.

The more people you have, the more normal people you have, but you also get more people on the fringe and the more people you get on the fringe, the weirder and wider that fringe gets. I don't think we will ever get a handle on it. Even if we get the 'thought police', they will never be able to catch everybody, and that might be a good thing. If everyone is the same and we know how everybody thinks, would we every get any new ideas? Many new ideas are bad, but every once is a while a good one pops up. Stamping out the abnormal could very well lead to stagnation, and then, when the spiders from Mars invade, what are you going to do, Bucky? Well, punk, are you feeling lucky?

Roger Ebert wrote a decent review, though he complains about there being a white guy in the film. Problem is that if there hadn't been a white guy, there wouldn't have been a story. Well, not this story anyway.

Update February 2019 replaced missing video.

Update October 2021 replaced missing video.

Begali Telegraphy Keys

KTXL Fox 40 new Interviews the W6SFM Samuel F Morse Amateur Radio Club
Roberta mentions the Bengali sideswiper telegraph key in her report on her trip to the Dayton Hamvention. I found this video on the Bengali website. It's notable because they compare an old technology (Morse code) with a new one (texting), and also because we have female talking heads delivering a report without all the gush and blather so common in TV news reporting. I'm impressed.

Or maybe it's just that Fox news has designed their reporting for people like me, that is people who are old and white (and therefore wrong). I am beginning to think that people who denigrate Fox news are idiots, but I'm wrong, so that's okay.

I am a little concerned that precision mechanical devices are going the way of the dodo bird. It used to be that we were surrounded by these things (key locks, pushbutton radios for automobiles, typewriters, wrist watches, rotary dials on telephones) but they have all been replaced by electronical gizmos. Maybe it's okay. There are more people that ever before which means there are more subjects that are being explored, so maybe the precision mechanical gizmo niche will always have proponents who will ensure its survival.

Charité

CHARITÉ - TRAILER (Miniserie, 2017) // UFA FICTION
This is a pretty great show. It takes it's name from Charité Medical Institute in Berlin. Founded in 1709, it is Europe's largest University clinic.

The show has your usual human drama, people being brave or foolish, falling in love, all that kind of thing, but it also chronicles a brief period in transformation of medicine from quackery to science.

The show is kind of amazing in that every scene touches on an element of human society that is very different from the way things are now. Women's rights is front and center, but there are so many things we take for granted now that were alien concepts back then. It makes for a weird experience. Indians (as in people from India) on display in the zoo as cannibals was a bit of a shock.

Several of the primary male characters in the show are historical figures that can be found in Wikipedia. The female lead, Ida Lenz, didn't make it into the history books.

The bacillus causing tuberculosis, M. tuberculosis, was identified and described on 24 March 1882 by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1905 for this discovery. - Tuberculosis

In 1890, Shibasaburo Kitasato and Emil von Behring immunized guinea pigs with heat-treated diphtheria toxin. The first cure of a person with diphtheria is dated to the 1891 Christmas holiday in Berlin. Von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in medicine in 1901 for his work on diphtheria. - Diphtheria

Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow . . . helped to discredit humourism, bringing more science to medicine.  . . .  he coined a well known aphorism: "Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale".  . . . [The Charité campus is named for him.]

Ernst von Bergmann was a pioneer of aseptic surgery.

Bernhard Spinola was the director of the Charité hospital in Berlin. Emil von Behring married his daughter.

The lovely Hedwig Frieberg autographed this photo to her admirer Dr. Robert Koch in 1889 as a scandal was about to unravel.

Hedwig Freiberg was an actress who became Robert Koch's second wife.

Heinrich von Minckwitz is listed in the German Wikipedia. He might be the same guy as the one in the show. He was a lawyer, not a medical man.

Paul Ehrlich was a German Jewish physician who invented the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia. "Bombastic and impetuous, he sometimes made tactless pronouncements on sensitive topics without consulting his ministers, culminating in a disastrous [interview] that cost him most of his influence." Sounds a lot like our current fearless leader.

Arthur Conan Doyle even makes a brief appearance. "Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and wrote several articles advocating for the practice and denouncing the views of anti-vaccinators." He spent some time as a doctor, but it seems he was more successful as a writer of fiction.

Update February 2019 replaced missing video. This one doesn't have the English subtitles.

Trepan

A parachute mine after being defused and partially dismantled by the Royal Navy Bomb Disposal Team

Posthip Scott sends us an entertaining story about a WW2 bomb squad in southern England. One paragraph talks about how they got inside a bomb:

A hole was then cut in the mine’s casing using a trepanner. This cutting tool was made of non-magnetic materials so that it could be used on magnetic mines and was driven by compressed air. After some time a four-inch circular hole had nearly been cut through the casing.

Okay, that sounds like how they cut the holes in the mine casing in the picture up top, but a treppaner? The only time I have heard that technique being used is when Stephen Maturin (the surgeon in the Patrick O'Brian sea stories) opened up the top of a guy's head to replace the damaged portion of his skull with a silver plate.

Brace and bit cranial trephine, Germany, 1701-1800

Stephen had a new "Lavoisier's trephine" and Google turned up the above image.

Trepaner
The bit at the center serves as a pivot to keep the cutting bit at the end of the arm on track.

This is probably more like the tool that the bomb squad guys used. A tool like this would normally be used in something like a milling machine, that is, a machine that could hold the tool and the target rigidly in place so that the depth of the cut made by the bit at the end of the rotating arm could be accurately controlled. It seems unlikely that they would have used an actual milling machine for this project, what with milling machines being in high demand for war production and the high probability of it being destroyed should the mine explode. I am sure the bomb squad guys cobbled up something.

The part that bugs me is the claim that is "was made of non-magnetic materials". I don't know that there are any non-magentic materials that could be used to cut through the mine's thick steel shell. I supposed you could use a grindstone of some sort, but that doesn't produce a sharp, well defined cut. And would it really need to be made of non-magnetic material? After all, the mine's casing is made of steel, and a magnetic fuse is going to be designed to react to the presence of the massive amount of steel that is a ship. So maybe the small amount of steel found in this tool wouldn't be enough to trigger a magnetic fuse, but any support and / or driving mechanism would, so those parts would need to be made of brass or wood or something similar.

WW2 UK Mine Disposal Locations

WW2Talk has some more pictures of bomb disposal activity at the stone frigate HMS Mirtle.

A Man After My Own Heart

Wondermark

The Reivers

The Reivers, a novel by William Faulkner, 1962. I picked this book up at the Goodwill in Beaverton last week when I arrived a few minutes early for Thursday Lunch with my gang at Thai Bloom. The cashier was an old-ish woman and she was dreadfully slow. I waited as patiently as I could, but when I finally got to the check-out counter there were half a dozen people behind me and instead of paying attention to me, she gets on the phone to call for assistance. If it had just been a quick, efficient, "Jasmine to the front counter" call, I would have waited, but she was still trying to figure out what number to dial, so I left two dollar bills on the counter (price tag stuck on the front cover said $1.99) and walked out.

Anyway, it's a tale about life in rural Mississippi in the first half of the 20th Century. I'm only a couple of dozen pages into it, and it seems like half of the words are people's names. Manfred de Spain has acquired a red E.M.F. racer (a car). Well, now we need a picture, and here we have one.

Love Never Dies

Extended Montage - Australia | Love Never Dies
My wife and I attended a performance of Love Never Dies at Keller Auditorium last night. It was a very impressive performance, full of singing, drama and elaborate stage sets. As is typical of these kind of shows there were also some dancing girls and a bit of comic relief.

It was an impressive production, but I am not sure how much it affected me. I didn't fall in love with it and I am not going to go out and buy the soundtrack, but then I am a bit of a barbarian. Beer and Rock & Roll are more my speed. However, I suspect there is a subtle effect of being immersed in an event that is the very pinnacle of what our civilization can produce. I am not quite sure what that effect might be, but it has to be better than what you get from being bombarded by commercial messages all frigging day long.

One of the props was an elaborate, ten-foot-tall horseless carriage. I had never seen anything like it, so when I got home I Googled Hammerstein steam carriage and the real thing popped right up. A similar prop makes a brief appearance in the above video around the 2:20 mark.

Trevithick Steam Carriage Replica

Supposedly the original was running around London back around 1802-1803. That was when Napoleon was still running around loose! That was a long time ago! This thing was probably the Bugatti Veyron of its time.

That got me thinking about the timeline of this whole production.

1802 - Trevithick Steam Carriage
1846–1919 - Oscar Hammerstein I (not II)
1850–1930 - Golden age of steamship travel
1881 - setting of Phantom of the Opera
1907 - setting of Love Never Dies
1909 - Phantom of the Opera novel published
1948 - Andrew Lloyd Weber born
1986 - Phantom of the Opera broadway show premier
2010 - Love Never Dies broadway show premier 

What has Hammerstein got to with any of this? I suspect an homage to a great musician. Supposedly he hires Christine to come to New York to sing, which is how this show gets started.