Bindweed

So, so sad, and so, so very true... no more amusing adventures for me involving a DA and being mistaken for Elvis, these days...


What? What??

At some point the UK Met Office started calling it Celsius instead of Centigrade. I don't know why. Nor do I really care, since I grew up with Fahrenheit, and that's the one I'm personally used to. I'm in a minority in the UK, I expect, actually preferring Fahrenheit to Centigrade/Celsius and Imperial units to that lazy Metric nonsense

I was going to say that.

But best someone else did, because I would have taken 2 pages.

New New Forum Software NOW!
Because we're worth it.

*Sigh*
Neither of you really understand the workings of cricket, do you...? You can't bet on the result of a cricket match by looking at the score at the end of the first day, FFM! There is no result until the end of play on Monday. Or until both sides have played two innings. Or unless Australia bowl England out in their second innings without troubling the Australians' first innings score. None of which can be predicted or even calculated based on the score at the end of the first day. It's like trying to establish who's won the FA Cup Final just by looking at the first 18 minutes of the first half.

It's insane!

For pity's sake, man, what are you? You're behaving like... like... like an American!

Shape up, man! Shape up!

*boxes FFM about the ears with rolled-up copy of Wisden*

And let's not forget the red-white-and-blue of the Dutch flag, while we're at it. Or Australia. New Zealand. Cuba. Russia. Norway. Luxembourg. Slovenia. Paraguay. Costa Rica. North Korea. Iceland. Cambodia. Slovakia. Panama. The Czech Republic. Laos. Serbia. The Dominican Republic. And the Faröes.

What?

I was bored...

What is this "soda" business? Do you mean "pop"? In that case, I submit for your edification, not only the gob-reddening Tizer, but also the very mighty Vimto!

Now I'm curious... Which one is it? I expect it's not We'regoingtolosetheAshesandthere'snothingPontingor anyonecandoaboutit?

Would that be the case, though? Surely, if the servers were relocated to another country, German-based players could still play, couldn't they? The article states that retailers would be prohibited from selling the game in Germany, but that doesn't mean that German players can't buy downloads and play online, on foreign-hosted servers.

I also hope that there are degrees of "violence" in whatever criteria the Joy Police are proposing: I can imagine things like GTA, or Bully, or Mortal Kombat and its fatalities qualifying for prohibition, but although City of Villains might raise questions regarding ethics and morality with some over-sensitive, political-advisor psychologists, they'd have to be extremely zealous and stupid to place a game like City of Heroes in the same class. If that's the case, then in, too, will go WoW, all the WW2 stuff, flight simulators, everything, in fact, that's a little more stern than My Little Pony.

Not only would such a sweeping act be impossible to police and cost the economy a fortune, it would be political suicide. It may not even be legal within the framework of the European Union. I'm not saying that the authorities responsible for this craziness are not mad or stupid, but I'd like to believe that they have enough common sense to draw the line at a practical and sensible point.

Not for the first time has political capital, supported by dubious sociology, pointed the finger of fury and blame at the latest popular pastime for the young and the restless. I remember when it was "video nasties"... Some things never change, just the names on the Id iot Sheet.

(the word "Id iot" is banned? What??? Is that a mistake or is someone really that much of one? )

Indeed. I'm sorry I was misled by the wording of your original post, which suggested that Polish intelligence staff had carried out significant Enigma code-breaking work independently of Station X. I did choose the word "Allied" quite deliberately, to encompass the work of all nationalities.

To be honest, Enigma did not impress me enough to imprint much of a memory of its plot, so pardon me if I haven't recalled the details of the film correctly.

[To be on the safe side, SPOILER coming up:]

What I do remember, though, is that the narrative firmly attributes the atrocity at Katyn to the USSR. If Polish viewers are offended that the plot calls for the whistleblower on the cover-up to be Polish, then they're missing the entire point. The narrative clearly does not seek to deny the atrocity of the Katyn Forest massacre; quite the contrary in fact. Instead it suggests that the need to shift blame for it to the Germans was evil - it's certainly held to be an evil conspiracy by the two main protagonists. If the film appears to judge the whistleblower, it's to recognise that the motives were correct, and that the need to attribute blame to the Nazis in order not to offend or disrupt relations with the USSR was wrong. Making the whistleblower a Pole lends an emotional, heroic weight to the action that could not exist if it were another nationality.

How this could offend Polish viewers, I don't understand.

The first capture by the Allies of an Enigma machine was made by the Poles and smuggled to Britain, certainly. The "cracking" couldn't be done until the machine was subjected to the array of Allied brains, resources and several lucky breaks at Bletchley Park, though.

I'll have to dig out the DVD but I seem to remember the Polish contribution being specifically dramatised, especially their bravery and ferocity alongside strange-but-apparently-true comic references to contemporary English parochial europhobia (did I just make that work up?). The Battle of Britain also commemorates every nationality that contributed pilots - including a lone Israeli (even though Israel didn't formally exist at the time), during the long end-credit sequence. But that was the point of the film; to commemorate the courage and sacrifice of those involved at a time when the war was less than 25 years over. It's more of an action/adventure movie these days, but at the time the audiences had a very different set of memories and experiences.

Nit-picking over, but onto a hugely lengthy ramble that kind of lends support to your point suggested here:

I doubt anyone in Hollywood makes films purely because they have a Nationalist agenda to brainwash gullible moviegoers into thinking, for example, that the USA won WW2 all by themselves. Certainly not the executives of the foreign owned multimedia corporations that dominate Hollywood. The reason Hollywood has a tradition of playing fast and loose with “history” has everything to do with money, politics, and above all engaging its audience with the story, rather than jingoism.

Whether we like it or not, Hollywood is forced to consider history as inspiration, rather than gospel. The North American market is so much vaster and potentially rewarding than the relatively tiny UK market, and Hollywood’s resources are equally much greater than any that could be mobilized in the UK film industry’s wildest dreams. Because of that, Hollywood has a duty to offset its investment risk by maximising its product appeal to the best market it can. That often means changing the focus of a story inspired by a historical event.

For example; David Puttnam, an English producer who was briefly head of Columbia, had for years been trying to turn Len Deighton’s excellent novel Bomber into a feature motion picture but could never quite put the investment together. When the financial backing was finally in place, however, the American investors insisted on maximising their chances of success by pitching the movie as something an American audience would be more likely to spend their money on. So out went the grim and gritty movie about the RAF Lancaster and in came the poignant movie of the USAAF B-17, Memphis Belle. Otherwise the film is a British affair: filmed in England, directed by a Scot, produced by an Englishman, advised by former RAF Lancaster bomber crewmen. But the star of the movie is a Flying Fortress with a star on the fuselage - which doesn’t fundamentally alter the nature of the story at all, and it’s still a fine movie.

Much more notorious is Objective, Burma!, which has, at times, been utterly reviled in the UK for apparently ignoring the tremendous effort of Commonwealth forces to drive the Japanese out of Burma and Malaya during WW2. What these people seem to forget, however, is that by the end of 1944, when the film was being made, Hollywood had a duty to the war effort to remind America that, even though the war in Europe was almost at an end, their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers may not be coming home because there was still a lot of fighting to be done, that there were reasons why, and that the war effort needed the continued support of the American people before the Japanese could be overcome in the Pacific theatre. Raoul Walsh delivers that by having Errol Flynn lead a bunch of GIs through a hellish jungle to help set up an Allied victory. It works as an excellent propaganda piece for a US audience when the same film but with David Niven leading a platoon of Chindits would not. It’s also an excellent war movie (and stars an Australian, too ).

As for U-571, well, like The Battle of Britain, at least the movie’s end credits do indeed list all the Royal Navy vessels who secured the intelligence, making it abundantly clear that what we’ve just seen is an imagined fiction born out of the real activities of those RN crews. And Enigma is just a period thriller, with the real-life story behind the antagonists’ motive no longer a politically sensitive issue by the time of the film’s release - and the conspiratorial tone fits neatly into a pattern of activities, real and imagined, undertaken by British Intelligence during WW2.

But I wouldn't fault Saving Private Ryan for a failure to include sequences of, for example, British and Commonwealth forces campaigning elsewhere along the front. The Rangers' mission in Ryan takes place in a purely American sector. The only non-US Allied activity would likely have been air support or French Resistance. What I find more annoying are the narratively unnecessary insertions in Saving Private Ryan, which draws upon some dubious analysis by an historian with debatable methodology in order to apparently endorse a populist dislike of Montgomery and underestimation of the contribution of non-US forces.

I especially detest “docu-drama” and other supposed education productions that just don’t do the research and can not, therefore, reach any kind of productive analysis, let alone pretend to draw conclusions. And yet some of our more vaunted institutions, like the BBC, are amongst the worst practitioners. No-one expects U-571 to be a history lesson, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable that it uses tales of historical heroism as a source of mythic adventures, just as storytellers have done since the human species first learnt to speak. But a lot of people watching documentary and factual programming on our TVs put their faith in them. When that faith is betrayed, by either incompetence or design, then that’s surely far less acceptable.

There are some subjects you just can't mention on a board filled with opinionated English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish participants without a storm kicking off, somewhere, somehow...

Reviewing Dollhouse, the Radio Times described Eliza Dushku as "portraying perfectly someone with absolutely no personality"...

OK, you've set me off. I can't post on these new combi-boards now without diving into a mile-long rant...

It's an atrocity that here in the UK there are cellarmen so wet behind the ears that they don't know how to keep ale (I'm calling it that to differentiate from beer. There really is a difference ). Barrels of ale should be maintained at 55° Fahrenheit. That is NOT room temperature, except in some badly heated rooms in winter. In warm weather there are light summer ales which are fantasatic at reducing body temperature and quenching thirst on a hot day - although we tend not to get the extremes of brain-melting heat and humidity that you have to suffer in the US - hell's bells, I have to have a cool drink just watching True Blood... But ales and stouts have individual combinations of flavour and characteristic that are destroyed at freezing temperatures. Modern Guinness, for me, is an example of a truly awful excuse for a stout: it's flavours destroyed by the dreadful need to make it ultra-cold. Guinness is to stout what John Smitth Smooth is to bitter ale. It's great if you want a cold, bitter, pint of nondescript generic liquid with a lingering aftertaste of plastic, but for contrast I recommend trying some excellent independent English, Scottish or Welsh stouts and porters that have retained a delicacy of flavour and are brewed by people who care about their craft, rather than how swiftly the conveyor belt is rolling.

Pub culture has utterly changed in the UK and is, in fact, in a desperate crisis. Most pubs around here have closed or turned into bizarre theme-toilets for the 16-24 age group. Ale in pubs, along with the means of brewing it, has become so heavily taxed that only the under-age can afford it - while wine and vodka from the European Union is often subsidised and can be bought very cheaply indeed in supermarkets. Pubs are consequently dying as most people can't afford to use them like they used to, and the youth who do, when they're not buying cheap vodka shots or fruit-flavoured vodka-pops, are buying not ale, but cut-price pressurized beer-pop.

If you want to experience British pubs in Britain, you'll have to get over here pretty darn fast before they all disappear. Otherwise, find a British-style theme pub in the USA, because they're probably the closest you'll find to a decent pub from now on.

/rant over. But please, PLEASE stop describing British ale as "room temperature" or "warm" because it's NOT.

Nope: boards.cityofheroes.com is the path, and it doesn't matter whether I login or not: the software doesn't recognise me. I have to log in twice to make sure I'm in, and then it has a tendency to log me out before I can post anything that takes me more than two minutes to write.

No wonder these boards have so many +1 replies, if that's all you can do before getting booted off.

Still fuming because we were promised better software, but instead we got a merge into something too bulky, unwieldy and unpredictable to allow some of us to cope with this new, homogenous mammoth.

I mean - there's free hosted forum space out there that's better than this!