A Different Kind Of Black And White Film

Back in my youth(far too long ago now) they uised to show black and white films on (I think) aturday mornings(and during the summer holidays all week)on BBC2.  Now these days they still do this on occasion, but this year I found a channel I was not aware of on our cable service, called Talking Pictures TV.  Now this channel specialises in show mainly pre-1970 film, more often than not British ones.  Now back in the day the BBC during their B&W film season used to show a bunch of films made around WW2 staring George Formby and I grew to dislike them as the usually showed the same ones over and over.

Last week I recorded one called, 'Get cracking', which stasrred the afoementioned actor as a member of the homeguard during WW2.  It was really good and I had not seen it before, OK it was produced by a British film studio in 1943 so it is pretty much a propagada film but still, it's a fun film,

George_Formby Wikipaedia

Home_Guard_(United_Kingdom)

Just incase anybody wants to know more.  George Formby was a pretty big fikm star of his day and was in 22 films between, 1934-46, so not a long career, but was huge at the time.  He also worked for ENSA during the war and it is thought that he enterained around 3 million troops

Another Wes Anderson Movie, only one more left to find

As some of you know I have a bit of a thing for Wes Anderson films.  Well a couple of days ago I found a cheap copy of 'Rushmore' on DVD and I watched it yesterday.  It's not a bad film, in fact, I enjoyed it a lot.  As with most of Wes Anderson's films, it shares parts of his prefered stable of actors(Bill Murry and Luke Wilson to name two) and it is a great ensemble piece.

Trailer

So to sum it up it's pretty good I'll not explain the plot here but if you have enjoyed any of his other films you should like this one to.

It's all just a game.

If thats the case why do I find a ertain somebody so frustrating to deal with?


Lets give you all a little context.  When I started playing Starwars Combine I joined a certain faction, this is not an uncommon thing for this game, now after six months I applied for a higher postition in said faction and am currently 2nd in command of my department.  My commanding officer, well lets just say thats my problemm.  Now it's not like I dislike the guy I just find communicating with him to be more than a little difficult for the most part.

It started day 1 I took the Executive Officer job, I'd send him a message with three questions in and get a reply to one of them.  This has happened on a number of occasions.  To add to that he has a habbit of sitting in orbit waiting to get permission to go down, but oddly I seem to take all of a few hours to do the same, it's just so frustrating !!!!!!!!

There is always more to learn.

Now I have been a big fan of aircraft since I was a boy.  Apart from new aircraft coming out, I thought I had pretty much seen all there was to see, but I was wrong.  Yesterday I was on facebook(yes I know...) and I came across an advert for a model aircraft I had never seen.  Now I know there was a lot of stuff in development by the Germans towards the end of WW2, but this one was from the very late '50's.  The EWR VJ101-C was a German attempt at building a supersonic VTOL aircraft( a machine that could take off and land vertically and thus not requiring a runway).  Ultimately the design was scrapped as there were too many issues to sort out.  But parts of the idea have been reused since....

So lets go back to the Early '60's and see what we can see....


The EWR VJ 101-C was developed by a conglomeration of German aircraft manufacturers from 1958.  The Engines were a joint effort from Rolls Royce and MAN of Germany, and for their time were fairly unique.  VJ stands for "Versuchsjäger"(German for Experimental Plane) 101 being a model number.  The idea had been proposed by the German Government and a number of companies (Messerschmidt, Heinkel and others) had started to come up with designs, later pooling their resources and forming a new Company EWR.  By the mid 60's the first of two prototypes were ready for testing.

Now it may look odd but when you compare it to later aircraft designs, like the V-22 Osprey you can see where the design ideas ended up.  The idea of wing mounted 'engines' was not the only idea, repurposed by later designers...

The Russians took the idea of fuselage mounted vertical engines and used it for their vertical take-off plane the Yak 38 and Yak 141.  And the latest Royal Navy fighter uses this arrangement in the-35C Lightning 2 when used for landing on our latest batch of aircraft carriers.  So it seems, for the most part, the problems that beset the German designers back in the 60's have been ironed out over the last 60 years!

The Future of Star Wars??

A while ago we discussed the future of Star Wars beyond the plans we were aware of at the time.  So what has changed?  The powers at Disney have decided to slow the release rate, which can only be a good idea.  The Obi Wan movie is still mentioned all over the place but I'm not sure anything concrete or official has been announced as if yet on that one.

So what do we know?

EPISODE 9:  Whatever they decide to call it is due Christmas 2019 and will likely end the skywalker saga for good.

A new trilogy of related films from Rian Johnson is in pre-pre-production(maybe a problem for some of the Ep VIII haters).

A live action series from the Walking dead guys, they do make some decent TV, but can they do something not based on a long running comic?

Jon Favreau's TV series....


Now here we have some news, and it's good news.

Exhibit A.   A Twitter post from yesterday:

Now I took this with a pinch of salt yesterday, sounds good but was it official?  No way of being 100% yesterday, but today....

Not news is true, not only is all of the above tweet correct but production is under way!

Oh and here is the first picture...