To the Rescue!!

 FAB!

ThunderWord

Glorious Tramp crossword on Friday, full of FAB references.  I thought it had been written tin response to the death of Gerry Anderson, but this is what Tramp says on Fifteensquared:-

I wrote this puzzle in December completely unaware that Gerry Anderson was dying. I finished the puzzle a few weeks before Christmas and was going to let it simmer for a few months before asking Lato would he be so kind to test solve and give me his comments. After doing a bit of research on Wikipedia, I realised that Thuderbirds will be 50 years old in 2014 so I thought it could get published then. Anyway, I found out that Gerry Anderson had passed away over the Christmas break and so sent the puzzle for checking and text Hugh to see if he could use the puzzle quite soon, which he agreed to.

I got the SCOTT PARKER idea ages ago and decided to keep it back for a future Thunderbirds puzzle. My original idea was to somehow put OWL+TIT+TH, or something similar (TH under “birds”), in a column of unchecked letters and then to define Thunderbirds as “show in fifth column?” or something. I spent ages trying to get this to work but had to give up as few, if any, Guardian grids have eight unchecked cells in a column. When I looked up Gerry Anderson on Wikipedia, I spotted SUPERMARIONATION and thought that might be a better idea. I managed to shoehorn in the pilots Alan, Gordon, Virgil, John, Scott; Brains and Parker and I also got in Scarlet (as in Capt) and Fireball (as in XL5). I tried for ages to get Joe 90 in but it was beyond my ability.

This contained some marvellous clues (IBIS at 7d for example and BRASSICA at 25a).

Thunder

So God has recalled Gerry Anderson to his side.  And soon, now, the Seraphim and Cherubim will have their lives made much easier by great, brightly-coloured machines that can gird the Cosmos much faster than mere Angel's wings.  The pearly gates will be re-engineered to lay flat at need, to allow the Hosts to issue forth much more speedily.  And the music of the spheres will become a rumbunctious march...

Ready with the countdown?

It will all be very exciting.

Between Olympics

Well, not quite.  The Paralympics have in fact started.  But I started this post in the hiatus between the two Games, and I'm not changing the title now.  So:

As I sit here between Olympics, and with the godawful ticketing system still not working properly, and not likely to let us get to see any Paralympic competitions up close in the near future, if at all, it seems a good time, as they say on Thought for Today, to pause and reflect.

We always expected the Olympics to be far, far better, and more worthwhile, than the benighted Jubilee - and they didn't disappoint.  We were on Dartmoor, on holiday, during the Opening Ceremony, which meant we got to watch it on a huge plasma TV.  Which was nice.

As every commentator - well most commentators - have said, it was astonishingly good. 

I have to admit, when I first heard about the bucolic idyll that was being planned, a fantasy English countryside, my heart sank. But even that was enlivened by the rippling blue cloth that covered the stands and allowed us to see the idyll as 'sea-girt'.

And then we tore it all up in the Steam-driven Pandemonium of the Industrial Revolution, led by  Sir Kenneth Branagh as Caliban (a theme for all four ceremonies it seems) - cum - Brunel.  Echoes of Blake and Milton. 

Followed by (in random order):-
- NHS nurses (a great invention from 1948)
- Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti.
- Suffragettes
- Voldemort from Harry Potter,  Rowling and Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang, and Mary Poppins (all representing children's literature?  But no Blyton I could see, nor Ahlberg, nor Kerr). And that section did  cause our 15-y-o to comment along the lines that the good socialist message of the NHS was undermined by the children in beds having to be saved by the privatised care of Mary Poppins...
- Beckham on a speedboat looking terribly stylish, and fireworks on Tower Bridge as it opened to let his ego through...
- The Swinging Sixties and psychedelia
- The Stunt Queen: so much more approachable than the one we have...
- The noise of the Tardis in the middle of another Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody...  (but why?)
- Rowan Atkinson & Simon Rattle in Chariots of Fire
A section on media (ish), introduced by the pips, Radio 4 and the Archers, leading to a house full of film and TV clips -  while decades of our pop and rock played...
- Python and Fawlty Towers, (let's ignore Eric Idle in the Closing Ceremony for the moment)
- A Matter of Life and Death
- Kes
- Gregory's Girl
- Bagpuss
- Queen Who Stones  Beatles
- Madness 
- Mud
- Jetpacks and Tim Berners-Lee
But sadly no Thunderbirds or HHGTTG or Fast Show that I noticed...

All really good fun.  But it did make me realise that we here at TANH appear to have been writing about the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in half of our postings, without really knowing what we were doing...  It's like we were revising for it.

So is that it?  Do we have to stop writing about all that stuff now?

Other Things have been Happening...

Well, although the Jubilation isn't quite finished (there is for example, the local Jubilee do on the Aquarius Golf Course with Steve Boltz still to come today), and bedraggled bunting can still be spotted around and about, we at TANH would like to remind our reader about the other stuff that has been going on while our Overlords have been celebrating their rule. 

This is just a random selection, in no particular order.

Dragon Lands The SpaceX Dragon landed successfully in the Pacific Ocean on May 31.  This was the first commercial spacecraft to dock successfully with the ISS.  The second stage of the rocket contained some of the ashes of the actor James Doohan, who played Scotty in Star trek, as well as (Keroy) Gordon Cooper, one of the secen original astromauts in the Mercury space program.  Gordon Tracy, the pilot of Thunderbird 4, was named after the latter.

Jeremy Hunt at Leveson The Leveson inquiry has shown that Jeremy Hunt was very, very much in favour of  the Newscorp bid to take over BSkyB.  The Prime Minister knew this when he appointed him to decide upon whether the bid should proceed.  Given that Vince Cable was removed from this role because of his bias (in the opposite direction), how was this a sound decision by the Cameron?  Can we assume that Cameron wanted the takeover to go ahead as well, so was unworried by Hunt's lack of neutrality, or was it just incompetence?  Hunt has said he thought the bid would have been good for British media, but (as far as I can tell) has failed in any way to say how.

The Awful Baroness Warsi has seemingly been breaking a few rules, with the (non)disclosure of some of her own financial arrangements.

Bankia in Trouble Spain's banks look as though they are in trouble, with Bankia, the fourth largest bank in Spain, asking for a 19bn Euro bailout, and the Eurozone crisis is lurching into new problems.

The Annan Plan in Syria seems to be failing, with escalating violence, while armed militia stormed Tripoli airport yesterday.

HIGNIFY Resurgent For a few series now, Have I Got News For You has been a little moribund. But just recently it seems to have perked up again. Firstly with an appearance bu Ken Livingstone, who Hislop agreed was a less interesting guest on the show than Boris Johnson, but would have been a better Mayor of London. And then last week we had Alastair Campbell as chair. Which turned into a straight battle between Campbell and, well everyone else. A real bruiser and very, very funny. Watch it again on i-Player before it goes. It also includes the largest margin win I've seen so far.

And Finally... Don't forget the Transit of Venus - just visible tomorrow in the early morning...

Who and Henges

It does feel a little late to be posting this.  As I write we are only hours away from the resolution of the new Dr Who series.  The Tardis is exploding, Amy has been shot and the Doctor is being locked forever into the Pandorica by all his foes, in a secret chamber under Stonehenge.

But therein lies my problem.  Under Stonehenge?  Surely everyone who is anyone in the field of SF and fantasy film making has been there already.  Every evil villain, and some heroes, have burrowed beneath those stones to create their secret bases.  Secret?  Frankly, it's the first place you look if you don't know where your enemy is lurking.

So there is something of a credibility gap, for me, in the new series's denoument beneath the henge.  And although at one level, I realise that discusing the notion of credibility in relation to Dr Who is itself something of a stretch, in another sense the use of Stonehenge feels a little, well, too ordinary.

Or it did, until I realised there was a simple answer.  All of those lairs, hidden bases and secret chambers can indeed be found under Stonehenge.  They are all present, in their hundreds, and all available for use by any story that needs them. 

The diagram below explains how this works:-

When the writer or director realises they need to locate their incredibly secret complex below the henge this week - ignoring the fact that it is one of the UK's most-visited tourist attractions - they ring ahead and the appropriate Evil Lair is brought forth from the massive Evil Lair Storage Facility (ELSF for short: think of it as something like a huge version of those vertical car parks they have in Germany).  It is loaded onto the ELDV (Evil Lair Delivery Vehicle), updated with any specialist equiment - cyberman arms or whatever - and then conveyed on ultra-heavy duty rails to a point beneath the henge. It is carefully alligned  with the heel stone and altar stone (so the stairs to the surface are properly lined up), after which a mighty piston  raises the required Lair into place, so that it can fulfil its role in the story.

During the rare times when Stonehenge is not featuring in some story or other as the centre of the bad guys' plans, a default plug of stratified earth, containing lip-smacking Bronze Age and earlier finds is pistoned into place, thus keeping all of the archaeologists happy and contented.

Now, I know this is all rather Thunderbirds-ish, and might be seen by some to be overkill, but I can think of no other sensible explanation that covers all the known facts.. 

It also explains why the Government has cancelled the new Visitor Centre scheme.  Apparently all of the alterations would have risked the discovery of all of this technology - and the politician's own emergency Lair....

Domestic

Sharing a house is hard - everybody does things a different way, and has their own beliefs and foibles. College fridges bear mute testimony to that.

Given this rule, Wife and I have differed over the years about the right way to do stuff. So I store jam in the fridge (after an unpleasant experience with sugar free jam many years ago), while she insists I don't have to. I tip quite a lot of stuff down the kitchen sink that she believes I shouldn't.

And so when I heard a bit of ' How to Get Things Really Flat' by Andrew Martin on the radio a few months back, and it seemed a witty take on, and guide to, men and housework, it was very interesting. The title comes from the section on ironing - and the tone suggests that a sensible, male, no-nonsense approach is what is being offered. I thought I'd get it - and it is out in paperback, so why not?

Unfortunately, I've now read it, and there is a problem.

Wherever Wife & I have disagreed on how to carry out a domestic chore over the years, and have agreed to disagree, (or more typically to continue arguing about it), and wherever I was hoping for some moral and well-researched support from Andrew Martin, the book is 90% certain to get the answer wrong. To side - dare I say it - with her.

This is most unhelpful. Apparently you don't need to store most jam in the fridge, and you shouldn't chuck fat down the kitchen sink, and you should empty bins when you see they need emptying. Or so he claims. And it isn't enough that his wife is clearly mad:

Tasteful people, it seems to me, wear black clothes and live in white houses. The walls in our house are all white, as are the blinds (we don't have curtains: 'they block the light', even when open, apparently); most of our upholstery has white covers, and our lampshades, duvet covers and pillowcases are all white. (p.199)

He is clearly giving advice I don't want to hear (and certainly don't want anyone else in my family to find out about).

Thankfully, however, I then came across this:

...I especially enjoyed those episodes of Thunderbirds in which the more obscure rescue craft crawled from the belly of Thunderbird Two: the rarely-seen Mole, for example... (p.77)

Rarely seen? Rarely seen!!? The Mole not only appears on the end-credits for every episode, it is the pod vehicle that is used in rescues most often (apart from Thunderbird 4, of course). Check if you don't believe me. And it is the pod vehicle that appears in the appallling and yet strangely appealing live action film from 2004. Amongst my coterie, growing up in North London in the 1960s, the problem with Thunderbird 6 was that we all already knew that the Mole was secretly T6, so what was the point?

It is clear that Andrew Martin cannot be trusted. If a man can't get his knowledge of Thunderbirds right, the kind of straightforward material that should be readily at everyone's fingertips, then how can he be trusted regarding more abstruse data, such as that associated with, say, cleaning or hoovering? The man clearly doesn't do research properly.

Thank goodness. I thought I might have to change my ways. But no, I can safely ignore him.