66 Replies to “May 15, 2022: Reader Tips”

      1. Ouch….

        Shattered Sword is an exceptionally good book. If you have a solid interest in the battle I recommend it and then recommend it a second time just in case. What throws you a bit at the start but is ultimately very rewarding is how the authors decided to structure the battle narrative based on the time line of what the Japanese commander knew, not what was happening.
        Hence you read about the morning strike being sent off to bomb Midway Island but then read about the series of US attacks from the island based aircraft. How did the raid go? You find out when the raid returns, because due to radio silence and limited communication that is when the Japanese admiral received the information.
        It throws you a bit at first but once you understand the method it helps you understand the decision processes the Japanese were forced into.
        Briefly corresponded with Tully back a few years ago. (the co-author of Shattered Sword). The breakdown between him and Parshall in the ‘who wrote what’ parts I don’t know.

        So… if Parshall is helping with the video… Good… I guess…

        Problem is Drachinifel is an utter hack. A hack that likes naval history, yes, but still a hack. I’ve already had at least two hours of my life watching some of their that I will never get back. Twice bitten, thrice shy.

        But yeah, Shattered Sword is VERY good.

        1. This is worth adding to the collection:
          A Dawn Like Thunder: The True Story of Torpedo Squadron Eight

          “One of the great untold stories of World War II finally comes to light in this thrilling account of Torpedo Squadron Eight and their heroic efforts in helping an outmatched U.S. fleet win critical victories at Midway and Guadalcanal.
          Thirty-five American men — many flying outmoded aircraft — changed the course of the war, going on to become the war’s most decorated naval air squadron, while suffering the heaviest losses in U.S. naval aviation history.
          Mrazek paints moving portraits of the men in the squadron, and exposes a shocking cover-up that cost many lives. ”
          ===

          A lot of interesting details and angles I’d never seen anywhere else, it ranks up with the very best books I’ve read on WWII.
          Midway was large part of the turning point from the peacetime Navy to the wartime Navy where the men who had their positions because of social position were replaced by the men who got things done.
          A lot of men died needlessly before the transition.

          1. I’ll take a look thanks… but the review does not inspire confidence. They flew outmoded aircraft only before and during Midway. Midway was the last time Devastator was used. By the time of Guadalcanal campaign, Devastator has long been retired and VT-8 flew much more capable Avengers.

          2. Coincidently, first Japanese aircraft carrier was lost a month earlier at Coral Sea. IJN Shoho was hit (overkill really) by a dozen bombs from SBDs and five torpedoes from Devastators. The torpedoes alone would be enough to secure a kill. So Devastator wasn’t all that useless.

        2. MudCrab, Shattered Sword is on my list… the ever growing list. Maybe will get to it this summer. Thanks for the recommendation.

          I have no idea why you don’t like Drach and consider him a hack. I think he does a great job. He knows much more than 99% of self proclaimed researchers and experts. And he makes his knowledge available to an average World of Warships playing imbecile surfing YouTube. If you belong to select few who are truly experts then I suppose you will not learn much from him. I did learn a lot and I am probably better versed in the topic than an average enthusiast.

    1. Tuco’s line “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk!” was improvised by Eli Wallach, which apparently caused the whole crew to burst out laughing. Eli was a little perplexed because he thought that what he said was actually pretty sensible. That is, he didn’t mean it as a joke, but his delivery and the look on his face made it side-splittingly hilarious.

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060196/trivia/

      1. I have to admit that Wallach steals the movie. He walks away with every scene he’s in and does it masterfully and with flair.

          1. Gotta love a line like that and Wallach’s delivery of it is perfect.

        2. There are two types of actors in that movie. Those who are Eli Wallach and those who ain’t.

          Great movie.

    2. The movie remains the highest rated movie on IMDb not to receive a single Oscar nomination.

      1. What’s not to like about this movie? It’s an epic, it’s based on history (Leone was a stickler for details, and there was a General Sibley leading the Confederate Army in a backwater campaign in New Mexico), it has terrific characters, and it has a stirring musical score.

        And, yes, I have a DVD copy of it in my collection. The theatrical release was edited and a few bits ended up on the cutting room floor. They were never dubbed into English until a director’s cut was released about 20 years ago. I have a copy of that, too, and the parts which were added on don’t add much to the original story others than smoothing out some of the jumps in the plot.

  3. I’ve seen lots of western movies, but there are 5 that, in my opinion, define the genre:

    – Red River (John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan–Howard Hawks, director)
    – Shane (Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jack Palance–George Stevens, director)
    – The Searchers (John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter–John Ford, director)
    – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef, Eli Wallach–Sergio Leone)
    – The Wild Bunch (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Edmond O’Brien–Sam Peckinpah, director)

    Of course there are many which are very good (e. g., The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or Rio Bravo), but watch those 5 and one has a good sense of the what westerns are about.

    The story is told that John Ford, after watching the Duke in RR, remarked, “I never knew the SOB could act.” Less than a decade earlier, JW had his first leading role in Stagecoach, also directed by Ford.

    3. Many people have the idea that John Wayne always played good guys in white hats. In both Red River and The Searchers, his characters were darker. In the former, Tom Dunson becomes a tyrant during the cattle drive. In the latter, Ethan Edwards is consumed with finding the niece (played later in the movie by Natalie Wood) that survived an attack which killed the rest of her family.

    4. If I see anything with John Wayne while flipping channels? Yes, I am going to finish watching it.
      I have a soft spot for “Virginia City.” Randolph Scott, Errol Flynn, and Humphrey Bogart, in a completely improbable plot.

      1. Virginia City was apparently based on actual history. I must admit, though, that Bogart was miscast in that movie.

        One John Wayne movie you may wish to avoid is The Conqueror. It’s regarded as being one of the 50 worst movies of all time and it’s hard not to see why. He plays Genghis Khan in that one with Susan Hayward as a Tatar princess. It’s a stinker which has to be seen to be believed, being unintentionally funny, and even JW was embarrassed to have been in it.

        Later the same year as TC was made, he starred in The Searchers.

        By the way, the Duke was originally offered the part of Dirty Harry, which he turned down, much to his regret. A few years later, he made two cop movies: McQ and Brannigan.

        1. I heard they did an aboveground nuke test while “The Conqueror” was being filmed, and the fallout caused a lot of future cancers amongst the cast and crew, including John Wayne’s. Maybe? Or maybe it was just the cigarettes everyone from that generation smoked?

          1. Many of the people associated with the movie eventually succumbed to cancer. John Wayne was one, but also Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and, also director Dick Powell.

            The cause was believed to have been downwind fallout from a Nevada nuclear test with the Utah film set in the direction of the cloud.

    5. Don’t forget that Mad Magazine did “The Good, The Bad and the Garlic”

    6. B.A., In the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I was bothered by the juxtaposition of Eastwood’s more modern handguns while the movie was set in the American Civil War:
      https://www.countrythangdaily.com/guns-clint-eastwood-used-in-the-dollars-trilogy/

      Compare Eastwood’s 1870s Colt .45 to the handguns used by officers in the movie “Gods and Generals”. The latter movie made a point of stressing the inefficiency of Civil War handguns. Mr. Eastwood seemed to mow down the bad guys quite well.

      I do concede the Good… did depict the absolute futility of the Civil War. The battle in the movie was ridiculous.

      1. That was a point Eastwood made in his movie Unforgiven, particularly in the scene with Gene Hackman’s character telling stories to the one played by Saul Rubinek.

    7. BA…All great films…no argument there.!!

      One of my favs was always the original 1960 Magnificent 7.

      Yul Brenner, Steve MCqueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Eli Wallach, Robert Vaughn, Horst Buchholz…

      John Sturges Director.
      ..a Classic fer sure..

      1. That was based on the Japanese movie The Seven Samurai directed by the great Akira Kurosawa. Sturges acknowledged the earlier work in the opening credits and, from what I heard, Kurosawa saw the film and liked it.

  6. Go Leafs go! The only thing Canada’s Team has in common with Canada is they’re fucking losers,

    2. Yup. Sergio Leone sure knew how to end a horse opera. Here’s the climactic scene from Once Upon A Time in the West:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwb3P0fuM1c

      I’ve got that one in my collection as well and the movie, too, is worth watching.

      Leone was influenced by John Ford. Ford liked to film in Monument Valley, and there’s a scene early in OUATITW which was actually shot there as a way of paying homage to him.

      1. Loved that film,
        “He’s Whittlin’ On A Piece Of Wood. I’ve Got A Feeling When He Stops Whittlin’… Somethin’s Gonna Happen.”

      2. Here’s another reason to watch OUATITW: Henry Fonda is absolutely terrific as the baddie.

      3. I thought the weak point in that movie was Jason Robards.
        The three gun men we see in the beginning were supposed to be played by Wallach, Cleef, and Eastwood, but they didn’t want to do it. That would have be cool though.

        1. Two of those were played by Woody Strode and Jack Elam. Good choices.

    1. Why use flimsy floating bridges?
      Build a proper ford or causeway.
      Don’t have gravel?
      Use drowned Russian T-72 tanks! They’ve got thousands of them!

  12. Kate,

    My comment @3:55 is in moderation. Maybe because the link has the word f*** spelled out?

    1. Spelling that word in a link with spaces between letters and with a caveat following to clean up the obvious seems to reduce moderation work on some sites.
      The “CU” inversion on others

      Don’t know about this one

    1. Maikeru

      Another CLASSIC western….One of the Absolute best final Gunfight scenes of any Western I’ve ever seen.

      Honourable Mention for 3:10 to Yuma

      1. 3:10 to Yuma

        Which version? The original made in the 1950s with Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, or the limp remake from about 20 years ago featuring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale?

        You want a classic gunfight? Take a look at My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, and Walter Brennan, directed by John Ford. It’s about what happened at the O. K. Corral.

        During his days of working on silent movies, Ford apparently met Wyatt Earp and based that film on some of his stories.

        1. I enjoyed both versions of “3:10 to Yuma.” I have no words to describe Glenn Ford’s performance. Well, perhaps sublime. You can’t get much better than that.

          1. I agree about Glenn Ford. In the movies of his that I’ve seen, he tended to underplay his roles. What also makes the original version of 3:10 to Yuma work is Van Heflin’s performance as the desperate farmer who needed the reward money.

            The re-make failed to capture that for me, so I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to.

  17. Lunar Eclipse Tonight

    The Super Flower Blood Moon lunar eclipse of 2022 occurs tonight! Here’s what to expect.

    https://www.space.com/super-flower-blood-moon-eclipse-tonight

    The link below says we have Twenty years left before the magnetic poles reverse and our Sun has a Micro Nova event but before then we should get some major volcanic eruptions to have a

    Year With No Summer, Eclipse, Solar Wind | S0 News May.15.2022

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=joGPVf_fM8w&feature=emb_title

    The Real Great Reset…

  18. We are in hell.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/bobscartoons/status/1525080228959293441?cxt=HHwWgsC40eqYlqoqAAAA

    Baby drowned in three inches of bathwater when her lawyer mother fainted a day after taking AstraZeneca Covid vaccine

    Her husband James came home from a trip to the dentist and pushed open the bathroom door to discover it had been blocked by his unresponsive wife on the floor.

    To his horror, he saw their baby daughter face down in the bath turning blue.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10812887/Baby-drowned-three-inches-bathwater-mother-fainted-day-taking-Covid-jab.html

  19. Maybe this will be the Great Reset.
    https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-backed-corner-prepared-26968406

    Will Putin use nuclear weapons?
    The author who thinks he could is Sir Antony Beevor, an historian. I have some of his books – Stalingrad and The Battle for Spain – and highly recommend them.

    I’m not on anyone’s side on this, but I think its obvious that NATO is fighting a proxy war. With Finland and Sweden wanting to join NATO now, it would seem that Putin’s choices are limited…to two: back down/retreat/withdraw and then he must be removed from power or tell the 30 countries pointing guns at him, “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk!” After he launches.

  20. PANDAMNED [documentary]

    2020 / 2022 – For the past two years, the world population has been under the spell of the coronavirus. Emergency regimes have been established, civil liberties have been dismantled, surveillance programs were being installed and an unprecedented global vaccination program has been rolled out.

    Are we doing the right thing, or did we make a deal with the devil in exchange for a benefit? Through critical voices from various areas of expertise, PANDAMNED attempted for the first time to paint the whole picture and shed light on the darkness. It has become a relentless stocktaking of our time, which global organizations, governments and big tech companies would have preferred to prevent.

    Documentary maker Marijn Poels takes the viewer on an enlightening journey through the emerging absurd world of the “New Normal” and how we can still prevent it.

    http://www.pandamned.org
    Subtitles: German, Englisch, Dutch

    https://rumble.com/v140n0y-pandamned-documentary.html

    1. She seems to have set a new standard when it comes to air pudding.

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