Festive airship story!

So, I was on a break from slavishly working, Bob Cratchit style, on Christmas Eve, and I glanced through an issue of Smithsonian magazine that someone had left in the break room. They had an article about the Graf Zeppelin on Christmas. One of her regular missions was to transport Tannenbaums and Frohliche Weinachten to ze Germans who had settled in south America. It took the airship only four days to cross the Atlantic, and letters sent on her bore a special, and adorable, stamp.

It's a Christmas tree with a dirigible flying behind it! >D

If I had an airship, I would have a Christmas tree in the ballroom (yes it would have a ballroom).

New Abney Park Album!

After long weeks of waiting, I finally received "Aether Shanties" the new Anbey Park CD in the mail (It's the first album of theirs that I actually got the physical CD for). It's quite good. Not as industrial or tribal sounding as some of their other stuff, but all the tracks definitely sound like them.

There is a steampunky version of the traditional pirate song "The Derelict", with all the verses in their gruesome glory, and they wrote their own pirate song too, "Aether Shanties". It's definitely my favorite song on the album. They have another pirate song, "Ballad of Captain Robert", that is on Youtube from an acoustic set at a convention, and I think they should put it on a CD in the near future.

There is even a Steampunk anthem! That's right! It's called "Throw Them Overboard", and it pretty much sums it up. Any anthem that say "newfangled" is all right in my book, dang-nabbit!

One thing that came as a nice surprise were a couple of 1920's sort of jazzy numbers. When I heard them, the first thing I thought of was a sort of Bertie Woosterish character in a garish club full of aeronauts, but that is probably because I have just begun reading all the P.G. Wodehouse I can get my hands on. It makes me want to write a story I have had in my head for a while...

Steampunk Art and Hats and Things

I started a DeviantArt page, where I'm putting all my steampunk creations. So far I have some hats, and a couple of other things. I'm working on a drawing, and I'll put up other things from time to time. I also take commissions, so if anyone needs an elegant top hat, just let me know.

Baby's First Steampunk

Last night - yesterday morning actually (it's tomorrow again, if you know what I mean) - I made my first AMV. It combines a cartoon and and song that just need to go together - Abney Park's "Airship Pirate", and Disney's "Talespin", and it stars the airship pirate, Don Karnage

Talespin is one my favorite shows, and has been ever since it was on the Disney Afternoon, which may be the greatest block of TV programming in the history of the medium. But it is more than that. It is also Baby's First Steampunk. One might argue that that coveted title should go to Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, given its sympathetic portrayal of steam-powered machines versus diesel and electric shovels, but we should probably not overanalyze these things. Also, while the story does center around steam power, it takes place in a contemporary setting and is not really speculative. No, Talespin is clearly the steampunk of choice for developing minds (as I replayed the first four episodes over and over narrowing down my selection of clips, I realized just how fully my subconscious mind is steeped in this show)

Now, I don't think the mere presence of airships makes something steampunk, and I'll examine this in more detail later. But the sense of adventure, and the overall look and feel, while a bit late - 1930s, probably - has a lot of steampunkness, especially the pirates. Don Karnage's airship, the Iron Vulture, is particularly interesting. If you look at it, it's not really a lighter-than-air ship. It has large gas envelopes on the sides, but it only lifts off when it uses the rows of upward-pointing propellers along the sides. Why is this significant? It's like the design of Captain Robur's airship in Jules Verne's "Robur the Conqueror", which was made into the movie "Master of the World" starring Vincent Price. Aside from that, look at the control room:

It has a certain flare. It reminds me of the Nautilus, and there are lovely giant pipes and gauges everywhere. If you watch the early episodes (I don't know if they continue later in the series), it doesn't make the usual low, droning hum we usually hear from airship engines. Instead it makes a steamy chugging noise like a train. That's just cool and it goes to show the amount of thought and research Disney used to put into their cartoons (do they even make half-hour cartoons now?)

The engines on the back even look like the boilers from locomotives, complete with smokestacks and steam domes. In fact, Talespin does what so many things we call steampunk don't bother with, and gives a nod to the way steam machines actually work. (more on that later too).

And of course, one look at the pirates themselves, with their googles, shabby top hats, vests, and variety of weapons, and it's pretty clear that they are very steampunk pirates indeed.

NANOWRIMO is here again!!!

It's been, well, several months since I last posted, and here we are in November again. I need to get writing! Ack. I'm stuck, but I'm determined. Like this:

I promise I'll write a real post this week!

NANOWRIMO words finished right on schedule...

... My schedule, that is.

I predicted it would take six months, rather than just the one for me to write fifty thousand words, and here we are. As of right now, I have 50596 words, most of which make sense and sound good, or about 99 pages. My book will end up being not quite 300 pages, as near as I can tell. Here is how I feel right now:

Steampunk Easter Eggs

Happy fifth Monday of Easter, gentle reader(s)! I love that liturgical seasons last so much longer than the one day - it makes my occasional holiday posts almost seem timely. . .

But enough about that. This Easter, I decided to do steampunk themed eggs. Then I took pictures of them. You might say I got carried away. I also made a cute chubby bumble bee, but I ate it. So, without further ado...

“Why are airships always white?” Drystan mused.

“Come again?” said Will, looking up at the ship too.

“They’re always painted the same whitish-silver. I’ve never seen one that was another color.”

“What color would you paint it?” Will asked.

“Saffron,” came the immediate response. Will raised his eyebrow so Drystan continued. “An airship made of saffron silk would look exquisite against the sky. And at sunset. . ." he waved his arms rhapsodically. “Think of it! I’ve always thought airships should be the color of saffron.”

Will smiled. Drystan probably had always thought that, for who knew how long. That was the kind of thing he thought about.

“But on a cloudy day,” Will said, “wouldn’t it look sort of bilious?” He continued along the walkway, leaving Drystan lapsed into a rare thoughtful silence.

It turns out it looks rather good in the clouds, although if it were completely overcast, it would indeed look bilious. Of course another type of airship that looks rather striking is a pirate ship. Dun dun DUUUUUUUN!!!

By the way, the above conversation is from a story I'm working on, with a situation very much like this, except the airships aren't quite as adorable, and the saffron-colored one is, sadly, white. Read on for two more steampunk Easter egg adventures.

Easter Eggs #2

I made a little Nautilus.

Ah, ze ocean. What mysteries will we encounter here in ze deep? Ze swaying seaweed, ze shifting shadows...

In 

ze kelp beds somzing is watching. Zere is a flash of color in ze ocean floor as ze giant octopus darts after 'iz prey.

Easter Eggs #3

I also made a little rocketship, but no bad guy or monster to go with it. 

Here it is being shot out of a cannon into the sky. It has a shooting star painted on the side of it, a little tribute to "Wings". There's a lot to be said for Halloween spider webs, a composition book, and a toilet paper tube.

The rocket turns around at some point before smacking into the moon! Aaaah! Splat! I didn't draw the moon. It's from the cover an exhibit catalog from the Georges Melies show at the cinema museum in Paris (more on that later).

What's with the Lafayette Escadrille movies?

So now I have seen (I think) all the World War I flying movies there are, at least on video and DVD. I saved the ones that are actually about the Lafayette Escadrille for last. And I gotta say, meh.

First, I rented "Lafayette Escadrille". I had high hopes for this one, since it was directed by William Wellman ("Wings"), who was actually one of the pilots who was in the real thing. I was a little suspicious of the fact that it was made in 1958, which is a little close to the 60s for my taste. The problem with this film wasn't that it seemed like a sixties movie, because it didn't. The problem was that it seemed like the first act of a bigger movie, and the Lafayette Escadrille was barely in it. In fact, it had very little flying at all. I suppose saying "I wanted more" isn't exactly a bad review, but when there isn't any more, it does mean the film is disappointing.

First, though, the good parts. Even more than "Wings", this film shows how the pilots lived, and how they were trained. It showed them trying to steer "penguins", basically plane bodies with stubby wings, and trying to follow orders and instructions in French. It also had the characters briefly meeting such awesome figures as Lufbery and Guynemer. The story was engaging, until it ended, and I was left going "Wait, where's the rest of the movie?" I was pretty into it, but it just wasn't satisfying. I'm not going to do a summary, since none of the issues I have are with the aviation-related parts, which were OK, but no "Hell's Angels" (curse, you, Howard Hughes - all dogfighting films are boring now!!!)

The best thing about "Lafayette Escadrille" is how it shows the reasons why they did what they did. Partly, they were young and seeking adventure, and fighting in the air force was the ultimate way to do that, but mostly they felt they should do something in the war, and they were angry the U.S. wasn't getting involved. That's not usually portrayed in movies.

Speaking of movies that miss the point, after several weeks I finally worked up the courage to rent "Flyboys". In those weeks I read the Red Baron's book, Eddie Rickenbacker's book - Fighting the Flying Circius, and James Norman Hall's series of magazine articles, in order to form a perfect picture in my mind, a picture that could withstand the thrashing that film would inevitably give it.

It actually wasn't as bad as I expected (not that it could have been). It was nice-looking, and the dogfighting bits were fun. Not good, but fun. Let us bear in mind that it was made by the guy who did "Independence Day" and "The Patriot", so yeah... The characters ranged from meh to lame, the acting was kind of appalling, and the story was totally predictable, except where it was surprisingly absurd.

The characters would have been OK if they had actually been developed. They basically had the usual mix of guys you have in a war film - the hotheaded guy, the religious guy, the nerdy skinny kid, the black guy, you know. They also had a rich snobby guy, a clumsy guy, and a guy whose family were all soldiers and he was eager to go carry on the family tradition... he was kinda weird. They had a leader, and he was distant and disillusioned - more on him later. The main character was pretty likable, but I hear he was inspired by Frank Luke. Let's just say he's no Frank Luke. This is mostly a personal pet peeve, but he should have been a miner from Arizona, not a rancher from Texas. What can I say - the Arizona Balloon Buster has a special place in my heart. The leader of their squadron was quite wanksty and needed to grow up and get over it. He was all "all my friends are dead and I only keep doing this for revenge and (the usual speech) no one even knows why we're in this war. You'll be dead in a few weeks too." Mr. Morale. None of the other characters were anything to write home about except some of them had some very strange (stupid) things happen to them. I did like their instructor, who was played by Jean Reno. My biggest problem with characters was that they each had their own personal reason for joining the Escadrille, each of which was all right, but not a single one was there for the actual reasons why most the real guys were, like doing the right thing for your country even when it hasn't figured out what the right thing is. It seemed very shallow.

I'm not even getting into the story. I do recommend watching this film though - it's worth a few laughs, and I would hate to spoil any spit-take worthy surprises. Seriously. Watch this movie.

Now for the technical things. First, the good parts. They show some training stuff that's not in the other films, and they have a pet lion, which is, strangely, almost historically accurate (there should have been two pet lions). Also, they have a very exciting attack on an airship. It's not quite as cool as the one in "Hell's Angels", but some parts were kind of interesting, such as how it's actually harder than it sounds to blow one up, even with incendiary bullets (basically because you can't get near it). What you have to do is upload a virus from your Mac to the German dirigible. I personally wish they would have shown some actual balloon busting, sticking with the whole Frank Luke thing. They also explain why Fokker triplanes were so formidable.

It's a good thing they do explain that, since the entire German air force apparently consisted of bright red triplanes, because, you know, the Red Baron wasn't special or anything. The main bad guy had a black one at least. They shouldn't have been using triplanes at all. But whatever - they did it on purpose to make it easier to tell the planes apart during the action sequences. I'm sure they could have found another way to do that. Like editing. Or painting big black crosses on some of the planes and red, white, and blue circles on the others...

The dogfighting scenes were fast-paced, but not really chaotic enough. They did try to show some tactics, like to get in a good firing position before shooting, using the sun and clouds, and things like that. There were some nice visuals, like when a bunch of planes come out of the sun, and when all the planes are fighting around the airship. A lot of the maneuvers they do are kind of stupid. For example, one time an American has a Fokker on his tail, maybe ten yards behind (and somehow unable to shoot him?) He does some kind of airbrake thing (not invented yet), pulls up, and uses his wheels to tear the triplane's top wing off. Uh-huh. Also, after making a big deal about how agile the triplanes are, and how fast they climb, the Americans proceed to fly circles around them, sometimes literally, in their Nieuports. Two or three times they do a move where they basically flip upside-down, let the triplane go under them (over their heads) and then finish the roll to drop onto the German's tail. It's shown in this video about Werner Voss, at 4:30. Except notice that in real life, Voss did the move in the triplane. That's the point of a triplane, and Voss was one of the most daring pilots when it came to the maneuvers he would do. He seems to have been a showboating rival character for the Red Baron.

It's a small detail, but there are parts where the propellers are spinning but the cylinders on the rotary engines are still. That's just an animation problem, but it's kind of lame. They should have grouped the engine to the propeller on the models, just like they were attached in real life. What's not a small detail is the way they show them flying through Archie, the German anti-aircraft guns. There's a funny part in Rickenbacker's book about what it's like to fly through artillery, and how it basically makes a bunch of shockwaves in the air. From as far as fifty yards one of those shells could knock a plane out of the sky. In the film they come considerably closer. It does make it more exciting, visually, and I would have done *almost* the same thing. What I would not do is have a shell burst right under the wheels of a plane, and the plane be OK.

My biggest problem with the dogfight scenes was the editing. They were done with computers, so there is nothing - NOTHING - they could not and should not show, and yet, they held back. It's not as though they had to put eighty planes in the sky with twenty-six cameras strapped to them and shoot miles and miles of film while endangering dozens of men's lives or anything. The usual (non-Howard Hughes) way of showing a plane getting shot down would be to do a couple of close-ups of guns and bullet holes, whatever intimacy with pilot death you feel your audience needs to see, the plane starts smoking and spinning down, you cut to it going behind a hill and cut to an explosion. The cuts are in there to protect the stuntmen, save the expensive real plane, and disguise your model. If you have an invincible digital model with an immortal digital pilot, you slam that plane into the ground and blow it up for all to see! Every maneuver should be shown in its entirety, since you don't need match-on-action cutting to construct the right moves, and you don't need clever angles to make the bad guys look closer than they actually are. The reason I love animation is that if you can imagine something, you can show it. It seems to me that the storyboarders, choreographers, and director weren't imaginative enough. They copied a bunch of dogfighting sequences from films with real-life limitations, instead of starting from scratch and showing us something we'd never seen before. Actually, there is a scene in "The Aviator", where Howard Hughes is shooting the big dogfight for "Hell's Angels", that has almost the perfect feeling of speed and stomach-churning acrobatics, and shots you could only get with animation. It seems somewhat ironic. Actually, the proper feeling in a dogfight scene might also be similar to the Quidditch games in the Harry Potter movies - truly dizzying action!

To me the "Flyboys" fights seemed detached, but that might just be the predictability of the story combined with the uninteresting characters, and I was the one who was detached. I just think a dogfight scene should be visceral and chaotic, but not like a Bourne movie. You should be in the pilot's head. You should be able to tell what's happening, but it should be blazing fast, and it should be scary!

Despite its sub-video game graphics and lack of any closeups of the pilots, History Channel's Dogfights series actually comes closest to this feeling, with the exception of "Hell's Angels". The dogfights in "Hell's Angels" are actually scary. They are some of the most intense and realistic portrayals of aerial combat - they show how unforgiving it is, how hard and frantic the most graceful movements are from the pilots' point of view, and how fragile those machines and the men who flew them really were. They used editing, not to disguise cuts between real planes and models (because there were no models), but to establish pacing and mood. Probably the longest shots were when a plane was going down, and they would show the pilot in the cockpit, dead or dying, or alive for the entire 15000 foot drop, with the shadow from his wings sweeping over him faster and faster as his plane went out of control. That, I think, is what made those scenes scary - death in a dogfight was lonely, and could come at any second, and even if you didn't make a mistake, you might just have rotten luck.

I, for one, am in awe of the people who fought in the air, and the ones who still do it to this day. (And it's not just because I kind of have a thing for airmen.)

This concludes what accidentally turned into a series about World War I films. Next up, Easter eggs (a month late).

Couldn't have said it better myself - really, I couldn't.

My far better-read brother emailed me this article some time ago, after I posted my first rant about World War I films. I finally read it (I know, shameful). It's a piece by G.K. Chesterton about the sort of stories people were writing about the Great War, and it pretty much said a lot of what I said, but in a more organized fashion. I particularly like this paragraph:

"Lastly, let us remember as a general principle that opinions should be stated as opinions and convictions as convictions. We must not be impatient because these statements are called abstract. Whereas some charming romance about mud and blood and disemboweled horses is in comparison beautifully concrete. We are not savages, to express ourselves only in picture-writing. We are civilised men, acquainted with mathematics and metaphysics, and presumably capable of thinking in terms of thought. Certainly if we ever lose that power, it will be a worse relapse into barbarism than the worst war in the world."

It almost makes me want to take a creative writing class just so I can tell them that when they get all "show don't tell" on me. Not that I don't think there is a place for description - Chesterton was an unparalleled master at describing how things looked, right down to lighting and "camera" angles!

Are the oldies the only goodies?

So, after watching almost every World War I flyer movie I could find (this week I'm going to rent "Lafayette Escadrille", and then finally bite the bullet and watch "Flyboys" *shudder*, and that will be pretty much all of them), I think the farther we get from history, the more people try to mess with it to suit their agendas, or just plain tell whatever story pops into their heads.

I watched "The Blue Max" (1966), which I thought was going to be good, since it has James Mason. I suppose it wasn't entirely awful - it started all right, and it had two good characters. The problem was the main character. From about thirty-five minutes into the film, I was rooting for someone to kill him. The other problem was the costumes on the leading "lady" *cough(hussy)cough*. Like many (most?) period films from the sixties, the men are in fairly accurate costumes, but the women have sixties eyeliner and that weird hair that's like a beehive or a bouffant on top but hangs down in the back. I almost can't watch movies like that. The really weird thing about this film in particular is that the women who are extras are all dressed in appropriately Edwardian-looking clothing and hair.

It also had bad dogfight scenes. Not only are they dull and don't show off any nice maneuvers or wide shots of the action, they also don't make a lot of sense. Basically, the main guy, and many other pilots whose POV we get to see, will fly towards a tiny speck, and begin blasting away (always the same shot too - looking through the propeller at his face with a lit-up machine on either side - a nice shot, but should be used sparingly). Anyway, not to sound picky, but Oswald Boelcke must spinning in his grave. The guns back then only had about ninety seconds of sustained fire, and were so inaccurate that the Dicta Boelcke and Mannock's Rules both say you should hold your fire until you're about a hundred yards away, if not closer, and preferably only from behind. Now, I might not be so picky (actually, yes, yes I would) if they didn't bring up this very issue right there in the movie itself. In one scene the main jerk character's armorer says that his guns had jammed after firing only forty rounds, or about two three-second bursts. It's kind of like in Star Trek when they are standing there in the transporter room talking about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - The audience was with you until you went and brought it up!!!

On a better note, I next rented "Wings" from 1927. It was the first movie to receive the academy award for best picture, and it truly is a great film! It also won for Best Engineering Effects. Also, the director, William Wellman, was actually in the Lafayette Flying Corps (not the Lafayette Escadrille), and apparently many of his films are about aviation and adventure, including "Lafayette Escadrille". (He also directed "The Story of G.I. Joe", which is an incredibly good film, based a real guy.) He's in the movie as well, according to this site, which has tons of info and pictures.

What a difference! Just like "Hell's Angels" which I wrote about earlier, this film actually gets to the point of World War I (which is sort like the point of World War II, oddly enough). Besides that, it's just a well-done movie. It's got great characters and fine acting (more subtle than many silent films), and an awesome combination of action, romance, suspense, and pathos, all thrown together in a melodramatic way that still had me actually jumping off the couch and crying, occasionally at the same time. I don't know what it is, but I get really into silent movies, and I think part of it is how you have to use your imagination, and you can go ahead and talk and yell and laugh and do whatever. Catharsis? I'm sure I learned this in film school.

But enough about that. What really set this film apart, for me, was the technical stuff! It shows how pilots were trained back then, and how they lived. It's very interesting. Then, when they actually get into some fights, it's just fantastic. The fights are cut in a way that makes them very intense, and shows off the actual dogfighting. The airmen who worked on those scenes must have been very good, because they do all the moves a geek like me would like to see in a dogfight, and you gotta figure multiple takes, flying with big running cameras on board, etc. They generally use four types of shots - looking at the front of the pilot with a view of the sky (and planes) behind him, looking from his POV past his guns, medium shot of the whole plane, and a wide shot of two or more planes with room to maneuver. Each shot of course had variations, being tighter or wider as the action demanded, and sometimes closeups of other angles, like instrument panels being shattered by bullets, or guns jamming.

My personal favorite thing about the dogfighting scenes was the title cards - yes title cards! Aside from showing the action in a very realistic fashion, they pop cards in to let you know what the pilots are thinking, what tactical use their artful movements serve, and how the fight is going (helpful since a German plane and a French plane look very similar from a distance and in black and white). It's especially cool that the director actually did those things himself. The language on the cards is very nice and poetic as well, throughout the film. I believe silent movies are their own medium, and the cards narrate in a way that is different from just showing the action, or even from spoken narration.

If you can find a video store that has "Hell's Angels" and "Wings" you should absolutely watch them both. It seems that after 1930, World War I aviation movies just weren't the same. Hopefully "Lafayette Escadrille" will be good, even though it's a talkie. (OK, Hell's Angels is a talkie too, but it was originally shot silent, then reshot with sound, so it counts!)

World War I Films, or, Why are they all Viet Nam films?

So I was trying to find some good World War I films that showed off the aircraft they used back then. Aside from the fact that there really weren't that many made, most of the ones I found were just so whiny! Now I should say that there are several very good WWI films, whiny or not, like Lawrence of Arabia, the Dawn Patrol, Galipoli, and Hell's Angels. And there are also a bunch of non-whiny ones that barely qualify as war films at all, focusing mainly on romance between girls and handsome pilots (not that I mind watching handsome WWI pilots).

I will not talk about the ultimate achievement in the art of whining and missing the point that is both versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, nor will I go into the WWII movies-disguised-as-WWI movies, like Sergeant York, which was a deliberate propaganda piece to get Americans to think about entering WWII (as well as being a great film). It's like how MASH was really about Viet Nam even though it's set in Korea, but with the opposite message.

I'm talking about the early 30s WWI films here, and unfortunately I must limit it to the ones that are available to rent (*sniff* I want to see Dirigible. . .) Once again heading to my favorite video store (the one that still rents tapes) I picked up The Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn. It's a very good movie, despite the fact that tension issues on this particular tape made it look as though the whole thing was filmed under water. It's got great characters and fine acting, and it's quite exciting. Flynn plays the leader of a squadron of British flyers in France. They are on their last legs, surviving only because they get new replacements every day for the men who are killed. Of course the replacements are basically cannon fodder for the far more battle-hardened German aces. During the film, Flynn's character makes the usual speech, looking off into the distance, about how they keep sending these boys up to die, and no one remembers what it's all for. Very "Bridge Too Far". I recall reading about another situation where it was all Britain could do to keep planes in the air, most of them piloted by young men who were lucky if they'd flown more than 10 hours. It's called the Battle of Britain, and of course their officers probably felt horrible sending them up knowing they had almost no chance of coming back. But they didn't pretend to have forgotten why they did it. Germany was trying to invade them.

So I took that tape back, after finally watching the whole thing, despite having to fast-forward it all the way to the end and then back to where I left off every time it got too hard to see. The guy at the store gave me a free rental. I was looking in the war films for 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (wrong war, but it's just so good, and Robert Mitchum is in it) when what should I see on the shelf but Hell's Angels!

Hell's Angels was directed and produced by Howard Hughes, and in 1930 was the the most expensive movie ever made. It's easy to see why. It has everything, including a long color sequence. It had the usual tinted blue-for-night, red-for-awesome-airship-crash bits, but this color sequence was actually in color. Other strains to the budget included a scene in an airship, which burns up and crashes spectacularly, much better than the one in the Rocketeer, and a dogfighting scene with countless planes on screen at once. When they filmed it they actually used something like 80 planes, which makes for some really really exciting dogfights, some of which are quite gruesome. The first time I saw it I was trying so hard to figure out how they could possibly have made it look so realistic, like did they use rear-projection? Did they use miniatures? Did they build cockpits and put them on moving stands? Turns out it was the obvious (and yet unbelievable) answer - they put a bunch of cameras on a bunch of planes and had themselves a dogfight! They reshot it a bunch and also had to wait around for months and months until they could get some clouds in the background. It has the Red Baron's Flying Circus (Jasta 11, which I was so impressed to see shown still using biplanes, the famous red triplane appearing only late in the war) and excellent special effects throughout. Basically Howard Hughes was one hell of a film-maker (it helps to be crazy).

But what makes Hell's Angels the best movie about WWI? They are fighting because Germany was stealing other countries. Imagine that. The final dramatic bombing mission in the film is to take out a munitions factory and supply lines so that when the infantry goes over the top to advance the next day, they won't get quite so slaughtered. It's quite clear, the lives lost are not shown as wasted, and it actually felt like the war it was made about, not like Viet Nam, which in real life wasn't even like "Viet Nam" as it's shown in movies.

Genuinely Old and Steampunk!

Greetings and salutations, everyone. I've decided to occasionally write a series on here about steampunk clothing that I have. Ideally, I'd like to focus on items that are genuinely old, from the age of steam, but that would make it a very short series, as I have only two such items. So I'll pad it with other random things from my growing collection. Who knows, if I get a real job and eBay fortune smiles on me, I may soon have more actually old steampunky goodness.

For this first installment in the series, I would like to present . . . Cinder Goggles! (circa 1850)

These are the oldest things I have in my house, being older even than my Edison phonograph cylinders! They come from a time when trains did not have windows on all the cars, and they prevented hot cinders from blowing into your eyes. Believe me, when that happens, it is not pleasant. To try it out, take the Durango-Silverton or Cumbres-Toltec railroads, or any of the steam railroads that are scattered around still. It's a truly steampunk experience.

But I digress. I like these goggles because they are small and ladylike. They even came in a handy tin case to slip in your purse. However, they also have a distinct mad science look to

them, as seen here. I want to play with the lighting to get both lenses to glow, but I already love the way the old glass creates a nice even shine with no details like an actual reflection. Out of all the goggles I have, these are my favorites, and the only ones I am not going to modify in any way, except maybe clean up the ends of the string.

Stayed tuned for an article on jodhpurs, the official trousers of adventure!

An Ideal Husband Part 3, or "A happy ending after all"

You may recall that the movie version of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" is a terrible adaptation, apart from the costumes. Not satisfied, and trying to get the taste out my mouth, I found an old tape of the 1947 version at a marvelous video store that has that sort of thing (tapes, I mean). Even with the poor image quality, muddy sound, and occasional suspenseful moments where it looked like the tape might break, it was a much better viewing experience, because it was a much better movie.

Basically, it was the play. They moved a few scenes and greatly condensed most of the ending, but it held up well. Lord Goring was charming, Mrs. Cheveley was slimy, and the other characters were quite good as well. I liked Miss Mabel, and unlike in the other version, they left her a funny, clever, and minor character. I hate when screenwriters feel the need to make minor female characters show up all over the story and take over (Arwen). But I digress.

I only had a couple of problems with it. There are spoilers in here, so go read the play. I've turned them a parchmenty yellow color, so you can highlight them and read if you want. First, the tremendous condensation of the ending left almost no time for the charming scenes between Lord Goring and Mabel. Her impatience to get Goring to propose to her, and her scolding of him, is so funny in the play, and it was largely left out. I suppose that's minor, but still...

The other problem is also pretty minor, but I find it annoying. Here's a bunch of spoilers. In the play, Lady Chiltern sends Goring a letter asking his help, which Mrs. Cheveley finds, and being a bad person herself, assumes meant she was having an affair with him. After Goring makes Mrs. Cheveley give him the other letter she has, she reveals she has pocketed Lady Chiltern's letter, and runs off. The ending is rather suspenseful because just when Sir Chiltern decides to stick to his guns, and Lord Goring has succeeded in keeping his past a secret, Mrs. Cheveley is scheming away to ruin the Chilterns' marriage again. In both movies, they have Mrs. Cheveley keep Lady Chiltern's letter a secret, and tell Lord Goring she has it after they all go to watch Sir Chiltern give his speech to Parliament (not in the play). While this is a more simple "good guys think they're safe but then the villain has one last trick" twist, I like the extra suspense of knowing her scheme the whole time, and hoping their success won't be ruined, and wondering how they'll get out of it. It works OK either way, but I like the play better. Also, showing the speech in Parliament is boring! It works fine in the play where it cuts to them back at home talking about what a great speech it was, while the audience knows the trouble that the letter could still bring.

Overall, though, it's a pretty good adaptation, and a pretty good movie.

"Steam Airships (Real Ones)" or "They said it couldn't be done!"

So, while I'm writing a steampunk story, I've been getting all these gloomy nay-sayers telling me you couldn't really have steam-powered airships. Now, obviously, the water tank would be pretty heavy, and you'd have to have a really good condenser so you don't boil all your water out into the atmosphere, but those are just details. What is even cooler, as this page shows, is that you can actually use steam as your lift gas!

This eliminates the danger of running a coal fire under a giant bag of hydrogen (anyone who's ever ridden on a steam train can tell you about the burning cinders blowing around). Also, it is a much cheaper option for pirate crews and the like. Your balloon and its boiler could be their own closed system, with the steam trap pipes dumping the condensed steam back into the boiler. A pressure valve would turn the steam off to prevent the balloon from bursting, and turn it back on as you gain altitude and the temperature drop condenses the steam at a faster rate. You could combine steam and other lift gases perhaps, in separate envelopes, since you would need a pretty big balloon to displace the weight of the boiler, the water tank, the coal or oil, your crew, and all your weapons, and a bigger steam balloon would necessitate a bigger water tank and more weight.

The next question I would try to answer is whether you ought to use normal steam or "dry" or superheated steam. Dry steam can perform an enormous amount of work, but is it lighter? It's hotter, so it's probably less dense. You just need to send the steam back through a separate section of the boiler to get it hotter. Jay Leno explains a bit about a compact version of this technology in his video about the amazing Doble Steam car. If you were going to use steam power to run your propellers as well, you certain would like to have a superheater.

So, I would just like to say, "They said it couldn't be done! But I'll show them all! Mwahahahaaaa!" (fires lightning cannon from airship)

Adventures in Victorian Steampunkland (London)

Merry Christmas (it counts until tomorrow!) and Happy New Year, everyone. As my first post this year, I will relate something I did last year. Three weeks before Christmas I went with my aunt to England, and Paris, via the Chunnel. We ran all over and did touristy things, but explored a lot too. We became hopelessly lost on Hampstead Heath, in the rain, and I got trenchfoot because the soles of my old boots wore through. A tragedy - they will be missed. (My boots, not my feet). Going off the name (since changed) of a street in a book we both read and enjoyed (Ghost Map) we wandered the narrow streets behind Picadilly Circus until we found the site of a pump responsible for London's worst ever cholera epidemic. The pub far in the background is the John Snow, named for the man who used data collected from the incident to prove that cholera is a water-borne disease.

So I guess that's touristy. I'm sure I needn't tell you how thrilled I was to be in the middle of so much history, particularly Victorian history. Even the tube station near our hostel (Palmer's Lodge, a former Victorian mansion) was steampunk. It was built in 1863 as one of the the first underground

stations, and it looks just as it did then, but grungier and with new advertisements on the walls. Even the fire extinguishers are inside fancy wood and glass cabinets.

The station's entrance had this war monument with an artillery shell from the first World War. All over London, and Paris, there are war monuments, mostly from WWI, and also WWII. The ones in Paris really got to me, since you almost can't walk down a street without seeing a plaque telling about someone who died on that spot, and what they were doing for the war. I'll have more on war monuments later.

First, more about steampunk! The highlight of the scientific expedition portion of the trip for me was, of course, the London Science Museum. I wanted to go there because I knew they had a difference engine, Charles Babbage's amazing steam-powered clockwork calculation machine. I believe at one time they had an exhibit of a modern analytical engine based on his design, but not when I went. Here I am standing next to Babbage's Difference Engine no. 1.

And on the right is the engine itself. You can see the numbered gears and the columns of other gears that somehow perform calculations. Honestly, it might as well be magic. I only understand it a tiny bit, but this is the little guy that kicked off steampunk as a literary genre.

The difference engine was in a room called "The making of the modern world." It was a huge jumble of wonderful things like dynamos and cars, a penny farthing bike, lenses, telephone, an Avro (One of Britain's WWI biplanes) an AC motor built by Tesla himself, and a box containing cross sections of different kinds of undersea telegraph cables. The museum also had rooms and rooms devoted to history of flight, with some really old planes, and models of even more planes, and airships. They had a flight suit from 1909, and even a real autogyro!