My father was in CBI during WWII, in a liaison flying unit. 25 years later, I flew from Ft. Lewis, WA to Cam Ranh Bay, RVN, by way of Flying Tiger Airways. Small world.
Generation cometh and generation passeth away. I can remember when the last Civil War vets died. The last WWI vets died only recently. The WWII generation is going fast and my Vietnam War contemporaries are starting to die of natural causes. It's in the nature of war that when the war is over...
For the American public, the revelations came only with the liberation of the camps in 1945. Higher-ups had known about them earlier but deemed winning the war to be the first priority.
You know you're middle-aged when you watch the news stories about foreign wars and the buck sergeants and captains look like kids. You know you're old when the master sergeants and colonels look like kids.
All the MGM Tarzan movies made extensive use of stock footage left over from the filming of "Trader Horn,"(1931). The filming of that movie in East Africa was an epic in itself. The photographers went crazy when they got out on the veldt and shot hundreds of miles of wildlife footage that never...
Douglas Wilmer, British character actor, 920-2016, dead at 94. He was a fixture in almost all of the Samuel Bronston big-budget spectaculars of the 60s, incuding "El Cid" and "Fall of the Roman Empire"and many others. A versatile presence on stage, screen and telly with a distinctive face and...
I've been asked if I'd like to have a tree planted at my gravesite, and if so, what kind? My answer is: Even if that tree lives for centuries, someday it will die and I'll still be dead. Eventually the entire family that constitutes trees will be gone and replaced by something else and I'll...
Another peculiarity of the 50s was that it was the first era when people had to have fears and anxieties manufactured for them. Previously, there was plenty to be worried about. During the Depression, it was where the next meal would come from or whether your job would disappear or, worst of...
I'm willing to give "Deadwood"a pass because it was almost as much a fantasy as a western, and the dialogue reached almost a sort of foul-mouthed poetry. It's like pointing out that there were no cannons in Hamlet's day, or tolling clocks in Julius Caesar's, despite Shakespeare's anachronisms.
According to IMDB, Patty Duke's first acting credit was from 1954, and her last won't be released until 2017. any way you look at it, that's a hell of a long career, and she seems to have worked in almost every one of those years. That's what you call a trouper.
Oddly, "son of a bitch"was once a euphemism. The original insult was "whoreson,"but that was so vulgar that people used "son of a bitch" as a more family-friendly version. But in the way these things happen "son of a bitch"became the vulgar term and by extension, "bitch"got to be a dirty word...
I find at least half of these very questionable. On the other hand, there are many surnames that come from archery. To wit:
Archer
Bowyer
Stringer
Fletcher
Shafter
Butts (butts were the targets used in archery. Someone named Butts either made targets or took care of the butts at the village...
In an odd case of the recurrence of an old expression that had fallen out of use, years ago, in a used book store, I found a Victorian adventure-in -the-far-reaches-of-the-empire novel titled "The Right Stuff."
It's been noted that the police were major vectors of slang. Much of the slang of the period originated with jazz musicians. Jazz was a venue where black and white musicians mingled. It was a pretty druggy milieu,(mostly marijuana and speed) and these guys were always getting arrested, so...
I didn't know whether to post this in the "Things that tick you off" thread, but it involves movies so here goes:
In movies set in the Golden Era, I often hear people use words or, especially, phrases that came into use much later. For instance, in the excellent film, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, based...
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