Over 70 degrees! For a while. Then the rain came and the temps went back to the forties. You kno, the temps we would have loved two months ago. It just feels as if it's been 43 degrees forever. Midnight? 43. High blazing noon? 43.
I'm not sure how I found this on Google Books, but I did. Must share this fully consolidated Communist mouthpiece rag from 1924.
It's the globohomo look from a hundred years ago:
All glory to the military, if they're killing the right people!
Don't spend too much time thinking about this fellow's proportions, because you'll start to get annoyed:
Oh joy
Soviet Comedy
This is my favorite part. The table of contents had something about Down with Savinkovism or something. Oh look, a show trial!
Oh, completely. Completely and irrevocably. Remember, this is 1924, when the Revolution was still pure and untainted! NO, the tankies say, this was during the NEP, when the Revolution was corrupt.
Boris Viktorovich Savinkovwas a Russian writer and revolutionary. As one of the leaders of the Fighting Organisation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, he became involved in the assassinations of several high-ranking imperial officials in 1904 and 1905.
After the February Revolution of 1917, he became Assistant War Minister (in office from July to August 1917) in the Provisional Government.
To his surprise, though, the wrong Revolutionaries won.
After the October Revolution of the same year he organized armed resistance against the ruling Bolsheviks.
In 1921 he wrote, "The Russian people do not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not merely because the Bolsheviks mobilize them, shoot them, take their grain and are ruining Russia. The Russian people do not want them for the simple reason that .... nobody elected them." Savinkov emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1920, but in 1924 the OGPU lured him back to the Soviet Union and arrested him.
Lured him back. How?
He was an acquaintance of Sidney Reilly, the legendary renegade British agent, and was involved in a number of counter-revolutionary plots against the Bolsheviks, sometimes collaborating with the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). These efforts were effectively undermined by the Trust Operation implemented by the Soviet security agency OGPU.
Savinkov was lured into the USSR to meet with false conspirators and consequently arrested.
Hence the groveling. Hence the reassurances to the American leadership that scientific Leninism was the only hope of mankind, and Soviet justice was mercifiul. I mean, he was sentenced to ten years in jail, and that's not bad, considering his crimes.
Then again: LOL as the kids say.
I'm going with the latter. It's a fine long-standing Russian tradition.
And now, our look at the ad campaign for a 1929 slate of movies from . . .
Oh, my God, this thing.
Based on the sinking of the “Titanic,” so natch you’ll have “Grim Comedy.”
It’s awful. I give you one of the most stirring moments: the Lancaster Inquiry. The moment when the bad news is broken to the Elbert-Hubbard type. Skip ahead to 42:00:
Hubbard was on the Titanic, and survived, along with his wife.
Both went down with the Lusitania, three years later.
For all its futuristic setting, it’s not that imaginative. Visually, yes. Story-wise? We have to go and stop this thing, but in the middle of it there is peril and seeming failure, but then there isn’t, and on we go.
Every sequel ever done. And that’s fine! So let’s catch up:
Buck and Buddy are in the nicely-designed Moderne HQ of Killer Kane, the planetary gangster who convinced the Saturnians he was a nice guy. Which is why he’s called Killer. At the end of the last ep, everyone was zapped with a ray gun. Well:
Just a paralyzing ray, then.
Killer Kane has some cool searchlights, I’ll give him that.
Well, back at the ol’ Hidden City of Models . . .
. . . it’s time to pad things out with trips through the transporter, walking though the cool sets, opening the stone gates, sending out the ships. They send Wilma to search for the boys.
Just look at this sequence, and imagine you’re 11 or so, and it’s 1939.
How cool was that? Then again there's that dumb Wilma spoiling everything . . .
Or maybe she didn't spoil it, you know? You didn't mind WIlma at all. You just didn't want to say anything to the guys or they'd razz you for bein' soft.
Anyway, they escape in Killer Kane’s ship, so Wilma’s patrol thinks they’re the bad guys. This . . . this is the third time this has happened. I mean, it happens all the time. No one has radio or IFF, I guess.
They’re soon set upon by Kane’s men, who dive-bomb them on the surface.
