Fed by Birds

The Young in Heart, 1938, as well as being a satisfying comedy about a family of spongers meeting their match in an innocent old lady, also features possibly the world's best car showroom:

The Flying Wombat was actually the 1938 Phantom Corsair, a futuristic prototype designed by Rust Heinz, the ketchup magnate. It's a beautiful-looking thing, but turned out not to be the car of tomorrow after all.

The film is bursting with up-to-the-minute Thirties style: a couple even have a date at Lubetkin's modernist penguin pool at London zoo, which had opened four years before.

Posted by at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are many reasons to like Marianne Moore:
1) Her poetry - particularly her "love of intricately shaped animals".
2) Her uniform. Not enough modern writers realise that without a tricorn hat and cape in the poetry world you are nothing. "She liked the shape of such hats, she said, because they concealed the defects of her head, which, she added, resembled that of a hop toad."
3) The fact that when the Ford Motor Company hired her to think of names for their new model, she threw herself into the task with great enthusiasm: the Anticipator! Dearborn Diamanté! Turcotinga! The Intelligent Whale! Utopian Turtletop! I'd drive any of them. Mongoose Civique! Inexplicably the fools went with the Ford Edsel instead.

Posted by at 11:23 AM | Permalink

I love these pictures of the Soyuz descent module landing in a field in Kazakhstan on its return from the ISS (via goodmachine). And particularly for the chance to get a close-up look at space fashion.

Badges! Blue plug-in nodules! White canvas boots with toggles!

Even better are the ceremonial return-from-space outfits they wear. I hope the reason Tracy Caldwell Dyson doesn't get a special hat is that she's a Nasa astronaut rather than because she's female.

Here they are back in normal clothes - although as you see Ms Dyson now carries a flower at all times as lady astronauts must when on planet Earth.

Posted by at 11:56 AM | Permalink

Defence cuts? Don't worry - as usual, GK Chesterton has the answer:

"I for one will confess that the only thing on earth I am frightfully afraid of is a little girl... If the Prussians were invading England, and I were holding a solitary outpost, the best thing they could do would be to send a regiment of Prussian girls of 12, from which I should fly, screaming."

It's a good point: who here can honestly say they could stand firm in the face of an army of 12-year-old girls, all staring contemptuously, giggling and whispering to each other? Osama bin Laden himself would feel hot around the neck and find he had important business elsewhere.

Posted by at 10:35 AM | Permalink