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Yesterday (New Year's Eve), the temperature here in Melbourne reached 41 degrees Celsius (that's just under 106 Fahrenheit for those of you in the United States and Belize) -- the hottest day of 2007, as it happens. The overnight minimum was 30 degrees (86 for those of you etc), which I think is higher than all but a few days I experienced in the northern summer just past. Today is predicted to be another 40 degree day, though at least a weak change is predicted for the afternoon. Even now (a bit after 11am), it's nudging 38 outside. Inside, my little flat at the top of my building is disgustingly hot and I can't think, so I'm going into town to work at the State Library instead, which should be nice and cool. (I do have a sadly-neglected desk in the department, in an air-conditioned room, but they've changed the building entry codes or something and I don't think I can get in.)

But what of the future? All else being equal, as global warming begins to take hold, and the average temperature rises, we will see more days like today and yesterday, and hotter days too. So more and more poor postgraduate students like me, who can't afford to live somewhere cool, will tend to gravitate towards the SLV. Eventually, a point of no return will be reached: so many postgrads will have gathered there that the mass of the combined SLV+postgrads aggregate will be enough to form a black hole. Then, even if they do finish writing their theses, how will their examiners read their theses? If Hawking is right, they'd have to wait until the black hole had evaporated before the outside world could know what they had written, which of course is no use to them anyway.

So, ultimately, as far as the outside world is concerned, the number of new PhDs being produced will drop to zero. This pattern will recur all around the planet. Australia and other hot countries will succumb first. Countries with colder climes will last longer, but they will fall too, eventually. So historical research will one day grind to a halt. This is the tragedy of global warming!

See, told you I can't think in this heat. I'm off to the library.

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I'm not sure what happened, exactly,1 but email wasn't getting through to me yesterday, for a period of -- I think -- about 8 to 10 hours. Sometimes there was a bounce back to the sender, other times it just vanished into a black hole. It seems to be back (with a flood of extra spam), so if anyone has sent me an email in the last day -- I apologise but please send it again!

  1. First response of tech support was: um, what was the problem again, because we can't be bothered reading what you wrote the first time around? Oh and give us your email passwords will ya. Er, no, you don't need them and you shouldn't be asking. [↩]

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For a long, long time, there was only Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls: the poster. Then there was ZvP: the movie mashup, followed by ZvP: the cartoon mashup. And now there's ZvP: the webcomic, along with ZvP: the t-shirt!

I obviously wasn't responsible for creating any of this. I wasn't even the first to blog about ZvP. But through the stochastic wonders of the blogosphere, my post about it was picked up by blogs more popular than my own, which then spread the word to a much larger audience, with the results that you see above. So I do feel as though I can claim a very modest share of the credit for this ZvP revival!

And I may just have to buy the t-shirt ...

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Around Easter, I happened to have a camera on me when an airship was passing overhead, and managed to take a couple of pictures before the camera batteries died. But they didn't look quite right, and eventually I realised that it was because the airship was too red. Everybody knows, at least subconsciously, that airships are always silver grey; in fact, they probably should be photographed in black and white. So I used Photoshop to turn the airship into grey and the photograph into black and white. It looks much better now!

Holden airship

The black line could almost be a bracing wire on some Sopwith biplane, straining to reach the raider. Sadly, it's just part of the tram power distribution system.

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Mark Connelly has written several very fine books on British military history. He also has an amusingly self-referential Wikipedia entry (emphasis added):

Mark Connelly is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of History, at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

He is also the author of a book on the Second World War and the British home front called, We Can Take It!, as well as other books and essays. He also detests Wikipedia and regards it as an unreferenced, unreliable and generally very poor source of (reputable) information. However, this entry would appear to be factually correct.

Well, I LOL'd anyway!

Digging a bit deeper, the last two sentences were added by user Rcarolina, who has made a grand total of 2 Wikipedia edits, the other being an earlier version of the same entry ('He regards Wikipedia as the work of the devil'). Another user, Timrollpickering (who Jack and Dr Dan might know, as he's a history PhD student at QMUL) quite rightly asks whether Connelly's opposition to Wikipedia is notable, so the laughs may not last -- which is why I'm preserving them for posterity.

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... all those years of habitually talking like a pilot to the consternation of all and sundry, then somebody goes along and organises The First International Talk Like A Pilot Day and I go and miss it! It was yesterday, 19 May 2007. Wizard idea though, what -- absolutely spiffing. Next year I'll be there with bells on, and top button carefully undone.

They also provide a link to The Aircrew Dictionary, which purportedly describes how real RAF aircrew speak. Well, maybe Douglas Bader and Guy Gibson used such foul language, but I'm sure Kenneth More and Richard Todd would never have!

(Thanks to Jeremy Boggs for the tip.)

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One of the pleasures of reading period newspapers and magazines, as I am doing now, is chancing upon reviews of old films I know and (usually) love. Here's what Graham Greene (yes, that Graham Greene) had to say about The Wizard of Oz:

The book has been popular in the States for forty years, and has been compared there to Alice in Wonderland, but to us in our old tribal continent the morality seems a little crude and the fancy material: the whole apparatus of Fairy Queen and witches and dwarfs called Munchkins, the Emerald City, the Scarecrow Man without a brain, and the Tin Man without a heart, and the Lion man without courage, rattles like dry goods.

After rubbishing the tastes of the former colonials in this fashion, Greene goes on to tell us that

the Wizard of Oz who sends the dreaming child with her three grotesque friends to capture the witch's broomstick turns out to be a Kansas conjurer operating a radio-electric contrivance.

After reading this, I was retrospectively enraged on behalf of the filmgoers of 1940! How rude. As he died in 1991, Greene never got the chance to review The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense, which is probably just as well ...

It wasn't all bad: he thought the songs 'charming' and the witch suitably repellent; in particular, he noted that

Miss Judy Garland, with her delectable long-legged stride, would have won one's heart for a whole winter season twenty years ago

And I must agree with Greene when he protests at the adults only certification given the film by the British Board of Film Censors:

Surely it is time that this absurd committee of elderly men and spinsters who feared, too, that Snow-white was unsuitable for those under sixteen, was laughed out of existence? As it is, in many places, parents will be forbidden by the by-laws to take their own children to The Wizard of Oz.

What can the censors have possibly objected to? Domicular homicides? Airborne primates? Saccharine overdoses? Weird.

The review is from the Spectator, 9 February 1940, p. 179.