...e extent that POPSTAT actually means something, I suppose it is the potential total earnings of a film, and this in turn reflects the judgement of cinema managers as to whether cinema patrons would actually come to see the film, which in its turn would have been based upon how well the film was actually doing (ie, is it worth keeping it on for another week?) So in the end, assuming that cinema managers were responding to market forces, POPSTAT doe...
...her. For that matter, there's not actually much evidence that there was a walkway along the top of it at all! So it was really more like the fence along the US-Mexico border than a Roman Maginot Line. mercuriuspoliticus Another wonderful post - and great pictures to go with it. My favorite Vindolanda tablet is: Masculus to Cerialis his king, greetings. Please, my lord, give instructions on what you want us to do tomorrow. Are we all to return with...
...t regime controlled Burma at this time, though I'm unsure of its geopolitical alignment. TURKISH [DE]COY NATO [...]T ANGENTINA ESCALATION [sic] This was just after the Falklands War. Though Angentina had nothing to do with that. ICELAND MAXIMUM Iceland, part of NATO, had a crucial position in the middle of the GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) gap, guarding the Atlantic sealanes from the Soviet navy. ARABIAN THEATERWIDE Oil. 'Nuff said. U.S....
...and I missed it by less than 5. So I took this photo while I was trudging along the walls back to St Peter's, feeling drained because of my sudden adrenalin burst and dejected because I'd missed out on seeing the Sistine Chapel. I mean, that's like going to London and not seeing the Tower ... Then I figuratively slapped myself upside the head. I was in Rome! It's not like there's nothing else to see and do. So I went and stood in the queue again,...
...pressive artefacts to the people of Rome (though it seems they weren't actually allowed to see them for about three hundred years) and housed them on the Capitoline. 1471! That's ZOMG-worthy in and of itself. But there are far more ZOMGs to come. These aren't part of the original collection: they have only been in the museum for 522 years. They are marble fragments of a colossal statue of Constantine which originally stood (or sat, rather, as he w...
...1913. From then until the Second World War, the threat of air attack was unparalleled in its ability to create defence panics. Examples include scares over the size of European air forces in 1922 and 1935, claims about German preparations for biological warfare in 1934, the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities in 1938 which were part of the background to the Munich crisis, itself a major defence panic, and finally the shocks of the Gotha air raid...
...elters which reveal ideologies at work. O'Brien is very thorough on the legal and organisational aspects, but he was writing more than half a century ago: surely there's something new to say? And he was not much interested in popular assent to or dissent from the government's ARP regulations, for example. Transnational airmindedness. The Scareship Age. Britain and the Bomb. A bit outside of my field, so maybe I've missed something. What I'm thinki...
...to generating their future specialist trades in-house: the BBC and the Royal Ballet. There's probably a Bench Grass post in that. Erik Lund Well. I've already done the (pre-WWI) Stoker Scheme. RAF Halton: where you were expected to graduate, and could anticipate being given a job. You know what? Never mind putting that on a blog post. I think I'll just go graffiti it over the walls at the UBC Old Admissions Office. "RAF Halton, 1925: Come to Halt...
...the Manchester Guardian are more reticent, the former leading with 'BATTLE ALONG ALBANIAN FRONT' (4), the latter with 'HEAVY RAID ON BERLIN'. The Guardian does also feature a firsthand account from 'A citizen of Coventry' (9): "But the attack was as persistent as it was ruthless," he said. "At times it seemed that there must be a hundred enemy 'planes overhead. Bombs were constantly whistling down and exploding, not on military objectives but with...
