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Can we paintball this lot?

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One more bit of James Horner.

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James Cameron, director of "Titanic", on film composer James Horner.

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A bit of James Horner.

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22 June 2015 (10 years ago): film composer and musical genius James Horner died by crashing his private airplane in northern California.

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Jerry Goldsmith's main theme for "The Last Castle".

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No film composer did military themes better than Jerry Goldsmith.

This expanded “Limited Edition” of “The Last Castle” provides sufficient proof - if you still needed it from the man who scored “Patton”, “The Swarm” and the Rambo movies.

If you’re into the trumpet, this album is a must. Mind you, I’m not saying that any trumpet player can play this music. It takes somebody like Tim Morrison, John Williams’ first trumpet, or studio musician Malcolm McNab to pull it off. (McNab, a “damn reliable” trumpeter in Goldsmith’s words, played the solos in this case.)

Final comment: Goldsmith’s main theme was used at concerts to commemorate 9/11. This track is now known as “September 11, 2001 - Theme from The Last Castle”.

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I hesitated if I was going to comment on Jaws' 50th anniversary or not.

John Williams' music for this scene illustrates how incredibly difficult writing a soundtrack can be. Every few seconds, the music changes direction because something happens on-screen.

They're called the "sync points" that the music has to "hit". And this scene has several dozens of them...

Second reason to post: no, Williams' music is NOT "just two notes".

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Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum): "You crazy son of a bitch. You did it."

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"Two Weeks Notice" is no longer a movie.

It's Trump's official policy. In every area.

Whatever needs to happen, he'll make up his mind in two weeks. And he hopes you've forgotten it by then...

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Alexandre Desplat's music for "The Imitation Game", the movie about Alan Turing.

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Are you aware that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) is the father of the computer? Not everybody is but more and more people are since the British government declassified the Enigma files in the nineties. (In the movie “The Imitation Game” (2014), Benedict Cumberbatch played his character.)

I watched this documentary on Turing, much of it filmed on site at Bletchley Park. A former operator of the “Bombe” machines shows how Turing’s code-breaking machine worked.

The Allied Armies invaded Normandy on June 6 1944 because two prerequisite conditions were fulfilled: an unprecedented buildup of soldiers, arms, ammunition, fuel, food and material in England and a successful execution of operation “Fortitude”, an intelligence program that misled the Germans into thinking an invasion would happen more to the north, in the Calais area.

Eisenhower’s staff knew that the Calais deception worked because Turing had broken the code that the German high command used. And they built up a lethal force on the south coast of England because the convoys of merchant ships coming in from America were able to survive the relentless U-boat attacks in the north Atlantic Ocean (the “Battle of the Atlantic”) once Turing had broken the Enigma code.

And thus 165,000 men and 20,000 vehicles landed on the coast of Normandy in a single day. By the end of the month, 1 million soldiers had crossed the North Sea to join the beachhead.

After Enigma, Turing cracked another German code machine, the Lorenz, called “Tunny” by the Brits, in a few weeks. This more sophisticated device converted plain German text directly into a binary, encoded radio signal and was exclusively used by Hitler’s staff and generals. (Enigma messages were transmitted as Morse code once they were encrypted.)

Turing again wanted to mechanize the codebreaking but it would involve 2,000 valves. As valves were then unreliable and no machine with more than, say, 30 valves had ever been built, the army refused the funding that late in the war. The engineer Tommy Flowers built the “Colossus” anyway in his personal laboratory…

The general thinking is that Turing’s contribution shortened World War II by two years. Amongst other things, that meant no atom bomb was dropped on Berlin.

Not that Turing knew about the plans for D-Day, compartmentalized secrecy being the order of the day. He learned about it over the radio as everybody else. Still, by that time, Bletchley Park had gone from 30 code breakers in the Victorian mansion to a 9,000-men operation spread across huts quickly built around the mansion.

And yet, it’s fair to assume he came to work that day on his bicycle wearing a gas mask. Not because he feared a chemical counterattack but because that’s how he fought hay fever during the summer.

But you may wonder why the British state kept a tight lid on Bletchley Park and the codebreaking effort once the war was over. This happened because the Russian army stole Tunny machines as it swept through Germany. They reconfigured them a bit to handle the Russian language with its Cyrillic script but otherwise used them without reservations. As a result, during the first years of the Cold War, the West listened in on Stalin’s conversations with the Russian army.

Economically, the strict secrecy was a unfortunate move. Great Britain did not develop an IT industry after World War II. Over time, valves got replaced by transistors and Silicon Valley became the center of the IT world after Vannevar Bush, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, laid the groundwork. (Matthew Modine played him In Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer” (2023).)

Turing died in 1954 at the age of 43. Strangely, in this documentary, Professor of Philosophy (read: Logic) and Turing biographer Jack Copeland doubts the traditional hypothesis - suicide. Still, he was found dead on his bed with cyanide in his body and a half-eaten apple on his nightstand. Where did the cyanide come from if the apple wasn’t laced with it…?

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Just wondering: can Washington's dogs walk up to Donald's flagpoles?

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Is this Dad's Army or Donald's army?

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Donald's army is more than ready to win a drone war with Russia.

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Shouldn't Trump's smartphone be called a "dumbphone"?

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Couldn't he wear a Richard Nixon mask as bank robbers do?