Tuesday 1 September 2009

Seventy years ago today

The fruits of appeasement.

6 comments:

jayessell said...

1) Excellent audio quality. Without magnetic tape, did they use movie film as a recording medium?

2) "What? You would go to war over a scrap of paper?
(Citation needed.)

3) What he should have done instead of signing over Czechoslovakia is shove the pen into Hitler's eye.
(Yes, hindsight is 20/20)

Sergej said...

That would be Mr. Chamberlain, wouldn't it? I only know him from the photograph---you know the one. Holding the umbrella. And that other thing, which it is not polite to mention.

Hindsight is indeed 20/20. Unless you're wearing opaque goggles, in which case it is not quite so good.

jayessell said...

Re: 1/1:

The audio quality may have been excellent because this is the audio from a newsreel.

Re: 1/2:

Oops! That was WW1.0.

In retrospect, there should have been a salt water sea where Belgium is starting just before the Belgian Congo Genocide. (10 million dead.)

Re: 1/3:

And Stalin could poke out the other one.

Sergej said...

Re: 3/2: Are you versioning your world wars now, jayessell? Good idea! So I suppose the Franco-Prussian War would be WW0.9, and maybe the goings-on around Israel (Amin al-Husseini was a pal of Hitler's, and South America wasn't the only place to which regrettably not-hanged Nazis escaped (to say nothing of one R. Khomeini and his followers)) would be WW2.1. Useful in case one ever misplaces a world war, and desires to restore it from backup tapes.

Re: 3/3: Stalin wasn't such a great guy either. If he hadn't had an even greater evil to fight, he might have been the worst animal of his generation.

jayessell said...

Sergej...

I meant that Hitler should have had an eye poked out for each peace treaty signing he attended.

Mart said...

@ Jayessell. This is probably a bit off subject but, apparently, tape recording dates back to 1935, before that recordings were made on reels of wire. That format dates back to the 20's. Before that I suppose we're getting into the wax cylinder age, and before that we have the grand-daddy of them all, the phonoautograph, which despite being revolutionary, sounded pretty crap...