The Apple iPad hits the stores tomorrow but only in the States, queue’s are forming already as Mac fans and future fans wave dollars in the air to be first with the new. Us fans in the UK and the rest of the world have to wait until later this month to get out fingers on one. I have heard of a few who, as you view this, are winging their way over the Atlantic from the UK to be the first on these shores to have one, I’m keen but not that keen. Will you be first in the queue when they arrive? Or will you wait for the next generation of iPads to emerge which will have a few of the things missing from the launch model as per the iPhone a few years ago. I came across that picture this morning which just about sums up the iPad for me, do you know which film the iPad has been added to in the pic? It fits to perfection. If their are any Americans reading this, have a happy ‘P’ day.

The new picture shows queue’s building up nicely in New York, can I offer anyone more shares in Apple?

The prediction has just been announced from Oldmovie Towers in the past few minutes, so if you move quickly into the realms of companies listed on the stock market who make small sofas, you could make a killing.

Now as a rule I do not spend an inordinate amount of time pondering the success or otherwise of companies who make small sofas but about an hour ago I had what could only be described as a ‘Eureka’ moment and, making sure that this blog would not cause the futures market in small sofas to be totally skewed in a rush to buy from WordPress investors, I have been blistering the lines to various brokers who specialise in buying shares in small sofa manufacturing conglomerates, so I’m ok. Now I think it only fair to divulge what has caused this mild but significant panic in the small sofa share market. And here it is Continue reading “Predicted Upsurge in Small Sofa Sales”

When I was a nipper my folks took me and my sister on a holiday to Whitby in Yorkshire to visit my Dad’s brother who ran a pub there. We set of for Victoria coach station at sparrows fart and boarded the motor coach that took us part way. This took the best part of the day,  no Mways and town bypasses then, we just jogged along in the traffic. We then boarded a train which again only took us part way and one thing I remember was the fact that this train changed gear, it must have been one of the first local diesels to go into operation and was really a bus that ran on railway tracks. By the time we got onto the local bus it had been dark for a long, long time and well past me and my siters bedtime. We yawned ourselves stupid in an heroic effort to keep awake as we did not wish to miss any sightings of the strange people that lived this far north from our home in South West London. We finally pulled into Whitby at around midnight and were given a cup of hot milk before being whisked between crisp white sheets and bed.

The whole journey had taken about nineteen hours door to door and that is why I say that with todays aircraft it is possible to travel from the UK to Australia in about twenty four hours, which in my book  and real time,  makes  Sydney  almost as close as Whitby in Yorkshire.

Will we or our followers look back at this time and regard it as the ‘Golden Age’ of communicating with each other, a last burst of collective imagination before the shutters come down on human endeavour. ‘They’, whoever ‘they’ are cannot be far from introducing the invention that will rock the world, end war, end strife and keep the population satisfied beyond it’s imagination and imagination will be the key. The pixels that are gently glowing on your screen are the afterwash of my mind and my fingers, it is  the digital pixie dust that I have conjured up for you to read, or ignore, it makes little difference to me, the joy is in the creation and the afterglow that comes from a large number of comments is the cherry on the top.

So if we accept the fact that the electrical impulses from my brain have caused a mechanical action in my fingers to press keys which then turn the keystrokes back into electrical impulses, when ‘they’ develop a way of cutting out the mechanical part and hardwire my brain to the computer, everything I think will appear before me on a glowing screen. Now lets extrapolate that, let my mind run riot with every fantasy that I have ever wished to see before me. Now give me a total immersion suit so that every move, every caress, every explosion of lust and perversion (this is for illustrative purposes only, I’m just taking it to its logical conclusion) will be laid before you, every wish will be your command. You wont need drugs, you wont need booze, you wont need porn, just think it and it will happen. The streets will empty, travel will stop, who needs to pay to go to Las Vegas, just imagine the strip and you will always be a winner from the comfort of your own home. It will cause massive problems as no one will want to work, what good is money when you can live the lifestyle of the rich and famous from the comfort of your fifty bed mansion in your minds eye, Sounds fun eh?

Posing with a smile is not something you may associate with Adolph Hitler but this picture sent a train of thought running in my mind.

Before Hitler began on his territorial ambitions to rule Europe,  if not the world, it was a well documented fact that anyone not fitting into the Aryan idea of racial perfection was probably destined for an appointment with a death chamber, Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, severley disabled were being put to death as a matter of routine. But then he started on his plan to dominate Europe and came to a sticky end in 1945,  with Germany in ruins and the third Reich crushed in its own rubble. So what if he had not invaded Poland, backed down at the last minute and went back to his own brand of ethnic cleansing within his own borders. Would  ‘we’  have intervened to save the Jews and the others or would we have just put it down to ‘It’s their business, let them get on with it’?

If I have offended anyone by using the word  ‘owners’, I apologise but you all know what I mean. Mrsoldmovie and I have been watching a programme on the old BBC of E called ‘Bombay Railway’ and it has inspired us to visit India next year to celebrate our 65th birthdays. She said to me, ‘apart from using ‘trip advisor’ where can we get the lowdown on tours to the sub continent, that may reflect ‘Bombay Railway’?

And do you know what?  I thought of you lot. Any suggestions of tour companies that you can recommend or ways that we can do it would go down a treat.

And my suggestion to the ‘owners’ is this: There is a lot of collective wisdom on this site, can we have a separate ‘bit’ where we can ask questions and get answers without it falling of the bottom of the page, if you get my drift. We all have different skill sets and thereby can help each other. Take my query as an example, who is to say that there is not an expert travel agent amongst us who knows exactly what I’m looking for? The possibilities are endless, why not share our skills together? Oh, and by the way, is there any way you can indicate how many contributors are ‘on line’ at any one time rather than just re-clicking ‘DnMyT’ in the vain hope that you may get a response?

Let me introduce you to this rather solid looking gentleman who goes by the name of Mike Osborn. His obituary appears in todays DT and I have no connection with him whatsoever other than having read his obituary this morning. I have neither asked the permission of the DT for using this obituary or his family and if I cause offence by doing either I apologise unreservedly.

I picked Mike because he is so typical of the type of person who populate the obit pages of the DT, he is not famous, he is not a ‘celeb’ but to those who loved him he was the most important man in the world. I suspect not many of us on this site will make the heady heights of the DTs obituary page, I could be wrong, I suspect many a light is hidden from view only to be revealed when the holder of the light dies. A close colleague of mine had his obit published in the Times some years ago and although I thought I knew the person I was surprised to read that during the WWII he was the man who tested different type of parachutes and it was done in the only way they knew, by strapping one on to Harry and saying ‘jump’. I often read the obits in the DT especially the military ones and I marvel and wonder at the deeds carried out and the lives lead after all the ‘derring-do’, sometimes fairly hum drum lives and I wonder what it must have been like to go from fighting to the death in a theatre of war and being recognised for your bravery and then coming home to pick up the threads in the Town Clerks dept of your local council. I think if I were a teacher today I would read these military obits occasionally to my class as some of them read like something from the old ‘Boy’s Own’ comics of my youth and when I had the class gasping for more I would gently remind them that the person concerned was once a young man or woman but now they are old and frail and you probably laugh at them as they totter along or get angry and barge past them if the get in your way. And there I think is the essence of the obit. It reminds us that a life stretches behind us, billowing like a dusty cape through our past, constantly attached and growing ever longer until one day, it stops growing and turns from something we can physically add to, to our mark upon this world. So please read about Mike and do as I will later, raise a glass to a stranger who has lived his life for better or worse and wish him well on his last journey.

Colonel Mike Osborn

Colonel Mike Osborn, who has died aged 92, had an adventurous career in which he was awarded a DSO and an MC, and played a leading part in the arrest of Heinrich Himmler.

Continue reading “Ever thought about Obituaries?”

Even though most of us transact by card these days, there are times when a bit of cash can come in handy. Turn your attention to the rugged looking guy in the riding coat which in no way would I wish you to think  in anyway depicted Oldmovieguy, I gave up smoking years ago. But rather look at the coat which is from the Marlboro ‘Classic’ range and is called a riding coat. Since the weather turned a bit nasty on us a few weeks ago I realised my old coat was just not up to the job as it was a bit light weight, ok for summer and the odd shower but not much cop in a blizzard. So I went of to seek the Australian ‘drizabone’ coat but something about it did not quite fit, so I left it. Then a friend told me about the Marlboro range and after a bit of a ‘google’ found a stockist. The coat you see is the coat I bought and very pleased with it I am indeed. It’s warm, stylish, waterproof in the extreme and, being 6’4″, keeps 90% of me dry. Continue reading “The Art of Haggling”