Monday 31 October 2011

Things that go thump in the night

No pumpkins here. I thought I'd mark the day at the Expanse a different way, by looking at one of the scariest in living memory - Hallowe'en 1962. The world just scraped through the Cuban missile crisis on the 28th, but the missiles were still on Cuba for maybe three more weeks, possibly in Turkey for six more months and in Italy till some time in 1963.

The first and second vids are from the movie Thirteen Days. That mention of John Paul Jones in the second could be useful for gamers and writers looking for a plot. The guy reading a new language is the man in the third. He has a message for an autumn day:

"I wanna say - and this is very important - at the end we lucked out. It was luck ... ."

Those are expensive tricks. They don't make Hallowe'ens like that anymore, do they?






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4 comments:

Ray Rousell said...

Excellent film, funnily enough I saw it for the first time only last week!!

Paul´s Bods said...

There´s always one thing that makes me think a wee bit differently about that event..it´s in the past and didn´t happen..so it never could of happened..so it never can make me think.."oops!! That was close." cos it wasn´t, not in a % comparison. It´s a bit like saying a thing happens 99% everytime you try it...but is the "1% of the time" you are attemting it the 1st go of 100 or the last?? IMHO..it never came close because there is no comparison of when it did actually come so close that it actually happened, ie, it went over the 1% rate of 100 goes of trying to blow the world up.
Also it´s a bit like giving any sort of meaning to the so called power of the people involved, who have the say in using the threat to blow us all up.
I just say "yeh, and?"
I mean, what can they do after that to scare me? Not a lot really. They can only cause a nuclear holocaust once.
If you see what I mean :-D

Cheers
paul

SinSynn said...

Heh- way to take a bit of the fun outta Halloween there, Porky!
Even these clip are genuinely scary...not like 'Mortarion sez BOO!' scary...GENUINELY scary....
*shiver*

Porky said...

@ Ray Rousell - I agree. It's been a while since I saw it, but it's still one of the best in that time. Understated and thoughtful.

@ Paul's Bods - Bang on form. That's a very powerful argument. Who do we trust for our data? Informed guesses only get us so far, and trust a bit further. What then?

@ SinSynn - Yep. This stuff really looms out of the mist. And I don't think we can underestimate what living in the shadow of the mushroom cloud has done to us all these years.