Daydream Notes

 So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. America got involved in Vietnam due to  overwhelming arrogance, one that assumed with enough force, materiel, and firepower, politics could  be ignored. “The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam” by James Williams Gibson is a book with a very good core criticizing how and why the war was fought, but when it steps away from that core, it can be atrocious. The book’s cardinal flaw (or saving grace, depending on your point of view) is that this core  and the halo of mostly confused nonsense around it never link together; the methods of one have nothing to do with the other. If the postmodern jank took over it’d be just another gibberish academic  book to be filed and forgotten; had an editor managed to cut out the extraneous bits, Technowar might  have been a classic.   So...when the book is good, it is ...

 So in my "long day's journey into emotional sterility" I watched a few 70s disaster films. In 1975, Jaws became the first blockbuster of a young Stephen Spielberg, and the Jaws-like subgenre was a kind of disaster film, except one where the disaster had intention.  Rob Hill  of the Bad Movie Bible has you covered if you want to know more. For Spooky Halloween, I thought I'd do another favorite...horror? film of mine, which is definitely a disaster: the Swarm, from 1978.  The Swarm is about swarms of angry killer bees, and it was directed by Irwin Allen, the producer/director of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.  In fact, the cast and crew are all recognizable names, especially if you know period disaster films. It stars Michael Caine as a  heroic entomologist,  Dr. Bradford Crane, and in the first sentence of description, it has already gotten silly. This movie is basically an alien invasion film, where the aliens were replaced by bees...

I made this kit a few years ago now; but only now have taken its picture. It's Tamiya's I-400 kit. The I-400/I-401 are fairly famous (I mean I saw a comprehensive documentary on them out of PBS), so I'll skip the info dump this time.  Just for context, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had some exceptionally large submarines, as the expected combat zone was the entirety of the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese warmed up to the aircraft-carrying subs for a few reasons. First, some of their submarine classes were large simply because they were built for trans-pacific operations. Second, for those finding things in the Pacific reasons, the idea of scout aircraft was seen as sensible, regardless of what job the submarine was assigned to. The Japanese were also really good at submarines, and really good at aircraft carriers, so making it practical came much easier. Finally, the Japanese were also the people who made floatplane versions of their fighters to operate air cover in ...