About five years ago I decided to take a short holiday in Vienna and travel there by train.  This necessitated changing trains in Cologne to get the sleeper down to Vienna.  There's a large book shop in Cologne station so I spent some of my wait there.  Although I don't read German I do like seeing what is available in German translation out of ( Read more... )

My family had a large collection of old 78 rpm records, mostly of old popular songs from the thirties and forties - I knew the song Ali Baba's Camel long before the Bonzos recorded it - but one of them, which I knew only as The Jewels of the Madonna, was classical music, although I probably wouldn't have made that distinction at the time.  If it ( Read more... )

Last week, the man who invented the computer mouse, this week, the man who designed the Trabant ( Read more... )

I heard on Radio 3 this morning that the film star Deanna Durbin has just died aged 91.  I suppose it was partly due to her that I was listening to Radio 3 at all ( Read more... )

I was reading an obituary in today's Independent of someone called Tommy Smith, an American amateur jockey who rode the winner of the 1965 Grand National.  (He gave racing a year later to concentrate on being a heath care executive.  A fall from a horse in 2001 left him a quadriplegic.)  His name didn't mean anything to me, but then I saw the name ( Read more... )

For some reason, I remember this one better than the other two ( Read more... )

This series is oddly structured.  Of the six episodes, three are to do with getting to Mars and one mostly about getting home, leaving very little of the show actually set on Mars ( Read more... )

Now watching the second part of the Pathfinders trilogy, which starts when Professor Wedgwood is injured in a re-fuelling explosion.  He breaks his arm which means he can't lead the next expedition to the moon.  So Henderson, the science reporter, is roped in to go.  Geoffrey Wedgwood is going again, but his brother and sister are back at school.  ( Read more... )

So, it seems the aliens who built the spaceship they found on the moon actually came from Earth 400 million years ago, but whilst the explorers were on the moon, a nuclear war broke out back on Earth, wiping out their civilisation.  Presumably, the pre-Cambrian explosion was life on Earth recovering from this disaster ( Read more... )

Just been watching a BBC documentary about the big freeze of 1963.  Basically this was a repeat of a Tonight programme special shown towards the end of the freeze, fronted by Cliff Michelmore , Derek Hart and Kenneth Alsop (and with designer Ridley Scott and director Anthony Jay ( Read more... )