The version that I recall, from around the time the Helvetica documentary came out, was that the Nazis were somewhat conflicted on the issue of fonts — The highly ornate, Fraktur or “Blackletter” style, now often associated with heavy metal album covers, was a long standing part of German tradition and identity, which…

We mustn’t forget its destruction in the mid-1960s at the hands of Gomora:

I’m a bit baffled by the difference between the US and French cuts of Shoah. Did someone really think “US audiences are never gonna sit through a 10+ hour movie. You really have to cut this down by two hours”?

I was a little disappointed in their score for Iron Sky, inasmuch as it was largely just a collection of musical quotations from Wagner, though the title song was pretty enjoyable.

I snapped up Opus Dei on vinyl soon after seeing the Nuremburgesque video for that on MTV’s 120 Minutes back in the day.

Beyond historical sources, I’m sure Martin has had some literary inspirations as well. I recently read S.R. Crockett’s 1899 historical novel The Black Douglas, which features [116 year-old Spoiler?] the fairly shocking “he’s too damn noble” demise of its seeming protagonist more than half-way through — It felt like an…

Plenty more such correlations here:

Grim indeed, but not too dissimilar to the ending of Notre Dame de Paris (sanitized in every “Hunchback” movie adaptation I’m aware of). Ultra-heavy romantic tragedy was obviously the flavor of the day in mid-19th century France.

I definitely agree on the “good idea”. Germany’s resource deficiencies forced them to utilize everything they could. Obsolete tanks were almost always recycled into tank destroyers or self-propelled artillery or the like. Porsche made a mistake in producing the hulls in the first place, but definitely made lemonade…

I was gonna say, her head also looks a little bigger than his, so it’s pretty clear that the Selina picture is just scaled up a bit.

PG-13 Sin City with a heavy dose of 1966 Batman

There was a Smithsonian magazine article back in the late '90s about the various presidential assassinations which claimed that we could — That given the wound track and the relatively low-powered bullet fired by Booth's derringer (muzzle velocity comparable a modern paintball gun, I believe, though firing lead rather…

I suppose I did jump to the conclusion that the warning came from Legal rather than Lucas. Your take makes a lot of sense, though from what I've heard about the amount of assistance Lucas got from friends like DePalma and Spielberg, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that one of them first had that realization and…

One of the glimpses of the "draft" model (around 0:36) shows it standing on four, foot-like landing gear. Between those and the large cluster of engine nozzles at the rear I think its lines were similar enough to Space: 1999's more common "Eagle" to make the lawyers skittish. I also think there might have been…

In a final, odd, "FU" to Czolgosz, the staff at the prison where he was executed and buried filled his casket with sulfuric acid to destroy the body. I would suppose that they were motivated by concern that his body might be exhumed by sympathizers and turned into some sort of Anarchist relic, but I've not seen a…

The question then being whether such "bottle rockets" and other small fireworks are legal in other jurisdictions, in the US or abroad. I strongly suspect that they are, and that these could legitimately have been sold in such places (or even back to their manufacturer or wholesaler at some fraction of their original…

Depends how they're "illegal". There may well be states or countries where they are legal, and I think it would be much more sensible to sell them there. If these are impermissible anywhere in the US, and if the US so dominates the international fireworks market that they'd almost certainly make their way back here if…

For the court to order this destruction, at the state's expense, rather than the sale/auction of the seized goods to legitimate buyers, proves that Dickens was right about the law being "a ass — a idiot".

I fully agree. Our knowledge of the importance of bacteria to human life is really in its infancy, and our understanding of the interdependencies of broader microecology is similarly undeveloped. I think the complexity of all of that is so vast that later-stage terraforming (after oxygen levels, temperature, and…

Initial colonies would be self-contained. Any expansive populating of Mars would require terraforming, and I would think that any such effort would involve populating Mars with bacteria — as Robinson alludes to regarding neutralizing the perchlorates. The real issues would be deciding what kinds of microorganisms to…