Lenny Lays an Egg. Louis Shalako.

Poor old Lenny...

Louis Shalako

 

“Is he prepped?” asked Doctor Rolf Ludwig, duty intern on the night shift in this busy metropolitan hospital.

“Yes, doctor,” replied Nurse Betty-Ann Genomi, a tall, brown-haired woman in her mid-forties with large, cone-shaped breasts.

Saint Athelstan’s was only a stones-throw from the police station, so they got all kinds of winners in here.

“He’s complaining about abdominal pain and the x-rays…well,” she said.

“Yeah. It’s real, all right,” he agreed, hands up in the air as he stared at the shots clipped into the light box.

“Wow,” he said.

The patient was face down, sedated but conscious. His frizzy red hair, rheumy, bloodshot blue eyes and swollen red nose bespoke a life-long love affair with the sauce. The bedclothes, steamy warm after coming out of the cubby, were pulled back to reveal the patient’s pale and globular gluteus maxima.

A nurse reached up and adjusted the light, and the rays of brilliant white reflected back up from the patient’s heinie.

“What’s your name, buddy?” asked Doctor Rolf.

“Lenny,” said the Caucasian male, who was about five-foot seven and approximately a hundred and forty-five pounds.

“How are you doing?” asked Betty-Ann, right there at his side.

She held onto Lenny’s hand with an open and sympathetic look.

“Am I going to die, doctor?” asked Lenny in a slurred manner.

“Nah,” assured the doctor. “We’ll have that nasty old thing out of there in a jiffy.”

“All righty then,” he noted. “Put a little petroleum jelly on there for me? We’re going in, ladies and gentlemen.”

A small titter went through the assembled class. This was a teaching hospital, and no opportunity was too small to pass up.

“Okay. We’re going to be doing a manual dis-impaction of what looks like a hard and compacted stool. Whether it is from compression during anal intercourse or some other cause is no concern right now.”

The doctor heard a few more gasps and giggles and he looked up for a moment.

“Pay attention,” he said. “The odds are you will have to do this sooner or later. I’m just grateful, but it doesn’t look like a light bulb, which I have also done.”

He patted the patient on the shoulder, but Lenny was pretty much out of it.

“Give me the retractor,” he muttered, and then the doctor got on with the job at hand.

“That’s strange,” he said. “Lenny?”

“Uh…yeah…?” said the patient and everyone laughed, even the doctor. “Whaddya want?”

“Well, I would kind of like to know what this is, if you have any idea,” said Doctor Rolf pleasantly.

Lenny stared wild-eyed and desperate at the floor.

“You mean you don’t know?” he gasped, and tears sprung into his eyes.

“Do you feel any pain, Lenny?” asked the Senior Nurse, Betty-Ann.

“No…?” said Lenny.

The room was silent.

“It’s not a stool,” said the doctor.

He watched on the screen as the forceps slid gently alongside the foreign object.

“It’s hard,” said Rolf. “But not too hard. It’s not metal or glass.”

Relief was apparent in his voice and what little they could see of his demeanor behind the cap and mask.

“Well, what have we got here?” he mused, pulling what looked like an ostrich egg from the long-suffering patient, one Lenny Bonsalvo.

“Was he drunk when he was brought in?” asked the doctor.

“No,” Betty-Ann shook her head. “But he admits to problems with alcohol.”

“It’s hard to believe he could swallow that, drunk or sober. I find it hard to believe he could do that, shove it so far up there,” he muttered.

"It's not a stool..."

***

“He must have had help, Doctor,” she murmured neutrally and in a non-committed tone.

“I tend to agree,” said Rolf. “Well, I guess you can’t blame the man for not wanting to talk about it too much.”

“Do me a favour, nurse?” he asked.

“Of course, what is it?” she replied.

“Clean that thing up for me. I want to show it to George. You know what! I think I’m going to show it to poor old Lenny, too.”

***

Lenny stared up from the bed in dismay.

“That thing—that thing was inside me?” he gaped.

“Yeah,” agreed Doctor Rolf. “I have to be completely honest with you, Lenny. I was sort of wondering if someone put it there. Did you have help? I am a doctor, and I’m not judging you, Lenny, but…”

“What! But what?” bellowed Lenny.

“Hey, hey, hey, calm down,” said the doctor. “I was just asking! It’s my job, you know? But I was kind of wondering if somebody did this to you? You know, like maybe as a joke, or even some kind of abusive situation—”

Lenny clambered up and out of the bed, staying on the far side from Doctor Rolf.

“Lenny, Lenny!” the doctor tried reassurance. “No one is judging you, Lenny. Honestly, I’m more curious than anything. I sort of wondered if you were in some kind of trouble.”

Lenny’s arm shot out and he pointed an accusing finger, seemingly at a loss for words.

“What’s the matter, Lenny, why are you so upset? I’m just trying to help you,” soothed Doctor Rolf.

“Ah! Ah! Ah,” screeched Lenny.

“Whoa! Simmer down,” said the doctor.

“It’s hatching! It’s hatching, that thing is hatching, doctor!” shouted Lenny, then he fell over backwards, hitting the adjacent bed and the patient in that one began screaming too.

Rolf took a quick look at the thing in the jar and his eyes almost bugged out of his head.

***

Doctors Rolf and George Malassori stared at the apparition in the jar.

They had it in a workroom off to one side of the internal medicine lab.

“What the hell?” muttered the normally soft-spoken George.

He straightened up, shaking his head in disbelief.

“It’s like a gecko, all covered in ketchup,” he marveled. “Let me get a sample of the fluid.”

“Yeah,” breathed Rolf. “It’s like a baby alligator or something. This is amazing…just nuts.”

“I won’t contradict an expert,” noted Doctor Malassori. “You’ve just made medical history, incidentally.”

“Huh,” said Rolf. “Lenny did. Not me.”

Malassori laughed in agreement.

“Can’t say as I blame you,” he said.

"Don't worry, gentlemen. Just another object up the bum."

***

Rolf had other emergencies, and the usual rounds, and he was asleep behind his computer when screams and thumps awoke him with a distinct nervous shock. You could read about adrenalin, and you could dissect the human body, and you could listen to witnesses. But this was real adrenalin and he had no objectivity.

The doctor ran sliding out into the hallway, to be confronted by a small wave of green-clad nurses and screaming people.

They almost bowled him over as he hurriedly stepped back into the room. He reached out and tried to grab an arm as they sped past.

“Nurse!” he yelled but she gave him a frightened glance and just kept going, looking back nervously and sobbing.

“What’s going on?” he asked, but she was clearly hysterical.

She spurted off again, shaking her head and moaning incoherently. Rolf thought about declaring a lockdown. His heart pounded in a moment of indecision. He needed more information.

As Doctor Rolf rounded the corner at a dead run, he ran smack into a hellish scene, the likes of which he would never forget for the rest of his life. Their floor security, Mister Nicholby, lay dead on the floor with his chest torn open and a black cavity exposed, and a thick trail of blood smeared in a path along the floor.

Nurse Betty-Ann had the gun up and was drawing a careful bead.

The sound of a shot, quickly followed by another, was shockingly loud in the now-quiet corridor.

The doctor flinched and covered his head, as a little fall of dust came down from the ceiling tiles.

Rolf stood there, open-mouthed, taking in the bizarre scene.

“Got the little bastard,” she said, looking calmly into Rolf’s eyes and blowing smoke from the end of the barrel.

“Nurse…?”

Doctor Rolf swallowed. His unbelieving eyes found a huddled, dirty dishrag-like form up the hallway.

“What the hell is going on around here?” he asked in shock. “What—”

The strident call of the overhead speakers broke into his state of mental inertia.

“Doctor Ludwig to emergency, Doctor Ludwig to emergency,” he heard, in a kind of relief.

Finally, something he could understand. Something that made sense. He was tempted to give his head a shake, or pinch himself or something.

He stepped over to the nursing station, reached over and grabbed a phone. Awkwardly, he put in the number, making sure to get it right first time. His hands were shaking.

“Yes? Doctor Ludwig here,” he reported. “What have you got?”

“Please get down here right away, Doctor Ludwig,” came the breathless voice of Nurse Helga Slovodnik. “We have another Lenny. Doctor George thinks we may have another one of those things.”

END

Louis has books, stories and audiobooks available from Google Play.

Louis Shalako has some art on Fine Art America.

Check out this other story.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

Grey Poupon, a short story. Louis Shalako.

"Would you have a little Grey Poupon, my good fellow...???

Louis Shalako

Derek Kane watched the view plate as the unidentified ship made a quick corkscrew turn to port/x-negative pitch/y-zero yaw and headed his way.

The ship’s alarm had alerted him to its presence, but there weren’t too many people out there and the maneuver was immediately suspicious.

There was a signal coming in, fairly strong but the machine language didn’t match. The computer was looking for software to decode it and he would have to wait.

The voice didn’t seem strident or unfriendly. The tonal register was similar to human, and his impression was of polite inquiry—but assumptions about alien mores and cultural norms, courtesies and polite forms of address varied considerably from region to region.

For no good reason he did up the lap belt but left the others. Now a picture came up. A being sat in a flight chair, with no helmet on, so that was good. He waved in what Derek interpreted as a cheerful fashion.

The fellow had two slits where his nose should have been, and the slightly orange tint to his skin revealed him to be from a white-dwarf planetary system. Two eyes and a mouth, that was helpful. The real eebie-jeebies were harder to talk to. He looked lightly built as well, and that was one of the hallmarks of inhabitants who had evolved on the small, lower-mass planets that were often found there. If he wanted to come aboard, that would be a bit of a giveaway.

There was a beep from the console.

“Got it.”

“Take your time.”

“Running translation. One moment please.”

“Put his voice up on real time when you crack it.”

“Roger.”

He might as well give the other ship’s computer a little lead time on their own translation, assuming they needed one. He keyed the microphone.

“Hello. I’m Derek Kane, skipper of the Hornet. Over.”

Let them work on that for a while, as the other skipper’s face lit up and he leaned forward to make some kind of an input.

His own bridge speakers crackled and then it came in.

“Excuse me, my good fellow. Do you speak English?”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“I do so hate to trouble you.”

“No, you’re quite welcome, go ahead.” He was getting curious.

The being held up what looked like a half-metre long hoagie, or perhaps a Ruben sandwich made out of something like the cultural equivalent of a baguette, with slices of pinkish mottled reel-meet and green leafy stuff hanging out all along it…maybe even what looked like some kind of alien cheese.

“Do you have any Grey Poupon?”

So that’s what it was all about. The idiot just wanted some mustard.

END

This story is included in Engines of Creation, a collection of stories long and short by Louis Shalako. You can find theaudiobook here on Google Play.

See his works on ArtPal.

Check out this story here.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moonraker: a Technical Analysis of the 1979 James Bond Film. Louis Shalako.

The structure is typical for the era, shiny and mostly bullshit...

 

Louis Shalako

In the James Bond film Moonraker, in the opening scenes, a space shuttle is stolen off the back of a Boeing 747. 

You may remember the scene, where a couple of guys sneak out of the broom closet or the pantry or somewhere. They fire up the engines, and take off, with the blast destroying the plane. 

(Yeah, piss-poor security, eh. - ed).

The empty weight of the shuttle would be about 165,000 lbs. It was transported on the back of a 747. That part is real. It really did happen, sort of. There would be no payload, obviously, what is really interesting is that there would be no fuel either. That is because the engines were fueled from the massive central tank system, additional boost coming from the solid-fuel rockets strapped onto that. So the entire premise of the film is bogus from scene one. Further criticisms are sort of redundant, and yet I plan on doing it anyways...

(That's our Louis. - ed.)

I could mention that the aircraft crashes in northern Canada and Drax’s shuttle base is in South America, or at least somewhere with some really big fucking snakes.

You simply can’t get there from here. There is no reason for the onboard tank, which would be located behind the cargo bay and ahead of the engines, to have any fuel at all in such a scenario. 

It is true, that the shuttle was glide-tested, and landings were conducted in order to gain the knowledge necessary to fly and land the thing. That was one reason for the whole 747-rig, that and transport between assembly and launch pad. Landing gear might get a lot of assistance from gravity, but they do have to contend with aerodynamic forces, and you want them to fully deploy and to lock into position. This implies some sort of powered system. You want to see three green lights on your dashboard. Two greens and one red would be real bad news—

It’s not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen—

It's not rocket science, Mister Bond...

#snork

You don’t use reaction control in the atmosphere, not when you have rudder, ailerons, elevators, all of which could run on battery-powered electric servo-motors. You don’t use reaction control to run the pumps and compressors for the hydraulic landing gear system, for example. All you need are batteries, in fact otherwise powerless aircraft have been saved by deploying a wind-turbine into the slipstream in order to generate minimal electrical power. With electrical power, temperature is less of a consideration, you don’t want an air tank or a fluid, hydraulic system to freeze up just when you need it most. And if you want to trickle a little bit of heat to any such system, you still need a battery.

Drax's shuttles do have external tanks, and solid boosters, and their cargo bays are full of people. They did that much research, they checked that many facts. Once that central tank is dropped, minimal fuel is aboard the shuttle, that is for maneuvering and re-entry, otherwise you're kind of stuck up there. The big problem there, is that the blast from all engines popping off at once in an enclosed space, would surely destroy the shuttles, all of them, as they were built as lightly as possible…also, there is no way in hell Bond and Doctor Goodhead could ever outrun the blast, directed as it is down, in an enclosed space, with ducts and tubes and all of that. Even so, Bond and Doctor Goodhead seem to be blasting along in Drax's personal Shuttle Five all right, trying to shoot down the pods that are to dispense the bug-juice, thereby destroying the human race…right? Those lasers run on electrical power from one source or another...

Oh, James...

As you know, in the actual shuttle flights, the solid boosters dropped off first, the shuttle riding the tank up a little higher, but of course it's the bottom part of that equation that takes most of the energy—going from zero miles per hour, at the bottom of that gravity well. The force of gravity varies inversely to (or with), the square of the distance, as we recall from our elementary school exercises, ladies and gentlemen. The higher you get, the less the force of gravity upon your 'body', organic, celestial, or man-made machine. The force of gravity would be an accelerating (or decelerating) curve, the further you get away from Earth.

Bearing in mind Drax's space station has a 'radar jamming system', even if it worked, (and not just putting out a strong signal in the sky, over a large band of frequencies, which could hardly be missed), such a large object would be visible due to simple reflected sunlight. You can see the ISS, (International Space Station) on any clear night, (even when it's dark out), and you can even track it online so you know where and when to look. The only thing more predictable than an orbit, is a geosynchronous orbit, if I may submit. That's because it ain't actually going anywheres, it just sits there in one spot all the fucking time. It's not really clear what Drax's station is doing from the available information, probably nothing if you ask me...

The ISS is a lot smaller than Drax's space station. I won't worry you with the artificial gravity, although with that central area allegedly 'horizontal', and the station rotating in the vertical axis, there are so many technical problems with this film that it isn't even funny. It has been said the series became, over time, a parody of itself. As for the actual structure, this thing is hardly designed for stealth.

The best part of this film is when Bond comes in the front door of the glass works in Venice. That girl—yeah, that one right there, that one interests me. She makes a lot of other women look like boys...

As for an amphibious gondola, coming up out of the water and zooming off through the square by what is presumably St. Mark's Cathedral, that one is just plain ridiculous. Everyone likes ‘Q’, the scenes where they ride across the pampas to the theme from The Magnificent Seven are cute. Just cute. Fight scenes in a glass museum, tossing a guy out through an antique clock, well, they’re always fun and satisfying for the audience.

Everyone loves me...'Q'.

***

I took my girlfriend to this film when it first came out. It was a thing, these were popular films and the truth is, we had a good time. These films are, first and foremost, entertainment.

I’ve mentioned fight scenes on top of cable-cars in a previous blogpost.

Stealing a parachute in mid-fall is of course hopeless…boat chases and runaway aircraft appear in other Bond films, in fact they reprise themselves surprisingly often. There are hang-gliding scenes in this film and in Live and Let Die, then there is the gyrocopter in You Only Live Twice, the jet-pack scene in Goldfinger and the car-plane in The Man With the Golden Gun. The battle in space, forces conveniently colour-coded, reprises the underwater scene in Thunderball and the ninjas-dropping-from-above of You Only Live Twice.

Right?

There were reasons why this series sort of fell away for a while and in fact it was Timothy Dalton that sort of breathed new life into it. It was still bad, in many ways, but it was at least watchable. Timothy Dalton is not gay, which puts his performance in The Lion in Winter, (Peter O'Toole, Katherine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins), into its proper perspective and all the more impressive because of that...

 

#technical_stuff

 

END

 

Images. Stolen from the internet.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Check out this story on the #superdough blog.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

Alistair Maclean's Where Eagles Dare: a Series of Plot-Holes Flying in Close Formation. Louis Shalako.

Heidi, Major Smith, and Mary Ellison in Where Eagles Dare.

Louis Shalako

Alistair Maclean’s Where Eagles Dare is one of the most popular war films of all time. I bought the book at about the age of eighteen. I liked Alistair Maclean so much, that I bought every book of his that I could find. Over the course of time I owned, and have read many of them, (some of them, many, many times), but by no means all of them.

Every so often, I search the internet looking for crummy old movies, which I like very much. I watch this film several times a year, as well as Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarone, Force 10 from Navarone, When Eight Bells Toll, Bear Island, Puppet on a Chain and of course Breakheart Pass. There are some I simply can’t find. One or two, I can find them but the thing is unwatchable, either due to poor reproduction or poor sound.

Some of these old films were taken off a television screen with a camcorder, dubbed more than once, and it really shows sometimes. Also, volume is often an issue, if you’re going to upload videos to the internet, for crying out loud, turn up the fucking volume already…we can turn it down ourselves if we have to.

River of Death is just plain bad, Donald Pleasance, Michael Dudikoff and Robert Vaughn, Herbert Lom and L.Q. Jones are unable to save it by mere presence alone. One pretty girl cannot save a bad film, ladies and gentlemen. (Full cast.)

***

As entertaining as the film is, Where Eagles Dare is riddled with plot holes and just plain inconsistencies.

Hopefully the reader understands that as a student of writing, one can learn a lot by attention to detail—a good lesson for any writer or director, then there is a bit of logical analysis, and then there is good old fact-checking.

For example, in the opening scene, a Junkers JU-52 aircraft simply does not have the range to fly from the U.K. to southern Germany, and return. The range is quoted at 620 miles, top speed of 165 mph. Cruising speed would be less. The town of Werfen is a real town, it’s in Austria, part of Germany after the Anschluss, not far from the Bavarian border. At its maximum speed, even if it had the range, you would be flying in enemy airspace for hours and hours at a time. You would have to do it twice in what looks like about twenty-four hours, for they parachute and land in darkness, hang out all day, leave in the night and take off in at least some daylight…

The action takes place before D-Day, in fact the fake General Carnaby was supposedly flying to Crete to consult with his Russian counterparts prior to the invasion, where some sort of coordination, or maybe just notification, would be in order.

Only problem there, is that Crete was not liberated until 1945—a simple statement of fact, which can be checked.

Also, assuming you just stole a JU-52 off a nearby airbase, every fighter and anti-aircraft battery in Western Europe would be looking for that plane, which would be lumbering along at 130-mph or whatever. Your best bet would be to head for Switzerland, and if the plane was simply stolen, there would be no way for Colonel Turner to be there in the final, climactic scene. And why send the Colonel along in the first place? It would be so much wiser just to arrest him while he’s still in England, still at headquarters, where armed people abound, hell, they might even have a cell to put him in. This is the significance of the scene where the Admiral asks, 'do you have it?' as Colonel Turner and the others have been under suspicion for some time. One wonders why they didn't just arrest him and sweat him a little, but then there would be no film...right? At this point, the other enemy agents are expendable and nothing but a hindrance to any escape plan...

Google. 2,292.9 miles.

It gets better. The fake general was aboard a de Havilland Mosquito, which might have had the range for a one-way trip to Crete in the long-range reconnaissance version which was developed for the Pacific Campaign, and they did range all over Europe. The bomber version has a quoted range of 1,300 miles. Launched from Suffolk, the distance to Crete is over 2,200 miles. Riddled with English bullet holes, as Major Smith (Richard Burton) says, it crash landed, conveniently enough, ten miles away at a German military airfield. No mention is ever made of what happened to the British pilot of that aircraft, one supposes the prisoners were kept separated in what is standard operating procedure.

Standard operating procedure is virtually ignored all through this film.

Okay, upon arrival by parachute, which would have made more sense if it had been from a Stirling bomber, or the Halifax, both of which were used by airborne forces, Sergeant Harrod is found dead. Assuming all of the others were wearing the same, standard issue boots, even so, it would have been possible to simply follow the tracks, for surely Harrod himself didn’t make too many. Seven people come down scattered. To rendezvous with the gear, seven (or six, to be accurate) sets of tracks converge on a point. Searching for the missing Harrod, six sets of tracks go out from that point in some kind of search pattern. Bearing this in mind, watching the film, we can see any number of tracks, one of the challenges of filming on location in wintertime. Yet Smith makes no attempt to follow any tracks. Yet he knows that Harrod has been murdered, taking into account all the bullshit about marks on the neck and stuff. Presumably the mission comes first. Presumably, they already have their suspicions of at least some of this crew already...in the film, the next to go is Jock, which tends to indicate his innocence.

Ingrid Pitt as Heidi.

As for Lieutenant Schaffer, (Clint Eastwood in one of many iconic roles), we know he's innocent, as Smith points out he's an American, and brought in for just this purpose...he's untainted by Britishness or something. Right.

Bloody well right...

(Louis is getting ahead of the plot here. - ed.)

The party proceeds to a small farmhouse in a high alpine meadow, seasonal accommodation fairly common in that part of the world. And he says, that while grabbing the radio, he has forgotten the codebooks. He has to go back, theoretically, for he actually did take them, this after sending the party back for the equipment. He goes out to the barn, where he meets the Mary Ellison character, after ordering the others not to leave the building. Yet it seems odd that not one of them ever needs to go the outhouse, for there is no likelihood of indoor plumbing in such a dwelling…

What is interesting is that never, at any time in the film, do they use code. They use call-signs, broadcasting in the clear, “Broadsword calling Danny Boy,” and all that sort of a thing.

Codes are codes. There is such a thing as a spoken code, or word-substitution text codes, but code books were basically a series of numbers, meant to be sent by something akin to Morse code—a series of dots and dashes sent by clicking a momentary switch.

***

We’ll skip over the clear, physical impossibility of leaping off the top of a cable-car and then half-running up a snow-covered roof. It’s a dramatic scene, full of suspense and dread, and yet there is just no way you could do it. Why would you, when you could just get some forged documents and ride up inside the cable-car, just like everybody else.

The whole premise of the film is bogus. A lie can be just as revealing as the truth, and this guy is supposed to allow himself to be tortured, according to Smith, into revealing false plans for the Second Front. I also find it difficult to believe that anyone, including a second-rate actor, would volunteer or allow themselves to be inveigled into undertaking such a mission. No one has that much faith, no one—as operations go, this one is awful hairy. Think about it: you are under torture. You have fake plans for D-Day. You most emphatically do not have the real plans for D-Day. How far would you push your luck? Right about the point where they're going to slice your pecker off, that's where.

It is true that a successful disinformation campaign was carried out prior to D-Day, much of it involving fake radio traffic, which emanated from the U.K.

Prior to the invasion of Sicily, (see The Man Who Never Was), there was an operation to convince the enemy, Germany and Italy, that the next invasion would be of the Balkans—rather than Sicily.

***

Der Schloss Adler. I bet there's a road, ladies and gentlemen.

Radio rooms. Once inside the castle, Smith and Schaffer take a look, Smith says they must disable the helicopter…Schaffer kills the guy in the Funkraum, (German for radio room), while Smith goes out and finds the helicopter pilot. There is literally a sign on the wall, this is for the audience to know its a radio room. He tells him there is a phone call, directing him to the Funkraum (radio room in German), just around the corner, where Schaffer stabs him. All very well, but the equipment in no way resembles a telephone switchboard. There would be an internal switchboard, connected within the castle. Outside lines would go through a switchboard down the mountain in the village.

I may tend to jump around in this analysis, if one has seen the film, you should be able to keep up, if you’ve never seen the film, then reading this post is essentially useless. There is a lot to cover, and I may not be able to hit every little thing.

Road work. The car accident. One wonders why three prisoners were taken to the castle via the cable car, whereas Smith and Schaffer were taken by car, which leads to the car accident scene. One wonders why their hands were not bound, when Schaffer moves to ‘tie up his shoelaces’, for example. One wonders what kind of road work, in the middle of winter, involves a piddly little cement mixer, or a few boards leaning up against the cliff, or various little racks that just stand there. There are two piles of gravel and some road barricades…after going out of control, the car goes up and over the first gravel pile and then crashes into the next one. Yet somehow, they manage to push the car back far enough, turn the wheel and then send it over the cliff. Now they walk back to town. All of this leads up to the question of where exactly does that road go…??? Presumably the castle. This just brings us back to question of why use the cable car at all. With good forged documents, the odds are, senior officers would have been admitted at the gate, even if they were unexpected. Truth is, they would have been brought in and then checked out very thoroughly. If the road does not go to the castle, just where in the hell were they going. A contradiction, if you will.

Himmler’s brother. When the six survivors arrive in town, stash their packs and enter zum Wilden Hirsh, (German for wild stag or wild hart), Smith informs another German officer that he is Himmler’s brother. This is about as stupid as it gets, ladies and gentlemen. A public figure in his own right, he might have been recognizable to anyone that read a newspaper, especially considering his older brother, but also as well as his employment at Berlin Radio.

Anti-aircraft gun in courtyard. This is more a matter of detail. With thirty or forty-foot curtain walls, the field of fire is severely restricted, and this weapon really should have been put up on the walls, or even outside the building, on a nearby hilltop, overlooking the valuable target it is meant to protect.

S.S. versus Gestapo. I became curious, as I often do. The Gestapo did indeed have a full-dress military style uniform. The average Gestapo in the civilian street really did wear the long, brown leather coats and various civilian attire. The psychology of a Gestapo officer wearing a uniform while surrounded by other military types is pretty obvious, it was meant to show rank, status, and perhaps to be taken seriously when surrounded by senior German officers. As far as that goes, there might not be too much love lost between S.S. and Gestapo, service rivalries being what they are in any army past and present.

***

The so-called proof. This is where the second radio room comes in...once we get to the scene in the great hall, where the assembled guests are comfortably seated around the table, with General Carnaby, soon to be revealed as Corporal Cartright-Jones, once we get past the fact that his hands are not bound, a clear violation of standard procedures, there is the question of so-called proof. This is when Major Smith suggests that the Germans have ‘one of the most powerful radio-telephones in Europe’ and that they contact Wilhelm Wilner in Italy to confirm his identity. One, the operator in the first Funkraum is dead, along with the helicopter pilot. Two, no one has discovered the bodies, and if this is indeed the telephone room, one wonders why no internal phone traffic, in what is purported to be the headquarters of the S.S. or Gestapo in southern Bavaria. How come no off-duty troopers use their privilege, pay the tolls and make a quick call home to the wife and family. But now, we see the need for a second radio room. That guy hasn’t been killed yet, right? And they obviously can't use the phone in the regular fashion. They're using the 'radio telephone', a real thing which actually did exist in WW II, referred to by British types as the r/t in many a book and film. Would it be possible to patch a phone line into the inputs of a radio set? Presumably, yes. The castle is described as the headquarters of the German Secret Service in Bavaria, yet seems to be populated with uniformed officers of the S.S. and Gestapo, and down below is a training camp for what are likely mountain troops...details, details.

#details

As far as the actual proof, it is of course ludicrous and no self-respecting senior officer would ever take it at face value. The very fact that two unknown officers come tramping down the stairs and into the room, unannounced, would have been something of a dead giveaway. Also, telling the enemy anything is bad practice. Yet the Germans bring in three spies to impress Carnaby, and Smith admits he’s been feeding bad info to Willi Wilner in Italy.

The poster.

There may be more, (maybe even plenty more), but you get the flavour of it. I have fantasized on occasion, of trying to find every Alistair Maclean book, perhaps in the thrift stores or buying them on Amazon. River of Death might be better enjoyed as a book than as a bad film, for example. I would love to read some of them again, that is for sure, ladies and gentlemen.

Films of this era have good colour, there are no computer generated images. Sets, vehicles, weapons are period, the locations are good, the acting is good, the budget was adequate. The pyrotechnics are good. It’s got a lot going for it, don’t get me wrong. Some guys like the Heidi character, for a couple of pretty obvious reasons. I like the Mary Ure character, but then I’ve always admired a girl that can shoot—that one’s more than just a pretty face.

Fighting on top of a cable-car is just plain nuts, yet the scene is reprised in Moonraker, with Bond and Jaws, and of course Doctor Goodhead—a real bad name, but Ian Fleming was famous for that sort of thing.

The film is fun, full of eye-candy for the war movie buff. In so many respects, it is a very good film and probably one of the best, for war movies fall down so very, very often...that, is a story for another day.

Other than that, you can learn much from almost any film, good or bad, if you have a jaundiced eye and a penchant for writing. One of the reasons I wanted to write in the first place, and this is not a thing to say lightly: because so much of film and television was just bad, ladies and gentlemen. That was true back then, and I reckon it’s still true today.

Notes. What was the German Secret Service. The answer is complicated. Heydrich and Himmler had their own ideas and their own empires to build, but the Abwehr existed until the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, after which Hitler did away with the Abwehr, and Admiral Canaris and Colonel Oster ended up in concentration camps, ultimately murdered in the most cruel and obscene ways.

See: Sicherhietsdienst.

END

Louis Shalako has ebooks and audiobooks available from Google Play. Some of them are presently free, for example On the Nature of the Gods.

Louis has some artworks on ArtPal.

My First Pho. See this story on the #superdough blog.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

Producing Audiobooks Using Artificial Intelligence: beta mode. Louis Shalako.

She can be trained...

Louis Shalako

A few notes on producing audiobooks, narrated by AI, on Google Play.

This feature is free while it’s in beta mode. I was uploading my new novel, A Stranger In Paris, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9.

It took three winters to write that thing, and I won’t say I was in a hurry—

As soon as I signed into the website, I saw the big blue button. Create an auto-narrated audiobook, click here.

Hmn. Interesting, I thought—

We will check that out later.

It clicked in after a while that they might be charging money for that, as soon as it goes into regular mode.

With 150 titles on Google Play, full-length novels, novellas, collections, short stories, this represents something of an opportunity. And early adopters often reap the greatest benefit from new technologies.

***

You have to read around in there, you sort of have to experiment. And yet, this is my book—but you have to take some risks. The ebooks are well formatted. The POD interiors are good, although I have yet to crack the code in terms of getting a cover uploaded on Lulu (dot) com, for example.

Okay, so your cover should be square, (not a regular portrait shot) and on the first couple of uploads, I went to the trouble of modifying the original ebook cover. Yet in the trouble-shooting phase, I read that Google Play will ‘letterbox’ your original image. Why make it square when you can just use the original marketing image. (Downloaded in full size from Smashwords. - ed.)

Also.

(If you’re just starting off and you have a small number of titles, you may want to do the work, but also, keep on going in the same manner. – ed.)

He’s right. Consistency is good. #Louis

***

Front matter. This tends to be repetitive, with a title page, a copyright page, your name in there twice or three times over two pages and a small number of words. I’m trimming that down to the minimum, also the author needs a unique ISBN number for each additional format, for every single product. You can get them from Collections Canada ISBN service, free to any Canadian citizen.

Okay. My book has chapters, my shorter works have scenes, acts, or whatever. In an Epub ebook, in order to get maximum distribution through a platform like Smashwords, you need internal navigation. You have a Table of Contents, which is in text, followed by a bunch of links to individual chapters. All of this is simply ignored. The links disappear, but you have to delete Table of Contents, which is merely text. Creating a credible audiobook, even with the help of the tool of AI, turns out to take some effort after all…you have to listen to every word. An audiobook can go six hours of listening time, and fixing things drags that out even longer. In my case, it would have been smarter to start with the absolutely shortest stories on the list.

***

Okay, so front matter, and end matter, that can be deleted or rewritten. For example, my bio also has a link to my blog. The bio remains, in the audiobook interface on Google Play Partner Centre, but the link is gone, what remains > Louis Shalako < (exactly as it appears. – ed.) remains. Again, this should be removed.

I should go back and check and see if the machine says ‘The End’ at the end of the book…

***

Editing. As for editing the actual text. "Hmn." will render as H-M-N, heh-heh-heh suffers a similar fate. Hyphenated words, for the most part, have a funny cadence and so now I'm taking out hyphens, one at a time...Chapters are deleted, so I put the cursor on the first line of text and bump that down, go back up, type in Chapter One, etc., then the machine will read it properly. You can adjust speed, you can pick voices, which are kind of limited in English. There are several other supported languages, and this is when it becomes all the more impressive, in terms of automation and AI.

So, having learned this much, it seems one should go back and review the first few audiobooks I have produced. That being said, the Google Play AI reads the text fairly well. The learning curve, as always, is fairly steep in the early stages.

I've tried changing the pronunciation of my name, which is not good. I have been unsuccessful.

I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the last two weeks, one could safely say. The machine has its limitations, but then so do I. So do we all.

Louis will crack the code.

#experimental

I had one book that just would not go yesterday, I tried again today and it still won’t go. I have no idea of what is wrong, and yet I am reluctant to chat with Google. Yet I’ve uploaded a dozen, converted them, and hopefully they are relatively good products.

The Bio.

It seems like you can update your bio, yet it’s not immediately evident on your first pass. I’ve published, and seen the product go live, and yet I seem to have skipped past the part where you select a genre, and put in the author’s bio.

You can’t get the book to go live without setting a price, yet you can mess around on the page for some time. A book should go live within 24 hours, my typical experience is ten or fifeen minutes at most.

Analysis.

Okay, so in beta mode, staff are working to perfect the thing and I’m working to perfect my thing. They must be learning a lot as well, and as long as it’s free, why not jam up as many titles as possible while the going is good. I can always go back later and fix things, I routinely do quality control and yet that is one big project for another day.

The full (hyphen) length books would be labour intensive, to say the least.

In a recent comment on Facebook, someone called AI ‘plagiarism software’. I cannot plagiarize myself. I own all copyright on products created using the tools otherwise known as AI.

AI would have been trained on the same open-source resources you and I also have access to, namely books, news sources, encyclopedias, as well as large spoken-word sources of a similar nature. They train it, (you and I train it), using music, and pictures and video and any number of other sources.

In that sense, it is ‘learning’, or being trained, and who knows where all of that is going to go. As for myself, I figure I can defeat any system by using its own rules against it.

I will try and stay ahead of it.

END

 

Formatting A Stranger In Paris (ebook).

Experimental: Artificial Intelligence.

 

Poor old Louis has books, stories and yes, ladies and gentlemen, audiobooks on Google Play.

 

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.