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A few nice swiss watches ladies images I found:

Sanke card 550. Kapitänleutnant Gunther Plüschow


Image by drakegoodman
Nothing on reverse.

The remarkable Kapitänleutnant Gunther Plüschow, the only German to escape from Britain back to Germany in either World War.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Lieutenant Plüschow was assigned to the East Asian Naval Station at Tsingtau, a German colony in China. Two Taube airplanes had been shipped in crates from Germany. After assembly of the planes, he began his duties as pilot and aerial observer (the second plane, flown by a Lt. Müllerskowsky, soon crashed). A Japanese ultimatum on August 15 for German evacuation from Kiautschou Bay was ignored, Japan declared war on August 23, and Japanese and British forces then conjointly set siege to the German colony.

By November 1914, the military situation at Kiautschou Bay proved untenable, and on the Sixth of that month Plüschow (who had to this time flown reconnaissance and had downed an enemy aircraft) flew out in his Taube, carrying the last dispatches and documents from the governor and bound for Hai-Daschou. After flying about 250 kilometers in his much-repaired airplane, Plüschow plunged into a rice paddy, burnt his airplane, and set off for Germany on foot.

He walked to the city of Daschou, where the local mandarin gave a party for him. He managed to finagle a passport to cross China as well as a junk, which he used to journey down a river, passing dozens of colorful towns along the way, finally arriving safely at Nanking. He soon sensed that he was being watched, even by officials friendly to Germany. After almost being arrested, he leapt in a rickshaw and sped to the railway station, where he bribed a guard and slipped on a train to Shanghai.

In Shanghai, he met the daughter of a diplomat he knew from Berlin, and she obtained for him papers as a Swiss national, money, and a ticket on a ship leaving for the United States via Nagasaki, Honolulu and San Francisco. In January 1915 he journeyed across the continent to New York City. He was reluctant to approach the German consulate there, for fear of being arrested by local authorities for illegal entry into the United States under a false identity. Worse, he read a newspaper report that he was presumed to be in New York.

His luck, not to mention his female friends, saved him again: he met a lady from Berlin who managed to get him travel documents for a ship that left on 30 January for Italy, from where he hoped to reach Germany. However, inclement weather forced his ship to dock at Gibraltar, where the British arrested him, suspecting he was an enemy alien. They then discovered that he was the famous aviator from Tsingtau.

On 1 July 1915 he was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Donington Hall in Leicestershire in England, but three days later during a storm he escaped and headed for London. Scotland Yard issued an alert, asking the public to be on the lookout for a man with a dragon tattoo on his arm.

Now disguised as a worker, Plüschow felt safe enough that he took souvenir photographs of himself at the docks of London. He occupied himself reading books about Patagonia, and at night hid inside the British Museum.

For security reasons, there were no published notices announcing the departure of ships, but a lucky encounter with another of his many lady friends allowed him to obtain the necessary information to get on board the ferry Princess Juliana, bound for neutral Holland. He arrived safely and from there he traveled to Germany, where he was at first arrested as a spy.

Plüschow was acclaimed as "the hero from Tsingtau," was decorated and promoted and named commander of the naval base at Libau in occupied Latvian Courland. In June 1916, in an airplane hangar at Libau, Plüschow married. There he also wrote his first book, The Adventures of the Aviator from Tsingtau, which sold more than 700,000 copies. In 1918, his son Guntolf was born.

The year 1918 was one of profound crisis in Germany. Wilhelm II, German Emperor, fled to Holland and left his nation in chaos. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was imposed on Germany by the victorious Allies, and several military and civil revolts took place, but Kapitänleutnant [lieutenant commander] Plüschow declined to participate. Instead, at age 33, he resigned from the Reichsmarine.

Post-War exploits and death

After the war, Plüschow took a number of jobs until he obtained a position on the sailing vessel Parma bound for South America. The ship took him around Cape Horn to Valdivia, from where he traveled across Chile to Patagonia. Upon his return to Germany he published Segelfahrt ins Wunderland [Sailing Journey to Wonderland], the success of which allowed him to proceed with further explorations.

On 27 November 1927 Plüschow took the wooden two-masted cutter Feuerland to Punta Arenas, Chile. His engineer Ernst Dreblow brought his seaplane, a Heinkel HD 24 D-1313 aboard a steamer. By December 1928 the airplane had been fully assembled and the inaugural flight brought the first air mail from Puntas Arenas to Ushuaia, Argentina.

In the subsequent months Plüschow and Dreblow were the first to explore by air the Cordillera Darwin, Cape Horn, the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, and the Torres del Paine of Patagonia. In 1929, to get back to Germany Plüschow had to sell the Feuerland. Upon his return, he published his explorations and photographs in the book Silberkondor über Feuerland [Silver Condor over Tierra del Fuego] and a documentary of the same name. The following year he returned to Patagonia to explore the Perito Moreno Glacier. There, he and Dreblow had a fatal aerial accident near the Brazo Rico, part of the Lake Argentino, on 28 January 1931.

The ‘Gunther Plüschow Glacier’ in Tierra del Fuego is named in his memory.

The last train to Redbridge


Image by O.F.E.
Tuesday December 30th 1969 – Ferdinand Marcos was inaugurated as President of the Philipines, Andrew Hyslop, a former police officer, shot dead two policemen and seriously injured a third whilst robbing a bank at Linwood in Glasgow, the Grateful Dead played a gig at the Boston Tea Party (four hour set, three songs), President Nixon signed the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 and, in the early evening, a Central line train pulls into Redbridge station with all its passengers, as well as the driver, dead (don’t ask me how it managed to stop). When no one disembarked and the train failed to pull out again a London Underground employee went down to the platform and promptly collapsed, poisoned (but not fatally, thankfully) by the nerve gas that had killed the commuters. These terrible events were witnessed by several million people (including me) who were glued to their TV’s at 8.00pm to watch the latest episode of ‘Department S’.

‘Department S’ was a wonderful programme (or so I thought, when I was nine) about three unlikely agents in a fictional department of Interpol, a lady computer expert (yes, despite what everyone thinks computers did exist in 1969), an obligatory American and, the star of the show Peter Wyngarde who played the smooth talking, wise cracking, chain smoking, womanising Jason King. Jason was a part time crime novelist and a flashily dressed but quite camp dandy who became an overnight sex symbol. At the height of his popularity he was mobbed by 30,000 hysterical women fans at Sydney Airport. He was given his own show when Department S finished and looked like he was about to become Britain’s biggest screen star ever. Unfortunately his lady killing image suffered a setback when he was arrested in 1974 in the public toilets at Kennedy Gardens in Birmingham and charged with committing an act of ‘gross indecency’. In newspaper interviews he claimed that all this was the result of a terrible misunderstanding. The excuse sounded even thinner a year later when he was arrested in the toilets at Gloucester bus station along with a lorry driver and both were charged and convicted of further gross indecency charges. Wyngarde’s popularity plummeted and he was forced to flee and work abroad. When he finally returned to the British screen in 1980 it was as General Klytus in the film of ‘Flash Gordon’, a part he had to play in a mask.

Wyngarde had a complex and troubling life, born in Marseille his mother was French and his father was a British diplomat and his real name may, or may not, have been Cyril Goldbert. He spent his childhood being shuttled from one diplomatic posting to another; whilst his parents were in India he was sent to stay with a Swiss family in Shanghai were he was trapped at the outbreak of the Second World War. He was interned by the invading Japanese at the notorious Lunghua concentration camp whose most famous inmate was J.G. Ballard )Empire of the Sun). After the war he returned to England and became a reasonably successful actor, albeit one with an outrageously camp sense of humour; at matinées of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ he played Petruchio with a ripe banana stuffed down his tights. Amongst the gay acting coterie he was known as Petunia Winegum. He became notorious again in the late 1990’s when a biography of butch Alan Bates revealed that the mean and moody northerner had had a ten year tempestuous relationship with Wyngarde.

A Scattershot Biography


Image by Profound Whatever
I’m a cinefreak.

I would not be the builder I am today without Hollywood.

The lighting, the framing, the mise-en-scene, and the minifig posing of everything I build has direct cinematic influences. The movies taught me how to shoot, how to frame, how to present. Hollywood has given me inspiration for content (as in this, inspired by this) or presentation (as in this, inspired by the opening credits of this). Anything I can pull from movies, I will pull.

And yeah, it goes beyond LEGO. I’ll quote. I’ll reference. Movies seep into daily life. And they should.

And if you’re interested in my personal top ten, then investigate a few films (in no order) that involve Marshall McLuhan, a Polaroid camera, a missing brick, a line-up, a lady in a lake, a standoff in a graveyard, a cardboard box, a masked bandit, a thumb in a vice, and of course the alcoves.

Pictured: Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, CA

Previous entries:
The Studio Tour
The Boardwalk
The London Street
The Card Shuffle
The Chairs
The Swiss Alps
The Hawaiian Night

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