Maybe something to do with Wall Street taking the shirts off their backs?

Happy birthday to Sophia Brooks and smonster! Cake all around.

Cool historical tidbit gleaned from Laura Hillenbrand:

In WWII, to stop the Germans from night bombing Alexandria harbor, the British hired a London magician, Jasper Maskelyne, who built a fake, identical harbor three miles away, with fake ships and torches set out in patterns just like the real lights in Alexandria. To fool German recon planes by day, the British painted fake bomb craters and scattered papier mache rubble all over Alexandria. The Germans fell for it, and Alexandria, and British supply lines, were saved.

The Germans bombed the fake Alexandria for eight straight days.

The Germans bombed the fake Alexandria for eight straight days.

That so needs to be made into a movie.

Job-ma for Hayden, and bubble-wrap-ma for everybody's folks. Which reminds me I need to call my mother tonight (she's been having shoulder problems the last month).

Last year, for the Alexandria (Virginia) Scottish Christmas Walk, there was a fuss because they had a new rule. Men in kilts were required to wear underwear. Such a fuss! (and, in too many cases, over too little)

That so needs to be made into a movie.

Right? It was an eight person crew composed of a Magician and a bunch of set directors, designers and other theater tech crew.

Didn't they also work on faking the run-up to the D-Day landing to make the Germans think they were going to go to Calais instead of Normandy? They put Patton in charge of the false Army group and used false tanks, trucks, etc. in Kent to show a build-up there instead of further west, where they were actually building up for Normandy.

I was just watching a "Secrets of WWII" show on the Military Channel that was about the Man Who Never Was, the corpse that they dropped into the sea off of Spain with fake papers indicating an Allied landing in Sardinia instead of Sicily.

And didn't they set up a fake airfield with mock-ups of airplanes as a decoy, while the real planes were camouflaged elsewhere? I think this was in Scotland ....

The misinformation campaign was my favorite part of Blackout/All Clear, by far. Such a fascinating little bit of history.

During WWI, two passenger liners that were armed with guns fought each other in the only passenger liner vs. passenger liner naval battle. Coincidentally, each passenger liner was disguised as the other.

The outdoor shopping mall near my office used to be an airplane factory. Even in Burbank, far away from the war, they took the time to create a huge net to cover all the many acres of it to make it look like innocuous suburban streets from the air. Check it out: [link]