Paint Table Sunday and a Martian

It's Paint Table Easter Sunday and, thankfully, the family have gone down to Hampshire for the usual family Easter Egg Hunt, leaving me in peace. I couldn't go this year as I had some work to do and there wasn't a seat for me in the car, for reasons too complex and tedious to go into. So, apart from the work, which I am having to spend hours on ever day of the holiday weekend because the World Bank have brought a report deadline forward, I have been getting some painting done. The original Paint Table Saturday was first a blog and then a Google+ group originally set up by a lady in Belgium. It really helped me focus on my painting for a while but now, with Google removing Google+, it has disappeared so I don't need to keep to a Paint Table Saturday and Sunday is actually a better day for this so it will be Paint Table Sunday from now on and I hope to post a bit more often.

Having finished a figure this week (see below) it was time to reassess my next unit and I decided to put the Napoleonic British aside for a while as it is a 25 man (and a horse) unit and so I got the 1864 Danes out again as there are only 12 of them, Hopefully, I can move these along a bit over the next ten days and get them finished for the end of April which will bring me back to a unit a month this year.

The one figure I finished this weekend was this Modiphius John Carter Thark. This has taken a long time to do as I wasn't quite sure how to handle it but it turned out OK, helped by the fact that it is a nice big figure.  I need to have another look at the rules but they are very much a Role Playing Game which will need other players and a games master so I may try and adapt some other rules for it. Lord of the Rings might work, I think, Next up will be the Giant White Ape and, if I am brave, Dejah Thoris. Plenty to be getting on with anyway, helped a lot by the lighter evenings.

Now what I should be doing is getting rid of surplus figures but instead I have bought quite a lot lately, including some more Star Wars figures at 25% off and the Lord of the Rings made to order deal. With this you have a week to place an order and they will then cast (in metal) just the number that are ordered. I ordered the whole lot on the basis that I can always sell on any I don't want (or, maybe, already have!).  I can sort of justify this because I have at least painted  a lot of LoTR figures in the last few months.

This weekend I have been on Facebook four years.  If you had asked me I would probably have said two years but time flies by when you are plummeting towards death and everything in life happened 40% longer ago than you think. Although you wouldn't guess it from the number of pictures of food and Martinis I post, I did it solely for wargames purposes, as I found that manufacturers were posting news of new releases on Facebook long before they appeared on websites.  I have around 250 'friends' and some I have even met in real life (if there is such a thing).  I do cull those who bang on about politics and try only to link up with those who post wargames material too. I also have ditched people who post too often. There was nice lady who did fantasy maps but she was posting about ten times a day and it clogged up my feed so, however interesting, it was stopping me seeing the hobby posts I wanted to see.  She was like the dreaded Tango01 from The Miniature Page!  Other things annoy me on Facebook but then that is no different from everything else in this so called life. The worst, however; even worse than people who bang on about politics, even worse than people who post brilliant painting and then fish for compliments, even worse than people who post pictures of Minions, even worse than people who post cute homilies (all Americans), even worse than people who write in that big colour background sign style (how do they do that?), even worse than people who say 'hey guys' or call themselves 'a noob', the absolute worse and the thing that sends my blood boiling are people who post gifs of faces reacting to things.  It's far, far worse than emojis, which are, at least small. Presumably there must be websites of these horrors somewhere. I was going to find one to illustrate the point but when I searched for gifs in my windows explorer all I got were a few pictures of naked ladies running along the beach (thanks Sophie) which would not be appropriate, however delightful.

Anyway, speaking of naked ladies, today's wallpaper is this superbly tactile painting by Earl Moran, which I found in my pin-up section of my PC when looking for a suitable Easter picture for my Facebook page yesterday. Moran (1893-1984) discovered a young lady named Norma Jean Dougherty and she modelled for him for four years from 1949. They remained friends even after she became Marilyn Monroe. Already an established pin-up artist, he had been doing calendars for Brown & Bigelow since 1932 and a 1940 Life feature on him made him a huge star. In those days, in a calendar of 12 pictures, the publishers would allow the artist to include onc nude a year and Moran's were more sensual than any others.  Later in his life he concentrated solely on nudes and this one comes from that period, dating from around 1970.  Nearly all of his work was in pastels, amazingly.

Having been working my way through Martian themed music, today's music is the expanded soundtrack to Total Recall (1990) by Jerry Goldsmith which has some striking 'alien' sounding cues and is one of his best scores, with an excellent blend of orchestral and electronic music.

The Old Bat was out at  a friend's 60th birthday party last night, so I watched Diamonds are Forever (1971) hence we have Jill St John on Legatus 'Wargames Ladies here.

Paint Table Saturday, Warfare and a taste of the past...

Having finished a big piece of work this week I thought I might have a weekend off and catch up on some painting. I didn't get much done on the ACW figures this week, although I have now started the first company of Confederate Infantry,  I need to do the shading on two more horses for the cavalry and then I can paint the harnesses and manes and eyes etc on the second half dozen horses.  This week I have researched US cavalry horse blankets so now I know how to do those, so they will be next (blue and  orange, who knew?)

The six figures in the back have the horses and harnesses complete and of the six in the foreground just the black ones need shading.  Since I took this picture I have put the base grey coats down for the first company of Confederates.  I think these will be Texans.  I did look at some Redoubt flags for these but they seemed huge (some people do over-sized flags for some reason) and even I can paint a Texas flag!  I do need to research the sizes, though.

Eric the Shed kindly picked me up from home today and took me to Reading for the Warfare show.  I usually do three shows a year: Salute, Colours and Warfare and this is the end of the season show for me.  Nothing until Salute next April now.  Warfare is always very cramped and certainly seemed busy this year.  Eric picked me up at 8.30 and we were there within an hour, half an hour before doors opened, and there were very few parking spaces left.  By 10.30, apparently, people were having to park a mile away.  

My first port of call was to Dave Thomas' stand.  How much of my money has this man had over the years?  My key objective was to get a couple of Renedra's American buildings to start my town of Centerville.  They didn't have the basic farmhouse but I got the store which can be made as a house anyway and the rather dinky church which I hadn't seen before.  Given I already have painted their barn I feel I have made a good start.  I might try and get one started this week.  In the background you can see an odd fellow who was wandering around the show wearing rabbit ears.  Frankly, I don't want to see anyone wearing rabbit ears unless they are female, dressed in a strapless corset teddy, collar and cuffs and have a cotton tail.

I also picked up a pack of plastic hills (or, rather, bluffs) from Kallistra, which are needed for the Centerville layout.  This saves all that fiddling around with mod-roc as espoused by Terence Wise.  These things were all on the list.  Today's impulse buys were the new African princesses from Copplestone Castings, which I was going to get anyway (honest!), as you can never have enough African princesses.  These will see service for Congo.   The other impulse buy (well, it probably isn't an impulse buy if you ask them if they have got it when you can't see it on the shelves) was the new Warlord Games Stuart tank.  I still have a hankering to do WW2 in the Pacific and this will work for that. I better get some more plastic cement!

I hadn't had breakfast and when I got home the family were all out so I cooked myself brunch.  Some years ago I found a load of letters from ex-girlfriends at university and my letters to my mother from there, in my mother's loft.  This week I was looking for something else in my vast pile of file boxes when I found this box of letters again, organised by year and while having a big mug of Lifeboat tea and some Boots diabetic shortbread (very good, unlike most diabetic biscuits) I re-read some of them and was taken back in time to 1979 (my first term).  One letter was about my first trip to Dungeons and Dragons at Jesus College where one of the other players was involved in importing the rule books.  I noted that I wasn't going to get the rule book as it was a staggering £8.  My college food bill for a term was £40.  The first letter discussed the food in Hall which was...variable.  Despite my college's food being ranked second at Oxford by a review at the time, some of it was decidedly odd.  I had met a nice redhead, C, at the law interviews the previous year and I literally ran into her after being in the college for less than five minutes, on my way to my rooms on my first day. 

1979

Within three days we were inseparable and, as we later discovered, the source of much amusement amongst the second and third year law students, who delighted in telling half the college that two of the new freshers were already 'at it'. We had not realised that one of the second year lawyers had the room next to mine and C was a very vocal girl. We also got caught coming down from the only decent bathroom in college, on Heberden Staircase, with wet hair, having had a companionable bath as, unfortunately, the bottom of the stairs was right by the entrance to the law library.  Who would have expected people to still be in there at gone midnight (after a week and our first reading list, we soon realised why!)

Brasenose Hall

Anyway, the endless background behind my brunch today continues in that in our first week (October 1979) C and I sat down to Formal Hall (the second sitting where you had to wear gowns which I didn't like because I only had a commoner's gown but C had a scholars gown as she was a swot) and were presented with, instead of pudding (Pear Conde was the worst), a savoury.  We later found that we would get this quite often and it was quite popular at dinners in Oxford.   C and I were sat opposite S, from Liverpool, who had an accent that sounded like she had escaped from an episode of The Liver Birds.  There were a lot of northerners at our college and I had never met any before.  Fascinating. 

"What the fucking hell is this?" she exclaimed, poking the rather rubbery scrambled egg in front of her (I apologise for the language but it is an exact quote).  What it was, was 'Scotch Woodcock' which is, basically toast spread with anchovy paste and topped with scrambled egg.  It is, a curious thing to have after dinner but makes a very good brunch.  Given I had just read about this in my letter home to my mother, had bought a big box of eggs this week and had a tin of anchovies rattling around in our cupboard (I am not allowed to open anchovies if any of the rest of the family are in the house) I thought it would be just the thing for my post Warfare brunch.  You can read the recipe on my food blog, inevitably.  

Serving suggestion

Well, C and I developed a taste for it and in our second year we had rooms in the modern college annex next to the Oxford Union which had kitchens.  We could cook (except C couldn't) and Scotch Woodcock became our favourite Sunday brunch.  She would lay on my floor (she was always horizontal) and read the Sunday Times while I had to do all the work in the kitchen.  To be fair she did do the washing up, which is no joke when you have cooked scrambled eggs.  I haven't made Scotch Woodcock for more than thirty years but it certainly was a taste of the past.  "Tastes like C!" I actually said to myself (actually she tasted like prawn cocktail) as I enjoyed it with more Lifeboat Tea and a flick through my new book on Sweden's finest painter, Anders Zorn.

Summer on the Beach (circa 1900)

Anders Zorn was famous for his paintings of naked ladies (and US presidents) who he scattered throughout the Stockholm archipelago from his yacht, like delicious ripe fruit.  No doubt one of his pictures will be inspirational wallpaper another week but today's is by another Scandinavian artist, Denmark's Paul Gustave Fischer (1860-1934).  Around the end of the nineteenth century, while previously best known for his paintings of grey scenes of Copenhagen, he painted a series of pictures of naked ladies sunbathing amongst the dunes of the Baltic.  He wasn't as good a painter as Zorn but these pictures give a welcome feel of warmth and light on what has been a cold day.

Talking to Eric the Shed about the new Star Wars film on the way back from Warfare, we both agreed that we were more Star Trek than Star Wars people.  Speaking of science fiction, Warlord had the new Dr Who sets for sale at Warfare but didn't have any figures on display so I couldn't see what size they are.  C and I always went to watch Dr Who every week at College in the JCR.  So, while I was writing this I listened to my new Star Trek Soundtrack Collection Volume 2.  These have the original soundtracks by Fred Steiner (1923-2011) from four series one episodes.  This really is the sound of Star Trek as I remember it, with Steiner's atmospheric, mainly minor key, compositions for these episodes being reused again and again for later shows.  

Something for the Weekend: Sheena Easton

We have had several incredulous comments about the presence of a Sheena Easton poster visible in a picture of  our old university room.  In our defence we offer some pictures of her on our Legatu's Wargames Ladies blog, although there is nothing racy about these pictures (sadly).

Something for the Weekend: Katheryn Winnick, Viking shield maiden

After our recent Vikings post I felt I had to feature the splendid Katheryn Winnick, from the TV series Vikings, on Legatus' Wargames Ladies this weekend. So I have posted some pictures of her in her marvellously inauthentic textured leather costumes as well as some more contemporary outfits.

Something for the weekend: Caroline Munro

Sinbadalicious!

Here, particularly for The Angry Lurker, is Miss Caroline Munro on our Legatus' Wargames Ladies blog.

Have a nice weekend!  The Legatus is off to Edinburgh to deposit the Space Cadet at the university for five years of astrophysics.  How we pack all the shoes she wants to take is proving to be something of a puzzle, however.