Paint Table Sunday: Back to Napoleonics and on to US Infantry

Even though I didn't think it was a classic Salute this year it has got me energised about my painting again. Having finished the Byzantine archers just before I left for Excel last Saturday it was time to get going on another unit. So far this year I have completed three units. Not quite one a month, partly because I was in Botswana for ten days, so I should really have picked some figures for April which I could get on quickly with. 

So last week I decided to get started on assembling some of the new Perry Miniatures WW2 American infantry. These have a pretty simple colour scheme so I thought maybe I could get some done, start to finish, in a couple of weeks.  Oh dear.  Now I often read about wargamers who refuse to do plastic figures because they don't like assembling them and I have some bad memories of some Victrix Napoleonic French from years ago. I have always found the Perry figures easy to do, however. Not these!  To cement six pairs of arms to the bodies took me 38 minutes. Argh,  I thought. as yet another arm fell off as I tried to position it. The real problem is the arm poses that require two arms holding a rifle. The left hand is attached to the rifle so there are three gluing points: the two shoulders and the wrist of the left hand. As soon as you get one arm in place and try to attach the other you end up pushing the first arm out of place When you try and get the wrists in the right place for the hand on the rifle, one or other of the shoulders (or both) go out of place. All the time you are trying to manoeuvre the parts into place the glue is drying. The whole process is really, really stressful and not part of what should be a relaxing hobby! Some of them still aren't quite right and the shoulder joints will require some filling. Also, the Perries themselves say that not all arms will fit on every body but there is no information in the instructions to show which ones go with which, Very much the least enjoyable half an hour with model soldiers I have had for many years. I was going to build and paint a section of 12 men but don't think I can bear to build the next six for a while!

Before I could even build them I had another crisis as I was about to build the first figures but found that I couldn't get any glue out of all three of my tubes of Revell cement. It seems to be like Games Workshop liquid Greenstuff; you open it to use it once but the next time you want to use it it has all set. Fortunately, the people of the Painting, modelling and gaming Facebook group came to the rescue. After well meaning suggestions such as use a lighter to heat the metal tube, use a gas cooker lighter and use a guitar string (?) someone said any flame would do, given I didn't have any of the three things suggested. I actually didn't have any matches, either, so had to go to Tesco but using a candle flame soon had them unblocked, miraculously. I would have just gone out and bought another tube of glue but couldn't as it was ten o'clock at night. I am just hopelessly impractical!

 One figure missing, which I found after I took the picture, thank goodness

Instead, inspired by the three-ups of the Perry French Napoleonic infantry I saw at Salute I got my British 87th Foot out to work on. I put these to one side as I had a nasty attack of strap phobia but yesterday confined myself to shading the flesh and the trousers. This is a big unit, for me, of 24 foot and a mounted officer so they will take some time to finish. Now, too, of course, I realise that I have the stress of the arms to do, as I am painting them without arms so I can access the front of the uniform. Looking at the arms on the sprue I can't work out which arms will give which pose so that is more stress to worry about. Good job the doctor has just doubled the dose of my blood pressure pills.

2016  - 22

2017 - 17

2018 - 13

2019 -  12

I have enjoyed reading everyone else's Salute posts and looking at the pictures of all the games I missed. When I went round I thought that there was less, WW2, Napoleonic and ACW games than usual but it my be I just missed them.  Other people have said that the Blogger meet up was smaller this year (it was an hour earlier than usual) so I have decided to apply some science by digging out pictures from the last four years. Now, of course, people come and go ,so this is a only a point in time sample. The trend is down, however.  I don't post on my blog as often as I used to, so perhaps if there was a wargames Facebook meet up there might be more people but who knows?

My forces overrun the kraal and send the British scarpering

One thing I posted on my Facebook page but haven't mentioned here was another enjoyable Zulu ward game at Eric the Shed's.  This was a recreation of the Battle of Khambula held just a few days shy of the 140th anniversary.  We had five players: two for the British and three for the Zulus. I took control of the Zulu right wing and was immediately in trouble because I couldn't remember anything about the Black Powder rules; in particular how to activate my forces, so spent the first two moves immobile, waiting to see what everyone else did. In the end the game was something of a draw but miraculously I didn't lose a unit, unlike everyone else.

Eric's table was simple but effective and the battlefield layout was instantly recognisable from the central fortified British position on the hill. Eric's account and some excellent pictures is here.  What I really need to do is read up on the rules before I play a game so I have at least a vague idea of what is likely to be going on. Unfortunately, I play so rarely (this was my first game for a year) that I always forget the rules completely.

Another issue is that,all of my wargames rules are trapped behind a giant pile in my study consisting of cardboard boxes (mainly used to send Charlotte things to Edinburgh which she has forgotten), seven file boxes of unpainted figures and almost the entire output of Penthouse magazine from the nineteen eighties.  All need to be relocated so I can actually read my rules before a game!

I went off to MG day at Brooklands with Guy today, as his grandfather wants to buy him an MG (the Old Bat is resisting of course but then she resists anything which isn't her idea).  There were hundreds of MG's of every sort there but I really liked this one!

Back home for lunch and the light was quite good. I meant to get on with the Peninsular British but caught the end of John Carter (2012) on TV last night so did a couple of hours on this Modiphius Thark. There is still a lot to do on him but he is probably more than half finished now.. It's so nice to paint such a large figure. Maybe I should get some Victrix 54mm Napoleonics!

Last week I went to the Bonnard exhibition with my particular friend K, who used to model for me at Oxford, Not in the bath, though, as you would need hot water to keep the lady comfortable but the steam wouldn't be good for the paper.  Also, I remember the BBC drama on the Pre-Raphaelites where poor Lizzie Siddell had to spend days in the bath while Millais painted her for his Ophelia, As a result of being in the cold water she got very ill and her father, fifty medical bills later, demanded that Millais pay up for her treatment, which he did, fortunately. Interestingly, the landscape part of Millais'  picture was painted from the Hogsmill River in Ewell, not that far from where I live.  No such worries for Bonnard, who largely painted in the South of France, so his naked ladies (usually his wife and the occasional mistress) would not have been too cold, hopefully. This one, Nu dans le bain, was quite a late one, painted in 1936.  I first learned about Bonnard from an art book in our school library and I had several postcards of his paintings on my wall at college. 

Today's music is the soundtrack from John Carter (2012) by Michael Giacchino, which I had to buy, at great expense, off eBay not long ago as it is no loner available. I've played it a couple of times now and it's definitely growing on me, with some strong themes although some of it is quite remiscent of Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings and David Arnold's Stargate scores but that is a good thing!

Anna Gaël, the latest addition to Legatus' Wargmes Ladies

Finally, some of you (quite a few by the number of hits!) have noticed a few posts on Legatus Wargames Ladies this last week from Italy's Playmen magazine. It was designed as an Italian copy of Playboy from a time (1967) when Playboy was banned in Italy, Unlike Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Bob Guccione at Penthouse, Larry Flynt at Hustler and Paul Raymond at Men Only and Club, Playmen was very much the brainchild of a woman, Adelino Tattilo, who ran the magazine for over thirty years; choosing the centrefolds, cover pictures and championed its left wing, reforming written content. The effect that Playmen had on the social attitudes, fashions and culture of Italy cannot be underestimated. Tattilo was very interested in the cinema and there were regular pictorials from the sets of films being shot and virtually every young Continental actress happily stripped off for its pages, thankfully. We will be featuring some of these on Legatus Wargames Ladies over the next few months, as we have shamefully neglected it!

Commemorating 100 years since the end of the Great War by La Vie Parisienne

There are many serious commemorations of the end of the Great War happening at present so, instead, I will present this rather lighter tribute from the French magazine La Vie Parisienne. This issue appeared on November 10th 1918; the day before the Armistice was signed. The ‘elite troop’ type illustrated is a grenadier, in this picture by Georges Léonnec (1881-1940). She is holding a pomegranate (grenade in French) which, of course, engendered the name of the hand held explosive device due to its shape. In addition, split pomegranates are symbols of suffering and rebirth, as well as being fertility symbols.

It is typical of an illustration from La Vie Parisienne that it gets all this symbolism into what otherwise looks like a pin up (American troops were banned from buying the magazine in case paintings of ladies in a state of déshabillé overcame their moral sense). France lost over 4% of its population in the war, mainly young men, of course, and the magazine seems to be saying that the ‘elite troop’ ladies of France would have to help repopulate the country to contribute to its rebirth.

Paint Table Saturday: Painting progress and some Kickstarters

Good progress on the Carthaginian war elephants this week and the elephants are now, well on the way to being  finished. They need to be varnished and metal work done but it is cold and damp here today, unfortunately. The next jobs are the howdahs and crew.  The Little Big Men transfers look very good but do not precisely fit the model so some touching up was required.  I found then extremely fiddly One of the small one popped out of my fingers as I was bending it to remove the plastic coating and disappeared completely, lost somewhere in the clutter of my desk.  I am not looking forward to putting the very tiny transfers on the howdahs.  This weekend's job is to get those moved along.  

I have put bases on the Zulus and undercoated them (although somehow I have lost a shield bearing arm but I think I can fix that from the bits box).  I have also based a couple of the Wargods of Olympus figures (see below).  I am now also starting the tedious black bits on the 1864 Danish infantry.  Slowly but surely!  Any way this is what is going to see some attention this weekend.

I seem to have bought rather a lot of art books lately and desperately need shelf space which is currently being taken up by a lot of old wargames magazines.  In addition I have a pile of wargames magazines on the floor.  I have decided to be brutal and get rid of them.  I don't read them again, anyway and usually only find one or two articles in them worth keeping but as they do feature in my occasional Reading Wargames Magazines over Lunch (TM) posts, I won't stop buying them.  Instead, I am going through them and removing any articles I might want to read again and scanning them.  I can then file them in the relevant section of my computer and it makes it much more likely that I will refer to them in the future, as I will know exactly where they are.  So the first one I scanned last night was a Sudan scenario from this month's Miniature Wargames.

Back in 2014, I bought into the Crocodile Games Wargods of Olympus game Kickstarter.  Not because I was interested in the game but because I was interested in the figures for my Jason and the Argonauts project.  There were huge delays on this and I contacted them again recently and they told me they had my parcel all ready to go but they needed my address confirming. Well, they said they had sent me an e-mail asking for it but they hadn't. Anyway a massive box of stuff arrived yesterday and it looks very good.  A huge impact on the lead pile, though!

The figures come on slotta bases, which I hate so I will saw off most of the tab and will mount them on my favourite steel washers from Hurst in Cowes.  The gods and goddesses are a head taller than the rank and file figures, appropriately, and I will start with some of these I think.  In fact the goddess Artemis (above) and the god Dionysus seems as good a place to start as any.

Ewoks, anyone?

I have bought into a number of other Kickstarters and, on the whole, have found them a good experience.  A couple I regretted, like 18mm Forged in Battle ancients (although I like the look of their new Dark Ages Kickstarter) and Mars Attacks (I still have them all somewhere) but usually I find them a good way to pick up new ranges.  Sometimes I change my mind before the Kickstarter ends and cancel, as I did with The Drowned Earth (I really liked the miniatures but reckoned the scenery would cost a fortune).  This week I cancelled another Kickstarter, Freya's Wrath by Bad Squiddo games.  Now I should really want lady Vikings and I have the Foundry ones plus some other odd figures I picked up for a planned Frostgrave Force.  I decided that Frostgrave probably isn't for me, despite buying some figures, as the magic element seemed to make it far too complicated for me to understand and Eric the Shed didn't think much of it when he tried it.  The rules we play at the Shed are usually excellent so I trust his judgement on this. The real issue I had with the Freya's Wrath figures was that I decided that I didn't like the sculpts.   These are squat ladies and suffer from, not only big head syndrome, but also old style Gripping Beast fat calf syndrome (like their Early Imperial Romans).  Life is too short (especially for me) to paint average figures. Now, to be fair, you can't always tell proportions from photos, as the camera often distorts figures but I can always look at them, once they are out, at one of the shows. Instead I put my money into the new John Carter range (something I have wanted since I was about ten).

On Thursday I also pledged for Dark Fable's bunny girls Kickstarter.  I have no idea what these will be used for but they are sculpted by Brother Vinni and he does the best 28mm women on the planet. I have bought most of Dark Fable's Egyptian harem girls and even painted some, so I know these will be excellent and they were fully funded in a couple of days.  Fortunately, I have just the right reference book for the figures: Osprey's  Playboy Bunny Girls in Urban America 1960-1988

Well, no, of course, but I do have this in my extensive Playboy library so that will help with research, enormously.  I did once have a notion to do a (perhaps) Black Ops style fight in the sort of nightclub you used to get in Alias, using the excellent Sally 4th Terra-Block bar.  Now I could build a miniature Playboy club! Hmm. 

Winterhalter - Florinda (1852)

Talking of scantily clad ladies, today's wallpaper is Florinda by Queen Victoria's favourite painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873).  I saw this painting in Osborne House on the Isle of Wight this summer and it featured in the most recent episode of BBC4's enjoyable series Art, Passion and Power: the Story of the Royal Collection.  At the time, this would have been something of a daring painting for a woman to purchase and a rather surprising birthday present, as it was, from Queen Victoria to Prince Albert. It must have been a favourite of both as they had it hanging over their adjoining desks in the Queen's Sitting Room in Osborne House, where it remains to this day.  In her diaries, Victoria bemoaned the fact that it couldn't be a secret gift (perhaps she was conscious of its  perceived raciness as a gift from the monarch) as it had to appear in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that year.  Likewise it looked like Winterhalter hadn't expected it to sell quite so quickly as he had to rapidly paint a copy (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) for the Paris Salon the following year.

Bernardo Blanco -King Rodrigo before his defeat by the Moors at the battle of Guadalete in 711 (1871)

The subject is based on an old Spanish/Portuguese/Arab story.  Florinda was the daughter (or wife, depending on the version of the story) of Count Julian governor of Cueta for the Visigothic King Rodrigo in the 8th century.    Illustrated in Winterhalter's painting is one version, where King Rodrigo (just visible in the bushes at the far left) spies on Florinda and her lady companions as they prepare to bathe in the River Tajo, near Toledo castle. Instantly falling in lust (not surprisingly given, Winterhalter's lustrous treatment of flesh) Kind Rodrigo either seduced her and she became his lover or he abducted and raped her ('falls violently in love' as the Royal Collection euphemistically calls it).  Some versions of the story have Florinda as the seducer, however. Whatever, her father/husband Julian is none too pleased so colludes with the leader of the Ummayad Caliphate, Musa Ibn Nusayr, then running riot in North Africa, to invade Spain and kick out King Rodrigo and the Visigoths. This of course they did, leading to the death of King Rodrigo at the battle of Guadalete, centuries of Moorish conquest, flamenco music, a heroic crusade to oust the Moors, a Hollywood epic feature film with a wonderful soundtrack by Miklós Rózsa and a Warhammer Ancient Battles supplement.  That's a lot of stuff caused by one naked woman. In some versions of the legend, despite the rocky start to their relationship, Florinda, distraught at the death of her lover Rodrigo, commits suicide by jumping into the river where she was first spied upon by the King.  Her spirit, embarrassed at the terrible fate she had caused to befall Spain, would haunt the area ever after, especially if you have consumed too much Manchego and La Mancha wine, no doubt.

Winterhalter - Leonilla, Princess Sayn Wittgenstein (1843)

It was a popular story in the mid-nineteenth century (less so now) and indeed Queen Victoria, with Albert, had attended the world premier of the opera by Swiss composer Sigismond Thalberg, Florinda, ou Les Maures en Espagne, the year before she bought the painting, so was well aware of the legend.  The bodies in Winterhalter's painting would have been professional models but many of the faces were that of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn Wittgenstein, as Queen Victoria noted in her diaries. The Russian Princess Wittgenstein had been painted by Winterhalter in Paris in 1843 in a remarkably sensuous, for the time, odalisque style, portrait. She was famous for her intellect and her beauty and in 1860, when she was in her mid-forties, Queen Victoria noted that she was 'still very handsome'.  Born the year after the battle of Waterloo, she died in 1918, at the age of a hundred and one.

Thalberg's opera, Florinda has never been recorded and these days he is best known as a pianist who was a bitter rival to Liszt and who produced a number of piano arrangements of other composer's opera music.  So to keep the theme I am listening to the monumental soundtrack of El Cid, by Miklós Rózsa, in the truly excellent re-recording of the complete score (all 150 minutes of it) by The City of Prague Philharmonic.  

Something for the Weekend: Saucy Pulp covers by Norman Saunders

Some saucy pulp covers for the weekend over on my adults only Legatus' Wargames Ladies blog.  They aren't really adults only (I would have loved them when I was eleven years old!) but that is how we have to classify them for repressed, puritan Blogger!  

Reading Wargames Magazines over lunch and what's going on

Well, I was in London on Tuesday and had one of those awkward breaks in the day.  I had finished my meetings by 12.00 and my meeting in the afternoon was cancelled but I was due to meet up with a friend in the evening. Nothing to do but go to the National Cafe at the National Gallery and have a spot of lunch.  I already had two wargames magazines in my bag and bought the new Miniature Wargames at WH Smith in Holborn, so I had three magazines to look at.

I had been in Trafalgar square last Friday as well (which was Trafalgar Day!) having walked there from Orc's Nest on my way to catch the Tube back to the City to meet up with some former colleagues for dinner.  We went to a Tapas bar in Mincing Lane (Camino - nice food, nice waitresses far too noisy for old people like me) and drank a toast " a pox on the Spanish and the French!"  My friend had a spare ticket for the NFL game at Twickenham which was a bonus.  I went to the old pre-season American Football games at Wembley back in the late eighties but haven't been to any of the new regular season games the NFL is running, while they decide if they are going to start a team in London or not.

At Orc's Nest I picked up The Men who Would be King rules, having played a large Zulu Wars game with them at the Shed on Monday.  After my meeting in the City (where I successfully avoided being posted to Riyadh for three months - no alcohol, no pork and no women - I cannot imagine a worse environment) I sat in Pret-a-Manger and had a look through them.  Having already played them that week I did at least manage to follow what the rules are about and I also noticed some of the house rules Eric the Shed had introduced, such as a skirmish unit category and having an overall leader who can rally pinned troops.  What really cheered me up was a whole section on solo play and also the suggested forces.  I already have all the figures painted for s Beja force in the the Sudan and have all but the Cavalry for the British.  I am well on the way with Zulus and British too.  The units of 16 for natives and 12 for the British are much more achievable for me than the units of 20 I was trying to paint for The Sword and the Flame.  My Colonial Wargaming looks like it might be rejuvenated by these rules.  What I have to get over is trying to recreate historic battles and play some imaginary ones (although it makes me shudder to do so!).

While looking for something else I discovered a pack of 4Ground skirmish movement trays I had forgotten I even owned.  I think I bought them at Salute when Dux Bellorum (another Dan Mersey ruleset) came out in 2012 but I never used them as I hate movement trays but I think I will have to give up on this one!   As they hold eight figure each they will be great for Zulus and Beja as I mount my figures on 20mm square bases.  I have tried a few in the holes and will have to trim each base by a millimetre or two but it could work!  If it does, I will try and pick up some more at Warfare in November.  Amazingly they are still the same price as they were four years ago!

In the same pile of horizontal format material I also found my Back of Beyond rules, several sheets of steel paper, a DVD of Up Pompeii (in one of those card sleeves that newspapers used to give away), the missing grass sheet I pose my painted figures on and several charcoal drawings I did of girlfriends at college (all dressed, surprisingly).

On Sunday I went to Twickenham for the American Football,  Rather depressingly, I worked out that I had last seen the Los Angeles Rams play in London 29 years ago!  I had not been to Twickenham stadium before, even though it is less than ten miles from where I live.  This is because I have never attended a rugby match.  When I told this to my friend he didn't believe it but I have only been to one football match as well. I am contemplating writing a post on things I have never done!

I was impressed by Twickenham Stadium, I have to say and it appeared to be completely full with rather more women than  I was expecting (although not as many as you get at a game in the US) and a lot more Germans, oddly.  However the pounding third rate rock music played constantly before and during the game got on my nerves.  It could have been worse, it could have been rap, I suppose. 

I was quite impressed that they had  Nicole Scherzinger singing the American National anthem and she completely out sang Laura Wright, the poor man's Katherine Jenkins (who is the poor man's opera singer), who sang God Save the Queen.  

My seat was right up the top of the stadium and to get there you have to go up along a spiral ramp, like the vertical car park in the first episode of Captain Scarlet. I was getting quite dizzy half way up so stopped to look at the view.  This was worthwhile as the Los Angeles Rams cheerleaders appeared to do a short routine down below.  A man with two sons of about eight and ten was just ahead of me and saw them too.  "Do you want to go down and watch the cheerleaders?" he asked the boys.  "No!"  Heh, heh!

Part way through the game, I realised why I preferred not to go to big stadia to watch sport: the people in the crowd are mostly ghastly.  For a start I was surprised that they allow alcohol into the stadium and I was stuck behind five boys who looked about fourteen to me but must have been eighteen given the amount of beer they were buying.  They were really stupid and annoying, conducting swordfights with their flags and shouting instructions at the players.  They can't hear you and you just sound like a pratt. Basically, I don't like people!  Of course the worst thing about British NFL fans is that they all want to be American so whoop and holler as if they were.  You're British!  Calm down!  Anyway I am off to Sunday's game at Wembley so it will be interesting to go there as I haven't been to Wembley Stadium either.

So, after this rather rambling diversion it is back to lunch at the National Gallery.  They have a special Italian menu to go with their Caravaggio exhibition, at present, so I decided to have Truffled White Bean Soup to start with.  Given I had four hours to kill before meeting up with my friend I thought I might as well have a bottle of wine too, so chose the Sicilian Nero d'Avola.  I have had several Sicilian girlfriends, including one who meant that I couldn't travel to Sicily for a while due to an incensed husband with 'connections'.  I looked her up on LinkedIn recently and she has aged badly but then she would probably say the same about me.  It was thirty years ago!

The first magazine I looked at was October's Wargames Illustrated.  The theme was warrior women but I have no interest in Joan of Arc, Saint Olga of Kiev or Empress Maria Theresa.  I did enjoy the piece on their fourth "warrior woman", the Dice Bag Lady, Annie Norman, from whom I have bought a number of figures for my not yet realised female Frostgrave company.  Although I would never admit to her that I like barely dressed women warrior figures.  Articles on the Spanish Civil War (one of my pet hates) and Team Yankee (actually I have been tempted by this; having read the book and bought some modern 1/300 armour for it many many years ago) were skipped over.  There was quite a good piece on making ruined buildings, although the day I make my own wargames scenery will be the day the they decide resin and laser cutting are banned for health reasons. I also wasn't interested in the Winter War piece (good pictures, though) or colonial Ethiopia but The Men Who Would be Kings wild west variant did look interesting, as I have always wanted a Seventh Cavalry force.

No, what really interested me in that issue was the In Her Majesty's Name statistics for a Lost World force plus cavemen and dinosaurs.  Of course, I have started to paint figures for this and the author's characters are very close to mine (as they are roughly based on the Conan Doyle novel plus the dreadfully enjoyable Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World  TV series (which made Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea look like Wolf Hall). 

One thing annoyed me about the article, however, in that it posited a second Professor Challenger expedition and includes fictional background which they date to 1895, making it a Victorian adventure (and by extension, Challenger's original adventure, as detailed in Conan Doyle's book).  Of course the novel was originally published in 1912 and was not, therefore, Victorian or even Edwardian!  Of course, I am writing my own erotic version of The Lost World, initially for a couple of lady friends but now I am serialising it online so I know a lot about the original story and the time period!

Right, onto my second course, of Tagliolini with braised shin of beef and bone marrow butter.  This was very good indeed although quite messy to eat and I kept splashing the pages of the two issues of Miniature Wargames I looked at.  I always thought of this magazine as the lesser of the two main wargames magazines in the nineties, when I started buying them regularly, mainly because of the badly painted figures that they used to feature in their articles.  Something to do with featuring achievable painting standards, they claimed,  but then that is rather akin to featuring "real women" in fashion and beauty advertisements.  I don't want to see them, I want to see some impossibly gorgeous looking Eastern European, however unattainable (although there was that girl, Ringaile, from Lithuania who  I met in a nightclub in Riga.  She was very attainable after a few glasses of Vodka).

This issue was the last one edited by Henry Hyde, a man whose loss to the magazine was much mourned.  Frankly, I am afraid I don't really register the editors of magazines.  It either has articles in it I am interested in or it doesn't. Still, Hyde, who seems to have been pushed out by a publisher with new ideas (usually a bad sign, often leading to the imminent demise of the publication) ,was well thought of and his Battlegames certainly had more to it than most equivalents at the time, although it was bit too gamey (like jugged hare) for me.

One thing that did annoy me about Hyde was his World Wide Wargaming page, despite it highlighting some blogs of bloggers I know (congratulations to Eric the Shed for deservedly featuring in this last one).  There was something a bit know it all and didactic about its tone.  This month's  edition was no different, in which he pondered why people continued to use Blogger rather than Wordpress like him.  To me, people who use Wordpress are like people who have Apple computers, hybrid cars or record turntables ("the sound is so much better" - yes apart from all the clicks and crackles)..  There is something slightly condescendingly superior about them,   Hyde says we should be "buying (bad start) one's (pretentious) own domain name and hosting from an Internet Service provider and installing Wordpress yourself" (not ones self?).  Well I wouldn't have the first idea about how to do this and that's why I use Blogger because it is dead simple. One thing I have noticed about Wordpress blogs is that I can't follow them on Blogger.  Updates don't appear, so they disappear as far as I am concerned.  This happened when Dr Phil Hendry switched to Wordpress, which is a shame as I used to like his blog.  Hyde then goes on to talk about how to code a picture so that it appears in the Miniatures Page.  I had no idea what this was about.  I just post the url to a picture in Blogger and up it comes with no problem.  No need to adjust widths or limit pixels as he suggested.  He also urged us to use gallery pages.  "I look at many wargames blogs, especially those with lots of photos, where I feel like they're missing a trick and could potentially present their material in a more attractive way, using photo-gallery plug-ins (what is a plug-in?) that are available with many Wordpress themes."  Again, its the superior tone.  It's like having Gwyneth Paltrow telling you what you should eat all the time.  Actually, I hate gallery pages.  I always switch off 'view in lightbox' on my blogs too as I don't want to separate the pictures from the text..

So what else was in his farewell issue?  Another one of those how to build ugly scenics by the Wargames Widow, which I didn't read, again.  Something on Kursk, which would have been of interest when I was fourteen but, like Science Fiction and pop music, I have grown out of WW2 tank battles, There was yet another old school eighteenth century imaginations piece,also of no interest, Something on the ECW using hex terrain (brain switches off).  I quite enjoyed the Wargaming my Way piece, despite the author's espousal of hexes.  There were also articles on small scale wargames (no thanks) and a show report (I never look at these).  Conrad Kinch had a piece on the problems of multi-player games which, of course, are what I play exclusively, so I will probably read that but the light was failing and the point size of Miniature Wargames is too small for me to read in poor light. So out with a whimper not bang, I think, for this one.

So, on to the, hot off the press, new Miniature Wargames, complete with ugly random fonts all over the cover which made it look like a mid 2000s Playboy.  The magazine title fonts (two, really?) looked rather more fantasy wargaming than historical (perhaps deliberately).  The "Miniature" font had something of the UK editions of those Slave Girl of Gor books about it.  "16-page Sci-Fi and Fantasy Section" it trumpets on the cover.  There has been much muttering about this, particularly given the choice of John Treadaway as editor. I have clashed with Mr T before, over the appalling Nazi apologists who appeared at Salute some years ago.  He also can be superior and condescending.  He is always going on, on TMP, about why don't people use real names for their posts on TMP and the rest of the internet?  Because with that information I immediately discovered where he lived, where he worked and the fact that he has a Dalek in his house. Anyway, the other thing I don't like about him is his fixation on Hammer's Slammers, an SF (who still calls it Sci-Fi?) wargames world based on a series of novels by David Drake. I read the original novel and unutterably tedious and depressing it was too.  Needless to say there is a how to paint hover tanks article by Mr T in this issue.

The first piece in Forward Observer (they aren't exactly the changing the content) was on the rise of plastic figures.  A wasted opportunity this.  I would have been interesting to find out why plastics are now so viable for wargames figures manufaturers not just a statement that they exist and a not very informative review of the new Vixtrix phalangites,  The Wargaming my Way piece I really enjoyed because it resonated with me more than Mr Hex from the previous issue..  Articles on playing with tanks in the garden and dreadnoughts (not interested in naval wargaming at all) had no interest.  There was a good piece on the 1940 invasion of Crete which is quite a tank free zone, thank goodness.  The article on hidden movement was hilarious in that the author proposed the very practical solution of having two identical wargames tables with each side on a different  table.

The vaunted new fantasy section was actually mostly SF apart from an interview with the creator of Frostgrave,  I was losing interest in this game, due to its new animal faced gnolls but I am now interested in it again because of the forthcoming barbarian figures (it's all about the figures, not the rules for me).  I'm not an automatic anti SF and fantasy person, although there is still this niggle at the back of my mind that it is for children, like sweets, pop music and carbonated drinks. Given my extensive SF reading background when I was young I do have a hankering for some sort of SF figures to paint (for fantasy I am happy with GW's Lord of the Rings and wouldn't be seeking anything else).  There was a piece on an interesting plug together corridor scenery system but the accompanying photos were so small and dark (see above) I couldn't work out what it looked like at all.

Frankly, inside, apart from the fantasy section, the magazine didn't look that different.  The typeface was just as small and difficult to read and they persist in printing text on coloured backgrounds, which also doesn't help legibility.  They were a few changes in the way they presented headings etc but it was largely cosmetic.  If there is one slight design change it is that there seems to be more but snaller pictures. Frankly, I was hoping for something a bit more radical but perhaps it will evolve.

So, if you have got this far you obviously don't have any figures to paint, although I actually painted some base colours on faces and a few jackets on my Mexicans yesterday, the first proper painting I have done since May,  I hope to get my Perry ACW cavalry filled, based and undercoated this weekend, except I will be at Wembley on Sunday.

Some new tunes, while writing this very long post (as I haven't posted much at all in the last few months) with Alexander Grechaninov's first two symphonies which I discoverd in my usual roundabout way.  Having watched a Michael Portillo Great Continental Railway Journeys TV programme on Romania I started looking for more music by George Enescu and came across a recording by the George Enescu State Philharmonic Orchestra of Grechaninov (1864-1956),  One thing iTunes is good for is trying out new tunes,  Grechaninov studied under Rimsky- Korsakov and if you like him or Borodin you will probably like this.  Some of it is reminiscent of John Williams second trilogy Star Wars music, which is not a surprise as Williams is an expert on lesser known Russian composers.

Maybe some "something for the weekend" ladies later!