The wind beneath my wings does NOT make me fly high

Bette Midler singing "Wind beneath my wings"

Actually, it's the wind above my wings that makes me fly.

Air flows faster over the upper surface of the wing, which lowers pressure, and therefore provides lift and enables flight. The mechanics are the same for a airplane wing, a frisbee, a sail, a swinging cricket ball or an eagle's wing. Similarly, the spoiler blades at the back of F1 racing cars are designed so the wind passes beneath the wings. This pulls the car down towards the tarmac, and provides stability.

This science is complex enough to provide many engineers with a lifetime of work, but is neither new nor controversial. It follows from Bernoulli's principle, which I was taught in 8th class by Kanaka Eshwaran-Miss (aka Kinetic Energy-miss).

So why does Bette Midler keep showing up on Muzak tracks around the world singing:

"I can fly higher than an eagle,
'cause you are the wind beneath my wings"?

Wrong! The wind above her wings makes her fly high. The wind beneath her wings brings her down to earth. Ignoramus. Fancy dress Fatima! Bougainvillea! Pithecanthropus! Odd-toed ungulate!! Nit-witted ninepin! Squawking popinjay!

F1 car, that uses wind beneath the wings to stay low

Airplane, that uses wind above the wings to fly high

PS: I'm kidding. It's fun to win an argument conclusively in an age of "it depends".

Would Captain Haddock have had a Scottish accent?

Blistering barnacles! Thundering typhoons! Ostrogoths! Bashi bazouks! Why has Steven Spielberg given Captain Haddock a Scottish accent?

Pithecanthropus! Lily livered landlubbers! Troglodytes!

I caught the Tintin movie on a flight recently, and it was a mixed bag. I loved the look. The motion capture technique works well. It strikes a  nice balance between maintaining the texture of the original comic and creating something contemporary. But the movie takes a bunch of arbitrary, and entirely unnecessary, liberties with the story and characterization, which grates on committed, long-term Tintin fans like me.

Like, for example, Captain Haddock's Scottish accent. There is no indication in any of Herge's comics that the Captain is Scottish. One doesn't have to be a Scot to love Scotch. Sure, Captain Haddock still is endearing even with his accent, but why introduce this Scottish distraction? 

Scottish identity is especially distinctive and pungent right now, with a referendum looming on Scotland's independence. A Scottish accent also communicates class. The Scottish upper classes - the kind of people who trace their lineage to colonial naval captains, are heirs to stately homes, and are christened Archibald - typically speak with upper-class English accents. Even The Scotsman is not sure how to react to this Scottish Haddock. Embrace him, because he is cool and Scottish? Or cringe, because he reinforces the stereotype of the Scot as a drunken grouch with a heart-of-gold? I don't think Spielberg is trying to stir these ghosts, but by treading on this ground, he inevitably does so.  

Fortunately, Spielberg's Tintin hasn't been saturated with a specific identity. He remains the Tintin we grew up with - the Tintin of indeterminate age, social class, nationality, sexuality and politics - which is the genius of Tintin. His ambiguity is his strength. Tintin is neutral. So, it is easy to project any self, any identity, into Tintin. As a Tam Bram boy in Madras, I didn't have to make an effort to locate myself in Tintin's skin, and go exploring the world of the Incas, Tibet, Al Capone's Chicago, Syldavia or the moon. I would have had a harder time getting myself into a Scottish, or even an explicitly Belgian, Tintin.

Another grouse: they don't sail to the Caribbean in search of Red Rackham's Treasure. Surely, they can't edit out that sequence! Exploring the wreck of the Unicorn in Professor Calculus' anti-shark submarine would make for some wonderful cinema.

I blame Steven Spielberg for these grating deviations from Herge's script, rather than his co-producer Peter Jackson. Steven Spielberg first heard about Tintin when his Indiana Jones character was likened to Tintin. Peter Jackson grew up as a Tintin devotee. He also grew up as a Lord of the Rings devotee, and he struck that delicate balance between fidelity and re-interpretation perfectly when he made the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Peter Jackson will be directing the next Tintin film, so I'm optimistic that the next film will show a more refined instinct for what is, and is not, sacred about Tintin.

Peter Jackson could do worse than to cast himself as a Kiwi Captain Haddock. He looks the part. Check out the featurette below...

Captain Haddock's Bashi Bazouks

Ever wondered who Bashi-Bazouks are?

I first encountered Bashi Bazouks in The Crab With The Golden Claws. At the time, I didn't really wonder who or what they were. I just accepted them as another Haddock-ism, like lily livered landlubbers, or fancy dress fatimas, or ostrogoths, all good ways of describing people who don't understand that Loch Lomond whiskey is sacred. Nonetheless, I was delighted when I found Bashi Bazouks in a totally different context.

It turns out that the story of the Bashi Bazouks is much sadder than that of odd-toed ungulates, or duck-billed platypuses or even billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles.

I came across Bashi Bazouks while reading about the Ottoman-Russian war in 1876. Bashi Bazouks were irregular fighters in the Ottoman Army. They were unpaid, non-uniformed, and used as lookouts or sentries. They gained international notoriety when they were involved in horrific escalating tit-for-tat violence in Bulgaria, between Christian Bulgarian nationalists and Muslim Ottomans, which culminated in the Bashi Bazouks' massacre of the entire mountain-town of Batak.

It is hard to know what actually happened at this time. Open sources like Wikipedia can be unreliable when describing emotionally-charged political history like this. But to the extent that my Googled-up references can be trusted, the Bashi Bazouks were both tragic victims and brutal aggressors. Many of them were Muslim Circassian refugees from the Crimean wars, displaced from their homeland and repeatedly brutalized by the Bulgarian majority, before retaliating with even more brutality when they were finally given license by the Ottomans.

This story has a surprisingly contemporary feel. The soul-destroying ethnic violence in the Balkans and the Caucuses is still going on. The great powers are still learning that fighting proxy wars with low-cost irregular troops usually ends in tragedy, whether you call them Bashi Bazouks, Tamil Tigers, Sandinistas or mujahedeen.

Changing tack a bit, ever wondered who Archibald is? Captain Haddock's first name is Archibald. Fortunately, this Archie is not a carrot-top.

Tintin

Found a superb article on Tintin in a back issue of the New Yorker, by Anthony Lane. The highlights:

- General de Gaulle declared that Tintin was his only international rival. He was envious, perhaps, of not just of Tintin's fame but of his defiantly positive attitude. Both figures can be recognized by silhouette alone

- Stimulation in Herge's solid, Catholic, bourgeois youth in Belgium came from his exploits as a scout. There remain in Tintin traces of the try-anything, do-gooding spirit of the scout troop

- Tintin was first serialized in 1925 in a daily newspaper which was described in it's masthead as a "Catholic and National Newspaper of Doctrine and Information". The editor had a framed picture of Mussolini on his desk

- Tintin in Congo (1931) is an unmitigated parade of racial prejudice, with bug-eyed natives swaying between ignorance and laziness. Herge later redrew the comic...and claimed that his concept of the Congo was no different from that of his compatriots at the time

- A crucial happening was Herge's encounter with Chang Chong-chen, a student at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. Chang suggested using real events as the inspiration for his adventures...the ouevre would have a historical value...The Blue Lotus (1936) was born

- Chang returned to China and lost touch with Herge. Tintin in Tibet (1960) showed Tintin searching for a lost friend called Chang. In 1981, two years before Herge died, the real Chang came to Belgium for a tearful reunion. Chang had shown Herge how to beat back prejudice: just tell the truth

- Herge's principle: the further your reach, the more compelling your duty to get it right. Herge knew he would not be able to emabrk on Tintin in Tibet without amassing photographs of monastries, lamas and chortens, all of which would be copied in fanatical detail in his book. I was thrilled to read Hindi in Tintin which was real

- Belgium was occupied. Herge - like Wodehouse, who was interred as an enemy alien - not only survied but bloomed into one of his most flourishing periods. Once the war ended, both were interrogated about the nature and intensity of their collaboration. Both pleaded guilty of innocence; neither ever dispelled the shadow of suspicion. Herge's (and Wodehouse's) ability to avert his gaze from evil verges on the chronic

- Commentators are both enticed and exasperated by how little he gives away. In particular, the Tintin who gazes out from the cover of The Castafoire Emerald (1963) shushing the reader with a finger held to his lips

- There is no sex. Tintin passes increasing portions of his time with an unmarried seaman, yet it seldom occurs to us to question their rapport. He never has a girlfriend, and never expresses the need for one. He has no parents or siblings. We are unsure whether he counts as a child himself. He reminds me, if anyone, of Charlie Brown. Enid Blyton, and maybe even JRR Tolkien, would be at home in this beautiful, adventure-filled, but asexual world

- Tintin may be too constrained for American tastes, being posessed of no superpowers. He is Clark Kent without the phone booth, although Clark at least had a paying job , wheras Tintin, nominally a reporter, never receives a paycheck or files a story

Flight 714

Just watched my favourite Tintin, Flight 714, on DVD.

It works. It was fun. But it doesn't work as well as the comic. Mainly because the DVD goes by too fast to soak up and enjoy the details.

I remember the comic frame when Professor Calculus demonstrates a "savate" move in Jakarta airport. I've spent hours laughing at the hundreds of things that flood out of his pockets. That frame lasts just a fraction of a second on the DVD. There's another frame when Captain Haddock pours some liquid (mineral water?) into a potted plant at the airport...and the plant wilts. I didn't spot that at all in the DVD.

A less visually rich comic, like Peanuts, probably works better on DVD than Tintin.