Germany's First Ally (book review)

A couple of weeks back  when I was still working on the early stages of The September Campaign v.2 I got into a discussion with Andreas at our club who's our resident Mid-War Slovak player. He asked if I was going to write in the Slovaks, which had been my plan from the start, and after some more talking about Slovak contributions to the invasion of Poland in 1939 Andreas started to talk about a book he had somewhere at home.

Little did I know then, but research on Early War Slovaks proved to be the hardest thing during the entire project, and while Andreas was looking for his book I scavenged the internet for information on units, weapons, army composition and battles. Ridiculously difficult task but puzzling together information like Dr. Frankenstein puzzled together his monster, I was able to work out 3 Slovak lists based upon what I could find. Just as I had finished the Slovak section, Andreas found his book.

"Germany's first ally" is the title of this book on the Slovak army during WW2, and it's an amazing resource for anyone interested in the Slovak army in Early, Mid and Late War. There are tons of pictures, maps, and information on Slovak contributions and operative status throughout the years.

Also a rich amount of background describing the Slovak independence just prior to the outbreak of the war. I was mostly interested in the Slovaks after their independence and their part in the invasion of Poland so I did not really read the rest of the book in detail. but it has a ton of detailed information and technical data about all the vehicles and weapons the Slovak army used during the war. It also includes a ton of pictures, most of which I had already seen or found on obscure WW2 sites and forums while working on the Slovak section for my campaign book.

The amount of time I spent looking for scraps of information during my research could have been cut down in half as this book included much of the information I had found myself. Though I was a bit disappointed that it did not include the composition of companies and platoons when it had information about other things such as the artillery and tanks. I mainly used it to double check what I had researched and already written. In any case, this book is a must have, and from what I gather - this seem to be the only book of its kind on this particular subject.

Inherit the Oprah

The battle between Katie Couric and Family Feud's Steve Harvey to inherit Oprah's talk show audience continues to garner media attention.

Media reporters have to chatter about something, but I have to wonder if Oprah's audience hasn't already dribbled away. Her ratings were headed down, down, down before she finally packed it in, and her OWN venture ain't doing so swell. Are there really huddled masses of Oprah-deprived daytime viewers yearning for a new icon?

I also have to wonder if Harvey isn't spreading his media empire a little thin. The radio show, Feud, the TV talker, the books, the movies, the baseball cards (I made up that last one)...after a while, there's only so much Steve any audience can absorb. But Harvey is hot right now thanks to Feud's improved ratings and the surprise success of his movie. He's got quite a few kids to support, after all, so I can't blame him for making hay while the media sun shines.

Will the talk show cut into Feud's numbers, as viewers get Steve-overloaded? I doubt it, but I could be generalizing from little old me. I never watch talkers, which makes me think most game show fans also aren't interested.

UPDATE: TVNewsCheck reports Steve Harvey's talk show averaged a 1.5 household rating, up considerably from the same time slots last year.

Olga 2SE

 (Note:  A blog was accidentally put on line before it was ready (Climate Tribes)....I took it off...will be finished later....cliff)

Last week, I was up on Orcas Island giving a talk on climate change in the Northwest.  While on Orcas, there was one place I was really interested in seeing...and it wasn't Mt. Constitution.  Rather, I wanted to check out an extraordinarily long-lasting observation site (122 years) that has been run by the Willis family the entire time:  Olga 2E.  You can imagine my delight when during the questions and answers, I found John Willis--the current keeper of the observing flame--right in front of me. 

An observing site like Olga 2SE (meaning it is found roughly 2 miles southeast of the town of Olga) is meteorological gold.   First, it is very long lasting, so we can really see the trends.  Second, it is in a rural area, so urban development is not an issue.  We owe John and his family a great deal for taking the time to provide this invaluable service to the region and the nation.

Just to orient you...here is a large map, followed by a closer in view, both using Google maps, that shows you the location of this site:

The green arrow is close to the location, but off by a few feet.  To really see it, here are some photos from the ground.  (I got these images from a really excellent site created by Anthony Watts and associates:   surfacestation.org -check WA sites here).  One close image and the other a bit back.  The temperature sensor is in the white housing, just north of the stairs.  A bit close to the porch, but that is probably consistent with the exposure over the last century.

What has this observing site told us about changes in the local climate for over a century?  Let me show you a few plots I made using the nice facility available at the Office of the Washington State Climatologist (found here).   First, annual  precipitation (blue line).  The state average is shown in green and the trend in red.  On average about 28.68 inches a year (roughly ten inches less than Seattle).  Really very little long-term trend:  a small downward tendency of .13 inches per decade.  Less precipitation extremes lately.  The State average is more...and not much trend in that either.

How about annual average maximum temperature at Olga?  Max temperatures appear to be cooling weakly...by about .05 F per decade.  This is consistent with other rural sites around the region--there is really very little sign of maximum temperature warming.

But annual average minimum temperature is a different story.  Virtually no trend until 1975 and then a jump in temperature.  As first I was suspicious of this jump, but checked out other local stations and many of them had a similar feature.

For example, consider Blaine or Port Angeles (you can click on them to enlarge).   Both show the warming after 1975.

 OK,  I believe that there was a warming in the minima at Olga 2E....but why?  One possible contributor to this might be the profound change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) at that time.  We believe the PDO is a form a natural variability for the Pacific basin, shifting from warm to cool phases over a period of roughly 30 years. Around 1975 the PDO transitioned quickly from a cool to warm phase.    So that is origin of the warming  and probably the best one. Or perhaps it is some influence of increased greenhouse gases--more moisture or greenhouse gases in the air keeping up minimum temperatures.  At Olga it is certainly  not local urbanization.

With cooling maxima and rising minima, the total (or mean) temperature change is a slight trend upward. Roughly 1F since 1955 (after which greenhouse gases increased more rapidly), less or even warming if you pick other periods.  Bottom line:  no significant changes in temperature over the period of record.

 Here are the extreme daily temperatures during the year at Olga.  Notice the interesting cold excursions (green lines)  during the winter..some even going below zero!  These are associated with strong northeasterly flow bringing arctic air through the Fraser River Valley.  Never go above the low 90s there for the extreme max.

Observing sites like Olga 2E give us important insights into long-term climatic trends unavailable from shorter lived stations.   They also identify earlier warm periods (like the 1930s), that are not included in the records of most climatological stations, many of which started in the 1940s and 1950s.

Orcas Island has a fascinating meteorology that includes blasts of northeast winds from Fraser River Valley, strong southeasterlies during the winter, a large contrast of precipitation due to it proximity to the Olympic rain shadow, and much more....perhaps in a future blog I will talk about it.

The malice test

Now, it is important to keep in mind that one in four women is not four in four women. And yet, ASSPOWALT. A Statistically Significant Percentage Of Women Are Like That. So, it is rather discouraging to see that more than a quarter of young women, up to 40 percent, are purposefully malicious.

One in four women deliberately puts unflattering photographs of their friends wearing bikinis on social networking websites such as Facebook, according to a new study. The majority of women posting the photos said they did so after falling out with their friends. Two-fifths of women also admitted deliberately posting photographs of their friends without make-up. Even when asked to permanently delete the unflattering picture from Facebook, a fifth of women said they had refused to do so.

This indicates that about 40 percent of women are overtly malicious and 20 percent are incorrigibly so. Again, that's not all women, but it is pretty close to half of them. So, if she's willing to do that sort of thing to her friends, knowingly and on purpose, just imagine what she is going to be willing to do when things aren't going her way and she is upset with you. Caveat emptor.

Life is far too short to involve yourself with a malicious woman. There are many personal shortcomings that can be overlooked or overcome, but pure malice isn't one of them. It isn't so much a red flag as a black one sporting a neon green skull-and-crossbones. The nice thing is, thanks to Facebook, there is an easy test for female malice. Look at the pictures she posts on social media sites. Are the pictures always good ones of her and bad ones of her friends, particularly her more attractive friends? If so, you are dealing with one of the 40 percent and should not even consider any sort of relationship with her.

The same article also provides evidence of a basic Game concept.

"To see that so many women deliberately commit ‘photo sabotage’ and upload unflattering pictures of friends is somewhat surprising, particularly when you consider how many said they’d be mad if the same was done to them.

Of course, this is not surprising at all to those who understand female solipsism and that most women refuse to hold themselves to the same standards they hold others.

The Avengers review

This was the summer blockbuster movie that I missed out on this year when it hit the cinema. Or rather I was very reluctant to go see it because it was in 3D and by the time I considered going it had been pulled from the theater's. People I knew were super excited about it, while I was on the fence considering the movies that had been released over the past few years in order to build up the knowledge about these characters.

I thought the first half of Captain America was amazing, the second half silly and plain boring to be honest. Never saw Thor because the concept wasn't interesting (and it looked goofy). I saw the first Iron Man movie and actually enjoyed it. Never saw any of the recent Hulk movies because they were torn to pieces by critics and I didn't have money to spend on trash.

So essentially I went into this movie with the knowledge of who each character was but not really having any of their "back story" movies in the back of my head. My friend Patrik said that I would hate it, because I am a film snob, that's not really true as I can enjoy stuff like The Rock, Con Air, Predators and other movies that are about the action and less about the story as well. What I can't stand are movies that fail to deliver what they promise or just end up being a half assed attempt (Battle Los Angeles), movies that are outright dumb and only after your money (Battleship) or movies that have a great premise and potential and just choose to waste it on really dated low brow political humor (Iron Sky).

So the Avengers, obviously, is more of a spectacle of costumed heroes kicking ass. It does not have Shawshank Redemption plot, the plot of this movie could probably fit on the back of a pack of matches. Doesn't mean it should suck, Rambo 4 was basically about shredding people to pieces with a .50 cal and I thought it was the best Rambo movie in the series (and action movie in a long while).

The problem with these kinds of movies in general, where you have a group of characters, is that some are very interesting and steal a lot of time, while others are dull fillers that just chime in with a clever comment every 25 minutes only to disappear into the background again. I think The Avengers, handle the ensemble thing quite well - with the exception for Jeremy Renner's character perhaps.

The action is also quite good BUT, it is seriously flawed if you are after something more than just harmless explosions. With the amount of shit blowing up, and probably thousands of people getting killed, the only blood you see in this movie is when Thor gets a nosebleed after getting punched in the face in a fight with Iron Man. There is ZERO sense of danger about anything going on, the shootouts, explosions, collapsing buildings, alien invaders etc.

And here is perhaps what became the biggest and most positive surprise of the movie for me, Scarlett Johansson’s character (Black Widow) and the performance of the actress herself came off a lot better than anyone elses. And I'm not talking about "performance" in the terms of lingering camera shots of Johansson’s ass. The scenes with her and the Hulk were really the only ones that I felt that someone could get killed or felt that the scenes conveyed a sense of danger.

And I don't necessarily need people getting torn limb from limb on screen to get my fix, but there really was an amazing lack of suspense in the action scenes. Everything was so easy. No one even broke a sweat in the final fight.

The pacing of the movie is also very weird, there are some really good scenes in the beginning when they are rounding up the "gang" of heroes - once again scenes with Black Widow and the Hulk are the best. Then pretty much nothing happens for what feels an hour, and suddenly you have this big battle that lasts something like 25 minutes. The main villain, Loki, just comes off as someone else’s bitch from the start. So you can't feel threatened by him, or take him seriously, he's clearly a puppet and his master plan is really bland. There is one scene between Loki and Iron Man when they try to intimidate each other talking about who's got who in his army - just doesn't work.There is another "oh so funny" scene with Loki and the Hulk where you just realize that no one cares anymore.

A much better scene, once again involving Black Widow, is shown earlier during the movie when she talks to Loki about his plan. There at least his character feels authentic and you can buy that he is the main villain of the movie and not some henchmen that gets pushed down an elevator shaft halfway through the second act.

It's a really mixed bag, the characters that are more low key, like Black Widow and the Hulk are a lot more interesting and are given better material to work with than the poster boys of this movie - Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. If the action had been a tad more serious and shown some consequence (not going to count the red-shirt agent  getting killed and the lame "motivation" he supposedly provided) it would have been a better movie. Now it just comes off as a PG-13 kids superhero movie, that to me is neither bad enough to be crap nor good enough to be great.

With all the bits of Black Widow's back story and the way the character was presented and worked in the Avengers, I'm actually looking forward to seeing the Black Widow movie more than the Avengers 2.

7/10. It's OK, but compared to more serious superhero movies like X-men, X-men first class, The Crow, Watchmen or Nolan's Batman movies this movie is lacking concern for the main characters, sense of real danger in the action, and a good main villain.

Panic?

The Futon Critic has posted some numbers for the second eps of American Bible Challenge and Beat the Chefs, which naturally show drops from the debuts. And just as naturally, a clueless poster on the GSN board pushes the panic button. I giggle at the post...

The original post is downright hilarious, though unintentionally. 949K total viewers "only" makes the second ep of American Bible Challenge the third most-watched show in GSN history, after the Bible debut and the Larsen documentary. Time to press the panic button, no doubt, he said sarcastically.

And old-skewing? Har-de-har-har. GSN usually gets somewhere around zero 18-49 viewers. The network will gladly take 176K of them. GSN has always skewed older than Everest. Once upon a time, High Stakes Poker topped the network with a little over 100K 18-49 viewers.

Beat the Chefs may suffer by comparison to Bible, and it certainly can't withstand all the reruns. I don't know that it's destined for cancellation, though. The cook-off is hardly a Late Night Liars disaster. 357K total viewers is very respectable by GSN's usual standards. But a cooking show was always going to be a tough sell to GSN's audience.

Couldn't find any numbers for the Pyramid sneak peek. May have to wait for Douglas Pucci's usual weekly list.

The September Campaign v2.1.2 Orders of Battle book

While I was not planning for release on September 1st when I started working on the project, it ended up becoming a natural release date for the Orders of Battle book as I finished writing it roughly a week ago and have been proof reading and tinkering with stats and points up until now.

This is the first time I've done something that resembles a complete self contained gaming resource (and anything on this scale). I've had similar projects in the past, but they were always leaning heavily on existing rules or army lists . This project however only requires the Flames of War version 3 rulebook. All army lists, stats, special rules and whatnot can be found within this book. The reason for me writing this book was simply because I grew tired of waiting for someone else to do it, and doing it well enough to give me a peace of mind. There have been a few resources on this subject released over the past couple of years but none of them offer a complete picture of the Polish campaign or all of the armies involved, and have so far (imo) only come off as not fully comfortable attempts dealing with a subject that is to them a highly unfamiliar territory. And while "something" is better than nothing, I just could not get over what a wasted opportunity this was, and what Early War gamers were really missing out on.

It took me some 6 weeks and roughly 200 hours to research and write this first half which covers the Polish, Slovak, German and Soviet armies and their army lists. My main goal is to bring this highly overlooked and overshadowed campaign of World War 2 to light, and show how diverse and interesting it actually is. I've invested a lot into this project, so this is not a half hearted attempt or a quick fix of existing material. The project soon grew out of proportion, perhaps out of a subconscious desire to do something similar to Norman Davies' "God's Playground" but with focus on Miniature Wargaming

Release of the Orders of Battle book does not mark the end of this project, I will shortly start writing and compiling the second half, the campaign section "Poland in flames". The second half will offer several operations as seen through the point of view of various armies as well as a lot of isolated battles. It should offer a dramatic recreation of pretty much the entire September Campaign on a whole new level and with a much more detailed approach than I could offer in version 1 (now much thanks to this OoB resource).

Both books will hopefully, beside offering an enjoyable addition to Early War gaming, also provide some bits of history about units, battles and equipment that might be interesting and valuable.

Important to know before delving into the pages of this book is that is is solely written with the September Campaign in mind. Unit ratings, specific units, special rules etc are meant to represent the circumstances and armies during the invasion of Poland. It is as such not advised to mix this book with any other if you are thinking about running an event, tournament or even friendly games.

Information about the first half of the book now available:

The September Campaign v.2.1.1 is a nonprofit free downloadable supplement for Flames of War v.3.

The book will be a "living" resource, meaning that updated versions will be published if needed and a FAQ document will be maintained. There will also be room for discussion and keeping track of news and updates of this project over at the What Would Patton Do forum (the best internet community dealing with FoW).

The book includes 4 armies, 13 Polish lists and 4 Polish characters, 15 German lists and 2 German characters, 3 Slovak lists and 5 Soviet lists. Not all army lists are "competition material", but a majority of the lists should work for tournaments and organized play if you wish to use them that way.

The second part of this project containing all the campaign section content will be released within the next 6 weeks. This book will perhaps be more useful to the whole WW2 EW community as opposed to the OoB book which is very much aimed at the FoW EW community.
.............

Download instructions,
Follow the links to my Google Drive, and click "Archive" and then save to your hard drive. The preview of the book looks like crap in Google Drive, for some reason. The real deal looks as it should. You don't need to have a Google account to access and download the file.

DOWNLOAD LINK TO FULL COLOR VERSION


DOWNLOAD LINK TO PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION



POLAND IN FLAMES HISTORICAL CAMPAIGN DOWNLOAD

Orders of Battle + Historical campaign book compilation

FIRESTORM CAMPAIGN
I also finished working on the Firestorm Campaign for Poland 1939. The firestorm campaign can be downloaded following the following links:

MAP

DOCUMENT WITH RULES



How to support this project?
Simply by using and sharing the book. Seeing and reading about people enjoying the contents of this book would make my efforts worthwhile.

If you like what you see and badly want to support the September Campaign further you can make a small donation to my paypal: alexanderkawczynski@hotmail.com

If you have questions about the contents of the book, the Polish campaign of 1939 or any other related topic you can check out the September Campaign thread over at the WWPD forum HERE.

Other questions can be emailed to me at: alexanderkawczynski@hotmail.com and I'll answer as soon as I can.