Another weird and wild Korean series on Netflix is “A Killer Paradox”. A young man learns his super power is recognizing dirt bags and murderers through a Spidey sense and well…shit gets wild.
Started Slow Horses and about 6 episodes in to the first season. I like it very much.
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Great show! S3 dropped in December and suspect S4 will drop sometime later this year.
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My favorite scene:
I still laugh at just the thought of Lamb jumping uninvited into some dude’s Rolls Royce and then ripping a wet fart that you know must’ve been absolutely rank.
Not the most high brow of moments, but totally in character and absolutely fucking hilarious.
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Ep 3 of Masters of the Air was brutal. Horrifyingly, the truth was even worse.
Spoilers…obviously.
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We traipsed through “House of Ninjas” on Netflix over the past few days. Not great, not terrible. Some interesting takes on modern shinobi.
I’m counting down the days to the new Shogun. I hope it doesn’t disappoint.
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Masters of the Air has been fantastic. First 1.5 episodes were solid, but it has been excellent since then.
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Who’d have thought I could get any more excited…
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I have been boning up on the 8th Air Force campaign since starting the show, and it’s sadly an all-too familiar story of sending brave men to their deaths because their leaders refused to react to the horror occurring before their very eyes.
The B-17 was horribly outdated, the tactics were awful and the Norden bombsight didn’t work anywhere nearly as well as advertised (making day bombing unnecessarily dangerous). Instead of adapting to tactics that were working better - such as how the RAF was doing it - they doubled-down; sending bigger formations into the barrel and loading them down with more guns that made them easier to shoot down because they were heavier, slower and less maneuverable.
The B-17’s operational payload was typically 2,000lbs to 4,000lbs, depending on the distance to/from the target. The B-17 cruised at 180mph, while the BF109 and FW190 could get close to 400mph. There was no getting away from them, and no shooting them down with a closing speed of over 500mph regardless of how many guns you stacked onto the bomber.
The Mosquito (of which I am an unabashed fanboy) could cruise at over 300mph with a 4,000lb bomb load, and top 400mph unladen. Meaning it was harder for the Luftwaffe to catch them and, once the bomb was dropped - which could be done at much lower altitude for greater accuracy - the Mozzie could show those Fokkers a clean pair of heels. Infinitely more survivable.
The Mosquito was offered to - and rejected by - the USAAF.
The effectiveness of the 8th’s campaign can be seen in the show, because they kept having to go back to hit targets they missed first time. The B-17 was a death trap and the tactics were fatally flawed. They knew it, and they kept sending them.
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Also, if any weebs around here need another gaijin-in-Japan show to pass the time, I’ve been hooked on Tokyo Vice the past few days. Season one aired in ‘22, season 2 is airing now. HBO Max. Really really good.
Same, now 2/3rds the show up on my youtube account are related to WWII aircraft…
Speaking of the Norden Bombsight…
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We’re still doing the same thing today, deifying smart bombs and drones as killing only the intended target, when the truth is far from that. War is messy, but we’re propagandized into thinking it’s not.
If you want to binge a year’s allowance of sarcasm in about 30 minutes, here ya go.
Read up on how the RAF kept sending Lancaster crews out without telling them that turning on their radar was like a deer turning on a flashlight in the forest. For the hunters.
Sadly, sociopathy in military leadership not a rare thing.
Humans are very good at rationalizing and normalizing the costs of things, whether that currency is huge sums of $$, human lives, character, future impact, etc…
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Malcolm Gladwell did a feature on Curtis Lemay during season 5 of his podcast - Revisionist History. He highlights the failure of precision bombing which ultimately led to the use of napalm in Japan. He expanded on his three episodes on Lemay in a subsequent audio book Bomber Mafia which leans heavily on interviews from several oral history projects that captured first hand accounts of WWII.
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I hope they solve a lot of the issues with the book but I’m not holding my breath.