Snow White - armed and dangerous

How many little girls must have grown up on those old Disney cartoons starring pretty ladies in danger – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Well it’s time to forget all that sweetness, for new movies are demolishing the dreamy myths.
Epic action-adventure story Snow white and the Huntsman is due out next year. About all that remains from the old story is that Snow White is far too beautiful and the evil queen is out to destroy her. But what the queen, played with blonde menace by Charlize Theron, does not know is that the pretty one has been getting martial-arts training from the very man who’s supposed to be killing her.
So forget Disney’s heroine in puffy sleeves with the perky red bow in her bobbed black hair. Here’s the new Snow White, all grimly armoured up with sharp sword like some latter-day Joan of Arc, ready to hack her enemies to pieces. The archetypal sweet and helpless girl has gone, swept up in the new admiration for Kill Bill-style heroines. You could say, of course, that it was time those dippy Disney heroines toughened up a bit, but I'm kind of uneasy about easily we've got used to girls adept at shooting, stabbing and kung fu kicking.
There is still a prince in the new Snow White movie, though now that the girl herself is so lethal it’s hard to know what purpose he'll serve. Small men are in the cast too, but undoubtedly they won't have cozy names like Happy, Sleepy and Dopy.
The movie's bound to be technically brilliant but the trailer looks oh so dark and certainly not anything you’ll want your five-year-old to see. But given that the movie stars Kristen Stewart from the Twilight series, it's clear the movie's made for teenagers.
What's next, I wonder – a version of Cinderella where she’s water-boarded by the stepsisters, or a Sleeping Beauty being raped by aliens? Tell you what, audiences would probably lap it up. Especially if the heroine gets to wreak bloody vengeance in the end. And meanwhile we keep on wondering why schoolgirls are so ready today to start fights and punch people.

Eleven eleven eleven

Friday! Here it comes - 11-11-11. It's a date some people are slightly nervous about, and even ecstatic about if they're seeing it as a pivotal moment in the evolution of mankind, as is the case for lots of Mayan Calendar watchers.
Numerologists are excited about it too - check out this article by Christine deLorey for instance. She says, "we are at an important moment in time and there is more to it than meets the eye."
11:11 of course famously marked a huge moment in 1918. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was when the Armistice was signed, thus ending the terrible Great War.
Why does a gaggle of elevens have the power to grab us? Maybe it's a hangover from the past. The number eleven was apparently regarded with some dread in medieval times, when numbers were often held to have mystical significance. There's even a new horror movie called 11-11-11, based on a widely reported 11:11 phenomenon, which is all about people constantly noticing that time on digital clocks.
Behavioural scientists say that rather than feeling something special is going on we should put our 11:11 alertness down to something called apophenia, which is the brain’s tendency to look for meaningful patterns in the world around us. Example: When women are dying to get pregnant they notice other women pushing baby buggies in the street and think they're everywhere, when in fact there are no more than there ever were. Or, anyone thinking about buying a red Honda will be noticing them all over the place too.
There are positive aspects for the date. Because some people really like the idea of 11-11-11 there are lots of weddings planned for the big day (almost 4000 scheduled in Las Vegas). And in New York they've poured extra effort into organizing Friday's Corduroy Appreciation Day, that being of course the date that most resembles the parallel lines in corduroy fabric. At one big party the required dress code is anything in corduroy... and course there's an 11-piece band.
Once Friday's over we can, hopefully, relax for another hundred years until 11-11-11 comes round again. That’s assuming of course we get through 2012.

Flying in 1950s style

I wrote about Pan Am (the airline) in a recent blog, which prompted my brother to send me some great pics of old planes that he found on the website of Motat, Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology. I love this one, showing the dining set-up in a Solent flying boat. The aircraft - currently under restoration at Motat and the only surviving Mark IV Solent in the world - represented "the pinnacle of luxury flying boat airliners".
We all aspire to fly business Class today but back in the 1950s when the Solent took tourists over the Tasman to Australia and on the Coral Route to Tahiti, the whole plane was business class.
Check out the decor in soft lemon and dove grey, the tables spread with white linen, fine china and glassware. Look closely and you can see the TEAL logo on the glasses (TEAL being the forerunner of Air New Zealand - short for Tasman Empire Airways Ltd).
Elaborate meals were apparently cooked on board and it all looks like the 45 passengers enjoyed an elegance that's hard to find today.
Mind you, you'd have needed something to pass the time. There was, after all, no inflight entertainment, so if you forgot to take a good book there was nothing to do but wait to get there. They weren't quick, cruising at around 400kmh; the Auckland-Sydney flight took five and a half hours. And the planes could go no higher than 17,000 feet which must have meant they had to batter their way through some hefty weather systems. There must, at times, have been a whole lotta rattling of that china going on.
When I was a kid I lived at the foot of Upland Road in Remuera, quite a long way from Auckland harbour but still close enough to be able to hear the flying boats on their lumbering take-off runs, those four 2000 horsepower engines roaring like fury as the pilots pushed them to maximum power to lift the plane off the water. I can still hear them now.