Matt Bacon

True, but... The Beatles formative, non-famous years were spent working a relentless schedule of gigs in a "hothouse" environment, so they learned their craft as musicians fast, and well. And just one day, somewhere, someone or some people are going to be the best pop musicians the world has ever seen. To borrow someone else's phrase about some other group of people, they "bottled lightning". You can't separate the band and the music from the historical context, but they were the right people at the right time, and I seriously doubt that anyone will ever do the same thing again. The Beach Boys had the songwriting, the imagination, the ability to evolve, and the vision. But they didn't burst out of Liverpool in a post rationing Britain that was dour and and black and white and bring a fresh spirit which allowed a generation of young people to redefine themselves versus their parents... bestest, M.

I wouldn't go 3D. I hear they are clever with how they use the IMAX, so that might be worth it (all too often, if you just make a movie bigger for IMAX, you make it horrible to watch dialogue scenes, because you can't see both characters at once; just zoom it up for the big action scenes and it's much better...). I just saw it in Sony 4K on a big screen and that was fine... bestest, M.

I think it's good sometimes to go back to the Beatles after a little time off. Some of the songs are so iconic, like "Help", "Penny Lane", "Michelle" or "Let it Be" that you stop listening to them as music. Take a couple of years off, and you can hear how good they are musically, as well... One of the reasons that the albums, especially the early ones, are often very different in their US and UK versions is that they date from a time when, in the UK at least, you didn't have the songs that had been released as singles on an album. Which meant that some of the best known songs from say 1963 or 64 wouldn't normally appear on the albums from the same period, in the UK at least. The US releases are often re-ordered to include them, since some of the early UK hits weren't originally released as singles in the US as well. That's also why Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane aren't on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Except the one I have in iTunes... it's a truly fantastic album if you put Penny Lane in to close the first side, and replace "Within You Without You" by Strawberry Fields, IMHO, anyway! I think that Rubber Soul is probably my favorite, though on any given day Revolver or my version of Sgt Pepper can shade it out. Norwegian Wood is one of those songs that's iconic, but really repays listening to carefully. The lyric is John on his funniest and most acerbic form... and really only Dylan and Elvis Costello have ever got anywhere close. bestest, M.

And one more: from before there were even slide rules, and "computers" were people who did lots of sums. You should never underestimate the value of smart people with lots of experience. They might not be able to explain WHY it works, but they could surely build one that did... bestest, M.

That's brilliant... though probably it's a good thing I didn't see it before I built the Kitmaster Princess. The detail freak in me might have started scratch building internal cylinders! That blacksmith guy must have had a HEROIC appetite for beer, since you'd think that an 8-hour shift of hard physical labour in a heated foundry environment would sweat off any normal spare pounds... It's worth reminding people every now and then that back in the day, people made really complex machines from sheet and molten metal without the help of any computers at all... Like these two: bestest, M.

£12K for a sports car...? That's entry level hot hatch money over here. £15-16K for an MX-5, £17K for a Fiesta ST, £15K for a SEAT Leon Cupra... The BRZ is £25K, the GT86 £27K... That is seriously affordable for a new car... ...now, as to what your £12K would buy in the used car lot... I can think of a few alternatives! bestest, M.

It's interesting that the "Skill level" gets more or less equal billing to the "Revell" brand... bestest, M.

My pleasure. I think that is the new style of Revell Germany box. They've had to up their game following Airfix's redesign and artwork. bestest, M.

...like I said, the built up model was on the Revell stand, and the Revell guy said that it probably wouldn't be in the shops in December. If it's not around sometime in January, though, I'd be very surprised. bestest, M.

Of course, Harry's right:

6. Clean up every part throughly when you remove it from the sprue: remove all the mould parting lines, ejector pin marks and the remnants of attachment points. Fill dings and holes. 7. Test fit every assembly, and trim, shape and clean up every part until they fit together cleanly in the bare plastic. There's nothing that spoils a build quicker than parts not fitting together properly because they just haven't been cleaned up adequately. 80% of the time, it's not the engineering and design of the parts that is responsible for bad fit... it's failure to get them the way they were meant to be before putting them together. Of the other 20%, maybe 15% can be fixed by test-fitting and remedying BEFORE glue or paint comes near them. And for the other 5%, well, that's where scratch-buulding comes in... bestest, M.

That's interesting. It hasn't managed to find it, even when I upload the original image. It looks like it takes some kind of "fingerprint" of the image which is independent of size, so it can find other versions of the exact same image, and then presumably parses the text around all of the other instances of the same image before doing a text search to find other pictures of the same thing. It certainly seems to be confused by a scanned-in picture that hasn't been sourced from on the web... I don't mind having a go at Auto ID for a while using images scanned from my library... bestest, M.

Just trying this out. I want to see how clever GIS actually is... bestest, M.

...and how many people complain about warped or broken parts whenever Revell (US) rebox a Revell Germany originated kit and stuff it into one of those tiny shoeboxes you guys have on that side of the pond? I don't even know how they do it sometimes... the i8 and 918 kits are so well stuffed into RoG's standard 14"x10"x2" boxes that I couldn't get either one back in so that it's still four-square and shuts properly! bestest, M.

IIRC they got their start producing the Pescarolo Judd, in some kind of deal where the team took quite a few built up as sponsorship and corporate gifts. Without that arrangement maybe the economics of the Matech GT and Focus didn't really work out... bestest, M. (who was very pleased to snag an affordable GT on eBay recently, even if it's a tricky kit to build by all accounts)

At that level of technology, you've got to assume that the driver's helmet is going to have some kind of visor HUD overlaying "situational awareness" on the real view. She'll be able to see where all the other cars around her are, their monitored or predicted fuel and kers state, accelerative potential (are they running light because they've yet to pit), and AI assessment of their driver's intent based on analysis of previous races. It'd be an R2 unit sat behind the canopy except that would interfere with the aero... Seriously, anything you could imagine that you could do with software and sensors you could do in the time it'll take to engineer the new engine and battery technology... bestest, M.

I'm in the UK, so I don't know much about US "One Hit Wonders", which rarely cross the pond (maybe "Camouflage" by Stan Ridgway... it made the top 5 over here). "Will You" was Top 10 here, and came from an album which spent over 6 months in the Top 100 and went double platinum. i'm surprised it never surfaced in the US -- you'd have thought the slightly alt take on big power power ballad would have had a natural home on college radio and even MOR stations... bestest, M.

One of my favorite songs ever. She's still working 35 years on, but never troubled the charts again... bestest, M.

Great kit... Tamiya Metallic Black for the catsuit, the rest mostly Citadel paints. bestest, M.

This is the first of the Pin-Up series from Master Box, no 24001, "Marylin." There are six in the range now, but she's the most "civilian" -- the others are more "Stars and Stripes" cover girls. I think she'll make a handy display accessory! And with a paint pot for scale: Mostly painted with Citadel colours, with my first airbrushed flesh tones -- although a lot of brush work over the top... bestest, M.

...again, I'm seeing two identical Ferrari pictures, one above the other, at this end at 17:27... bestest, M.

The top one is right click copy, right click paste from above. The bottom one is right click "copy image address" and then "paste" between hand-typed [ IMG ] tags... bestest, M.

The reply box was completely empty when I first pasted the first picture. That screwy "jpg.html.jpg" on the end must have come in as part of the right click copy or paste. As a matter of interest, the images I pasted have now (15 minutes later) disappeared on my screen as well. The Ferraris that you posted and Ken copied and posted are visible up above. So it looks like Windows firefox does something different from Mac Safari, and the forum software likes one but not the other... bestest, M.

Now it's 17:04 UK time on Thursday (why aren't you lot all out at Thanksgiving dinners?) and I can still see both of those pictures in this thread on my computer screen. But on my phone, they are replaced by hollow boxes with: "custom-made-front-engine-dragster-02-zpsiisqxlil.jpg.html.jpg" and "51Tk3T0jS6L.jpg" inside. So right click copy and right click paste is clearly not working in Safari on a Mac. Though if all I ever looked at was my own computer, it might look like it was. I wonder if those image filenames are all you guys ever see, but I see the actual pictures while they are still in my browser cache, but once they are flushed from the cache they revert to the filenames in my browser as well... bestest, M.

OK... so I just right clicked up on the image in line above and pasted it in. As I type this, I can see the image in the reply window. Now, here goes copy-pasting exactly the same way from a different web site`; That's from Amazon. As I type this time, I can see both images in the reply window. Now I'm going to hit "Submit Reply" M.