The Phantom

The phantom power mentioned in a Nady Phantom power supply is a mystery to me...or at least it was until I found a very useful page telling me exactly what phantom power is. Read the page: he does it much better than I could, and manages to make it comprehensible.

For those who don't get around to reading the page, I can tell you that phantom power has nothing to do with the paranormal (although some singing that goes into the mics using phantom power might well be considered abnormal).

That aside, it reminded me of that old comic strip, The Phantom, a character who doesn't seem to have been taken up by Hollywood in its current rash of super heroes. Admittedly The Phantom - or The Ghost Who Walks - didn't seem to have any particular powers - his abilities were mostly fairly easily explained if you thought about it. Perhaps his peculiar power of being able to wander through the jungle in a tight suit and mask without ever getting it torn was something special, but otherwise he was a pretty ordinary bloke, I think.

I thought The Phantom had long since departed the syndicated comics scene, but though his creator, Lee Falk (who first introduced him in 1936) died twenty-one years ago, the series continues. It's been drawn by several artists over the period, though only one other writer, Tony DePaul, seems to have been involved since Lee Falk died.

The Phantom was the first hero to wander around in a skin-tight suit (thus setting a trend for all the later super heroes) and also the first to wear a mask that somehow hid his pupils. This idea of having no visible pupils apparently came from sculptured Greek statues, many of which were eyeless.

When I say that Hollywood hasn't recently worked with The Phantom, that's not to say it never has. There was a successful serial way back in the forties, and there was a feature film in 1996 (starring Billy Zane), which I can't say I remember seeing advertised. A more recent version was to have been filmed, but seems to have gone down the plughole. Sam Worthington was at one time being touted as the lead.

There have been at least three Phantom musicals, two of them originating in Scandinavia, an area of the world with which the Phantom has long had an association through Fantomen, the Swedish version of the character, which dates from 1950, Fantomet in Norway, and Mustanaamio in Finland.

Well, there you go. Plainly The Phantom/Fantomen/Fantomet/Mustanaamio is alive and well, and looking forward to being around much longer than any of his creators. It helps, of course, that us ordinary mortals can't distinguish Phantom number 21 from number 20 and so on.

How not to throw the discus

Four days without rain or overcast skies or freezing winds. Real live sunshine. We’re beginning to feel human again.
While we were watching the movie, Serenity, last night at a friend’s place, our host was recording some of the Olympic Games on his HDD. (It’s something we can do too on our machine, although we haven’t actually done it yet.) Anyway, amongst the various things that we picked up on after the movie was finished, were some of the Decathlon events: the hurdles and the discus throwing.
A couple of odd things stood out. In one of the hurdles heats, one of the contestants leapt up with all the others to race, and then stopped, and did nothing more, while the other hurdlers ran on. No explanation from the commentators – he was just ignored, as though he’d never been in the race to begin with.
And then, as we were watching the discus, we pondered on how easy it would be for someone throwing the thing to miss the opening and send it crashing into the nets. And immediately one did! A gentleman by the name of Roman Šebrle, who was the top man in the Decathlon discus. How frustrating for such a thing to slip from an athlete’s fingers. Our host reckoned it was because Roman had spat on the discus before he threw it!
I didn’t know Šebrle as a name, so I kept hearing it as Roman Chevrolet, which seemed to be how the announcers were saying it. Crikey, what a romantic sounding name – it’s the sort of name you give to a hero in a romantic novel!
We also watched a bit of the Russian/American volleyball game. I think if you added up the amount of time they spend playing and the amount of time they spend hugging each other, the latter would come out on top easily. The game is played in a pretty boring fashion, really, with massive serves that almost invariably cause nothing else to happen in that volley. When they do actually all get to chase the ball around, it's over in seconds.
I watched the table tennis the other night: at least in that game they get on with it, and while some of the rallies may be very short, a good number have some action in them. I don't know who the two guys were, but one was a tall Scandinavian and the other a Chinese from China or Hong Kong. The Scandinavian wiped the floor with the Chinese, which apparently wasn't supposed to happen.
And one other thing we caught up on: the women's Taekwondo. There was a New Zealand girl in this, and she and her opponent spent so much time hopping back and forth from foot to foot and never actually doing more than sizing up the opposition that the referee had to keep stepping in and reminding them they were supposed to be fighting - and giving them penalties for not doing so. Not one of the highlights.

Driving in hot and cold

One of the areas of the world that hasn’t ever really appealed to me for some reason is Scandinavia. Maybe I always have the impression of cold and that puts me off. Maybe I’m just not interested in wending my way up there in order to stay at one of the Sweden Hotels or the Norway Hotels.
I remember reading one of Bill Bryson’s books in which he was particularly rude about the bus trip he made at the beginning at it rather put me off reading the rest. However it was about a trip he made to somewhere in Scandinavia, and certainly cold was the impression you were left with.
On the other hand, my most recent experience of anything Scandinavian wasn’t to do with Stockholm Hotels, or Oslo Hotels, or any hotels at all, in fact. We were in Spain, (not the coldest place on earth), travelling from Barcelona to Valencia. Normally we would have travelled all the way by train, but there were major works going on at the railway station and we had to be transported the first part of the journey by bus.
Now it was autumn in Spain, and for the Spanish it probably felt chilly. We felt warm, as we did through our entire time in Spain. Anyway, the heating was on in the bus. On full bore. We’d hardly got out of Barcelona before we began to feel as though we were going to melt, but the Spaniards on board were no doubt quite comfortable.
Across the aisle from us were two women from Denmark. Like us, being used to cooler climes, they felt the heat as oppressive. The problem was, we had no idea how far we would be going in the bus. Our first understanding was that it was merely taking us to another station within Barcelona, but the bus kept on and on and left the outskirts of Barcelona well behind.
Then one of the other passengers claimed that we were travelling all the way to Valencia in the bus. This would have meant that the bus would arrive in that lovely city with at least four melted passengers, if not more. (And one who would be desperate to go to the loo!)
However, we breathed a huge sigh of relief when the bus finally pulled into a station in another city, and dropped us off into the wonderfully cooling autumn air. The Spaniards’ armpits were no doubt thoroughly dry. Ours were dripping!
I've never driven in Scandinavia, unlike Bryson, though I was recently sent an email which had a longish description of the sort of things you need to watch out for when driving there. They're mostly pretty similar to driving anywhere else in Europe, except that dipped headlights are required at all times, and there are heavy fines for anyone driving under the influence of euphoriants - a word I can't say I'm familiar with.
Another interesting thing is that you can get something called an Autopass. There are some 45 road tolls in Norway, and the autopass allows you to drive in a special lane straight through the tolls. You've paid in advance, in other words. (You'd want to make sure you did enough driving there to get your full value out of the pass!)
The only other thing to watch in these four countries is the state of the roads. The winter weather closes some of them completely. Not nice to get stuck in the mountains in the middle of winter, I'd say. It would be the equivalent of being stuck on a steaming hot bus in Spain!

The photo in the upper right corner is of the Öresund Bridge. It was taken by Jonas B. The other photo is by Geek2Nurse, and shows the Great Belt Bridge. Both are massive sea bridges, as you may be able to tell.