Monday, November 03, 2003

Sunday "Spring " clean at the Woodcraft Hall. Its been long overdue. The building is looking sorely dilapidated both outside and in nowadays. We used to regularly get a gang of folk round to wash and buff the floors, give it a good clear out and feed them at the same time for their trouble. But we have sort of let it drift for a while, people are just too busy I guess to run a group night during the week as well as give up precious weekends as well. Ideally we could do with a lotteries grant for a � 100,000 or so for a prefab new building, which I am damn sure we would keep clean and tidy. For a wee while anyway.

Fascinating article in the Guardian about it's digital picture editor, Simon Waldman's blog. He recently uncovered an 1938 Homes and Gardens edition featuring Hitler at home in "Haus Wachenfeld." A sort of Hello of the 30s it refers to the evil one in fawning terms throughout. Seemingly the house painter favoured a cool fade green throughout the chalet, tranquil or what? His decision to let IPC magazines, the publishers of the magazine, know that he had put scans of the magazine on his web site, led them to invoke their copyright ownership and request that he remove it. Which he obligingly did. Following a bit of a stushy, it became apparent that the magazine did not own the pictures at all, but that they were publicity shots (propaganda) taken by the Reich Fuhrer's personal photographer. Whether Goebbels wrote the text remains to be established. What does beggar belief is that the article appeared in a British publication, in 1938 following Hitler's seizure of power, Kristallnacht, persecution of Jews. Were the publishers worried about copyright at all or the adverse publicity of the public knowing just how far the British establishment had a soft spot for the Fuhrer and his achievements?

posted by timesnewroman at 6:53 AM  

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