Dead chuffed

[Frankie]

Deader Chuffed.



Picked up another book for a song on www.ebid.net - Coffee Table book on U-boats by David Miller. The shipping was NOT for a song though since the Illustrated U-Boat book weighed in almost at 3lbs in weight. But I 'canna' find these books in Malaysia. So I am now deader chuffed. Now the waiting begins. I gave my office address as my shipping address so that I will not miss the delivery. Can't wait to get my books which I will share with my 83-year old father.

Cheers
Frankie Kam

[Frankie]

Another book I am aiming my sights at is this one:



It is interesting to note that the late author of Das Boot took over 5,000 photographs of his time in the U-Boat mission. Out of which, 200 photographs adorn this book, accompanied by narrative text. if I do get this book later, my life will be complete(r). Haha.

Regards
Frankie Kam

P.S., ever since I started playing Silent Hunter 3, my smatterings of spoken German has strangely improved. Ach!

[Asid]

Nice to see people still buy physical books.

Maybe when you have read them you can give us a review?

Postage........many times it can be a lot more than the product!

[Frankie]

It's nice that quality books can be bought for less than 2 UK Pounds.

Life is frugal.

[Asid]

It's nice that quality books can be bought for less than 2 UK Pounds.

Life is frugal.

Here in the UK companies buy up all the books from the charity shops then they sell them for more.

[Asid]

Nice.

Good to see a physical book.

[Frankie]

Hola!

[Frankie]

Look what the mail man delivered to my office's letterbox this afternoon. From the UK to Malaysia.



Pablo Manson's autobiography. Check out that handlebar moustache. This makes an excellent companion book to Tornado Down. Squadron Leader Pablo Manson had the heartbreak of losing John Peter's Tornado during the very first airstrip raid over Iraq in 1991. It's written in a different style to Tornado Down. I can't wait to read it.

[Asid]

Look what the mail man delivered to my office's letterbox this afternoon. From the UK to Malaysia.

Pablo Manson's autobiography. Check out that handlebar moustache. This makes an excellent companion book to Tornado Down. Squadron Leader Pablo Manson had the heartbreak of losing John Peter's Tornado during the very first airstrip raid over Iraq in 1991. It's written in a different style to Tornado Down. I can't wait to read it.

Thats a crazy tash.

Lets us know what the book was like. You are building quite a library

Regards

[Frankie]

Me reading (or pretending to read) this hard-cover U-Boat book by Lothar-Günther 'Das Boot' Buchheim. Translated into English by Gudie Lawaetz. Essay by Michael Salewski. Holy Molly! it's a 1978 book (originally printed in 1976), in relatively good condition! It cost me £5.99 for the book, plus another £11.00 for shipping. It's a big book.

It arrived in my office's letterbox three  days ago, last Tuesday. From the UK. Took nearly 3 weeks to arrive by normal mail. The pages are ...wait for it....unnumbered! It's a word and picture chronicle with essay text. I *manually* counted each page - in total around 160 pages. Each page is slightly shorter, but slightly wider than A4 paper. Many full-spread-double-page photographs. Total of 205 black-and-white photographs. You can see a sample of 36 such photographs here. I had earlier passed it to my 84-year old father to read. He passed it back to me today.

Sorry about the messy background. Photo taken in my daughters' room. I asked them to remove the soft toys and emoji pillow,originally in the background. Haha! Now you know what I look like.

Cheers,
Frankie.

[Asid]

Frankie. Our resident bookworm

[Frankie]

The book is a frontline account of the three Battles of Fallujah. I borrowed this book for the state library. I haven't finished reading it. Although it is well-researched, I found some parts of the book hard to read. The combat scenes, however, were intense, gripping. In many chapters I could not put down the book. US Marines and insurgents. Fighting street to street, house to house, roof to roof, wall to wall, staircase to staircase, room to room.



Death and Casualties. Torture. Gory details. AK-47s, RPGs, Hercules gunships, F-18s, mortars, Predator drones, Bradleys, 120mm tanks,  snipers, grenades, flashbombs, smoke, medics, IEDs. Man's inhumanity against Humanity. Suicide bombers. Freedom fighters. Terrorists. Politicians. International outrage. Devastation of the city and the suffering of its inhabitants.

The author interviewed more than seven hundred soldiers and Marines over five months. Maybe one day there will be a book that details the close quarters battles from the perspective of all sides involved in the conflict. All sides meaning the Iraqi police, army, Marines, insurgents and civilian population.

[Frankie]

Look what just came in through the mail today. I got this from the postman just as he was about to stuff it inside the office's mailbox slot. So I brought it with me to lunch.

Hardcover. Got it from http://abebooks.co.uk for £0.71 plus £5.00 for shipping. Total of £5.71. Not bad since my lunch cost me RM7.00 which is  £1.20. A brand-new hard-cover book in a Malaysian bookshop would cost me anything from RM90 to RM140 (£15 to £25). So it's good to read old bestselling books! I have never read any of Stephen Coonts' books before.

Flight Of The Intruder is special for me because in 1993 when I was in Hull, UK, I watched the movie starring Willem Dafoe and Danny Glover. Video tape I mean.

SAM launch! SAM Launch!

-and-

Fancy a one-way-trip flight over Hanoi?

The book is also special to me because in 1993, also in Hull, I bought this game from a local Hull Game shop:

Box Cover

I played it on my IBM PC - a superfast Intel 286 with an astounding 20Megabytes of Hard-disk space. I can't remember how much RAM it had, but the IBM keyboard was absolutely the best quality keyboard I had ever used. DOS 5.0 and Wordperfect 4.1 (I think it was) Gray-monochrome video monitor. Ah those were the days.

Opening Screen animation

This 1990 game was fantastic when it came out. The box came with a book-novel-sized game manual. You could take the controls of up 12 planes - 6 Phantoms and 6 A6 Intruders. I played it almost non-stop for a month at least. It contributed to my poor Research Paper grades. That was the biggest mistake of my study life, then. But I loved it nevertheless. I also read the manual cover-to-cover at least twice.

Doesn't the A6 look like a bird? That's 1990 graphics for you!

This game had an amazing amount of gameplay. You had carrier operations, CAP, Ironhand and bridge-busting missions. It made me believe I was flying over North Vietnam evading SAMs and shooting dowm MIG-17s. You could fly either the A6 Intuder or the A4 Phantom. The flight modelling was shockingly bad though. But it was loads of fun!

-and-

Coming back to the book, so far I've only read up to page 3 (during lunchtime). I like the way the author takes care to explain the avionics to the non-navy reader. After all, Stephen himself saw action over the skies of Vietnam inside an A6.

Cheers
Frankie Grafton

[Asid]

Great story Frankie.

Ahhh the golden age of gaming. I have tried some of those games I played from the early 80's onward....Some of the memories were best left as memories

You have quite the library building up. You are going to need a bigger shelf....

Regards