February 18 movie: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Michael Powell movie that follows the life of a career soldier from a brash young man fresh off the Boer War to a stodgy old general who discovers during WWII that the world has left him behind. I found this movie thought-provoking and emotionally affecting, but I'm honestly too tired tonight to talk about it in any depth. I did read that Winston Churchill hated the movie because he thought it referred to himself. "Blimp" was not the main character's name, but was (I hear) a dirisive term used for the old guard in the British military at the time.
the life and death of colonel blimp
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The barrage balloons used in World War 2 were referred to as "Blimps". These were filled with hydrogen and tethered by long cables (at least a thousand feet long, I think) to trucks on the ground equipped with windlasses. They were set up on the outskirts of London to deter low flying German bombers on the basis that these might fly into the cables. I don't think they were very effective, but they might have made the Londoners feel a little safer during the German air raids, just like the Patriot anti-missile batteries used in the Gulf War, which looked good, and made a lot of noise, but were totally ineffective. The term blimp came to mean an older army officer who was overweight and ineffective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Blimp
"The cartoonist David Low first drew Colonel Blimp for Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard in the 1930s: pompous, irascible, jingoistic and stereotypically English..."