The news reports are mindboggling. Airliner passengers can see the smoke from tens of miles away. One fire is expected to march 35 miles westward to the ocean. LA is surrounded on three sides by fires. Some evacuation centers are themselves being evacuated.

As for the tankers, intense smoke is hampering air operations. The thermals can’t be fun either.

These recordings were used to recreate Hitler’s conversational voice in a project to dub Eva Braun’s silent home movies. Lipreading was used to recreate the dialog. The results were interesting, but provided no really new historical information.

His early sixties half-hour sitcom was rerun on TVLand several years ago. If you like Ratpack stuff, it was OK, if not, it wasn’t. That may explain why it had middling ratings and several format changes, but it did launch Bill Bixby’s career.

In Stingray, she costarred (vicariously) with James Garner and Laurence Olivier, the models for Tempest and Titan.

By the way, Phones was voiced by Robert Easton, who had earlier played Sparks in the feature film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) and Sgt. Handown in The War Lover (1962). Known as “The Henry Higgins of Hollywood” because of his knowledge of accents and skill as a voice coach, he turns 77 next month and is still working.

The official search for Steve Fossett has ended due to the absence of fresh clues and the impending onset of winter. That may seem early, but in the mountains of the American West the first snow often arrives in October and the last may fall in April. Details at:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,300156,00.html

Possible leads

I plugged in some of the provided information in the advance search function at http://www.abebooks.com. Here are a couple of possible leads (I haven’t read them myself):

Conquest Before Autumn by Matthew Eden (Abelard-Schuman, 1973)

A Piece of Resistance: The Russian Invasion of Britain by Clive Egleton (New English Library, 1972)

Good luck!