Mike Paine's "Hanghai " 1930s Pulp Adventure Game


Hanghai, 1930s the Exotic Far East in Miniature 
or 

Mike Paine's Travelling Circus




Mike Paine is one of those people who meet once or twice and then consider him a friend, and his hobby is an elaborate interactive game using model building ships, people, cars, and buildings to create an imaginary Far East China port called HangHai (rhymes with Shanghai.) 

Mike PaineWhille not exactly historically accurate, after all there are just too many ships in the harbor, too many exotic looking things, and lots and lots of stuff, not to mention the occasional presence of monsters and magical artifacts and supernatural beings of all kinds. (And if you do look carefully or are told, he will admit that one of his Asian buildings really is a model of the Alamo with some Terra Cotta Army statues in front to hide the iconic entrance, but that's okay.) Mike travels around to wargaming conventions in the northeast lugging all these things with him, setting it all up, and making a lot of people laugh and enjoy themselves when he does. If it's not the real China, then it is the China of our old movies and imagination. 

it's really something to see, and, if possible, participate in.Rules were surprisingly simple, some might argue too simple, but no one cared about that as everyone was having fun. 
I was told to choose a main character (I chose Professor Flagg as I really enjoyed the old 1980s "American Flagg" science fiction comic by Howard Chaykin) and then a sidekick and three other figures. 


Professor Flagg and his companions, a beautiful side kick, three French sailors, a large Mongolian warrior, and a nun. Never hurts to bring a nun for moral, morale, and spiritual support in such places. 

The rules were such that it really did not matter what figures I chose, as they all were treated pretty much the same in the rules, but the visual effect and the stimulus to the imagination are everything in this game. 





 


Old West Undead Miniature Wargaming Army



An Old West Undead Miniature Wargaming Army in 28mm Scale





But first, deep thoughts 
on hobbies, stress, and living a Good Life

Years ago, I set an informal personal goal of painting a different miniature wargames army each year.  As I have gotten older, I have gotten away from that, but I think it was a good goal, and I will try to get back to it. Not too small, it's a real hobby. Not too big, it is an achievable goal and a fun one.

If a hobby goal is too big, it's not achievable, and if it's not achievable it becomes frustrating and a source of stress.  And that's not the goal of a hobby. In fact, its the direct opposite of what a hobby should do. Hobbies are to destress, not increase stress, and while I, for one, have lots of unpainted figures collected over the years for several reasons, I also have a very sedentary job. Painting wargame figures does not help people, it does not make the world a better place, it does not really help me achieve my dreams (save for the small dreams involving owning nicely painted figures,), and should only paint figures when it relaxes me.

And in today's internet, social media, highly connected world, it's easy to find yourself unconsciously setting hobby goals that climb higher and higher as you try to impress your social media contacts on the other side of the world with your hobby related accomplishments or at least keep up with them. Little social media voices from strangers continuously joke about things like "You can never have too many miniatures" and the (alleged) importance of painting, painting, painting all those figures and doing so to the increasingly higher (yet admittedly wonderful and impressive) standards that we see in magazines like "Miniature Wargames" and the internet. In such cases, one needs to catch yourself, recenter, recalibrate your perspective, and remember why are doing this in the first place --to have fun and relax. 

My advice, remember that. And when you forget, as I surely will from time to time, try to catch yourself and remember why you are here.

Which brings me to photos my latest project, The Old West Undead Miniature Wargaming Army. 

The Old West Undead Miniature Wargaming Army




Figures


Figures come from a variety of sources. 

The undead or zombies come from Foundry, Reaper, Artizan (Dracula's America range), Great Escape Games, and the old 1990s Deadlands range (those are the noticably tall ones). Several are conversions made from some extra Artizan dismounted Seventh Cavalry that I had acquired but wasn't sure what to do with. Conversions often consisted of drilling holes in them with a mini-drill and adding wounds with an exacto knife. A couple undead figures from fantasy ranges were painted appropriately and slid in.

The Grim Reaper and the Cowboy Vampires on Foot were from Pontoonier but purchased through Badger Games (Many of the zombie figures were also purchased from Badger Games.)  

The Vampire on the Haunted Bicycle from Eureka's Pax Limpopo range and is sold as "French Lady on Penny Farthing." Making her a vampire was done with a carefully chosen paint job and a little bit of green stuff ectoplasm adding to the one and a half inch washer I used for her base. 

The gray coated necromancer leading the zombies is a simple conversion from Copplestone's Back of Beyond range "Mad Baron" figure. (The historical "Mad Baron" was a crazed warlord with very strange and bloodthirsty beliefs who led an army in Central Asia during the mid-war period. He may be best known for leading his army to burn Ulan Bator, the Capital of Mongolia. See: War History On-Line.  ) The figure was modifed by adding a sword to the foot figure so that he would match the mounted figure and adding gree stuff flames to the bases of both the foot and the mounted figure.

Note that both the Grim Reaper and the Mad Baron figure came in sets of a matching mounted and dismounted figures for the same character. This is how I prefer to buy figures for skirmish gaming when availability and the budget allow.








Rules


As for rules, there are a quite a lot of Old West Gunfight Rules out there. Most of them are quite good and produce good games. Several have rules for supernatural creatures, but not all do. 

I have recently started using Gunfighter's Ball rules. They produce a good game, but they are designed for smaller actions than I'd like. Although well researched, they are intended for fun but historically sound games and do not include rules for supernatural creatures. 

I have written my own rules to add the things I want to these games, but I haven't playtested them yet. Therefore, I am not ready to discuss or share them. Perhaps in the future. 














 

And please don't forget to check out the Hamchuck Writers Collective Website.




The 1950s and the Contactee Phase of Modern UFOlogy

First, updates and news. Follow my writing at this blog, my other blog - www.peterhuston.blogspot.com and the Hamchuck Writers' Collective Website, www.hamchuckwc.com    

And you can also try my Goodreads page at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/339311.Peter_Huston Or my Amazon.com page at https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Huston/e/B000APT3YY?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1646105078&sr=8-1


I have pieces scheduled to appear, most likely within the next year in the following edited volumes. 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brickcommajason/there-i-waswhen-nothing-happened?fbclid=IwAR2OgupQaj1Jzn-fBATT5hgS-DUFQadggCcu_BIi_LHZ57JCaatjk0Ne-38

There I was and . . . Nothing Happened, edited by Jason Brick. 

Buy this, or get it from the many public libraries that have expressed interest and made plans to acquire a copy (has yours? If not, why not?), and you can treat yourself to the story of how one night I almost got my face slashed to ribbons in a dive bar in Shanghai. Due out within the next year. Please enjoy the read. 

Second piece is scheduled to appear here: 

 
The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony, edited by  VICENTE-JUAN BALLESTER OLMOS

For this one, I also drew on past events, and wrote about my experiences meeting Betty Hill, Richard Price, and many other UFO Abductees, of the late 1990s / early 21st century. Read it, and you can learn why I remain skeptical of their stories.

Having done extensive research into UFO claims, I decided it was time to turn my knowledge and views into a book and am working on it now. What follows is one excerpt. 


The Contactee Phase of Modern UFOlogy

 


The so-called “Contactee Phase” of UFOlogy began in the mid 1950s, less than ten years after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting. It would only make sense that if people were seeing piloted objects of unknown origin zipping around in the skey, that sooner or later someone would claim to have met their pilots. And so, it happened.

Although during this period, there were a few people who claimed such contact, George Adamski was the first and most famous. Although Adamski made his name spreading the philosophical teachings of the benevolent saucer beings who had allegedly spoken to him, prior to his claims of contact with saucer beings, Adamski had been spreading the messages of other enlightened beings and had created his own order, the Brotherhood of Tibet. In addition to this,  he ran a hamburger stand near the famous Hale Telescope and lectured on Eastern philosophy. 

The teachings of this organization, like those of Adamski’s later flying saucer related organization, were heavily influenced by Theosophy and similar organizations. Theosophy was an American religious or philosophical organization based on the teachings and ideas that Russian immigrant Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had allegedly received from Ascended Masters reported to be living in exotic places such as Tibet or Egypt. These teachings consisted of several Asian religious or mystical concepts that at that time were largely unknown or unfamiliar to Americans (such as “karma” and”reincarnation”), mixed in with reworked versions of more familiar Western fringe concepts such as the stories of Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria, mixed in with the ideas of the spiritualists of those days such as astral projection and telepathic communication.  Although little known today, Theosophy had a lasting impact and influence on the Western intellectual landscape and many of today’s popular fringe, esoteric, “New Age,” and other pop-spiritual beliefs and ideas.  

While Adamski had limited formal schooling, he lectured regularly on such subjects using the title “Professor.” He also took advantage of prohibition and his special standing as a religious order to manufacture wine, something very much in demand when prohibition made the sale and purchase of alcohol against the law, against the law, of course, except for special religious orders.

Adamski seems to have realized that by using the public interest in flying saucers to add to his mix and attributing the messages he spread to enlightened beings from Venus, Mars, and the Moon he could better capture the public imagination, spread these messages and teachings, and get attention and profit for his organization. 

Although he and a ghost writer had together written a novel describing contact with aliens and a voyage through the solar system on a flying saucer in 1949, it was in 1950 that he gave his first lecture on “flying saucers” in which he shared the story of how the US Naval Laboratory had asked him for assistance with using the observatory to take pictures of flying saucers. Alas, the Navy denied it although the fact was that two members of their laboratory personnel had, indeed, visited his hamburger stand and bought lunch one day and they had chatted with him while doing so.

According to Adamski’s reports, it was November 20, 1952, when he made his own personal first contact with a saucer being named Orthon who came from Venus and shared important messages about how we should all be nice to each other. Ultimately, he wrote two more books on his contact with the saucer beings and lectured and travelled widely speaking on the subject. Although most flying saucer enthusiasts of the time were skeptical of the truth of Adamski’s cl;aims, nevertheless he became a regular speaker and panelist at UFO and flying saucer related gatherings for the next few decades.

In  his memoir, “Shockingly Close to the Truth –Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist,” James Moseley describes Adamski as “charming,” clearly enjoyed interacting with him, but points out several discrepancies between Adamski’s claims about the events described and the people who witnessed them. Similarly, a French biographer of Adamski, Marc Hallet, while reportedly beginning his biography of Adamski as a believer, came to a very different conclusion by the time he finished. His conclusions were summarized in the very bluntly titled, nine page document, “Why I can say Adamski is a liar.” For reasons such as those offered by these two men, as well as what astronomers have since learned about conditions on Venus, Mars, and the Moon that make it difficult to believe that they are or ever were home to the societies and peoples that Adamski described, it’s safe to say very few historians consider George Adamski’s claim of contact with enlighted beings as having taken place and being historically important events.

Nevertheless, soon there were others claiming similar experiences, telling similar stories, spreading similar teachings, and writing similar books. These included Truman Bethurum, Daniel Fry, Orfeo Angelucci, and Howard Menger.  

To put this in historical context, although all the prominent contactees began to share their stories in the 1950s, Adamski, the first, begin in 1953, they all claimed to have been interacting with the enlightened space beings for several years. Nevertheless, most historians see them as a mid-1950s cultural development.

Gordon J. Melton, scholar of new religious movements, has made a few generalizations about these contactees and their stories. In order, he offered the following. As can be seen, these points make it clear how in many ways the contactees and their stories were doing and offering a distinctly different message, experience, and approach to the issue of alleged extraterrestrial visitation than the later UFO abduction proponents.

First, and this is unlike later beliefs held in ufological circles about on-going extraterrestrial visitation to our planet, the visitors came from within our solar system. Originally, they were beings from Mars, Venus, and the Moon. Later they came from a little further, places like Jupiter and Saturn. In 1953, one contactee, Truman Bethurum began telling stories of being visited and taken on flying saucer trips by the inhabitants of the mysterious Planet Clarion, but as he also reported that this unknown world was directly opposite the Earth on the other side of the sun (and thus impossible for us to see), it was still located in the solar system. Although flying saucers from other worlds were visiting, they were not presented or said to be interstellar craft.

Second, according to Melton, “the flying saucer remains the only new element in the contactee story.” The other elements of the Contactees’ stories, argues Melton, had all been seen before in other stories, in other tales which reported the teachings of enlightened beings and otherworldly teachers. The difference was that they met their enlightened, mystical teachers through astral travel or other means, not by travel in flying saucer.        

In the reports of the Contactees, interactions with the alien saucer pilots were surprisingly easy. Communication was either done in English or through non-verbal telepathy. (As a teacher of English as a Second or Other Language, I confess that I have never understood how this could possibly happen as so much of human thought is, indeed, based in language.)

Bottom line is, however, that very little in these reports was terribly groundbreaking or eye opening.

Third, what the Contactees did share tended to be ethical and religious teachings. Very little time and focus was spent on describing the anthropological details of the alien societies or the intricacies of their technologies. In other words, the Aliens and the Contactees who had met them were much more interested in spreading messages that warned the people of Earth about the dangers of atomic weapons testing or pollution and advocating for world peace than they were interested in telling us about themselves or sharing their advanced technologies or teaching us how to make our own flying saucers.  

Fourth, the Contactees operated in a religious context. Many came from a religious or occult background or a background where the two overlapped such as Theosophy. As Peebles wrote in his excellent history,  Many founded churches or organizations devoted to spreading religious or philosophical teachings. (It needs to be mentioned, that under US law, there are many advantages to structuring an entity as a church, a fact that no doubt affected the way many contactees structured their organizations.) 

In summary, the picture presented by the contactees was that highly advanced space brothers lived in the other worlds of our solar system, and, if one was lucky enough, they would take you on a trip around the solar system on one of their flying saucers. Since their societies were free of war and disease, they had a lot to teach us and one thing in particular that they hope we would do was stop atomic testing. They offered us a message of peace and brotherhood and since they either spoke good English or else communicated through telepathy, the message was not just simple but also easy to understand. 

The whole thing was in some ways delightful. Optimistic.

Although the world was in trouble and humanity imperiled, fear                 not. There were beings out there who knew more about this than we did, and they were here to offer guidance. All we had to do was listen and believe and all would be well.

Unlike the later grays and other extraterrestrials of later decades, rather than presenting a mystery and leaving us with disturbing questions as to who were the aliens and what were they hoping to ultimately accomplish, the contactees of this era claimed to have answers for us instead.  And they were more than willing to share the answers they had obtained through lectures, radio appearances, and books.

Saratoga Battlefield -random photos






























 

Trip to Saratoga National Historical Park in upstate New York


Greetings. Over the last year, I've visited several of the Revolutionary War era historical sites in upstate New York. I took lots of pictures and will be sharing many of them here. Be forewarned I don't claim to be a terribly talented photographer. 



This is a shot of the eastern portion of the park overlooking the Hudson River. 

































Biker Films -- The Wild Angels

Last week, it was miniature wargaming, a valid historical enthusiasm, this week, it is old movies, another valid historical enthusiasm. Yeah, the blog jumps around a lot but it's always something somehow related to history. (Hint -follow the labels and find what you want -remember the old stuff is just as good, sometimes better, than the new stuff( 

Tonight we discuss Roger Corman's classic film, "The Wild Angels," from 1966. If you have any interest at all in the biker film genre, then you know this is the one which started it all. Roger Corman, known to many as "king of the B-movies," had read an article in Life magazine about the Hell's Angels and decided they warranted a movie. 

And the result was The Wild Angels, which like most of the genre had delightfully over the top, sensationalized trailers --trailers which are often more fun to watch then the films themselves. 





The film starred Peter Fonda, later the star of "Easy Rider," as "Blues" or "Heavenly Blues," the leader of a fictitious California Hell's Angel chapter. Nancy Sinatra, a singer in her own right yet known forever as Frank Sinatra's daughter, plays his girlfriend. 

Supporting roles are played by, among others, Bruce Dern, who went on to do countless biker films, and Diane Ladd, as well as Michael J. Pollard, the actor who made a guest appearance Star Trek (how it is that anyone anywhere who did a guest role on the original Star Trek shall now be immortalized.) 


As one watches the film now, it's interesting to ponder why and how it, and this is a documented fact, The Wild Angels film launched a genre of films that stretched over a decade or more and included at least twenty films although I've heard forty as the number, as well. 

Not only did it launch a film genre, but it also fueld the growth of the real life Hell's Angels motorcycle group (notice how I avoided saying either "club" or "gang"?), an organization that now spans several continents with chapters around the world. You can read about this in the book, "The Wild Ride -How the Outlaw Motorcycle Myth Conquered America," by Tom Reynolds, 2000. TV Books, New York. 
In other words, in 1965, when this film came out, while the Hell's Angels had gained publicity in the form of magazine articles and so on as well as Hunter Thompson's classic book, they were no where near as important as they became later, and did not, for instance, have chapters in Europe, South Africa, South America, and Australia among other places. These all came later, and came, in part, due to the popularity of films like this one and those that followed it.   

So, what was the appeal of this film? The cinematography is well done, the acting not awful, at least by biker film standards, but not great either. It is kind of a corny film full of corny lines. 

What it shows is a group of people on a quest, the quest being to transport the body of a dead Angel and then give it a proper funeral.   

It's got a lot of the common trops and scenes and such that one sees again and again in biker films. Wild dance parties on beaches with bongo drums, sunsets, bikers on lonely roads, rape and attempted rape scenes (yes, there are many of them in this film and even more in later films in this genre. They are, for better or worse, endemic to the genre.) 

And it's got the classic scene where a pastor in a church asks 

the Angels, more or less, if you want to be free, what is that you want to be free to do anyway? 

"We want to be free, free to get loaded and ride our machines." 

Obviously this struck a chord with some people. Simon Pegg references it frequently in his 2013 film, The Word's End. 

There is a sense of the characters being part of a group that lives outside the laws of normal society, something that definitely appeals to many in an escapist film. But even then at the end of the film "Heavenly Blues" just decides this whole thing has gone too far. 

There's a lot of minor controversies surrounding the film. One of them is whether or not actual Hell's Angels participated in the making of the film. Roger Corman often spoke of how they were hired as extras and brought their bikes and girlfriends, charging for their appearance in the film and billing more for the appearances of the motorcycles than the women. He also wrote of how they were unreliable workers and this posed challenges filming ( see "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime," by Roger Corman) Sonny Barger, the head of the Hell's Angels, however insists that no Angels appeared in the film. Personally I don't consider either to be reliable witnesses so I guess we'll never know. 


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More Chop Sockey Pictures

 Some more photos from last week's solo test game of my "Chop Sockey! Kung Fu Miniature Wargame Rules." I made some changes to them this week. 


In other projects, I have done some studying on the history or pseudo of ninjas, dug several files of academic papers on a many subjects out of storage for possible projects, and begun some reading on the history of proto-scientific thought in China for a couple projects. I also submitted a couple book reviews on conspiracy thinking to the skeptical inquirer. And I primed a few figures that now need painting. 

Let me also off you think link to a piece of interesting history: 





As always, please consider buying my books. Thanks: Peter Huston's author page at Goodreads
















Hand to Hand combat. The red poker chips indicate the figure has suffered a wound. 
This effects their abilities in several ways. 

Mike Paine's "Hanghai " 1930s Pulp Adventure Game

Hanghai, 1930s the Exotic Far East in Miniature  or  Mike Paine's Travelling Circus Mike Paine is one of those people who meet once or t...