Ranger Pickups, Lead The Way!

The 352nd was in charge of the defense at Omaha and put up a fierce resistance to the invasion force consisting of the US 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions. Personally it’s just me, but I’d rather play a US Soldier (they had the tougher time that day) that is if I were into that sort of thing.

Oddball Trivia…
Among the first “germans” captured at Omaha were some Polish “troops” who were part of the shanghaied forces.

The weirder story is the Koreans who were captured at Utah Beach. They had been impressed into the Kwangtung Army (like a lot of Koreans) and captured by the Soviets at Khakalin Gol in 1939. Then were impressed into the Red Army and captured by the Nazzzis 1941-43. Then were impressed into the German Army only to be captured by US Americans on D-Day.

Speaking of senseless slaughters, I’m going to be attempting a server upgrade in a couple of hours, and there will be blood. The site either won’t work, or may look like it works but really doesn’t whilst I tinker.

@nojo: Buena suerte.

TEN MINUTES TO SERVER ARMAGEDDON.

@nojo: *poof*

ADD: anybody else make it through the wormhole?

I think everything’s okay here.

@ManchuCandidate: I’m still in Nova Scotia. It’s buggy.

We still here? Because everything before this doesn’t count.

Noje is our Moses.

@ManchuCandidate: I never heard that story before. My damn Eurocentric education (what there was of it).

Meanwhile, back on Twitter…

@NYPostOpinion is now following you (@stinque).

Gadsden-related? Dunno.

@Benedick HRH KFC:
I didn’t know anything about it till 10 years ago. It was amusing in a grim sort of way, but not involving tragedy of the insanity of war.

@ManchuCandidate: That’s a really interesting story — I’m somewhat of a history buff (no reenactment) and had never heard of it. Given the quantity of books written about WWII, I’m sure there are some tomes on the story – not that I can order them from Amazon and give Nojo some beer and popcorn money…

@SanFranLefty:
A little digging reveals only one Korean
/Copied and Paste/
This soldier in the photo is Kyoungjong Yang who was born in Shin Euijoo, Northwestern Korea on March 3, 1920.

He was conscripted to the Kwantung army in 1938 and captured by the Soviets in Nomonhan and captured again by Germans in Ukraine in the summer of 1943, maybe in the battle of Kharkov, and captured finally by Americans in Utah beach, Normandy on June 6, 1944.

He was freed from a POW camp in Britain on May, 1945 and moved and settled in America in 1947. He lived near the Northwestern Univ. in Illinois until he died on April 7, 1992. He lived as an ordinary US citizen without telling his unbelievable life story even to his two sons and one daughter

@Dodgerblue: DEET

@Dodgerblue:
I agree with JNOV.

Lots of places are rather buggy in Canada City. Right now anything north of Toronto, but especially Winnipeg (mosquito capital of Canada City perhaps the world) is buggy. Probably worse this year thanks to the huge amount of rain we got.

Didn’t know that Nova Scotia was buggy, but not surprised.

Carvaggio.

And The Game. I just lost, BTW.

@Benedick HRH KFC: Hey — when do people have to start paying royalties — when rehearsal starts?

@ManchuCandidate: One person is more than enough to go through that nightmare.

Oh. Now I know what David Grohl will look like in 20 years. If he’s lucky.

Oh!

@JNOV: Maybe when revenue appears that can be skimmed for royalties. I dunno. You have to rent orchestra scores even if you just want to rehearse the piece because it’s the berries.

@FlyingChainSaw: Yeah. Some community theater folks were talking about how their production is going to be shut down before it opens b/c they haven’t paid royalties, and I was thinking that didn’t sound right. I dunno.

Why are they called “royalties” anyway?

@Nabisco: No, my pants are now on backwards.

@JNOV: Royalties on what?

In the theatre the producing outfit or person first options a piece to secure the rights. It’s very cheap. You can option a play for Broadway for $7,000. That secures the rights for 18 months with automatic extensions. That means the producer has 18 months to get into rehearsal. If it’s a small production it’s done through a licensing house. I don’t know what they charge but I should think around $1,500. These sums are not fees but are advances (non-refundable) against future earnings. There is a certain amount of wiggle room but a play traditionally earns 6-8% of the gross for its author. (musicals pay 6% which is usually split between three writers) In regional that’s on everything. On B’way it’s a good deal more complicated with losing weeks, royalty pools, and two week bumps they give the producers, etc. In Europe you can reckon on the same percentages. The writer then pays lots of fees, commissions and subsidiary rights but in theory, royalties are paid whenever a piece is presented and admission is charged. Apart from the advance (which must first be recouped before any other money is paid) they come from the weekly running expenses of a show. Amounts are not guaranteed but come from box-office receipts.

It sounds like your theatre buddies didn’t acquire the rights first. Most often this means contacting Samuel French or the Dramatists’ Play Service, getting permission, paying them the advance (I don’t know what community theatres pay but imagine it’s not very much), before doing anything else. The licensing company would be stern with them but would most likely allow them to go ahead once they’d done the right thing. Unless they were fooling with the play, in which case they break the contract and all bets are off.

The name comes from the days when the monarch would grant mineral rights (say) to a person or persons which were the Royal Rights or royalties. As trade expanded the name carried over into patents and finally copyrights. Before we had royalties, a writer for the theatre was paid a flat fee (Mozart got 200 florins for the manuscript of Don Giovanni while the star singers earned 1200 for the season. And any new production earned nothing for him) so it completely changed the very way writers were thought of. They stopped being dependents on noble houses – Haydn and the Esterhazys – and began to be the independent entities they are today.

There is a popular romance that the finances of the theatre are somehow haphazard and chaotic: they aren’t. They are extremely carefully policed. Of course abuses occur, but they are the exception rather than the rule.