This week’s whimsy is brought to you by a reminder of why it’s important to Mind The Gap at railway stations.
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Image Credit: Fight Times Magazine, which tells one exactly which sorts of knee damage result from targeting which parts of the knee's anatomy
Above you see a rather clear X-ray image of a fractured tibial plateau, unlike the rather more furtively displaced fracture of my husband’s tibial plateau which only showed up this week on an MRI (which we weren’t sure he needed) after he twisted his knee and ankle several weeks ago during a fall between the platform and the railway carriage. Looks like surgery, a few more weeks at home and a pair of crutches after all.
What’s the most interesting/embarrassing injury you’ve ever managed to experience?
More generally, as with every weekly whimsy thread, please share any bits and pieces you have come across recently that have surprised, delighted, intrigued or otherwise positively engaged you.
I fell down a 20 m cliff and only picked up a fractured wrist and dislocated finger.
Which I had to climb out the same damn cliff with!
I snapped my patella tendon playing Frisbee Ultimate.
I broke my arm falling off the washing line (hey, I was 6…)
I helped some other women break a washing line at a hen’s party night…
For the month during which my right arm was in plaster, I (truthfully) answered the inevitable question with “um, well, I was trying to balance my way across the backyard on a half-deflated basketball.”
I dislocated my kneecap in front of about 20 people doing an impromptu imitation of Kermit the Frog’s Talking Heads performance at a party. I punched the patella back in as I fell (I’ve been down that road before, and it’s better in than out). I was on the pull that night and enjoying myself (and the girl I was chasing dashed to my side after the fall, so I figured I was good to go), so I didn’t go to hospital immediately. Who wants to anyway, on a Saturday night?
Anyway, so the girl’s friends told her not to go home with me (can’t think why!) and she listened (can’t think why!!!) and then I went to the hospital, where I had to wait for hours etc. Oh the fecklessness of a woman not scorned!
Anyway, so the next day coming home in the taxi I discovered that Princess Diana had died. I thought nothing of this at the time, but when I got home realized that with my bedroom on the first floor of a terrace, and my knee brace too uncomfortable to sit upright properly or read for long periods of time, I was going to have to spend the next 5 days on the couch, with nothing to do but watch TV.
And what was on every channel? I think this is the root cause of my intense hatred for Britain’s overly sentimental response to tragedy.
Also, BigBob, did you try that again recently? Some climber in the UK fell 1000 feet and was found walking at the bottom of the cliff.
SG,
Once was more than enough, I was incredibly lucky.
It was many years ago now, but when my arm healed, I went back and climbed it again.
I can’t imagine what falling for a 1000 feet would be like – it would feel like an eternity, just waiting for the final crunch.
I was also run over by a car as a four year old and managed to set myself on fire two years ago.
What’s your next adventure, BigBob? Sounds like you’d be safest confined to the (non-flammable) couch…
Motor cycle accident on the F6 (1977) when someone waited for me to get within range and then turned right from the s-lane in front of me … we were the only two vehicles on about 500m of road outside the Heathcote Hotel — (hairline) fracture collarbone and my Suzuki wound up in the gutter … Ouch!
sg,
Oh, I’ve got plenty more. All self inflicted.
Stabbed my left hand with a chef’s knife, required lots of stitches (and I was over 18 and not drunk!).
Managed to get liquid caustic in my right eye, as I was arguing with my cellar staff about how dangerous the set-up was.
Last day of June 2000, attempted to descend the Waterfall Way from Dorrigo on my pushie, got into the loose stuff when the shoulder of the road disappeared beneath me and went base over apex. Bone-deep laceration of the right knee, cracked and dislocated left wrist, various other bumps and scrapes and the weird thing is that if my front wheel hadn’t been buckled I would probably have climbed back on and tried to ride the rest of the way to Urunga.
I regularly manage to get small bits of finger mixed up with the spinach.
It’s a bugger trying to play the guitar till it heals.
I tore a medial ligament in my left knee when I fell on a wet path while chasing a disobedient toddler who was heading towards the traffic. My screams of pain brought him back much more effectively than the preceding yell of fury. That was years ago, but the knee still feels different.
My partner was hit by a car while riding his motorcycle. He picked himself off the road (broken collarbone) and went to the phone box where the woman who had hit him was calling to hear ‘darling I’ve hit another motorcyclist. What should I do?’
I’ve just remembered falling up some steps whilst extremely drunk and stoned (it was a while ago … )
My shins still bear the scars.
I copped a Potts’ fracture [ankle] falling from a shearing shed foof after half of the roof lifted off during Ash Wednesday’s northerly. I hit the floor feet first and tried to roll as I felt my foot buckle sending me out of the loading bay for another 10 ft drop. Lying on my back with my leg in the air and my foot dislocated to rightangle. When the ankle was first set I noticed the foot was 45 degrees left of perpendicular but my knee was straight up. After a fortnight it was re-set and pinned but I’d also found that the clicking fibular was also a break which meant I needed an entire leg cast. Chasing some errant sheep through a wet paddock four weeks later softened the cast so much I cut it off, something I’d seriously been considering for quite a while. Anyway all was well although it was many months before I could flex my foot far enough to get my heel down for a good seat on my horse.
I cut a sizable and steeply angled piece of the tip of my left index finger completely off with a self-sharpening vegetable knife while slicing capsicum the day after Bob Hawke and Labor won the drover’s dog election, leaving a circular open wound (the knife not the election). A swish young plastic surgeon at the Royal Melbourne sewed it back on (successfully, to my astonishment) using something called a Wolf graft, and while he was doing it I did indeed feel as though I were being grafted to a wolf.
Had to prepare and give the first few lectures of 1983 with the arm in a sling and a big steel splint on the finger.
Zorronsky et al, is there not something enormously special to that feeling when you get the cast off and can bend your leg for the first time in weeks? The feeling of muscles moving for the first time in weeks is almost orgasmic in its intensity.
Actually, Dr Cat, a “circular open wound” isn’t a bad description for that election. (Disclosure: it’s the last time I voted for the ALP in any election, State or Federal.)
I apparently fell off a doorstep when I was three and broke my ankle. I also ran into a brickwall when I was in a race and forgot to stop at the finishing line. This resulted in a broken nose. That was sometime in primary school.
I’ve had many spectacular falls from horses, including a horse falling and rolling on me. I’ve luckily never broken a bone. The funniest horse fall was doing a cross country course in Ireland. We came to a large drop jump, which means a jump in which the landing is far lower ground than the take off point. You ride it by leaning as far back as possible to counterbalance the horse’s downward trajectory. I just didn’t manage to lean enough, came off over the horse’s shoulder into several feet of mud and had to shelter under the jump as the other horses came over it. No time to run away. Several other people came off and we were all sitting in he mud, laughing like drains. Only in Ireland.
I had a home made bomb go of in my face when i was about 11.
Burnt off my eyelashes, eyebrows and some hair. My skin looked all waxy and a bit crispy for a while, but left no significant scars.
Embarrassing, and painful.
Once smashed both my heels jumping off the stage at the Wayside Chapel onto a concrete floor. Which was a very stupid thing to do. But when yer young … Was hobbling round the Cross on crutches for a fortnight + that dreadful fall on my chest a few months ago.
Crashed an aeroplane in 1986.
Aeroplane was a write-off.
I got a sore little finger on my left hand for about a week.
Now look here – neither Baines or Hawke – and I know they both had wonton hair but doesn’t matter – are worth a good woman’s finger, I say.
Down with the patriarchy and I take it you’ve been more careful since those heady days?
Is this valid for Queensland?
sg @19 – Oh yes
Dinr – you have reminded me that i have a much more embarrassing injury. About 4 weeks after breaking my collar bone coming off my mountain bike in Namadgi national park, i was riding home, a little tired and emotional, a case of coopers perched on my good shoulder, a quiet song on my lips and i hit a parked car. collar bone broke again, coopers ok.
Most of my ‘interesting’ ones are cycling related. These include:
My friend forgetting to tell me he had switched around the brake cables before I took off on his bike. Pulling hard on the back brake sent me sailing over the handlebars. Managed to get away with only some scrapes and bruises.
Someone deciding they would like to turn right across several lanes off traffic just at the moment that I was heading past the sidestreet they were turning out of. I was probably only a few seconds away from being hit by traffic coming the opposite way to which I was originally traveling as I was thrown on and then off the bonnet. There was no malice involved and the driver did later pay for my bike repairs but there was no way I was going to accept the offer for a lift to the hospital!
Another two incidents where drivers decided they would like to turn right across traffic while I was in their path. Nothing quite like the feeling of knowing you are going to be hit and just wondering what the outcome is going to be. Couldn’t bend my leg properly without pain for over a year after the first of these.
The first one was interesting because of the complete muppet of a doctor who told me I would never be able to play competitive sport again after the most perfunctory of examinations (I knew what tests he was supposed to be doing and he didn’t do all of them).
The second was the moral bind I was put in by the driver who begged me not to report the accident because he would get fined by his taxi company and possible lose his job. Several witnesses couldn’t believe he’d actually tried to turn onto the road from a T junction with a stop sign as I was turning into the street he was on.
Looking back at that one I probably had a fair concussion, as I accepted his offer of a lift (something which I regretted about halfway through the journey). Broke down crying when I got home, just couldn’t process what had happened.
I found it quite hard to get back on the bike several weeks after, kept having flashbacks to being hit.
Well, at least the beer survived, dylwah. Perspective is everything.
And not just beer, either. Mmmm Coopers!
On a slightly different note:
(hat Tip Crikey)
{Caution: High Level coarse language: do not click link if likely to be offended}
I loved this performance of Ce Lo’s F|_|ck You using sign language. The integration of signing with other expressive gesture worked brilliantly.
For obvious CP and school/class management reasons I can’t show this to my kiddies at school … {sigh!}
Oh what a magnificent comparison, right down to the wonton hair as you rightly observe. Not that there is any comparison; one will take Harvey any day thank you very much. On matters musical you are spot-on; my first thought as I looked at the little piece of finger on the knife blade was Oh God, I’ll never play the guitar again.
Not sure there was a direct connection between the election win and the knife-wielding, but it’s true I was a tad euphoric. DI(nr), I know that government was not all that one would have wished, but think what they delivered us from.
Indeed, Dr Cat. Another 3 years of Fraser would’ve been even worse.
One of the worst funny kitchen accidents I’ve ever inflicted on myself was about 30 years ago, in Bendigo. I was drunkenly quartering baby mushrooms for a Beef Boogy-on, and accidentally quartered my thumb. I should’ve had it stiched, as it took ages to heal and is still slightly numb.
At least I didn’t get too much blood on the mushrooms!
That’s stitched, dammit!
Injuries, is it?
Well, when I was a lad of four, I had a job working as a piano mover for my dad’s Child Cruelty business. That was my day job, I also moonlighted on weeknights as shark chum.
Anyway, one hot summer’s day I had to move a Steinway grand piano all by myself, on foot, from Alice Springs to Sydney; a pleasant little trek, I’ve ‘ad worse. Before I set out, for provisions my dad gave me a single leaky canteen filled with powdered caustic bauxite, and a jar of me mum’s famous termite-and-thumbtack preserves.
All went well until I was about a half a mile from the Sydney CBD. I had tied myself to the piano, in order to drag it up the slope of a 70-degree incline, when the piano was suddenly struck by a demolition wrecking ball — hurling the piano and me into the air. Well I flew right into the side of the Sydney Opera House at speed, then the piano hit me, then we both slid down the side of the Opera House (mind you, on the very day that a famous installation artist had covered it with razor blades and cayenne pepper), and we fell right on top of the points of two dozen pikes and spears that were being used by a Historical Re-enactment Society to simulate the Battle of Lake Trasimene. The re-enacters of Hannibal’s army were so angry at my disrupting their event, that they trampled me with their elephant.
And when my dad found out about it, he was so angry that he beat me black and blue for a fortnight, using a gas-powered lawn mower.
And docked me a day’s wages.
Moderator — I have a feeling that if you check the mod bins, the Four Yorkshiremen may have something to share concerning accidental injuries…
Ah the seventies: Beef boogy-on and its near relation, Cock-o-van.
Bicycling accidents always seemed to involve decapitating your big toe, gravel rash and the embarrassing bit – the horrendous pain of falling onto the bar. To this day I cannot understand why “boy’s” bikes have that deadly object so strategically placed. Is it some kind of machismo thing – yes I ride with the constant threat of instant emascualtion, what of it?
Curiously su, I’ve never been nutsed by a bike frame, despite having a strong tendency towards that holiest of slapstick grails.
My most painful and public episode was on stage after mixing a quite well-attended gig. Coiling up the mic leads, which I always enjoy as a kind of Zen relaxation task to accompany slyly polishing off the bands’ rider, I was coming to the end of one and just miscalculated the last loop before tying the knot. I was wearing tight shorts (it was that kind of show), and my right testicle must have been ideally framed for impact with the male end (naturally) of the mic lead. The pain was worse than anything I’ve ever felt, including broken bones, deep lacerations and having a soccer ball driven hard at close range into the same area.
I literally collapsed, writhed a bit, then got to my knees and dry-retched, then noticed a couple of guys who’d seen it telling everyone nearby all about it. Pretty soon about fifty pairs of eyes and laughing lungs were celebrating the spectacle.
Actually another of my worst injuries was apparently a big fucking larf for onlookers, but that’s another story and shall be told another time.
Reading through everyones posts, I thought of several more stupid accidents of my own, one in particular which I can’t believe I didn’t even think of. Having already written enough I won’t inflict them on you. Let’s just say it is lucky I can reach ‘t’ on the keyboard.
That does indeed sound very painful FDB given the comparative examples you provided!
Add another data point to the never hit the top tube set too.
No way! I must have been an uberklutz, it happened more than once to me.
I’ve always thought of you as a woman, su. So maybe it’s just that (unwilling as I am to play down the pain of a vadge-mash, I’m sure it’s awful), dudes have a very well-developed reflex avoidance of the nut-nobble.
That’s some reflex, to overcome the momentum when your foot slips off the pedal. What do you do, hurl yourself sideways in midair? I will keep my eye out for cyclists hurling themselves into the shrubbery in future.To be tediously accurate, it is pubic symphysis-smash and it is really horrible. BTW women can feel that pain, but our “nuts” are much harder to reach.
Have I killed the whimsy yet?
Just about, su – you brought tears to my eyes.
Q.. What is worse, a full frontal kick to the jats crackers or child birth?
A.. A man will NEVER say ” I had a full frontal kick to the jats crackers 12 months ago. And, if all goes well, I’ll have another full frontal kick to the jats crackers in 9 months time.
Craigy (I refuse to render your shouty nom-de-blog accurately) I think you’re fixating on the cons, and forgetting that there are no pros to a kick in the goolies (for the kickee at least).
If I had to take one in the pants-yabbies to bring Miss or Master FDB Jn into the world, I’d do it and be happy to consider doing it again.
Su – it’s pretty clear that something went wrong in evolution for dudes. Mammal dudes, at any rate. Why the freaking freak would you put two such important and sensitive things on the outside? One, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune &c &c.
I wish mine were safely ensconced halfway to my stomach like yours, frankly.
Well, I would say in my case su, if I have come off it has mainly either been over the handlebars or I have managed to lay the bike down or leave it behind me. Also, if I slip off the saddle for some reason with most of my bikes if I managed to get my feet on the ground it was/is pretty unlikey that I will hit the top tube, especially now bike geometry has shifted to a sloping top tube.
This is not to say that I would not have had some close calls when younger and riding on bmx tracks, jumping up and off kerbs, bunnyhopping, etc etc. but I can’t recall ever knackering myself like that.
To keep the temperature down so the tadpoles stay viable, of course. It’s one of the few things I remember from Matric Biology. Of course this does not answer the question of why normal body heat would kill sperm, which seems counter-intuitive to say the least.
Yeah see the trouble with that is that if something goes wrong with them, you often don’t find out until it’s life-threatening.
(More whimsy-bashing, soz.)
The deeper question is why men then invented skintight jeans to reverse evolution’s benefits. Some kind of ovary-envy?
Wednesday Wince-y.
Well the usual evolutionary reason for making these things so *cough* prominent is that they are used in some kind of display. Contemporary behaviour bears this out, therefore I assert it to be true and my book will be out in the Autumn (hey, I take it all back about evolutionary psychology, it’s the jazz).It could be that the temperature sensitivity developed as a result of them being held out of the body cavity rather than the reverse. The little swimmers just lost the ability to tolerate heat over time.
Display also answers sg’s question @ 48.
Well, I’m off to see the Donkey Derby in Castletown, to go back to being whimsical.
What would be funny, would be if the donkeys getting their delicate mouths yanked around and their poor backs being thumped on, as well as having evil little brutes flogging them, actually kicked the evil brutes heads in. I’d laugh then.
In an attempt to re-light an old shellite fuelled “choofer” stove while on a long walk in the Budawangs I managed to set the Sigg fuel bottle on fire. I let it stand and burn before, in a deeply panick stricken moment, I decided to to hurl the thing into a nearby creek (Styles Creek if you know the area) to extinguish it and to hell with pollution of the waterway.
I threw it over the creek into heavy scrub on the other side which immediately burst into flames. I plunged in, crossed the creek, grabbed the container and spilled fuel everywhere over myself. Then plunged back into the creek and stripped right down to nothing except singed and stinking hair before clambering out and using my wet and burnt clothing to beat out the not insignificant scrub fire I’d started. I had really only just brought the entire mess under control when a large party of male and female Rover Scouts emerged at the Styles Creek campsite. They didn’t even ask for an explanation and looked relieved when I failed to offer one.
Russell Quoit eat your heart out.
I think first prize should go to AKN for just surviving himself.
Yes. akn deserves at least one internet. That even beats Duncan’s pre-teen Molotov Cocktail mentioned above.
Thank you. I have found surviving myself a full time occupation.
Pav @32 my first thought as I looked at the little piece of finger on the knife blade was Oh God, I’ll never play the guitar again.
Horrors! come on, don’t leave us hanging! Can you play now? What did the doctors say?
akn,
I know Styles Creek well, hiked the Budawangs many a time in the early 80′s. Did all the mountains at least once.
Actually, my cliff fall happened at Tianjarra Falls, which is on the way into the Wangs on Braidwood Road. A little bit of symmetry!
Actually, Helen, you can lose multiple chunks of finger and still play. (I’m living proof of that – I’ve sliced small bits off my left thumb and at least two fingers.)
Hell, you can even play with fewer than the usual number of fingers. (Jerry Garcia, Django Reinhardt, … )
BigB: good grief! So close yet so far. Know the area well. Were you looking at the floor of the falls when you fell? Budawangs is the best walking park in NSW I reckon. Just the right size and scale.
akn,
As you probably know, if I had fallen at the actual falls, well, I wouldn’t be writing anything today!
I was abseilling the falls proper and my mishap was on a section of the climb out (To the left of the falls, when you look down the valley.
I agree, the Budawangs combine a lot of things – reasonable access, some challenging bits and a bit of variety.
Deua National Park was gorgeous back in the 80′s too, I don’t know how either have fared since then.
Ah, the perils of abseiling. So easy to go down and so hard to get out, eh? Haven’t ever been in Deua. I was out to Folly Point last year with my kids. No ground water and the walk appropriately named so far as my kids are concerned. Cheers.
DI(nr) — it was nearly half the tip of my left index finger, so negotiating the fretboard would have been tricky without it, at least for a while, and just at that very moment I was not thinking clearly. But Helen, yes, the graft took — in fact a lot of what I cut off turned out to be guitar-playing callous. Whether I could ever ‘play the guitar’ is of course another question.
Okay, this is off-topic, but this headline is just about the most whimisical think I’ve seen
“Moran gunman disguised as Dickie Knee”.
What is going on in the streets of Melbourne?
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/australian-news/8777238/moran-gunman-disguised-as-dickie-knee/
As I recall, the audience never actually get to see Dickie Knee’s face.
(Was the witness Daryl Somers?)
Nah, Red Symons.
I was listening to Richard Stubbs on 774 today around 2 or so and he introduced a talkback session on interesting/embarassing injuries. Coincidence?
If only this were satire, rather than the simple content substitution it is: http://www.theonion.com/articles/republicans-vote-to-repeal-obamabacked-bill-that-w,19025/
And totally off topic of gruesome accidents, broken bones, et, this quite entranced me a couple of days ago.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/googleganger-is-word-of-the-year-20110202-1adug.html
I have a bloke who writes biographies of saints, some sort of American businessman and a surgeon, I think. Its been quite a while since I looked.
Just checked. There is also a couple of lawyers, an orthopaedic surgeon and a footballer. And several obituaries. (I’d been wondering why every now and then I’ve had people ringing me up thinking I’m dead. I’d just put it down to the Armidale gossip mill, but it looks like it was teh internet.)
You know Paul, if you don’t check the link, you get a completely different interpretation there about the one’s you’ve had.
I’ve played the googleganger game and a very esoteric bunch of people come up. There’s a Californian beach volleyball champion. To appreciate the humour of that you need to know I’m really short, dark and totally unathletic. She’s me in an alternate universe. But my favourite googleganger is a New York nightclub singer. I want her life.
Casey,
You have me confused. Are you talking about googleganger being the word of the year, which works, so far as I can see, or what happens when you google your own name?
No Im talking about somethin else but never mind. Did you know there is no one in the world with my name?. Alack I have no googleganger.
I’m slow tonight. It is when you click on people who have the same name as yours. Had a busy day and I’m not thinking straight.
Do you feel lonely Casey?
Fine. I wander lonely as a cloud.
Nah, Pav, it would’ve scarred up eventually. Might’ve taken a couple of months, though.
I no longer bother googling myself, Paul. For reasons that should be obvious.
You poor little daffodil, Casey.
Fine & Casey. We’re all lonely.
Song
by Adrienne Rich
You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns’ first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning
Mind you, I can’t imagine myself as any of them. I think I’d hate to be any of them. I just kill people if I was a surgeon. I don’t like being an entrepreneur. (Did sort of try it once.) Can’t see myself as any kind of lawyer. And the idea of me being a footballer is laughable for so many reasons I don’t think I could count them.
D! (nr)
well, I/ve never googled him but I have read some of the books he wrote before he wrote Hitler’s War and Churchill’S War (in which he went utterly completely bananas. Churchill’s doppoelganger. Gawd.
That’s beautiful Joseph.Carey.
I’ll say it is.
Is it really a song, or is that just the name of the poem?
I have many googlegangers. Some moderately famous and/or prolific, so it’s disappointingly only at page 7 of results that the real me shows up.
Would I rather be a moderately famous disabled Welsh actor?
Take out the Welsh bit, and maybe…
A high-flying Sydney banker? No.
A little-known dilletante musician from Ontario? Nah, I can do that just fine from here.
I get a naturalist, and whacko Catholic amateur theologian whose been in strife with elements in the Vatican more than once, a US football coach, a moderately famous tennis player from the 80s.
However, if I select ‘pages from Australia’ I normally get meself, for outstanding achievements in the ‘Portuguese forts in Asia’ studies field.
I am my own first seven Googlegangers, but the eighth entry tells me that I am eight separate people in the United States (of America).
…and one of my American personas lives in the wonderfully-named town of “Boiling Springs”, South Carolina.
I’m a prostitute with a heart of gold in Coronation Street, apparently :-/ Oh joy!
My most common googleganger is a famous American Civil War General (as I expected).
If you don’t know who that is, another one is the voiceover guy from Mythbusters.
PB @ 84, don’t bother. You’re at Stormfront before you know it. Pretty depressing that we have to share the planet with people like that, really.
DI (nr) @ 92,
I haven’t read anything Irving wrote after Churchill’s War. His stuff about the size of the gas chambers in Hitler’s War as an argument against the Holocaust was ridiculous was nonsense of course. (He should have read Martin Gilbert’s magisterial work on the subject which is mindboggling in its page after page of narrative of Jews shot in the back of the head, beaten to death, worked to death, starved to death etc as well as gassed to death in the death camps which Irving seemed not to recognise was also part of the Holocaust, and make up many of the 6 million dead.)
He did/does provide a good analysis of the internal working of Nazi politics,but to suggest Hitler didn’t know about the Holocaust because he never signed a document ordering it when he knew almost everything else that was going on in Nazi Germany is to completely misunderstand how Hitler ran the Nazi party and just plain wrong.
When one gets to Churchill’s War, he exposes himself as the sad travesty of the historian he could have been, Apart from completely wilfully misunderstanding the role of Churchill’s radio actor double (it was, as I understand it, to confuse Nazi intelligence)he launches into an ahistorical fantasy that in essence says Churchill and Roosevelt were part of some imagined International Jewish Conspiracy, and in about five pages manages to utterly and completely destroy his own reputation. The third book of the trilogy, Roosevelt’s War, was never, so far as I know, published, and if the few hints in Churchill’s War are any indication would have been even worse.
(My comments on the content of these books are from memory. I think it must be 20 years since I read them, so if I’ve erred in describing the content I apologise in advance.)
(Have to say this thread hasn’t been very whimsical, so I took the liberty …)