Today is Ernest Borgnine's birthday. This Blogger had just finished an extremely stressful assigment; as a break from stress, he became a gofer on an independent film, THE YOUNG WARRIORS, shot in Canada. Since he was the oldest gofer in living memory, he became the driver to the lead of the film, Ernest Borgnine. He was the kindest, funniest guy you ever dealt with, without pretension or crassness or phoniness. We were shooting in  a very small town outside of Vancouver; at night, he would go food shopping by himself. This Blogger, and a hired local goon shadowed him for safety's sake. That was a waste of time; the  locals were enthralled, and he was patient with their requests for pictures, and autographs. Naturally, he had great stories about  Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden,Ward Bond, Nicholas Ray, Victor Mature, Susan Hayward, Valerie French,Glenn Ford, Randolph Scott, Burt Lancaster,Gary Cooper, Charles Bronson,Robert Aldrich, Spenc...

  THE MAXEY CHRONICLES is publishing a series of Blogs on World War II, A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II. This Blog is on Imperial Japan. "The statistics of the war are almost mind-numbing. Estimates differ, but up to 70m people died as a direct consequence of the fighting between 1939 and 1945, about two-thirds of them non-combatants, making it in absolute terms the deadliest conflict ever. Nearly one in ten Germans died and 30% of their army. About 15m Chinese perished and 27m Soviets. Squeezed between two totalitarian neighbours, Poland lost 16% of its population, about half of them Jews who were part of Hitler’s final solution. On average, nearly 30,000 people were being killed every day." How best to understand Imperial Japan in World War II?  Stanley Ketchel. The best way to understand Imperial Japan is to view it as a historical embodiment of middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel.  ‘  Stanisław Kiecal  (September 14, 1886 – October 15, 1910), better k...