Wind and Rain Man
QUESTION Ten minutes into the film Rain Man, Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman drive past a wind farm which seems to go on for ever. Where is this? THESE are the 4,000 wind turbines lining the San Gorgonio Pass in California, one of the windiest spots in the States. You will see these massive structures if you drive the Interstate 10 highway which passes by Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley.
The wind which occurs there is created when cool ocean breezes mix with hot desert air.
The largest turbines are 150ft tall and can produce up to 300 kilowatts an hour, the amount of electricity used by a typical household in a month. Electricity produced by the wind turbines in the San Gorgonio Pass is enough to power Palm Springs and the entire Coachella Valley.
J.W. McGuire, Ormskirk, Lancs. THErE have been many real games released over the years with a Victorian theme which our forebears would have enjoyed. The obvious example is a complex real-time strategy game which came out for PCs in 2003 called Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun, and its 2009 sequel Victoria II, made by Paradox Entertainment.
This has everything you might want from a Victorian computer game. Players direct Britain in the fields of diplomacy, warfare, industrialisation, colonisation and politics. The goal is to become a global power.
Players can i ndulge in all the key moments in Victorian history. They can pick a side in the American Civil War, crush the Zulus, take part in the Crimean War and dispatch explorers to map out darkest Africa and the Americas.
There have been lots of other games based in the Victorian era over the years: Heart Of Africa (1985) was an old Commodore 64 game that cast the player as an explorer searching for the Lost Tomb of Pharaoh Ankh; Stanley And The Search For Dr Livingstone was a Nintendo Entertainment System scroller from 1992; Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds was a 1998 game based on the H.G. Wells novel; and Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2011) was a Nintendo DS based on the Jim Carrey animation of the Charles Dickens story.
There have been numerous mystery games with Victorian themes such as Sherlock Holmes Nemesis, Mystery Of The Mummy, Dracula Origin, Jekyll & Hyde, Jack The ripper, The Time Machine, etc. There are, in fact, a whole host of Dracula and Sherlock Holmes games.
On the more recent platforms, there was Sherlock Holmes v. Jack The ripper on the Xbox and, the best of the bunch, Alice: Madness returns on PS3 and Xbox.
The latter is a survival horror game that features an older, mentally unstable Alice who returns to Wonderland to face her demons. This was a very underrated game that is definitely not for children.
As for made-up games, I can envisage one called Spinning Jenny, where a child worker has to collect as much cotton as possible without being struck by the spinning mules and looms as they collect the errant puffs of cotton from under the whirling spindles. Or perhaps a strategy or technical game based on the works of Brunel or one of the great canal or railway builders.
Jacob Riley, Maidenhead, Berks. QUESTION Who invented the breakfast dish muesli? MUESLI was invented by Swiss doctor Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner. The word is a diminutive of the Swiss/German Mues which means ‘puree’ or ‘mash-up’.
Bircher-Benner was born in Switzerland on August 22, 1867. After studying medicine in Zurich, he opened a general practice in the city’s industrial quarter, but during his first year he fell ill with jaundice and cured himself by eating a diet of raw apples.
He became convinced of the healing power of raw fruits, cereals and vegetables which he called ‘foods of sunlight’.
From 1895, he conducted nutritional experiments with raw vegetables on himself, his family and patients and it was around this time he invented his muesli.
The original recipe for Birchermuesli consisted of: one tablespoon of rolled oats (soaked overnight), one tablespoon of lemon juice, one tablespoon of unsweetened condensed milk (a safe option in the days before pasteurisation) and one large sour apple (grated), topped with a tablespoon of ground hazelnuts or almonds.
Bircher-Benner’s nutritional theories were revolutionary: at that time, red meat and bread were regarded as the most valuable food for human consumption, based on their high energy content; fruit, nuts and vegetables were considered the foodstuffs of the poor.
In November 1897, Bircher- Benner opened a small private clinic for dietetics and physical healing methods on the Asylstrasse in Zurich. In 1904 he opened a sanatorium called Vital Force, a term from the German ‘lifestyle reform’ movement, which advocated l i ving i n harmony with nature.
At his sanatorium, patients not only improved their nutrition, but underwent physical training and active gardening work.
Dr Bircher-Benner died on January 24, 1939, aged 72. The Vital Force Clinic was renamed the Bircher-Benner Clinic in his memory. It closed in the late Nineties.
Diane Coltman, Stroud, Glos. QUESTION Is there any archaeological evidence for the Biblical characters known as The Nephilim? THE previous answer raised an interesting point about the Nephilim story possibly being a folk-memory of the intermingling between modern and Neanderthal man, which we know did occur in t he Middle East among other places.
The only problem is that far from being giants, Neanderthals were around 5ft 6in, similar to most of the new settlers.
However, since those first modern-type humans were Africans, it might be that some of those African settlers came from tribes similar to the modern Watutsi and Masai, who frequently produce men over 7ft tall.
In that case, the folk-memory would probably be the Neanderthals’ own, and the Nephilim, the giants in the hills, would be these very tall modern settlers.
Claire M Jordan, West Calder, West Lothian.