There Will Always Be an England

Anyone who's ever seen Oliver! or My Fair Lady or Mary Poppins already knows that London is full of colorful characters, ready to burst into song and lively dance at the drop of a hat. But even beyond the winsome orphans, the mystically wise chimney sweeps and the oh-so-proper upper crust at Ascot, we now know that delightful musical pageantry extends even to ruthless killer James Bond and and the effervescent Dark Lord, Voldemort himself!

Yes, it was a veritable Disney parade style roll call of British icons at the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. The headiness was almost enough to make you forget that the main characters, James Bond, the Beatles, Mary Poppins et al, were a half century old or more. And yet stage and film director Danny Boyle also managed to work in the history of Britain's contributions to industry and technology, from the railroads to the industrial revolution to the World Wide Web.

It really was an entire theme park packed into one stadium and 3 and a half hours.

Late Boomer #3

The Bond Market

Goldfinger is one of the better James Bond movies.¹ To aid in the assault on Goldfinger's headquarters, Her Majesty's Secret Service issues Bond a sports car, an Aston Martin DB5, with a slew of special gadgets and features. These include: a slide-up rear bullet-proof shield, front-mounted machine guns and rear-mounted smoke screen, oil sprayers and nail spreaders to thwart pursuers. The pièce de résistance is an ejection seat to launch unwelcome passengers through the roof of the car.

Bond uses every one of these gadgets in a single 5-minute chase scene during the movie. But despite all this high-tech weaponry, he's captured anyway! That's because the British Secret Service's gadget group, headed by Q, has designed and built the whole thing without doing any user studies.

As presented in the Bond films, Q and his department dream up all kinds of exotic weaponry, and then build it and test it in the lab on wooden dummies, ersatz espionage agents and pseudo-supervillains. Then these gadgets are issued to field agents like James Bond, with no more instruction than a quick demo. The agents are expected to rely on this equipment in life-threatening situations. It's no wonder Bond always has to fall back on his sex appeal in a pinch.

A more effective head, lets call him R, would have field agents involved from the concept stage. Bond and his colleagues would be specifying what devices they need, and how they should work. R would then bring the agents back in for prototype testing, which might require multiple iterations. Only when these gizmos have been thoroughly tested and approved would they be put to work in real assignments.

Then maybe 007 wouldn't wind up strapped to a table with a laser beam aimed at his groin.

¹From Russia With Love is the best one.