.: The Red Brick – Dubai College's Student Newspaper :.

24th October 1901: First person to successfully ride down the Niagara Falls

The first successful barrel ride over Niagara Falls occurred when Anna Edson Taylor, a school teacher, rode safely over the Falls on her 63^rd birthday. The ride through the rapids took 18 minutes and she dropped a total of 51 meters, sustaining only very small injuries.

October 17th 1989: Loma Prieta earthquake strikes in San Francisco

An earthquake hits the San Francisco Bay Area on this day in 1989, killing 67 people and causing more than $5 billion in damages. Though this was one of the most powerful and destructive earthquakes ever to hit a populated area of the United States, the death toll was quite small.

The proximity of the San Andreas Fault to San Francisco was well-known for most of the 20^th century, but the knowledge did not stop the construction of many un-reinforced brick buildings in the area. Finally, in 1972, revised building codes forced new structures to be built to withstand earthquakes. The new regulations also called for older buildings to be retrofitted to meet the new standards, but the expense involved made these projects a low priority for the community.

On October 17, the Bay Area was buzzing about baseball. The Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, both local teams, had reached the World Series. The first game of the series was scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Just prior to the game, with the cameras on the field, a 7.1-magnitude tremor centered near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains rocked the region from Santa Cruz to Oakland. Though the stadium withstood the shaking, much of the rest of San Francisco was not so fortunate.

October 18th 1998: Pipeline explosion killed 700 in Nigeria

Nigeria is an oil-rich country on the west coast of Africa. The oil fields are controlled by several multi-national corporations in cooperation with the Nigerian government. Very little of the proceeds from oil exports reaches the average citizen of the country and millions of people live in abject poverty. In fact, gas pipelines run right through impoverished villages.

One such pipeline ran through the town of Jesse, where it became commonplace for residents to steal oil from the pipeline to supplement their meager incomes. This was known as “bunkering” and was taking place on October 18, when a helicopter was dispatched to disperse the people assembled at the pipeline. Just after the helicopter arrived, a massive fireball shot up 100 feet into the sky. The exact cause of the explosion remains unknown.

The pipeline explosion incinerated hundreds of people instantly. Others died from agonizing burn injuries. The fire burned so hot that rescue workers could not approach the scene for six days. Meanwhile, survivors, some suffering from terrible burns, were afraid to go to the hospital for fear that they would be charged with theft or be blamed for causing the fire.

October 19th 1745: Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, died

October 20th 1935: Mao’s ‘Long March’ concludes

Just over a year after the start of the Long March, Mao Zedong arrives in Shensi Province in northwest China with 4,000 survivors and sets up Chinese Communist headquarters. The epic flight from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles, nearly twice the distance from New York to San Francisco.

Civil War in China between the Nationalists and the Communists broke out in 1927. In 1931, Communist leader Mao Zedong was elected chairman of the newly established Soviet Republic of China, based in Kiangsi province, in the southwest. Between 1930 and 1934, the Nationalists launched a series of five encirclement campaigns against the Soviet Republic. Under the leadership of Mao, the Communists employed guerrilla tactics to successfully resist the first four campaigns, but in the fifth, Chiang raised 700,000 troops and built fortifications around the Communist positions. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were killed or died of starvation in the siege, and Mao was removed as chairman by the Communist Central Committee. The new Communist leadership employed more conventional warfare tactics, and its Red Army was decimated.

With defeat imminent, the Communists decided to break out of the encirclement at its weakest points. The Long March began on October 16, 1934. Secrecy and rear-guard actions confused the Nationalists, and it was several weeks before they realized that the main body of the Red Army had fled. The retreating force initially consisted of 86,000 troops, 15,000 personnel, and 35 women. Weapons and supplies were borne on men’s backs or in horse-drawn carts, and the line of marchers stretched 50 miles. The Communists generally marched at night, and when the enemy was not near, a long column of glowing torches could be seen snaking over valleys and hills into the distance.

The Communist marchers crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges, mostly snow-capped. Only 4,000 troops completed the journey. The majority of those who did not complete the journey had perished along the way. It was the longest continuous march in the history of warfare and marked the emergence of Mao Zedong as the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communists. Learning of the Communists’ heroism and determination in the Long March, thousands of young Chinese traveled to Shensi to enlist in Mao’s Red Army. After fighting the Japanese for a decade, the Chinese Civil War resumed in 1945. Four years later, the Nationalists were defeated, and Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. He served as chairman of the country until his death in 1976.

October 21st 1966: Mudslide buries school in Wales

On this day in 1966, an avalanche of mud and rocks buries a school in Aberfan, Wales, killing 148 people, mostly young students. The elementary school was located below a hill where a mining operation dumped its waste.

October 22nd 1797: The first parachute jump of note is made by André-Jacques Garnerin from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris.

October 23rd 4004BC: Creation of the world begins according to the calculations of Archbishop James Ussher

October 10th 1731: Henry Cavendish, English physicist who measured the density and mass of the Earth, is born

October 11th 2002: Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize

On this day in 2002, former President Jimmy Carter wins the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

October 12th 1609: The song “Three Blind Mice” is published in London, believed to be the earliest printed secular song.

October 13th 1925: Margaret Thatcher, the first female UK prime minister (1979-1990), is born

October 14th1947: U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound

Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter during World War II and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13 German planes and was himself shot down over France, but he escaped capture with the assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he was among several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight.

For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise would tear any aircraft apart. All that changed on October 14, 1947, when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1 was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding 662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket plane, nicknamed “Glamorous Glennis,” was designed with thin, unswept wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet.

Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager’s achievement was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.

October 15th 1965: In a demonstration staged by the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the first public burning of a draft card in the United States takes place.

October 16th 1946: 10 high-ranking Nazi officials executed at Nuremberg

The short form of film has been around for years, as long as film itself. However, I doubt that many of you can name a favourite short film except maybe a pixar short.

The best short films are those that tell a story, it can be an important story or just story that someone needed to tell. They can be made by the rich, with their overpriced cameras or just on your mobile phone! They can be 10 Seconds long even! There are lots of Shorts you may find which aren’t very good, student films with a weak narrative and low production values, but out there are some gems of beauty so…

Here are my Top 5 Short Films.

1.  George Méliès –  Voyage dans la lune (Trip To The Moon): 1902

This film was made right at the beginning of film and you can see with the wide shots and no moving cameras that film was still treated like theatre. However, to decide to make a film about Flying to the Moon in 1902 shows how ambitious George Méliès was!

Also – A hand coloured version of the film, premiered at Cannes 2011 is being shown at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival on the 15th of October.

2. Andreas Pasvantis – December – 2010

A beautifully filmed yet chilling short. With a big twist to watch out for! Many modern techniques are employed in this film and soft focus plays a huge part in the distortion of the senses. After watching it for the first time, I sat back and said… “clever.”

3. Offside – Erez Tadmor & Guy Nattiv – 2005

Offside is the second short film in the trilogy by Erez Tadmor & Guy Nattiv regarding the Middle East conflict. This short is a fallow-up to their last short film Strangers, Offside was shot in Israel, during September 2005, at the security zone that separates between Israel and the Palestine Authority.

4. New Boy – Steph Green

A fantastic story looking at differences is culture, A young African boy with a haunting back story starts school in Ireland, and finds out quickly exactly what it means to be the new kid. Winner of Best Narrative Short at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar. Some great performances from the children too!

5. Day & Night – Teddy Newton

What I think is Pixar’s best film, stunning in 3D and 2D this animated short captures entirely what Pixar is about. Beautiful images combined with well crafted sound and a thought provoking yet humorous story.

Hope you get the time to take a look at some of these, and enjoy!

Final Destination 5 is a film for those of you who enjoy gore, nail-biting suspense, and also have that little part of you that loves a bit of schadenfreude.

The basis of the story is the same as ever, people escape death, and death comes to find them. The film begins with the introduction of 8 fairly tedious characters as they share some poorly written and dull dialogue before they embark on a bus journey that will change their lives.

As usual Final Destination 5 manages to find new amusing and sick ways to kill off the characters, some were fast, some were drawn out with so many possibilities that the audience didn’t know what to expect. Humour played a large part in releasing the tension as the audience sat and laughed, along with a sigh of relief, when the characters finally did meet their makers.

The director has managed to create some characters so slimy and irritating that you want them to die and watching their demise becomes all the more enjoyable. However the characters that the audience is meant to want to survive, become equally dislikeable, as they are so boring! Whoever told the production team for FD5 that more scenes of crying and love were needed was wrong!

The film is totally what you would expect. Repetitive, gory and tense. In that respect the FD5 team have done their job but not much else. It may be the case that the most basic production values were left for granted as the FD5 team focused on making the 3-D experience as high quality as the many other competitors in their market.

However, I did leave the cinema happy, happy to not be being chased by death and happy that I’d got the full “Scary Movie Experience.”

If you fancy a fright and a laugh go ahead and try out Final Destination 5 for yourself! Oh and I dare you to watch it in 3-D!

Teacher: What is 2k + k?
Student: 3000!

Q: Why do you divide Sin over Tan?
A: Just cos!

Q: Did you hear the one about the statistician?
A: Probably….