Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle, who died at the end of May at the age of 88, had a valiant and varied career in the Royal Navy during World War II. After the war, he established two shipping lines and an airline in Africa and competed in the Olympics for Kenya. Despite this impressive career, he may be best remembered for his time spent in a German POW camp as one of the creators of “Albert RN,” a life sized dummy, used to facilitate prisoner escapes.
Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle
Bentley-Buckle was the camp’s watch repairer and lock picker, and he made the mechanism which enabled Albert’s eyes to blink and move, giving added realism to the dummy. In 1953 a highly fictionalised version of the episode was made into a film, Albert RN, but Bentley-Buckle’s true wartime adventures, behind enemy lines in Italy and Yugoslavia, were even stranger than fiction. Read the rest of the obituary.
A clip from the movie, Albert RN (distributed in the United States as Break to Freedom)
Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing the obituary along.
Two projects are underway in Maine and Oregon to produce energy from ocean waves. 
The 
Hurricane Earl, or rather tropical storm Earl, spun its way past New York, far enough out to sea so we had neither wind nor rain to mark his passing. Having missed this hurricane, here is an interesting article on 
An oil platform operated by Mariner Energy exploded today near Vermilion Bay in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. One worker was reported injured. No one was killed and no significant oil spill resulted. Mariner Energy has been involved at least 13 offshore accidents since 2006 in Gulf of Mexico waters — including a blowout and four fires.
Two major maritime festivals on the US East coast, scheduled for the Labor Day weekend, appear to be generally in the path of Hurricane Earl. The organizers of the 
