Air Traffic Control Assistants

[anotherthing]

Eggs

Walt - abbreviation for 'Walter Mitty' - a character masquerading as something he was not. Most often 'Walt' is used in military circles, but has found its way more and more into civvy street.

Based on the lead character in James Thurbers' short story 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' in which Walter fantasises about situations he is in

Each of the fantasies is inspired by some detail of Mitty's mundane surroundings:

• The powering up of the "Navy hydroplane” in the opening scene is followed by Mrs. Mitty's complaint that Mitty is "driving too fast", which suggests that his driving was what led to the daydream.
• Mitty's turn as a brilliant surgeon immediately follows his taking off and putting on his gloves (as a surgeon dons surgical gloves) and driving past a hospital.
• The courtroom dram cliché "Perhaps this will refresh your memory", which begins the third fantasy, follows Mitty's attempt to remember what (besides overshoes) his wife told him to buy; and also a newspaper vendor using news of a trial to sell his papers. (Thurber once used the same line to caption a cartoon in which a prosecutor shows the defendant akangaroo.)
• Mitty's romanticized version of British pilots in the early days of WW1 is inspired from his looking at "an old copy of Liberty’, which contains images of a war in which the United States was not yet involved at the time of the story's publication.

The closing firing-squad scene comes when Mitty is standing against a wall, smoking.