BoomTown is not even going to try to explain this trailer for the movie “Jackboots on Whitehall,” except to say:

No 3-D.

Foul-mouthed puppets.

World War II.

Coming soon to a theater, but here’s the film’s trailer:

Last week, the only known filmed images of doomed teenage diarist Anne Frank were posted online.

The short film, from 1941, is part of a whole channel the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam launched on YouTube last week.

The clip of the inspiring Frank has had close to 1.7 million views so far.

Frank, of course, became a heroine worldwide after her death, following publication of her eloquent diary chronicling the years she and her family spent hiding from the Nazis during World War II.

In the 20-second video below, filmed before any of that happened, Frank appears for about nine seconds, peeking from a balcony at a newlywed couple below her.

A year after the film was taken, Frank and her family were living in fear of Nazi persecution, hidden in the attic space above the family business.

She and the others there were later discovered and taken to concentration camps, where she died in 1945, just before the war ended.

The Anne Frank Museum is now located in the building where she hid and wrote the diary–which, as anyone who has gone there can tell you, is a wonderful memorial to her and the many victims of the Nazi regime.

Here’s the video of Frank, and there is much more worth checking out on the channel on YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOG):

Responding to a petition posted on the Web site for Number 10 Downing Street, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown late Thursday apologized for what he characterized as the “appalling” treatment of Turing 55 years earlier by British officials. Turing, who was gay, was convicted in 1952 of gross indecency and given two choices, prison or “chemical castration” by a series of injections of female hormones. Two years after choosing the latter punishment, he committed suicide.

Turing had helped lead the team of British codebreakers at Bletchley Park whose work gave the Allies crucial advantages against German forces during the war, and formed a basis for later generations of computers.

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The U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, closing out the worst year for job attrition since World War II, according to the BLS. Total job losses for 2008: 2.6 million, the largest decline since 2.750 million jobs were lost in 1945. A 16-year high. Congratulations, folks….

Suffice to say, that’s quite a bit more than some economists were expecting. And that’s an ugly, ugly number, 2.750 million jobs lost. With the national unemployment rate rising to 7.2 percent during December, the first quarter of 2009 is also looking pretty bleak. “The job situation is ugly and is going to get uglier,” Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research, told Reuters. “There’s no reason to expect hiring anytime in the next three to six months. We are not going to see any hiring until the government steps in and acts. Talk doesn’t work.”

Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, was even more pessimistic–if that’s possible. “I would suspect that starting this past October and lasting through April, we will have really big job losses,” he told The New York Times. “We are not yet near the numbers of those earlier recessions,” he added, referring to the downturns of the mid-’70s and early ’80s, “but five more months like what we have been having and we’ll be there.”

The evidence suggest that people’s views on devices such as televisions, notebook computers and mobile phones are changing, says Shawn DuBravac, economist for the Consumer Electronics Association. Through November of 2008, 17.22 percent of total durable good purchases were tech goods, the highest share in 50 years, he says.

“While these are typically discretionary purchases, consumers are treating them like nondiscretionary purchases,” says Mr. DuBravac.

That doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t making cutbacks. In fact, in many categories, consumers seem to be gravitating toward lower-priced items for varying reasons. For example, coming out of the 2007 holiday season, nearly 50 percent of all flat panel sales were over 40 inches. Today, Mr. DuBravac says, that numbers stands closer to 35 percent.

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