Month: September 2015

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Holograms FFS

So, I have been spending time in Rugby to see Sally. It’s actually a really nice town and I like it a lot. The town has three markets a week, plenty of independent shops in the town centre and plenty of drinking establishments. It is well connected and easy to get to. There are a number of out of town shopping places and I hope these don’t detract from the town centre income. Many of the villages around Rugby are nice, pretty and look expensive.

There also happens to be a school where a game started. It is called The Rugby School and the game is Rugby Football. Now, as you might imagine, the town itself is very proud of this heritage. The game is named after the town. The game was invented in the town. The town doesn’t have a stadium for the purposes of playing the said sport and so it makes the most of its history.

I have two issues with Rugby and its branding along with rugby football:

History:
The evidence shows that William Webb Ellis was more than likely NOT the boy who picked up the ball and ran with it. He never mentioned this himself in the rest of his life. He worked as a vicar at St Clement Danes church in the Strand and then in the South of France where he died and is buried. The ONLY source is someone writing about WWE running with the ball about 40 years after the actual event. It is most likely that WWE wasn’t the boy. It is also most likely that rugby developed over time and Rugby School only tried to impose its own version when there were differences with the game around the country, just when it would have been handy to have history on its side.

By the way, it was perfectly ok to hold the football and run with it as long as you ran towards your own goal. What the boy did was run towards the opposing goal, this was illegal at the time.

As a good friend said to me recently.

You shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

Here’s the statue to William Webb Ellis outside the front of The Rugby School. Please understand he didn’t look like this. He was modelled on the sculpture’s own son.

More Important Things:
HOLOGRAMS were invented in Rugby. Denis Gabor worked for British Thomson-Houston in Rugby where he invented the hologram. The hologram FFS. In Rugby. There are holograms on nearly every bank card and bank note around the world. In terms of affecting most people and importance to the world holograms easily beats the game of rugby football. Jesus, HOLOGRAMS!

The Jet Engine was partially developed at the British Thomson-Houston labs in Rugby. Whittle used the manufacturing firm to build his first jet and then the company was involved with the development of the engine, mostly at the Lutterworth site. While many places can claim the jet engine Rugby is allowed some kudos. This, complex, beautiful piece of engineering has easily affected more people than the game of rugby football.

Rugby Cement is based somewhere locally. Oh, they are based in Rugby. They are now owned by Cemex but once their red trucks were seen all over the country. They still produce plenty of fine cement and other products. The cement works serve as a guide over the countryside to find your way back to Rugby. The industrial site looks awesome. It is arguable that Rugby Cement has affected more people than the game of rugby football.

RUGBY – home to holograms, the jet engine, cement and a game for men played with odd shaped balls.

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Inside out

I went to see this film. I don’t remember being that impressed. It was quite nice to see a particular model of how our brains work even if it was very simplified, there wasn’t any executive function. Overall I just didn’t really enjoy it. I think they could have made a better film about kids and emotions. Also, we don’t really remember the way the film depicted it.

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Combichrist – O2 Academy Islington

Early one Monday morning I returned from Germany and a music festival there. Some details are contained within this communication. After getting home and sleeping for a short while I had to get ready to see Combichrist at the O2 Academy in Islington.

Combichrist Setlist Fleece, Bristol, England 2015

The above set list is for a gig in Bristol although it looks pretty similar to the gig I saw.

Stereo Juggernaut and Controlled Collapse were the support bands. I seem to remember that both bands were pretty good and enjoyable.

Combichrist were pretty darn good. They were impressive and the crowd was very active. Having just come from a weekend at a festival where the crowd all stood where they were and didn’t rush the stage this was a very different experience. There were some quite violent people in the mosh pit and, maybe I’m too old, but this was a bit of a turn off.

Now that Combichrist have guitarists the older songs have been adjusted to keep the musicians busy. They have created guitar parts to the mostly synth music and I think this detracts entirely from the quality of the original songs.

Even with all that this was still a bloody fantastic gig. Not quite as good as being at Electrowerkz but close.

Combichrist
Combichrist
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M’era Luna 2015

Smith and I travelled to Germany to a music festival over the summer. We searched many festivals to find the right one for price, distance and bands, although that wasn’t the order of the criteria. We settled on M’era Luna, a gothic/industrial festival that takes place on an old British Army Air Corps airfield near the town of Hildesheim, just south of Hanover.

On the Friday we traversed the channel via a train that carries cars [just imagine! a train that can carry cars! UNDER the sea! We humans are ingenious!] and headed to Germany. We used just a Sat Nav device, neither of us had a proper map. France, Belgium and the Netherlands were all pretty boring and we longed for some hills or vague scenery. The world kept track of our journey via twitter.

The route took us on the ring roads of two large towns and the traffic slowed a lot around them, hindering our progress! Once in Germany we travelled fast on the autobahn although we did have a detour around the northern edges of Dortmund as the sat-nav didn’t quite warn about a lane change on a slip road in time and then the next junction was closed. Dortmund looked like the edges of any town.

The temperature was hitting 32 Celsius along the way and finally we arrived at the airport near Hildesheim. 500 miles, 1 tank of diesel and plenty of snacks and LOTs of music.

We only just managed to find somewhere to put up the tent. There wasn’t a great deal of space left in any of the campsite. Our spot was furthest as could be from the main festival area, but reasonable close to toilets and leaving on the Sunday.

That evening we wandered the festival area, drank some alcohol already purchased from a service station and went to the disco hangar. There was some pretty good music played and it was good fun.

After a good sleep we awoke to find that the air bed had stayed up and was really comfortable. We both went about our routines to get ready to leave our tent area. I needed to satisfy my caffeine addiction and stave off withdrawal symptoms by finding more caffeine to ingest. Just as we were getting dressed Andy managed to puncture the airbed. It slowly deflated. We found a repair kit and tried to stick on a patch. We would have to wait 6 hours before we knew whether it had worked.

I found coffee. I also found some food. The weather for the Saturday was meant to be slightly overcast with a chance of rain showers. It had rained quite heavily in the early morning but the ground was so dry from the scorching summer that it didn’t really create any puddles or mud. Shortly after the sun had arisen the whole place was dry. Once we were ready we headed to the festival area to check out the shops, food places and mediaeval village (with food places and shops). It was also a good chance to see how the arena and hanger were set up so we knew where toilets, drink entrances, exits etc.

There now follows a list of bands we saw with comments about them if I can remember them. It is a good few months since the festival while writing this, unlike my detailed descriptions about Download.

  • Nachtgeschrei
  • Versengeld (with person playing the hurdy gurdy and another on bag pipes)
  • Speilbann
  • Coppellius (who played some Maiden covers in the style of mediaeval rock)
  • The Other
  • Frozen Plasma (half of this band is Reaper which is good, but Frozen Plasma were a bit dull)
  • Lord of the Lost
  • L’ame Immortal
  • Aesthetic Perfection (3rd or 4th time seeing these and they were awesome)
  • In Strict Confidence (surprisingly ok even with a female singer)
  • Blut Engel (just no)
  • X-RX this band replaced Suicide Commando who had to pull out of the weekend. They were good and I liked it, but left to see . . . .
  • Rob Zombie who just blew the competition away and was professionally brilliant.

Sunday started with the search for caffeine and then food. The air bed did not stay inflated and so the night was reasonably uncomfortable. We had decided we would probably leave M’era Luna that evening and then drive as far as we could home before kipping in the car. The bands on Sunday were:

  • Private Pact (a bad goth, stand still, band)
  • Schwarzer Engel getting better, quite thrash, goth and heavy.
  • Unzucht were just a great band with heavy thrash riffs and a great guitarist.
  • Dope Stars Inc. were good but looked as though they had just come from the 80s!
  • Tying Tiffany was the surprise of the weekend. They started slow and boring but from the third song onwards it was full of energy and heavy. Just a great find for the summer.
  • Assemblage 23 dull. very dull.
  • Rotersand a great band, a great show and really put previous band to shame. I loved it.
  • Nachtmahr were slightly disappointing. It’s hard to pin point this. Their music is very good. But live, they just didn’t capture the mood. It was almost boring, even with two women acting out a fetish scene it was dull. Can’t quite figure it out.
  • Nightwish we said we would stay for two songs but managed just a half of one song. We then drove towards the UK.

A strange thing about the German crowds is that if you had your spot to watch from everyone stayed in that spot. No-one moved when a band appeared. There was no crush at the front. Andy and I were in the second row for a number of bands on the Sunday and there was room to dance, moved around and no crush. This was actually refreshing and pleasant. It made the weekend a much more enjoyable event that had there been the UK crush.

It was easy to leave the festival as the final band hadn’t finished. The roads were clear and we made fast progress across Germany and then the Netherlands. We agreed between us that we would stop at the first rest area we found after midnight. It was fascinating to see how the landscape changed from central Germany to the low lands. Flat and straight is pretty much every road after Germany. We stopped at some services about 1km before the Belgian border. I think we slept ok.

The Monday we woke, I found caffeine and then we drove towards Calais. We arrived at the tunnel way before we were due but we paid some extra money to be on an earlier train. This was worth it as it meant I got home before my family left for other things.

The excitement of the weekend continued to the Monday evening as Combichrist played the O2 Islington thing.

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Rust In Peace

I am in shock. Rust In Peace by Megadeth came out 25 years ago!

To me, this is still a new and fresh album. I think of Peace Sells as an “old” album and “Rust In Peace” as new! The good thing is that this album is brilliant. I don’t think there’s a bad song on here. The previous couple had a dodgy song or two [Mary Jane, Anarchy, I ain’t superstitious] but this album is truly a classic. Everyone should own it.

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Moomins On The Riviera

I saw this film with my children at the Cineworld in Rochester or it may have been the Odeon in Maidstone. I can’t remember.

The film was largely dull. The social commentary was vaguely amusing. That’s all I can remember.

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All Ship Shape

It has taken a while for me to get back to this and I apologise to those who read this rubbish whenever I publish. I will get on top of it all soon. I have many draft communications and not many rants so it might actually be a pleasant read for you five.

Sally and I went to Bristol for the weekend, way back before the summer holidays. Why Bristol? Well, it’s a place in Britain and it has good engineering history. That’s about it, all of my reasoning for choosing Bristol. Oh, that and it’s not London.

We drove down (across) on a Friday. I think we left late to avoid a lot of the traffic but it didn’t matter, there was plenty. Also, it pissed down. Thoroughly terrible rain! On the way there we listened to an 80s mix on Spotify. It surprised me how much I knew about this music, given that I consider myself to be a metal-head.

We stayed at the Double Tree Hilton, which was chosen because it had a car park and looked close to the centre of town. When you check in to these hotels you are given a cookie [warm]. Not sure that makes it worth the price but it was a nice touch. We only had time for a drink in the bar before heading to bed. Breakfast was nice in the old kiln room of the hotel.

The Saturday morning we toured the SS Great Britain. It was a wonderful piece of engineering and I recommend everyone see it and learn about it. Brilliant. There was an Olympus jet engine as part of the museum, that was cool. We then did a harbour [harbor] tour of the Bristol Floating Harbour. It was fascinating and I also learnt why the phrase:

All ship shape and Bristol fashion.

Turns out the Bristol shipmakers had to cope with large tides, when the water was in the boats floated. When the tide was low the boats rested on the rocky floor. Therefore they had to be build stronger and better to cope with this. “Bristol fashion” means study, well built. The harbour tour was on a little boat called the Red Shank.

Red Shank
Red Shank

During this harbour tour we spotted a “green”, “emission less” boat used for tours and another boat which was the harbour’s fire boat. Somehow the conversation revolved around these for a short while and I started to make a matter-anti-matter annihilation joke and Sally laughed before I had finished. That was the moment I knew.

M-Shed was our next destination. It’s a museum of Bristol stuff. It had stuff in it. I can’t quite remember but I think there may have been a jet engine somewhere in there. There was definitely an exhibition of photographs taken showing local industry and people in their workplace.

After the M-Shed we walked around to the centre of the city and as sheer luck would have it there was a thing going on. The festival of nature had taken over one of the city squares and it seemed to be quite a big thing! There was a hashtag and it was well worth the time to take a selfie.

Following on from our journey around the festival of nature we went back to the hotel before heading out to dinner.

Dinner that night was at The Ox. It’s a steakhouse, if you can find it. We walked up and down the street a few times before seeing a tiny ox head picture above a door to a basement underneath the local Weatherspoons pub. We started with cocktails and then had dinner. We drank a Dr Gonzo, an Elevator, a Martini along with wine with the main meal. There was a meat platter to start and then I had steak and Sal had what seemed to be the world’s biggest burger. After breakfast we went to walk the length of the Clifton Suspension bridge (twice). Getting there was fun as lots of roads were blocked off for a cycling race, so we pretty much made up a route through the back streets making sure that our general progress was “up”. We made it and spent some time admiring the bridge. DSC_4634 I do think that if you don’t find bridges fascinating then you are potentially dead. They are glorious! The ingenuity of man continues to amaze me. It was time to head back to the real world and the south east and so we travelled home along the M4. I decided we should drive once around Swindon to see what it has to offer. I had made some disparaging comments about the town on the way to Bristol and I felt bad about that. It seemed a good thing to do, to see what Swindon was like. We drove in to the town centre. There really isn’t a great deal there, it’s awful. We did find the magic roundabout and drove around/over it just to see what that would be like. Magicfuckingroundabout Yep, it really is as crazy as the sign shows. It was strange driving over it. I just kept following the arrows on the ground and checking that nothing was in my way or coming to hit me! After that we found some sort of outlet centre and I bought a tea pot. That is how exciting my life gets sometimes! It also turns out that I might know some of the Spice Girl songs. They were playing in the car and I accidentally sang some lyrics and mentioned that I knew how the dance went in the video. I got quite a bit of grief for that!

There you have it. A very boring run down of the things Sally and I did for a weekend in Bristol. Great fun and very interesting, for nerds.

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