January 2019 – Fooyah

January 31 2019

Vice

It’s taken a couple of days to calm down after a trip to the cinema to see Vice. This film is from the same director who gave us The Big Short which again made me angry for a long time. Also, I watched The Big Short quite close to seeing “Spotlight”, that’s not a combination to be taken lightly.

I went to the cinema at Rochester on the west bank of the river Medway. In this area the Medway is still tidal and so possibly brackish although I would need to look that up. I’m slightly fascinated by the idea of where along the river does the salinity change to make it more sea water? It has to be between Sheerness and Allington lock but where? Also, I imagine it depends on what the tide is doing and how much rain we’ve had. There must be a mathematical model somewhere.

The tide was pretty high when I went to the cinema. I remember looking to make sure I could report it on these pages. Although it was dark I could see a shimmering reflection of lights across the valley in the lapping water close to the wharf.

I went to see Vice and as is customary I gave the film a score on the IMDB site. I use the iPhone app to score these films and then the application then tweets the result. It’s interesting how the language around computing had changed over the years. I would still call these things programs along with calling folders directories. I do come from the generation that understands most about computers and such. Younger generations, on the whole, don’t have to worry about the mechanics of these things as they tend to work straight out of the box. Who in the future will know the delights of messing around with config files? The nerds and geeks.

To understand the rating system used you should read this particular communication as it explains how a 1-10 system doesn’t work. Here’s the tweet:

I rated Vice (2018) 8/10 #IMDb https://t.co/8w2GGHaGhV

— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 29, 2019

Angry. that is what this film does to me. It makes me angry and raging inside at a political system that doesn’t care about people. It shows how people claim to be doing the right thing even though the evidence is clearly not there to prove that is what happens. I’m still angry and I watched this film about three days ago. It highlights the motivations of people in power and how much they are happy to screw over the little people.

This film is great. The acting is brilliant and the make-up is amazing. I really enjoyed it and the few moments of humour within. What I don’t like is the republicanism [USA type] that it shows. These right wing religious zealots have controlled the government for so many years trying to transform their own society into one that they think is the best. This is largely about making themselves richer and maintaining power to keep themselves rich. They don’t give a shit about the poor or the fact the people exist.

Things to be angry about and keep moaning about:

George W Bush STEALING the election in 2000.
Antonin Scalia being a religious zealot who did his best to remove rights from all people.
The complete fucking lack of evidence for the justification of the Iraq way.
How the UK bent over backwards to follow the USA into the Iraq war.
How military intervention in Gulf War I wasn’t enough and caused the next 50 years of stability.
The complete power vacuum in Iraq.
The EMAILS for fucks sake. [Republican emails from 2000s]
The religiosity of the leaders which means they already think they are supreme [Blair – catholic, George W – religious, Cheney – right wing religious]
Why the right-wing appeals to the poorest when that is who they mess up.

The Iraq war WAS illegal and no evidence existed for it. What a sham. I’m angry. I’m coming around to the idea of a revolution to remove the existing power hierarchies. I’m not completely stupid to understand that another thirty years or so after we smash the institutions we’d have to do it again but maybe that is how you make society as fair as possible.

January 29 2019

Sleepless Night

Every now and then over the last nine years or so, since I’ve had an iPhone I’ve been trying to find the audio of a song called “Sleepless Night” by Dokken. It had to be the live version from the album “Beast From The East”. I’ve reviewed this album elsewhere on this site and you can read that here. It looks like I wrote that review in 2013! So, this morning, I once again did a search for the audio of the song Sleepless Night (live from Beast From The East).

I found a version! This song wasn’t on the CD release version of the album when I bought that and so all I had was the record version and the tape I had made of it. I found the song on YouTube and I have no idea if it is there legally or not but now at least I can listen to it while it remains on that site. I’ll just have to figure out how to find a decent CD copy of the song for quality ripping purposes.

You can listen here for now if you want, until it gets taken from YouTube. Listen for the pause just after the solo and then wonder at the screech as George Lynch re-enters the main riff. I love that bit.

January 29 2019

Unsightly

Scanning down the BBC News headlines page I came across a few headlines that bothered me and I think they show a disconnect between what the public think and what is correct. This has always been the case but social media and the ease of connectivity now means that people who are wrong can gather together and think that being in a community of like-minded people means that their views are correct.

Apparently 5% of the population do not think the holocaust happened. Whether this is the same as denial I am not sure. Perhaps they just haven’t appraised the evidence. Apparently 45% of people polled didn’t know how many people were killed in the holocaust but I think that is more forgivable. To know something happened is one thing but to know numbers about it is another. As long as they all know it was a bad thing then we should be ok. There were 17 million victims in total.

What this news article seems to be pointing out is that we clearly are not learning from the mistakes of the past. We are also pretty poor at appraising evidence. Too many people don’t understand how to read articles critically and to appraise their sources of information. Too many people can easily be swayed by group-think and the idea that many people saying the same thing over and over must be right.

What’s more these people also probably don’t care that they are wrong. They are going to believe what they want because they can. They also probably think that there isn’t objective truth. They probably struggle to cope with the idea that they can be easily manipulated and are possibly being used by other forces or that they are just stupid. The reason we have experts in certain fields of human endeavour is so that not everyone needs to be an expert about everything. People should be accepting of allowing us to defer our human knowledge to people who have spent their lives pursuing the best-as-we-know-it truth in these matters. We also need to understand that it’s not just a single expert we should trust but the consensus view of the world of experts.

This is what science does. Science changes its views with evidence and sometimes it changes quickly and sometimes its a more gradual change but over time the direction of scientific knowledge is to getting things correct. In terms of history we should listen to the consensus view of academics while we learn more and more. In terms of economics we shouldn’t really listen to anyone because it’s not a science, more a dark art. In terms of Brexit we should listen to the lawyers, the economists and the scientists. We should not be listening to the MPs because they aren’t experts in those fields. They are people elected by us to represent us whom, we would think, have the best interests of the country and its citizens as a whole. But we should also recognise that they are human and so fundamentally flawed individually.

We also need to understand that sometimes we just won’t know and answer to a particular problem or that the question isn’t a valid question. Think about something from history, something like what Masham said to Queen Anne. We can’t know what was said but we can use the best evidence we have to try and build a picture. Think about the start of the universe, we have a pretty good idea of what happened and asking “what” is a very legitimate question. The problem with that one is asking “why”. Although why something happens is a legitimate question the answer is unknowable and this makes the question reasonably void. It is these gaps in answers to questions that humans don’t seem to like and in those are inserted many stupid theories along with the concept of god.

Education is how we get out of this. We need to educate the country in particular matters so that people understand why and how. This is not an easy process. To allow a decent explanation to the country on matters of importance with a series on TV or radio or the internet somewhere. Mind you, you can’t make the horse drink. Some people will choose to be willfully ignorant and others are just ignorant. Personally I think this is correlated to good effect with empathy, but that is something I haven’t investigated.

This is how it is done. We educate people. We let them understand the experiences. We talk to them. We hope they are willing to listen and learn. I do think, however, that there is an awful lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect going on with people who choose not to learn.

Two more headlines next to each other on the very same BBC News front pages as the others in this communication. I did not read each article and that may be the start of the problem but I want to point out the following:

Astrology is bollocks and, unfortunately, people fall for its charm and simplicity. Perhaps if we could educate people more about appraising evidence and understanding a little more physics we could kill off this bollocks and other religious bollocks too.

Finally, putting a question mark at the end of a headline does not good journalism make. It is really lazy. It implies that the answer is yes but also shows that the journalist doesn’t really have any proper evidence to answer the question because otherwise the question mark wouldn’t need to be there. If you have evidence then it is fact and you can write something like that as an indictment of underfunding of our roads. But if you are just using “anecdotal evidence”, or to give it its proper name; “anecdotes”, then you are just a lazy piece of shit and you shouldn’t be a journalist.

Always remember when your aunt starts telling you that she took activated carbon tablets and that cleared up her cancer that the plural of anecdotes is not evidence. People are flawed and terrible at understanding evidence. That is why science and experts exist.

January 27 2019January 27 2019

Led Zeppelin IV – Led Zeppelin

Of all the Led Zeppelin albums this one is the biggy in my mind. It is the first I listened to and I was blown away by how complex it is and just how much this band influenced later music. I can’t remember the last time I listened to it. My tastes have moved on and I am in another world altogether. The current plan is to review all the albums from before my current aggrotech phase and then go back and review all those I have bought since then. It’s a project.

Led zep 4 – not a bad song on it. Ground breaking and stunning.

January 27 2019

Things Change

I watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark yesterday. It’s still a great film if you ignore the glaring inconsistencies and “Indy” problem. I think it’s one of those things you should just enjoy rather than tear it apart. Having said that I have an issue with it, something that had never struck me before but bothers me now.

Indiana Jones is a university lecturer who has young women swooning over him in lectures. This is made clear by the number of women in the lecture theatre when he is lecturing, this is 1936 and women weren’t commonly at university then, and the young lady with “Love You” written on her eyelids.

Later in the movie Indiana travels to Nepal to meet with his ex-girlfriend Marion. After an initial greeting she hits him [wrong thing to do]. This is the exchange just after that:

MARION: You son-of-a-bitch! You know what you did to me, to my life? This is your handiwork.

INDY: I never meant to hurt you.

MARION: I was a child!

INDY: You knew what you were doing.

MARION: I was in love.

INDY: I guess that depends on your definition.

MARION: It was wrong. You knew it.

Quite clearly in this situation we have a college lecturer taking advantage of his position of influence over a younger female student. She has every right to be angry at him. He’s even quite dismissive of her feelings in this situation.

You can see that in the early 1980s when this was released this was an accepted form of abuse. We now recognise the problems with this behaviour and treat it accordingly. Let’s be clear, I am not asking for the film to be withdrawn, I’m not saying you shouldn’t watch it but I am saying that times have changed and we need to understand how society is generally self improving over time [or at least the last seventy years].

Given the way things are going in this country and the USA I am worried that society will regress in acceptance and understanding of moral codes over the next twenty years. I mean I’m optimistic about it, but I do worry.

January 26 2019January 26 2019

Led Zeppelin II – Led Zeppelin

Of the Led Zeppelin albums I own, and hopefully they’ll be done soon, this one I’ve listened to least. Looking at the track listing I can only remember what one song sounds like and that one is “Whole Lotta Love” which is iconic enough to be known without this album along with being a theme from the television show about music.

January 22 2019January 22 2019

Led Zeppelin I – Led Zeppelin

This could cause some controversy but I’m not fussed. Opinion is just that. There are critics out there whose job it is to justify their thoughts and these are the people to rate the “excellence” of all forms of art. Whether I agree with them or not doesn’t really matter. I do think that there’s something important about the idea of learning how to appreciate certain aspects of art. It’s hard for me, as a layman, to see how a movie has been put together and what was difficult with it although that might still not make it “good”.

I don’t know how much we can standardise our subjective thoughts. We might take expert opinion and use many of those to form a consensus about certain issues, that seems a sensible approach. Suppose we asked the population the question “what is the best food?”. You might imagine many many types of answers to this and I would need clarification because sometimes a burger is what you need and sometimes cheese on toast is required. These views across the population could possibly be why this country is in this particular political state at the moment. Maybe we shouldn’t ask the population its thoughts on things as the population is quite often wrong.

The plebiscite was wrong about proportional representation and the “leaving the EU” question. In fact, most people didn’t vote. That is what is amazing. This country is heading towards a cliff top at full speed because it is the “will of the people”. Well, fuck you. It was the vague idea of about 35% of the voting age population. The rest of the lazy cunts didn’t vote. People didn’t know what they were voting for. People don’t understand the issues because it is really fucking complicated. Don’t ask the people! We have an elected representation of (hopefully educated and intelligent) people who we let make these decisions based on our behalf. Even when some are wankers, some are thick, some are motivated by unreasonable needs and some are just plain corrupt.

This brings me to this and the next few albums. Because I have been reviewing these albums in alphabetical order by album title it means that most artists are spread out throughout this website. But there is Led Zeppelin who named their first four albums (maybe more) numerically. This means there follows two more communications about the same band. This is slightly annoying.

Led Zeppelin lie in that circle on the Venn diagram of bands I know needed to exist to create the music that inspired all the music that I like but at the same time I find them a little boring. This boredom is precisely because they inspired my kind of music. My kind of music has moved on, it’s evolved, it’s become dirty and dark and is allowed because bands were magical in the early 70s and 80s. Along with Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin inspired the heavy metal bands that formed ten years later. All music is traceable along the ages.

This album has some excellent songs on it. It is historically important. It is highly rated by critics and is important in the history of music. It is summer music. I don’t play it that often.

January 20 2019

The Favourite

Yesterday I took a saunter over to Rochester so visit the cinema. I’d been looking at what’s on during the week and there wasn’t a huge amount that impressed me. But, I decided to go and see an historical drama. I don’t really like any form of period dramas. The idea that someone has scripted what *might* have happened and been said really bothers me. It moves those imaginations into the common collective about what really happened. It seems that these sorts of things are really popular with The Crown on Netflix and other things always being watched on classic television. I don’t mind fiction period drama as much, although I’m still not keen, because you can say what you want, it’s your story.

I noted that the tide was pretty low as I arrived at the cinema. Lots of the mud bank on the west of the river was showing and the boats seemed below average protuberance. As is usual I rated the film on IMDB, there’s a system so perhaps you should read this communication which explains that.

I rated The Favourite (2018) 6/10 #IMDb https://t.co/nDhHJwpg0U

— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 19, 2019

While watching I normally fixate on three or four things and try to remember them to write here. This isn’t perfect and I often forget what I was going to say. I guess I could take a note book into the theatre but I’m quite convinced that would be rude and somewhat professional, I don’t want to raise these reviews of movies to a level where object criticism could be placed at me. These reviews are mine they don’t represent any form of global ratings. If you know me then they probably make sense, if you don’t then your experiences of a movie could be vastly different to mine.

For the first thirty minutes or so of this film I didn’t even think about what to write here. That probably means the film was pretty good. If it was terrible I would have been pondering my context of this communication for a long time. I wasn’t really sure where this film was meant to be set or when Queen Anne reigned over us. A quick Wikipedia reading left me to understand that the action takes place at Kensington Palace and she was queen at the start of the 18th century. I am slightly worried that this communication will descend into a rant about society, hierarchy and the feudal system but I will do my best. You can read previous film reviews to see what I mean.

My short summary about this movie would be thus:

More lesbianism than I was expecting.

There should be other things to say about this film and so I shall put them here. I had three main points to say once I left the environs of the cinema. Firstly, not knowing anything about the movie on the way in I was slightly surprised at the level of lesbianism contained within.

Next, there were quite a few establishing shots where a fish eye lens was used, which in itself is fine but then they moved the camera and it felt like watching a VR film somehow and if the shot had gone on much longer I think I would have felt slightly sick.

The next thing that surprised me, but I guess shouldn’t have, was the fair usage of the word “cunt”. I am not bothered by usage of this word and it is interesting knowing the general reaction of the populace now compared to what was probably common usage three hundred years ago.

This film was probably more “arty” than it needed to be. There were plenty of lingering, holding shots that could be different and I guess the director wanted to make a statement. I’m not sure what the intention was but a statement was made. At times the soundtrack consisted of quiet repetitive sounds that slowly increased and stayed in the scene minutes more than would normally be expected. This was slightly irritating and a purely artistic choice, possibly one that I would not have made. It made it feel quite “my first art film”.

A quick read of Wikipedia about Queen Anne and you can see how much of this film is fiction. How much of it is speculation rather than being a well sourced historical film. I would rather have an as-close-as-possible film than this, but I guess it made a good story. Queen Anne is a fascinating subject and more complex than could be shown on film. I will state that Olivia Coleman was stunning and her facial acting in one scene was outstanding, you can read the emotions and thoughts of this queen perfectly, it was all so subtle.

This is the second film with Rachel Weisz in period costume that I have seen in the last year. I don’t think that’s enough for a trend but given I didn’t know she was in the film I think I’m excused.

A lot of the filming was done at Hatfield House, which I have never been to see, but my mate’s mum used to work there so I’m claiming a personal connection to that. It turns out that Abigail Masham is buried in a village near where I grew up, High Laver, and so I think I will visit the grave and see the church as it turns out that John Locke is buried there too.

January 18 2019January 18 2019

Lean Into It – Mr Big

This, as far as I know, was the second album by Mr Big. They were a supergroup. They had a massive hit with the dong “To Be With You” which is the last song on this album. Can I remember any of the other songs? Not really. I think the album is fine for a US rock band. It’s just never really hooked me in.

January 16 2019January 20 2019

Sheer Fluke

The other day at work I needed to draw a circle on the whiteboard. I did it freehand and without thinking about it too much.

It looks pretty good, even if I say so myself. It’s a plan diagram of a car’s turning circle. The class were given the circumference of the turning circle and they had to work out the kerb-kerb distance even though in reality the question wanted the wall-to-wall turning circle distance.

Giotto did far better than me [so says the legend].

January 16 2019January 16 2019

1989 – A Good Vintage

There are a number of reasons why 1989 was a good year for me but the one to talk about is my trouncing of my ATC squadron for awards. As listed in this communication I won four of the awards that year.

Shooting
Bandsman
Cadet Of The Year
NCO i/c Flight Of The Year

I am very proud of these. I still have the personal trophy for Cadet of the Year.

I recently attended a meal in celebration of thirty five years of 309 squadron and it was a good bash. It was lovely to see lots of faces from the old days. The trophies were on display and although my names are no longer on the prizes given out now – there’s not enough space for the new names and so new trophies were bought – I could see the old trophies around the room along with plenty of clippings in the scrap books.

There was also a presentation on the large screen with plenty of photographs from the old days. A fair few had me in them, mind you I was involved for over ten years.

The above photograph has John Trant, Lisa Slater, me, Flt Lt Andrew Passfield OC 309, Jamie Hubbard, Dean Willetts and Simon McGarry. We are the ones who won prizes in 1989.

That’s me playing the fife as the band marched down the town high street.

January 12 2019January 12 2019

Midnight

I’ve been thinking about time. Well, let’s face it I think about lots of things all the time but time is problematic. I was mostly thinking about this at the turn of the year, when 2018 magically turned into 2019 or the start of the nth journey around the sun when starting from an arbitrary point. I mean starting the new year on the day after the shortest day for the northern hemisphere would be more sensible but I guess we could have a war with the southern hemisphere about that.

Midnight is the first moment of the next day. When the clock hits 00:00 that is the start of the next day. The previous day ends at a moment which is the limit of all time before 00:00. Twelve AM is the beginning of that day. Such is the definition.

Now, here’s the problem and it involves language and colloquialisms as is often the case with problems about definitions. Within mathematics there are plenty of words which have specific definitions in the subject and different meanings in casual language, I mean that was designed that way originally to exclude the masses from education.

So, if I said to you I will meet you “at midnight on Thursday” then it is likely that we would be talking about meeting at the boundary between Thursday and Friday. But, if I said I’d meet you at 12am on Thursday that would probably mean we were still meeting at the boundary between Thursday and Friday but in reality that time is the boundary between Wednesday and Thursday.

Thinking about this now I think it would be only me having problems with a meeting time of “midnight on Thursday” and in a group discussion I would be the one asking for clarification whereas everyone else would be perfectly happy with the understanding of the meeting time. Oh how I hate language sometimes.

January 12 2019

Laughing – Re-Animator

I’m pretty sure I got this album sometime in my third year of university. Although I can’t remember the specifics I do suspect it was in the “metal” section at a music shop. Obviously this was in the days before streaming and even previewing an album. What you bought was what you got.

I’m not sure this is a serious album. I mean musically it’s pretty good and the songs are good but there are plenty of songs with humour in them and start with clips of audio from film etc. If you like heavy slow paced thrash metal then this is a good album for you, assuming that you don’t mind the odd piece of fun.

The following songs are stuck in my head, even after twenty (or more) years.

Rude Awakening
Kipper ‘n’
Research – has French spoken at the beginning
Another Fine Mess
Monkey See, Monkey Dance
Don’t Patronise Me

I guess you could stream this album now, for nothing, listen to it and then dismiss it. Over the last few months I’ve come back to the idea of paying for music properly! Sad old me and my liberal sensitivities.

January 2 2019January 2 2019

Lighting

First communication for the new year of 2019 is a couple of pictures from Gran Turismo photographic mode. The first is my Chevvy over-steering around the penultimate bend on the Sainte-Croix Circuit. You can see a list of circuits here.

This second picture is of my two favourite cars on GT Sport. Both have a really good balanced feel and I’ve raced over 500 miles in the Porsche.