Ian – Page 14 – Fooyah

August 30 2021August 30 2021

Too Fast For Love – Mötley Crüe

This album is pure cock-rock and I love it. It’s got a very raw early 80s metal sound and isn’t too polished like their later albums. Way back when, there was a controversy about Nikki Sixx appearing in Kerrang! magazine where they thought they had proof that he had been replaced by someone else. I think what makes this album good is that it was self-recorded.

Live Wire – great opening fast song.
Come On And Dance – the opening riff is heavy as fuck. I love it. The cow bell makes me laugh every time.
Public Enemy #1 – has some great heavy riffs but overall is a good rock song. Excellent for singing along.
Merry-Go-Round – every Crue album has one shit song, almost by definition. This is the one for this album.
Take Me To The Top – a good jogging song. Decent plonky bass and excellent sliding harmonics work from Mick Mars. Good chugging guitars too.
Piece of Your Action – Slower paced but not terrible. I do have a thing for lead guitars and just bass with no rhythm guitars added. Speeds up halfway through, goes mental.
Starry Eyes – A good start but then goes all soppy and I’m not sure I like it!
Too Fast For Love – quality song. Excellent riffage and good start-stop stuff. A classic of its time.
On With The Show – A good sing along as well. You can imagine this going down well live. Doesn’t quite hit the spot for me but I can see how it is a good song.

This is communication number 1943 so here are some things that happened that year, avoiding all the obvious shit:

Shoe rationing goes into effect in the USA.
The Paricutin volcano starts to appear in a field in Mexico.
A race riot in Detroit kills 34.
2-3 million die in the Bengal Famine.

August 30 2021August 30 2021

Is Three Enough?

I recently spent some time at RAF Syerston and saw plenty of flight simulators there and generally the fashion was that you can’t have too many screens. So, because I’ve had a spare screen sitting on the dining room table for the last eighteen months I decided to fit it, again, to the PC. The only place it can go is at “the top” although I’d be tempted to place it into an aircraft instruments position at some point. I had all the gear because I had already tried the monitor there, but didn’t like the look of it. I’ve probably changed my mind for now.

So, this screen shows the flight simulator running with aircraft view on the right and various instrument views on the other screens. I’m not entirely sure I like this set up and I will try another way of doing this.

Have changed to have the cockpit view spread across the two centre screens, ancillary instruments at the top and a tablet with flight information on it under the main screens. This set up makes more sense as far as I’m concerned. I know the items on the upper screen wouldn’t be there in a real cockpit but I don’t have the kit to move the monitor. It would take too much hassle to make it look proper and I don’t use the PC as a flight sim all the time anyway.

I’m not necessarily happy about the bezels in the middle of the cockpit view and I know I could adjust the offset to make it look slightly more realistic, but then I would also lose some of the centre instrumentation. I guess the only answer is a massive curved screen. Maybe I’ll get one sometime in the future but I am massively aware that my hot water boiler is fucked and I need to think sensibly about spending money for the next while!!

This is communication number 1942 and so here are a few [non WWII] things that happened that year:

The Sikorsky R-4 first flies
A coal dust explosion in china claims 1549 lives.
The first nuclear accident occurs in Leipzig.
Plutonium is isolated.
The first man-made self sustaining nuclear chain reaction at Stagg Field in Chicago.

August 29 2021August 29 2021

What I’ve Learnt About Education

To get through this let’s start with some assumptions and then we can take those and explain what I think about them. There are two scales for this. The macro and the micro, so how education considers the masses and how it treats the individual. Given my thinking style the following is likely to be a mess of thoughts and ideas rather than a coherent essay!

The Macro

I’m going to let you into a little secret. This is going to be controversial although maybe not that surprising if you’ve ever thought about education.

No one really knows what the education system is for, and no one is willing to decide the reason we do this.

Here’s my reasoning for this statement. No one has decided to state what examinations are for. What is their purpose. You might have some ideas about this but I don’t recall a Secretary Of State ever really telling us what the system is for. Let’s have a look:

Is the system to educate children so they know things? In this case they would be allowed to follow their own choices for learning and encouraged and supported by teachers and staff while progressing through whatever curriculum was attractive. Pupils would be supported to make progress and encouraged to develop their understanding. Learning would be at a speed which suits the individual and academic inquisitiveness encouraged. I don’t think you would have examinations. Just a written report about what how that individual could use their knowledge. This is not what happens in schools.

Is the system to measure pupils as a guide for future employers? If so then we would want a system that allows us to measure in a standard way each child across cohorts and the years. There would be a system in place that FAIRLY gave us a list of outcomes about each child. This is not what happens in schools. The measuring system is examinations and the results of those are used to measure individuals and schools which can’t be done effectively for each when the system is split like that, ask a statistician. We don’t have a system of examinations which compares across years because the results “keep going up”.

The government considers education to be a service which can be measured and that measurement is mostly the examination results of the individuals in the system. But how do you show progress? By progress I mean getting better examination results and not actual progress. The examination system is rigged to show better results each year because the exam boards are in competition with each other. Our current examination system does not do any of the things you think it does. The grade inflation – APPROVED BY THE REGULATOR – means that the grades don’t reflect an individual’s ability and they don’t reflect a school. The system is broken and no one seems to want to attempt to admit it.

One method for clearing up what the examinations do is to state that the results every year will be norm referenced. So, the top 5% will get a particular grade, the next 10% the next grade and so on. This would mean that the examination results each year would be the same. It is not the case that people ten years ago were any dumber than those today. If exam results were scored this way then the results a pupil achieves would reflect their ability compared to the rest of the cohort. BUT, this method would not allow the results to show “progress”. Government couldn’t say that their interventions with the system are working because the examination results would be static forever. There would need to be other ways to measure the success of policy changes and they would be academic studies which, because they can control for effects, would show that policy changes do fuck all to results and teachers just try their best most of the time.

For me, as an educator I would like the system to encourage personal growth and intellectual curiousness in people. I would like students to want to learn and to be fascinated by whatever aspects of the universe they want. This can’t be measured and so is highly unlikely to ever become a governmental system because every right wing government in my lifetime [which is all of them post 1979] wants education measured, to spit out students with certain letters or numbers to show how they can be economically viable.

On a gross scale we expect the education system to develop academically, and with knowledge, the youth of the current generation. We want them to know things useful to themselves and we then want to measure them as a guidance for how they can be used within society to progress the zeitgeist. We want people to have a list of “things I’m good at” and we want them to be able to use that knowledge. We want people to add to society, to be useful. We want people to be motivated and to learn. We want the system to be fair and for all people to have the same opportunities.

The recent experience of Covid Lockdowns showed me more than any other time that the education system is firstly a childcare system for allowing parents to contribute economically to society while their children are not with them. While I consider that a by-product of the education system it is clear that parents fucking love the fact that they don’t have to spend all day with their children and that schools can take them and look after them. Pre-Covid I don’t think I would have mentioned this as my first point but that is how it felt with comments on social media and generally the new and old media going on about how hard it is to have your offspring constantly around at home.

The government seems to think that the education system is a linear thing forcing knowledge into children to make them economically productive. Hence all the moaning about lost learning recently and generally down-talking students and pupils. It appears that to the government the education system is a “putting knowledge in kids” system and a childcare system. It’s down to teachers and educators to reach the economic worth of children and this is measured by examination results. The job that we do is measured by examinations. This system has only been around for around twenty years, before that I think schools were seen as successful if they didn’t burn down each year.

In the grand scheme of things we know that you should be careful what you measure to garner success. Schools have become objects of pushing exam results rather than education. It’s all about making the school look as though it’s doing a good job because good results mean a good school. I don’t think good results mean a good school. In the overall sense there is also an issue with random variations in results being used to push particular interventions. Consider that natural variation is a thing and so results just will vary from year to year. Also, consider that schools are constantly measuring children and comparing their results through the years against a benchmark from when they were eleven years old. There is NO leeway for individuality in this.

Some schools have numbers people. Staff whose job is to analyse the numbers and results as pupils progress through the years. In my career I have met many of these staff and only a few actually understood numbers and statistics. Many places even outsource their number manipulation to companies whose market did not exist twenty years ago. This number tracking is meant to allow schools to track pupils and intervene where necessary while also tracking staff and cohorts to ensure they are making progress. Well, that’s great you might think. Managers in school can see which staff are doing a good job, which staff aren’t, which pupils are making good progress and which pupils aren’t. Here’s the thing: if you’re good as a “middle manager” then you know your staff, you know their weaknesses, you can intervene and help staff. If you are a vaguely human teacher then you know when pupils are struggling, you know when pupils are doing well. We don’t need this layer of bureaucracy to help us do our job. Amazing, I know, but the management intervention just isn’t needed.

Schools are clearly a place to dump children for childcare so parents can contribute to the economy of the country. It genuinely feels as though that is the primary by-product of our education system. Just look at all the shit that followed schools closing for the Covid lockdowns we had. Parents seemed unable to cope with having their children around all the time and the economy ground to a halt because children had to be looked after. I honestly thought that learning stuff just happens to be the least important thing that education does.

The education system has never been about learning for learning’s sake, no matter how much idealists like to say it.

The Micro

Let’s look at what we might expect for a pupil attending a school. I’m writing this from the perspective of a parent and interactions with parents of pupils I teach. I know that I would like to think that all staff at a school have my child’s interests as their main focus. I would want them to understand my child’s personality, I want them to understand the motivations and weaknesses of my child and I want them to work tirelessly to help my child achieve their “potential”. More about “potential” later.

In the day to day running of lessons in a secondary school I can assure you there is no way that I, as a teacher, am able to do my best for every pupil all the time. I teach classes of around 30 pupils for an hour at a time. Five classes a day means 150 pupils. All of whom we would like to think I work to improve their knowledge each day. The reality is nothing at all like that. Teachers are human. Pupils are human. Some days it’s all we can do to get through a lesson and get to the end of the day. Some days everything flows really well and we might consider we have done a good job. Some days it’s a heap of shit and you know you’ve done terrible and write that day off.

In the fixed period of time that exists in a lesson I can focus on a few pupils. There is no chance I can help all pupils to the same extent. You would like to think that I understand all of the weaknesses of the individuals and have the chance to boost them all through a lesson. But let’s look at this. I teach for around twenty to thirty minutes each lesson, longer in sixth form lessons. I then set some work, so by the time the pupils are actually doing something there might be twenty minutes of practice time. In that time I’m working to evaluate at the class level what they understood. The individual gets lost in that. I have, at most, thirty seconds to help an individual if they are all to be treated the same. This is just not going to happen.

I have conversations with parents where they ask what specific weaknesses their child has with a topic or subject. You honestly think I can keep a matrix in my head of which topics for which kid for around two hundred children? I might be special, mentally, but I am definitely not that special. That’s why we hand examinations back to pupils, so they can evaluate what they can do and what they can’t.

Parents want to know that I have every pupil’s progress in my main focus. While I can do that, kind of, sort of, it’s not as good as parents think. The government has policies which force me to focus on a few in class and consider their needs. It could be those at the top or it could be those at the bottom or it could be those with special needs. All of this energy is lost for the person in the middle. I honestly don’t think I can focus on all the groups the school policy forces me to.

Here’s the rub. Education comes down to the pupils. Humans are complicated lumps of sentient meat and having to focus every day for five hours a day is an impossibility. It’s hard work. Pupils don’t and can’t do that. They have to be teased and coaxed into working on school stuff. That’s all fine but with my subject as soon as you are a little behind the rest of everything is going to be a struggle. We change topics and move things around to spread out the types of work we do but in the grand scheme of things other factors are always a bigger influence on pupils that teachers in an individual lesson. This has been understood for many years. I don’t understand why it isn’t understood by government or most school management.

There may be some terrible teachers out there. In fact there are. I’ve worked with some. But you are always going to have a ten percent tail. They are always going to be there. You can’t really do anything about that tail. I know that schools pretty much hope that they leave at some point and go somewhere else. For me, my input to teaching relies on my energy levels and some times that’s high and others it’s low. I probably have a lower “fuck it” threshold that most, but then I think my lessons go OK and my pupils broadly do OK. Oh, OK is not an acceptable outcome. OK just means middling and so all lessons are meant to be excellent or something similar. Gone are the days when OK means OK. Being OK is fine for me, but then I’m not a manager.

POTENTIAL. This word gets bandied about as though all pupils have some lofty goals they should be aiming for. In reality it means fuck all. What happens if you reach your potential? Can you stop. Is “potential” a limiting factor? I absolutely hate that word in the education context. As a teacher I want pupils to do the best they can for the majority of the time. All while recognising that humans are complicated and sometimes this just doesn’t happen. That child has potential just means we think they have the capacity to learn a lot – more likely they have the capacity to get good examination results which isn’t always the same as learning. “Reach your potential” – I hate it.

The Secret

In ten years from your GCSEs no one is going to give a shit about what you got. They open doors initially but they don’t slam them shut for you. There are plenty of future opportunities to get where you want, you just need to find your motivation.

This is communication number 1941, so here are some things that happened that year:

An earthquake kills 1200 in Saudi Arabia.
The valley of geysers is discovered in Kamchatka.
The first British jet is flown.
A lot of pretty depressing holocaust stuff.

August 27 2021August 27 2021

RAFAC NAC SYE

In a kind of desperation to be somewhere (anywhere) else along with missing all things aviation based I volunteered to spend some time in Lincolnshire helping staff the RAFAC National Aerospace Camp. This event had been running for about six years and it seemed a good opportunity to use my knowledge and skills along with networking and meeting people of note. There was a large length of time when it was unclear whether this would go ahead or in what form it could run, due to changing Covid-19 restrictions and decisions in the upper echelons of the management structure. In the end it was decided to make this camp non-residential and so cadets would arrive each day from a base, brought by their parents or coaches from Wing. I wasn’t needed all week as a newbie and so I spent just two days at the camp getting to know the people and organisation. It was also a chance to meet old friends, mainly TR, who I last saw at the Shawbury camp two years ago.

The main crew for the camp seem to stay at PWG but I volunteered to stay ay Cranwell for two reasons. One, I’m not important enough to be with the main crew and Two, I might be able to sneak into CHOM, finally, and stand on the carpet [old traditions]. It’s quite different going to a base when you’ve been on many compared with your first time. I knew my way around and knew where to park along with knowing shortcuts through the mess which is huge.

College Hall Officers' Mess, RAFC Cranwell — College Hall Officers’ Mess, RAFC Cranwell

The above picture is not where I was staying, I was in the effective transit mess called Daedalus Officers’ Mess. The above picture shows CHOM and I went in their with the other staff staying at RAF College Cranwell because there is a carpet you may only walk on once you have your commission. When I was first at Cranwell in 2014 I was not permitted near CHOM because there was a passing out parade that day and it was a busy area [it did mean there was a Reds flyover though]. On the Tuesday evening, once we had returned from Syerston, three of us wandered over to CHOM and were allowed to have a look around and get photographs of us on the carpet. The porter was very helpful and lovely.

So, I finally feel official. I’ve stood on the carpet and been in CHOM. I’ve completed my OIC, albeit somewhat delayed. I feel happy that I managed to do my OIC in person as recently staff have been doing them virtually and so won’t get the chance to stay in Daedalus or visit CHOM until they are fortunate enough to be staying close by on some event. It’s quite likely the RAF team I’m in will have a “team building” few days sometime to have a wander around the noisy places in Lincolnshire.

The Tuesday for me was mostly seeing how the camp worked along with a brief chat with the Camp Comm. I saw a talk with Serco where they show us various gliders and engines. I liked the engines, they were cutaway versions so I could see inside. I knew a fair bit of what was going on so I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to the talk although I did chat with the engineer after the cadets and had some parts of the turbines explained.

Inside this hanger were loads of gliders and it looked as though they were the original stock from my days in the corps so I looked up my gliding log on this site. I was trying to spot an airframe that I had flown in and while walking along the line of “those yet to be maintained” I spotted one.

From this communication you can see that I’ve flown in 585 three times for around 28 minutes total. Not bad really. I do keep checking this site whenever I see an aircraft type that I know I’ve been in to see if it’s one of “mine”. Once outside we had a talk from a current glider pilot who also flew Tornados and he showed us around the two Tornados and the Tucano that were sitting on the pan.

I prefer the GR type of Tornado rather than the F type but I do have an image of the F type which is a rare one because it’s an F2 but fitted with F3 type engines and so the rear of the plane looks super stupid. But, I guess it worked. Lunch was provided by a field kitchen, and a fantastic job they did too, I was super impressed with the whole set up. In the afternoon I talked to people about PTT and how I can deliver that in my unit.

Wednesday was my final day at the camp, only here for two days if you remember and a chance to chat to people about PTT and also help with the car marshalling as parents were dropping cadets off in the base. It was nice to be involved and chat to new people. The main event for the camp was the Wednesday afternoon where a private airshow was organised and the bigwigs were invited to see what we do. There was an Air Marshall, the ACO Commandant and others. I just hung around with the few people I had go to know while my head slowly burned in the cloudy weather – we can’t wear lids on the airfield and we have to wear uniform so we can’t wear a baseball cap and I forgot my sunscreen.

On the ground was an Apache from Wattisham and a Juno from Shawbury. It was the actual Juno that I had flown in two years ago which was pretty cool. The flying display consisted of the Red Arrows, the Chinook [which also landed], a Spitfire, a Hurricane, the RAF Falcons, and finally the Typhoon.

Red Arrows - Head to Head — Red Arrows – Head to Head

I had wondered whether to use my camera a lot and possibly concentrate too much on getting the perfect picture or do I just watch and absorb the atmosphere. I chose to just take the odd picture here and there on my phone. It was a really chilled out atmosphere and a good chance to chat to plenty of people. The Red Arrows performed their “rolling display” because the cloud cover was pretty low. The BBMF aircraft were impressive for their age and the Chinook was very – how the hell do you make it do that? I really wanted to see the Typhoon because – NOISE. I though even the nine jets of the Reds were quiet. Maybe it’s growing up under a flightpath that means not a lot bothers me.

I was on marshalling duties when the Typhoon display took place. So I was an extra 800m away from the display centre and, while slightly disappointed, I still had a good view. I was basically in charge of keeping the parents calm and in the car park as the Typhoon display was delayed slightly by technical issues. When this thing did arrive the noise made me very happy as the first minute or two is at 100 power and full reheat. You know it’s loud when you can’t talk to the person next to you. It was brilliant and well worth driving through the bloody Dartford tunnel to see. I had a really good time at Syerston and made some good contacts. I’m looking forward to returning next year.

Hmmm, this is communication number 1939. So, in keeping with tradition I write a few things that happened in that year, I’m going to avoid the obvious:

30,000 killed in earthquake in Chile.
Borley Rectory is destroyed by fire.
Lina Medina gave birth aged FIVE, I mean, WTF?
A passenger air service starts between USA and UK.
32,700 people die in earthquake in Turkey.

August 23 2021August 23 2021

This Is What We Are – Fuckshovel

I bought this album because Smith and I were due to see this band at some festival somewhere at some time. I haven’t seen this band. I seem to remember the album being OK. Nothing special but also not terrible.

This is communication number 1938, here are some things that happened in that year:

Oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia.
The Yellow River flood kills at least 400,000.
“I have in my hand a piece of paper”.
LSD is first synthesised.
Nuclear fission of uranium discovered.

August 23 2021August 23 2021

Reminiscence

Another day to fill and so I booked another trip to the cinema. What’s quite nice is that I book films without knowing a single thing about them. The previous film, The Night House, has been playing on my mind and I’m concerned for the main character. At the end of the film it was clearly implied that she was safe from the demon just because she didn’t kill herself, but if, as the film wants us to believe, a demon is after her then how can it be defeated? Oh, maybe it can’t affect her directly which was why it was using her husband to attempt to kill her? Nope, the film clearly shows the demon affecting her directly so it can’t be that. Maybe it’s because she didn’t kill herself and so the demon is giving up? Nope, can’t be that because that fucker had chased her from the shadows since her NDE following a car crash. This is the problem with supernatural horror films with demons and shit. You can’t make them internally consistent because it’s all bollocks. I’d still go for the mental breakdown version of this film, but then it has the neighbour seeing the “shadow” at the end of the film, so who knows what the intention was. Maybe a I care too much about this film? Maybe it deserves a higher rating? Nope, I’m not going to watch it again.

So, I drove to the cinema on this Sunday and actually got there before the showtime. This allowed me to take a photograph of the river. As you can see from the green plant layers on the nearest pillar that the tide is reasonably low [it was even lower when I Ieft the cinema]. Don’t look too closely at the nearest bridge otherwise you’ll see all the strengthening bolts and rods and start to get concerned about the integrity of the structure. A lot of bridges have this down this way and I think it’s because of the gradual increase in maximum limits of truck mass. I’ve written about the bridges before.

Three Bridges - River Medway — Three Bridges – River Medway

Sometimes after watching a film I have to think about the rating and what I consider to be “fair”, although this is cancelled out by the rating system that I created and you can read about here. This particular film soon dove down to a lowly rating while watching it. I’ll explain shortly. Here’s my rating, but Twitter based.

I watched Reminiscence (2021) and rated it 4/10 – IMDb – https://t.co/xkgcZyCw2D
— Ian Parish (@iparish) August 23, 2021

Oh, my god. This film was utter shit. I even think I might have been generous with a 4/10 rating. I hated it after about ten minutes and that hate did not dissipate as time went on. Even now, the day after, I feel angry at how bad this film was and I don’t have any connections to it.

Let me start off with a good thing. I quite liked the world that was drowned and how they played with Miami being under the sea. This was quite good. I don’t like the dams they created because they looked at though they were designed by a five year old and they wouldn’t work. I’m not sure the production designers had any concept of the depth pressure relationship and how much water actually weighs. I did wonder if I was meant to recognise the city from the skyline and before I knew it was Miami I had settled on Chicago but I was wrong in a big way. Oh, Miami and most of Florida is absolutely fucked when it comes to sea rises. As is New Orleans, another city featured in the film.

Another thing I quite liked about this film was that during a fight scene the camera stayed at a distance and actually followed the fight rather than get all “in the action” and blurry. The underwater scenes actually looked pretty too, but they suffered like all underwater scenes in movies that people can’t hold their breath for that long and the “action” is super slow.

Now it’s time for all the bad in this shit movie which I’m going to write as a stream of consciousness so watch out. None of the voice over was necessary. Why is he set up in a bank? How does the electricity still work? How did he get into the mansion at the end? Why is this such a tart with a heart film – it could have been better? How many times do I need to see the same scene? What the fuck was this film actually about? Who the fuck wrote this utter shit? How did it get 68 million dollars to be made? Why is more than 30 volts terrible? Why was the bad man facially scarred? Scarring is one of those things that is only on bad people in films, it’s terrible. Why is this film?

I absolutely hated this film, it was shit and I only stayed to see how they decided to resolve the film, which, much like the rest of it, was poor. Fuck this film, it’s a heap of shit.

This is communication number 1937 and so here, in keeping with recent tradition, is a list of some things that happened that year.

GM recognises a workers’ union.
Over 295 students and teachers are killed in an explosion in New London, Texas.
Police kill ten unarmed demonstrators in Chicago.
724,000 people are killed in a Soviet “purge”.
The last Bali tiger dies.

August 22 2021August 22 2021

Third Stage – Boston

I had a Boston phase and their first album still strikes me as utter genius. I’m not saying this one isn’t brilliant I’m just saying that I couldn’t tell you whether this album is good or not. I don’t think I’ve listened to it all the way through and all Boston listens are effectively part of a shuffle. It’s not something I deliberately choose to listen to.

Communication number 1936, here’s some shit that happened in that year:

Italy gains victory in Ethiopia.
Alan Turing introduces the Turing Machine concept.
Stress as a biological condition is first recognised.
The Tasmanian Tiger becomes extinct.
A levee burst in Japan causes 375 deaths.

August 22 2021August 22 2021

Me And Twitter – It’s Complicated

Many years ago I can remember opening a Twitter account to try and follow Formula 1 stuff as it kept being mentioned on the telecasts. I knew I wasn’t really into social media and had avoided Faceshit before then. I only kept that account open for a few days before shutting it down as I knew it was a rabbit hole I didn’t really want to enter. Not long later I had another go and got into Twitter. A while later I then decided to have a second Twitter account so I could follow all the stuff I was interested in while keeping one account for close friends and stuff I really wanted to see. Back in those days I definitely used Twitter as a distraction, a thing to look at now and then and while away some time, a thing for finding information and following the news.

I think I was reasonably happy with the system. I could see what friends were saying on one account and follow all the shit on another so I had it all nicely organised. Then. 2016 happened. In terms of a crock of shit year 2016, I think, still rates as the worst I’ve experienced. The lies and propaganda spread for the two big plebiscites that year really got to me. It was when I realised that this country [UK] is full of people who are a “little bit racist”. Actually, most of the things that have happened since that vote also confirm that the majority of people in this country are a “little bit racist”. Then, there was the presidential election in the USA where citizens of that country proved that they are definitely “quite a lot racist”. The comments and commentary on Twitter slowly got to me emotionally. There always seemed to be shit happening and people would jump on to make comments and yet, when I listened to the news on the radio, these things weren’t mentioned.

Twitter and other social media sites seem to spend too much time reacting against things rather than actually consider them. There is an instantaneous effect where rage flies around and then the storm dissipates quickly enough. I got caught up in this and it did not help my mental health to be confronted with all that confrontation. I eventually made the decision to get rid of my “other people” account and keep the personal account. This stopped me looking at all the shit that people decided to commentate on. I haven’t had Twitter on my phone for quite a while as I got into some trouble at work following a tweet at the beginning of the current pandemic. I’m still not sure whether that tweet should have got me in trouble and I ponder that a lot, trying to work out my responsibilities.

A part of me would like to remove myself completely from Twitter. But, it is too ingrained in this website. Every communication I write tweets a thing out to let the world know there is new content. There are also a large number of links within this site that go to Twitter along with quite a few embeds. So, in the interests of sanity in keeping this site working I won’t be shutting down the Twitter account. I only comment on Twitter now and then. I use it to keep track of my current #roundtheworldtrip in X-Plane. Twitter is with me now, but I only look at it once a week or so in normal working times and so I feel mentally stable with that relationship.

See my Twitter feed on this site.

This is communication number 1935, there are reasons here, this is what happened in that year:

There’s a coup attempt in Greece.
The king of Siam abdicates.
The north American Texan first flies.
Air Mail from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

August 21 2021August 21 2021

Themes – Vangelis

Not overly sure why I got this! I think I had seen Blade Runner and wanted some nice calming music in the same style. I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve played it al the way through. Sometimes songs will come on as part of a shuffle and it depends on my mood as to whether I skip or not.

This is communication number 1934. Here are some things that happened that year:

The Japanese invaded Manchuria.
The Philippines is given some autonomous control from the USA.
A typhoon in Japan kills 3036 people.
Australian Frontier Wars end.

August 21 2021August 21 2021

The Night House

Yesterday I went to the cinema because I like going to the cinema and there wasn’t really a lot else to watch. The film was being shown in screen 8 and that’s my favourite of them apart from the shitty right speaker which I might have to email the cinema about, but still, a film being shown in screen 8 is a bonus. The traffic was bad heading to the cinema so I missed all the adverts which can only be considered a good thing but I’m experienced enough to know that the film normally starts 15-20 minutes after the advertised time. While checking the state of the tide I decided to take a photograph to illustrate the view I have.

In the picture above you can see the Medway bridges, I wrote about them here, the North Downs and a little bit of Borstal along with boats and things.

Medway Tides - Annotated — Medway Tides – Annotated

I look for the following as I drive along the esplanade.

A – the edge of the mud bank.
B – the little water channel.
C – the “dip”.
D – how high are the boats that are anchored over this side of the river.

Each of those four things and how much I can see or not tell me about the state of the tide. I suspect I probably have spent too long of my life wondering about and looking at this view – who cares anyway?

After watching the film I rated it on IMDB and there’re communications that deal with the rating system but the most important one is this one. At some point after I’ve rated it I tweet the result.

I watched The Night House (2020) and rated it 6/10. IMDb – https://t.co/PQeNhhDNRW
— Ian Parish (@iparish) August 21, 2021

There are going to be spoilers ahead so you should consider yourself warned that I will give away a lot of the film plot points in the next few paragraphs. Overall I actually nearly enjoyed this film. About halfway through I remember trying to work out whether I cared about the main character or whether I was just staying in the theatre to see how it ends and it turned out I actually wanted to know how the person coped. Now, let me point out something I think film makers need to know:

You don’t need fucking pop-scares to make a film scary.
I Parish

It was a touch annoying, for me, that this film could have been a decent psychological thriller and an investigation into a woman’s grief for her husband and yet, for me again, it was spoilt very slightly by the supernatural aspects of it. The big problem for these films and their relationship to me is that I don’t believe in any of that shit and so I just write it off as childish. Let’s get into this in a little more detail:

One way of interpreting this film is that, following a near death experience, a malevolent spirit keeps trying to claim the “soul” he is owed by whispering to the woman’s husband that he must kill her. To avoid killing the wife he loves the husband kidnaps and murders women who looked like his wife to trick the spirit into thinking he had killed his wife. Eventually the husband kills himself to save his wife from being murdered by the spirit through him. The woman knows nothing of this until she discovers some photographs on her husbands phone and computer of women who look like her. She considers killing herself to escape the torture of the spirit who has finally decided to take her on himself rather than act through a proxy. The woman’s best friend saves her and the neighbour sees a dark shadow on a boat.

The upshot of this interpretation of the film is that spirits want what they are owed and are willing to act through someone else to get them even though they can interact with the main person themselves. They are lazy? Or just like contrived plots? I don’t know. The film seemed to want us to believe this interpretation because of the shadow at the end of the film. If the film was written with this in mind then it really opens up many many questions about an awful lot of the film and kind of removes all the mystery.

For me, a better interpretation is that, following her husbands suicide a woman descends into psychological and emotional hell. She discovers some photographs on his phone and twists her reality around to make sense of them. Slowly, she goes mad, including hitting herself onto the mirror and making up stories about finding bodies. She suffers many hallucinations, including some of extreme sexual torture. The alcohol keeps pushing her towards suicide and eventually after deciding that she needs to die to stop her emotional pain she rows out on the lake only to be found by her friend who “saves” her. Now, the film stops at this point but it would have been far more scary and mysterious if this was the acknowledged reality.

I wrote the words “extreme sexual torture” in the previous paragraph mostly because this was mentioned at the beginning of the film and close to the end of the film I found myself wondering where the sexual torture was. I didn’t really see any. There was a statuette thing that the main character found but there wasn’t really any sex stuff. The movie had teased me but failed to deliver. Not that I wanted to see that type of thing. Sexual violence [unless consensual in which case I suppose you could argue it’s not violent] is a horrible thing.

To think the best of this film is to remove all the supernatural and just read the meaning as the complete psychological breakdown of a grieving widow. Humans are complicated enough without adding all that god-shit to everything.

This is number 1933 and so here are some things that happened that year:

The bodyline Ashes tour.
Dachau is opened.
The birth of radio astronomy.
FM radio is patented.

August 20 2021August 20 2021

The Years Thing

I’ve taken to writing a few things about what happened in each year of the same number as the communication that I post. I’m can only vaguely remember why I started this and I will do my best to explain. I also want to give some reasoning to point out that I’m not a complete shit and quite respective of other cultures [generally].

Quite a while ago the number of communications written for this site was a question in a quiz at work. I was somewhat surprised that people cared enough to try and create a question based on what I write but you should also be warned that a lot of flattery is just used sarcastically. Anyway, I started adding the odd tweet after a communication tweet just saying what number those words were.

Number 1806
— Ian Parish (@iparish) February 6, 2021

I think I might have started doing some “year” things way back in communications 1660 or so as it seemed that a lot was happening around the world that time and maybe I should just add it as a feature of this site. I think I gave up. I’m not sure what happened and I’m not even sure how long ago I was writing those communications. FYI I’m also considering shortening “communication” to Comms but that just feels wrong at the moment. I made a conscious choice to call these things communications and so I should continue to use my own terminology.

Recently I have been heading to communication number 2000 and so I wanted to make sure that I mark that with the respect that is suitable and required. Also, I wanted to mark some of the things in history that I feel people might not know. Most of the things I have written at the bottom of my verbiage aren’t going to be the most famous events that people seem to know. I have deliberately chosen particular happenings that I think tell a story or give some ideas of the human sacrifice to get us to this point.

The things I chose to write at the end of each communication are what I find interesting. I’m trying to point out the tragedies, the hard fought rights, the little things that show just how terrible and horrible we are as a species to our fellow people. Once of the things I have learnt in the short period that I’ve been doing this the amount that countries/governments/organisations have changed over a short period of time. In the early 1900s as I am now the “west” are still carving up Africa and the Middle East along with massive political changes in the far east. It’s quite amazing really. I wonder if growing up in the relative stability of the Cold War gave me a false sense of security with the political organisation of the world. As I write this Afghanistan is going to shit, again.

There is quite an issue with dealing with what year it is. I am using the calendar of the “common era” or at least the one that most of the world agrees to use to cope with organising business. I do not endorse that particular calendar or any other. Many cultures use different calendar systems and as explained in this podcast the casual use of language can really exclude or affect many people.

So, here we go with a few things that happened in 1932 [according to the common calendar].

The Anglican church bans the church re-marriage of divorced people.
Johnny Weissmuller first stars as Tarzan. I write this as those films were such a part of my childhood and I now suspect they are hugely problematic!
WW1 veterans march on Washington DC to claim money they are owed – clearly Govt gives very few shits about the human cost of imperialism and armies.
A hurricane kills around 2500 in Cube.

August 19 2021August 19 2021

The X Factor – Iron Maiden

I am not sure if I’ve ever really listened to this album.

This is communication number 1931. Here’s what happened that year:

Oswald Mosely founds the New Party.
Porsche is founded.
The China floods have deaths between 400,000 and 4,000,000.
The Panama Canal is closed for a while due to damage by earthquakes.

August 19 2021August 19 2021

The Wrong Side Of Heaven and the Righteous Side Of Hell – Five Finger Death Punch

I think all I had to say about FFDP I said in the previous communication about them. There seems to be a bit of a dip in quality albums in this area of the alphabet. Or, it’s just that there are a lot of Ts and coupled with my mistake of the “THE” word creates a stretch of albums I’m not fussed about.

This is communication number 1930 and I’m kinda trying to beat my “most in a month” record while at the same time trying to keep the quality up. It’s 19 days into the month and progress is good. I’ve got some ideas for longer communications too so maybe they will get written when I have some more time and freedom? Here are some things that happened in 1930:

The existence of Pluto, dwarf planet, is confirmed.
Lili Elbe begins sex reassignment surgeries.
A fire in the Ohio penitentiary kills 320 people.
The last recorded lynching of African Americans in USA.
The Pope stresses the sanctity of marriage, the ban on artificial birth control and the church’s view on abortion [what a cunt].

August 18 2021August 18 2021

Base Progress

I spent a few hours yesterday gathering resources to start the landscaping project on my base area in the Caves and Cliffs part one section of my world. I expect to move to a new base area once the next part of the update is released.

In the above image you can see railways over the sea connecting the main components of the base. Sitting in a minecart allows me to eat and get my inventory sorted while also travelling from one place to another. I am going to keep the railways but I wanted to make it look a little prettier. So, I decided to claim back some land and build an artificial island.

The above picture shows the start of the landscaping works. My first thought was to try and make it look natural but I’m actually now keen to make it obviously man-made. Let’s see what I can be bothered to do. It turns out I’ve also made a secret harbour area and so I need to add in railways to that somehow. The pond in the middle is going to be for the axolotls I gather. I also need to light up quite a bit of the work so to avoid mobs spawning. I don’t want all of it to look the same so I have some other ideas for joining to New Holland. Look out for a walk around video on my YouTube channel at some point.

This is communication number 1929 and so here are some things that happened in that year:

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu moves to India. This woman is horrible.
The gulag system is created in Russia.
A rocket powered aircraft is demonstrated.
The Afghan civil war ends.

August 18 2021August 18 2021

The Way Of The Fist – Five Finger Death Punch

I got a number of FFDP albums after I saw them at Download and then a location in London. I don’t mind when one of their songs comes on in a shuffle but I am definitely not bothered about playing a complete album. I’m not too fussed by their double bass drumming all the way through complete songs. Chaps, you have to have variation. But then, I’m old so maybe that is the way to go? So, there may be good stuff on here, there may not. I’m also trying to beat one of my previous best communications-per-month totals so that is why I’m publishing a lot this month.

In 1928 some of the following things happened:

Frederick Griffith proves the existence of DNA.
A dam failed north of LA killing 600.
The voting age for women in UK lowers from 30 to 21. Prior to this only women over 30 and with property could vote.
Farnsworth demonstrates the first all-electric television system.

August 18 2021

The War Of The Worlds – Jeff Wayne

This is actually a really good album in that late 1970s way. I’m glad Jeff has made a shit-ton of money from this. I like the fact that the first Martians land near Jase’s house, also loads of the place names are places I know. But those two things were more about HG than Mr Wayne. Oh well.

Communication number 1927 so in keeping with recent tradition and recognising this communication feels like a “cheat”, there’s not much to it, here’s what happened in 1927, curated by me:

British troops land in Shanghai which is British [apparently].
The UK formally becomes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The Mississippi floods and kills 700,000.
Iraq gains independence from the UK.

August 17 2021August 17 2021

Not Everywhere Has One Of These

One of the things I did this summer was go and see my parents whom I have seen little since early 2020 because, you know, Covid and pandemic. It was nice to travel out of Kent for once and see them. It turns out my father is somewhat interested in history which, much like his love of frogs, is something that I was never really aware of, it is something he has rarely ever spoken of. Anyway, a local, MR, gives walking tours of the village with history talks and as much as he wasn’t doing one this day, my mum had been on the walk and so we covered the same grounds.

The huts you can see in the picture are the remains of a World War 2 prisoner of war camp that housed around 1500 prisoners. It’s about four hundred metres from the house where I grew up and I can’t believe that, as a kid, I never trespassed and explored, but I didn’t! There were plenty of other places in the village I explored but not this. There are quite a few links to blogs and such like from other people who have explored this urban land and so if you just google POW Camp 116 you’ll see loads of results including national news about a planning application being turned down [good].

It would be a shame for these buildings to be demolished. I would hope that somehow funds are raised to at least preserve them as they are as a monument to the folly of human interactions and power seeking. I write this as Afghanistan descends into hell after the US and UK completely pulled out. I’ve been adding information about years of the twentieth century to my communications and it is quite clear to me that global politics has never been stable and it’s all about power and wealth for the few.

This is communication 1926 and so here are some of the things that happened that year:

Marital Law in the UK following a General Strike.
Portugal has a military coup.
Women are banned from holding public office in Italy.
Deutsche Luft Hansa is founded.

August 14 2021August 14 2021

The Sleeping System – 2021

This is my solution to – how do you split a small room into separate rooms? I had been trying to work out how to give my kids a bit of privacy and their own area in the house which isn’t very big. I had thought about a loft conversion which I’ve had in other houses I’ve lived in but I can’t afford that type of house conversion. I thought about a wall down the middle of the room to make two separate rooms but they would both end up being quite small. So, I did what everyone does and Googled to see what ideas other people had. This was the best result I had:

I don’t have a larger size image and I’m not even sure there this idea came from but it struck me as a sensible way to split a small room. Each side of the room gains half a bed width worth of floor space compared to a wall down the middle. I also like the floating upper bunk with no supports but that wasn’t really what I was after. I spent an age thinking about how to do this. How to utilise the current sleeping system that I have and how much stuff I would need to buy and also what would I need to throw away. I just played this over in my head as I walked around or ran or cycled or drove somewhere.

I did some research on tools I would need to use as I didn’t want to have to hand saw all the wood. It seemed that I would need a circular saw and maybe a mitre saw. I already have a jigsaw for the tougher pieces. I also didn’t want to use a chair as my work bench so I looked up workbenches. I think the investment was worth it. I could use these things in the future and I do think I have achieved peak “man” now that I own a Black and Decker workmate and compound mitre saw.

I had a general plan for what I wanted to build and I worked out how many lengths of wood I would need along with screws and other bits and bobs. I had already wandered the halls of Homebase and Wickes to see what sort of materials were available and how much they were. I had always considered Wickes to be the cheaper option but for most of the wood and materials Homebase was cheaper. So, one morning I went to Homebase [one of the local three stores] and bought all the things I assumed I would need for the main sleeping system structure. The biggest challenge was trying to ensure that wooden spars 2400mm long would fit in the car and I had to hope I wouldn’t look an idiot in the car park when I either threw everything out or broke the boot door window. It turns out that there is plenty of room for a straight object 2400mm long in Bora Horza Gobuchul.

The Sleeping System 2021 - The Start — The Sleeping System 2021 – The Start`

This is the room at the start of the project once the existing furniture had been removed and the carpet lifted and chucked out the window. It took a good morning of work to remove all the stuff. The beds had to be broken down and the chipboard removed to the garden. All things being kept were offloaded to other parts of the house. The carpet was wrapped in bags to make sure it didn’t become overly wet in the rain of the English summer. While I worked I listened to music on my Sonos Roam. Once the test match season started I listened to Test Match Special on BBC Radio 5 Live. I’ve been getting back into the cricket a little recently and I am enjoying it.

The aim for the first day was to build the structure of the bunk bed sleeping system. The overall aim was to have the beds stacked with one opening to one side of the bedroom as and the other bunk opening to the other side of the room. This meant measuring to ensure fairness in terms of room placement along with plenty of time thinking about how to make the structure secure enough for grumpy teenagers for later on in life. It took around a day to build the basic structure to the point where the beds were mostly made. The room could be used from this point although there was plenty of time before it needed to have live sleepers. I can inform you that sleeping on a mattress on top of a mattress is not as comfortable as you think it might be. Every other room in the house was filled with stuff from the second bedroom.

The Sleeping System 2021 - End Day One — The Sleeping System 2021 – End Day One

The above image shows how the main structure was built and created to be stable and strong. The system is secured to the floor spars on one side and roof/ceiling spars on the other side. The triangles add lateral strength and all the wood is a good 2.5cm thick and so strong enough to support people. I even spent time manoeuvring myself around in the top bunk as I secured the system and it was nicely secure. There are some lessons I learnt as I built this. One is that if you keep a window open below this room then all the sawdust will sneak back into your house and cover everything with a fine layer of tiny particles. The image above is a room that has been hoovered and cleaned to show the best perspective of what has been completed.

Day two was about fixing hardboard to the surfaces that mean the room will be split into two and reasonably private each side of the bed. I had to make a number of decisions about placement of the boarding and the whole process took the entire day. I also created a small ladder for the top bunk – I quite enjoyed building this part! After this weekend of complete sweat and work I had organised a couple of days training cadets on the L98A2 weapons system. This was a nice break and gave me a chance to run ideas through my head ready for the next phase.

Painting an undercoat on the structure came next and this, I thought would take maybe an hour. Well, it turns out that painting takes roughly three times longer than I had expected and I had actually just run out of the undercoat/primer at completion of the coat so this was fortunate. I did not enjoy painting the thing. The next day was the main coat. Both the primer tin and the main coat tin had said that one coat should be good enough and I hope that is the case. I still have about a litre of paint left ready for any touch ups that are needed.

I will say at this point that I’m not putting any more images in to this communication because this is where my kids live and it’s up to them what I show of their lives on this site. Given my profession and the age of my kids there are many opportunities for their compatriots to find out information about them that they wouldn’t want public. If I know you then I might send you a picture anyway. But overall, you’ll have to read the descriptions.

So, the bed part of the sleeping system was complete, nicely painted and the mattresses fitted perfectly well. Next up would be general furniture, some shelving, the lighting and the flooring. The shelving was just some things that I had already taken down before. There were two and so that was an easy decision to make what goes where. Lights were LED lights controlled by a remote and fitted to the house lighting system. There’s already a complete system of smart lights within the house and only two rooms without them [the bathroom and the stairs which isn’t really a room]. So the lights are controllable by voice and phone or even switches on the walls.

The flooring is a laminate thing which was measured and ordered and arrived within a week. it took a day to lay the flooring while listening to the cricket and getting covered in sawdust again. I also had to buy the beading which meant I aimed for the cheapest and now I can confirm that none of the wood items in this room match colours. It is a many wooded room. I also got annoyed/bored at doing the trimmings so I just stopped at some point and while I know where that is no-one else has pointed it out to me. Maybe one day . . . .

The last thing was to build a couple of pieces of furniture which I bought from Argos and then wait for the glue to dry because I never just screw things together. Everything gets glued. It makes it stronger and less likely to wobble as time goes by. Finally the furniture, clothes, toys, electronics and all storage forms were placed in the the sleeping system room. Finally the rest of the house looked back to normal after three weeks of nicely placed chaos. It is nice to have the space back in the house. I am pleased with the sleeping system and I hope it lasts. At least I know how to fix any part of it should that be required.

I had intended to use this summer time to also clear the loft of things that I don’t want but my energies have been used up and I am now just chilling the fuck out. I don’t want to spend another few days of lugging things around and making the house a mess again. Once again I think this job will be pushed to next year. Also, the bath needs replacing and I’m considering doing that myself. I reckon I could do it. Possibly. But as long as I have a few weeks it’s definitely a job I would be prepared to do. Next year for that too.

Communication number 1925 requires a list of some things that happened that year:

The RAF bomb mountain strongholds in South Waziristan.
The Scopes trial.
The SS are formed.
Enclosed double-decker buses are used in London for first time.

August 14 2021August 14 2021

Mapping My World

I play a lot of Minecraft. I’ve been into it since the start of the first pandemic lockdown when my kids talked a lot about it and I decided it’d be nice to know what they are talking about. So I gave it a go. I have loved it every since. I mean, I made a YouTube series on my megabuild in one of our worlds.

It was an interesting experience doing the recordings once the build was complete. I had to learn how to play the game, or at least wander around, while also talking about what I have done and I found that quite tricky at first and so there were plenty of recordings that I deleted for quality purposes. I am also not going to edit the videos once recorded because that’s a level of caring I don’t have.

For a long time I have used some software t create maps of my world. I know this is cheating to a certain extent but I have decided that it’s ok to do somethings but not others. I think it’s ok to have a map and I think it’s ok to have coordinates turned on. Other than that I don’t employ any other “cheats”. I have played in some worlds with teleporting and keep inventory turned on but to be quite frank that makes it too easy. There should be an element of death and destruction within the game. The random things are what make it interesting for me. So, I don’t really play in creating mode, in fact I’ve only ever been in creative mode once, and I don’t have many “cheats” turned on. Everything I have done is in survival mode, because it’s more interesting to me.

The above map shows the area of my current base. Once the Caves And Cliffs Part One update was released I went a long way in the nether and popped out wherever it was in the overworld. The aim was to generated new areas of the world using the latest version of Minecraft. I suspect that I’ll do this again once the Part 2 update comes out and start a new-new base there.

Things to note in the map of my world are the mob-spawner just SE of the centre of the map along with an island, called New Holland, just SW of the spawner. The island is around 70% man-made in terms of area and houses my slave villagers and farm animals. There are two iron-golems there to protect the villagers which is nice I guess. It is my trading area. From the villagers I have easy access to mending and silk touch enchantments for tools. Over the next while I think I need to look more into potions and learn how they work.

Just left of centre in the map is my portal to the nether where I popped out originally when finding a new area for the latest update. There are three railways that connect this hub with the island, the spawner and my crop farm and storage area. Just NE of centre is my crop farm – currently wheat and potatoes – along with a subterranean storage area and my bed on top of a hill nearby. I’ll see if I can get some screenshots or do a video walk around of this new base area. I should probably do a video of the old base area in this world although I think I wrote about it here.

For information, the mapping software I use is called bedrock-viz for Minecraft Bedrock Visualiser. It works on the server map files and turns them into a webpage that works similar to google maps. So, if you are running your Minecraft world on a PC and you know where the database files are and you are comfortable taking copies of those then you can probably use the software. I also FTP the files to a webspace so I can see the map on a laptop screen while I’m playing, it’s a little small on my phone. I like it and I find it really helpful just for getting around the place. It’s just enough of a help that it’s worth it and not a silly amount of cheating that I think it’s ok to use. To give you an idea of what it does here is what it looks like at level 13 under my base:

In the real version of the map you are able to zoom in and hover over blocks to see the coordinates so that’s really helpful. In the picture above you can see water and bubble columns – blue and light blue – along with geodes. The yellow bits are gold and the dull yellow is iron. Bright blue is diamond and red is redstone, green squares are emeralds but once you’ve got a trading farm going with villagers who cares about mining for emeralds?

Communication number 1924 and here’s a selection of stuff that happened then:

A radio time signal is broadcast for the first time.
An explosion in a mine in West Virginia kills 119.
400 indigenous people of Toba are massacred.
Belgium introduces an eight hour work day.