Tag: penguin

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The Legend Of Tarzan

I went to the Cineworld cinema at Rochester to see The Legend Of Tarzan. As usual I have rated this film on IMDB and if you aren’t sure of my rating system then you should see this communication.

I thought the film was enjoyable. A good romp with those pesky colonial Belgians in charge. I was largely impressed with the CGI animals, very impressive and realistic. The story was ok but nothing special. My one quibble would be with the physics of swinging on vines and catching a train doing so, simply unrealistic, but a minor infraction for this particular film. I guess I should read the book.

By the way, the first corner at Zandvoort race track is called Tarzan. It is named after the man whose garden was used to create that part of the track.

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New Wheels

Consider the state of these:

Tatty Trainers
Tatty Trainers

I thought it was time to change them. I think I’ve had them for about 2 years and so they have probably done around 1000 miles! So I bought some new trainers. These ones are nice and bouncy!

Shiny!
Shiny!

 

Let’s see how long these ones last!

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For God’s Sake Man It’s Only A Weather App

I recently saw that the Met Office had a new weather app. I think it popped up on the front page of the app store. I was interested as I’m quite fussy about my weather apps. Once you get used to one and the information it gives you it’s quite hard to change. Much like buying a new wallet, which I have to do soon and it fills me with dread. By the way, I don’t like the term “app”, I’m not particularly fond of the term “application”, to me these are programs and always will be.

Here’s the front page of the new app:

The new app had embedded video forecasts from the Met Office – these are not needed, I’m too old to care for video forecasts. Also, video on a phone is antisocial and useless, I can get the same information without the noise and movement. I think this may be a generational thing. I don’t need sound and people to inform me something that I can see in a diagram or map. It could possibly be why I also don’t like the news that is broadcast into our homes all the time [hint: change channel, which I do].

 

Here’s another view of the new app:

I’m not sure I like the days across the top. I think that’s mostly because I the older app [which is still available] had the days going down the screen. The worst part of the new app is the weather alert screen. This screen used to be a map with colours over it.

This is a good weather warning map. It tells me what I need to know. The new app just has text to read. I can’t be bothered to read it. The text is broken down into regions. I can be even less bothered to find my region and then decode the words. Oddly, I do like listening to radio weather broadcasts so maybe I’m just weird here.

One last thing. The new app has done away with proper weather charts. These actually mean something to me and I like them. They give an overall impression of what is really going on in the weather. Here are some examples of good stuff:

Day by day and then lovely extra information if you need it. There’s a page that will give hour by hour predictions too.

Look at these maps. Aren’t they pretty and lovely. They let you know what’s going on. The new app doesn’t have this. Which is a shame. I do get the feeling that sometimes things are “improved” to include lots of new functions but the reality is that they just fuck them up.

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CCF Camp WITT

I recently spent a lovely week at RAF Wittering [EGXT] with the MGS CCF RAF Section. We were there with cadets and staff from Malvern College who all turned out to be great people. In fact, their Officer Commanding had been on my OIC course.

Harrier Fun
Harrier Fun

Here’s a list of activities we got up to followed by a small photograph gallery which could have been bigger but sometimes there are restrictions on what we can photograph.

  • High ropes course and power fan
  • Archery
  • Air Experience Flying with No 5 AEF
  • WHST
  • Shooting with the L98A2
  • Drill and drill competition
  • Command Tasks
  • Visit to Marshalls Aerospace Company
  • Visit to the American Cemetery near Cambridge
  • 5131 BD Sqn visit
  • Fire Section visit [I might have been sprayed by a branch]
  • Harrier Heritage Centre visit
  • I did two runs
  • Ten pin bowling
  • Meal out in Stamford
  • Outreach team
  • Party minibus

This was a very enjoyable camp. Great fun. Some of the pictures below aren’t really level with the horizon, but I am not going to edit them. It’d take time I don’t really have.

My last photo is of a lovely elliptical bridge I saw in Leicester. Very pretty:

Elliptical Beauty
Elliptical Beauty
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Ayria – Electrowerkz

Smith and I went to see Ayria play at Electrowerkz in The Angel last night. The standard room was used for the bands and the bar at the back was open but only with one person serving which seems about two too few! We had actually caught a train from Purley to St Pancras and so the venue was only about a fifteen minute walk from the terminus.

When we arrived a KLOQ were already playing.

Kloq
Kloq

This band were pretty good. The singer could sing, which is not necessary in this genre, more of an advantage. They had a live drummer and bassist. All other noises were produced by a computer. They were a bit dancy but very enjoyable. Andy and I both liked them a lot. I’d happily see them again.

Next up were a band called Inertia. They were a project of the drummer from Killing Joke. Now, I have seen Killing Joke and they were pretty good. However this side project were not good. They weren’t terrible but the style of music mostly left me cold. There was a guitarist, the drummer, a singer and the programmer. The guitars were too much and there was too much noise and sound. The first two songs had a slow walking keyboard riff that irritated me a lot.

Inertia
Inertia

I thought the singer was a bit weak and needed to be much more powerful to compliment the sound of the rest of the band. We left them playing. It was that boring.

The headline act was a Canadian female singer called Ayria. I would describe her stuff as quite pop-like but with the slight edge that means she plays places like Electrowerkz and not the Smash Hits Pop Party [possibly showing my age there].

She was much better than the other two bands. She had two musicians with her who both seemed to be really enjoying themselves. It’s odd but watching musicians enjoy themselves makes the whole thing much more enjoyable for me.

Ayria
Ayria

All her songs were great and she didn’t talk a great deal, if at all, in between the songs. She did a great job and it was very enjoyable.

After the gig all the bands were hanging around and I accidentally hip-bumped Ayria later on in the evening. Electrowerkz turns into Slimelight club at 23:00 and so Smith and I hung around for a while. We sampled some lovely cocktails and chatted to some of the bods who attend these events.

Fortunately for us there are trains from Victoria to home once an hour through the night. This means it’s possible to get back without having to use stupidly expensive taxis. All in all it was a very good night out.

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Going Underground

Spent an hour under the Kent countryside one afternoon as I dived into the world of Chislehurst Caves. They are man made caves in the chalky hills. They are also quite impressive and a good place to go when you want to escape the summer heat and humidity. The tour guide was a bit cheeky but funny in the right way and he was knowledgeable, he was just the sort of person you want to show you around.

According to the guide Hendrix and Zeppelin both played the caves, which would have been amazing to see but I guess the sound would have been terrible. Although this was the late 60s and early 70s so you would have been smashed out of your head and not notice.

I would recommend this tour as it was good value and interesting.

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Impressive Tech?

So, I saw this the other day while waiting at a set of traffic lights.

Van
Van

I was impressed because the sign seems to imply that the van is “restricted” to particular speeds in different areas.

Restricted to me means that the driver can NOT go above those speeds when on those types of roads. I just wonder how it works. I will grant you that the tech for this already exists and I’m not entirely sure why it isn’t compulsory.

You can fit a vehicle with a GPS receiver and a set of maps so it “knows” where it is. This is connected to the ECU and hey presto, you can’t go faster than the speed limit allows. It should be easy enough. There might be some issues with travelling on the motorway over a bridge and the GPS thinks you are suddenly in a 40 zone but this can be worked around I am sure. I am not sure why these aren’t the law.

Anyway, if the van uses impressive tech then that’s brilliant. If the tech is a biological ape then that’s shit.

I’ve asked Sky. When I get a response I’ll put it here!

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Money Monster

Last night I traveled to the Odeon cinema in Royal Tunbridge Wells, or rather on the outskirts of RTW. The Odeon website doesn’t list this cinema as Royal Tunbridge Wells, it’s listed as Tunbridge Wells which is a little confusing because there’s also a town called Tonbridge close by. Have a look at this map and see the naming conventions in Kent:

I tweeted my rating of 6/10 on IMDB, you should read this communication about my rating system.

I felt remarkably not bothered emotionally by this film. From the trailers I thought it was going to be an expose of how companies and banks and the entire financial system is designed to screw the normal person out of money. I thought it would be something along the lines of The Big Short. But no.

This film was based on a fictional fraud committed by your classic British baddie. There be spoilers ahead. A young but not very clever man invests his inheritance in a company and then loses it all, or most of it, these being shares and all rather than an investment fund as far as I can tell. This annoyed the man and so he decided to take a TV show hostage to figure out what went wrong.

The company was claiming it was a software “glitch”. Others were more cynical. It turned out to be fraud and dodgy stuff. It wasn’t a glitch.

In the end the stupid guy gets shot dead.

Then, the world goes back to normal. Every just starts again. People stop watching this live drama and go back to being people. No-one GIVES A SHIT.

This was an odd film. In the end NOTHING had changed. The world kept going. Someone had died. People went back to being money makers and shakers. The TV show went on.

This was more a film about a TV show than about people and financial crises. A shame. It could have been great. Instead it got a 6 on my scale.

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Black Widow

Went to look around Rochester Castle and Cathedral. I’d not been in the cathedral before and I was impressed, but then that’s the point of them. They are meant to intimidate you into believing a load of bollocks. It was strange as the organ was being tuned up and so added a creepy scary atmosphere. I mean, more of a creepy atmosphere than a whole building dedicated to the murder of a Jew, who possibly didn’t even exist.

So, there was a submarine in the river. This was somewhat of a surprise as I’d never noticed it before.

Black Widow
Black Widow

A quick Google tells me this is U-475, a Soviet era submarine called Black Widow. I could write stuff here but you could just visit the Wikipedia page here. Apparently this sub has been here for over ten years, but I have to say she’s not always been moored off Strood or I would have definitely noticed her before now. It’s an impressive sight. Not quite as impressive as the Raid On The Medway must have been, those pesky Dutch!

Rochester Bridge got in touch via Twitter:

Cathedral
Cathedral

It’s the cathedral. Lovely but useless.

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Stupid Comparisons

The following picture was tweeted by BBC Radio 4 this morning as an explanation for the scale of the new Gotthard Base Tunnel. I have a few things to say but initially I would like to let you know that the genius of man never fails to surprise me. We have been so successful in being brilliant. The things we can do to overcome problems are stunning. An irritating by-product of this is that our ingenuity has also been used to create ever more bizarre ways of killing our own species.

comparisons

I have a few things to say:

  • I am not even aware of Nicaragua’s GDP and I care not a lot. How about comparing it to teachers employed, or even the cost of other tunnels. 12.5 billion seems reasonable to me in terms of EU budgets.
  • I have never understood the football field comparison. Surely people understand that football fields are roughly 100m long anyway. It’s not necessary.
  • This is the one that really bugged me. 4,000,000 cubic metres does NOT compare to a height. One is a volume and the other is NOT. Apart from reservoir engineers who can picture or comprehend this volume anyway.
  • Because I know exactly how much a freight container holds???
  • Why do I need a diagram showing me the distance between London and New York. They haven’t even used the Great Circle. I get it 3200km is a long way.

At least they didn’t mention double decker buses.

The ONLY comparison that should be made is country area and Wales because it leads to countries being described in KiloWales [thanks to More Or Less for that].

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Don’t Be A Dick

I am going to be hypocritical here. I am going to lecture about not being nasty and trying to keep the discussion calm and then I am going to rage about things on my most public of forums.

The big message and thing I try to remember is that when tackling the issues that I disagree with or know are wrong then it’s very hard not to be a dick. It’s too easy to get angry and want to shout at people. I have written about this before, I follow some people on Twitter and various other internets because I want to know the sort of things they are saying. I want to try to listen to their points of view and to see where they come from.

Don’t Be A Dick started with Phil Plait giving a talk at TAM:

Phil Plait – Don’t Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.

I often have to remind myself of this. My instant response when reading tweets like these below is to scream FUCK OFF at these arseholes. I don’t think I am made for being nice when such hatred and misinformation is spread.

Ken Ham is currently building an ark in Kentucky.

Answers in Genesis use confirmation bias to “prove” the bible.

Matthew Lawrence is religious and believes hell is expanding.

The pope continues to seem reasonable until you realise that he won’t endorse contraception, gays or hand over kid-fucking priests to the police and justice system.

“Pastor” Alex Rivas should be all about love and forgiveness, unless you are gay or LGBT.

Lifeforce claim to cure many things using a method that doesn’t work.

Dana Ullman talks bollocks.

All these people are cunts.
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Screw

I walked along the river Medway today from Allington Locks to Maidstone town centre. I should point out that the river walk is delightful, I recommend it. The only issue was the obnoxious music beingplayed by the Beefeater Inn called the Malta Inn. Why they have to pump music outside I don’t know. It spoils the peace and calm of the river.

N51 17 14.3     E00 30 30.25

This is where I was when I spotted an awesome thing of engineering. On the other side of the river was a very large Archimedes Screw. I say large because I have never seen a screw this big before. I’m used to the screws that you can play on in kids water parks and things but this was impressive!

Archimedes Screw
Archimedes Screw

I don’t know what it’s there for. Obviously it raises water and brilliantly so but why just there? I am going to have to ask around to find out.

screw map 1

screw map 2

It can be seen using images on Google earth. I was hoping to have some company or website pop up and declare what it does but there was none. It is rather an object of wonder.

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My Favourite Brands

This afternoon I went to Brands Hatch to see some Club Car Championship races. It was very agreeable and a good way to spend the afternoon. I had forgotten the smell and sounds of the place!

As usual I took the camera to this place and got a few shots. There are a number of communications within this site with pictures of cars, but if that’s what you like then so what!

A Supermarine Spitfire flew over twice, once on the way to a show and once on the way back. It was lovely to see even though I couldn’t hear it!

This is the sound of Lotus cars, mostly Exige, racing down the Brabham Straight.

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Numbers Say So

According to the Daily Mail, with which I could write about 5 communications a day ranting, the Manchester Police have been accused of racism after a terror exercise in the Trafford Centre.

Training

The article is here. This is quite amusing as slightly further down the front page of the Mail Online is the following headline:

Real

The article is here. Is it racist to use a realistic scenario when training? The majority of current terror threats come from Islamist terrorists. Would there be outcry if the police had someone in an Irish accent twenty years ago? This is not racism or offensive.

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Captain America: Civil War

You know me by now. If there’s a big film then I’m likely to see it. Except for Batman V Superman that I couldn’t care about. I’m not that big on superhero films and I can’t quite figure out why. I remember the “first” Batman by Tim Burton and leaving thinking “meh” or whatever the early 90s version of “meh” was. I think now I recognise it as brilliant but not so much back then. Perhaps it’s Batman films? I don’t enjoy them.

Avengers Assemble was different, it had a good script, good action and a good director. I really enjoyed it. Some of the other superhero films have been OK, mostly the Marvel ones, although I don’t like the Spiderman films either. Perhaps it’s a solo-crime-fighter thing? I am very not sure.

So, to this. I watched this at Rochester Cineworld and rated this on IMDB. You should see this communication about my rating system, which I broke for God’s Not Dead 2.

I guess there needs to be a slight explanation as I feel this could be controversial, not that I care. The film was OK. Nothing special. Really, I mean that, nothing special. I enjoyed one bit and that was the fight scene at the airport. I only like that because there was humour. My overall impression was that there was too much fighting, one on one. Yes, I know it was called Civil War and war involves fighting, but there was too much in this film.

That’s it really. I don’t have a lot else to say. Except this should have been called Avengers 3. It was mostly an Avengers story.

Tony Stark would seriously want more regulation? Seems improbable, he’s an arse and totally self-interested.

Why, when fighting Ironman, do people swing at his chin? Why use a fist. I don’t understand.

Also, every time Ironman lands his body would be broken apart inside the suit through the deceleration.

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God’s Not Dead 2

This is Part Two of Bullshit Saturday. Part one is here.

While looking through the cinema listings in the afternoon of Saturday 30 April I booked a ticket to see Bastille Day and then looked what, if anything, to see in the evening. If I didn’t find a film my plan was to listen to some live music in Maidstone. I had decided to leave Captain America for a few days and had a look at the Bluewater listings.

Oh goodness, they were showing God’s Not Dead 2. I got very excited. I had heard a lot about this film and thought it would be brilliant to actually see it. So, I booked a ticket.

As you can see I was excited. Now, there needs to be some explanation.

I listen to a number of podcasts, mainly while running or driving. My favourites are:

  • Scathing Atheist
  • Skepticrat
  • GAM Cast
  • Skeptics Guide To The Universe
  • Skeptics With A K

I have listen to these for quite a few years and they have enlarged my knowledge and appreciation of science and humanism. I also have learnt a lot about the politics of the USA.

Now, the Scathing Atheist is hilarious and rage inducing at the same time. There is also a lot of swearing and jokes about puppy rape. I love listening and recently became a Patreon. The guys who produce this podcast also make God Awful Movies. This is a weekly podcast in which they VOLUNTARILY watch christian cinema/films and take the piss out of them. It’s funny and opens up a new world of film and beliefs.

They have reviewed a number of films about the rapture and having listened to about twenty episodes I decided it would be a good idea to sit through a film, to understand just how bad they are. I watched Left Behind, click to visit the podcast page. I will admit that almost any film can be reduced to rubble when critically appraised it’s just that these guys stick with christian cinema [mostly]. Left Behind is a terrible film, it makes no sense. At all.

Gamcast episode 33 covers the cinematic marvels of God’s Not Dead 2. I listened to this and thought it would be good to see a film with a decent budget. However, it seemed unlikely that this would head out to Kent and as much as I like a day out in London I am NOT going to see christian cinema when I go there. It seemed I would have to wait to try and download this some time in the future.

I headed to Bluewater shopping centre and bought a pair of shoes in the time between arriving and having to endure watch the film. Now, I don’t like buying shoes or spending money on clothing and the such. It seems a waste. Yes, I do appreciate wearing clothes though. Anyway, new shoes were purchased. I headed to the Showcase cinema. Upon entering the auditorium it turns out some dude was in my seat. I’m not sure how that happens but he moved and sat next to me.

I was very curious as to the make up of the audience and whether they were there purely to take the piss and experience cinema shittery. The chap next to me seemed potentially mentally ill or possibly had a terrible headache, every ten minutes he would lean forward and rub his head, almost like praying, very odd. The rest of the cinema seemed normal I guess. There were about 30 people in the theatre, some families with teenage kids and some couples. I couldn’t get the measure of it.

So, I rated this film on IMDB and you should see this communication about my rating system and then return here to see how I broke the rules.

This was a bad film. The legal aspects of the film were bad. Everything was bad. I have also broken my system for rating films. But the lowest anyone can give is a 1 and so that is what I gave. Maybe I need to update my system, I don’t know.

Normally I would give you a run down of the movie and what I thought but instead you should go and listen to the God Awful Movie podcast episode covering this. Or see this tweet.

Also, you should go and buy the parody song written about this film. You can find it here. Or see this tweet:

This film did not disappoint. I honestly want to thank GAMcast and Scathing Atheist for giving the chance to experience this. I was really excited and it live down to expectations.

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Bastille Day

You know me. Always going to the cinema and this weekend there’s quite a good choice. There are definitely three films I fancy seeing and so I will spread them out. First up was Bastille Day, which was watched at the Cineworld Cinema in [not] Rochester. As usual I have rated the film on IMDB and tweeted about the result.

Now, this seems harsh according to the scale I have explained previously in this communication. To be honest this film wasn’t that great. It wasn’t a funny film, it lacked a chemistry in the buddy-buddy aspect and the action scenes were too long. The roof top running got boring. Nope, just terrible and potentially the whole thing was in bad taste.

Perhaps I was struggling to cope with made up stuff after having spent an hour in the delightful environment of mystical stuff. I’m not sure but this film didn’t deliver.

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EGSU

I was meant to be visiting EGXT today but it was called off so I detoured to EGSU. If you want more details of EGSU then you can, of course, JFGI, I have a map here.

I don’t have a great deal to say about the day, I will just leave you with a gallery of “different” photos rather than the usual full on full frontal.

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