Considering how much I like AC/DC I’m not sure I’ve listened to this album all the way through. I love the Bon Scott era and there are some albums from the Brian Johnson era that are stunning but, this one’s just too recent. Black Ice was really the last AC/DC album I really knew. I bought it, obviously, but I’m not enough of a super-fan to listen to this. I didn’t even put it on before writing this.
Ritual de lo Habitual – Jane’s Addiction
I bought this album because I felt that I should like Jane’s Addiction. I bought Strays by Jane’s Addiction and I think I remember liking that. We will find out once we get to the “S” section of these album reviews. I have to say I have played this album one and a half times and I don’t like it. It has no good features. Yeah, I know it was raved about but I don’t like it.
Keeping The Sanity
I’m not sure if this will help or not but if you need it then there’s plenty of internet radio to help you out. This is one of my favourites:
Rio Grande Blood – Ministry
So, I’ve been playing this recently and I really like it. There’s a particular level of noise and industry to it. This is an album well worth getting [if you like industrial metal and hate Bush Jr].
Pow!
I was a little shocked yesterday after I wrote a tweet that kinda blew up. Normally there’re not many who view my words and thoughts and I understand that. Who would be interested in what I have to say? I am not a regular tweeter who has a particular theme. I’m not in a position of power. So, I just say stuff that comes to mind. Below is my tweet as of 0650 GMT Mar 23 2020.
Thinking about what I wrote there is one main reason it went viral and that is Whitstable was trending at the time and probably also Skegness. This means this tweet would appear in those selective areas of twitter when people browsed. I didn’t do this deliberately but if you wanted a tweet to “hit it big” then I guess including trending hashtags and words is the best way. You have to deliberately write a tweet with all the right ingredients to make it go viral [or just be a cunt like Piers Morgan].
My phone kept pinging with all the notifications that I turned off those notifications for Twitter. It was actually annoying. I also scanned a few of the comments that people wrote in reply but didn’t really take them in. Much like I don’t allow comments on my YouTube videos or these communications I’m not interested in your opinions, you won’t change my mind unless I know you and I don’t need the emotional mess that some comments can create.
If Whitstable and Skegness were [in reality] busy yesterday then I am once again amazed at how stupid people are. Mind you, the country keeps voting Tory so I should already know.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) March 22, 2020
I think what I want to do is explain what the tweet means. I had some people comment that Skegness doesn’t have tory voters and that it’s not just tories out in Whitstable. I’d like to point out that I didn’t say that. I hedged my bets on whether the news was reliable first using the [in reality] bit. This allows the trending tweets to be not true and allows me to still say what I want to say. If the reports were true then I explained that I am amazed at how stupid people are. I am amazed at that. It freaks me out just how much people don’t listen or do the best for themselves. I know about it a bit because I’m a human too [believe it or not] and we all do stupid things at times but I have to say, gathering in large groups at the moment is really fucking stupid.
After explaining the stupidity I placed a full-stop. This means that sentence has now stopped. I start a new one explaining that I already know people are stupid because they keep voting tory. I even capitalised the word tory and I often don’t capitalise words that I don’t respect, thank god. I’m not calling tory voters stupid, I’m sure they have their reasons [mostly selfish] and I wasn’t calling anyone at Whitstable or Skegness tory although I was calling them stupid. I am consistently amazed that this country keeps voting the tories into power. I was chatting recently and that person said “you don’t have to be stupid to vote tory just greedy”.
I am glad that as I get older I get more and more left wing. I think we should be helping each other more. I think we should have certain things in state ownership. I’m not a communist or anything like that and I even think businesses should be able to run themselves within a strongly regulated framework. I think we should all act and behave in ways that benefit society and treat people humanely. I don’t think we do that at the moment. Anyway, it was interesting seeing a tweet blow up [a little]. I am amused it has 499 likes. Not quite the 500, but that’s just an integer which is half of a power of our number base system. 245 would have been nice.
Countryside Noise
I wrote a short while ago about the area in which I live and how I would consider it countryside but there’s also the machines of human activity nearby. In that communication I mentioned motorways, supermarkets, train tunnels and an airport. So, here is a map of Eccles’s surrounding area:
And here is a map with various things highlighted. The legend is below the picture.
- Yellow: motorways
- Green: airport
- Blue: high speed train tunnel
- Pink dots: Supermarkets I visit
Below is where I grew up, the village of Hatfield Heath in Essex, and I’ve marked similar things onto that map. Perhaps that is why I like my current village. I spent nineteen years on the Heath and had a very similar environment.
It’ll Still Be Here
I do like living in the country away from things. Well, I’m not really that far away from things; there are two motorways within five minutes, all the supermarkets you could want and I live under the flight path for a small airport, which essentially means this is an almost perfect place to live. It’s generally quiet, even though I can hear the M20 and also the Eurostar as it blasts its way through a tunnel in the North Downs, there are aircraft [at the moment] flying overhead on their way to the money centres of the world and small planes circle around doing their thing at Rochester. So, it’s not quiet but it’s my kind of noise.
My recent angst at all things human society have been calmed by the idea that even if we fuck it all up this planet of life will continue and something will stay here, alive and well. It could take a long time but maybe this planet will once again be an amazing world of life and beauty [beauty being a human property because of the way our brains work]. So, here are some photographs of this wonderful place. It might turn out that everything becomes forested again at some point. Wouldn’t that be great.
The vineyard below won’t exist but something will be there.
I Had A Moment
I wasn’t feeling great on Thursday and ws mostly convinced that “preppers” had got the right idea. I’ve been more chilled out since but I did order a battery operated radio just in case it all goes to shit. I can’t decide if it was paranoia or just plain silly but I did. This is a really strange time and I just don’t know what is going to happen.
I ordered this thing from Amazon. It’s a perfectly functional battery operated radio.
I keep going from wanting to not write anything about all this to wanting to write a lot about this whole thing. I feel it should be documented somehow for me to look back over one day.
It’s Almost As If
Our society wasn’t set up to cope with a massive short term change to the way it operates. By short term I mean in the order of months. We aren’t even months in and it feels as though the world is ending. There’s panic in the supermarkets and many many businesses are going to go bust. People won’t get paid and it’s not going to be pleasant.
If only our society hadn’t been chronically underfunded over the last ten years. If only the “gig-economy” wasn’t a thing. If only companies weren’t driven by responsibilities to shareholders but rather to a social responsibility that means they would look after their employees and make sure everyone had a decent standard of living.
We SHOULD be paying for goods and expecting everyone involved in those process to make them to be paid a FAIR wage. It is utterly immoral that they don’t.
This was meant to be the start of something big but I think I’ll have to leave it for a while. I might keep my ramblings short while we go through this.
Ride The Lightning – Metallica
Writing this in the middle of a spell of self-isolation is strange. I’m not sure if I’m going to write a communication covering what I think of the current Covid-19 nightmare we seem to be in. I’ve started writing something, not sure it’ll be coherent at all. Anyway, back to what I think about Ride The Lightning.
This album is a MONSTER. It’s raw and powerful.
- Fight Fire With Fire – amazing opening track Lovely.
- Ride The Lightning – possibly about being electrocuted in the chair. I don’t know, I don’t listen to lyrics.
- For Whom The Bell Tolls – look, it has a bass guitar melody. What more do you need. Brilliant song.
- Fade To Black – what all the latter Metallica songs are based on and they can fuck off. This is an amazing song.
- Trapped Under Ice – freezing. Dying. Horror.
- Escape – Possibly the least interesting song on here. But it’s still good.
- Creeping Death – Jesus, this is an amazing song. One of the times I saw Metallica they opened with this and it is a stunning song. Die, Die, Die, Die, Die.
- The Call Of Ktulu – an instrumental. Still great. SR was playing this once on the balcony of her holiday apartment in the Canary’s and it got strange looks. I don’t know why it’s genius.
This is an amazing album and it has that power to keep being great all this time later. I won’t pass on any of these songs when they crop up.