Ian – Page 142 – Fooyah

February 28 2016

Deadpool

Went to see Deadpool earlier today. As ever I have rated a film on IMDB, see my rating guide here. I went to the Cineworld cinema at Rochester, although it’s on the wrong side of the river to be in Rochester.

I rated Deadpool (2016) 6/10 #IMDb https://t.co/WLDjpfD54z

— Ian Parish (@iparish) February 28, 2016

So, here’s what I thought. It was a superhero movie, which don’t really bother me, and it was entirely like all the other superhero movie except this one included breaking the forth wall and general slutty humour.

Was it funny? Yes.

Was it laugh out loud funny? No.

Was it a good film. Not really. If you remove the humour it wasn’t that great. Just another superhero revenge movie with fights and crashes and stuff. There, I said it.

February 28 2016

Fuckit – :wumpscut:

This was the first album by :wumpscut: that I bought. Along with my descent into aggrotech and hellecktro I started searching and reading Wikipedia about the genre trying to find new artists. There also seems to be cross pollination within the genre as quite often songs are re-mixed by other artists so by reading credits on albums it’s easy to see which bands associate with others. For instance Rotersand have remixed stuff for Aesthetic Perfection. Another method for finding new bands is to read the gig leaflets given out at venues [even if the mostly end up on the floor like a carpet of unwanted postcards].

So, :wumpscut: has been around for ages. This is a nicely produced album with some great tunes. It’s never going to make the mainstream but all the songs have a good beat and it’s well worth a listen. Youtube carries plenty of the music with people adding their own images. Go have a look.

February 28 2016

The Fragile (Right) – Nine Inch Nails

NIN. The place to go when you want dirty industrial with haunting melodies and lyrics that speak to you. Along with the Left this album is great for me to listen to while working. It has all the usual NIN experience and hasn’t been overplayed by me so always sounds fresh.

I’ve seen NIN twice, once at Wembley Stadium [the old one] when they supported GnR and also at Brixton Academy [or whatever it is called now]. The Brixton gig was damn brilliant.

February 28 2016

The Fragile (Left) – Nine Inch Nails

It’s been a while since I posted anything about album reviews. In fact it’s been so long I can’t remember the format I worked on. That doesn’t matter. I wrote about Broken and also Fixed. Nine Inch Nails are an awesome collective who write angry industrial sounding music. Trent Reznor follows on from the Revolting Cocks and Ministry and others and creates a niche sound. Everything NIN is clearly him.

This album is good. If I want that sound then this is where I come. It’s not an album I have over played and so I can listen to it and it always sounds fresh. A good start point although you should really go to The Downward Spiral first.

February 12 2016

It’s Where I Am

So, I have written about music a lot. If people ask what sort of music I like I answer: metal. It’s the easiest answer and everyone pretty much understands what it means. I wrote about my descent into metal here. Something strange happened since I saw Rammstein at Wembley Arena in February 2010. My music tastes shifted after seeing Combichrist. I wrote about that here as it distressed me somewhat.

Now, to give you a taste you can listen to the music here:

There’s plenty of stuff here that I know and quite a bit I don’t. It’s all good by association. It makes me happy, smile and want to dance. It’s new and different.

February 11 2016July 22 2021

XM655

Wellesbourne Airfield in Warwickshire. Home to a flying school, a Saturday market and an AVRO VULCAN: XM655.

This Vulcan is the most complete of all the Vulcans remaining. Although XH558 was the last airworthy Vulcan they had to remove stuff from it to get the airworthiness certificate. Hence, XM655 is more complete and still does high speed taxi runs.

I wrote about XH558 here when I saw her perform for the last time over Coventry airport.

I think the most amusing thing about XM655 is that when it was bought from the RAF it landed at Wellesbourne, but the runway isn’t long enough for it to take off again. That does seem a touch short sighted.

If you get the chance on a Saturday to visit you most definitely should. For a donation the members of the preservation society will give you a tour of the cockpit and tell you wonderful stories about the Vulcan and her history. Did you know that all the money went into the airframe and so the navigation equipment was pretty much the same as the Lancaster? For long flights the crew had a sextant.

With a crew of five, but only two ejector seats there were “design” issues I guess. The three crew facing backwards had to jump out through the entrance door in the floor. That was probably an issue when flying low!

So, the Vulcan is a beautiful plane. It’s very loud and imposing. I am curious as to how good it was compared to other planes of its generation. We Brits love to imagine that our stuff is the best. I just wonder how much that is true.

This beast is graceful and wonderful. I am glad she never was used for her intended mission.

January 23 2016

Capture The Flag

Went to see Capture The Flag earlier at the Cineworld in Rochester. As is now usual I rated this film on IMDB and you should see an explanation of those ratings on this communication.

I rated Capture the Flag (2015) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/ZfVwKn9AN9

— Ian Parish (@iparish) January 23, 2016

So, let me explain a little more about all this. This was a CGI kids film. It was about a kid who wants to get his father speaking to his grandfather. Both are NASA astronauts. The grandfather missed out on the moon for reasons that are explained much later in the film.

SPOILER WARNING

It would appear that an evil corporate head and owner wants to mine all the H3 on the moon and sell it to countries on Earth in a monopoly. In doing so he tells the Earth that the original landings were faked and that he is going to claim the moon by getting there first. The POTUS decides that an Apollo craft needs to be sent to the moon as soon as possible so that the FLAG on the moon can be saved and ownership of the moon is for all humans.

Grandfather then trains the father in Apollo style techniques using craft that have been mothballed for 50 years. By an unfortunate series of coincidences the grandfather, the boy and his best female friend end up launching to the moon. Big evil corporation head gets there too and starts destroying the previous landing sites [even though he also declared in the film he doesn’t care about that only the H3]. Evil man has managed to launch an entire mining operation to the moon, developed within his own corporation. etc. etc.

I had issues with this film. It’s just too implausible. I know it was CGi and all that but there were many points that irritated me. Space suits that would fit a kid. Having to go to the moon rather than orbit Earth and return. Massive moon mining ship that is developed without anyone knowing about it. Surfing over the moon’s surface. Oh, just so much.

It could have been made a much more enjoyable film if it had been made more realistic. In short, it irked me. Hence the low rating.

January 21 2016

Summer Choices

Met with Smith last night and we chatted about which music festival to attend this year. You may have read about M’era Luna from last year. It was a very good time but this year there’s more choice!

Our preferred choice was to head to Munich for the Dark Festival, but this has been cancelled which is a shame. There were a lot of good bands that we would have liked to see there.

So now there are two choices. M’era Luna at Hildesheim again or Amphi Festival in Cologne. Here’s the line up for M’era Luna:

Of the bands in the above list I would really like to see VNV Nation, Eisbrecher, Combichrist, Hocico and Suicide Commando. But there are more:

This list has a few tasty treats: [:SITD:], Noisuf-X and Centhron. So, M’era Luna has a good selection, worth travelling the 500 miles for!

Next up we have the selection from Amphi Festival.

The list of bands to definitely see at Amphi is: Aesthetic Perfection, Covenant, Faderhead, Frontline Assembly, Mono Inc, Suicide Commando, Unzucht and [X-RX].

It’s a tough choice. The current preference is M’era Luna. Wait and see.

January 20 2016June 28 2020

Hmmm. Snoring Cure?

So, stumbled across a snoring cure. You can see the website here. Now, I’m gonna call bullshit on this right now, but that would seem rather unfair to the company so let’s look a little closer at what they claim.

I have screen clipped their website and I will discuss each section. The main page looks like this:

This says that you wear the ring on your little finger and that it is a snoring treatment that is guaranteed to work. Apparently it’s also been clinically tested! They have made a very specific claim here that wearing this ring on your little finger will make you stop snoring. What else do they have to say?

This explains how it works. Or rather it doesn’t. All it says is that there are Acu-activators on the ring. A quick google shows that this isn’t a real term and isn’t used anywhere apart from the stop snoring website.

It’s not looking too good for this product and we’ve not even really started. I think they may be trying to imply that the things on the ring activate acupuncture points? This is irrelevant as acupuncture is clearly bullshit.

Next bit from the www.goodnightsnoring.com website:

Testimonials amount to nothing. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. I don’t care. 3500 years of history can’t be wrong can it? Of course it can. We now use medicine with evidence not rubbish about Chi and acupuncture points. Also, being mentioned in the Daily Fail is not necessarily a good thing. In fact if a medical “cure” is mentioned in the Mail or Express you can pretty much assume it’s bullshit.

Now, the website covers this with the following page:

They claim that a good clinical trial was performed and the results were almost a miracle. This is good because if there is good evidence then I would be prepared to change my mind. The goodnightsnoring.com website doesn’t have a link to the clinical trial. I want to be able to read it and then change my mind. It seems that these are extraordinary claims and so it would be prudent to examine the evidence.

I searched PubMed. There was nothing about the Snoring Ring as being sold here. So I tried searching Google Scholar. Nothing again, just a paper about breast cancer. This was troublesome, my two main sources for scientific papers were showing nada. I decided to look using plain old Google. I searched for “snoring ring clinical trial”.

From these results I wasn’t interested in the Snoring Ring website, there’s nothing on there. I also couldn’t care for a news article in the Daily Fail [they don’t know how to report science]. The other links were mostly places that sell the product and so have probably just got the blurb from a product information release. What interested me originally was the ASA link.

In 2012 a complaint was made to the ASA about the evidence for the claims that the Snoring Ring company were making. The complaint was upheld and the company were told not to make claims about the snoring ring. The so called medical trial was completed after this ruling by the ASA!

Also in the search results was a link to ANTISNOR, a company who produce anti snoring rings. Now, this company mentioned on this page a French company who had done the clinical trials.

In 2012, a French scientific research organisation, Proclaim (www.proclaim.fr), studied the effect of AntiSnor Acupressure Ring . . . .

The Proclaim website doesn’t exist. Even though ANTISNOR link to it. Oh dear, the trail has gone cold.

There are a number of RED FLAGS on the original website. The mention of the following aspects all cause concern. They don’t mean it doesn’t work, they just mean we should be sceptical until we have seen the evidence.

Money back guarentees
Testimonials
No links to the evidence
Publicity from the Daily Mail
Anecdotes
Non invasive and side effect free
Appeal to antiquity on the acupressure part of the site
No email address to ask for a copy of the clinical trial

So far, I’ve had some people say they think this work and no actual medical trials even though one is claimed. Back to Google.

Another link from Google heads towards Princeton Consumer Research. It appears that this company will undertake clinical trials for you and then allow you to use the results in your publicity. Here’s a Princeton Brochure with their claims. After finding this I found a company called Aspen Clinical Research. They had a pdf linked here and also Aspen-Clinical-Anti-Snoring-Ring-Media-Coverage1 from my site. This PDF essentially claims that the publicity they managed to produce for the Anti Snoring ring was brilliant. They seem to be more of a PR firm than a clinical trial firm. This makes me very wary.

Aspen Clinical Research even went so far as to persuade the press that there was a National Stop Snoring Week in 2014. This is depressing reading.

I hadn’t realised there would be companies that are willing to be paid to undertake some form of research to legitimise PR claims and also produce media puff.

Both Aspen Clinical Research and Princeton Consumer Research do not seem concerned with legitimate medical trials, rather they concentrate on PR friendly trials to produce media results. Neither of the websites were searchable from their homepages. Also, both companies seem to be offering to pay participants. This can’t be a good thing, it would bias the results. All I want is a copy of the clinical trial for the Anti Snoring Ring and I can’t find it. What I have found are companies who provide easy results for PR.

It seems to me that these companies offer to do science the wrong way around and therefore they don’t offer science. It looks like the cycle goes:

You have a product and want to make specific claims
You will be banned from advertising if you can’t substantiate these claims
You PAY one of these companies to do a trial for you so you can then substantiate your claim
You then advertise claiming scientific proof.

The correct cycle should be:

Scientific research indicates that a specific product could work
The product is developed
A trial is designed and the details published before being conducted
The product is tested rigorously
The product is deemed to work, the product can be advertised with specific claims
The product is deemed not to work, the product can’t be advertised

I feel utterly depressed at the state of media manipulation and that there are companies that do this as their raison d’etre. Everything we see and hear is manipulated to sell products. I started this communication as a simple investigation into the evidence for a product as they claim. What I found was a collection of companies willing to provide you the evidence you want so you can claim what you want for your product that (probably) does nothing.

Anyway, I can’t get to the evidence for the Snoring Ring. I haven’t found the paper with details of the trial and so I am going to complain to the ASA about their website claims. Watch this space.