"Nothing but the rain"
This is a compilation so songs will be reviewed elsewhere.
In terms of Slipknot canon I don’t know where this fits. I think it might be their second album. Just not sure. I’ve bought a few Slipknot albums but never really played any other than the first one. Having now listened to it I can say that some of the songs I recognise from the live album Antennas To Hell. They also play some of these songs live.
Highlights are:
I do like the Heretic Anthem and the chorus is something I have sung with my childerbeasts.
I have noticed while looking through some of my older communications that the pictures aren’t loading. It took a little detective work to figure out that the pictures not showing were all embedded from my cloud storage.
I can’t see this from my computer as when I load the communications the picture still loads due to cloud storage cookies [I think]. When I use an incognito browser the pictures don’t load. They also don’t load on my phone and I haven’t signed in to my cloud storage in the browser application on that.
So, I have decided to upload all the pictures that were stored in the cloud to my web hosting company and then I can re-insert them into all the pages where they weren’t working properly. I suspect this will take around a month of playing a little at a time.
The existing photos need to be uploaded, which is easy. They I have to name them all, again quite easy, and then add them to each communication where they don’t show up from other browsers. I suspect that when I changed the file structure of my cloud storage the picture URLs somehow didn’t work the same way.
I’ll probably announce this update to great fanfare but it doesn’t matter a great deal. I doubt the people out there interested in the minutiae of my life really go searching for things I may have done over a year ago.
This is a teenage fantasy album. It’s pretty obviously a load of cock-rock and remarkably a product of its time. I’m pretty sure I own this on picture disk and the cover is likely the reason I bought it. All my vinyl disks are stored in decent boxes in a cupboard. I haven’t put them in the loft as I harbour secret desires to play them again one day. I don’t have the same response with my tapes, they are less tactile and less loved, tucked away in the loft somewhere getting heat cycled.
Look, if you want 80s LA rock then get this. It’s does exactly what it says on the cover.
This communication serves only to remind me which NFL matches I have seen in the London series. I should probably create a page like my Bands I Have Seen page, but this will do for now.
Well, it may have been a boring match but it was good fun anyway to spend the day with friends at Wembley Stadium. I was quite excited as I was seeing my NFL team play for the second time. The first time was 2008. Now, 9 years later I have seen them again. My dream is to see them play in the Superdome one day.
I do like the atmosphere in the stadium for these matches. It’s friendly and good fun. I’ve never seen any form of trouble.
I think I have written about the actual games in the past but I can’t really remember. There were some interceptions and two touchdowns. Will Lutz missed the first field goal attempt. The first two drives took more than the first quarter so it was quite a slow paced game.
The Saints won the match 20 – 0. The cheerleaders were nice. It was pretty good to see Drew Brees and others playing.
Before the match I went to Savile Row to see where they filmed part of the Kingsman movie. Nearby was a street called Cork Street and so I took a photograph of that.
The Huntsman tailors is the shop where the secret service agency is based within London. Next door is a wine merchant in the film. Here are the shots I took.
Another shot:
Finally, just for fun, here’s a photo of colour material hanging in Regent Street.
I spent a lovely Saturday afternoon on a slightly wobbly chair in Rochester cinema watching the latest Kingsman movie: The Golden Circle. The tide was about halfway. I’m not sure if it was coming in or leaving. This morning on my run it looked as though it was coming in. Have just used the UK Hyographic Office Tide Predictor.
That picture shows how little I know or perhaps I just can’t remember a lot about the state of the river when I see it! I’m not really sure when this whole tide-cinema thing started. I know I was attempting to indicate the time of day that I went to the cinema but I can’t remember why I wanted to be so obscure.
I also rated this film on IMDB, please read this communication about the ratings system. I then “share” my scoring with twitter and those who follow me there:
I rated Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) 8/10 #IMDb https://t.co/oKAEtg6oI9
— Ian Parish (@iparish) September 30, 2017
I should probably explain what I liked about the movie. Well, it’s a good action comedy romp around the world. I laughed and found the whole film an enjoyable experience. There’s a lot of blood and gory ways to die. But then there are great actors who all look like they are enjoying themselves.
I actually wrote some notes down at the end of the film as I was sure I’d forget some things. I usually try and hold on to my snarky comments as I drive home ready to type this, but there were some nice touches through the film that made me smile.
Tomorrow I am heading into town and if I have time, I’m off to see the blue plaque.
By Gareth E Kegg – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Holy Shit!
This album has been with me throughout most of my life and I still rate it as one of the best albums I have ever heard. Blow Up Your Video came out in 1988 and the singles were released before then in the wonder-year of 1987. so, you love AC/DC and start looking up old albums. Then, the excitement that there are thirteen albums is palpable.
This is a best of the first few albums, and it fucking rocks. They hadn’t even released Highway To Hell yet and all the songs on here rock.
This album has healed me emotionally when I have felt broken. It has calmed me when I have been un-calm and it has restored me to who I am on many occasion. SR once told me to go and listen to “If You Want Blood”, it’ll make you happier. That was somewhere in the early 90s and I hadn’t realised its effect was so obvious.
I had to re-purchase this on music cassette because I had listened to my first version of this so many times the tape had stretched in places and it made the music sound wrong.
I’ve bought this on CD since. And then I ripped that to save onto an MP3 player. Then I used the CD to rip to a higher specification and it is now on the NAS Drive.
After you’ve listened to this a lot you can hear the smiles in the band, you recognise every note, you can imagine where they are on stage and what they are doing there.
For many years I had only seen the front of this album, the rear cover wasn’t part of the tape version I had. When I saw the back cover I wasn’t disappointed.
I dare you to find a song on this album that can be considered weak. I dare you.
I have spent part of the last few days setting up my new mobile phone so that all the music is on it and that it works how I want it to work. Given that this is an Apple phone and most of my stuff is backed up to the cloud moving stuff to a new phone is remarkably simple.
In the old days you learnt how the new phone worked by entering all the contact details manually and playing around in the settings menu. Now all you do is enter your cloud details and wait. All the settings transfer over along with contacts and ringtones. While this is an improvement and people now have way too much data the requires transfer it is also a shame as it means most people don’t mess around in the settings menu.
When people ask me how to make a phone or device do a particular thing I often ask “Have you messed around in the settings menu?”. The reply is often “no”. People expect everything to work correctly out of the box and don’t understand how to tweak things or even that perhaps they should tweak things.
The main contents I needed to transfer to the new phone was music. Now, I suspect that within five years this won’t be necessary at all as I will stream all the music that I want. But that time is not yet so I keep “hard” versions of a lot of my music. I could use iTunes to transfer music. However, iTunes hates me. Or it hates my PC. Or it’s just shit. I’m not sure which it is but iTunes often freezes on the PC, fucks up the iPhone or just deletes the entire music content on the phone. I haven’t used iTunes to back up my phone for a few years now and I don’t use it to transfer music. I do use iTunes to import music onto the NAS and also create playlists and keep the folder contents organised to some degree. I have been frustrated with the way that iTunes hasn’t been consistent with the folder structure it uses and so I often delete the xml library file, move the folders around and then get iTunes to scan for new music.
A list of music that is contained within the iTunes folder is on this page: My Music. It isn’t a list of all music on the NAS because there’s also kids stuff, audiobooks, and stuff I rarely play.
I have used CopyTrans to move the music onto the new phone. It’s way more useful than iTunes and far more predictable.
Happily using @CopyTrans to put my music onto my new iPhone.
— Ian Parish (@iparish) September 29, 2017
I have used CopyTrans in the past to keep text messages and back those up but I rarely do that now, it’s not needed.
CopyTrans doesn’t hurt the PC in the same was iTunes does. It is a positive experience and well worth looking into if you find that iTunes is unpredictable and hard work on your PC. I have transferred around 7000 songs onto the new iPhone in a few hours. Job done. I’m a happy chap.
Wow. This album was released in my summer of music awakening. 1987, when I was fifteen, was, in my mind, a year of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet and Hyteria by Def Leppard. It was the year of my second summer camp and moving into the fifth year at school.
I think Armageddon It was released as a single and I loved it. So I bought the album. It’s great. Well, it was then. It’s a product of its time and I’m happy with that. It has consistently been in the top of album lists.
Then you hear that the drummer only has one arm. He lost the other one in a car accident and you think, wow. This is really impressive.
I was meant to see Def Leppard as my first concert. They were playing the Royal Albert Hall in the round in April 1988. I had a friend to go with and everything. But I got a cadet trip to Cyprus and so did that instead. I’m still glad I went to Cyprus, it was a brilliant, but frustrating experience. That left Iron Maiden to become my first concert on December 10 1988.
I finally did see Def Leppard play. They opened one of the NFL games at Wembley Stadium that I’ve been to. I had grown up then and they didn’t really bother me.
So, the album.
It’s full of hits and power ballads that knocks the 80’s out of 1987. It’s probably another great driving album.
The thing is, once you’ve listened to this, you seek out other Def Leppard and you get some excellent stuff like “On Through The Night”, “High n Dry” and “Pyromania”. Each of these is a better album, but not as popular.
