This is really hard to write and I’m not even sure what I’m going to say. I really like the music of this band and I even went to see them at the Brixton Academy over ten years ago on a really fucking hot summer’s day. It was intensely hot inside the theatre and was a complete test of stamina. It was a really good show and I had a great time. There are four albums by these guys. But I’m still not sure what to write. I’m not sure I even reviewed The Fake Sound Of Progress. There’s a possibility the reviewing system is a little broken as all the albums starting with “The” may have been reviewed already or they may be coming when I get to the Ts. I might have skipped “Fake Sound” deliberately.
There’s some explanation needed here although I’m still struggling with all of it really. Firstly, this is a really good album. I really like it and I thought the Lostprophets brought something new to the table in terms of sound and popular metal / rock.
BUT
The singer is a convicted paedophile. If it’s ok to list the types of bad there is then he is pretty much down at the bottom as a complete sick-fuck. I haven’t listened to a single song by this band since that happened. I don’t even know if it’s OK to listen to their music. I don’t know if it’s OK to admit really liking the songs. I don’t know if it’s OK because the singer is a sick-fuck. It distresses me, just writing this is hard, because I know it’s easy to be taken out of context. It’s easy for something to think the wrong thing about my intentions. But, at the time I thought this was a good band. I guess they still were. It’s just the singer is a sick-fuck.
Ever wanted your heavy metal and rock to be a little more . . . redneck? This is the album for you. I’m not sure I could go and see them live, this is definitely an album of piss take which just happens to have allowed the band to make a decent living I guess. It’s like the album I have of Metallica songs played as lullabies. Here’s the track listing:
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Fat Bottom Girls
Whole Lotta Rosie
You Shook Me All Night Long
I Believe In A Thing Called Love
Ace Of Spades
Detroit Rock City
Corn Liquor
Feel Like Making Love
Walk This Way
Centrefold
I’m Keeping Your Poop
Highway To Hell
Will The Circle Be Unbroken
A couple of things to note. I spelt Centrefold correctly for UK usage. I’ve not listened to “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” but I suspect that it’s about a jerk-circle.
I raced a race the other night and I really enjoyed it. The car was a lovely little Renault Megane Sport and the track was Mount Panorama in Australia. The circuit is amazing and I’d love to see some real racing there one day. The car performed well and was remarkably balanced for that circuit, the braking was sharp and there wasn’t much under-steer, I didn’t notice any over-steer. I sent the video to YouTube and you can watch it below:
I like the way the red rims on the wheels make it look like I’ve got proper glowing brakes. A reason for publishing this video was to bump a band video down my list a little, it wasn’t a good performance.
Nearly anything by AC/DC has to be on the good side of good. This album . . . . . . . I don’t know why but this album has a much dirtier, grungier sound than all the others especially those from the Bon Scott era. I think they turned the grit up and balanced the bass a little deeper. It’s got a gorgeous sound, which, the first time I heard it jarred me a little because it didn’t sound like AC/DC.
Whatever you think about the production you can’t argue with the writing. There is not a bad song on this album. In fact they still play fifty percent of these songs on stage now, Y years later where Y = current year – 1977.
“Go Down”, I explained to a class recently that while they think most rock and metal is about death and destruction most is about love and sex. This song encapsulates that.
“Dog Eat Dog”, feeling blue? Listen to this.
Then the masterpiece “Let There Be Rock” a biblical version of the history of rock. Such high energy and an amazing song. Everything about this should be taught in every school.
“Bad Boy Boogie”, what other song are you going to get an old man to prance around the stage and eventually reveal his arse to the crowd?
“Problem Child”, amazing song, aren’t we all?
“Overdose”, it’s sad.
“Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be”, reminds us all that we should be having fun and that heaven and hell are bullshit (that’s my own take on it).
“Whole Lotta Rosie”, holy fuck this is an anthem of a song.
Get this album, get anything by AC/DC before 1982. It such lovely summer sounding music and mostly about sex. FIVE stars.
I have spent some time recently at an Army Training Camp with a team of CCF cadets whilst they trained to compete in the Royal Air Squadron Trophy. They worked very hard and won the South East heats and so now move on to the national finals in a month’s time.
I can’t show you any photographs of that because they all contain the cadets. What I can show you are two pictures of Crowborough in the lovely sunny snow.
Crowborough Snow
Another:
Glimmer Of Sun
I’m very proud of the work the cadets put into the competition.
Also, while at the defence training area I found an old safe. I thought it looked particularly picturesque and so here it is:
It’s taken a couple of days to calm down after a trip to the cinema to see Vice. This film is from the same director who gave us The Big Short which again made me angry for a long time. Also, I watched The Big Short quite close to seeing “Spotlight”, that’s not a combination to be taken lightly.
I went to the cinema at Rochester on the west bank of the river Medway. In this area the Medway is still tidal and so possibly brackish although I would need to look that up. I’m slightly fascinated by the idea of where along the river does the salinity change to make it more sea water? It has to be between Sheerness and Allington lock but where? Also, I imagine it depends on what the tide is doing and how much rain we’ve had. There must be a mathematical model somewhere.
The tide was pretty high when I went to the cinema. I remember looking to make sure I could report it on these pages. Although it was dark I could see a shimmering reflection of lights across the valley in the lapping water close to the wharf.
I went to see Vice and as is customary I gave the film a score on the IMDB site. I use the iPhone app to score these films and then the application then tweets the result. It’s interesting how the language around computing had changed over the years. I would still call these things programs along with calling folders directories. I do come from the generation that understands most about computers and such. Younger generations, on the whole, don’t have to worry about the mechanics of these things as they tend to work straight out of the box. Who in the future will know the delights of messing around with config files? The nerds and geeks.
To understand the rating system used you should read this particular communication as it explains how a 1-10 system doesn’t work. Here’s the tweet:
Angry. that is what this film does to me. It makes me angry and raging inside at a political system that doesn’t care about people. It shows how people claim to be doing the right thing even though the evidence is clearly not there to prove that is what happens. I’m still angry and I watched this film about three days ago. It highlights the motivations of people in power and how much they are happy to screw over the little people.
This film is great. The acting is brilliant and the make-up is amazing. I really enjoyed it and the few moments of humour within. What I don’t like is the republicanism [USA type] that it shows. These right wing religious zealots have controlled the government for so many years trying to transform their own society into one that they think is the best. This is largely about making themselves richer and maintaining power to keep themselves rich. They don’t give a shit about the poor or the fact the people exist.
Things to be angry about and keep moaning about:
George W Bush STEALING the election in 2000.
Antonin Scalia being a religious zealot who did his best to remove rights from all people.
The complete fucking lack of evidence for the justification of the Iraq way.
How the UK bent over backwards to follow the USA into the Iraq war.
How military intervention in Gulf War I wasn’t enough and caused the next 50 years of stability.
The complete power vacuum in Iraq.
The EMAILS for fucks sake. [Republican emails from 2000s]
The religiosity of the leaders which means they already think they are supreme [Blair – catholic, George W – religious, Cheney – right wing religious]
Why the right-wing appeals to the poorest when that is who they mess up.
The Iraq war WAS illegal and no evidence existed for it. What a sham. I’m angry. I’m coming around to the idea of a revolution to remove the existing power hierarchies. I’m not completely stupid to understand that another thirty years or so after we smash the institutions we’d have to do it again but maybe that is how you make society as fair as possible.
Every now and then over the last nine years or so, since I’ve had an iPhone I’ve been trying to find the audio of a song called “Sleepless Night” by Dokken. It had to be the live version from the album “Beast From The East”. I’ve reviewed this album elsewhere on this site and you can read that here. It looks like I wrote that review in 2013! So, this morning, I once again did a search for the audio of the song Sleepless Night (live from Beast From The East).
I found a version! This song wasn’t on the CD release version of the album when I bought that and so all I had was the record version and the tape I had made of it. I found the song on YouTube and I have no idea if it is there legally or not but now at least I can listen to it while it remains on that site. I’ll just have to figure out how to find a decent CD copy of the song for quality ripping purposes.
You can listen here for now if you want, until it gets taken from YouTube. Listen for the pause just after the solo and then wonder at the screech as George Lynch re-enters the main riff. I love that bit.
Scanning down the BBC News headlines page I came across a few headlines that bothered me and I think they show a disconnect between what the public think and what is correct. This has always been the case but social media and the ease of connectivity now means that people who are wrong can gather together and think that being in a community of like-minded people means that their views are correct.
Holocaust Denial
Apparently 5% of the population do not think the holocaust happened. Whether this is the same as denial I am not sure. Perhaps they just haven’t appraised the evidence. Apparently 45% of people polled didn’t know how many people were killed in the holocaust but I think that is more forgivable. To know something happened is one thing but to know numbers about it is another. As long as they all know it was a bad thing then we should be ok. There were 17 million victims in total.
What this news article seems to be pointing out is that we clearly are not learning from the mistakes of the past. We are also pretty poor at appraising evidence. Too many people don’t understand how to read articles critically and to appraise their sources of information. Too many people can easily be swayed by group-think and the idea that many people saying the same thing over and over must be right.
What’s more these people also probably don’t care that they are wrong. They are going to believe what they want because they can. They also probably think that there isn’t objective truth. They probably struggle to cope with the idea that they can be easily manipulated and are possibly being used by other forces or that they are just stupid. The reason we have experts in certain fields of human endeavour is so that not everyone needs to be an expert about everything. People should be accepting of allowing us to defer our human knowledge to people who have spent their lives pursuing the best-as-we-know-it truth in these matters. We also need to understand that it’s not just a single expert we should trust but the consensus view of the world of experts.
This is what science does. Science changes its views with evidence and sometimes it changes quickly and sometimes its a more gradual change but over time the direction of scientific knowledge is to getting things correct. In terms of history we should listen to the consensus view of academics while we learn more and more. In terms of economics we shouldn’t really listen to anyone because it’s not a science, more a dark art. In terms of Brexit we should listen to the lawyers, the economists and the scientists. We should not be listening to the MPs because they aren’t experts in those fields. They are people elected by us to represent us whom, we would think, have the best interests of the country and its citizens as a whole. But we should also recognise that they are human and so fundamentally flawed individually.
We also need to understand that sometimes we just won’t know and answer to a particular problem or that the question isn’t a valid question. Think about something from history, something like what Masham said to Queen Anne. We can’t know what was said but we can use the best evidence we have to try and build a picture. Think about the start of the universe, we have a pretty good idea of what happened and asking “what” is a very legitimate question. The problem with that one is asking “why”. Although why something happens is a legitimate question the answer is unknowable and this makes the question reasonably void. It is these gaps in answers to questions that humans don’t seem to like and in those are inserted many stupid theories along with the concept of god.
Education is how we get out of this. We need to educate the country in particular matters so that people understand why and how. This is not an easy process. To allow a decent explanation to the country on matters of importance with a series on TV or radio or the internet somewhere. Mind you, you can’t make the horse drink. Some people will choose to be willfully ignorant and others are just ignorant. Personally I think this is correlated to good effect with empathy, but that is something I haven’t investigated.
Holocaust
This is how it is done. We educate people. We let them understand the experiences. We talk to them. We hope they are willing to listen and learn. I do think, however, that there is an awful lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect going on with people who choose not to learn.
Asstrology
Two more headlines next to each other on the very same BBC News front pages as the others in this communication. I did not read each article and that may be the start of the problem but I want to point out the following:
Astrology is bollocks and, unfortunately, people fall for its charm and simplicity. Perhaps if we could educate people more about appraising evidence and understanding a little more physics we could kill off this bollocks and other religious bollocks too.
Finally, putting a question mark at the end of a headline does not good journalism make. It is really lazy. It implies that the answer is yes but also shows that the journalist doesn’t really have any proper evidence to answer the question because otherwise the question mark wouldn’t need to be there. If you have evidence then it is fact and you can write something like that as an indictment of underfunding of our roads. But if you are just using “anecdotal evidence”, or to give it its proper name; “anecdotes”, then you are just a lazy piece of shit and you shouldn’t be a journalist.
Always remember when your aunt starts telling you that she took activated carbon tablets and that cleared up her cancer that the plural of anecdotes is not evidence. People are flawed and terrible at understanding evidence. That is why science and experts exist.
Of all the Led Zeppelin albums this one is the biggy in my mind. It is the first I listened to and I was blown away by how complex it is and just how much this band influenced later music. I can’t remember the last time I listened to it. My tastes have moved on and I am in another world altogether. The current plan is to review all the albums from before my current aggrotech phase and then go back and review all those I have bought since then. It’s a project.
Led zep 4 – not a bad song on it. Ground breaking and stunning.
I watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark yesterday. It’s still a great film if you ignore the glaring inconsistencies and “Indy” problem. I think it’s one of those things you should just enjoy rather than tear it apart. Having said that I have an issue with it, something that had never struck me before but bothers me now.
Indiana Jones is a university lecturer who has young women swooning over him in lectures. This is made clear by the number of women in the lecture theatre when he is lecturing, this is 1936 and women weren’t commonly at university then, and the young lady with “Love You” written on her eyelids.
Later in the movie Indiana travels to Nepal to meet with his ex-girlfriend Marion. After an initial greeting she hits him [wrong thing to do]. This is the exchange just after that:
MARION: You son-of-a-bitch! You know what you did to me, to my life? This is your handiwork.
INDY: I never meant to hurt you.
MARION: I was a child!
INDY: You knew what you were doing.
MARION: I was in love.
INDY: I guess that depends on your definition.
MARION: It was wrong. You knew it.
Quite clearly in this situation we have a college lecturer taking advantage of his position of influence over a younger female student. She has every right to be angry at him. He’s even quite dismissive of her feelings in this situation.
You can see that in the early 1980s when this was released this was an accepted form of abuse. We now recognise the problems with this behaviour and treat it accordingly. Let’s be clear, I am not asking for the film to be withdrawn, I’m not saying you shouldn’t watch it but I am saying that times have changed and we need to understand how society is generally self improving over time [or at least the last seventy years].
Given the way things are going in this country and the USA I am worried that society will regress in acceptance and understanding of moral codes over the next twenty years. I mean I’m optimistic about it, but I do worry.
