What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than watching a classic tale of cowboys robbing banks. But, I get ahead from myself. I went to the cinema. I watched a film. Possibly the best bit was using a new bridge to get there, see this communication. I had tweeted the following:
Normal trip to cinema (pre-bridge) was 14km. Will inform you of new distance.
Well the new journey was about 11.5km. So it’s a shorter distance and has some lovely corners with adverse camber and brows of hills, however if you get stuck behind someone slow it’s incredibly boring. The normal route would include some motorway and nice accelerating corners, this new route was good as long as there’s no traffic.
You should refer to this communication if you don’t know how my rating system works. This is the first 8/10 for quite a while! It was a good film.
The story was a classic cowboy story with two brothers robbing banks. The horses were replaced by cars but all the other elements were there. The music complimented the filming wonderfully and the acting was great. The pace was suitably relaxed. I really enjoyed it. There’s a lot to worry about with the modern audience if they can’t cope with a film of this pace. I’m not saying they can’t cope just that most films aren’t like this one. Perhaps modern superhero films could learn something from this film.
The title of this communication does not refer to the more frequent sea passage in the Northwest of the globe. The fact that this passage is becoming a more regular occurrence should scare the fuck out of all of you. Anthropogenic Global Climate change is happening and the speed is increasing. The biggest problem is that all the damage has been done already. Because the effects are long term and not pleasant and will cost a fucking fortune to sort out it’s not the sort of thing politicians really want to talk about. As far as I can tell this planet is fucked. It isn’t going to get solved and our grandchildren will be suffering as a result of this. Fuck the self-interested assholes who “govern” the countries. Fuck them and the short-termism of politics.
Bridges
The bit in the middle of the map, bounded by the river, the A229 and the two motorways is a lovely area to live in. I have written about it before see this communication. To get to Snodland, which the Post Office thinks is the best place to take my parcels, is a 9 or 12 mile journey ONE WAY. This is largely because of the river and the location of bridges over the river.
A new village is being built on brownfield site in the three villages area. There will soon be four in the valley. While I understand the need for more housing I do think the character of the valley villages is going to be ruined. Currently the villages are largely working class Victorian homes built for the workers of Burham Brick Works. There’s a certain look and feel to the villages. The brand new village will be large, expensive homes. My chip on my shoulder is back! I have found myself getting annoyed recently at the stratification of society and the problems that causes. Anyway, back to the journey to the post office lest this writing become another rant about the uselessness of politicians and the social engineering they mess with [along with fucking the planet].
Part of the deal for these new houses was a new bridge to be built. This will allow most of the traffic of the new village to not go past the junction to my village. But in reality that’s bullshit. What may happen is that the local country roads become over run with people cutting through along the bottom of the Downs. We shall see. My village is already planning a zebra crossing because of the expected extra traffic.
New Bridge
The new bridge is in place and opened recently. I drove over it this evening and took a photo. Already the road seems busier [anecdote and confirmation bias]. I will run that way tomorrow. Normally running along that stretch I would be passed by about 3-4 cars during the mile I am on that road. It will be interesting to see what happens. While I like the idea of the bridge I am not happy about what it means for those who live around here.
The New Bridge
So I now have to spend the next few months behind non locals who think the road [at the split] is two way because they haven’t paid attention. My patience could be tested.
I will keep you chaps updated about what happens. I predict a serious crash at the Bull Lane / Pilgrims Way junction within a year and then traffic lights or a mini roundabout will be installed.
There’s nothing on at the cinema I want to see tonight so how about a picture of the aircraft I am currently tracking?
I don’t think it’s too bad. I’ve been working on port forwarding and things to try and see stuff outside my home network and it’s getting there.
This isn’t all the aircraft my receiver is getting signals from but it shows the aircraft with known positions, the ones that broadcast their GPS location.
About a year ago a microscope came to be in my possession [legally] I might add. It needed a little work to make the light focusing platform to work properly but that was completed in July.
Microscope
I also ordered some prepared slides with your standard introduction to looking at little things samples. It was pretty good looking through the microscope at these. What I want to do soon is get some blank slides and then cut stuff open to get my own samples for viewing. Here’s a photograph, taken through the view piece by placing the camera lens on top of the eye piece. I think it’s a photograph of a housefly leg.
Fly Legs
I’m looking forward to seeing more of less of the world.
I don’t often do late night trips to the cinema but Suicide Squad was a film I was interested in and there was only one showing at Ashford Cineworld last night. That said, by late I mean 21:20 hrs and not midnight or something, I am definitely not 18 anymore! As has become custom I have rated this film on IMDB using my wonderful rating system which is explained here. I also then shared this rating on twitter to my one point six two million followers.
This film was terrible. I did stay in the cinema until the end though. Now as a slight warning I should inform you that I don’t like the Batman films. I don’t really like Batman. The recent Superman films weren’t very good. When you look at the Marvel cannon there are only two or three good films in there. The problem is there are a lot of super fanatics of these comics and trying to create a film for them doesn’t work. The comic translations just seem to leave me cold.
In this particular film I thought Harley Quinn was tame, she could have been a lot more crazy. I didn’t like the Joker or Batman. I didn’t think any of there characters were any good. The fight scenes were boring, nothing special, all been seen before. I spent the first thirty minutes of this film hoping for it to be good but thinking constantly that it was shit.
There, this film was shit.
Addition: Something I thought while watching this film but forgot to write down is that great songs do not a great movie make. The soundtrack put this film to shame.
Took a little trip last night to see the film Morgan at the Cineworld cinema in Rochester. I haven’t been to the cinema as much as I would want recently because there just haven’t been the films on that encouraged me. This choice was more of a “I’m not that fussed but I’ll go anyway and see what it’s like”. As is custom I rated this on IMDB and you should read this communication about my system.
So why did I rate it as a 4? Because it wasn’t that good that’s why. The first forty five minutes were boring and nothing particularly special. There was lots of exposition from the usual cast of terrible scientists. I didn’t find Morgan particularly creepy although I thought making it wear a hoody all the way through was quite a good touch.
Perhaps I’m just too old to find these kind of stories interesting or new? It felt like a film I had seen too often and there wasn’t anything that was new or interesting about this one. I would recommend you watch Blade Runner instead. It’s the same overall story but just done in a far better way.
While watching Kate Mara in House Of Cards I always thought she was pretty and sweet but her face seems incapable of any form of expression, which, as it happens, was probably the perfect thing for this movie but it distresses me about her. I do hope she can smile or frown and I am sure she can but I haven’t ever seen evidence of that.
Mild spoilers: when escaping the “room” Kate Mara manages to climb up a shaft to a window and kick that window out. If Morgan was so intelligent why didn’t she do that much earlier. How did Morgan know how to drive?
It turns out this film was produced by Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner. Hmmm.
A weekend during August meant it was time to travel to Germany again and the beautiful town of Hildesheim. In 2015 Smith and I went to the M’era Luna festival. This year we had tickets earlier, the tunnel booked earlier and also a plan! Except the plan had to be adjusted as Smith was flying into Brussels on the Friday morning. I spent the Thursday evening packing the car ready for the weekend and got up early on the Friday to head down the M20 to the Channel Tunnel. Last year there were problems with Operation Stack and this year the M20 was fine although the scene of a fallen pedestrian bridge a few weeks later.
I don’t care how old you are if you wear a baseball cap while driving you are a knob.
After the tunnel I headed to Brussels, which wasn’t that far off the route we needed to get to Hildesheim. There are two main motorway routes that head to the industrial heartland of Germany’s Ruhr Valley and one goes via Brussels, the other via Antwerp. So the first three hours of the journey were completed on my own, with podcasts and talking books for company [I don’t do music on long journeys].
Smith sent a message saying he’d meet me in P1 level 3. Well, I wondered while traversing the Ring if that is what the signs on approach to the airport would say or would they be in another language or missing entirely. Fortunately they did and we found each other easily. A quick adjustment on the iPhone Googlemaps app and we were heading to Hildesheim past Leuven.
Not a great deal of note happened along the way until we got close to Bad Oeynhausen when the app was telling us that there was a 90 minute delay and would we like to go a different route? Well, yes please. So we left the A2 motorway, where speeds reach in excess of 110mph, and headed cross country to Hamelin and then Hildesheim. I think that all in all the journey was about eight hours, which isn’t that bad for five hundred miles. All we now had to do was load up the trolley and walk about a mile from the car to the festival entrance, find a spot to camp, put up the tent, eat food and drink. We camped almost exactly as we did last year, about as far from the main festival as possible. This meant it was reasonably quiet and the toilets weren’t over run.
Runway 07
Friday evening meant wine, Jägermeister and Absinthe. This was possibly a little silly as Saturday was quite hard work for me. Although there is no live music on the Friday evening there is a disco in one of the hangers and plenty of stalls open along with the Medieval Village where you can practise your ax throwing, should you want to.
The weather wasn’t as hot this year compared with 2015. The forecast had 25C or so which suited me fine, the 33C of last year was too much. The night was good and Saturday morning meant a walk along the runway to showers and coffee. Not at the same time but I needed both. The shower marquee was pretty good and had lovely hot water to clean away the hours of travel yesterday. The queues for coffee were pretty long and I wondered whether it was worth bringing a stove to make a coffee each morning but it feels quite sophisticated drinking coffee in the morning sun on the taxiway of an airfield waiting for the outfits and music.
M’era Luna is cheap enough that if you just come along to display your costume and make up abilities then you don’t have to worry about the music. With Download coming in at about GBP200 the GBP80 for M’era Luna seems a bargain. It’s also small enough to feel cosy and pleasant. Getting ready for the day’s activities this year was a little more time consuming this year as Smith and I had plans for costumes, also it appeared there was a naked selfie competition on WhatsApp with a group of friends started by Walshe! These photos still exist in the ether but they are not going to be published anywhere public.
I should probably get on to the music with that being the reason for driving five hundred miles an’ all. But first there was getting an outfit on! Because Suicide Commando wasn’t playing on the Saturday it meant we dressed in white shirts [shock horror!] and Ayria ties bought when we saw her play at Electrowerkz.
. Bringing the spirit of @ayria to #mera16pic.twitter.com/bJ9wmfwMv1
And so on to the music. I seem to recall saying last year that the little details disappear from my mind and so what follows is mostly just a list with my thoughts at the time. Some of my favourite bands will appear with more details. There are two stages at M’Era Luna, the main stage and the hanger stage.
Saturday
Shaargot [main stage] – good industrial metal.
Vlad In Tears [hanger stage] – shit.
Erdling [main stage] – goth. shit.
Time for lunch.
Gothminster [main stage] – killing a zombie on stage during the first song. Bat ventriloquism in the second. What the fuck is going on? Left to the hanger stage.
Gothminister
A Life Divided [hanger stage] – caught the last song. pop metal.
Chrom [hanger stage] – the first band I was really looking forward to. I liked the music but they were boring. A shame.
Chrom
Stahlmann [main stage] – dressed in silver. female guitarist. slow goth rock. couple of faster ones, ok.
Noisuf X [hanger stage] – three blokes. White shirts. Two drumming. Heavy EBM. Good.
Cassandra Complex [hanger stage] – listened to this stuff before we went. Sounded ok. Turns out that live it’s just goth shit.
Oomph!
Oomph! [main stage] – Good German pop rock. 2 guitars, keyboards, percussion, drummer. Bass and singer.
Hamatom [hanger stage] – from outside hangar. Faster metal. Masks. Ok. A little derivative! Should be more dangerous given masks.
Apocalyptica [main stage] – Pretty good given it’s men with cellos. Too many Metallica covers.
[:SITD:] [hanger stage] – Solid good set. This was actually a pretty good set and they played well. Very good to finally see this band.
[:SITD:]Die Krupps [hangar stage] – Fuck yes! Playing metal pipes. Breaking guitars. Industrial well done.
Die Krupps
VNV nation [Main stage] – 1 song. Boring. I’ve listened to a lot of this at home and I like it. But only at certain times. It’s gentle music. The sort to put on when having dinner.
Hocico [Hanger stage] – Actually pretty good. Big sound. Two percussionists with black Angel wings!
Sisters of Mercy [main stage] – Bad. Dull.
And there ends the first day at M’Era Luna festival 2016. It was a good day. Plenty to see and the surprises of the day were Hamatom and Oomph! for me. I enjoyed both. Not to say I hated all the others, I just liked these two more. Oh, and Die Krupps were pretty awesome along with [:SITD:]. Hocico made a better impression that when I saw them previously at Electrowerkz, but still didn’t quite manage brilliant.
Morning time means the usual hunt for coffee. Showers and packing up the tent. Sunday’s plan was to pack up camp and then drive a couple of hundred miles after the last band. We had a date with Eurotunnel at about midday on Monday and we definitely wouldn’t make it if we left Monday morning. We walked the mile or so to the car and then got dressed in the costumes. Again we were dressed in white.
Droogs and the suicide crew!! #mera16pic.twitter.com/GTj4o4Ovsg
Me The Tiger [hanger stage] – Pretty good. One song. Good.
Aeverium [main stage] – Female main singer, sexy. Heavy. Male singer. Good contrast.
Rabia Sorda [hanger stage] – Rock, a bit pop? Guitar with keyboard sounds over top. Ok. Nothing special.
Rabia Sorda
Heldmaschine [hanger stage] – Ok. Industrial. Correction very good.
Centhron [hangar stage] – Live bassist. Good. Shame we left early.
Combichrist [main stage] – Darn good. Pit. I’ve seen this band many times and they haven’t failed to impress although I do prefer their earlier electronic work! [go to 3:24 in the video and there I am!]
I was there! M’era Luna 2016 – Combichrist live/ https://t.co/ACue1uLPaG
Zeromancer [hangar stage] – Sat at back. Sounds ok.
Eisbrecher [main stage] – Drunk girl talk, orange hair. Late on stage. Very good. Speaks too much. Liked the set and the black suits. Left early to see:
Suicide Commando [Hangar stage] – Live drummer. Excellent. Including song: Die Motherfucker Die.
Suicide Commando
In Extremo [Main stage] – 1 song. Fucking medieval rock.
Had cup of tea. Listened to Within Temptation. Went and got some food. Left.
We travelled just inside Belgium and parked the car up and slept for a few hours before waking, driving to a service station for coffee and then getting to Calais for the Eurotunnel and home. We chatted about music and costumes for next year. I’ve got some ideas but I need to learn about mammal skulls first.
It’s hard to sum up the entire weekend. Almost every aspect of it was brilliant. The journey, the chatting, the alcohol, the food, the vegan food server with her lovely freckles, the coffee, the costumes, the music, just being away and feeling like I was at home.
There may be more to add to this but it has taken a long time for me to get around to writing this so I will publish this communication. Changes and added bits will be noted as such.
Went to the cinema beside the tidal river Medway to watch Pete’s Dragon [tidal rounds down the number of cinemas to one]. As is the custom I rated this film on IMDB and readers are directed to this explanation of how that rating system works.
I have a long history with this film. It was the first film my father took me to see at the cinema and I cried my eyes out for ages at the end because the dragon leaves. I can remember nothing else about the story, just that the dragon left and it hurt. My dad explained that he was leaving to help out other children now that Pete was sorted. I don’t remember what was wrong with Pete. I do remember that the dragon was a cartoon creature who could disappear.
So to the new version of this film. SPOILERS THERE BE.
It starts with a car crash where the parents die. What the fuck?? You know, it’s done well but fuck, what a start. Shortly after that we meet the dragon. I am going to suspend my disbelief about dragons, I don’t like the aerodynamics or mass to wing area ratio etc. The dragon was very well done. Not a big scaly thing but with fur (poor aerodynamics) and magic and smiles.
This is quite a good film. The rest of the story isn’t up to much. The way I interact with films is to imagine what I am going to write on this website. That way I am always thinking about what is going on. I am not quite at the point of writing notes during a film but I did consider it today.
After the initial car crash nothing really stuck in my head about what to write. It ended up being your standard film about a creature captured by men. You know:
Let’s kill it.
Let’s look after it.
That sort of thing. It feels rather harsh to have taken children to a film that made me sob when I was younger and one of them was affected similarly. But it didn’t last long. The ending of this movie seemed more positive than the one I remember!
Overall, apart from the horror of the first few minutes this was a good film.
A part of the summer’s tour was to visit the West Country to see friends. As I’ve been driving around quite a bit I found some radio series to listen to. I already listen to podcasts and I do that mostly when I am running so I wanted other things to listen to while driving. I had an audio book version of Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan and then I listened to all of Cabin Pressure, a radio situation comedy by John Finnimore. Cabin Pressure is brilliant and so very well written, I’d recommend it to all.
I spent two nights at the Kilna Guest House just on the edge of Tideford. This is a few miles along from crossing the Tamar bridge and so is definitely in Cornwall.
On my first night there I went to see a film in Plymouth at the Vue cinema, I watched David Brent. On the first full day in Cornwall I has a quick run around the lovely countryside.
After that I then met with my good friend Jamie and he had a surprise first activity for us. We travelled a small distance along the A38 to Adrenalin Quarry. For a relatively small sum we were able to launch ourselves off the top edge of the quarry and fly down the zip line for 490m.
Zip Wire
It was pretty good fun and there was a video service available so we decided to do the whole thing again. Having looked into zip wires a little bit there’s one in Wales which is a mile long! I would really like to do that one. At the end of the Adrenalin zip wire we were about one metre above the lake travelling at 40 miles per hour.
The set up at Adrenalin Quarry was very professional and one of the best outdoor activity centres I have been to. I was very impressed and the technology was impressive. To get the video I just needed a code number for their website which was printed on a wrist band. Inside the wrist band was an RFID chip which I placed near a reader just before we launched off the platform. It all worked very well.
Later that afternoon the full-on sport experience continued with frisbee golf at Mount Edgcumbe House on the opposite side of the Tamar from Plymouth. We bumped into more experienced players of frisbee golf and they had different frisbees for different distances and conditions, it was quite an impressive set up and just a little nerdy!
Frisbee Golf at Mount Edgcumbe House
I have been around the grounds of Mount Edgcumbe a number of times but never actually inside [I’m not even sure if you can see inside] maybe next time I will go inside and have a nose around. Now that I’ve seen inside a few of these old houses they do seem similar and less impressive the more I see!
Mount Edgcumbe House
That evening was a meal in Saltash and then back to the guest house for sleep. I didn’t run the next morning but instead got ready to drive across the county towards the end of lands. I have other friends in Camborne and so listened to more of Cabin Pressure along the way. This was my first time to Camborne and I was curious as when I was at college the Royal School of Mines had a traditional rivalry with Camborne School of Mines and so I have been aware of this place since the early 90s!
While having a bit of an overview of the road map I noticed a monolith along the way and so I thought I should probably divert to see it. According to Wikipedia it is the largest prehistoric monolith in Cornwall. At the top of St Breock Downs I thought it’d be worth seeing.
St Breock Downs Monolith
In the picture you can see the monolith and the Beast! I managed to take a photograph of the side without a graffiti penis! According to my OS map app there was also a trig point nearby and so I walked the short distance to that also.
St Breock Downs Trig Point
The roads heading to the monolith were “classic” Cornish roads as they were single track two way roads with very few passing points. After this I stopped off for a coffee at “Cornwall Services” and then kept going to Camborne.
Later that afternoon a trip to the beach was required. It wasn’t cold nor too hot and there were sunny intervals. I didn’t take a hat and so I got burnt on my head. I should have known better.
Gwithian Beach
Clearly the southern most point of this island beckoned and the next day we travelled to the Lizard via a short time in the viewing area of RNAS Culdrose to see what was happening. We were quite lucky as there were about four Hawks doing their thing in the skies along with one Sea King. The Hawks were quite loud but not as good as the Tornados seen at RAF Marham. They were practising landings by performing touch and goes. Hopefully there’ll be F-35s here soon as they prepare for duties on the carriers.
Hawk, RNAS Culdrose
Pub lunch at Lizard and a stroll around the lighthouse and southern most point. It was very pleasant and lovely weather. One day I might have to order some pasties to get that authentic Cornish taste here in Kent.
Later that day we visited a monument on top of a hill near Camborne and from this vantage point you can see the impact that mining had on the landscape. There are small industrial buildings dotted around the place with chimneys clearly visible.
Carn Brea
And so the trip was over. The journey home was smooth enough. The roads were flowing quite well until the M25 which was to be expected. This was the last big trip of my summer although I have still to write about the biggest so keep an eye open for that!
After a particularly hard day cooking a very slow roast pork shoulder and then being requested to just cook normal stuff the next day my oven stopped working. I did wonder why it was taking ages to heat up and it slowly dawned on my that something was wrong. I did some googling and it seemed the best thing to do [given all other parts of cooker worked including the oven fan] was to remove the heating element then checking the continuity of it.
Burnt out
I didn’t really need to check it, but I did just to make sure. It was fucked. I ordered another from PartMaster and it arrived a day later.
There are two types of element fittings apparently. The simplest can be removed and fitted just from the front of the oven/cooker and therefore can be changed with the whole unit in place. The other type requires the entire cooked to be removed, a back panel taken off and screws the found. Guess which mine was? The bloody second!
Complexities
This is the back of the cooker. What a pain to get this thing out and the new one fitted. Once it was in place and the gubbins all put back the oven was tested and it worked! I’m pretty happy. Once oven fixed for around GBP55 and one day’s wait. I felt quite smug and pleased after this.
![[:SITD:]](https://fooyah.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20160813_171145112_iOS-1024x768.jpg)
