You know when you are out and see something a little different? Well, that happened to me last October time while I was at Crowborough. I spotted an old safe in a storage area and I thought it would make a pretty good picture, probably in black and white to give it that arty look:
1st Safe – Crowborough
Then you start seeing safes everywhere! So, I’ve decided that whenever I see a new one I’ll take a photograph of it. Here’s another I saw in the Maidstone area:
2nd Safe – Maidstone
This next one was sneakily hiding in a school staff room in Tonbridge! I probably looked a little odd getting this photo and I didn’t move stuff around so it’s not the best photograph.
3rd Safe – Tonbridge
My final safe for now was in my room at RAF Halton, obviously. I guess it’s just in case you bring some top secret materials back to study in your evening? Nope, that would be illegal. I’m not sure why it’s there but it’s still pretty cool.
4th Safe – Halton
I think there will be more, I’ll keep looking as I travel around. It’s fun having a stupid hobby like this one.
On Saturday I went to visit the Redsand Forts. There are a couple of things I’d like to note for you.
Firstly I use the opportunity to calibrate the altitude on my Garmin Instinct watch. I usually give it a go each month, just to make sure it’s working properly. While out near the forts I used the calibrate with GPS option and I got an altitude of -2m. Initially this confused me but then I realised that I was close to the sea but during low tide, therefore I was likely negative AMSL, so -2m seemed about right.
Garmin GPS
The above picture is my position as saved by the Garmin Instinct. I didn’t even know that was an option but I noticed it while I was calibrating the altitude. I saved the position and then was able to display it on my phone. There’s a Garmin app called Explore and I like the functionality.
While out on the sea I also used Google Maps to see where I was.
iPhone GPS
I took this screen shot a bit before the Garmin one and so you can see I am slightly further east than the previous picture. I don’t think either of these was taken at the Redsands Forts complex as I was too busy watching.
While walking along the wharf before I went to the cinema to see The Matrix I happened upon some cranes on boats. Now, I know technology and science stuff but cranes on boats still amaze me. They shouldn’t but they do.
Crane On A Boat
Above is a crane on a boat. That’s pretty impressive. What could be better than a crane on a boat? Well, surely a boat being held by a crane on a boat:
Boat Held By Crane On A Boat
Also, as a bonus there are two cranes on two boats. I think this could turn into a minor fascination along with my occasional series on safes! Having glanced through these esteemed communications I can see that my series on safes didn’t even mage these pages. I’ll try and correct that.
Yesterday I sailed out from Queenborough into the Thames Estuary to see the Redsand Forts. My ship fo rthe journey was the X-Pilot captained by Captain Chris, they weren’t worried with formalities. It was meant to be a four hour trip to see these abandoned aircraft defenses.
X-Pilot
After a safety brief the four passengers including me boarded the vessel and made ourselves at home. What really happened was we dumped our bags in the crew room and sat outside for the journey. The tide was waning, there was little wind, the skies looked kinda moody and the seas were slight. To make it a slightly more perfect trip it would have been nice to have glimses of sunlight for the photography but I was happy.
The boat departed Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey and headed out past Sheerness to the Redsand Forts. These were built in the second world war to aid the anti-aircraft defenses of London. There are a few sets of Maunsell Forts in the estuary but I was booked on a trip to see just the Redsand ones.
Approaching Aliens
These forts were designed by Maunsell and towed out to the different sand banks in the Thames and sunk. They were crewed by over two hundred members of the army. There are pages about them on Wikipedia and the general Web. I won’t go into too much detail about their history in this communication because you’ll find much more information elsewhere, this is a good page.
Redsand Forts
These beasts spring up out of the shallow waters and tower over the flowing sea to impress. They are such incredible structures. Four reinforced concrete legs followed by the I-pattern beams and metal walls. I do wonder how cold these were in winter! Most of the walkways are gone, can you imagine having to move from one to another?
Roof Garden
In the above photograph you can see the two story structure and the roof. One of the towers is further away from the centre and I wonder if that’s where they kept the ammunition. It would be fascintating to see movie footage of these in use.
Redsand Forts looking like Martians
Above is my favourite photograph, I love the way the water looks so still and the towers look like little toys. I think we were lucky with the seas. As I said earlier, a few rays of sunsine breaking through would have made this a perfect photography day.
Departing the Forts
On the way back to port we passed around the SS Richard Montgomery. We had made good time out of the Medway because of the waning tide and so we had the chance to add to our excursion which meant a chance to encompass the ticking-time-bomb that is the Liberty Ship Richard Montgomery.
SS Richard Montgomery
You have to love a sign that says:
Danger. Unexploded Ammunition. Do Not Approach or Board This Wreck. By Order.
If it goes up there will be a massive bang, a huge cloud and plenty of water heading to the shores on both sides of the estuary. There are plenty of warnings around this wreck including yellow bouys, red bouys, signs and an exclusion zone on the charts.
This trip was great fun, a wonderful experience and very good value. I really enjoyed it.
Yesterday I took an evening trip to see The Matrix at the Cineworld cinema in Rochester. I had spent a good portion of the day already aware of the tides as I visited the Redsand Forts and while it was high-ish tide when the trip started it was half tide on the way out when we returned to port. The tide at Rochester was about half again I think when I got to the cinema.
The showing was at 20:00 and I got there about twenty minutes before then. I went for a walk along the wharf. It’s that or buy sweets to eat and so I opted for the healthy option. I’m in a bit of a healthy phase and hoping, once again, to adjust my routines to be more healthy. I’ll probably write stuff here someday about that, I’ll see how it goes first. At the other end of the wharf there was a new development of houses along the river’s edge. They look nice and had lovely balconies and views but I couldn’t help thinking that in less than one hundred years they will either have been destroyed in the Water Wars or flooded by rising ocean levels. I am not optimistic about anthropogenic global climate change.
After seeing a movie at the cinema I rate it on IMDB and I was looking forward to rating this film until I watched it. There will be more about my battle with memory below the embedded tweet. If you read through the movie reviews on this site you will be able to spot the time I learnt how to embed tweets!
Hmmm, WordPress, my website editing software had a update about a month ago and I am learning the new features. I’m not sure if that embedding will work. I’ll wait and see once this page is published. [It worked fine, no need to edit anything]
The scoring of this film as a SEVEN is controversial, I know. Especially if you read my guidance communication on the rating system but I guess I’m trying to break the Matrix [ha fucking ha]. The thing is I was hoping I would love this film. The 27 year old me loved this movie, I bought it on DVD and I’m sure I watched it a few times, I even went to see the sequels and they were fucking terrible films, really terrible. I mean they were really really bad. I went with friends to see them at the Odeon in Maidstone.
Right, here we go.
I wanted this movie to be amazing, I wanted it to blow my mind and when I was 27 it did. Bullet-time was a filming style invented for this movie. The whole look and feel of this film was ground-breaking. It was an amazing action film along with the philosophical grandness of wondering what if we are in a dreamworld or the product of other people’s dreams or in a computer simulation – each of those is equivalent I think.
The things I remembered about this film were:
Trinity being amazing at the beginning
“I know Kung Fu”
The lobby scene
Dodging bullets
The things I had clearly forgotten were how fucking dull some of the philosophical bullshit scenes were. God, there were times in this movie when I just wanted it to finish. I think that’s the problem with nearly every genre now taking lessons from the Matrix and how to make films, the Grandmaster gets killed by those he trains.
Looking at the film now there were lots of things that don’t work in the plot and timing. I will admit though that 1999 was a pretty good time to be alive, just think:
No 9/11
No Iraq war
No Afghan war
No GW Bush
No 7/7
No Brexit
No Trump
To get around the “dying in the Matrix” problem the writers just said that if you die there your mind dies and your body can’t live without a mind. Which is bullshit. They could have just used another excuse, they could have said that you become metally unstable and we kill your body. Similarly getting injured in the Matrix means that you get the same injuries in real life, this is poor writing but I guess you need to have some form of risk involved once you are in the Matrix. I think that just entering a different world would be managed perfectly well by the mind, we do it every night. Unplugging the link into the Matrix shouldn’t kill you either.
The action scenes were pretty good but the Lobby scene seemed much shorter than I remember. I wasn’t that impressed. This is mostly to do with me having watched another twenty years worth of films in an age of computer graphics and near photorealistic graphics. It isn’t really a problem with the Matrix but it just looked slow and I was unimpressed. This is a shame and more a problem with me than the movie.
Fuuuck films with an oracle or wise old woman or man. What a lazy crock of shit those plot devices are. I hate it. Of course, that person needs to be black or they wouldn’t have the same credibility. What I sugest you do is look through all movies with wise old people and see what their current role in society is.
More fuuuck films which use a prophecy. I’ve been reading books recently that have a theme of a prophecy and it’s lazy fucking bullshit. Our species seems to live with the idea that we can predict the future and so some wanker somewhere will have written down what is going to happen. We love the concept of agency and we can’t cope as individuals if we understand that the shit is just random. Nope, we have to have prophecy. We have to have a way of explaining the world and how some people become the heroes or gods. Fuck that shit. It annoys me so much.
“Neo – you are the one”. Fuck you.
How about just Neo being a hacker and then considered someone who can cope with being out of the Matrix. Then he could just develop into an amazing leader. All this destiny bollocks makes me want to cry. It’s a throw back to the days when we didn’t understand how stuff works. It’s a way of giving the human race hope for a future that won’t happen. It’s calming to the global psyche. It’s fucking bullshit that’s what it is.
I hope that now I’ve alerted you to this prophecy shit you will spot it in future and start to downgrade those stories. I do know they are popular. I do know that most of the world relies on that shit but it’s time for reality. All this pophecy shit does is reinforce the idea that some people are born better than others. It keeps the poor poor and the rich/powerful wankers. Our entire societal structure is formed so that only some will be in charge and they will do all they can to stay there. They love this prophecy chosen-one bullshit. Just look at Boris Johnson and tell me he doesn’t believe he should run this country. You see what these stories do to people?
I do note that the Matrix had many scenes without music and I admire that. It was nice to have the stark contrast so that when the action happened the music worked pretty well. I was struck by the idea that people who dress in black and look “alternative” are the dangerous ones. As someone who lives in that world I don’t think it’s right for society to cast those people aside and see them as dangerous but things will change slowly. At least I hope they will, it seems that the world is getting more intolerant recently due to the leading politicians of our time.
I don’t know whether it was the soundtrack or the cinema or where I was sitting in the cinema but some of the scenes’ sound seemed balanced poorly. There were a couple of times I couldn’t hear the speech because of the music and I couldn’t hear the music at the beginning of the Lobby scene. This was a shame because those are important parts in my memory of this film. Along with sound issues fuck the person who seemed to be wrestling with a loud plastic bag during all the quiet bits of the film. Obviously they have no empathy or they would have waited before making that much noise.
Overall this film left me slightly sad that it didn’t meet my memories of it. I saw it as a tired slow film full of philosophical-bull. I understand that it was mind-blowing and ground breaking when it was released but not all groundbreaking films remain amazing, some slowly go away and get remembered for their effects rather than their plot.
On the way out I overheard someone mention they might watch the two sequels. Jesus, that’s beyond the call of duty. I will NOT be seeing them. They were worse than shit.
This photo shows me in the rear seat waving at the crew room as the Juno helicopter taxied past before landing. I’ll thank OM for this photo. The Flight was easily the best fifteen minutes of the year so far, I can’t see it being outstripped either.
DHFS – Wave
The DHFS uses two types of helicopter and both are pretty much Eurocopter versions painted similar to all others! I’ve found it hard to tell them apart but after examination the easiest difference is the engine intakes. The Juno has intakes flush with the bodywork whereas the Jupiter has intakes mostly vertical in shape and they stick out more, the engine exhaust is more pronounced. There might be a slight difference in the landing skids too.
Last Saturday I went to see Rammstein play their current set at the MK Stadium in Milton Keynes. It was bloody amazeballs.
Early Fire
I had spent the previous week at RAF Shawbury with a cadet camp which was already a brilliant week and I then topped it off with this brilliant show. I drove down from the West Midlands to Milton Keynes and met with Smith in a supermarket car park. This gig is an important one because he had brought his kids along, their first major gig. You could tell that there was a slight trepidation from the eldest [around 14] but the youngest displayed nothing but sheer excitement [around 12].
The support band were two women who played pianos on a stage just in front of our seats. It was nice but I didn’t really pay attention. I was suffering with the effects of being tired and so I read a book on the development of the pressure suit for high altitude flying published by Nasa. It wasn’t bad but I needed to rest!
Extinguishers?
Rammstein themselves were amazing. Absolutely amazing. The show they put on is remarkable and worth every penny of the 7500 for the cost of a ticket. There were the normal theatrics with lots of fire. And I mean lots of fire. There were black clouds bellowing over the stadium at certain points during the show and I wondered what it must look like to someone outside the stadium.
Angel Of Fire
There were many highlights. Every song had its own act. The keyboardist being burnt in a massive cauldron, the burning to death of a giant baby, the massive riding cock for the song “Pussy”, and flames shooting from guitars.
This might seem odd but the dance track halfway through made my night. That was the moment I thought “this is the best show ever”. One of the guitarists DJd while being lifted high above the stage and the other members of the band came on with suits that lit up along the limbs. They then performed a dance routine to an electronic version of thier own song. What balls, to make 30,000 metal fans listen and dance to electronic music. This band have it all.
This was the best show I have ever seen and is the third best gig I have been to. The Prodigy last year at M’era Luna may have been an excellent show, I don’t know I can’t remember any of it. This concert would have been top of the list had I been in the pit. You have to take whatever you can from a gig and I loved this but part of me hankered to be in the mild violence of the circle. I still had a great time. My top three gigs are: Combichrist Old School, The Prodigy and Rammstien – this one.
This Was Warm
This is the thrid time I have seen Rammstein and it was bloody brilliant.
“Did I mention? I’m seeing Rammstein in Milton Keynes this weekend.”
It’s the end of a great week and tiring week at RAF Shawbury. I spent a week there with the CCF RAF cadets and I’m pretty sure everyone had a great time. I’m struggling today with being super tired [fault of seeing Rammstein last night] and so have decided to write this instead of doing some pressing work badly.
Baby Helicopter, Moody Sky
RAF Shawbury is home to the helicopter flying school for the three services and there is a mixture of uniforms walking around.
On the Sunday we had some time on a high ropes course in Telford and then went to fly some birds of prey along with seeing owls close up. I got some excellent photographs and I endeavour to show them on here at some point.
Monday was the first day of section visits and we had the RAF Police tell us about their job and demonstrate restraining an adult volunteer [me]. One of the Midlands ARVs also came along to show us what kit they have and what they do. In the afternoon we had talks about training Air Traffic Controllers and we saw the simulators they use covering RAF Cottom. We had a tour around the dry helo training area run by the Ascent military contractors.
Apache
Tuesday brought a trip to nearly RAF Cosford and involvement in training the Midlands police how to cope with public demonstrations and protests. The cadets also learnt how to use riot shields correctly.
Wednesday for me was time spent at the DCCT block and then on the range in the afternoon. It was a little disconcerting that we had to stop often as there was a helicopter taxi way just behind bullet catcher. The last thing we needed was a stray round to kiss a Juno flying ten feet above the ground.
Thursday meant a visit to Air Traffic Control and a drive across the airfield. Then we nearly all had a helicopter flight in the afternoon piloted by an Army major. In the evening we had a camp meal out at The Red Lion in Shrewsbury.
In The Air Again
On Friday I had a very short visit to the RAF Museum at RAF Cosford and then another afternoon on the range. It was very hot and there was a lot of aircraft activity including a visit from an Apache and two Pumas. We managed to get a tour around the Pumas. In the evening an ex-SAS member gave us a talk on motivation. This was followed by the traditional ceremony of the plates.
Only a PUMA!
The final day meant tidying rooms, packing and then a journey home. Mind you, I had to stop at Milton Keynes to see Rammstein burn gallons of fuel during their concert. The review should follow shortly.
There’s a big news story around at the moment that the over 75s in this country are going to have to pay for a TV licence. I’ve got some thoughts on this matter which I will communicate here.
In the UK the TV Licence pays for some of the BBC along with some of Channel 4 and, I think, channel 5. It used to be more of a licence to operate receiving equipment which just happened to be used to pay for public broadcasting. I think nowadays it is considered to be a tax by people which goes directly to the BBC.
The reason the BBC are going to charge the over 75s is because the GOVERNMENT has chosen to withdraw that part of the funding for the BBC. It seems amazing to me that the majority of the anger is placed at the BBC where it should be placed directly at the government. The media which isn’t funded by the government has a massive issue with the BBC funding and targets it a lot about everything.
Much like the anger placed at immigrants or the NHS or housing or local councils the real anger should be directed at the GOVERNMENT because they set the fucking rules. Annoyed with people dodging tax? Then moan at the government, they set the rules, they produce the law. It’s the government’s fault. The fact that the anger is deliberately directed away from the government is astonishing.
Local councils get their funding from two main sources, the national government and the taxes, council tax, placed on those who live in the area. The national government has spent years reducing the amount it sends to the local councils and so the only way to make up the shortfall is to charge more to locals. Where does the anger go? To the local council, not to the national government.
I don’t see that just because you are old you shouldn’t have to pay for a service that you use. It should probably be means tested. There are plenty of old folk out there who can afford this and they should pay slightly more to allow those who struggle to have access to services. It’s how society should work. Some parts of society struggle and the rest of us should help, it’s the morally correct thing to do.
There seems to be a perception that poor people or people who struggle through life deserve it. Their failure must be because they haven’t worked hard enough, that they have made poor choices. This is incorrect. The poor work hard, those who struggle work hard. It’s the way our current society works that produces parts of the population who struggle and always will. We must change society to make it work for all people.
Yesterday was a little busy but it was one of those good-busy days where everything seemed positive and fulfilling. In the morning the collektive known as DBL-MF went on a photoshoot. It was pretty good fun. In the afternoon I traveled to see this film at Rochester cinema and in the evening I had a run.
I did note that as I drove to the cinema the tide was quite high, I couldn’t see the edges of the inlet which was dredged just over a year ago, and when I returned home the tide was about at its highest.
After the film I rated it on the IMDB site, there’s a section here about rules concerning rating films and you can see that communication here. I then tweeted the result, through the wrong account initially, but I corrected that this morning.
I pretty much enjoyed this film. I even laughed out loud in the cinema and that is quite a rare thing. I would have liked to have seen a more political push in the discussions about the monologue but that’ probably wouldn’t have kept the humour at the correct level. I enjoyed this film although it was very much a feelgood movie. It made me laugh and really enjoy watching the characters develop.
John Lithgow’s performance was fantastic. He’s such an amazing actor and it’s strange to see him looking old he’s always much younger in my head. I think I remember that one of the first films I saw him in was called Raising Cain. I think he played a twin or person with multiple personality disorder. It was spooky and amazing. Then he appeared as a baddie in Cliffhanger, I think and also played an astronaut/scientist in 2010. He’s always been there in the background.
I know he had a long run on TV with 3rd Rock From The Sun, which was very good fun, and I watched quite a lot of those but I always felt as though he was an actor I discovered and tracked over the ages. He was brilliant.
