Category: Penguin

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Gone Girl

Gone Girl. In all honesty I haven’t decided whether I liked it or not. Last night I rated it as a 6 on IMDB.

Please remember to see my previous explanations of how my IMDB scoring system works.

Was this film a comment on the rabid invasiveness of the media upon private lives? Was this film a comment on sociopaths? Was this film a comment on poor little rich girl who liked a bit of rough to get back at her parents?

POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW

(I haven’t worked out what I’m going to write yet and although I could come back and edit that header I won’t, mostly what you see is the train of consciousness of me)

Overall, this film was neither of those. I have no interest in reading the book, although I probably wouldn’t have read it before seeing the film. I think we end up coming back to the main crux of the problem. After a while neither of the main characters were likeable. The wife was appalling and the husband annoyed me. To make a film effective you need to create characters that people can empathise with. In this film there is the poor little rich girl with a trust fund who has degrees from Harvard and the writer for a men’s magazine who has a smooth patter approaching someone at a party. They live in a big house in the middle of shit-ville. They have a cat. He owns a bar.

Would this film be made if the main characters were scum bags living in a trailer park? Why doesn’t film (or TV) show us real life with normal characters? Where are the films that represent normality. People who have lost their homes or struggle to make ends meet. People who love and laugh and cry. People who form MOST of our society. People who have friends and family and tragedy but humility? Soap Operas do not count. Look at what happens in soap operas. Look at the tragedies that befall a single person. Look at the terror and strife that happens to all. Where are the happy and comfortable couples? Television and cinema thrives on scandal.

My friend would tell me these films exist but I chose not to see them. I would argue they don’t show them outside of London art-house cinemas. I would also argue that for the majority of the time I see films that are clearly escapism. I see sci-fi and trash action movies. I don’t often see humdrum films. Maybe I should.

Well, there you go. It turns out I didn’t like the film.

Gone Girl was written by a writer about a clever writer who had a mum who wrote children’s books. The husband character was a writer. Say no more.

 

Added extra [06:24]

WTF was up with the Doogie Howser ex boyfriend guy? Who was he? What kind of relationship was it he had with the wife? ANOTHER rich spoilt brat enjoying life. There’s about 5 minutes of him in the film but was he controlling or was the wife? WTF? How? Who? Where? Actually, I’m glad there wasn’t any more of him in the film, it was over two hours long anyway.

Again I arrive at the conclusion that rich people suck. They mostly don’t pay taxes, don’t give a shit about those who work hard and they aren’t likeable. Stop making films about privileged twats.

Right, time for me to calm down and to go and do some work for the day.

Please let me know if you watch this film and actually like any of the main characters. I’ll let you like the police investigation and the sister, these seemed to be the only two main people who had any decent morals, approach to life.

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Switching The Blue Sky

A short while back I wrote about changing broadband supplier. This is an update to that communication.

It is a few months since the new broadband internet connection started. It appears that my network has settled down tremendously since those early days.

All streaming, file sharing and music systems within the house seem to be working well. Large upload files are no longer causing connection issues.

Bandwidths seem to be approaching 650KB/s which translates to 5.2 Mb/s. This is not bad given my quite rural location and the aging connections within the village and house.

The Wi-Fi provided by the Sky router is pretty good. The signal dips a bit at the extremes of my house (top front room) but otherwise it is fine. The router connects everything that I need to be connected and my initial worries about a lack of “user” options have dissipated. This router and also the free EE one I had before both do a better job of routing that the £100 Netgear router I bought and have since sold on eBay.

Essentially, so far so good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So what.

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Hello Vivo

It happened. Finally. My Up band died again. Out of warranty.

The Up band is a fitness and health tracker, a wearable technology device. Well, it doesn’t track fitness unless you do and it’s not a health tracker unless you do the work, but you know what I mean. You wear it, you look at the data and you either change your lifestyle or you don’t. The flaw in this is that just wearing one won’t improve your health or fitness, you still have to put the effort in. What these devices do is give you the information to help you decide what to do to change.

Up By JawboenIt’s stylish, a little different and worked well, when it worked. I first got one just after my trip to DC in 2013. I’ve written about it here a few times. According to the data I have the total number of steps I moved while wearing the Up band is:

2013 – 2,428,950
2014 – 2,276,268

Total – 4,705,218

I really liked the Up band. But there was a major problem. It stops working after a while. I first got the Up band on 2 April 2013. The first one I had stopped working properly on 8 June 2013. I got a replacement one on 19 June 2013. That new one then died on 10 August 2013. I ordered a replacement, gave that to my niece and bought a brand new one to try and break the cycle! I started tracking again on 30 August 2013. The “new” one decided that kaput was the standard state of working on the 3 February 2014. It was still within warranty and so I got another replacement on 8 March 2014. The 5 October 2014 was the final bell toll.

Over the summer I had investigated the step counting bands out there. I knew that the Up band was going to wander off this mortal realm at some point and although I like it and think it looks good I can’t justify buying another Up band when they don’t last. Much like my iPhone when it works properly it’s lovely, but when it fails it’s very frustrating. Mind you, I’ve never really had an issue with the iPhone, my biggest issue is with the awfulness turd that is iTunes.

These are the pedometers I investigated:

  • Up by Jawbone
  • Samsung Gear Fit
  • Razer Nabu
  • LG Lifeband Touch
  • Garmin Vivofit
  • Jaybird Reign
  • Fitbit Flex
  • Larklife
  • Nike Fuelband
  • MyBasis

A lot of these seem to be “notifiers” as well. They will let you know who or what is calling your phone along with displaying notifications. I don’t want this. If I want to know who or what is happening to my phone I will LOOK AT MY PHONE. I don’t need an extra display on my wrist telling me stuff I don’t want to know. Also, having this feature means that the Bluetooth connection is always on which MUST be a drain on all batteries. I don’t see the point. I don’t use Bluetooth often and when I’m not using it I turn it off. I don’t see the point of having stuff turned on when you don’t use it.

The Fitbit Flex and the Garmin Vivofit seemed to be the best options for what I want. It took a while to decide but I went with the Garmin device. The reasons were as follows:

  • Reputable company known for making portable devices
  • Battery life of 1 year
  • User replaceable batteries
  • Always on display
  • Syncs with MyFitnessPal
  • Heart rate monitor accessory
  • Looks pretty good

According to the reviews that I looked at there were issues with the strap clasp being easily caught on things and the device can fall off easily. There are ways around this and although it’s not ideal the benefits of this device outweighed this by a long way. Although Garmin are new to the “wearable tech” market they have been making “wearable tech” for a long time and are an established company using proven technology. They aren’t a start up or someone jumping on the bandwagon. They aren’t a “sexy” company but I’m not fussed about that.

This is the Vivofit device:
vivofit1 vivofit2

So far I have been impressed and am left happy with my choice (mind you I don’t have any comparative data in that case). I shall update you people in future about my experiences with the Vivofit and how I think it stacks up with my experience with the Up by Jawbone.

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Other Activities

And, finally, we come to the last section of my immortalisation of my 3822. The Air Training Corps Record of Service. This page does not list everything that should be listed in the “Other Activities” section of the blue book. All I have now is what is recorded on this page. The detail follow. Should you wish to see more of these communications then please search this site.

Other ActivitiesOther Activities

This list does not include the band engagements that I played. There were probably about an average of 10 a year of those. I have, also, not attempted to adjust the list at all. What you see is how it is recorded in the 3822. Because of this some of the dates are in the wrong order and there’s a vague reference to an airshow in June 89. I doubt this was a month long airshow but the details are now lost in time.

I doubt this is the last communication on my Air Cadet journey and there are probably going to be more of my CCF journey. Enjoy!

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NFL, Baby

A couple of Sundays ago, more accurately on the 28 September 2014 I went to London Town.

While there I met a group of people for an afternoon of sport. We met at MEATliquor just behind Oxford Street and I have to say it was one of the best burger meals I have ever had. The food was lovely.

After that we travelled to Wembley stadium to see an American Football match. It amuses me that in all my time I haven’t seen a soccer match at the home of soccer, just music and NFL.

The teams playing were

Miami Dolphins @ Oakland Raiders

I chose to support the Dolphins, although that wasn’t really a choice. I have “supported” the Dolphins since I was a teenager, I now consider the New Orleans Saints as my first team.

The match was good, although the Dolphins smashed the Raiders. There was plenty of action and I had a good time.

I don’t take my camera to events I want to watch, mainly because I’d end up spending my time looking for a few great photos rather than actually watching the game. So here’s a shot using my mobile phone and all the restrictions that come with that.

IMG_7534.JPG

Def Leppard played before the game which was interesting, although I couldn’t see them as the stage faced the other way. Some dude sang the USA National Anthem and a female opera singer sang the UK National Anthem. See my communication here about that!

I was meant to see Def Leppard in 1988. A friend and I had bought tickets to see them at the Royal Albert Hall in the round in London. It would have been a great gig to see and it would have been my first. However, I was offered a place on the ATC Cyprus camp and so went to that instead. So, 26 years later and I get the chance to see Def Leppard, except I couldn’t as the back of the stage blocked my view. I have placed them back on the list of bands I haven’t seen!

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Glider Flying Log

It’s been a while, but you could catch up on all these in a single session by searching Fooyah.net for a list of 3822 communications! What follows is a list of the gliding experiences I had as an Air Cadet a long time ago. These were my formative years and this community influenced me a lot, enough to still get involved.

As a Squadron we would go to RAF Wethersfield in Essex and go gliding with 614 VGS a squadron of volunteer pilots.

Here follows my log:

AEG

As you can see the 21 July 1990 was a bumper day for gliding. Most flights tended to be a short hop as the glider is winched up to about 1000ft and then does a single circuit as it returns to land. On the 21st it was a sunny day and there were plenty of thermals. I can remember parts of my 35 minute flight, I almost got bored, which is a terrible thing to say about flying!! I could see the other gliders in the air at the time and had a great view of Wethersfield.

I also remember that Lisa was having a flight and coming around to land when her glider traded altitude for velocity and sped up greatly while heading towards the ground, from my view the glider even dropped below the tree line and I was slightly worried but a couple of seconds later the glider popped up from below the tree line and landed successfully.

I always felt that gliding was a poor cousin to powered flying but I think I would appreciate its beauty a little more now. Don’t get me wrong, any chance to go flying and experience these things was great, but given the choice, I’d go powered flying first.

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Location, Location and a Camera

I spent the day at RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire and while there an RAF Tornado flew past at high speed. I was fortunate enough to take a few photographs, of which the following is the best. I haven’t cropped it or anything. [the other 5 photos were ok-ish].

RAF Tornado

My favourite thing about this shot is that you can see the Navigator/Weapons Officer looking at the ground as they fly by.

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Stones

I had a lovely run today. Up over the North Downs and then back again. I actually stopped today to take two photos of stuff I regularly see.
This is the route I took.

Run 4 Oct 2014

Here’s the fist photo I took of the Upper White Horse Stone on the way up the North Downs [the link takes you to Wikipedia].

White Horse Stone

And here’s a photo of a distance marker I passed at the top of the Downs.

Distances

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Loyalty

Today I will face an annual grumping. On this day, the day of the NFL International Series, Jase will moan at me, about me, to me. I love American Football and today I am going to Wembley to watch my second (but really first) team, the Miami Dolphins, take on the Oakland Raiders. Before the match, every year, I get an ear roasting.

I have been struggling over the last few years to decide where my loyalties lie and why. What social groups do I belong to, or at least feel most allegiance? If we accept that we are social beings and that we need to belong to groups or tribes then you start to think to which tribes do I belong?

My tribes change depending on what I am doing or who I am with. I guess my tribes are how I identify myself within society. It’s a way of quickly explaining things about me. We take information about these tribes and use them to make decisions about people. We do this all the time. It’s similar to the cast system in India, we judge people by their associations and not necessarily their deeds.

Some of my tribes IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

  • Heavy Metal – I spent a great deal of teenage time associating myself with this tribe. It was and still is a very big part of my life.
  • Industrial Electronica – this is a new tribe. It’s what I listen to and write.
  • Tottenham Hotspur – Now, this is an odd one. It seems to me that if you live in the UK you must have a soccer team. “My team” is Spurs. I don’t like football. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t understand the fanatical following by people but Spurs is my family’s team and so that’s who I support. It’s my dad’s fault, but then we grew up in the London over-run area so it was to be expected.
  • Fulham Five – a bunch of 5+1 people who met over 20 years ago.
  • Home Friends – a few people I still would “go that extra mile” for. I know none of them from school, I feel very little allegiance to my school.
  • 309 ATC – This was where I spent my teenage years getting to experience things most people can only dream of. I’ve not been a part of the Squadron for 15 years and I still visit, I still give money, I still attend the dinners.
  • MGS CCF RAF Section – My new thing. It’s a strange one because I’m not initially a CCF man but am becoming one. This CCF Section does a lot of good.
  • MGS – having been here for six or so years I feel part of the community and happy to be there. It’s looked after me well.
  • New Orleans Saints – my first NFL team after seeing them play at Wembley in 2008. The Dolphins are my second team as I have supported them since the mid-eighties.

I should feel a great deal of patriotism, I think it’s expected, but I struggle to identify with what the UK is or stands for. I guess this may have been easier in the cold war because there was an enemy, the zeitgeist was more patriotic. I’m not sure that I love the UK or England. I don’t know what it means to be British I guess. We Brits are meant to have common values but I don’t know what they are. I am British but I don’t know what that means. I struggle with this.

Would I stand and fight if necessary? Yes. Where would I draw the line? I don’t know. Part of me feels that the cliffs of Dover make a good line, through the fortunate but randomness that the UK is (mostly) an island and we have distinct borders. But if there’s an army marching across Europe would I wait until they got to Calais? Probably not, so does that mean I identify as European? I don’t know. Once you start moving the “line” where do you stop?

I feel that we as a collection of humans need to see each other for what we really are:

The SAME

We break our societies down into manageable chunks so that we can closely identify and organise ourselves, but in reality we are the SAME. We are one collection of lots of little tribes where we fight for one tribe or identity above another and that’s quite sad. Who cares if you support Arsenal or Spurs? Who cares if you speak Spanish and I speak English? We care the same for our families and our societies, we are the same. I think this is at the crux of my problems with identifying with a country [which is purely a socially constructed tribe for the organisation of things].

Countries are too big and vague for me to feel a connection. I think I feel a connection or loyalty to those things which I experience regularly. Hence the list above. I don’t really feel loyalty to things I don’t feel or see or experience regularly.

And finally to the reason that Jase will moan at me today. I won’t sing the national anthem. Jase doesn’t like this, he thinks it’s wrong. I will stand, if only to avoid having to explain myself because it seems that it is “disrespectful” to sit [I don’t understand who or what I would be disrespecting or even what that means]. I don’t feel a connection to the UK. I won’t sing the anthem. At work when we have awards presentations I sing the school song [small local tribe] but I still don’t sing the national anthem.

Another, small point. Our national anthem [see how I said “our”, because I feel some connection, oh the hypocrisy] has nothing to do with our country. It’s about god blessing and saving a person [or legal entity]. We don’t sing about the lands and its people, we sing for praise to a person who is meant to be more important than anyone else. Fuck that. Give me a song about the land, as long as it’s not “Jerusalem”, and I might consider singing it.

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The Equalizer [sic]

I have just got in from watching The Equaliser. There are probably going to be spoilers in here so if you think you might watch it and yet don’t want to know any more than the trailer tells you then feel free to pop back another time.

Overall I rated this film a 6. As with all my ratings you need to refer to this previous communication.

I enjoyed this film. It’s hard not to like a film that opens with warnings of graphic violence on the ratings certificate. I often remember a friend saying

It’s good to see a proper 18 film now and then

this may have been in reference to Ong Bak.

The Equaliser:
A good action movie. The opening was pretty good and set the mood. I liked the slow pace of it. The problem was that the initial killing sequence was over the top and from there the only place to go was to make it more “involved” and more elaborate deaths.

I kept trying to remember the TV series I watched with my dad. I’ve a feeling there were adverts so it may have been on ITV (shock, horror). Edward Woodward played a man with a mysterious past who helped people in trouble. He would do so in a menacing way and with lots of guns, did he have a secret wardrobe full of weapons? I’m pretty sure that he was rather low-key and sinister in that English way.

In this film version there wasn’t any real subtlety. The first killing was five men brutally executed after a slight altercation about nearly $10,000. Oh, and it turns out these people were key players in the Russian mob. After that the Equaliser can only go on and root out all evil that plagues modern Boston and Russia.

There wasn’t a need to make this a nasty, violent film. It would have been better if the first story in this inevitable franchise was a low key story of a man helping those in his neighbourhood. It could have been a slow-burner of a film and then about three into the series we could have had the decimation of all the mobs running the East Coast.

This film, while enjoyable, missed the point of the Equaliser and I think they also missed a trick. It could have been better.

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