I’ve written here quite a bit about ADS-B and stuff along with tracking aircraft and multi-lateration. Well, I was looking at the aircraft tracking website 360 Radar this evening and spotted an amusing thing.
Almost A Penis
The route shown on the picture is that taken by an RAF Voyager aircraft over the North Sea. The plane took off from RAF Brize Norton and headed out over the Scottish area of the North Sea. The green area is rain and the purple highlights are RAF airfields along with the blue highlights showing civilian airports. What particularly struck me about this picture was the almost-penis drawn as the second area of activity. I think they should have tried a little harder [but would probably get “moved” assignment].
Let’s put this thing into some perspective by adding recognised Danger Areas in red and refuelling training areas in green.
AAR Ranges
Now we can see that the Voyager has maneuvered beautifully through the danger areas and maintained some lovely flight paths in the AAR areas. The plane is currently at 16,000ft and moving at 330 kts. Pretty standard stuff.
It’s amazing to see that this is practiced and practiced to make sure that when it comes to doing this in a real theatre everyone knows exactly what they are doing and it all goes to plan.
After a visit to the RAF Museum at Hendon I came into contact with a couple of not-Lego models that while not-Lego certainly look nice and have a good size. These are Cobi blocks and it looks like they are made in Poland.
I went to visit the RAF Museum at Hendon. It’s a lovely place, partly because it costs nothing to go in* but also because it’s full of aircraft.
*there are parking charges.
My main issue with the museum is that the aircraft are parked close together and it’s hard to get decent photographs of them. Also, some of the rooms are pretty dark and getting the white balance correct is a pain. Maybe I need to be a better photographer!
Today’s plan was reasonably simple. Head to Costco for lunch and a bit of shopping then head home and watch some TV. I expected to be back for about 16:00 [BST]. It initially went well. The lunch was bought and the stuff purchased, the car was filled and I went to leave the car park. Except I couldn’t because the road was busy. So I drove to the other exit thinking I’d go out by Ikea and head to the A13 and join the M25 there. But that way was blocked with traffic too. That was when I decided to look at my phone and see what Google maps was saying about the traffic.
It was fucked.
The maps app was reporting that the QE II bridge was closed. North and southbound. Bugger. I needed to use that to get back home. Alternatives exist but they are a pain and involve London.
Classic Dartford
Apparently two trucks had collided on the north side of the bridge. This meant both tunnel and bridge were closed. This meant the entire area because a car park. I decided to stop in the official car park I hadn’t left and leave the car and try and waste some time so I would start again when at least the traffic was moving a little.
I walked to Ikea, wandered around, found a few things to buy and then also went to the restaurant and ate some food. Periodically I would check twitter and maps to see if there was any movement. There was not.
I then thought it might be worth joining a queue again and maybe we would move a car’s length every minute or so, at least make some progress. So I drove to the Costco exit and joined a queue. The only times I moved forward was when a car not far ahead pulled a U-ey and we all move one car length. After an hour I turned around and parked in Costco again. To be honest I had made it about 50 m from the car park exit in that time so it wasn’t really like I had left!
A cuppa and toilet break in Costco and time to spend a little longer wasting time hoping that something would move soon. It wouldn’t.
Eventual Route
While still trying to get out of Ikea and head directly north to the A13 it struck me it that heading south [the blue lines] and then heading east might work. The traffic seemed to be moving in those directions. Maybe I could then head north to the A127, rejoin the M25 or head into London.
Final Route – ish
The roads seemed reasonably clear. I got on the M25 anti-clockwise and I just kept following Google Maps. I headed down the M11, around the Olympic stadium in Stratford and then there were slight delays on the approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. After that there were no more delays. I think they had started to open the Dartford Tunnels at some point because the traffic seemed to be moving north at that point. The M25 was delayed and stopped from Dartford to about Stapelford Tawney, the delays were immense.
#M25 J31 incident on clockwise approach to #DartfordCrossing. HGV recovery operation complex and pictures from scene show the scale of task. We’re working with all available resources to get the scene cleared but it will take some more time due to damage and position of the HGVs. pic.twitter.com/dQzRVaQrKP
My overall thoughts are that I am glad no one was badly injured. Yes, it caused huge delays and would have cost a lot of money because of those delays, but hopefully everyone got home OK.
I got home around 22:30 [BST]. A little later than planned. I’m not annoyed. I almost enjoyed the adventure of it all. I had looked at cinema times but there were no suitable films, I had looked at booking into the Travelodge over the road but it was full, I had considered driving to my parents’ house but the issue was getting out of the car park!
The trucks had spilled fuel over the road and this meant it needed to be resurfaced. They also managed to crash just before the slip way for southbound traffic to enter the tunnel. Therefore there was no alternative to shutting the entire crossing.
Next time, for there will be another time, I will do my best to look at the roads heading in the opposite direction. Had I thought of that earlier I think I could have been home around 19:00 [BST]. Oh well.
On a recent trip to Surrey I stopped off at Chobham services on the M25. You wouldn’t think I’d find much to comment on while having a quick wee break on a journey but “Oh My!”.
Every advert in the male toilets was for Shreddies and not the breakfast cereal.
Women Can’t Fart
Now, I will look at their website shortly and comment after but my initial reaction was:
WHY THE FUCK CAN’T WOMEN FART? WHO CARES?
My immediate next thought was:
We’ve had plenty of period shaming on women and now we shame them into smelling nice and pretty all the time and won’t allow them to perform normal bodily functions.
Well. I hope that the adverts in the ladies’ toilets were all for fart-pants for men, but i am unaware of those facts.
This advert is appalling. Women must remain clean and sweet and smell of roses for men. Women aren’t allowed to fart. Women should be beautiful for men. Farting is bad.
FUCK this company. I found this advert and all the other similar ones in the toilets sexist and shaming of humans for doing NORMAL human things.
Now, I’m off to look at the website and I’ll comment below.
So, they do men’s stuff too. Most of the web page is products aimed at men. It’s still disgusting.
“Fabulous idea, a great quality product with great styling, this could save many a marriage! A much needed product, fantastic innovation.”
I’m having a short phase of ignoring Twitter on my phone, or rather just ignoring my general account where I follow too many people. Strangely the news hasn’t been getting me down, although it should, but I feel that it’s time to use other things to distract me. Because of this I was looking at Google News and spotted the weather box.
Google News
How cool is it that you can set the temperature to Kelvin? I thought that was a nice touch. It’s something I can explain to people and give them the knowledge of Kelvin as a temperature scale.
Then there’s the BBC and they default to a decent scale of temperature:
BBC
This is clearly that the BBC knows the correct units to use. Finally I give you the Daily Mail:
Daily Fail
You can tell it’s the Daily Mail, partly by the insane length of the headline and the other reason is that they still use Fahrenheit as their measure of temperature. I’ve moaned about this before but the use of antiquated units is why this country CAN’T MOVE ON. It reinforces the idea that old people can have things the way they want. It continues to allow people to refuse to accept change. It is a deliberate attempt to force this country to stay in the past. The Daily Mail knows this. It is bullshit.
Celsius has been in use since 1995 in the UK because of alignment needed with the EU. There are some measurements which are allowed to be in Imperial units still and they are:
the mile, yard, foot and inch for road traffic signs, distance and speed measurement,
the imperial pint for the dispensing of draught beer and cider, and for the sale of milk in returnable containers,
the acre for land registration,
the troy ounce for transaction in precious metals.
These are almost acceptable. The implied cost of changing roads signs and the education to change to kilometres makes that something that is never going to happen. However, the pint, should go. All you have to do is order a large or small. Did you know that if you go to a pub and order a pint of lemonade you aren’t buying a pint? You’re buying the metric equivalent. There isn’t a good reason for this to have not changed but all you need is the image of that far right politician Nigel Farage with his pint to understand that the government was scared of those old people who go down the pub a lot and didn’t want to upset them. Not that the experience would have been any different to anyone visiting a pub.
Now, pubs are closing. They aren’t sustained by the changing use of society. They are losing money. There are campaigns to keep pubs open but these people don’t understand that society is changing. People don’t go down the pub anymore. Closing pubs might be sad but such is life.
I recently traveled to London for the day. I did plenty of walking along with a few train rides and underground journeys. Not going to say a huge amount about what I saw but here are some of the highlights:
HMS Belfast
National Gallery
Westwards
The Shard
The Tower and a pointy thing
There you are. Some of the classic sights of the city of London and Greater London and the City of Westminster.
It does seem that every year I end up driving all around the country and continent. This summer I drove to the Lake District for a few days of mountain walking. It is literally the other end of the country from me. If I travel about 50 miles from where I live I would be in France and my destination in the Lake District is about 25 miles from Scotland.
Then I drove to the middle of Germany. This means crossing the Channel, crossing France, Belgium, Netherlands and then half of Germany to pretty close to where the old border was with East Germany. This is about 400 miles as the crow flies. I have such a great time while there that the driving is perfectly worth it.
The only place not included this summer is a trip to Cornwall, another end of this country and maybe I need to correct that.
The total for these two trips, excluding driving around while there was 1658 miles or 2652km.
One of my favourite times of year is when I drive the 798km to Hildesheim in Germany. It takes about a day to get there and a further day to return, however, it is so incredibly worth it. Smith and I go there to spend the weekend camping in a tent city of 20,000 people to watch bands and be a part of the atmosphere.
Thursday was the day to leave Kent around lunchtime, drive the short distance to the magical train where you put cars on board and it drives you underneath the English Channel. Once we arrived in France we set about navigating our way to Bochum which is where we have a stop for the night. We travel through France, Belgium and the Netherlands to get to Germany and I will be really fucking pissed off if next year we have to pay for visas to get through those. Also, I suspect that the “leaving the UK” system will be a crock of shit. Fuck Brexit.
Friday morning we woke early and headed to Hildesheim. It’s another three hours or so of driving and we wanted to get there before the campsite opened to try and get a good spot to stay. We’d filled up with fuel back in Bochum so we should be good for the rest of the trip. Once in Hildesheim we followed the SatNav to the festival and managed to find the normal entrance to the car park. This year the fields were dry and we were much earlier than other times and so able to park reasonably close to the festival. We got some bits together and then joined the 400m long queue to enter the campsite. We had about an hour before the campsite opened but the queue was long already. It took ninety minutes to get into the old Army Air Corps base.
Mera Site
The Google Map star in the field is where I parked the car. We then walked due south and the campsite started at the runway. The grass area to the north of the runway is all campsite. The festival pretty much all takes place in between four hangers, where the red cross is marked.
The Friday was spent chilling, looking around the Middle Ages market and generally getting used to what’s around. We also had to do another run to the car to collect more equipment. Around 22:00 we headed to the disco hangar.
Daniel Graves DJ-ing
The disco was good fun. Daniel Graves of Aesthetic Perfection spent an hour at the mixing desk and it was good to see him doing this stuff.
Ok, this isn’t a gif. It’s a video clip but you can at least see the colours. pic.twitter.com/cD9Wyyl5rA
At some point that night we went back to the tent but I have no idea what time that might have been.
Saturday started with getting dressed up for the day. I recycled a costume from a couple of years ago. I was planning to wear the coloured mask that day but it was quite heavy and not easy to carry [except on my head]. If I was going to dance and mosh then I wanted a simple costume. Therefore I went for the human butcher look again.
The bands on that evening were Ministry and Prodigy, I expected both of these to be really good and possibly ones I would dance along to. So, the following is a list of the bands seen and what I thought:
Whispering Sons – hangar stage – Goth. Androgynous singer. Goth indie. Songs were ok.
Erdling – main stage – German rock. Pretty good.
Cephalgy – hangar – heavy dance but not fast. Ok. Blonde keyboardist. Singer had shirt tucked into his jeans. Not great crowd interaction. Songs slightly too long? Left after about 5 songs. My anticipation for The Prodigy is immense.
Merciful Nuns – main stage – samey songs, but goth. Goth shit.
Eisfabrik – hangar stage – dance. Snowman on stage. I guess someone has to corner the snow market? Didn’t really watch it, just saw them on the screens from outside the hangar.
Rabia Sorda – hangar stage – best so far. Good solid rock set.
Lord Of The Lost – main stage – pretty solid set. The band did well.
M’era Luna 2018: Lord Of The Lost live https://t.co/chnYP8l2Wb
Ministry – main stage – by this time I was drunk, had been for a few hours, but I have to say that Ministry were pretty amazing. I saw them about 20 years ago at Brixton and this was just as good, if not better. Smith and I were in the mosh pit for quite a bit of the set. There’s a live steam video and we appear a number of times. Just look for the two people dressed in white next to each other.
M’era Luna 2018: Ministry live https://t.co/pfwnqHePMV
In the video you can see me and Smith at 18:42 in the middle of the screen. Look for the white and me clapping.
Next band up were In Extremo but I have written no notes about them so I can’t comment. I don’t remember a huge amount about the rest of the day/
The final band were THE PRODIGY. I was very pumped to see them. They were on stage for about 90 minutes but I will admit that apart from knowing it was amazing I have very little recollection of the event. I don’t think there is any video either which is a shame because I would love to see what songs they played and possible see me in the mosh pit. All I can say is that at then end of the set I was drenched in sweat and absolutely knackered. Smith lost his phone. I know I had an amazing time. I just don’t remember much of it.
The Prodigy
Once the set was finished and Smith had used my phone to cancel his handset and we spent a short while looking over the ground it was time to head back to the tent [a 12 minute walk] and then shower the make up off. The showers were open all night so that wasn’t too much of a problem and to be fair the showers are pretty good. The biggest problem for me now was making sure I didn’t have a monster hangover, my hangovers are legendary.
Sunday morning was a little rough and eventually I got up, had an intake of caffeine and tablets, there was a headache there, brewing, waiting for the right opportunity to strike and limit me to slow movements and quiet. I struggled through trying to get ready for the day, which meant mostly painting Smith.
The collektiv at #meraluna18pic.twitter.com/RQ7sZnYCXO
— DBL_MF (@DBL_MF) August 12, 2018
So, here is the run down of the day, after we had been to the Info Point to see if a phone had been handed in.
Massive Ego – hangar stage -goth with a reasonable heavy but slow beat. British band. Buns on his head. Some of the longer deeper sung notes were not good. We saw this singer hanging around the main arena later on and that’s pretty cool,
FabrikC – hangar stage – heavy fast dance. Singer talks too much. Really heavy sound. No real singing and lots of samples from movies.
Aesthetic Perfection – hangar stage – really impressive again. Joe Letz on drums.
Rotersand – hangar stage – bloody brilliant, as usual.
Atari Teenage Riot – hangar stage – first two songs were really poor but after that it turned into high energy industrial punk. Pretty good.
Front 242 – main stage – really good sound. Songs were solid but very 242
Eisbrecher – main stage – A very good set. Impressive show. I liked the snow on stage.
M’era Luna 2018: Eisbrecher live https://t.co/7Du3fI1Uac
Considering the amount of alcohol I drank on Saturday along with being drunk before midday, sobering a little and then getting drunk again, the Sunday went remarkably well. I didn’t have a headache, I did drink lots of water, I didn’t have any alcohol this day.
I think the show finished around 22:00 and then there were showers to be had. Monday morning was all about packing up, getting everything to the car, Smith going to the police station and then driving the 798km home. This was easily the best M’era Luna so far. My suspicion is that although I am into EBM now, I have been a metal head for over thirty years and this M’era Luna was more of that than goth.
Just so you can see, here are two diagrams that show how much I moved over the two main days of the festival.
M’era Luna SaturdayM’era Luna Sunday
I am already thinking about costumes for next year and looking forward to it!
While the second day in the Lake District was spent wandering around Maryport on the Cumbrian coast I did learn a reasonable amount about the Romans in Britain. The weather while there was pretty poor with low visibility and often rain.
Maryport Harbour Wall
I visited the Roman museum there and I was going to visit the town’s museum about the sea and fishing but it’s one of those museums that only opens on even numbered days or something like that. There is, nearby, the only discovered remains of a Roman Milefortlet which was a fort placed every Roman mile along the coast to protect the country.
Roman Milefortlet 21
There was also the remains of a salt pan from medieval times.
Salt Pan
All fish and meat was preserved using salt and much of that salt came from pans like this where the water evaporated leaving the sea salt. This is much like the process used in Maldon. Later that day I drove back to the campsite via Buttermere and the wonderful cake and ice creams that are served there.
Maryport Boat
So, my last full day in the Lake District was going to be walking more fells. I decided to try and complete the Langdale Pikes. These are quite close together so once up at height it should be easy to get around. That is if the weather was clear. I started my walk later than normal because the weather was due to clear after midday [it was more like 15:00 but you know, they can’t get it correct all the time]. It’s also worth noting that the temperature at altitude is lower than that in the valleys. So, around 600m up the temp was around 12C rather than the 20C in the valley, along with wind this means clothing must be carried.
I took a route up from the New Dungeon Ghyll hotel up along Mark Gate towards Loft Crag. My first stop was at Thorn Crag, which is written on the map a little way off from where it is and I used a second app on my iPhone for working out where I was with more accuracy. Pretty much all the while I was at the top I was in cloud. This only abated after I had spent a little time at High Raise.
So, here’s the list of fells and pikes reached and where they figure in the Wainwright list:
Thorn Cragg [not on the list]
Loft Cragg [number 93 by height – 2270 ft]
Pike Of Stickle [number 83 by height – 2323 ft]
Harrison Stickle [number 71 by height – 2403 ft]
Pavey Ark [number 88 by height – 2288 ft]
Thunacar Knott [number 77 by height – 2351 ft]
High Raise [number 57 by height – 2500 ft]
Sergeant Man [number 69 by height – 2414 ft]
A couple of things stick in my mind; rock climbing up to the top of Pike Of Stickle which was fun but only because I missed the footpath by about three metres. The footpaths were not clear to me at the top an I did a lot of dead reckoning about taking bearings etc. The cloud didn’t help much either. Whenever there was a break in the weather I tried to look for footpaths and remember where they were going.
View From Pavey Ark
Eventually when I got back down the mountains it was much later than normal for me. I try to walk early in the day to give myself time in case things start going wrong but the weather forced me to walk at a particular time.
Finally I leave you with a picture of a Roman article. I mean, it’s a penis isn’t it?
