I went to the Cineworld cinema at Rochester to see The Legend Of Tarzan. As usual I have rated this film on IMDB and if you aren’t sure of my rating system then you should see this communication.
I thought the film was enjoyable. A good romp with those pesky colonial Belgians in charge. I was largely impressed with the CGI animals, very impressive and realistic. The story was ok but nothing special. My one quibble would be with the physics of swinging on vines and catching a train doing so, simply unrealistic, but a minor infraction for this particular film. I guess I should read the book.
By the way, the first corner at Zandvoort race track is called Tarzan. It is named after the man whose garden was used to create that part of the track.
I thought it was time to change them. I think I’ve had them for about 2 years and so they have probably done around 1000 miles! So I bought some new trainers. These ones are nice and bouncy!
I recently saw that the Met Office had a new weather app. I think it popped up on the front page of the app store. I was interested as I’m quite fussy about my weather apps. Once you get used to one and the information it gives you it’s quite hard to change. Much like buying a new wallet, which I have to do soon and it fills me with dread. By the way, I don’t like the term “app”, I’m not particularly fond of the term “application”, to me these are programs and always will be.
Here’s the front page of the new app:
The new app had embedded video forecasts from the Met Office – these are not needed, I’m too old to care for video forecasts. Also, video on a phone is antisocial and useless, I can get the same information without the noise and movement. I think this may be a generational thing. I don’t need sound and people to inform me something that I can see in a diagram or map. It could possibly be why I also don’t like the news that is broadcast into our homes all the time [hint: change channel, which I do].
Here’s another view of the new app:
I’m not sure I like the days across the top. I think that’s mostly because I the older app [which is still available] had the days going down the screen. The worst part of the new app is the weather alert screen. This screen used to be a map with colours over it.
This is a good weather warning map. It tells me what I need to know. The new app just has text to read. I can’t be bothered to read it. The text is broken down into regions. I can be even less bothered to find my region and then decode the words. Oddly, I do like listening to radio weather broadcasts so maybe I’m just weird here.
One last thing. The new app has done away with proper weather charts. These actually mean something to me and I like them. They give an overall impression of what is really going on in the weather. Here are some examples of good stuff:
Day by day and then lovely extra information if you need it. There’s a page that will give hour by hour predictions too.
Look at these maps. Aren’t they pretty and lovely. They let you know what’s going on. The new app doesn’t have this. Which is a shame. I do get the feeling that sometimes things are “improved” to include lots of new functions but the reality is that they just fuck them up.
I recently spent a lovely week at RAF Wittering [EGXT] with the MGS CCF RAF Section. We were there with cadets and staff from Malvern College who all turned out to be great people. In fact, their Officer Commanding had been on my OIC course.
Harrier Fun
Here’s a list of activities we got up to followed by a small photograph gallery which could have been bigger but sometimes there are restrictions on what we can photograph.
High ropes course and power fan
Archery
Air Experience Flying with No 5 AEF
WHST
Shooting with the L98A2
Drill and drill competition
Command Tasks
Visit to Marshalls Aerospace Company
Visit to the American Cemetery near Cambridge
5131 BD Sqn visit
Fire Section visit [I might have been sprayed by a branch]
Harrier Heritage Centre visit
I did two runs
Ten pin bowling
Meal out in Stamford
Outreach team
Party minibus
This was a very enjoyable camp. Great fun. Some of the pictures below aren’t really level with the horizon, but I am not going to edit them. It’d take time I don’t really have.
Shiny – but not mine
Holding the branch
Fire section visit
American Cemetery
American Cemetery
Pegasus Fan
Truck
Trucks
Grob Tutor
Propellor
Pegasus Fan
Harrier
Cockpit
Pegasus Fan
Cockpit
Tutor
Harrier
My last photo is of a lovely elliptical bridge I saw in Leicester. Very pretty:
Smith and I went to see Ayria play at Electrowerkz in The Angel last night. The standard room was used for the bands and the bar at the back was open but only with one person serving which seems about two too few! We had actually caught a train from Purley to St Pancras and so the venue was only about a fifteen minute walk from the terminus.
When we arrived a KLOQ were already playing.
Kloq
This band were pretty good. The singer could sing, which is not necessary in this genre, more of an advantage. They had a live drummer and bassist. All other noises were produced by a computer. They were a bit dancy but very enjoyable. Andy and I both liked them a lot. I’d happily see them again.
Next up were a band called Inertia. They were a project of the drummer from Killing Joke. Now, I have seen Killing Joke and they were pretty good. However this side project were not good. They weren’t terrible but the style of music mostly left me cold. There was a guitarist, the drummer, a singer and the programmer. The guitars were too much and there was too much noise and sound. The first two songs had a slow walking keyboard riff that irritated me a lot.
Inertia
I thought the singer was a bit weak and needed to be much more powerful to compliment the sound of the rest of the band. We left them playing. It was that boring.
The headline act was a Canadian female singer called Ayria. I would describe her stuff as quite pop-like but with the slight edge that means she plays places like Electrowerkz and not the Smash Hits Pop Party [possibly showing my age there].
She was much better than the other two bands. She had two musicians with her who both seemed to be really enjoying themselves. It’s odd but watching musicians enjoy themselves makes the whole thing much more enjoyable for me.
Ayria
All her songs were great and she didn’t talk a great deal, if at all, in between the songs. She did a great job and it was very enjoyable.
After the gig all the bands were hanging around and I accidentally hip-bumped Ayria later on in the evening. Electrowerkz turns into Slimelight club at 23:00 and so Smith and I hung around for a while. We sampled some lovely cocktails and chatted to some of the bods who attend these events.
Fortunately for us there are trains from Victoria to home once an hour through the night. This means it’s possible to get back without having to use stupidly expensive taxis. All in all it was a very good night out.
Spent an hour under the Kent countryside one afternoon as I dived into the world of Chislehurst Caves. They are man made caves in the chalky hills. They are also quite impressive and a good place to go when you want to escape the summer heat and humidity. The tour guide was a bit cheeky but funny in the right way and he was knowledgeable, he was just the sort of person you want to show you around.
Paraffin Lamps
Ammonite Impression
Quite Dark
Carvings
Hendrix and Led Zeppelin Played Here
People On Tour
Ammunition Dump
Church
According to the guide Hendrix and Zeppelin both played the caves, which would have been amazing to see but I guess the sound would have been terrible. Although this was the late 60s and early 70s so you would have been smashed out of your head and not notice.
I would recommend this tour as it was good value and interesting.
So, I saw this the other day while waiting at a set of traffic lights.
Van
I was impressed because the sign seems to imply that the van is “restricted” to particular speeds in different areas.
Restricted to me means that the driver can NOT go above those speeds when on those types of roads. I just wonder how it works. I will grant you that the tech for this already exists and I’m not entirely sure why it isn’t compulsory.
You can fit a vehicle with a GPS receiver and a set of maps so it “knows” where it is. This is connected to the ECU and hey presto, you can’t go faster than the speed limit allows. It should be easy enough. There might be some issues with travelling on the motorway over a bridge and the GPS thinks you are suddenly in a 40 zone but this can be worked around I am sure. I am not sure why these aren’t the law.
Anyway, if the van uses impressive tech then that’s brilliant. If the tech is a biological ape then that’s shit.
I’ve asked Sky. When I get a response I’ll put it here!
.@SkyUK Are your vans really speed restricted? What technology do you use to do that? pic.twitter.com/kJxOkqSTmQ
Last night I traveled to the Odeon cinema in Royal Tunbridge Wells, or rather on the outskirts of RTW. The Odeon website doesn’t list this cinema as Royal Tunbridge Wells, it’s listed as Tunbridge Wells which is a little confusing because there’s also a town called Tonbridge close by. Have a look at this map and see the naming conventions in Kent:
I tweeted my rating of 6/10 on IMDB, you should read this communication about my rating system.
I felt remarkably not bothered emotionally by this film. From the trailers I thought it was going to be an expose of how companies and banks and the entire financial system is designed to screw the normal person out of money. I thought it would be something along the lines of The Big Short. But no.
This film was based on a fictional fraud committed by your classic British baddie. There be spoilers ahead. A young but not very clever man invests his inheritance in a company and then loses it all, or most of it, these being shares and all rather than an investment fund as far as I can tell. This annoyed the man and so he decided to take a TV show hostage to figure out what went wrong.
The company was claiming it was a software “glitch”. Others were more cynical. It turned out to be fraud and dodgy stuff. It wasn’t a glitch.
In the end the stupid guy gets shot dead.
Then, the world goes back to normal. Every just starts again. People stop watching this live drama and go back to being people. No-one GIVES A SHIT.
This was an odd film. In the end NOTHING had changed. The world kept going. Someone had died. People went back to being money makers and shakers. The TV show went on.
This was more a film about a TV show than about people and financial crises. A shame. It could have been great. Instead it got a 6 on my scale.
Went to look around Rochester Castle and Cathedral. I’d not been in the cathedral before and I was impressed, but then that’s the point of them. They are meant to intimidate you into believing a load of bollocks. It was strange as the organ was being tuned up and so added a creepy scary atmosphere. I mean, more of a creepy atmosphere than a whole building dedicated to the murder of a Jew, who possibly didn’t even exist.
So, there was a submarine in the river. This was somewhat of a surprise as I’d never noticed it before.
Black Widow
A quick Google tells me this is U-475, a Soviet era submarine called Black Widow. I could write stuff here but you could just visit the Wikipedia page here. Apparently this sub has been here for over ten years, but I have to say she’s not always been moored off Strood or I would have definitely noticed her before now. It’s an impressive sight. Not quite as impressive as the Raid On The Medway must have been, those pesky Dutch!
Rochester Bridge got in touch via Twitter:
@iparish and a nice inclusion of our Old Bridge too
— Rochester Bridge (@RochesterBridge) June 2, 2016
The following picture was tweeted by BBC Radio 4 this morning as an explanation for the scale of the new Gotthard Base Tunnel. I have a few things to say but initially I would like to let you know that the genius of man never fails to surprise me. We have been so successful in being brilliant. The things we can do to overcome problems are stunning. An irritating by-product of this is that our ingenuity has also been used to create ever more bizarre ways of killing our own species.
I have a few things to say:
I am not even aware of Nicaragua’s GDP and I care not a lot. How about comparing it to teachers employed, or even the cost of other tunnels. 12.5 billion seems reasonable to me in terms of EU budgets.
I have never understood the football field comparison. Surely people understand that football fields are roughly 100m long anyway. It’s not necessary.
This is the one that really bugged me. 4,000,000 cubic metres does NOT compare to a height. One is a volume and the other is NOT. Apart from reservoir engineers who can picture or comprehend this volume anyway.
Because I know exactly how much a freight container holds???
Why do I need a diagram showing me the distance between London and New York. They haven’t even used the Great Circle. I get it 3200km is a long way.
At least they didn’t mention double decker buses.
The ONLY comparison that should be made is country area and Wales because it leads to countries being described in KiloWales [thanks to More Or Less for that].
