"Nothing but the rain"
Wellesbourne Airfield in Warwickshire. Home to a flying school, a Saturday market and an AVRO VULCAN: XM655.
This Vulcan is the most complete of all the Vulcans remaining. Although XH558 was the last airworthy Vulcan they had to remove stuff from it to get the airworthiness certificate. Hence, XM655 is more complete and still does high speed taxi runs.
I wrote about XH558 here when I saw her perform for the last time over Coventry airport.
I think the most amusing thing about XM655 is that when it was bought from the RAF it landed at Wellesbourne, but the runway isn’t long enough for it to take off again. That does seem a touch short sighted.
If you get the chance on a Saturday to visit you most definitely should. For a donation the members of the preservation society will give you a tour of the cockpit and tell you wonderful stories about the Vulcan and her history. Did you know that all the money went into the airframe and so the navigation equipment was pretty much the same as the Lancaster? For long flights the crew had a sextant.
With a crew of five, but only two ejector seats there were “design” issues I guess. The three crew facing backwards had to jump out through the entrance door in the floor. That was probably an issue when flying low!
So, the Vulcan is a beautiful plane. It’s very loud and imposing. I am curious as to how good it was compared to other planes of its generation. We Brits love to imagine that our stuff is the best. I just wonder how much that is true.
This beast is graceful and wonderful. I am glad she never was used for her intended mission.
Not sure this counts as the worst traffic ever, but it does look pretty bad.
I think there must be a site out there with historic traffic data. Will search.
Met with Smith last night and we chatted about which music festival to attend this year. You may have read about M’era Luna from last year. It was a very good time but this year there’s more choice!
Our preferred choice was to head to Munich for the Dark Festival, but this has been cancelled which is a shame. There were a lot of good bands that we would have liked to see there.
So now there are two choices. M’era Luna at Hildesheim again or Amphi Festival in Cologne. Here’s the line up for M’era Luna:
Of the bands in the above list I would really like to see VNV Nation, Eisbrecher, Combichrist, Hocico and Suicide Commando. But there are more:
This list has a few tasty treats: [:SITD:], Noisuf-X and Centhron. So, M’era Luna has a good selection, worth travelling the 500 miles for!
Next up we have the selection from Amphi Festival.
The list of bands to definitely see at Amphi is: Aesthetic Perfection, Covenant, Faderhead, Frontline Assembly, Mono Inc, Suicide Commando, Unzucht and [X-RX].
It’s a tough choice. The current preference is M’era Luna. Wait and see.
So, stumbled across a snoring cure. You can see the website here. Now, I’m gonna call bullshit on this right now, but that would seem rather unfair to the company so let’s look a little closer at what they claim.
I have screen clipped their website and I will discuss each section. The main page looks like this:
This says that you wear the ring on your little finger and that it is a snoring treatment that is guaranteed to work. Apparently it’s also been clinically tested! They have made a very specific claim here that wearing this ring on your little finger will make you stop snoring. What else do they have to say?
This explains how it works. Or rather it doesn’t. All it says is that there are Acu-activators on the ring. A quick google shows that this isn’t a real term and isn’t used anywhere apart from the stop snoring website.
It’s not looking too good for this product and we’ve not even really started. I think they may be trying to imply that the things on the ring activate acupuncture points? This is irrelevant as acupuncture is clearly bullshit.
Next bit from the www.goodnightsnoring.com website:
Testimonials amount to nothing. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. I don’t care. 3500 years of history can’t be wrong can it? Of course it can. We now use medicine with evidence not rubbish about Chi and acupuncture points. Also, being mentioned in the Daily Fail is not necessarily a good thing. In fact if a medical “cure” is mentioned in the Mail or Express you can pretty much assume it’s bullshit.
Now, the website covers this with the following page:
They claim that a good clinical trial was performed and the results were almost a miracle. This is good because if there is good evidence then I would be prepared to change my mind. The goodnightsnoring.com website doesn’t have a link to the clinical trial. I want to be able to read it and then change my mind. It seems that these are extraordinary claims and so it would be prudent to examine the evidence.
I searched PubMed. There was nothing about the Snoring Ring as being sold here. So I tried searching Google Scholar. Nothing again, just a paper about breast cancer. This was troublesome, my two main sources for scientific papers were showing nada. I decided to look using plain old Google. I searched for “snoring ring clinical trial”.
From these results I wasn’t interested in the Snoring Ring website, there’s nothing on there. I also couldn’t care for a news article in the Daily Fail [they don’t know how to report science]. The other links were mostly places that sell the product and so have probably just got the blurb from a product information release. What interested me originally was the ASA link.
In 2012 a complaint was made to the ASA about the evidence for the claims that the Snoring Ring company were making. The complaint was upheld and the company were told not to make claims about the snoring ring. The so called medical trial was completed after this ruling by the ASA!
Also in the search results was a link to ANTISNOR, a company who produce anti snoring rings. Now, this company mentioned on this page a French company who had done the clinical trials.
In 2012, a French scientific research organisation, Proclaim (www.proclaim.fr), studied the effect of AntiSnor Acupressure Ring . . . .
The Proclaim website doesn’t exist. Even though ANTISNOR link to it. Oh dear, the trail has gone cold.
There are a number of RED FLAGS on the original website. The mention of the following aspects all cause concern. They don’t mean it doesn’t work, they just mean we should be sceptical until we have seen the evidence.
So far, I’ve had some people say they think this work and no actual medical trials even though one is claimed. Back to Google.
Another link from Google heads towards Princeton Consumer Research. It appears that this company will undertake clinical trials for you and then allow you to use the results in your publicity. Here’s a Princeton Brochure with their claims. After finding this I found a company called Aspen Clinical Research. They had a pdf linked here and also Aspen-Clinical-Anti-Snoring-Ring-Media-Coverage1 from my site. This PDF essentially claims that the publicity they managed to produce for the Anti Snoring ring was brilliant. They seem to be more of a PR firm than a clinical trial firm. This makes me very wary.
Aspen Clinical Research even went so far as to persuade the press that there was a National Stop Snoring Week in 2014. This is depressing reading.
I hadn’t realised there would be companies that are willing to be paid to undertake some form of research to legitimise PR claims and also produce media puff.
Both Aspen Clinical Research and Princeton Consumer Research do not seem concerned with legitimate medical trials, rather they concentrate on PR friendly trials to produce media results. Neither of the websites were searchable from their homepages. Also, both companies seem to be offering to pay participants. This can’t be a good thing, it would bias the results. All I want is a copy of the clinical trial for the Anti Snoring Ring and I can’t find it. What I have found are companies who provide easy results for PR.
It seems to me that these companies offer to do science the wrong way around and therefore they don’t offer science. It looks like the cycle goes:
The correct cycle should be:
I feel utterly depressed at the state of media manipulation and that there are companies that do this as their raison d’etre. Everything we see and hear is manipulated to sell products. I started this communication as a simple investigation into the evidence for a product as they claim. What I found was a collection of companies willing to provide you the evidence you want so you can claim what you want for your product that (probably) does nothing.
Anyway, I can’t get to the evidence for the Snoring Ring. I haven’t found the paper with details of the trial and so I am going to complain to the ASA about their website claims. Watch this space.
So, the xmas break, which requires food and alcohol, along with a significant drop in exercise has resulted in what I would call a considerable gain of mass. I have written about mass loss before and I wrote more here also. To lose mass you have to burn more energy than you consume. It’s that simple [and no, you don’t have a gland problem!]. Not a lot else to it, it’s the psychology of it all that will fuck you over. I like eating and I comfort eat. It’s the self discipline that hurts. I know that when I am a healthy mass and exercise I can maintain that mass and still have blow-outs now and then.
So, before I get to my numbers, here are some facts about fat and exercise.
So, my ideal mass would be <80Kg. However, I’ve not been that for a long time and I would be happy with <82.5Kg which comes in at 13 stone in old money. I am currently hovering around +90Kg. This upsets me greatly, but it is my own fault. Now is the time for action. Let’s just assume I want to lose 10Kg just to make the numbers easy. It’s worth knowing how long this will take and what effort I will face. I think many people are unrealistic about mass loss.
Some maths:
10Kg is approximately 22 pounds of fat to be lost.
22 pounds of fat is roughly 77 000 kcalories extra that needs to be burnt.
If I reduce my daily intake by 500 kcalories then this would take 22 weeks, as I would lose one pound per week. This is nearly half a year, which is a depressing amount of time to be on a restricted calorie diet.
If I maintain 2500 kcalories per day and run to burn the excess I will need to run 770 kilometres. Given that my average run is probably around 10km this means 77 runs. If I manage to run twice a week, on average, then this is over 35 weeks which is again an intolerable amount of time.
What I need to do is reduce my calorific intake while at the same time exercising to produce the desired results in a shorter (but sensible) length of time. I aim to be a healthy mass again by the end of March. This gives me three months or twelve weeks. I need to lose around 2 pounds per week. I can do it. I am determined to do it as some of the health issues that I have mentioned previously are back.
My progress isn’t going to be public. I am not going to start tweeting about this all the time. I probably won’t even mention it if I do or do not get down to the target mass.
I am fully aware that I am going to come across as an asshole in this piece but this sort of thing really annoys me. This is a special allowance given to a group of people who “sincerely believe” that they must fast during a particular time of the year. Now, it’s not just Islam that is catered for. Christianity gets Easter breaks for schools moved around every year just because they “sincerely believe” that something special happened two thousand years ago not on that date.
Here’s my thought process.
Clearly god does not exist. If god did exist then how come all the books written for him by messengers are different and contain different messages. This is not my only argument against god but it is clearly a human invention. Show me your proof and I promise I will believe, I’m happy to wait.
As god does not exist all religions are bullshit. They are just codified ways of treating each other (or hating women, foreigners, gays, the disabled etc if you have really read them).
Therefore all “sincerely held beliefs” are bullshit. No state should tolerate them being used as excuses for special treatment.
Now that seems extreme but in reality it means everyone gets treated the same. The same rules apply to one and all. I utterly fail to understand how you can tell what a “sincerely held belief” is. How do you know someone has that? If I want every Wednesday off work because the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster deems that necessary everyone would laugh at me.
That’s not a real religion.
They would say.
How the fuck can you tell?
Would be my response.
It’s a bit like Donald Trump claiming he’ll stop all muslims entering the USA. How the fuck can you tell who is a muslim? Do you ask them? How do you know they aren’t lying. What do you have to do to be a true muslim? How can you prove you are a true jew? How do you tell someone that you are a devoted christian? This is the “no true scotsman” fallacy. You can’t tell this stuff.
Let’s stop asking for changes for groups of people because of “special pleading” or “sincerely held beliefs”. I don’t like the idea that once one group gets special treatment then all the others should get it too. Let’s just treat everyone the same and call this treatment out for what it truly is: bullshit.
If you read my communications regularly then you will be aware that I spend some of my time in the Midlands. Mostly the West Midlands but I’m not sure where the divide is.
Way back in May I went with Sally to the Stockton Locks on the Grand Union Canal. Here’s a Wikipedia page about it all. The locks are quite impressive and the pub near them, The Blue Lias, was very nice too.
I also have been to Hatton Locks, which are part of the Grand Union Canal. These are even more impressive. There was a pub nearby but we didn’t go in as we were heading home from Packwood House and it was raining and cold.
I have been very impressed with the industrial history of the Midlands and as much as I knew that existed it is nice to see it in person and appreciate it more.
Anyway, I decided to change the lock screen on my iPhone to a picture of locks. I initially had this picture of Stockton Locks.
However I now have this picture of Hatton Locks as my lock screen.
I will tell you that every time I look at this screen I chuckle. My lock screen is a series of locks.
Over a weekend in the summer Sally and I travelled to the North Sea coast and Lincolnshire. We drove from Rugby, towards Leicester and then followed the A46 to Lincoln and the coast. We had booked to spend a night on a campsite near Mablethorpe. The campsite was called Grange Leisure Park and was predominantly a caravan park but with good camping facilities. We didn’t use my tent [see this communication for a picture of that], we used Sally’s. It’s a pretty good summer tent although not quite as nuclear proof as my gorgeous Vango!
We arrived, set up base camp and then headed to Mablethorpe to experience the Great British seaside. Oh, wow, it didn’t disappoint. It was a classic seaside town. There was plenty of shops selling tat. Plenty of punters on holiday and a few crazy golf courses. One of the purposes of this trip was to start a crazy golf championship between Sally and me. Our aim was to play as many of these courses as possible along the coast in the two days we had planned to be there.
Seaside selfie with @trusmoov pic.twitter.com/L7hnT0qaAp
— Ian Parish (@iparish) August 20, 2015
Within Mablethorpe we found the following courses: Pirate Hill, a win to Sally. Pirate not on the hill, a win to Ian. Dinosaur Park, a win to Sally.
So after that we spent some money in an arcade. It was fascinating. It was a huge place where you can win tickets for playing the machines. We won about 50 tickets quite quickly but then realised you need well over 1000 tickets to claim a prize. We just gave our tickets to someone at a ticket counting machine. We also played some of the “tipping point” games because they are quite fun, whereas the TV show is utter shite. So, at this point Sally was winning the golf competition and we looked around for somewhere to eat dinner. I found the Kings Head a few miles away and we travelled there for food. It was quite a “local” pub but was also friendly and welcoming. The food was delicious and very impressive, it was nice to be treated well and have the chef actually speak to us about what to eat.
The Lincolnshire coast is a rather amazing place if you like caravans, static or otherwise. We spent some time looking at the caravans for sale at the camp site and I was also amazed at the number of re-sale places along our journeys.
2-1 down now. @trusmoov — Ian Parish (@iparish) August 20, 2015
On the second day we packed up camp and headed along the coast road after having breakfast and another round of golf at Queen’s Park in Mablethorpe. Sally won this round. I was 3-1 down in the series. Breakfast was good though!
We drove towards Anderby Creek, a place that Sally had visited as a child. I’d not been there as far as I know. The only Lincolnshire coast place I’d been to was RAF Donna Nook in the 1980s. I think I wrote about it here. Anderby Creek was a small place with chalets and caravans. We spent time on the beach flying the kites and then had morning tea in the restaurant near the Cloud Bar. By the way, a cloud bar isn’t a bar. It’s a platform from where you can look at the clouds [because you can’t do that from ground level!].
Here’s us flying kites. I managed to mess up my control cables and so had to order more from Amazon. It turns out there’s a kite specialist shop in Hinkley which is close-ish to Rugby.
After Anderby we headed to Chapel St Leonards. The beach here was quite nice and there was another arcade we visited. But this trip was about the crazy golf and so we managed to find a course just outside Chapel on the road south to Skegness. The course was based on a theme of elephants and I managed to win this one. It was now 4-2 to Sally.
It was now time to head to Ingoldmells. This is a part of Skegness to the north of the town. There was a theme park where entry was free and you just have to pay for the rides. There were some awesome ice cream shops and the whole place was manically busy. There were also plenty of caravans. Check out the aerial view of the town and spot just how many caravans are packed into the area.
We had a wander around and ate some food at a fish and chip shop. I have to say I found the whole experience rather surreal. It was a very odd place. We found two crazy golf places. We played an indoor course which was reasonable fun. I won that. Then we found a Pirate course that was suspended above the beach. I also won that. The scores on the doors were 4-5 to me. I felt quite pleased at this although Sally wasn’t happy about it.
4-3 up in the crazy golf challenge with @trusmoov
— Ian Parish (@iparish) August 22, 2015
The journey home took a while. We skirted Skegness and headed home via Boston and Grantham as there were awful roadworks on the way to the coast near Newark. We also went through Melton Mowbray. I did my best to avoid heading to Coningsby, Cranwell, Waddington and the air museum near Newark. One day I will do a tour of the RAF bases of Lincolnshire.
I loved this short break. It was really good fun.
So, took a trip, with Sally, to see the film Steve Jobs at the Cineworld cinema in Rugby [or rather on the outskirts of Rugby].
As ever, I have rated this film on IMDb, but you need to see this communication for an explanation of how the numbers work.
I rated Steve Jobs (2015) 6/10 #IMDb https://t.co/VI7OL0nzEI
— Ian Parish (@iparish) November 22, 2015
Before I start on the film I would just like to mention some ‘ealth and safety gone mad. There was a popcorn making dude working two popcorn machines in an alcove behind the concessions stand. I kid you not he was wearing one of these:
Now, I’m not sure what the issue is, as the popping cookers are closed while the popping process is in play but this made me giggle, quite a bit!
So, the film. You can read about it and the synopsis and where it all takes place. My opinion of Apple has always been one of suspicion and, although I am an iPhone whore, I am perfectly aware that Apple always steal other ideas and make them that little bit better. I don’t think they really do for originality. They do great design.
As a film this was very well made. I liked the shooting and the actors. I liked knowing a bit more about the history and seeing the characters over time. I did NOT like Steve Jobs. I had already read about him being an arse and this film [I know it’s fiction] largely represented him as an arse. Do I think he was a clever man? Yes. Do I like Apple products? Yes. Do I have to like him or think he was great? No.
This film is well worth seeing. I enjoyed it. Even though Jobs was an arse.