I have some good friends. Back in the summer a good friend, AG, leant me his Mazda MX5 for a weekend. I think I picked it up on a Friday evening and then returned it late afternoon on the Sunday. I would have to say that it is a great little car, really fun to drive. Sally and I explored the countryside around Kent and also took a trip into London.
So, we bombed around Kent. I drove the car out and about and we went to Scotney Castle. It was pretty good weather while we were there, but we didn’t go into the Castle itself as we would have to pay around £14 each. We did walk around the grounds and suffered a short while with fine rain.
It was soon lunchtime and so we drove to the Three Chimneys pub near Biddenden. The Mazda looked good in the car park. Lunch was nice, I had Welsh Rarebit and Sally had a posh sausage roll.
After that we visited the Biddenden Vineyard shop to purchase some of their fine cider. I had been persuaded to try some of this by Sally. I’d never really enjoyed cider before, especially from the pub, I just didn’t like it. This real cider from a decent maker was really tasty. When leaving the car park for the vineyard I *may* have wheel spun and also handbraked a turn a little, you know, just for kicks.
From there we drove through the fine countryside of Kent towards a hairdressers shop in Parkwood, Maidstone. Sunday morning was going to be interesting and Sally wanted to make sure her hair looked awesome.
Sunday was a special-get-up-early day. We had to get ready for a photoshoot in London. For some reason, mainly my exhibitionism, we had met a photographer at a club night and she wanted to expand her portfolio and offered us a free photoshoot. This took a while and plenty of emails to arrange but organise it we did. We dressed, did make up and checked hair before driving in the Mazda to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. We had to keep the roof of the car up for most of the journey else hair would have been blown around and looked bad.
We found [free] parking and met Marisa, our photographer. We then spent about 2 hours posing in various locations around the square. Onlookers aplenty were staring and some cheeky fuckers (mostly men) even took photos of us (or mostly of Sally) as we posed in the street. The results of the official photos are stunning and we are both really happy. We will be ordering some for the walls.
As the photos were now complete we decided to tour around parts of London with the roof down. I had sunglasses on so my make up didn’t show too much and Sally wore extra clothes to keep warm. We toured around the Embankment, Trafalgar Square but we couldn’t get to Buckingham Palace as The Mall was closed.
After wandering around London we drove home and got changed. It wasn’t long until it was time to give the car back. It was great fun to have and drive around. I want to do it again, or maybe buy my own.
We plan to explore the Midlands and Cotswolds and so a Mazda would be very good for this. I’ll have to ask AG if I can borrow it again! Maybe even for a week!
I saw this over the summer break with Sally. It was ok. That’s about it. I think it was entertaining, but not a film I’d bother to watch again if it was on TV.
I recently rated this on IMDB.
So, I have been spending time in Rugby to see Sally. It’s actually a really nice town and I like it a lot. The town has three markets a week, plenty of independent shops in the town centre and plenty of drinking establishments. It is well connected and easy to get to. There are a number of out of town shopping places and I hope these don’t detract from the town centre income. Many of the villages around Rugby are nice, pretty and look expensive.
There also happens to be a school where a game started. It is called The Rugby School and the game is Rugby Football. Now, as you might imagine, the town itself is very proud of this heritage. The game is named after the town. The game was invented in the town. The town doesn’t have a stadium for the purposes of playing the said sport and so it makes the most of its history.
I have two issues with Rugby and its branding along with rugby football:
History:
The evidence shows that William Webb Ellis was more than likely NOT the boy who picked up the ball and ran with it. He never mentioned this himself in the rest of his life. He worked as a vicar at St Clement Danes church in the Strand and then in the South of France where he died and is buried. The ONLY source is someone writing about WWE running with the ball about 40 years after the actual event. It is most likely that WWE wasn’t the boy. It is also most likely that rugby developed over time and Rugby School only tried to impose its own version when there were differences with the game around the country, just when it would have been handy to have history on its side.
By the way, it was perfectly ok to hold the football and run with it as long as you ran towards your own goal. What the boy did was run towards the opposing goal, this was illegal at the time.
As a good friend said to me recently.
You shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
Here’s the statue to William Webb Ellis outside the front of The Rugby School. Please understand he didn’t look like this. He was modelled on the sculpture’s own son.
More Important Things: HOLOGRAMS were invented in Rugby. Denis Gabor worked for British Thomson-Houston in Rugby where he invented the hologram. The hologram FFS. In Rugby. There are holograms on nearly every bank card and bank note around the world. In terms of affecting most people and importance to the world holograms easily beats the game of rugby football. Jesus, HOLOGRAMS!
The Jet Engine was partially developed at the British Thomson-Houston labs in Rugby. Whittle used the manufacturing firm to build his first jet and then the company was involved with the development of the engine, mostly at the Lutterworth site. While many places can claim the jet engine Rugby is allowed some kudos. This, complex, beautiful piece of engineering has easily affected more people than the game of rugby football.
Rugby Cement is based somewhere locally. Oh, they are based in Rugby. They are now owned by Cemex but once their red trucks were seen all over the country. They still produce plenty of fine cement and other products. The cement works serve as a guide over the countryside to find your way back to Rugby. The industrial site looks awesome. It is arguable that Rugby Cement has affected more people than the game of rugby football.
RUGBY – home to holograms, the jet engine, cement and a game for men played with odd shaped balls.
I went to see this film. I don’t remember being that impressed. It was quite nice to see a particular model of how our brains work even if it was very simplified, there wasn’t any executive function. Overall I just didn’t really enjoy it. I think they could have made a better film about kids and emotions. Also, we don’t really remember the way the film depicted it.
Smith and I travelled to Germany to a music festival over the summer. We searched many festivals to find the right one for price, distance and bands, although that wasn’t the order of the criteria. We settled on M’era Luna, a gothic/industrial festival that takes place on an old British Army Air Corps airfield near the town of Hildesheim, just south of Hanover.
On the Friday we traversed the channel via a train that carries cars [just imagine! a train that can carry cars! UNDER the sea! We humans are ingenious!] and headed to Germany. We used just a Sat Nav device, neither of us had a proper map. France, Belgium and the Netherlands were all pretty boring and we longed for some hills or vague scenery. The world kept track of our journey via twitter.
In Germany! Passing Wankum. And now there’s hills! — Ian Parish (@iparish) August 7, 2015
The route took us on the ring roads of two large towns and the traffic slowed a lot around them, hindering our progress! Once in Germany we travelled fast on the autobahn although we did have a detour around the northern edges of Dortmund as the sat-nav didn’t quite warn about a lane change on a slip road in time and then the next junction was closed. Dortmund looked like the edges of any town.
The temperature was hitting 32 Celsius along the way and finally we arrived at the airport near Hildesheim. 500 miles, 1 tank of diesel and plenty of snacks and LOTs of music.
We only just managed to find somewhere to put up the tent. There wasn’t a great deal of space left in any of the campsite. Our spot was furthest as could be from the main festival area, but reasonable close to toilets and leaving on the Sunday.
That evening we wandered the festival area, drank some alcohol already purchased from a service station and went to the disco hangar. There was some pretty good music played and it was good fun.
After a good sleep we awoke to find that the air bed had stayed up and was really comfortable. We both went about our routines to get ready to leave our tent area. I needed to satisfy my caffeine addiction and stave off withdrawal symptoms by finding more caffeine to ingest. Just as we were getting dressed Andy managed to puncture the airbed. It slowly deflated. We found a repair kit and tried to stick on a patch. We would have to wait 6 hours before we knew whether it had worked.
I found coffee. I also found some food. The weather for the Saturday was meant to be slightly overcast with a chance of rain showers. It had rained quite heavily in the early morning but the ground was so dry from the scorching summer that it didn’t really create any puddles or mud. Shortly after the sun had arisen the whole place was dry. Once we were ready we headed to the festival area to check out the shops, food places and mediaeval village (with food places and shops). It was also a good chance to see how the arena and hanger were set up so we knew where toilets, drink entrances, exits etc.
There now follows a list of bands we saw with comments about them if I can remember them. It is a good few months since the festival while writing this, unlike my detailed descriptions about Download.
Nachtgeschrei
Versengeld (with person playing the hurdy gurdy and another on bag pipes)
Speilbann
Coppellius (who played some Maiden covers in the style of mediaeval rock)
The Other
Frozen Plasma (half of this band is Reaper which is good, but Frozen Plasma were a bit dull)
Lord of the Lost
L’ame Immortal
Aesthetic Perfection (3rd or 4th time seeing these and they were awesome)
In Strict Confidence (surprisingly ok even with a female singer)
Blut Engel (just no)
X-RX this band replaced Suicide Commando who had to pull out of the weekend. They were good and I liked it, but left to see . . . .
Rob Zombie who just blew the competition away and was professionally brilliant.
Sunday started with the search for caffeine and then food. The air bed did not stay inflated and so the night was reasonably uncomfortable. We had decided we would probably leave M’era Luna that evening and then drive as far as we could home before kipping in the car. The bands on Sunday were:
Private Pact (a bad goth, stand still, band)
Schwarzer Engel getting better, quite thrash, goth and heavy.
Unzucht were just a great band with heavy thrash riffs and a great guitarist.
Dope Stars Inc. were good but looked as though they had just come from the 80s!
Tying Tiffany was the surprise of the weekend. They started slow and boring but from the third song onwards it was full of energy and heavy. Just a great find for the summer.
Assemblage 23 dull. very dull.
Rotersand a great band, a great show and really put previous band to shame. I loved it.
Nachtmahr were slightly disappointing. It’s hard to pin point this. Their music is very good. But live, they just didn’t capture the mood. It was almost boring, even with two women acting out a fetish scene it was dull. Can’t quite figure it out.
Nightwish we said we would stay for two songs but managed just a half of one song. We then drove towards the UK.
A strange thing about the German crowds is that if you had your spot to watch from everyone stayed in that spot. No-one moved when a band appeared. There was no crush at the front. Andy and I were in the second row for a number of bands on the Sunday and there was room to dance, moved around and no crush. This was actually refreshing and pleasant. It made the weekend a much more enjoyable event that had there been the UK crush.
Nachtmahtr
Rotersand
Rotersand
Assemblage 23
Rob Zombie
Private Pact
Schwarzer Engel
Unzucht
Dope Stars Inc.
X-RX
Aesthetic Perfection
Frozen Plasma
The Other
Blut Engel (I think)
Spielbann
Coppellius (possibly)
Smiff and Tent
It was easy to leave the festival as the final band hadn’t finished. The roads were clear and we made fast progress across Germany and then the Netherlands. We agreed between us that we would stop at the first rest area we found after midnight. It was fascinating to see how the landscape changed from central Germany to the low lands. Flat and straight is pretty much every road after Germany. We stopped at some services about 1km before the Belgian border. I think we slept ok.
The Monday we woke, I found caffeine and then we drove towards Calais. We arrived at the tunnel way before we were due but we paid some extra money to be on an earlier train. This was worth it as it meant I got home before my family left for other things.
The excitement of the weekend continued to the Monday evening as Combichrist played the O2 Islington thing.
I have some new proposed SI units for you to use. I think you should use them liberally because language evolves and changes over time so these could be commonplace in the next couple of decades. Both of these units have been developed with Sally.
THE WARDROBE
The wardrobe is an integer measurement with an upper and lower bound for determining the minimum number of romantic dates before new clothes must be purchased because clearly outfits can’t be repeated. The symbol for the wardrobe is:
][
This unit is quite person specific and covers the following range:
Lower bound – the number of complete clothing outfits that can be worn given that no single item of clothing may be worn twice.
Upper bound – the number of clothing outfits that can be worn given that any complete combination can’t be used twice.
As an example consider the following rather basic wardrobe contents:
7 different pairs of socks (socks of same colour and style count as 1)
5 different pairs of pants (pants of same colour and style count as 1)
4 different shirts
5 different pairs of trousers
6 different pairs of shoes/boots
Given this situation then clearly:
This person can only wear the four different shirts before they need repeating. It doesn’t matter what else that person owns. The upper bound is simply calculated as the product of the number of items in each group that can be considered as being fully dressed for a romantic date.
As you can see the ][ unit has a wide range. The minimum is merely equal to the fewest items of a clothing category. The upper bound, because of combinatorics, becomes quite large, quite quickly.
example question: I own shoes, pants and onesies. If determine how I organise my wardrobe.
Solution:
4823 = 13 x 371
371 is product of two primes, namely 53 and 7.
Therefore you have either have 53 sets of pants or 53 sets of onesies. Either way I would suggest that you use a pack of playing cards, with one joker included, attached to your clothing to organise the items in a wardrobe.
THE FUCKTON
This unit developed out of the need to describe large quantities where previous units and measurements had failed. It may be clearly seen that the etymological derivation of this unit comes from a portmanteau of fuckloads and tons. This unit is not specifically a measure of mass, but could be used as such. The fuckton is used primarily to give a sense of more than “very much”.
The symbol for the fuckton is:
The fuckton should be used as a non-specific answer to questions where the term “a lot” doesn’t quite give the correct impression.
How many raindrops fall on the UK over a year?
How much does middle lane driving annoy you?
If you go in the express petrol lane, how wrong is it to then pay in the shop?
How many colours are there in a rainbow?
To give a sense of scale I think it is necessary to indicate what size the number is that a fuckton could represent. The fuckton is defined as the total number of Lego bricks ever made. So the current value of a fuckton is:
This, we believe, to be an extremely useful unit of measurement. The difficulty associated with a changing definition is outweighed by the usefulness of the value.
Went to see Mad Max last night at Rochester Cinema (which is in Strood). I went with Sally and we had dinner before the movie. Well, I say dinner, we ate at McDonalds because we got to the restaurants too late to get food before the movie, mind you it was worth being late.
I rated this movie on IMDB, as I do with all movies I see at the cinema. You don’t get reviews for stuff I watch on the TV though. That would make this site tedious! You should read this communication about my ratings system.
I then thought about the movie some more and I got asked “What didn’t you like about it?”. This made me re-evaluate my IMDB score. So I changed my mind.
So, I should tell you what I thought. I would watch this movie again and that is the main reason for increasing the score from a 6 to an 8. I really liked the way it looked, was filmed and acted. Max didn’t say much, but then, he’s mad. This is, overall, a really enjoyable film.
But there were issues [potential spoilers follow].
The main tribe seem to have mastered modifying cars and trucks and keeping them running in the heat and sand of the desert, but they seem unable to design and build a water distribution device that doesn’t just pour everything in to the ground.
Why did they keep the rig attached to the truck they were driving for all the film. Really? What purpose did they have for it?
The tribes seemed to clear the fallen rocks very quickly and easily without any heavy lifting equipment laying around.
Motorbikes heading for 160 days across a salt lake. That sounds fine until you REALLY think how much food you would need. I’ve owned motorbikes. They run out of fuel after five hours.
If you can suspend the disbelief then this is a gorgeous, great film.
I thought I ought give an explanation. I had bought some desserts for dinner with Sally.
When she asked what they were I couldn’t remember what they were called.
Passion Dribble
Was my response. I think it was an accurate description of the dessert. Apparently there may be other connotations of that phrase. She laughed. A lot. I’m not sure what she was getting at!
