Monthly archives: December 2015

Doomflight

This entry was posted in B Movie Night Review on by

doomflightDoomflight

This is a thin book, and I had the time to spare, so I read it in a day. And it’s taken me over a month to write up the review.

Fradley aerodrome was built, and then abandoned during the war, and, at the start of the book, has been functioning as a storage space and makeout spot. In the prologue, we get a hint of the evil that resides on the site, as a young woman is whisked away to be sacrificed by hooded figures.

Fast forward a little while, and the aerodrome has been purchased by Flyways (Guy N Smith wasn’t great at making up company and product names) to be turned into a major airport for the Midlands. Even before the first sod is cut, the deaths start. But, despite the mortalities, and local opposition, construction continues.

The problem is, the airport has been built on the site of an old stone circle. It’s even larger than Stonehenge, and still guarded by the spirits of the evil followers of the Old Religion who worshipped there. The grotesque Druids are able to bend space and time, or seriously cloud the minds of their victims, to kill people in recreations of their old domain.

When the airport is built, the deaths ramp up even more, with plane crashes, hotel fires, virgin sacrifices and more. There’s so much chaos that one whole plane crash is skipped, and you only find out about it several pages later when it’s mentioned in passing.

It’s all fun, and a bit gruesome, but, as a whole, the book felt unfocussed. Just what the Druids wanted, or expected to achieve, was never explained. The reactions, of staff and public, aren’t too deeply explored, and it ends with an event which feels unrelated, which was prophesied a mere few pages earlier.

Despite my misgivings above, I still enjoy these seventies vintage horror potboilers, so I’m going to give it a good score.

From:: Ian Pattinson Goodreads reviews

A wander around post-flood Salford

This entry was posted in climate change Floods Salford on by

Two days after the Boxing Day floods, I decided to take a quick look at the aftermath along a short stretch of the Irwell.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

I started out in Peel Park, which is now Peel Pond.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

The geese were enjoying the children’s play ground.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

You’ve got to wonder what the flood has done to the asking price of these new builds.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

Debris caught in the railings gives an indication of how high the water got.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

An even bigger piece of debris still hooked onto the bridge.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

Gunky silt coats the road where the water topped the bank.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

Positive thoughts. Though this was on a building a way uphill from where the river had overflowed.

Salford after the Boxing Day floods

RIP The Mark Addy? It’s hard to see from this angle, but the silt/sand was piled up quite deep.

Water level at points along the Irwell were reported as the highest since monitoring began in the 1930s. I’d like to know if this December has been a record breaker for rainfall, or if some other factors contributed to the floods. There are still a few more months of winter to go, as well, so we might be seeing more flood damage yet.

UKIP are racist? Who’d have thought

This entry was posted in racists UKIP on by

Labour won the Oldham West and Royton by-election yesterday, with UKIP coming in a distant second. Nigel Farage, who had been claiming their candidate was going to win easily, has gone straight to blaming immigrants

In multiple interviews, he insisted that mass immigration and the increase of ethnic minorities meant democracy had “died” in parts of Britain.

He repeatedly cited a report he claimed to have read in the Guardian last Saturday.

“The northern correspondent of the Guardian wrote last Saturday that she knocked on the doors of a street in Oldham where nobody spoke English, nobody had ever heard of Jeremy Corbyn, but they were all voting Labour,” he told the BBC.

“So there is a very large ethnic vote in this country in our inner cities. They vote Labour indeed and in one of the boxes last night it was 99% Labour and almost the electoral process is now dead in those areas.”

He went on:

“What I’m saying is that mass immigration, the change to our demographics in Britain… is fundamentally changing politics. The system is widely open to fraud and there is an ethnic element to British elections which we’ve never seen before.”

It goes without saying that the Guardian report doesn’t mention streets full of immigrants, or masses of people who don’t know who Corbyn is, but will vote for him anyway.

The race baiting and immigrant blaming started before last night, though. I follow the RSS feed of a Salford UKIP activist’s website. It’s an incoherent and often painful read, which feels like you’re being fed snippets of his stream of thought after a couple of lunch time beers. He posted a variation of Farage’s lament this morning, but, on Monday, he posted this-

UKIPThink

Something to think about
11/30/2015
10:10 pm
Swinton South UKIP
mole45

According to the 2011 census more than 50,000 of the 220,000 population in Oldham are from an ethnic minority. There have been some reports that some Asian voters have lived in the area for more than a decade and do not speak English – but will vote Labour.

It’s worrying to me in a sense that parties could bow to the minority sector to maintain it’s power base no matter what the view of that minority was. The figures are from 2011 i would not be surprised if those figures are inflated dramatically today.

I’ve posted a screen shot from my Netvibes feed, because the original post isn’t there any more. Perhaps he had a think, or maybe someone suggested he remove it. Either way, a UKIP activist on Monday was making the same sort of claim that Farage is today.

I hope the defeat in Oldham is a sign of the great UKIP deflation that’s long overdue.

The collapse of the Biospheric Foundation

This entry was posted in Manchester International Festival Salford on by

I visited the Biospheric Foundation a couple of times during the 2013 Manchester International Festival. It was an interesting project, taking first steps towards a self contained urban farm.

Sadly, it has gone bust, with over £100,000 in debts and tales of bad behaviour and rotten business practices from people who worked with it.

It’s a terrible shame, and it’s likely to put people off funding similar projects, which just makes it worse.

I’m too old to be an extremist, I’ll settle for being a terrorist sympathiser

This entry was posted in David Cameron on by

If you don’t do and say just what the Government wants you to, then obviously you’re an enemy of freedom.

Apparently, there are ‘experts’ who think that being a teenager looks exactly like being a terrorist.

A leaflet drawn up by an inner-city child safeguarding board warns that “appearing angry about government policies, especially foreign policies” is a sign “specific to radicalisation”.

Parents and carers have also been advised by the safeguarding children board in the London Borough of Camden that “showing a mistrust of mainstream media reports and a belief in conspiracy theories” could be a sign that children are being groomed by extremists.

Other apparent hints listed include young people changing friendship groups or styles of dress, secretive behaviour, switching computer screens when adults approach, or glorifying violence.

Meanwhile,

David Cameron has appealed to Conservative MPs to give him an overall parliamentary majority in favour of military action in Syria by warning them against voting alongside “Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers”.

Those sound like the words of a man who isn’t confident he’s going to win the vote on bombing Syria. I do hope he loses, not just because bombing’s so obviously the wrong plan, but also to see him get increasingly petulant and pathetic as the reality of defeat dawned on him.