Maps courtesy of the algorithm

I love a good map. I enjoy books that have a map in the front of them. I like looking at old maps, obscure maps, made up maps... 

Some of the maps in this post are more like data visualisations. They are all maps that have popped up on my social media feeds that I've liked enough to save. The algorithm now knows I like maps and keeps showing me them!

If anyone finds a map on here that belongs to them, then please let me know and I will credit you properly.

Let's start with this beautiful graphic of African river basins.

I found it interesting to compare the map of natural features with this map showing which European colonisers laid claim to parts of Africa in 1914. 

Moving to another continent altogether, here's a map showing the relative populations of humans and kangaroos in Australia. The roos seem to have the upper hand in most of Oz. 

Meanwhile this agricultural map from 1920 firmly divides Australia into terrain suitable for sheep and inhospitable to sheep. 

A friend of mine commented this would make the good basis for a remix of Insomnia by Faithless. "I can't get no sheep."

This map of placenames in Tasmania is done purely for puerile amusement. It amused me.

Coming closer to home, this is a map of the western edge of Europe during the last ice age. A person could walk from Britain to Denmark across Doggerland. 

A map showing Cymraeg names for places in England. 

And another map showing castles - note how many were built along the border between Cymru and England. 

It's almost as impressive as this map showing Gregg's locations across the UK.

Back to castles, this cute map of castellau Cymreig isn't very accurate.

And to bring the post full circle, here's another map of rivers, showing all the rivers in Cymru. 

I wonder what maps the algorithm will push my way next.

Apostrophe catastrophe

In terms of apostrophe misuse, this feels like hitting a new low...

Also, when I shared this someone pointed out the word "vistor". Maybe the i dropped down a line to make the word iVisit. Who knew there was a scarcity issue with the letter i?

Snack of the Month - Oreo weirdness

Oreos divide opinion. I've heard several negative comments about them. Personally I quite like them although I think I liked them more when they were harder to find in the UK. Now they are almost everywhere and in almost every format - mini, 'double stuffed', chocolate covered - and in a host of flavours.

And then there's this.

Yeah, that's right. Cookie flavoured pop.

I tried it so you don't have to. It is most definitely fizzy pop that leaves an aftertaste of Oreo cookies. (Which makes me wonder how artificial the flavour of the actual cookies are if they can replicate them in a drink.) 

This isn't some bizarre import, either. That's the British spelling of "flavoured" printed on the can.

I couldn't drink much of this, simply because after each mouthful it felt like I had eaten an Oreo. And there are only so many biscuits I feel I should eat in one go. 

Meanwhile, how about some actual biscuits? Cathy bought both these flavours for me, along with the can. 

Oreo Red Velvet and Oreo Gingerbread. Bit of a departure from the regular flavour.

Is this really a trick? Everyone knows about this with Oreos, don't they?

They tasted different. I'm not sure what red velvet cake is meant to taste like. They sort of tasted like red velvet cake. 

I wasn't very keen on them and didn't finish the packet.

The gingerbread ones, however, were absolutely delicious. They didn't have too much ginger in them but they had enough to give a little zing. 

And the pattern on the biscuit was delightful too!

Overall verdicts: undrinkable pop, meh red velvet flavour biscuits, cracking gingerbread flavour biscuits. 

Book of the Month - A History of Heavy Metal

This book was a makeweight in a 'buy two for £7' deal in HMV, which used to be a record shop but now is a more general emporium of random things. Including books. (I bought Slaughterhouse Five and The Boys from Brazil in a previous deal - both reviewed back in September.) It felt sort of suitable that I would be buying a book about music from HMV despite the company's drift away from selling music.

A History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O'Neill is based on a stand up comedy show about heavy metal. Without wishing to be too rude, that's pretty apparent from the way it's written. The narrative goes off on tangents. There are a lot of opinions. And it gets quite repetitive after a while, like he's forgotten what he has previously told you (twice) about a particular album or how he thinks Metallica declined in greatness when they went commercial. 

The thing is that heavy metal is inherently ridiculous. Andrew sort of recognises this, but rather than let the stupid excesses of the movement speak for themselves, he feels the need to put his own gloss on it by telling you they were stupid. And fair enough, if you despise 'glam metal' as much as he does, maybe recounting stories from those bands is tedious. I did like his comment about forcing himself to watch a documentary about Motley Crue as research for the book. I understand how painful that must have been - but really it did feel like the minimum amount of effort in terms of actual research. 

But although Andrew is willing to admit that metal is often just very silly, he also tries to paint it as an important movement, uniting outsiders and providing a community for people who don't feel they fit in. Which is all fair, I suppose. He tells his own story of getting into metal a couple of times in the book and that was more interesting than being told, again, how his favourite Death Metal albums were amazingly innovative and genre-defining.

Overall the book could have done with more stories, more nuggets gleaned from research and fewer opinions (or at least just being told those opinions once). There was plenty left out and glossed over - the entire Satanic Panic in the USA in the 1980s, for example. But maybe he didn't know much about that because I'm aware that religious moral panics are often opaque to people outside the religion. 

Several times he alluded to stuff, but didn't return to the topic to explain it further. The reader is just assumed to know what went wrong with Celtic Frost, for example. That's the one that really stuck out but there were several others. It feels like the book is aimed at people who don't know much about heavy metal; the interrupted explanations wouldn't be helpful.

He also has a very annoying authorial habit of putting jokes and tidbits of information in footnotes. These really interrupted the flow of reading. A long time ago I was told that if a point (or a joke) is worth a footnote, then you should really think about including it in the main body of the text. The continual footnoting did make me wonder if he doubted his ability to land a joke. Truthfully, many didn't land. They just got in the way. 

Although I wouldn't particularly recommend the book, it did have some highlights. I liked this comment on page 84 so much I read it out loud to Cathy:

"Def Leppard's enormous success in the States is what the other... bands were aiming for, though none went for it with quite the same ferocity, plus of course they possibly lacked the shark-eyed commercial killer instinct and pop chops to write the sorts of songs that millions of people want to hear. Bear in mind that most humans are awful, and so if millions of people want to buy your art... it's probably not good art."

That final sentence really made me laugh. 

And towards the end of the book (p.271) this rather astute comment caught my eye:

"One of the major advantages of cassette tapes was the lack of random access - you just started it where you'd left off. As a result albums and mix tapes got listened to more evenly. Records and CDs favour the beginnings of albums, and MP3s lead to the universal experience of listening to someone dj-ing at a party and skipping tracks halfway through. Being spoiled for choice means many people give albums less time to grow, and fewer listens in general."

I remember listening mainly to cassettes in my formative musical years in the late 80s and early 90s (when, I admit, I really liked Def Leppard) and I think he is on to something here. There are a lot of album tracks I listened to in order to get to the bits I liked because fiddling about with fast forward or rewind was annoying. Even the few albums I had on CD got taped onto cassettes because I didn't have a CD played in my bedroom, but I did have a succession of tape-players.

(It's strange, because at the time there was a big movement saying 'home taping was killing music' but I got introduced to a lot of bands whose albums I have subsequently bought and rebought in different editions because a mate taped me a copy to listen to.)

There's a certain level of nostalgia at work there, and that is a theme for the book. The chapter titled 'In the Late Nineties Every Band I Loved Went Shit' gives it away. The following chapter slagging off Nu Metal feels a bit like an old guy complaining the music the kids are into is rubbish. The nasty comments about Linkin Park felt awkward given Chester Bennington's suicide - which was actually in the same year this book was published. I'd have taken them out for the paperback release because it really comes across as punching down. 

The book ends with a rather silly series of predictions that heavy metal will eventually take over the world, which mainly seems to be a rather long gag about the heat death of the universe arriving before the release of a new Guns & Roses album. It felt like unnecessary filler when the previous chapter about the current state of heavy metal had ended on an optimistic high point. 

And a note on indexes - the book really needed two, an index of bands and artists and an index of topics. 

So, this is 'a' history of heavy metal. I think 'the' history is probably still waiting to be written.

Monthly round up - October 2024

It feels like winter has suddenly arrived. The clocks have gone back. It's getting dark as I finish work. And all of a sudden it's November! Time for a review of the month just gone. 

The week before the clocks went back I was working on a filming project in various locations around Barry. It included some shooting on the Knap at sunset, so I got some lovely photos. 

The film will tell the story of Jacob, one of the young people involved in the programme I work in. We were a great little team, with our freelance videographer, Sarah, and my colleague Rhys joining us for the second day of filming. We finished on Barry Island, where else. 

In other work-related news, I had a great time meeting up with Heather who I worked with for seven years in the diabetes network. Heather has now retired and when we met up for lunch in Cardiff Bay, we had such good weather it was sunny enough for us to sit outside!

Our good friend Clare had a big number birthday (40) and we made her pose for a photo with us at her birthday party.

Another former work colleague, Ruth, was at the party too. We worked together a long time ago in the comms team at Care for the Family. 

A fairly random highlight from the month was going to an evening presentation by the Grangetown History Society. It was about the massive gasworks that used to exist not very far from our house. If you go to Ikea, you can still see the steel skeleton of one of the massive gasometers. I was a bit late getting to the talk, so have borrowed this picture of the presenter from my friend, Fiona.

In addition to lots of archive pictures of the area, there was a useful explanation about how a gasworks functioned, and how they produced gas by burning coal at a very high temperature without much oxygen. There were hundreds of miles of pipes transporting the gas all across Cardiff and as far as Pontypridd. It was used for street-lighting and domestic and industrial use. 

I made it to my second monthly Keep Grangetown Tidy litter pick in a row. I'm not sure why we all stood around the post-box for the group photo. 

The litter-pick had been postponed by a week because of a storm. As someone said, if we had gone out on the original date it would have been more of a litter-chase than a litter pick!

I collected some big items, including a large abandoned suitcase. I'm pretty sure it didn't have a body in although to be honest, I didn't dare check. 

But my biggest prize was the entire front of a car. Clearly someone had had a shunt and they decided not to take their bumper home. Instead they dumped it on a piece of waste ground next to the road. 

Anyway, that sets a new high bar for ridiculous finds on a litter-pick, overtaking the abandoned aquarium I picked up once. 

Our house has been an ongoing project since February. We now have the replastered hallway and landing painted! We have also had some carpentry work done. There is one last big bit to do - sorting a new understairs cupboard and putting down new flooring in the hallway. It feels like we are on the home straight. I'm really hoping we can get it sorted in time for Cathy's birthday.

And finally, my football round up. I went to five games in October - three at Barry Town, one at Cardiff Draconians, and the Women's European Championship Qualifying play-off between Wales and Slovakia. At one of the Barry Town games I met the new club mascot, Derek the Dragon. 

I went to the Wales game with Sara. It was our first game together since watching Penrhiwceiber Rangers win their league title back in May. 

I also earned a Futbology badge for my 75th game at Jenner Park. Happily, it was a game that Barry won. 

And here is my running total for the season so far!

Halloween movie review - Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!

Hey, remember when I posed with this guy?

Well, I finally got round to seeing his new film. I went this week with Bryan and Elaine. Considering the film was released in early September I was surprised how many other people were watching it too - but then it was half term week in the run up to Halloween. The further mystery is why the studio didn't wait to release this as a big Halloween release, considering it's set at Halloween and is a ghost story (of sorts).

Mild spoilers follow...

This is a sequel that rides the current trend of very late sequels, arriving 36 years after the original movie. Alongside Michael Keaton as the titular Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara both revive their roles as Lydia and Delia. We get a throwaway line explaining why Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin's characters aren't around and Jeffrey Jones's character, Charles, appears in an animated segment and is sort of in it thereafter but in a way they didn't need to use the actor.

I was a fan of Tim Burton's movies for a long time but lost a bit of faith in him as a director more recently. This felt like a return to form - as if someone had said to him 'Hey, Tim, go and make a Tim Burton movie!' And he definitely maxed out the trademark black humour and silly gore. The writers must have had fun imagining as many different gruesome deaths for the residents in the afterlife. I particularly chuckled at the escapologist who was still chained inside his box that was full of water. 

It's a short, fast-paced film with a lot going on. Lydia is now a TV ghost whisperer. Her stepmother Delia is a successful artist. After Charles dies, the pair travel back to the 'ghost house' where they first met Beetlejuice for a memorial service. Lydia's daughter. Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega) is with them. She definitely doesn't believe in ghosts and thinks her mother is a fraud. She changes her mind during the course of the film.

Because there is a lot going on, some storylines feel rushed and unnecessary. Monica Bellucci is frankly wasted as Beetlejuice's angry ex-wife seeking to kill him for good. Willem Defoe as a dead actor who thinks he's a cop steals the scenes he is in, but it's also an aspect of the story that gets squeezed. Meanwhile there are some scenes that are overplayed - while I like any scenes featuring trains in movies, the "Soul Train" dance sequence could have been cut despite the energy it brought to the perilous journey into the underworld for the mortal characters. 

After a great dance number during the wedding scene, with the characters bewitched to sing along to MacArthur Park (with the wedding cake dissolving as they sing about a cake left out in the rain), the film ends with the characters suffering a variety of fates - some pleasant, some not so. There is a mixed bag of happy ever afters for the main characters, again playing to Tim Burton's strength of not ending a character's storyline conventionally. One happy ending turns into a horrible nightmare and then the credits roll.

As very belated sequels go, this was great fun. I laughed a lot, winced at some gory bits, laughed again, enjoyed the spectacle of the musical sequences, and overall thought it was great. It extended the Beetlejuice story without just rehashing the original film and was well worth seeing on its own merits too. 

Pumpkin spice reaches a new extreme

"Autumn" in recent years could more accurately be called "pumpkinspice" given the ubiquity of this mysterious flavour. I'm not really sure what it's meant to be - an ersatz pumpkin pie taste, maybe? It's definitely very sweet.

And it's everywhere. Every coffee house has at least one pumpkin spice brew. There are seasonal pumpkin spice baked goods in stores. Pumpkin spice candles (don't eat those). Pretty much everything.

And now you can pumpkin spice your ride as well.

(Spotted at the Asda car wash in Cardiff Bay; photo by Cathy)

Ultimate American patriotic footwear

Our friends Bryan and Elaine have recently returned from a trip to the USA. They went to Las Vegas and New York and somewhere on their trip they bought me a present - the ultimate American patriotic pair of socks!

A well-muscled bald eagle? Nothing screams 'Merica more than that!

Snack of the Month - grape sherbet candy

Knowing how much I like grape flavoured things (jam, soda, sweets), Cathy bought me these in TK Maxx.

Not just grape. American grape!

All packaging should have info as clear as this. However I'm not quite sure why it needs vegan and vegetarian labels.

Inside the purple carton is a packet of sweets.

They are all individually wrapped.

And up close look like a typical boiled sweet.

They had a nice fruity flavour and a bit of fizzy sherbet that leaked out as I was sucking the sweet. I don't know if I would automatically place the taste as "grape" if this was a blind taste test. I'd probably have guessed they were going for blackcurrant. No surprises they are very sweet - and Cathy is very sweet for buying them for me! 

Book of the Month - British Rail

After several months reviewing fiction, here's something a bit different. 

British Rail by Christian Wolmar sets out an alternative view of the state-owned rail network in Britain - away from the jokes about sandwiches and the wrong kind of snow. His argument is that this portrayal of costly ineptitude is underserved and was deliberately created to justify the privatisation of the railways, which has in fact ended up costing the taxpayer more while charging more for tickets on a worse service.

I was half expecting this to be a nostalgic look back to the good old days on the railways, but actually there is little nostalgia for the steam age or the pre-Beeching era. Beeching was the civil servant whose name is synonymous with railway closures, especially many rural branchlines. But Christian gives him a fair assessment - many of those lines were in disrepair and no longer served any industries or centres of population. Many of them hadn't turned a profit before being nationalised and actually 'British Rail' extended their lives longer than they would have lasted if run commercially. 

There are some fascinating insights in this book. In the 1950s British Railways had an ambitious plan to build helipads at major stations because helicopters were the transport of the future. But it's not just flights of fancy like that - there are plenty of actual railway practices that seem hilariously wrong-headed now.

One of those was the use of slip coaches. Basically, this was a system that meant fast trains didn't have to slow down at stations. At a given point, the last coach on the train would be uncoupled and roll to a halt in the station while the train thundered on. This meant that lots more staff were needed, one for each coach to apply the brakes and make sure it stopped in the right place. And the coaches needed to be collected up and shunted somewhere else until they were used again. It was crazily inefficient just to shave a few minutes off the time it took for a train to get to its eventual destination. 

The other thing I found interesting is that although Beeching's plans were made under a Tory government, the cuts were almost all carried out under a Labour administration. That's despite the opposition of unions to the cuts and lay-offs.

Most of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s were in the name of modernisation, but actually real modernisation didn't happen until a new generation of managers came through the system in the 1970s and 80s. Power shifted in favour of managers and away from engineers meaning that priority was given to joining up timetables and improving the experience of train travel. There were even marketing campaigns - many of which triggered memories of seeing the TV ads in the 80s. (Like "Let the Train Take the Strain.")

The real big shift was away from regionalised thinking - the country was basically split into four competing regions that mirrored the original four companies that were merged into British Railways. Instead of region-based organisation, the bosses at British Rail decided to focus on 'sectors' - passenger, freight, post and so on. The InterCity brand that I really remember from my childhood came in around then - along with Regional Railways which I remember seeing a lot more on trains operating out of my home town. 

I was very interested in the way focusing on the service being delivered, rather than the region services were being delivered in, transformed the railways. Some sectors started turning a profit, which was invested back into new trains, creating a virtuous circle of profit generation. A lot of this happened under Margaret Thatcher's Tory government, which is surprisingly depicted as broadly supportive of British Rail and less inclined to meddle with the railways than previous governments.

But, sadly, then came privatisation. Christian presents this as a gross act of political vandalism, implemented entirely, and incompetently, for ideological reasons. It was a loose statement in John Major's manifesto in 1992, enacted without any real plan or sense of purpose by his unpopular government. The epilogue about the quarter century post-privatisation is a panoply of failures.

I think the highest credit I can give this book is that it's a book about railways that's ideal for people who don't get excited about railways as much as for people who do. There are lots of interesting tidbits of information - like the sheer number of steam engines built by British Rail that all ended up on the scrapheap by 1970 - and the overall story of a state owned industry achieving success is a compelling narrative.