Bexley Invicta.

Like pretty much everybody, I get annoyed by the repetitious nature of TV commercials. The same old boring dross seemingly repeated ad infinitum. It has got to the stage, that I now, rather than ignore them, have started picking them apart. Two current adverts especially have drawn my attention – the Dulux paint commercial, and the grindingly awful BT Infinity advert. The Dulux commercial – should you have been fortunate not to have seen it shows a forty something bloke who still lives with his parents. After staggering home drunk one time too many, his Mum and Dad repaint his room in bright yellow whilst he is out. When he awakens the next morning and sees the eye watering colour scheme, he tells his parents that he is moving out – much to their delight. The commercial has a glaring continuity error in it. There is a close up shot of the bloke as he awakens from his drunken slumber. He is lying on the mattress and there is a visible dark spot which is meant to be where he was drooling in his sleep. The shot then cuts to a wider view of the repainted bedroom with the bloke sitting up in bed, looking horrified at the transformation of his bedroom. The dark spot on the mattress is absent – in the space of about two seconds of screen time it has vanished. Look for it next time you have to endure the commercial; once you know of the error, it becomes glaringly obvious. I love finding this kind of thing, as it makes the whole commercial break experience more endurable. The second issue is with the BT Infinity commercial. This time it is not a technical fault with the filming, it is a matter of the advert does not make sense. The scene starts with one of the students who has featured in several of the recent advert series answering the door of their shared flat, to find an attractive girl standing there. She’s a fellow student from Spain, and wants to use their fibre optic wifi. All well and good, you may think – a strong plot device to get the girl (and an unfeasibly large number of her companions) into the lads’ flat. The point is, the wifi signal indicated on her laptop would suggest that she had a good signal in her own flat – all she needed was permission to use the signal, and the password. There was no need for the girls to lounge around in the boys’ flat, other than for the female student who lives with the lads to come home and find the place crawling with women. The advert makes no sense, and is pretty insulting to all parties portrayed. It is lazy film making, conforming to a ton of stereo types. I understand that commercials often use stereo types, mainly due to time constraints – the director has around 28 seconds to tell a story, and there is not enough time to set up a character, so you have to then rely on a stereo type that the viewer will instantly identify. Nevertheless the number of clichés that are shoe horned into the advert are to me unacceptable. I doubt that many viewers pay as much attention as I do, to what is essentially a piece of throw – away viewing. I would be interested in others views on the subject.

Planning consent is now under consideration by Bexley Council for the redevelopment of the Howbury Centre in Slade Green. Redrow Homes have the contract to build a total of 278 houses in three phases over the next eighteen months or so. I understand that a percentage of the new properties will be social housing. Whilst the potential creation of new housing is overall to be welcomed, I do question the location of the development. Slade Green is not exactly crawling with shops – the Londis mini supermarket in the small parade of shops opposite Slade Green station is about the largest in walking distance. Other than that, potential residents without a car will have to get the 99 bus into Erith for Morrison’s, Farm Foods, or Iceland. The other issue is that the housing market is flat right now, and for the foreseeable future. Although a proportion if the properties will be rental, I doubt that many people will want to buy a house on the new estate. First time buyers are having a hell of a time, often being required to stump up the most impossibly huge deposits – effectively barring them from the market. Whether this intolerable situation will change by the time the houses are built is debatable. Slade Green is never going to be the most desirable of addresses, convenient though it is for the rail journey into London, and close to the M25, it has not exactly got much in the way of cachet.

Much to my surprise, the Emails I received from the Melbourne Theatre Company have gone on to the point where I have now signed a contract, authorising use of one of my photographs as the backdrop to a stage production they are undertaking. I just received a small parcel in the post which contained a copy of the programme, complete with a credit, thanking me for the use of the image. I let them use it for free, as amongst other reasons, I don’t consider my photos to be of “proper” commercial quality. I was quite surprised at the theatre company’s choice of shot – a rather dreary snap of the office buildings in Snow Hill, Birmingham that I took a couple of years ago, whilst I was in the city on business (see the image above - click for a larger view). The photo does rather confirm most prejudices regarding Birmingham – that it is a dull, grey concrete jungle. This may have been true ten or so years ago, but nowadays it is a really nice city, with some excellent shops and restaurants – certainly somewhere well worth a day out visit to. I get the feeling the theatre company wanted an image of a grey and faceless municipal cityscape to portray an anonymous metropolis – although it is not anonymous as all that – there is a bit of a giveaway in the form of the BT tower in the foreground. I am unsure if they noticed this – far be it for me to impose editorial decisions on them.

Earlier I mentioned my current views on the state of current television advertising. I omitted one particular advert, as I felt it needed a piece all to itself, as I feel that it represents the thin end of the wedge, and a potential privacy concern. You may have seen the latest television commercial for Confused.com featuring their usual selection of animated people singing new lyrics to the tune of “YMCA”. “Why pay for bad drivers?” goes the hook line for the commercial, which features a cartoon stereo typical chav boy racer in a souped up hot hatchback, racing around and causing several upsets. The ad goes on to say that by fitting a small black box “to monitor what a good driver you are” you can reduce insurance costs. This sounds all fine and good, but the implications are widespread and serious. The Black Box they refer to is what is known as a Telematic Monitor.  It is designed to monitor what the driver does and how they behave. In essence it is a telemetric monitor of the vehicle, recording where you go, how long you spend in the car, your acceleration / deceleration and even G-forces experienced by the vehicle during each journey. The insurers (and for that matter, anyone the insurers give access to the data) can thus remotely tell what the driver has been doing. “Fine” you may say “I have got nothing to hide, and if it gets me cheaper car insurance” – but this is missing the point; it is only a matter of time before most, if not all insurers demand a telematic monitor box be installed. As soon as this tipping point is reached, the government will be in the position of making them law – and they will then have the perfect method of monitoring and controlling the general public. We are sleep walking into a system of totalitarian control. The government are already able to monitor and track the position of anyone with a mobile phone with a degree of accuracy you may find disturbing. To couple this with (potentially) compulsory telematic monitoring really would leave us in a situation where Big Brother from 1984 would be jealous. Paranoid rantings? I think not; it is just that most people don’t know about the technology or what use it can be put to; by the time they do, it may well be too late.

Local amateur football club Bexley Invicta are recruiting new players. They are just about to begin the new season for the first time in a competitive league; they will be competing in the London Unity League. Bexley Invicta are a gay friendly football club - their players are a mix of gay and straight people; something that should be strongly supported in the still widely homophobic world of association football. Their chairperson is a chap called Brian Silk, who is a Maggot Sandwich reader (and occasional contributor). He also manages the excellent Erith centered web resource Erithtown.net - which I can highly recommend. Here is a recording of an interview that Brian undertook about the team on BBC Radio Kent.



There has been some debate in the technology press over the last couple of weeks in relation to retro gaming – that is, playing old 8 bit games designed for 1980’s home computers. Nowadays emulators for all the major classic computers are available on pretty much every platform, and seem especially popular on Android. Websites such as The Register regularly feature “top ten” favourite retro games. One that consistently features is the ground breaking space warfare / trading game “Elite”. This was a very early pseudo 3D wire frame animation which initially ran on the BBC Micro, although it was later ported to the Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64. The application is still available in various forms, and a small team of independent developers have created a modern, 32 and 64 bit updated version, now called “Oolite” with improved, solid graphics. The game is available for Windows, Apple OS X and Linux. The game is free and open source and you can download it here. I have tried the OS X and Linux versions and it has the same game play as the original, even though the graphics are now more refined. I would certainly recommend that you give it a spin – after all, it is free.

I swear that one or more reporters from the News Shopper read the Maggot Sandwich. The recent mini campaign I have been running about local food hygiene and the "Scores on the Doors"project seems to have been picked up by the local paper. The fact that Erith, and Bexley in general gets such a woeful overall food hygiene rating has been picked up by them; they have published a story on the subject - pointing out that the London Borough of Bexley gets the lowest score of any local authority in the UK! You can read the News Shoppers' take on the story by clicking here. It would seem that the area's kebab shops are the absolute overall worst offenders, and the advice is to avoid any establishment with less than three stars out of five. The bad news is that the highest rating any independent (non chain) takeaway in Erith gets is two stars!

The computer floppy disk is forty years old this week; its’ heyday was really from the mid 1980’s to the mid 1990’s. Whilst they are most definitely yesterday’s technology, they were the first truly portable storage media. I know cassettes were very popular in the early 80’s, but they were so grindingly slow that unless you were a die – hard (like me) you did not bother copying them and passing them around. Once floppies became popular, initially with the 5.25” format, a whole computer subculture arose around them. Many kids could not afford double sided disks – ones that you could turn over like a record and “play” the other side. Some enterprising individual discovered that if you carefully cut a notch in the correct position on the vinyl disk cover, you could turn over a single sided disk and use the other side – which nearly always worked – it seemed that the single and double sided disks had the same recording media inside – the single sided just lacked the extra notch which told the drive the disk was double sided. Most brands were absolutely fine doing this; indeed several kitchen table companies were set up selling notching tools of varying quality. Personally I found a pair of small nail scissors did the job just fine, and I cannot recall ever actually ever knackering a disk as a result. The 3.5” coffee mat sized disk came in during the mid 80’s – a more robust format, with a spring loaded cover over the recording media, but it lacked the ability to have its’ hardware hacked in the way of the older, physically larger , but smaller capacity disks. You can read more about the history of the floppy disk here.

I have been running an occasional series featuring independent local companies for a while now. This time it is the turn of Defender Consoles – not the home of the classic 80’s arcade game (which would have been nice in itself), but an Erith based company that manufactures custom dashboards and roof consoles for the Land Rover Defender series of off road vehicles. You can see their excellent website by clicking here. I think that this is just the kind of niche, specialist manufacturing facility that a small local company can really succeed at.

So many buildings in and around Erith stand empty and seemingly abandoned; Erith Trades and Social Club, situated on a piece of land that separates Morrison’s petrol station on one side, and the KFC drive through on the other has been derelict and empty for a couple of years now. The same is true of the old Erith Pop in Parlour building, opposite the Baptist Church in Queen Street, which was bought at auction on the 12th December last year, but which still remains boarded up and unloved (see the photo above - click for a larger view). I try and keep an eye on the local planning applications for clues as to what is going on locally, but I have seen nothing in respect of this building. The same can be said of the infamous Cross Keys pub, which has also been boarded up and seemingly abandoned since it lost its’ licence back in September 2010. It has been put up for auction a couple of times, and I believe it eventually found a buyer, but I have no idea what the latest position regarding it is. If any reader has information on any of these buildings, please let me know – you can contact me at hugh dot neal at gmail dot com (sorry about the format, but I don’t want a ton of spam as the result of an over enthusiastic web crawler).

I had a couple of comments regarding my coverage of the history of Sebel and Co. manufacturers of Mobo Toys in West Street, Erith, between the end of the war and the early 1970's. It would seem that a significant number of locals had an involvement with the business. I had a couple of comments regarding this, but for some obscure technical reason, one of them would not publish correctly - it shows in the blog management console as published, but it is not - until now. Here is the previously missing comment: "Sebels - I worked there for a bit as a kind, drilling and press operating. Pay wasn't all that bad for the late 1960's although the factory was falling to bits. Pathe have an interesting newsreel clip of local Erith kids testing some of the toy horses, etc, to destruction, something they liked doing, but was frowned on by mum and dad. See http://www.britishpathe.com/video/toy-testing/query/erith+toy+testing"

This weeks' video clip is from US sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" where Sheldon gets an unexpected Christmas present. Enjoy.

Albedo 0.39.

Erith made the national press for all of the wrong reasons this week; on Tuesday the Sun reported on the story of an Erith resident who had mistreated his pet Alsatian dog so badly that it had died of starvation. The story was originally run by the News Shopper, but my guess is that they have sold it on to the tabloids.  I don't think the scumbag who was found guilty of animal abuse will have a particularly pleasant time in jail, or indeed when he gets out. Serves him right. You can read more about the distressing case by clicking here.

The extensive re - roofing work on the North wing of Pewty Acres has now been completed, and the scaffolding was removed on Wednesday morning. Almost all the building work has now been completed; all that remains is the installation of the bespoke tempered glass splash backs in the kitchen and the bathroom, and a small amount of snagging work - it has been a long and very expensive process, but it is now looking very good. 

I was debating covering the then impending landing of the NASA Mars Curiosity Rover on Mars in last weeks’ Maggot Sandwich update. In the end I decided against it, on the grounds that had I written about it, something might have gone horribly wrong. The whole landing sequence was horribly complicated and fraught by dozens of potential dangers. Fortunately the craft came down in a text book landing. NASA are not missing a trick – the rover has a Twitter feed that it updates on a regular basis – you can read it by clicking here. From what I wrote last week about conspiracy theorists and the “false flag” brigade, I assume that they think the whole thing is being filmed in a warehouse in Los Angeles, rather than actually on the surface of Mars. The fact that NASA have already released footage of the landing, taken from the MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) a satellite that has been in orbit around Mars for some years already. The Curiosity also shot “dash cam” time lapse photography of it nearing the Martian surface, and finally touching down, from a small, low resolution camera that is primarily designed to stop the vehicle bumping into things when on the surface. Now that Curiosity's camera mast is now up and capturing high definition photographs we are getting a much clearer idea of what the surface of Mars looks like. What the gainsayers will do with all of this virtually real – time information is anyone’s guess – they seem to be the 21st century’s equivalent of the old Flat Earth Society.  The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail both inadvertently gave support to the rumour that a UFO had been spotted over the Stratford stadium during the firework display that marked the ending of the opening ceremony. You can see what the Mail said by clicking here. As you will see from their breathless and rather under researched prose, they are pretty convinced that ET is about to land in the East End. The trouble is, if you listen to the sound track of the video footage, you can clearly hear a couple of four stroke petrol engines. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was needing to traverse vast swathes of interstellar space, I would want to use something with a bit more poke than a brace of Volvo six pots. If you watched the BBC TV coverage of the opening ceremony, there was extensive footage shot from above, from precisely the location where the flying saucer was supposed to have been. Starting to see a pattern here? The "UFO" was actually the shiny underside of the former Goodyear blimp*, reflecting the flashes of the fireworks as it was used as a filming platform by the Beeb. Only the very most hard of thinking cannot have worked this out. It is lazy journalism to have so unthinkingly reported what really was the most flimsy of stories that stood up to very little in the way of analysis. *The blimp, which has been flying round the local area recently, as I have photographed, currently is blank and unbranded; the Goodyear name and logo were removed from it to keep the main Olympic sponsors happy. The Daily Mail continue to dig themselves into an increasingly deep hole with another "paranormal" story they reported on Thursday; A couple, concerned that their car was being vandalised on their driveway, installed CCTV cameras, and were then amazed when a "ghost child" appeared to walk over their vehicle. Do you recall the Father Ted episode where Ted was trying to explain to Dougal the difference between big things far away, and small things nearby? As anyone who has worked with CCTV will tell you, arachnids are attracted to the Infra Red LED's that many cameras use to film in the dark - to the extent that several manufacturers actually produce spider repellent sprays to keep the cameras free of the creatures. The so called "Ghost Boy" is nothing more than a spider crawling over the camera lens. Yet another piece of poorly researched sensationalism on the part of the Mail.

Have  you noticed how pretty much every TV advert ends with a splash screen saying something along the lines of “visit our Facebook page” – even the current adverts for the Territorial Army has it. It seems that no business or organisation feels that they can do without having a large online presence, specifically on Facebook. Have we not all seen this before? Do you recall it was not that very long ago that it seemed like everyone was using MySpace – yet that seems to have disappeared virtually without a trace. Prior to that it was deemed de rigeur to be on Friends Reunited, and prior to that,  AOL, before that MSN ( to a lesser extent) and in the dim and distant past, the service of choice was run by CompuServe. What links all of these services is that they are / were all “walled gardens” – a pay per use or ad supported private network with their own rules and communities. They are not truly part of the World Wide Web, and applications developed for use in these enclosed communities usually won’t run out in “the real world”. By limiting yourself to any of these walled communities, you are cutting yourself off from a lot of good stuff. Facebook is already showing the first signs of dying. Give it a year or so and another online service will have taken its’ place.

I am not, as Jeremy Clarkson would put it, a motor bicyclist, but when I came across this short film featuring the 2012 Isle of Man TT race, I had to feature it; motorbikes travelling at close to 200mph on (closed) public roads - astonishing, and I am sure the Health and Safety brigade would never allow it on the mainland. Cracking photography, editing and sound make for a very entertaining six and a half minutes.

The Radio Society of Great Britain (of which I am a member) has been making very strong representations to OFCOM about the forthcoming new regulations for PLT (Power Line Telecommunications). This might sound like something really technical and irrelevant to the general public, but if it is not addressed in the correct manner, it could come back to adversely affect just about everyone. PLT is a technology that allows data to be transmitted over a standard domestic or business power grid – basically using the electrical wiring in a building to run a computer network. It can also be used to transmit data over longer distances using the national grid. This sounds absolutely great – whilst Wi Fi is good, it is limited in range and often has problems penetrating thick walls and structural steel beams. Running RJ45 Ethernet cable can be a problem in a domestic or small business environment. So if an option becomes available to use the power line infrastructure to carry the data, it would seem to be a win / win scenario. Except that it is not. The adaptors that inject the data signal into the power lines also generate RF (Radio Frequency) signals, which then propagate via the cabling – which acts as an antenna. Radio Hams have been complaining as their particular set of H.F radio frequencies (1.8 to 30MHz) are one of the worst affected with radio interference. Well, you may think, who cares if a small bunch of beardy anoraks suffer from a bit of interference?  The trouble is several fold. The H.F bands are not just home to Hams, but are shared with aircraft, ships at sea, the military, diplomatic services, as well as international shortwave broadcasting stations. Any interference to these services can potentially lead to risk to life. In the event of natural disaster, radio is one of the few methods of communication that will get through when the normal infrastructure is damaged or out of commission. It just seems that OFCOM are pretty toothless when dealing with any threat to the radio spectrum – they certainly don’t have the appetite for a fight that the old DTI Radio Investigation Service had – I should know, they tried to feel my collar on a number of occasions, when I was still a poacher, rather than a gamekeeper now. The Power Line Telecommunications radio interference story looks like it will run and run.

Residents of Abbey Wood are in for some local changes – the area is about to be the recipient of an investment totalling £85 million. This will comprise of 220 affordable homes, a children’s nursery, an 80 to 100 bed hotel, and a new town square, which will have a large Sainsbury’s supermarket, with a floor area . There will also be 5,000 square feet of space allocated to new start up businesses. This is all very good news for an area that is too often overlooked for investment. My only real question is in relation to the proposed hotel is who exactly is going to use it? There are no big businesses in the area which would merit an overnight stay by business travellers; Abbey Wood station is not an interchange where someone heading elsewhere might break their journey, though Ian has suggested that the hotel will be built in anticipation of the forthcoming Crossrail Project, which will link North Essex, Abbey Wood and West London with a fast rail link. The area is currently really too far from London to merit tourist visitors (those that do come to stay in Abbey Wood generally stay at the excellent camping site run by the Caravan Club in Federation Road. The site is open all of the year round, and receives one of the highest rated customer satisfaction reviews of any site in the entire UK. Once Crossrail opens, this situation will markedly change.

Two veteran prog rock multi instrumentalist composer performers must be rubbing their hands with glee right now. Both Mike Oldfield and Vangelis have very astutely released “Best of” compilations, designed to coincide with a surge in interest in their music, following their key performances in the Olympic opening ceremony. Oldfield and Vangelis have in many ways had very similar careers. Both started up playing in bands where they were frustrated at not having total control over the musical direction. Both have had hugely successful albums where they collaborated with singers, and both have had varying degrees of success in writing film scores – an area in which Vangelis especially has excelled. Both have for years been deeply unfashionable (despite Oldfields’ woeful foray into dance music during the period in which he lived on Ibiza). This lack of fashionability has actually worked in their favour. A lot of the audience for the opening ceremony had quite possibly not heard of either musician prior to the event – and having been exposed to a few minutes of their music, were interested enough to want to hear more. I think this will have benefitted both artists, as broadly speaking, most people who like one, will probably like the other, as their styles are not dissimilar. It will be interesting to see how their compilation albums fare in the charts. Personally I would be tempted to dust off my copy of Vangelis’s “Albedo 0.39” album from 1976, were my Linn Sondek LP12 turntable not packed up for storage, along with my entire collection of vinyl.

I was contacted a week or so ago by the administrator of the Melbourne Theatre Company; she asked my permission for them to use a photo of mine as the backdrop for a forthcoming theatrical production the company were undertaking. They had found my Flickr account and had been looking at my work. I have given them permission to use the photo free of charge, providing that I get a written credit in the Programme. This is the photo that they will be using - not that impressive, I agree, but they wanted something of an urban landscape.

The video clip this week is the trailer for a new British comedy horror movie “Cockneys versus Zombies”. From the trailer, it would appear to be a cross between “Shaun of the Dead” and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”. The movie has a fantastic cast, including Honor Blackman, Richard Briers, Alan Ford, Michelle Ryan and Georgia King. Basically it features a group of cockney gangsters who take on a zombie invasion. Any movie that features Richard Briers with a zimmer frame, toting an Uzi 9mm has got to be worth seeing! The trailer is not very office friendly, as it does feature some bad language, but it is very funny. This kind of low to mid budget genre film did get me thinking. Back in the 1980’s at the height of the home video boom, every parade of shops had an independent video hire shop – in the days before Blockbuster came to dominate the market. In addition to the big Hollywood movies that everyone wanted to see (and were invariably already out on hire) the shelves were packed with B – Movie grade films, many of which never got a cinematic release in Europe. The production company behind many of these was Cannon Films, an Israeli – American outfit who produced a huge array of low budget, but very profitable movies such as Missing in Action, American Ninja, Masters of the Universe, Death Wish II, The Delta Force and so on. Cannon were instrumental in popularising the career of Chuck Norris (no sniggering at the back, please) and also in running an independent chain of cinemas in the UK. The company was wound up in the early 1990’s, but it strikes me that a modern version of the production house could do well now. We have the giant Hollywood movies, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and to promote. No newcomer is ever going to be able to compete with this; however, now that the worlds of cinema, home video and online streaming are becoming increasingly intertwined, a low budget, tightly run company producing niche films might well be successful. When one considers the recent success of “Iron Sky” – which was produced by a small, independent company using online resources to produce the CGI effects, it proves that it can be done, and for a far lower cost than would be the case in Hollywood. Anyway, watch the trailer below and feel free to leave a comment.