SatNav for the soul™

The idea that theme parks are designed for children is a myth. They are like pet foods; pets don’t read labels, the owners do. Pet food is aimed at humans.

It’s the same with theme parks. Children have a limited capacity for enjoyment, it’s called; Full On. A bucket of water and a pile of dirt is every child’s idea of fantasy come true. A ride or large empty building or funny costumes holds equal enjoyment to a child or possibly, slightly less because theme parks tend to ’suck’ overall. They take energy, instead of giving energy. They are like huge, life size television sets with surround-qualia. People have the experience foist upon them.

A mud world is diametrically opposed to a theme park. The child’s imagination is king. The child creates the experience and gives energy to the activity, the child learns from the experience, even if it’s only how mud behaves in a solution.

However, adults have a conditioned imagination, fire-hosed with advertising and for them enjoyment has to be represented by MASSIVE capitals, otherwise they just ignore it. So adults think that children will enjoy what adults think children will enjoy. The adult believes that a child will think a monstrous ride that has had millions of euros spent on it MUST be better than the experience of being dandled in the loving arms of its parent. The park builders know this and play on the fallacy.

That is why parents are prepared to spend so much time and money standing in line, with their children, almost comatose with boredom (they take pictures of each other standing in line to break the boredom and to provide cherished memories of their visit) because that little squeal of delight from their child when they finally experience the ride, justifies it all.

At least the children are happy (and the park owners).

After visiting two theme parks now, I simply don’t understand how these parks can get away with the product that they offer. Let’s look at the balance sheet for our ROI.

The debit side,

• you have to queue to get into the park.

• you have to pay an entrance fee, typically anything up to £70 each.

• the bigger the park, the further you have to walk from one attraction to another and so the less time you have to queue for the rides you want to go on.

• you have to queue for a ride, typically forty minutes for a two minute ride This means in an eight hour day you might realistically get twenty minutes of ride time for seven and a half hours of queuing.

• you have to queue to get out of the park. If you came by car, getting out could take hours.

The credit side,

• you er., see stuff that is ‘themed’ to whichever park you are visiting.

• you might get twenty minutes of fun, if you are lucky (I say lucky because some rides are a huge disappointment when you eventually get to go on them).

That’s it basically. So for twenty minutes of fun people pay up to £70 each. Does that sound like a convincing return on investment to you?

The cinema could provide hours of entertainment for a fraction of that cost - an imax cinema can even give the sensation of movement if you want the ride experience. A walk in the countryside can provide hours of fun for free and no queuing (just think of it as a huge park with a countryside theme). A large Natural History museum can also provide hours of absorbing entertainment, sometimes for free.

Equally, finding a dipping road and driving over the bumps can provide as much fun as some of the rides on offer at these parks.

The public is being had. In years to come we look fondly back at theme parks and comment how stupid people must have been to pay good money for standing in line. They might as well create the theme park that is themed on theme parks. You queue for forty minutes only to be told some mildly disappointing news at the end. That sort of thing.

On a recent visit with my family to a theme park I had to consider various issues which posed challenging questions. Here is one of them - individual responsibility.

We had a hotel booked near to the park and so we stopped until the park closed for the evening. A mistake. Everyone left at the same time and the traffic management of the car parks was non existent - it was every family for themselves.

As I queued to get out I watched a young family approach their huge SUV with ultra shiny alloy wheels and personalised number plate. After everyone had got in the truck I noticed the man nonchalantly throw his empty beer cans out of the vehicle and onto the car park. I was appalled.

This man had everything and it still wasn’t enough; he had to trash the environment for everyone else. He then set off and drove the wrong way up a one way system to bully his way into the queue.

As I reflected on the hopelessness of converting such a selfish individual to any sort of communal responsibility, I couldn’t help thinking of someone like Dick Cheney. He was made out of the same material as the man driving the SUV but instead of dumping litter, he dumps bombs.

Sometime later I had a rethink. The original guy might have had had everything materially but spiritually he must have been dirt poor. Perhaps I should have felt pity for him instead of rage. Perhaps what I actually saw was one of those terrible images on the television of a starving child crying for food, but his hunger was for soul food, the bony skeleton of his ego sticking out of his spiritual nakedness.

The challenging question was this; how do I help this man? He probably doesn’t even know that he is so starved of spirituality that he is near death. Should I try to help him?

Some recent European Cup football matches have demonstrated that a major review of how to resolve drawn matches is required. Here is my suggestion.

Before the match is played a penalty shoot out is staged. This will be called the ‘pre-shoot out’. Each team will take five penalties apiece. If after the ten penalties there is an unequal result, then the actual match can be played. If, after ten penalties, the ‘pre-shoot out’ results in an equal score then additional penalties are taken until a team is at a disadvantage; say, 7-6 overall.

The purpose of the ‘pre-shoot out’ is to act as an insurance policy for attacking football. The ‘pre-shoot out’ only comes into play if the actual match results in a draw. If the match provides goals and a win for either team, then the match result stands and the ‘pre-shoot out’ is ignored.

If the match results in a score draw then the ‘pre-shoot out’ comes into play and the winner of the ‘pre-shoot out’ is the overall winner of the match and no extra time is played. However, if the match results in a goaless draw then an additional ‘post-shoot out’ is staged and five more penalties each are taken. The result of the ‘post-shoot out’ is added to the ‘pre-shoot out’ and the team with the greatest number of penalties is deemed the winner of the match.

If the penalties are equal after the ‘post-shoot out’ then the ‘post-shoot out’ continues in a sudden death finish.

It can be seen from this that the result from the ‘pre-shoot out’ will encourage attacking football. Should a notoriously defensive team win the ‘pre-shoot out’ and attempt to kill the game into a goaless draw then the ‘post-shoot out’ will still give the other team a chance to win the match and so it would not be in the interests of the defensive team to play for a goaless draw.

Other advantages are;

• a) extra time is not played thus allowing for television schedules to run smoothly
• b) winning teams can preserve their fitness for the subsequent matches in the tournament
• c) penalty shoot out’s are riveting drama to those people who have only a passing interest in football.
• d) the ‘post-shoot out’ will be an entirely different strategy to the ‘pre-shoot out’ as some players will have been substituted or sent off, making it tactically interesting.

Whilst watching a movie the other night, the camera cut to an overhead shot. It is such an unusual angle (how many times have you been strapped to the ceiling looking down into the room) that I considered its purpose.

Presumably, the unusual angle is meant to unnerve us in some way; ‘this is unusual, so something strange is going to happen’. Most often, nothing unusual does happen and I am left wondering if the director asked for that angle just to be edgy.

If it is that the angle is meant to unnerve the audience, why don’t they choose some other weird angle, like shooting up through the floor? Why has the overhead shot become established as an acceptable angle which the audience would ‘get’?

Another unresolved (for me at least) device is when the actor speaks directly to the camera and thus, the audience. The suspension of disbelief is destroyed there, so what has the film narrative become, a kind of stand-up comedy routine? I’m not sure.

Film language must develop like any other language but how is a new ‘word’ explained to an audience who have never heard that particular word before? Do the audience create their own interpretation?

… how do I throw it away?

Modern technology seems to encourage learned helplessness. The result can only be disaster. I know this from experience.

I have come to rely on my SatNav technology a little too much. It is too easy; punch in the postcode and away you go. Normally you arrive exactly as predicted by the device. But when things go wrong…

I had a gig last night about two and a half hours journey away. The SatNav took me on a route I was familiar with. On the way, I noticed signs on the motorway saying that it would be closed that evening. Not good, as it would inevitably mean some kind of delay as the traffic was directed through the diversion. Still, I might be able to find a way round with the Satnav.

On the return journey I just missed the window to get through on the motorway and was caught in the diverted flow of traffic. To my alarm, the diversion signs seemed to be sending me in the opposite direction of my destination. I did a u-turn when I could and trusted the SatNav to direct me out of the maze. Thus began a nightmare journey of many miles and many hours.

I realised I didn’t know where I was. I had an idea of where I should be and tried to navigate using that rough mental map along with the SatNav. This failed utterly as I found myself returning to the same bit of diverted motorway I had left not twenty minutes earlier. After much cursing I finally abandoned all hope in the SatNav and pulled over to refer to the old road atlas I still carried in the car.

It appeared I had travelled tens of miles in the opposite direction of where I needed to be and I needed to make a massive loop around a large city before I could get back on a course for home. This at a time when I had just paid £1.32p per litre of fuel.

The next day I decided to review the debacle and see what had gone wrong (I wasn’t going to let that expensive and painful experience go to waste).

I discovered the cause of my confusion. The SatNav decided to use a completely different route for the return leg of my journey. I assumed it would use the same route it had used to get me there as it is supposed to always choose the fastest route. Logic dictates that if you use the same roads going back it has to be the same travel time. SatNav’s obviously don’t use logic.

So now my rough mental map is conflicting with where I really am and when the diversion signs are telling me I’m heading South when I think I need to be North, I naturally start to doubt any information I am being given. Had I continued South on the diversion I would have eventually reached the connecting road the SatNav was originally trying to reach.

Ultimately, without the aid of old technology such as the printed road map I carried in the car, I would still be going round in circles on unfamiliar roads right now.

Always, always, always have a plan B.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any leaders having any kind of plan B (unless it is to save their own hide). We’re in the lazy phase of this posts’ title.

Aaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

The conscious mind can be so dumb sometimes and our intuition so powerful.

This puzzle was handed to me by my son, unravelled and without instructions. I attempted to reform the cube but after many hours of trial and error it defeated me.

Humbled, I Googled the puzzle and found the solution. The solution is unique, only one particular sequence of moves will work. I demonstrated this knowledge to the rest of the family then forgot about the puzzle.

Some months later, it came to my attention again when I found it unravelled. Confidently I attempted to reform the cube. My confidence quickly crumbled as I realised I had forgotten the sequence. It must be one of those stupid pride switches in the brain that made me resolve to reform the cube without any assistance from the internet. Rationally, I should have just repeated the Google search but stubbornness made me take the hard route.

An hour later I had learned a couple of valuable lessons.

Lesson one.
I was certain how the puzzle had to be started, so my first position was always the same but no matter how many times I tried to form the cube I got one of several incorrect results. I simply repeated the same mistakes thinking I might spot where I was going wrong. Humans are pretty dumb sometimes. Eventually I became so frustrated I unthinkingly tore at the puzzle.

Lesson two.
After I had had my little tantrum I noticed the snake was in a configuration I wasn’t used to seeing. Another few moves and the snake was snugly coiled back into the cube form. Working backwards I tried to see where I had been going wrong. To my amazement, the error was in my very first position, the one I had been so sure about and which I never questioned. That massive assumption cost me an hour of frustration. But the real lesson was this, by giving up on the conscious attempt to solve the puzzle my subconscious side took over which clearly remembered the correct sequence. Here was a dramatic reminder that some folklore, such as sleep on the problem, holds good.

Most people would be able to detect a bum note. The bum note is just another note, but In a Western musical scale only certain notes are ‘allowed’ to be played alongside each other. It is like a game, with its own rules. Anything outside the ‘allowed’ scale of notes is considered a bum note.

Over the centuries we have followed and understood this game so that we now find it difficult to imagine any other game.

So when we hear a Chinese musical scale we are at a loss. The scale is incomprehensible to our ears and we puzzle over the idea that anyone can enjoy this ‘music’ which seems to be full of bum notes. To the Chinese however, it is beautiful music (I will have to enquire if the Chinese find our music equally incomprehensible when they first encounter it. Logic dictates that they should).

Music is only sounds which exhibit a pattern. How we interpret these patterns is culturally conditioned. What else is culturally conditioned? How can we identify them? Does it take an outsider to point them out or can we figure it out for ourselves? Does the music/art/philosophy of any culture limit itself to what it considers to be harmonious notes?

But it is the bum notes which give meaning to the other notes.