Fractured Politics

We are living in troubled times but frankly there's hee-haw anybody can do right now to fix things. At least we're not living in Englandshire.

In other news one of my daughters shared this with me this morning and I can’t quite get it out of my head:

It could be said that horse’s legs are fingers, so horse’s run on their “fingers”.

But horses do not run on their fingers in the same way humans do, though their anatomy is somewhat analogous.

Hoof Structure

• Horses run on the tips of their toes, which are covered by hooves.

• The hoof acts like a large, strong nail that protects the toe and supports the horse's weight.

Comparison to Human Anatomy

• In humans, we walk on our fingers and toes, while horses bear their weight on a single elongated toe.

• The horse's hoof corresponds to the last bone of a human finger, allowing them to run efficiently despite their large size.

Benefits of This Structure

• This unique toe structure enables horses to support their heavy bodies while running and performing other activities.

• It provides stability and strength, essential for their survival in the wild.

In summary, while horses do not run on their fingers, their locomotion is based on a similar principle of weight-bearing on their toe tips, adapted for their specific needs.

Recently Consumed

1. Some wine.

2. Some soup.

3. Some sandwiches.

We are what we eat. Most days it's from a limited range of things. The sort of stuff as seen in the pics in all it's ordinary and average glory. However I refuse to list the amount of micro-plastics I've knocked back because a) I don't want to boast and b) I don't want it to look like I'm addicted to those tasty little darlings that just pop up, mostly unseen these days, everywhere, like coleslaw or traffic cones. That's what I'm regularly hearing from my various reliable sources.

Another Greenish World

A day of trecking in the not too green wilds. This is Scotland a few minutes before the rain. Not very wild either, just a bit dangerous underfoot for those of a certain age. I may have parked up on the verge too, because despite the extensive CCTV coverage we enjoy in the UK it's not quite a police state yet. The thing is no matter who you vote for it won't change the faceless state's appetite for total surveillance anytime soon. 

I'm happy that the mountain goats can pass us by easily while the ravens watch from their rocky homes as if we were truly enemies of the state. Naturally I'd trust the ravens more than the state right now. It's all just Middle Earth as you'd expect it to be but maybe a bit over towards the left hand side, up to a point. The fact that I enjoyed a bowl of lentil and bacon soup for lunch must of course remain a closely guarded secret. Careless talk etc.

Personal Cherub

Your own, personal Cherub.

Someone to hold your phone.

You're not alone. 

Eternity awaits.

Openings

As I lead a relatively quite life I'm often caught out by what might be going on over there in the wider outside world. So this idea seems to me a new and original way to look at a career arc. Take a well established band and create an album/playlist (call it what you will) made up of the opening tunes from all of their albums. With a band like Yes* there's 26 opening tracks between 1969 and 2026. It creates a unique view of the artist's output; style, line-ups, changes etc. Not my idea of course, it was this guy CBQ. His other musical projects and live work are all there on his site.

*Other artists and bands are readily available for such a listening exercise, all out there somewhere. They make still be plugging away, they may be extinct by now.  That doesn't matter.

Mr CBQ has also done some work on "Endings" - you get the idea.

Downton Abbey Demon Slayer

The long anticipated 2026 Strawberry Project is now well and truly underway. It's been years in the making so we're looking forward to it all bearing no nonsense fruit etc.

Can't wait to see this at the cinema.

Wingstop - where fast food arrives slowly: An interesting chicken based dining experience. Not a bad one either but I won't hurry back. I give it six months.

The last in a long line of fairly short lived (superior) blueberry muffins. Photo taken under glass because that's the kind of wacky, crazy thing we like to get up to in the stone temple kitchen. Looks a bit sad on it's own really. Badly needs eaten.

A Scottish Election

Not a good time to shoot or even shoot at the messenger: Less than week to go before what some may say is the big democratic event of the year. Click on the pic, I promise it won't make anything much worse. That's about all I can say other than that I have principles and beliefs, but with the passage of time and a lack of energy they are liable to change.

Grudge Free

Free at the point of being free from: At this time in my life I want to say that I currently have no grudges whatsover against the Tunnock's biscuit empire. I'm a fairly regular purchaser and consumer of their iconic Scottish products. So I'd be the first to urge against a grudge. I know that doesn't sound right but saying  "no fudge against a grudge" or "no nudge against a grudge" etc. doesn't really work. A grudge of crows is not the correct collective term either.

The Persistence of a Photo Dump

 

Life is like an abandoned court covered in surplus shuttlecocks, so said nobody ever. It doesn't explain the picture. We are here to feel a mild alienation that also carries a quiet sense of peace. It has no name. It feels like a settled oddness, a sense of not quite belonging but being there. An unspoken threat, weak and bearable, it stays veiled by our feeble optimism. There is a way out of this that we can see, yet we fear to pull that loose switch. Beyond the edges there may be a deeper dark, not a place we would choose to visit.

We are unsure where we are. Once so called wise people spoke of signs and wonders, of visions and dreams. It all seemed fine then. In truth nothing happened. Nothing changed. We stayed where we were. The oldnesss of it all just unfolded like dead skin. There is comfort in that.

Back to making use of our heavy spectacles to read old instructions and find our way. We check the small clues as they appear, thumbing through grey photos. Blow the dust away if you have the breath. The ink fades as you study the words but the letters don't want to form up into legible patterns so progress is tough. The letters have their own reasons for this I suppose.

 

Thank you for checking out this nice but dim photo dump.

Tuesday Already

If you think that three days of cake might be a good idea then you'd be wrong. It's currently on Substack but no clearer there than here. Happy Tuesday.

Week Away

Been away for a week. It was good. Saw three eagles in the wild. Don Henly, Joe Walsh and Timothy B Schmit walked into a bar in Aberfeldy. Actually that wasn't their names nor their location; these ones were the real deal, high flying Scottish eagles and I'm not saying where they were because you, dear reader, just might be a baddie of some sort ...

Doing It

 

Everybody is doing it. Sincere thanks to NASA for engineering lots of things out there in space that very few of us understand but that we can use, after a fashion, on pages like this for our cheap amusement in the sweet and peculiar name of creating confusing content for the numerous AI bot brothers and their data farms out there in Brazil or Singapore or anywhere so they can quietly crawl across the page and harvest all this wonderful but meaningless information. What do they make of it?

Unavailable.

This story was never available, but now it is unavailable (click on the Substack link above to prove next to nothing). Just get your head round that. I did not bother to plot it, record it, type it or illustrate it. I didn't spell check or grammar check it. I did not do anything. There is no content whatsoever. But now, despite there being nothing, I am choosing to keep that from you. I declared that sweet nothing to be unavailable. It may be here and released one day, should I decide to do so. You would probably come across it if you were idly scrolling, or if you followed me. Maybe a friend shared it, or some algorithm pushed it your way. But for any of that to happen it must be available and, clearly, it is not. So it remains unavailable. You cannot get beyond the black.

Another Day

 Graphic art by @wefail1

Click to read: It's quite a short post.

Art and the Deconstructed Salad

Spoken word shopping list for a Supermarket Salad in the City.

Products come in bags and plastic and wraps and shrink wrap and have no clear serving suggestions. Scissors are required. Sharp knives. What’s your postcode?

Tomatoes on the vine. An aspirational dream for the middle class wannabe.

Chopped and washed mixed leaves from some huge polytunnel somewhere in Spain. Rocket, spinach and iceberg. Salad days stereotypes. (Salad days is a Shakespearian term from the play Antony & Cleopatra referring to a period of carefree innocence, idealism, and pleasure associated with youth. The modern use describes a heyday, when a person is was at the peak of their abilities, but not necessarily youthful. A time of perfect rapport … perhaps.) Salad Boys are a band from New Zealand.

Hedge clippings. Shapes and textures. Parked up Park Ranger Jeep Wrangler.

Added extra crunch. Lubricate the parts. Balsamic vinegar. Whenever I see somebody outside but heading into a salad bar wearing earbuds or headphones it’s hard not to assume that they are also using a Bluetooth butt plug device … for the clarity of the bass tones of course.

Carrots cut like crunchy soldiers modelled from Barry Lyndon style uniforms or just 4 x 1 Lego bricks.

Peppers in at least two colours, but is it the three bump bottom or the four bump bottom that I need, and why can I not taste any difference?

Cheese. All kinds of cheese. So many that I cannot name the best flavours or tell you the details. Soft Italian. Cheddar. Maybe Greek. Maybe mozzarella. Blue cheese for the carefree. Brie for those who like to bite into a triangle’s powerful shape in the vain hope of cracking the universe. Carefully set the temperature on your fridge as if you were defusing an unexploded bomb.

Potato salad, any kind you can get, in a plastic click top tub. Poverty spec. Ready made.

I would ask you to add anchovies, but you might ignore me. What are these salty little fish, cramped and all oily from a can, doing here anyway? A deep sea mystery and unjust market forces are at play.

Chicken with garlic mushrooms. Pretty basic. Anyone could do this but I’m not judging you or your level of skill.

French Bread. Hot butter.

Branston’s fine pickle pieces on a shiny sliced tomato are nice. Chutney is another thing.

Raw red onion, sliced and hidden like landmines among the green jungle. Your breath will not thank you, but they add a twist. Dangerous living. Best to leave early.

Thousand Island dressing and the steel blue eyes of Paul Newman (RIP). Other name dropping products are available but I can’t recall the names.

Crumbly, flaky, seedy mixes to throw across the plain bowl. Salad nuts. Beans and has beens. I forgot the celery, cucumber and various watercolour flavoured dips and nobody really minded.

Boiled eggs, cut up perfectly. Beyond the skills of the average human, but we try. We often fail too. It is possible to “keep” chickens these days. Egg shells are also useful items that you can just throw away with a clear conscience.

Olive oil. The height, width and depth of all of civilisation is here, stored in these virgin green glass bottles with their exotic names and arty labels. £6 a pop. Or maybe use a plastic squeezy bottle that can be fine tuned for an exact rate of magical drizzle experience. Use of such an item suggests a professional level of cookery skill and/or that you shop in Tesco. Also try an actual olive. Beware of world shortages and spikes of frosty weather.

Herbs and seasoning. Fresh or dried or frozen. Green leafy herbs are the key and garlic is the lock, and that makes no sense at all. Some people have these readily available from their garden herb tubs or tub free herb gardens. A trowel may be needed. Sharpen up your knife. Wear good quality gloves.

Croutons to scatter like edible confetti at a teenage wedding.

Breadsticks we munch and nod towards, wringing your hands in the queue for the mayonnaise spoon. Is it clean? The mayo is not homemade either. The body language for idiosyncratic queue behaviours is learned from dealing with difficult adult encounters at an early age.

Hellmann’s.

No joke. Now need some lemons to juice. What could you say to that if you were a vegan?

Try a fine red wine with it. Clink.

All on a warm, clean white plate. A splodge of Guacamole to add some post war bathroom/hospital colours to the feast. Smashed Black and Decker avacado and some tipsy roll-mop herring pierced by a well machined cocktail stick. Not to be confused with Coleslaw. Shredded raw cabbage.

In any garden centre cafe you will likely get a pile of plain industrial style potato crisps with your tuna panini, plus a green salad with some of the above piled up on the side. That’s all going to be overpriced but OK at the same time too.

Radio play for mood music: The Guitar Twang King Thing.

The Blood of Angels - Part 2

 

Angels are not at all like us

They're wispy spirit beings

All light and fancy fine and white

Something you might believe in.

-.-.-.-.-

But I don't.

No Law

I've told myself that I'll stop once I get to one hundred. Make what you will of that. Click the pic above to enjoy the thing that's there, whatever it is. Also, cats don't really do laws.

Thought for the Day

 

During a normal day, like everyone else, I have a few thoughts. Most are ordinary, nothing worth keeping, nothing worth sharing either. The one that's colour-cartooned above isn’t mine. And I don't mind saying that I admire it. Credit to the thinker and the artist. They may be the same person. I don’t know. I don't even have a job.

A Useful "A" Word

Stuck for a word to describe yourself, your feelings, your views, your way of being? You may not know it, but the word you are currently looking for has been found. It was me who found it. Not just the other day. Some time ago, but like many things, it sort of comes along and then goes away. I am not sure it has ever been hashtagged much either, not that hashtagging is so much of a thing any more. Those early days of Twitter? Good times. Then it all went a bit dumper truck. I closed my account.

This particular word has been around for a while though, hidden in plain sight - as “they” like to say. I just don’t use it often enough. Neither do you. Something to do with the actual word maybe, or how things really are. Getting your tongue around it or fitting it into a sentence is tough. Not one for a sharpshooter mouth. I have no idea how this situation came to be either. Probably a common enough experience, but I have done little or no research in support of anything I’m saying here. I just have not had the time or inclination. I have been busy with other things that, to be honest, I cannot quite recall in any great detail. Time passed as it does. Then the penny dropped and so I wrote a casual para or two. You just read them.

So what is this word then?

Here is what it means:

The coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings, such as love and hate, towards a person, object, or idea.

Uncertainty or indecisiveness as to which course to follow.

Mixed feelings or emotions; uncertainty or vacillation in making a choice.

The word you are looking for is, of course, ambivalence.

There. You can thank me later.

Free for all at the point of use. Try it today. Or tomorrow.

Indie Music

There's a lot of it about. Maybe too much. Decide for yourself. Click on the gun barrel.