Not Sorry

I never did like The Clash, admit it, they were a bit shit. Also they just kind of gave me the creeps. Plus there were other much better and more talented bands around at the time that deserved more attention and didn't get it. Anyway RIP Joe Strummer, no hard feelings. Click if you want to read more but in summary, that's all I really have to say about them.

Prelude

Prelude: It should be the ambition of all sensible people of a certain age to have a very brief obituary planned. Then you can know the relief of having the weight of your life being reduced to one single sentence (or thereabouts).

Clearer Than Other Things

You get older, you get forgetful. Some of the time. Any flashbacks of true clarity however can really make your day. Click on the above to read more.

Butter Me Down

This time I'm mostly moaning about buttery things and showing my complete lack of sophistication when it comes to popular modern foodstuffs. Click pic to read or don't and just avoid it altogether.

Inevitable

That's really all I have to say.

Use a Medium Font

In some homes guitars hang upon the wall as if they were works of art or battle trophies or even awards for some incredible feat of shredding, jangle poppery or complex jazz chording excess. Mine lies upon the couch because it doesn't give a fuck about any of that shit.

An almost famous piece of random passive aggressive absurdity. Please feel free to read it but not to understand it but also completely get it. You may also wish that you were the one who had pinned it to the wall in the coffee making corner of the office in the name of being disruptive. Thank You (should always be in uppercase).

Bungle the cat looks down disdainfully at mere mortals who might try to challenge her right to sit up high upon the garden wall. Well, we'll certainly be coming for that overgrown ivy shortly. It's way too green and shiny for the likes of us ... but then it's habitat ... 😟

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.