Fargo on TV

Some good stuff on Sunday night TV: "He's a big believer in coincidence apparently and what he lacks in common sense he makes up for in self-esteem." Lou - ex-cop.

Squeezed muddles

A race to the bottom. Ed Miliband says that a Yes Vote will mean just that. This grinning snake and a poor apology for a Labour Party leader knows this only too well, that's exactly the race that his own party is running in at the moment both in Scotland and in England. It's just not as it should be; who would have thought that the Labour Party would ever struggle to find respect and credibility in Scotland of all places? It's a measure of the damage done by New Labour and their abject failure to remain on the creative left of politics as a result of chasing the Home Counties vote and the support of that nebulous, fickle and impossible to define “squeezed middle”. I've got some sympathy for those Scottish Labour supporters who believe  that the only back for the party here is to swallow a load of other bad medicine and some pride and vote yes. Gordon Brown etc. hang your head in shame.

Dead Pope Society. Pope John Paul, a dead man who is now to be made a saint, but despite all the pomp, prayer and celebration he will remain dead through the ceremony and well beyond. Even the great and powerful Oz and a large gathering of delusional but well meaning people in Rome cannot bring him back from wherever he may be now on the cosmic treadmill. No sausage rolls or chilled Prosecco for John Paul when the speeches are up. I'm sure, apart from being Pope and presiding over a hugely corrupt and corrupting religious body he was a probably nice chap who meant well (even if some of his hypocritical team did not and are clearly evil incarnate). So the obvious and difficult to digest fact for some that he's as dead as the Monty Python parrot and that his canonisation is simply a surreal, superstitious  and ridiculous event. That  may be a tough fact for the faithful to understand. Once again organised religion exposes itself as man's most optimistic, ignorant and futile series of emotionally charged practices – chronicles of wasted time if you will (as a wise man once described his life). P.S. Other Popes are also available for impromptu canonisation.

Here's a Pope that knows a thing or two.

Enter Shakira

It was lentil and bacon soup from a Morrison's can. Lunch. Heated up in the microwave for three minutes, stirred twice and then double plated so I didn't burn my fingers. I supped it slowly (for me) as I looked at Wikipedia, the history of pulp comics and their artwork. It was one of the featured articles of the day that I would scan a random hoping to find a story or an angle or something interesting or titillating. I'd given up on most news sites (apart from proper factual ones) and though Wikipedia had a reputation for being corrupted or unreliable I didn't really buy that. Most of the daily dose of pseudo facts I hoovered up were...believable. Eating the lunch time soup took about three wiki clicks as I jumped onto biographic pages (for artists) and then some image files where I check their work. It was cartoon sex and sci-fi mostly. Pin-up girls, big headed robots and flimsy space suits containing muscular men. A time before science was real and threatening and before CGI made everything believable and ultimately boring. A wonderful world had briefly existed in rough paper and glamour but It had been squeezed out of existence by progress and neurosis of our modern world. Why hadn't anybody realised that the Star-Trek crew on the Enterprise would just unquestioningly use their handhelds and communicators? They'd all be out there in space anxious and neurotic about picking up the latest upgrade or downloading a service pack or an app. The writers had seen the future all right but failed to put stupid people (aka us humans) into it. 

The soup was gone and my mind moved on, I looked at a few political pages but, frankly, they were dull. Dull and unbelievable. The opposition made promises about what they'd do in two years time when they won. As if the world and the electorate would stand still, frozen on the spot waiting on that time happening. It was a distant Christmas or a twenty first birthday present for a sixteen year old. Sentences that began “We will...” were there to be ridiculed. The sad politicians learning nothing from history or from their own recent experiences. They swam in a strange pool of media events bubbling and repeating their messages like rotating goldfish. I washed up the dishes and rinsed out the can. I rinsed out the can and stuck it into a bag of general waste as there was no recycling here, unless I took it home. That idea though worthy was a tedious one. One I didn't want to think about and as a result it tugged at me for all of five minutes. I would save the world a recycle tin cans another, easier more convenient day. When I had the means and the focus, not right now plus I seemed to align itself (recycling) with a kind of political obedience and set of behaviours that I felt like rebelling against. Why should I just adopt that mass conscious and always do the right thing. I fancied a fag and a Mars Bar and a great bulbous glass of deep red, fruity French wine. Three compatible but incompatible evils that I might, in complete defiance of the Daily Mail, Telegraph or BBC whatever channel, enjoy. Life had to be about enjoyment in order to rise above the misery of media scrums and corrupt debates. Advertisements and good advice. The joy of doing things and, in the process and without caring too much about the consequences of just fucking yourself up a bit. Enjoyment.

I do repeat or reuse the same words a lot. At first, or when I first noticed it bothered me and I tried to retrace my steps and find others. I thought that was what writing must be about, proving your vocabulary. Finding different ways to say the same thing so that what you say is more entertaining or informative or just less repetitive. But then I thought about my own streams of thought and colours. It's fine to repeat colours in patterns and designs, in pictures or illustrations, why not words? Why was I being tough on myself? If that word came out three times in a paragraph (as long as the word isn't amazing or fantastic) then why not just use it and go with the flow. For all the readers that there are will they really care or criticize? That actually would be good, some actual attention over the use of repeated words and my limited vocabulary. There; my vocabulary, some place in the wasteland between a Premiership Football Manager or a social worker and a scholar of English Literature or Richard Dimbleby. That was where I sat, which is no place in particular but is a least a position. I had a position in vocabulary and was unafraid to use it. My position in good grammar usage was however a different thing altogether.

The dishes, three bowls and two spoons, a can opener and a knife were done by hand. There was tomato sauce on the tin opener, or perhaps tomato soup. I wondered how long it had been there as I scraped it away with my fingernail and ducked it into the hot, soapy water. Then I clashed (?) the clean dishes on the draining board, walked away and checked my phone. I had a brief Star Trek moment but let it pass. Those poor actors I thought, play acting with dumb props and suggestions but without anything in the script that actually placed them in the future. Just plywood and cardboard knock ups to hold and, if the word had been around at the time, interact with. All that functionality without any of the social anxiety. No wonder everybody wants to live in the future.

At three o'clock, in a moment of total harmonious perfection and agreement between unrelated items the rain, as predicted on the BBC weather web site, began. It may not have been precisely the correct kind of rain, there are about a thousand kinds though only a hundred descriptive terms are in current use. Whatever this one was (approximately slow drizzle, like olive oil applied to those crunchy green leaves on as cookery show or the end of an uneventful but none the less necessary piss) it was a kind of rain. Good enough for me and welcome for the hanging baskets (an unfortunate name for them if there ever was) so as to restore life to dry things and just pleasant enough to add a zesty ambiance to the air and the day. It was also nice to look out upon. Rain, when you're not in it allows a smug superiority in the rain viewer. A smugness that allows a giggling mockery for those out there, trapped by duty, or travel or some other piece of self inflicted or demanded misery. A special place in rain is reserved for those poor souls who ventured out unprepared (without a car), boys with T shirts and tattoos, girls with cardigans and old people who've lived on this planet a long time but failed to plan for the obvious and inevitable patterns of weather. “Have you learned nothing!” I wanted to shout, “Eighty years shuffling around here and you still don't get it!” of course if they're eighty then perhaps worrying about protection from the rain isn't quite so important. Rain, in normal quantities wont kill you. If it's a lake or a swimming pool then that's a different thing. I wondered if anybody had ever actually drowned standing up when out walking in the rain. A proper cloudburst. Unlikely but there must be somebody, most likely in the US Midwest or Florida who had gone out this way. If may not been recorded, today I would be clip on YouTube or a Vine, gone in ten seconds like one of Noah's enemies.

I left the building and got out into the car, turned the key and it started. That hadn't always been the case but I now had a reliable sense of confidence in the vehicle. The drizzle continued and the wipers ticked across the screen at just the wrong speed, just out of pace with the rain as they danced with conspiratorial elegance against each other. Probably Audi had fixed this, lesser manufactures or older models still struggled with adapting to the weather. I bumped off the main road at the turning and zigzagged homeward avoiding pot holes whist trying to make a pattern I couldn't quite see but one that might be seen if someone else was flying in an aeroplane directly above my car and filming it via a camera mounted downwards on the lower part of the plane's fuselage. That was what I was thinking anyway. The part ten became longer, looser and less well imagined as I travelled along the track. There were two bad corners. The first with the boulder (a remnant from the Ice Age I imagined) has generally easier. I did sometimes feel a strange compulsion to scrape the side of the car on the boulder, I don't quite know why. I resisted and soldiered on. Just on the next corner, sharp, blind and challenging a red Mitsubishi pick up truck met me. We slowed abruptly but in unison and crawled past one another. I looked across at the, driver, I was ready  to deliver one of those awkward nods that says, “Hail fellow road user, well met and a good day to you!” I was ready with this move. It was there right up my sleeve but you can well imagine my surprise when I looked across at the truck's cab and saw that the driver was none other than the Colombian singer and some time celeb beauty known as Shakira. I didn't expect that to happen today.

100% Britpop

Britpop. To celebrate 20 years since Blur's Parklife came out we're now suffering a range of awful reminders about a fairly dodgy period in British pop history. Blur, Oasis and Pulp are the only bands I remember, in fact I don't think I ever knowingly bought a Britpop record. Even the splendidly stupid and meaningless genre's name is off putting and hard to divorce from the grinning face of Tony Blair in his full manic 90s splendour. Not a good modern history lesson. So all the splendid and once radical Britpop rock gods have either embraced full and well deserved obscurity and gone onto normal careers as inner city social workers or they're playing out their days building up ever more pretentious projects and churning out the same old sixties type shit as if they'd actually invented it. Others have gained some kind of Hipster and cultural respect and write self centred articles for the posh Sundays or curate art galleries and run organic farms while their Gibson 335s and their Rickenbackers gather dust under beds or on wall hangers in Cotswolds farmhouses. They infiltrated the great British consciousness like cheap burglars who steal your couch but leave your Tag Heuer whilst in the dusty background the shallow voices of Radio 1's near dead DJs sycophantically compliments their every cliched move through a tinny loudspeaker. Oasis sadly sang about being in a rock and roll band and being stars, if only, they didn't even come close. They were stuck in a British built loop of slowed down and turgid musical soup like a Morris Marina groaning in third gear trying to tow a caravan across the Thelwall Viaduct on the M6. Meanwhile, the people that did know how to do rock and roll stayed safe and creative on the other side of the Atlantic and the English Channel. Britpop? Shitpop.

Cloudy and clammy

Paint stripper: slow-mo action shot in B&W.

Every so often just take a little time out and look up at the clouds and try not to trip up either. So a cloudy and almost (at 17C) clammy day when nothing much happened apart from the ritualistic cleaning of bird shit from windows and cars that took place. A long silence followed during which winds and moving air hustled those same clouds from a to b and possibly beyond even as far as c. Indoors the paint stripper chemicals were magically activated when they came into contact with wood, air and accidental human flesh. Oh how we laughed and then screamed with pain and the shock of it all. Back in the kitchen my earlier successful but moodily petulant unarmed robbery from the M&S food court provided a series of tea time treats with milk and two sugars. It all tasted a bit like chicken but we're suckers for any decent three for a tenner promotion that includes fresh green leaves and a Key Lime pie or two. 

Here's a beer I had earlier, sinking into a tartan worm hole. 

Here's a cat thinking deep and profound thoughts about inter-cat and inter-human relationships...and food.

Being exceptional sucks

Having driven 200 miles today on a mixture of business and pleasure related things I'm a bit tired and maybe dehydrated in a mental way.  Too tired to blog and so explore and go on to find deep and meaningful things to say and describe. It's not as if they've disappeared (those issues and things), there are more things there than ever. All excruciatingly important and crying out to be said or critiqued or spat upon with some derisory comment or tirade or laughed at, mocked or built up into some fantastic and creative mind palace of presentational perfection, but not now. Not now when I'm tired and I want to watch trashy TV, drink strong dirty coffee, suck a Cadbury's creme egg and sleep in various stages of shallow awareness and deep, vivid, fitful dreaming. In other words I'm not feeling at all exceptional right now. Normal in other, other words.

And another thing...

A word from Peggy

From the scaffold

As Scotland breathes in the unseasonal and unfamiliar warm air of the pseudo summer we assume for a brief period that as it's dull down south then our own cruel and vindictive god may well love us or even feel some other close thing to it. Maybe a mild indifference or accidental weather management problems in heaven's nerve centre perhaps, could it be the Devil's own global warming? So we enjoy our meagre ration of vitamin D straight from the Vatican and let Easter Sunday melt away into some strange, green and muggy salad memory. It's really too nice to blog or even think too much.

Travelling without moving

Small and quirky guitars are big news in my tiny mind right now. What a discovery they are. Here are three, so small that they can fit in the passport pocket of a Levis jacket folded up and placed in an Easyjet overhead luggage rack and still stay perfectly in tune and not sound in the least distorted nor will they hamper any of the pure enjoyment you might get from supping on your overpriced tepid Nescafe Gold Blend from a recycled paper cup. Just watch out for the bright and gobby sales representative in the sharp suit and stilettos who may well clunk her bulging Antler wheelie bag right on top of your minuscule travelling musical treasures.

Whilst on the subject of travel, one of these devices has now been set up in Kinross Services on the M90, incredibly and thanks to a European Price Fixing Charter they (doughnuts) cost the same as they do in Tesco.

Drop test

I can confirm the the Sainsbury's white chocolate celebration cake can fully survive the trauma and forces incurred during a high speed 1m drop onto any hard and unforgiving surface. Useful to know in the event of one of those awkward birthday cake butterfingers moments occurring during the special day at a critical moment. I'm about to write to Sainsburys with my findings and to offer my congratulations on fabricating a cake that is both tasty and robust, I'll also copy in What Cake and Cake Advisor. Job done.

Busy day

I can produce art work like this in seconds.

Busy day: The old kitchen was hit by a sudden sub-Saharan dust storm that began in the new kitchen (when the wall came down). You could taste it on your tongue. Once the camel stampede was over and the wild wind abated we got on with the clearing up. A feverish episode really. Dust, despite being one of the universe's foundational items is a devil of a thing to clear up and apparently is quite useless except as a punch line in some morbid song lyric. We bagged and wetted the dust and soon it was gone, replaced with a wet, clean sheen, victory at last. It was then I put away numerous bags of ex-ASDA groceries and began to cook three meals in one go. This consisted of soup, stovies and chicken things accompanied by huge mushrooms filled with Stilton that came from some other world. Once eaten I hit the couch and rested the slightly less purple eye and slightly less painful right hand and checked out an episode of Cosmos from National Geographic that described astro physics in simple but incomprehensible terms that might be understood by the average American. Then sleep crept up on me like a warm and friendly glove. 

My Purple Eye

Headlines and thought sketches.

What is the mysterious black ring in the sky above Leamington Spa? Might just be the International Space Station or a facsimile of Mars. There’s a lot of it about.

Why has my eye turned purple (purple) overnight? Foreign body, bug, fate or badly applied make up perhaps. A mishap in the dead of that once moonlit night with Mars (once again) high up on the shoulder of the aforementioned Moonplace.

How do you take a huge dinosaur skeleton across the US? I assume that it’s already dead so I don’t see a major problem.

Should offices change from places where people sit down to places where people stand up? Generally people can sit down or stand up as they wish, most of the time that is. Some office cultures can be a bit restrictive as can be their chairs. Religious ceremonies, office parades and things remain a bit more formal but I have stood up and sat down when attending them from time to time.

" Dip a cereal biscuit in the yogurt" is not some euphemism but a genuine snack suggestion.

So…

My Purple Eye

I woke this morning with a purple eye.

Purple to blue I can’t explain why.

There’s no real discomfort and no big pain

But I wonder when my eye might be normal again.

One minute before...

...the Abbey Road photo was taken, sadly I wasn't able to be there on the actual day.

Culross Daily Photo

Culross is a lovely wee place; curious little buildings, eccentric cobbled streets, abandoned houses and part ruins, car unfriendly and stuck with the modern mismatches that occur when time, planning and money come together without a common or understood purpose.

Fags, Kelpies and Pylons

Meg

Sad to hear that a great little rock n' roll kitty passed away yesterday. Meg was a regular and impossibly photogenic feature on the CBQ blog and a vital member of the Reilly family. So sad when pets leave like this, they fairly get to you and soften you in ways you'd never have imagined.

Despair - not so bad really

A passing ship in the night seen during day time, a rare thing.

Sun tunnel before the eclipse.

Thought for the day: I've just about had it with these glorious snippets and  encouraging daily messages. Why is it that inspirational segments and soundbites make me want to destroy the radio? Actually I know why. It's a platform for a set of smug self righteous behaviours and passive aggressive preaching worse than any blog, Facebook post,  Reddit meme or Huffington Tweet that spoils my day rather than enhancing it, but still I return to listen and soak up this fresh nonsense (between sports, weather and travel news). My current pet hate are the true Glasgow born but now reborn Buddhists or scholars of Islamic studies or some other tosh and they've undergone a name and career change to suit and prove their credentials ; former social worker Agnes Mavis McGovern now know as Karma Preraphaelite Tupac or the ex-junkie and badly spoken NED Wayne Daugherty now calling himself Muhammad Lennon. Then it's five minutes on how their serene lives are now lived, how peace is everywhere and how the light of (insert convenient teaching of handy god here) has stopped them from shoplifting and masturbation (not generally practiced at the same time I guess). This tale is usually coupled with some major world event and joined up so as to add weight to an argument or illustration that is basically composed of waffle. Good work if you can get it.

Grave expectations

According to a deal I made with myself I was going to post this on the 5th of April to mark the 38 years that have come and gone since my father passed away. Naturally I forgot, I'm doing it now so that it's done and that's that. The photo marks a belated attempt at collecting some precious family details and preserving them before the East Neuk sea winds and the relentless winter rains blast any more information away from the face of this stone and the back of my mind.

The Forces of Darkness etc.

Lord George Robertson of the Back of Beyond intriguingly suggests that forces of darkness would love it if the good and downtrodden folks of Scotland were to vote yes in September. It does make me wonder where he gets his information and quite what part of the legion(s) of forces of darkness he is in this instance referring to. It also suggests that he and his Labour, Tory and Liberal cronies represent the forces of clear, bright and shining light ceaselessly battling evil in all it's many forms. The true Illuminati. Anyway if you do wish to follow the forces of darkness or make some casual enquiry into their possibly nefarious business I've added copies of the kind of correspondence you might need to prepare in order to sell your mortal soul to the Devil himself, easy peasy. You'll thank me later no doubt.

Universaily Challenged

When Cambridge met Oxford there was a predictable outcome, one of them would win and then go on to run the country via the offices of some dark and secret sect like the Roman Catholic Church. Anyway as an innocent spectator and with a few lucky breaks I reckon I'd score about 50 points but lose 20 by interrupting with wild and incorrect guesses. That of course assumes I'd get to my buzzer before the young  chap with the plumber's mate glasses and slogan T shirt, the pretty posh girl with the short hair and the grey and mature student who looks a bit like Vic Reeves. 

Habitual watching of this show makes it so easy to kid yourself that somehow your ageing brain  coupled with a lifetime of media trivia hoovering and despite a lack of true academic prowess might just get  a seat on the bench or even a shot in the team. Perhaps it could come about if one member had a really bad hangover, lost their sense of decorum or suffered a highly inflamed bout of acne, maybe then my name would be drawn out of the sweaty woolly student hat. It's a pipe dream (is that an expression you can use these days and "by the way," says the bold and clever cos' I've all the answers Jeremy, "who first coined the phrase?" "Was it C S Lewis, Rudyard Kipling or Charles Dickens?". BUZZ. "Might it have been Sherlock Holmes?". "You stupid man, he's a fictional character..."), yes it surely is. 

Editors note: Way too much TV talk this week. Next series will see us back to music, ranting about politicians, religious intolerance, Airfix models, home improvements and real life. I promise.