Thursday, September 10, 2020
Hejira - Live
Wednesday, September 09, 2020
Almost Satisfactory
Never easy to capture a cat either in real life or via a camera. Satisfactory cat pics are rare, here are two. So if you're now lulled into things by my cute cat photos, good. Here's reality as it stands:
I suppose we are living in an unsatisfactory world and definitely in an unsatisfactory country (the rogue and lawless state known as the UK). We are headed down the tubes, BJ and Co at the reigns and clueless in a way only stupid, selfish, privileged people can be. It seems to me now that the time for complaining or ranting is over, it's way too late for that. We just hold on tight and observe the train wreck that is happening (whilst not gloating at the eventual mess). Only a proper disaster will wake up and shake up the systems and jaded electorate that voted these liars and criminals in and allowed this to happen. The best thing now is to plan for a better future beyond the next couple of years. Gird your loins, grit your teeth and try not to panic as the speed of the slide increases and the impacts thump us about the head and bank balance. I just hope we can get through without a full on blood bath. Just remember the Tories and the Brexit boys and girls will do their utmost to blame everybody else come the day and the media will yet again shield the guilty and blame the poor.
Tuesday, September 08, 2020
Cherries v Walnuts
Monday, September 07, 2020
Fruits of no labour
An unsung modern hymn with neither tune nor verses: "When you didn't clear the ground, you didn't turn the soil, you didn't plant the seeds or saplings, you didn't feed and nurture, you didn't prune and protect, you didn't stand back and admire the growth and shape. All you did was come along and pick the fruit. Unfortunately the fruits on this tree are pears and they are like some giant mutation of lead shot. You're all going to Hell or at the very least somewhere pretty unpleasant. Amen."
Sunday, September 06, 2020
Northside of the Masonic Lodge
This is nothing to do with Freemasons. It's on the cemetery side of the grand dilapidated lodge, the once proud meeting place of the great, the good, the mediocre and the troublemakers. Let's face it, in more recent times, getting into the Masons was always about your face fitting more than your actual character, that and sopping up as much cheap beer as your face could take. So perhaps this is something to do with the Masons, maybe I've something to get off my chest. Maybe not, nothing worth saying other than that my own prejudice and dislike of them is based on my own family history and that skews my view. This is after all Central Scotland, an area well known for wonky and spiteful opinions, mindless cults and stupid followers and of course bigotry with a capital B (except that's not how I formatted it).
I'm not sorry for you and your big grinning gravestone. Perhaps you were a good family, perhaps you were complete bastards. The stone tells us nothing other than you're gone and that for the safety of the family souls you carved a piece of Bible text on your front panel. Nobody's buying this stuff anymore and guess what, your pious text makes no difference. As useful as a Trump bumper sticker. (Obviously I regret saying these dumb things about something I know nothing about but I'll just leave them away).
Saturday, September 05, 2020
Not in the same boat
Short and unreliable quiz for your tea break.
So what's playing on the fishing boat's radio today? You can make tiny guesses or rather large guesses. I'm not sure what the difference is apart from size and I'm unsure as to how you measure actual guess size.
So I'll go first and suggest that it's a Radio 4 program just randomly playing, possibly "Woman's Hour" or as a second guess (of indeterminate size) I'll say Radio Forth (as the boast is fishing in the Forth) and to be more precise I'll plump for Forth 2 with the catchy strapline "the greatest hits". Third guess (unsporting I know) is that it's VHF Channel 16 in case there's any trouble out there.
Next question: Is "and" a better and more useful word than "but"? Asking for a friend.
Next question. What is the fishing boat fishing for and (no but) just saying "fish" is not an acceptable answer. Is it a) Mackerel using baited lines? b) Lobster using kreels or c) Crab using kreels.
Next, next question: Is the boat facing east or west or is it steadily rotating clockwise?
Final question: Estimate the crew size i.e. not heights and weights but actual numbers.
Thank you.
Whatever you think, remember ... there is no answer.
Friday, September 04, 2020
Detectorist
In the distance a lone detectorist scours a newly cropped field hoping for treasure. I'm in a nearby lay-by taking five. Perhaps he knows something no one else does or likes to think that. So I was briefly reminded of the TV show, dry humour, back stories and escape, oh and the nice theme song. Out in the Fife countryside the other day on an appealingly warm and calm morning it almost seemed to be the perfect low key pastime. Like buying sets of slow moving lottery tickets and quietly waiting for some lazy, lost buried jackpot to be uncovered from the soft brown soil. You keep half of the treasure's value, the rest goes to charity and the historical item, once cleaned and catalogued, sits in some glass case in a dull museum. A small slip of card mentions you as the finder and the one who made the donation - all in a tiny font.
Thursday, September 03, 2020
To all the lonely lone wolves
So you'd all do well not to ignore wolfy wisdom however it may be communicated. They are like the ancient forest spirits that live within the trees and branches, except they are animals and not made of wood or squiggly, smoky, spirit kind of ectoplasm stuff, just wolf meat, bones and fur. The one in the photo above is living it up, having the best life in South Queensferry right now with his best friend a tennis ball, albeit always behind bars.
Given the chance though he'd go straight for that soft, fleshy, narrow throat of yours. I'd wear a thick scarf if I was you.
Wednesday, September 02, 2020
Plums etc.
*Plums: Plums are in season, we are living in the season of the plum. All of us here, brothers and sisters, unite. Nobody talks about this. The fresh fruit is tasty and the rapid acceleration possible in your metabolism if you eat enough of them can be very useful. Mentioning plums early in any conversation is always seen as a good starter topic and will win over rivals. In these troubled times, they may be very good for you. Unite or face the consequences of your body works slowing down way too soon.
Pears: Pears grown in Scotland are not generally fit for human consumption. In the middle of the Middle Ages locally grown pears were used as a form of currency or as house building materials due to their inherent density and resistance to various plagues and also because of feeble Scottish engineering knowledge. Much of the housing on Edinburgh's famous Royal Mile is constructed using horizontally sliced pears as foundation materials, laid out across an oatmeal base and cured with pickled herring tails and heads (minus the eyes). Some buildings constructed over 600 years ago still stand but nobody actually wants to live in them. For some reason English based banks and building societies tend to be unwilling to lend against any building or property using pears as part of the original construction materials. Buyer beware.
Rhubarb: Safer but less photogenic.
*Other fruits, vegetables and edibles of all sorts are readily available here and there.
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Monday, August 31, 2020
When we did nothing
It should have been something more than it turned out to be. That's the problem with reflection if there's not enough to reflect upon. Regretting not so much what happened but what didn't happen. Those things that were talked about but never progressed, those places never visited, those conversations we failed to have. The wrong directions now clearly visible looking back on life's cruelly real and undeniable mapping systems.
Everything back then was strained and strange. How did cars and appliances ever work even in the 1970s, how could we speak to each other, why did we think that our food was nice, was working really miserable, where did money come from, what was the real news, were our clothes ever clean, where did you get information, why did you fall in love?
The past is horrible even though horrible things only rarely happened. Yet people write books and stories and make fortunes trawling up their early lives and experiences, their version of the universe, ensuring their history comes out on top. They have their victims lined up. How they got a job with the BBC, signed on the dotted line, went to art college, traveled to Nepal, fought in a war, met somebody famous, wrote a song, had casual sex, discovered themselves, woke up alone. Their halcyon years of well remembered trivia and fibs. Nostalgia matters to the nostalgic, but it was never quite like that, never as it's portrayed, never the same as it was seen through your eyes and with your own feelings, there before you like some collapsed wooden Jenga puzzle. The past is mostly uncomfortable for ordinary people because they didn't really do much with their lives, just towed the line. Got by.
People might say I cheated, that I was a cheat, a traitor, I kept myself to myself, I didn't speak or speak out, if they actually noticed. Everything is true and everything is a lie, in this belief I'm relaxed as I approach the later stages of life, not looking back but looking forward to interesting things still to come ... like an new anorak. Most likely blue.
In the next few days, 1st September, my dad's 100th birthday happens. I'll visit his grave but I don't know what I'll do when I get there. Probably just stand and feel awkward, look blank, try to think the correct thoughts but know that my memories of him are pale and not properly constructed. I've not worked hard enough at remembering, I was too busy passing time in the here and now and in the fuzzy travelogue narrative of daily life, the information and detail I need to call up just isn't there. I didn't collect or curate it. I didn't think it mattered. I didn't think. Perhaps I'll just do what writer's do, make things up and embellish. Perhaps that'll compensate for actually doing next to nothing all this time.
Sunday, August 30, 2020
La Suite Apocalyptique
The Umbrella Academy is strange, surreal, almost compulsive watch. A TV show that engages (me) with each new episode but then you somehow struggle to remember details of what went before (normal at my age). The previous episodes lie there like dried out muddy puddles as the action moves forward in a repetitive cycle that is the basis of the comic book story arc and shows some inventive genius. It's odd because for once I actually like all the characters complete with their obvious flaws, contradictions and the occasional editorial jump that renders the story line nonsense or at least a little less believable with each episode ... but it's a comic. Sense, sensibility and logic are not required. I'm not worried about them, I've not invested anything in this pulp TV, I'm being entertained by Netflix. I understand that they can never die, never be saved, simply because they never existed...and Season 2 is over and done with. Not sure I've the stamina for a Season 3 should it ever materialize.
Saturday, August 29, 2020
New Radiators
Seventeen years of gunk, corrosion, chemicals, road film, Scottish weather, high operating temperatures and environmental trashing* means the two radiators on my car need replaced. They're on their last little sad radiator legs. They're leaking. Something I noticed when a) I noticed a warm fluid leak dripping down by the front wheel that certainly wasn't coming from me or my trousers and b) the temp gauge, always steady at 80 degrees whatever the weather, decided to move by all of a millimetre to a little more than 80 degrees. OCD me quickly sweated and panicked at the sight. Fortunately these events clashed with an MOT and service booking so there was an opportunity to get everything sorted in one sweet if sightly expensive move.
*May also just have been yet another random mutant algorithm. Or a perhaps a big mutant algorithm did it and ran away.
Friday, August 28, 2020
Squirrelproof Bins
Out for a healthy walk: Sometimes that irrational fear just creeps up on you. Out there, beyond the boundary of senses, no easy navigation possible, like dark waters, too deep for your feet to touch the bottom. Then, that cold breath on your shoulder slowly turning warm. What ravenous beast is this? What's out there, unnamed, rattling on the bars of it's damp dungeon, whispering spells and words to ingratiate itself with golden lies and promises as you lean into the dark spaces? Out there in the blind woods, where eyesight is unreliable, where sounds are tortured and unclear, where signs remain distorted and warped. Mostly just brisk cyclists and clumsy joggers passing by.
You shift your weight, foot to foot, uneasy, troubled. The sweat begins to stick to you. You're aware of your own smell, your nerve's show their clean edges. Sparking with invisible electricity and ferrule dirt. You're looking but not seeing anything, there are no connections to be made. There is no sense to this. A funny looking old dog that's off the lead is almost approaching but meandering across the path with no clear purpose, the owner cannot be seen.
Spittle and fury, limbs writhing and items flying in all directions, whimpering or howling tries to match the sounds of crows and seagulls attacking stray pigeons over on the foreshore. Or peace, tranquility, only the smooth hum of Chinese plastic wheels rings out across the bumpy unrepaired tramac and puddles as they breeze along, fruit shoots and bottles successfully deployed. Mums in leggings and hoodies shoving buggies, headed for the nursery.
You're in Scotland and it's still August. Will this month ever end? Please adjust your face mask and remain 2m clear of fellow humans, avoid eye contact, look serious and take care because our current litter bin designs don't seem to be very squirrel proof. Thank you.
Here's a drone view of some early Earl Gray tea plants we're cultivating as a hedge against future shortages.
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Not one of those people
If I ever were asked to sum up the UK's current state I'd probably use an illustration something like this one. That only makes me a realist, not bitter and twisted in any way and certainly not a traitor, though you can stuff your jingoistic Rule Britannia type anthems wherever they might be the least comfortable for you.
So, having established that I am not one of those people who moans and drones on and on about how things are getting worse and how the UK is an international laughing stocks, a denier of it's own putrid history and currently run by a bunch of crooks and jumped up village idiots. I actually think things, whilst far from perfect are tolerable, up to a point. Many things are wrong and are going wrong but there are quite a few good things happening in science, industry, culture, language and human relations ... I'm sure. They tend to be overlooked by a squalid media scrum over nonsense news, celebrity trivia and editorial guidelines that "promote" the jumped up village idiot's idiotic behaviour and utterances. Otherwise things are just fine if you're keen on measuring that sort of thing.
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
The Glow of a German Cat
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
TSINGTAO
I recently collected a substantial Chinese carry out from our local place and it came in this rather nice box, one which I quite like. Tsingtao is a type of Chinese beer that I've never heard of, not being much of a world traveler or beer geek etc. The carton, meal time contents duly consumed is now destined for the recycling skip across the street and will presumably return to us one day in the form of toilet rolls or a brown paper bag. It's the circle of life, as every Chinese lion knows only too well. Here's a sort of Steam Punk / Industrial rendering of it, purely for reference.
Monday, August 24, 2020
Vicarious Coffee and Cake
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Distorted Woodland Gods
Saturday, August 22, 2020
In Dreams
It's found in the second aisle in Aldi, around the corner from the cheese, ready meals and cold meats. It's on your left, down a bit on the lower half of the display rack, lower than the unpleasant chocolate and the strange biscuits. It's not like the much hyped Dreamies for cats, they're hard biscuity things smelling of fish and unpleasant to human taste (I suspect). This Dreemy is really a knock off Milky Way but, quite strangely a lot better. As if the Aldi brothers had secretly nicked some old, not quite right for 2020, cost effective or PC Milky Way recipe from Mars and actually improved it. I'm impressed and I will return and buy more in my new found role as a happy customer.