West Lothian Floaters

Strolling along the footpath of the Union Canal today, low sun and vanilla drizzle. Chilly indeed. The canal is named after the infamous union of West West Lothian and East West Lothian that took place (on this day) in 1812ish, so unreliable versions of history tell us. Prior to that it was simply known as Onion Canal because of the numerous onion plantations in the area. For a long while West Lothian was the home of serious onion smuggling across this part of northern Europe until the Calvinists poisoned the soil. The other notorious and illegal union of clowns, chumps and parliaments (1707) has of course nothing to do with the name Union here. 

Many strong willed, brave and reckless tattooed people have chosen to live upon these turbulent waters in narrow boats and canoes. These boat people are sometimes known as "Floaters" as in the sci-fi genre of beach combing. Some venture ashore at times to plant great field fulls of crops such as iceberg-blue-lettuce, sweet Chinese tobacco and liquorice root. While living in makeshift yurts along the canal banks these "Floaters" harvest their crops, steal nearby donkeys, burn damp logs and generally mess with the heads of local old people. They are story tellers and mystics. Their vegetative goods are then sold on at nearby markets, mostly to American tourists eagerly searching for recreational drugs and their family roots in what they term their "homeland" or "old country".

The canal winds it's way from Fountainbridge in the charming district of Edinburghshire to somewhere out there beyond the shape of Falkirk. No one I know has ever gone that far into the dark west and lived to tell the tale. The outline of Scotland and it's many warring counties and tribes has never been fully understood or recognized. Viewed from space it remains a vague and fuzzy enigma. Overall the Romans, who actually built the Onion Canal as a watery wall, seem to have done the best job of providing a ruling regime that at least worked for a time in a few regions. They are long gone now but fondly remembered in our many fish and chip and pizza establishments.

Heading westwards on the Onion Canal.

Emergency on Planet Scotia

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We are experiencing rain but not really in a bad or destructive way. It may well be affecting the general outlook of parts of the population but this is the current version of Scotland. Scotland 2024 for want of a more descriptive title. Mist, lochs, missed opportunities and the ongoing struggle with some nameless internal misery that can't quite be explained but is tolerated as some sort of national quirk. We don't want to be understood. At first glance it may be amusing, whimsical even but in the long term quite deadly. Beware the maniacal laugh or sinister snigger at the end of those well structured sentences.

You'll always know us by a mix of our friendly but blank demeanor, the positively negative body language and the overuse of a poetic and over amplified drawl. There's trouble in using too many words too, apart from when swearing. Oh bother! We'll be badly dressed mostly, like somebody who's just come in from a day of picking potatoes in drizzle. History tells us that it'll all be fine once the oppression and the rain stops; then everything will be like the weather ... fine. Nothing new to see here.

Weekender Daily Photos

Visited god's own country, the town of the green oak where quite a lot of faded engineering glory and heavy metal is on display. I'm there in order to witness and celebrate a narrow win for Dunfermline Athletic. Three valuable points as the struggle continues. A day of outandaboutery, sunshine, showers and a reasonably priced Lorne sausage roll at the game. Never actually seen the Pars beaten in Greenock.

Early Sunday morning saw the mysterious appearance of four mystical symbols on the outside wall of a nearby house above the waste bins. This cannot be explained by anything we know about so we just quietly and reverently celebrated witnessing this spectral passing spectacle. Strange events are common enough around here on a mad March Sunday.  Meanwhile we're getting through the equally mysterious "Three Body Problem" over on the Netflix channel. There's been a lot of hype about this show but so far it's certainly delivering and not at all disappointing. Weird, scary and believable. Also a big improvement on continually watching the daytime Cat TV channels on YouTube.

This is George, one of the trio of cats, performing a spectacular head roll and some extendable paw grabs on Saturday night. The inner joy of living lives within and is real.

Fill Your Head With Rock

 

In the interests of scientific experimentation I asked Alexa and some random AI bot that I met in a pub to "fill my head with rock". It was of course too vague an instruction and so fell upon deaf mechanical ears. My requests all just silently clattered into the great imaginary recycle bin in the sky.  My head was not filled with rock or indeed any kind of music or any actual buried minerals or stones. I just can't seem to get through to these things and their adopted devices, it's as if I'm the one who isn't real. And that ladies and gentlemen may just be closer to the truth than any of us dare to imagine.

A once mandatory listening experience: Too old now that it hardly matters and with so many peculiar (and dead) people playing on it. Perhaps the AI culture feeders were doing me a favour or adhering to some censorship instruction from on high, but this was what I had in mind: 

Edinburgh - Not Quite Live

The things that pass for "news" reporting around here: Apparently a giant "battleship" arrived in the Forth and the locals were "awestruck". This style of shallow, puerile reporting really gets my goat. Firstly it's a broken aircraft carrier that was being towed into Rosyth for repair. The RN hasn't done battleships for about sixty years. As for the awestruck locals, well the two RN aircraft carriers were built here and we've seen them come and go numerous times, we're not over excited feckin' idiots. It also came up the river and under the bridges at 6:45 in the morning, there were not any cheering or bedazzled crowds on the shore. I watched it, in the still of the morning, from my window just before doing a Joe Wick's session. 

The absurdity of the media's habit of upgrading the mundane and dare I say normal routine of things into some kind of sensation kills me. Even writing about it is painful. "Edinburgh Live" is nothing more than an irritating advertising site that sneaks in occasional bits of waffle and tittle tattle between the pop-ups, click bait and noise. I never asked for it but somehow it's embedded in my phone if I dare to swipe left. Sadly it's not alone.

What's the point of the internet if you can't just moan about it? Ho hum.

Untitled

Yeah, the music business is a mess, nobody at the creative bottom end makes real money, what's the point? The suits hoover up any profit, the middlemen and the touts get the rest, the media is corrupt, the poor artists starve and those quirky graphic designers just get abuse, blah blah blah! Oh and we're all doomed and plagiarism and skull duggery rule and who is buying 24 million guitars from China every year? All of this may be true but we can't fix it at the moment, too many other pressing tasks in the pipeline. We've decided to just be insanely happy instead. So should you and without any further ado also get all the digitized sonic spice from our latest efforts here. 🠜 or 🠞 here.

Friends With Egg Benefits

 

On a busy morning there's nothing better than a nice cup of egg or two to slow down your  highly active metabolic and thought processes. Take the stress out of the everyday ups and the polar opposite of everyday ups. Quite soon you will be your old laconic, chilled, dry mouthed but energized self again. Life is indeed a bowl of cherry flavoured yogurt that contains absolutely no real cherries but on the bright side, no stones either. You must seek the pathway of ... something vaguely reasonable or wholesome. 

Failure to self medicate and so calm your unnatural inclinations can increase your chances of well-being related pompous grandiosity and arrogant long-termism and may even result in extreme cases of you becoming a high risk passenger aboard this sort of thing 🡇 ... the temperature on Mars sits at around -60C. A rather extreme alternative to living with global warming really, maybe just wake up and fix this planet first?

Attention Visitor of Boots

 

Always a sucker for a good slab of spam so the pithy and attention grabbing title "Attention Visitor of Boots" had me right away. It's so hard to resist clicking further into such a well worded invitation and thereby gain access to world of digital and financial pain but somehow I avoided doing so. I chose to screen shot it and then delete it but what a promise ... just complete a simple survey involving only your bank account details and you shall receive what looks like a 1 litre bottle of j'adore. I presume that this isn't quaffable alcohol but something suitably exotic that you might splash all over your person after a hot or even mid temperature shower. What a deal! Truly hard to resist and of course the girl looks really pretty, happy and honest ... OK then, just take all of my personal info and send me the fancy red box. 

Film Noir in the 90s

Clarke Ladle, Emily Frankfurter and Dolby Enterprise.

Obscurity Knocks: They* were never really troubled by movie success or the dangers of over exposure and those airily intoxicating wafts of flickering fame. The mini boom in *Film Noir as a genre in the 90s was just that and always much more maximum mini than any kind of earth shattering boom. Still for a brief period of time there was some excitement generated by these folks but that quietly died away when something else more commercially successful and better written came along. So here are some of the potential great, forgotten would be stars of a valiant but failed Noir experiment. Do you remember any of them? Where are they all now?

Smith Zippo, Teardrop Chicane-Phillips, Valerie Hicksville and Fingal M Blossom.

Holly Wally, Bernadette St Joan of Arc, Stevie Von-Zeppelin. 

Categorical

The not so fine art of regular blog posting is basically a long running brain dump (and I know it's mostly complaints, moans and awkward photos). Perhaps not quite for everyone who practices this futile pastime but it is in my case anyway. Here's what an over exposed brain dump actually looks like if it's retrieved from the dump, stretched out and displayed. It probably makes more sense in this bleak but organized image than most of the stuff I put out. So here am I wasting energy on my best attempts at mangling the English language with pithy observations and abstract ideas only to find that it's reduced, reformed and translated into coded nonsense under the digital engine's glossy cover.

Here's a real (?) brain dump.

Psychic Cat TV

Dateline 15th March 2024, about 8ish in the morning. Cats are happily watching TV. There are many special programs etc. As an added warning my own experience is that nearby humans slowly become hypnotized also. There is no known cure or antidote.

Film Noir Daily Photo

 

Another day spent out and about in the oblique world of Film Noir, taking the occasional picture of course. There's a cast of characters here but they don't really mean much to me. Some are badly written, some badly imagined. You can never tell. Everyone has a story. Everybody wants to get somewhere, maybe even out of this town. They all have weaknesses that will become obvious. Cigarettes and coffee. Desire, passion and money. The good old days. Personal clouds hang overhead. It's a spectacle of dank atmosphere. Tight shoes, neckties and rain. Forever rain. 

Hear them whisper their dark and hungry motives out loud in the soundtrack's crackle. All set up to try to do bad things, things that they think will end well for them but they'll soon sleep with those silver fishes. They are as unreal as their monochrome images. Spectres and ghosts breathing, trying to sound sincere as they mouth their fictional lines at the counter in the joint. The audience long to dwell and become lost in this dramatic world, a world before smart phones and distractions.

Real names are for losers and only ever mentioned in the final credits, those blurred up things that nobody bothers to read. The state of the greasy hairdos is no one's business either and the music is as intense as a weighted blanket thrown from a third floor window. It was a cheap and grim production but I'd go again. I'm devoted. Silently we all leave the cinema and embrace the rain.

B Movie Cast, L to R clockwise: Stig O'Tracy Snr. Jackie Whatabout, 

Miles Ducktop, Hannah McBiggins.

C Movie Cast, L to R no-clock: Alex Fingerbob, Dick Steel, 

Tallulah Ivory-Merchant, the Sinister Hidden Man.

Versatile Pasta

This is not ordinary pasta. This pasta is versatile. Apparently it can be eaten either hot or cold. It's hard not to be impressed by almost casual statements like this and the other hidden gems often found in the small print that is so often ignored on pasta packets. Get yourself down to the supermarket and just, for once, pay attention to the details and the specific advice that somebody has worked so hard to create for you. Eventually it all came together as both tasty and versatile once the brightly coloured sauce had brewed itself into a spicy conclusion and been added to the mix. Then we ate it.

Don't Ask Me

"Poor Things".

It seems that everything is broken but that's not new, arguably it always has been. What does anybody actually expect based on thousands of years of human activity and behaviour? There's no evidence to suggest we can resolve conflict and ideological differences. We can master technology but not ourselves. We're mostly unable to work together to find solutions for common problems and when we do we still squabble over the outcomes and the distribution of any powers that develop or profit that might be gained. 

There is no fair, sustainable and/or reasonable way of living and organizing ourselves that's actually being promoted either by religion, education or political process. They all just talk across each other. And while I'm at it your heat pumps, farmer's markets and EVs aren't going to save you. Best thing to do is develop your photo editing skills and rewrite your own story for posterity. Then find new ways to recycle, clean and reuse your own domestic water. You'll thank me later. 😉

Virtual Snacks

A confession from the Citadel of Indifference where they dare to write such things as: 

"A lukewarm steak bake in Kinross

A chicken curry pie in Ellon

A salted caramel Ritter Sport near Brechin

These are the things I may have eaten."

Clearly our thoughts and prayers are with you at this time. That's about all though. Kyrie Eleison.

Logs

A giant builder's bag of logs was delivered today (which is really yesterday now) by two average sized people. It's always a worry that an actual giant will turn up with the delivery and be in a bit of a bad mood for some reason and just create havoc and destruction all over the place before he sees the error of his ways and clumsily but honestly tries to clear up his mess but doesn't really do it very well. Then he spills his tea on an old ladies' dog and accidentally punches a passing bus in the rear radiator etc. etc. We've all been there I'm sure, owning any kind of property comes with a stream of irrational but possible worries. 

So we're back again to holding a reasonable (giant I suppose) stock of "air dried" logs that should tide us over until we need some more. I'm conflicted about the greenness of this way of heating our things but as you might imagine all the log sellers say don't be bothered it's going to be fine and everything is sustainable as long as nobody does anything stupid, like annoying the imaginary giant that I keep imagining. I also enjoy building and then lighting fires ... it's likely that this won't end well.

Forever Psychedelic

 

Happy trails: Some things are old but they never actually get old. This is because I just wont allow it. Time may be an infinite thing but eventually it also becomes whatever you make when using it up because looking backwards time is only finite. Your time is your life, nothing more. Don't dare ask how I've come upon this knowledge.

In other news I am now of the firm opinion that the person who came up with the term "to break the internet"  truly deserves some sort of humiliating rotten vegetable and cold rice pudding based, medieval style of  public punishment. This also applies to a lesser extent to any other users of that meaningless phrase.

No Wizard

 

I've taken up temporary residence in the up to date and trendy world of Harry Potter. Yes, even at my advanced age becoming a wizard was always an option. It hasn't been easy however, what with all those incomprehensible spells to learn, all the infighting and the shocking amounts of food that's wasted daily. Politics and human nature do spoil everything. Too much drama really and no time to carry out any proper scientific research into dark magic, life after death and the like. 

Anyway I've got a nice cat, a quill pen and some sort of uncomfortable hoodie from Temu to wear. It's probably a bit like working as a comedy writer for the BBC might have been, before colour TV was invented, not that I've ever had the privilege of holding such a free and creative type of position or that I can write comedy. 

They tell me a new wizarding adventure is just around the corner, somewhere past the old lady's shrunken head shop and beyond the wobbly tree. At least, due to my collection of well and truly lived in years, I don't have annoying, trumpeting parents to deal with unlike all the spoiled screen fixated and pixelated brats in my various classes. My spirit animal is now a magpie in case you were wondering. Perhaps I'm living in the wrong book?

Walkers?

 Conclusive proof that there is no hope for humanity.

Mingulay Boat Song

OK, so what part of being Scottish is it that really matters? It's a confusing issue, what makes us who we are? All screwed up, conflicted, frustrated and in perpetual disagreement about anything that's vaguely touchy, like our prickly nationality issues and our tattered cultural history. For no good reason I'm currently of the opinion that there are two types of people in our tiny, mongrel version of the world. Those who know of the Mingulay Boat Song and those who don't. I see this as being a mark of a few personal, generational and tribal divisions. There are other marks too I suppose (like who knows where exactly Mingulay is? Does the No. 43 bus go past it?) but so what?

I'm also wondering if it might be, in some way, put to use as an identifier or as a divider. What does it mean to be properly Scottish these days? Legal status, Scottish parents, tartan embarrassment, a sense of being lost in the Scotch mist, self destructive behaviour? It's a mystery to me but could you live an entire life in Scotland and have not ever heard of the Mingulay Boat Song? Hmm. Would you want it played at your funeral or are you a "My Way" kind of person? Perhaps you'd rather that a creative dance piece was performed to sum up and pay tribute to your existence in a novel and stimulating way.

Nationalistic extremists might suggest (?) that those who don't know the Mingulay Boat Song should be considered traitors or at the very least are only sham Scots deserving some awkward but painful fate; say banishment to the Isle of Man, severe financial penalties or being shunned in public. I'm shrinking back from that kind of action. That's taking things too far. I'm certainly uncomfortable with any ethnic based violence, primitive  retribution or being exposed to a perpetual frizzled huff; but if you are Scottish and you don't know this song ... 

This thinking could also be applied to holding up a reasonable (at least in my opinion) appreciation of the wonderful Alex Harvey's back catalogue ... or Chick Murray, or the history of the Broons family or knowing what to do with a "slider". None of this is ever easy, we're in conflict with ourselves and our confused heritage all the time, because despite our common threads and failings we kind of despise our fellow Scot's own Scottish ignorance when encountered in the flesh. I'm thinking of some recent efforts like the "Redcoat Cafe" in Edinburgh Castle.

It's been a long, hard road to some non specific redemption that we can't seem to find (it is non specific after all) but the crippling guilt remains real. The mixed, diseased and tragic blood of our forefathers' many follies is stirred up by it all and so far I can't apologize for it any more than I can get past it. It's a sinking ship that never quite goes under. We're up to the gunwales in salty sea water and fish heads and the waters of the Minch are white. Brave people ruled over by idiots, so we'll always find ourselves fucked over time and time again. It's all too much, but in troubled times just sing a quiet wee song to yourselves, some self soothing, the good lord will find you ... "heel yo ho boys, let her go boys" ...