Extraordinary Sausage

Travelled overland to the remote, mountainous and almost perpendicular village of Kippen where there is an extraordinary sausage company. I've no idea what it was that attracted me to the place, anyway once there I bought no sausages (other than pigs in blankets) and mainly concentrated on a soon to be dead turkey for the festive feast albeit steak pies were also thrown firmly into the mix. I may return for the sausages at some later date.

Cold spells

The cold spell tempted me to start a fire, burning up waste wood not dry or good enough for the household stoves; so I let it burn away in the garden. A small and avoidable contribution towards global warning I suppose. 

I rather like the mystery red spots that appear in sunny shots, here and there, inexplicably. It's as if they exist but unless you discover them and then attack them from a certain angle they can't be seen. A bit like some media and political figures...and the royal family. 

Stones from the old pier seem to scrub up well in the pale winter sunlight. Broken lines and disrepair. Dog and human footprints everywhere messing up any clues to any unsolved crimes or acts of treason. 

Just the ragged patterns of some wall clinging  shrubs, lost without their leaves in the cold, and naked to the bone and bark.

Good to go

What happens to ironwork if you don't paint it.

What happens to ironwork if you do paint it.

Breakfast yesterday was in Rankin's Cafe North Queensferry. Here's it's web page if you're interested. They do all the usual cafe stuff but (unusually) they do a decent all-day breakfast, something  that not so many of the other Fife coast cafes do; internet research and a few phone calls revealed that fact to me. Another cafe that does breakfasts is the Yellow Coloured Cafe in nearby Rosyth. FB Page here. 

In truth I have no idea why I'm banging on about cafes, elusive breakfast providers and the like but there you are.

The air that we breathe

The good folks at Ineos Grangemouth are happy to send smoke and vapour signals to all and sundry on a clear December day. Unfortunately I'm not fluent neither in smoke or vapour so I've no choice other than to simply observe the spectacle from what I presume is a safe distance. I did try Google Translator but it doesn't do smoke much either. It may be a Christmas message of some sort or perhaps the presentation of an economic forecast for us all here in the ideologically foggy, bloody freezing and culturally bankrupt north. I'm sure the future is bright around here, particularly at night when their spectacular  roaring chemical flares light up the dark skies.

Pop up put down

Those pop up ads that fly in lethal squadrons in formation across my laptop screen are sending me some new messages today. It is the dawn of the "bladder calming" treatment era. Based on who knows what I'm now assured on all the best places to go for non-prescribed but guaranteed help for my irritated bladder (some herbal kind of solution). Smiling middle aged male models with strangely combed hair assure me that I'll be well taken care off as their perfect wives look on and nod in passive approval. If only it was my bladder that was irritated I'd know just what to do. It's a change however from funeral expenses, little black party dresses (?) and holidays in the Canary Islands. Inspired by my recent browsing history never has made sense; when did I ever search for a new Vauxhall or a smart phone on eBay? A credit card with HSBC, Chinese recipes or Netflix access so I could catch up on the Gilmore Girls? The truth is it's a very blunt instrument that is being used against me, and sadly, despite all the effort I'm unlikely to bite on any of this algorithmic bait. Ah! But still it influences my thinking in sinister, strange ways I cannot comprehend...like the ads in the Glasgow Herald or the billboards at the traffic lights? The internet is not as smart as it thinks it is. I also wonder what advertisement would go best with spending a sunny morning indoors drawing Christmas hats onto cat's heads?

Official dead bird photos

Exhibit A. Colourized.

Exhibit B. Natural

It's officially official, signed, sealed and verified. Another dead bird discovered in the conservatory. A guilty cat stands by, looking the other way. To ease the pain and mask the sense of loss and bewilderment I broke open the emergency mince pie stash that I bought today. 

In other news: a brief visit to the fair city, the purchase of fired up audio (talking that is) ginger biscuits and more drum machine practice using time travel techniques established in the 1980s. Singing and operating heavy equipment tends to lead to lyrical mix up mash ups...

"First we take MacDonald's, then we take Limekilns."

Twink

Twink is a lovely wee cat who comes around to our back garden  on odd evenings for food and not much else. We've tried to coax her in, particularly on cold nights but she refuses. She remains stubbornly aloof and independent which is pretty much how most cats are. Our own cats seem to have a convivial enough relationship with her; no howling or fighting so far anyway. 

After being away (?) for a few days she returned last night, curiously mooning about outside just when we'd finished watching the latest Attenborough epic episode of Planet Earth II on the iPlayer; all about animals feeding in strange and arid locations. So she quickly scoffed a tin of cat food and a portion of biscuits before disappearing back into the final night of  November 2016.

More pictures of the sky

Ten things that successful people sometimes do:

1. Take the headlights off the car, fiddle, fix and change a bulb. Top up the oil in another car.
2. Eat two bananas one at a time.
3. Split some logs just for fun.
4. Check out the woods and invasive ivy (still pretty much there but under control).
5. Exercise apprentice drum machine operator antics, coordination C+, concentration C-.
6. Observe one fire engine, one Coast Guard pickup, one ambulance, one police car passed the door.
7. Walk out to see what the fuss was all about...fuss far away. Lifeboat in the water but headed East. All appliances stood down shortly thereafter (except for household ones).
8. Sort cardboard and recycling materials.
9. Check the "Build a Bear" website.
10.Take a few pictures of the sky, keep some and discard the rest.

That was yesterday but only up to a vague point in time.

As if I could

Well that was yesterday, irritating and stubborn clouds hanging around blocking bits of sunlight and keeping the entire area dull ... but I needed a rest anyway. So things are so much different now. The weekend required some recovery; driving, football, theatre, hot, cold, steak pies and new places. I find that the best therapy is simply to sit down and take the tumble drier to bits. Give it a good clean, extricate all that stubborn belly button type fluff, hose down the filters and major components, reassemble methodically using a carefully chosen Chinese screwdriver and fire her up for a quick spin. Summed up: as exhilarating as a burn out in a sports car. 

Long live Fidel?

Castro in 1951, a truly timeless photo.

Now that Fidel Castro is dead the process of reevaluating his life has begun; revolutionary, leader, torturer, killer, oppressor, man of the people, obsessed with getting the better of the USA and not caring about Cuba enough? The man the CIA failed to kill, smoker of cigars and friend of Che, he outlived most of his rivals and died peacefully (?). I don't know what to think. When I was first reading Guevara's writings as a teenager, (me being a revolutionary without a cause), their work was fascinating and seemed simple and righteous. It was all set in black and white 1950's jungles, government troops were the enemy and capitalist influences were everywhere corrupting the good, plain, simple people (who could do no wrong). Now I'm not so sure. 

None of it every happened in Scotland, it was all irrelevant really and an almost romantic distraction whilst we were failing to build a better post-industrial society, sitting around smoking dope, listening to downer rock and talking rubbish. A wistful reading, fashion and fantasy exercise and no more than that. Combat jackets, jeans and a blank stare into space because the Tories never were smashed and Socialism, with it's petty antics simply gave itself a bad name. As we grew up we only built New Labour and it drove itself over a cliff. Now that troubled but impotent generation has passed and really there is no clear direction, which is just the way that things actually are and maybe always were.

Daily Sky

Surf Beast

Strange Surf Beast: Some guitar projects work out better than others, this one has been a struggle, resisting construction and refusing to line up properly in all the main places. It's a (cheap but cheerful considering it's injuries) Blackie Strat type body with obvious added in road worn features. It's been hard-tailed via rough surgery and has gone through intensive renovation to receive a neck transplant and a pair of lip-stick single coil tube pickups on a custom scratch plate. You could say it's unusual. Almost Danelectro in look and in feel (the body) and not as playable as I'd hoped but it still is...interesting. As it's a surf beast there's heavier strings (possibly part of the problem) and tight action. The thing is it sounds pretty good; twangy, pingy, crystalline even (well in places). I'm viewing this as work in progress, changes may be made. Time and my powers of endurance will tell.

This may be some kind of emerging  "view from the office" photo series. I don't know, I just make this up as I go along. Obviously. 

Wheels falling off

Not often that punctures occurs these days. Though this was more of a disagreement between the wheel and the tyre where one decided they'd had enough of the other. There followed some loss of pressure and a dull thud and a reminder that cars need four equally sized wheels to remain happy and stable when on the road. It was a case of limping to anywhere suitable  for carrying out a repair. The limping was perhaps not the best idea but by then the tyre was pretty much shot. The man said that major structural damage had occurred so whilst a replacement was sought the natty red space saver had a rare outing. I followed the instructions and remained calm at no more than 49mph, some extra lessons in limping. That is the rule.

Sorry...

...you probably can't read this either. Try Vision Express for vision success.

Alt-Right now

Hopefully we'll have all the best draughtsmen and artists on our side come the day, though no matter how well you think you know people you can never really tell.

Baby it's Alt-Right now. When exactly did the term Alt-Right become part of common parlance? These guys and gals appear to be on the march, released it seems by some evil force now that we've all become bored with regular corrupted politics. So Alt-Right sneaked up and now it's mushroomed out into an appropriate descriptor for New Fascism available everywhere. Maybe New Labour used to be called Alt-Left and I missed that too. That's the thing with political labels, they're are coined presumably by some young and cunning spin doctor and then adopted by all and sundry as the correct new way to describe some old regurgitated political idea as if it was new and sexy. New and sexy is just about simple enough to get foot soldiers and camp followers signing up in droves. That's what people do it seems. The evil absurdity of it all is awful and it's as powerful as a runaway bushfire. 2016's getting a reputation for being one of the worst years on record (well that's what my biased and carefully manicured and cultivated Facebook and Twitter feeds tell me) but I suspect that we've seen nothing yet. Certainly nobody's laughing on my side (?) except for cackling idiots like Farage, Johnstone and Trump.

Older school

A pot of vegetable curry and a pot of vegetable soup fly in close formation upon the red hot and sacred top of the sacrificial log burner. Some of the vegetables involved found themselves in both pots, others did not.  Good choice of cooking and kitchen warming medium on a cold and foggy day filled with strange distant noises and the deafening clatter of the falling leaves over there in the woodland. Regards cook outs,  I'm quite serious in trying to have more of a mixed but balanced diet. These hot and splodgy meals kind of help (as far as my own roving and free flowing imagination is concerned) to maintain a balance.

In other news, a wise man once sang: "When they said repent, I wondered what they meant." I wonder what it means?

Towers of Babel

I suppose if we knew why we were here it might be OK to ask the question why aliens might  also be here. A bit of sightseeing, kill time after a long space flight, hoover up a little culture and then invade? We do make a lot of assumptions about our rights to things and of course when it comes to this planet nobody else has a say (except for the absent gods of Islam and Christianity and they are obviously really bothered about things here right now). Territorially speaking we'll never give up on earth.

The film ARRIVAL is a sci-fi offering that offers the obvious premise that, thanks to that whole Tower of Babel incident 6000 Biblical and fictional years ago we all opted for our own strange and conflicting languages and so plunged ourselves into years of warfare and misunderstanding. This situation was in fact created by the ever reliable Hebrew god for a bit of fun, presumably one wet afternoon when mankind may have been on the verge of actually getting on. If he really did consider the consequences of his actions then he's even worse than I thought - but if you still choose to follow him then good luck to you.

Meanwhile many years later somebody made this interesting film about how our different languages continue to keep us apart and how, no matter what guise they come in, we'll never be able to welcome aliens into our world. As the military tend to manage all the clumsy negotiations in some primary coloured language, you know the script already and we're doomed. You also can understand why any sensible alien just avoids this place altogether, interventions don't play well these days. Probably for the best, concepts like non-linear time, working together and circular, inclusive writing would not catch on with those dumb fucks determined to make America, the UK and the Soviet Union "great" again. Yeah, like back in the real old days, when they first put up the Tower of Babel and people were still fighting over pastures and flocks of sheep.

Below: this means something...

Poor choice of font?

Out of your box

Spotted yesterday, somewhere out in the Scottish wilderness, where no mobile phone signal dares to go so still a good place to break down; that is if you have the correct key to phone for rescue (they once were standard issue to all AA members). 

Note: nervous, existential, financial or communication breakdowns are/were not covered by this offer. Terms and conditions therefore apply to the full extent that the current law allows.

Looking out on the world

Thought I'd something more to say...

Far away and in a field...

20/20 blindness

A paragraph from Richard Rorty written in 1998. Whilst part of me thinks that if you checked enough recent pieces of philosophical work you'll always find some theory proven to be correct and lining up with current events in any given set of circumstances; there's also the more worrying reality that most human behaviour is cyclical and repeated over some sort of time period, be it short or long. So while we refuse to learn from experience and the evil in the past we're stuck in this loop. The fact that we continue to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come since the last disaster (or whatever behavioural dip we suffered) simply prevents us from seeing that we haven't really moved on and confirms our static state with 20/20 blindness.

Holiday Home

The recently refurbished cat hotel/holiday home received it's first visitor yesterday. Only a few hours after opening for business the neighbourhood Top Cat aka Tigger crept in to test the luxurious facilities without making any prior booking. In fairness the weather had turned pretty awful I can hardly blame the cat for taking shelter. As might be expected he left a little later without actually bothering to settle his bill.

Steps across the water

Food thoughts beside the edge: Back to standing on the brink, staring into the distant space and wondering what to have along with my reformatted Fife Diet pot of beef and vegetable soup. Food is a vital daily ritual round here. Bread or bread rolls and various kinds of aloof and posh cheeses top the list presently but frankly, it's a tough decision. No beetroot, neither baby or sliced has been considered either. As the waves crash, the wake of now far away ships passes across and massages the shore whilst the wind howls; I decide upon olive bread with some low fat cheese and a slow dipping, hand made regime. Then I'll nip back and empty the dishwasher and may even go on to tackle the tumble drier with all it's high liquid content, heat and mysterious black fluff. The water and it's restless energy and sooting sounds caught in these wide open spaces generates such profound thinking.

Obscured by cloud

I caught an early morning, blurry glimpse of the fabled super moon. An unexpected smattering of blue grey sky came over from Australia and freed us from cloudy normality. My pin hole camera however failed to do justice to the celestial spectacle. At least I've seen it so now I won't feel left out in imaginary pub conversations or if I happen to engage with any Lycra clad triathlon trainee who's skipping past the front door. I have seen the moon in full iMax perfection but without the costly apparatus.

Still on the subject of space we caught up on "Mars" a kind of docu-drama on the History Channel. It's a watchable, well made piece of SpaceX sales propaganda that flits between 2016 (round about now) and 2033, when a launch to Mars is a real event. Lots of heavy talking heads provide the big pitch in well telegraphed segments. 

Anyway having recently returned from Cape Canaveral and spied out the various locations shown it's a nice reminder of our balmy summer time tourist encounters. The casting however looks a bit clunky to me, as usual they've put a Captain Kirk type in as flight commander. I've already written him out in my version but I suspect that he'll somehow make it through despite quickly becoming a heroic dead weight on the mission. 

I wonder what the new Commander in Chief Mr Trump makes of this? Has he any taste for science fiction and is he even aware that there is such a thing as science? He talks a lot of fiction. I'm not sure I've ever heard him wax lyrically about space travel either. But if you really want to make America great...

Healthy

You can always trust our trusty supermarkets to promote possibly poisonous items as bait to the unprepared or unthinking shoppers, just to mess with their heads a little. These odd juice cocktails being a prime example but one which works (for me anyway) and they operate under the guise of appearing to be healthy in some way. Why these aisle end items appeal to me is not clear. I'm drawn by some magnetic force to buy and try these beverage based social experiments and so far I'm living to tell the tale. I've already downed a bottle of pea green asparagus and apple so why should apple, beetroot and blackcurrant phase me. It's actually quite a delightful flavour and as for carrot and orange, well that's been a soup for many years so why not a drink? So far no side effects other than that odd sense of well being you get when consuming something labeled around fruit and veg as opposed to junk. Image is everything and cost is another.

The start of something neither big nor small, just mildly interesting.

Step into the occult

For no particular reason some strangely doodled on and corrupted stolen images. A brush with the world of the strange you might say (or the normal if you're a bit strange).

The beer is neither weird nor strange, just good, dark and strong. At a staggering 17% it's not a tipple to knock back quickly. Best savoured slowly and a little cautiously etc.

Set the controls

Set the controls for the heart of the sun (where it's bound to get a little warmer). Above: One well and truly fried thermometer that sadly expired when exposed to plus 300 degrees in the log fired oven. Little did we know it had such limitations, strangely and despite being off the scale for a few hours it still seems to be working. 

Below: On the recurring theme of my appetite for destruction and recording it's unexpected consequences here are some altered and pseudo artistic images illustrating the destructive processes undertaken to destroy some obsolete materials. They're now safely binned. Pretty much business as usual around here on a rainy Sunday afternoon.