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" ...

Butterfly on the Moon

Butterfly on the Moon: Another older song rendered into video form thanks to the tech of Rotor, a few of their clips and a few of ours. This is fun already. If you think that there's no real, modern and intelligent audience for this stuff, you might well be right. You might also be wrong. They say that size matters but it's not everything.

Mystery Box

 

I get what seems like a lot of spam messages from (fake?) supermarkets promising me a mystery box if I'll only ... I ignore them but would still like to get a mystery box. That far away and tantalising one I'm regularly promised. Morrison's Mystery Box, Sainsbury's Mystery Box, all full of ... proper mystery. Mysterious things in boxes are hard to resist. What if it was something valuable or just really dark? 

Who remembers "lucky bags" when they were kids? Those tacky mystery packages from about 60 years ago that all good corner shops sold. Cheap paper bags sealed and feebly filled with maybe a balloon or a wax crayon, rubbish sweets and a sense of disappointment. We kept coming back for more though, one time you just might be really lucky. Nobody ever was. Nobody had experienced a good lucky bag but we still tried and failed to find one. Nobody knew what lucky looked or felt like.

When people tell you after some event, trauma or serious episode in their life that "lessons have been learned", you can be pretty sure that they haven't. We're all hooked into experiencing the mystery. Repeat. We click the bait and believe in ... something.

China Penguin

Original but imaginary art: A fine porcelain penguin that was accidentally broken by a mischievous kitten is successfully repaired using the famous and quite difficult to master Kintsugi technique. This method is often practiced in Japan where fragile things seem to suffer damage from time to time. There is no clear information regarding the other objects pictured here but one looks like a similarly repaired egg also made from porcelain. That's it.

Natural Laser Use

When the bombardment of the on line adverts begin there's no hiding place. These are now crawling across my phone and laptop despite my chronic lack of historical foot fungi and any related infections - but I'm in the target demographic I guess being a 60+ white male; impulsive and obviously stupid. They know me so well and are delving into my click history ... or maybe not really. So who thought that the "natural solution" for fungal foot and toe troubles would be a Chinese built (I assume) laser device that you can safely clamp onto your toe? 

A Nobel prize is heading out in the post for the genius inventor of something we've all thought only possible in wildly crazy Sci-fi scenarios and maybe our worst nightmares. I did not see this historic medical leap forward and self use healthy lifestyle tech coming along in my lifetime. Take all of my money now and I'll quietly sit on the couch, laser doctoring my feet as I watch some AI crafted crime drama on Apple TV. Whatever it was Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke said or even just inferred about the future was all perfectly correct.

Insomnia

Are you troubled by insomnia? Night terrors, wee small hours starvation, itchy feet, over active imagination, wandering thoughts, anxious musings, a weird and unwholesome dread for what tomorrow might bring, hearing strange noises/voices, zombie nightmares, sleep talking or walking, monsters in the wardrobe, icy cold feeling, captivated by shadows moving across the ceiling, jumpy legs, enemies who might just be friends, over attentive pets, the need to pee, mysterious outside activity, drafting a novel in your head, distant alarms and disturbances, a dry throat or a persistent cough, far away train whistles, badly deconstructed guitar lines, tomorrow's shopping list, fear of the angel of death visiting, night sweats?

Well I'm not (so far), but none of this is true.

12 Years Gone

This started life as a so called bargain kit guitar bought on eBay with "parts missing". I can't actually remember what parts were missing and it hardly matters now. That was about 12 years ago and I had some enthusiasm for the project because I was selling pyro decorated guitars as a sideline. I put the cat design on it and fiddled with it for a while but it was never finished and never playable. I just couldn't get the neck level right, it went through a few necks and it was all a bit of a bodge, so I thought. There's a broken drill bit stuck inside there as well but that's another story. Needless to say it went on to gather dust.

Fast forward: It's now complete (I bought some crappy wooden neck shims from Temu that actually worked) but maybe it still needs a few adjustments. The guitar plays well enough and actually has a decent Tele sound, I didn't expect that. OK it's a bit of a mess but ... twelve years on and still a bodge. I'm lacking in the development of the necessary skills but I keep plodding along with this. Might just use it for slide. 🤔

Slouching Towards Bethlehem etc.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

...

Incomplete verses by my own editorial action, 

all still by W B Yeats, but you knew that anyway.

These words should get an outing on a regular basis.

Slow Moments

More detail than is actually required.

Enjoy the slow moments. We all need slow moments now and again. Time is made up of many moments, linked and stitched together but forever out of reach. Moving along on the narrowest way, walking beside some unfamiliar landmark, then standing under a tree to avoid the rain and wandering aimlessly to get nowhere. We are scattered across the dust, trapped under those heavy clouds. Always unprepared for the next time. 

Meanwhile cats just stay focused on those odd, floating, tiny particles, while remaining upside down and uncaring.

464 Articles

Now I'm being lectured over the fact (?) that I've read 464 Guardian articles in the past year, a bit more than one a day. In fairness it's a better browse than the rest of the mainstream press I suppose. To be honest I can't really remember much about it all. I was trying to recollect which articles stood out ... couldn't quite think of any. In one orifice and out another it seems. Too many words, bad news, tales, opinions, events, reviews and general bullshit out there. I doubt I'll even remember writing this in a day or two. That's my level of engagement.

It's nice to be one of their top readers globally but I'm not sure that a couple of reads a day is all that an impressive statistic. What's the average strike rate? Things must be tough for all these well intentioned and noble writers out there, and just because I read it doesn't mean that I enjoy it or agree with it. What's the point of holding politicians and businesses  to account when nothing actually happens to them as a result? I do look at the glossy ads by the edges sometimes, perhaps that's not good enough if I don't buy the stuff. I wonder why? I'm just tired of it all really.

Anyway I'm being scolded for being mean they say. I get "incredible value". It's worse than shoplifting. Pay up for the privilege of clicking on our page and stumbling over our hard work. There's an idea. I get the customary commercial point but I don't really care that much. It's all bad Karma's doing; because of me being a victim of the infinitesimal Spotify, Apple, Amazon and YouTube scales of payments. Sadly nothing has any value if you create, only if you distribute. The economic model (is it a model or a blatant conspiracy piece?) is broken. You read that here, for free. I'm a terrible person.

Happy Tuesday

 Everyone needs a happy Tuesday.

A golden shoes day.

I don't really understand what golden shoes might mean.

Sounds interesting.

Illustration by LB.

Imagined Daily Photo

Inner mediocrity: Turns out that my imagination is a fairly dull place with rather blunt edges and a lack of sympathetic tonal application. Some coin operated appliances may work up to a point. The property is available to rent via Airbnb but with limited seasonable availability even in the low to medium seasons. Forget the highs. Sleeps four. Pets and shoes welcome. Swamp parking conversion in progress.

Stories That Can Never Be Told

The Wager is a good book that I'd recommend. It's also nice to find subtle but subversive revelations and hidden truths in unexpected places. This makes me feel less alone in the world. A world which is a terrible place for too many people most of the time. Dark enemies, dark deals, dark silences and no real prospect of change.

"Empires* preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don't - the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out."

*David Grann is of course referring to the British Empire here. Not much about it's operating methods has changed since 1740.

Fire Walk With Me

Lego: Back in the days of the crazy cults movement this might have been a useful part of an initiation ceremony. You could tackle it dry as suggested above or of course add petrol and a lit match for the full early disciple, hot, sticky and life changing experience. Those who fail or refuse can't ever join but might be able to walk home from the meeting physically unscathed though some kind of mental health damage is likely. Anyway the abstract plastic hail storm that is deconstructed Lego remains both a marvel and a baffling enigma for most adults. 

Many modern homes will have a bin full of it somewhere, all the stray pieces that are never likely to be reconstructed into anything remotely recognizable making this also a study of pain, frustration and considerable expense. It could fit nicely into your team building sessions as an extra task if such things are still common in the workplace. Otherwise very useful as a prank when carefully set up on the parent's bedroom floor for late night high jinks and swear fests. All of this is very good for the Danish economy and certain aspects of Viking mythology.

Tokyo Skyline (Offical Visualiser)

Obviously at some point I was bound to use the sweetly pretentious "official visualiser" term with a video because ... I'm addicted to using bullshit descriptions and well, why not? However no high scoring hit count or forecast of some reasonable extra income whatsoever is predicted. Fame, recognition and notoriety remain elusive and far away helium filled balloons that I seldom think about these days. I also have a morbid fear of balloons. This is actually known as globophobia. There, you've learned something new and so have I.

Spectral Musings

"The light enters the room and bounces around onto walls and through glass objects creating pretty patterns as it travels. It actually does this at the speed of light which still seems a rather strange description to use despite the fact that we experience light speed every day because we see everything at the speed of light. Light speed isn't just for describing distances in space, we live all of our lives immersed in it. God save the Queen!" 

From the diary and journal entries of Dr John Claude Boscoe, 14th February 1842. Chief Scientific Officer on the sloop HMS Twigberry.

Dead Pigeons

Because we have sinned (obviously) in various fairly regular ways, God has sent a plague of dead pigeons upon us. Well at least two ex-pigeons have been encountered in the garden recently. Strangely the destroyed corpse of one of them ended up perched on the top of our seasonally bald willow tree. About half an hour after I took this shaky photo a small raptor, probably a sparrow hawk, came along and carried the stiff pigeon's remains off into the woodland nearby. It was lunch time after all. I saw it with my own two eyes but unfortunately not with a camera to hand.

Idiots Guide

Idiots guide to blog posts: Waking up on a strangely sunny February morning and having nothing much new to say about anything, what to do? Easy, simply post a picture with a quotation from some reasonably interesting historical figure. Dead or alive doesn't really matter. The quotation should be profound enough to cause the reader to think for a moment (that's all anybody ever does), then they can move along and get on with their day. The blogger then feels like something has been achieved despite knowing that it's all trivial, unconnected and unable to be properly measured because of the abstract nature of all things.

Of course none of this applies to the higher life forms who post messages, kitten and puppy pics, car crashes and advice and incidents of all sorts on Insta or Tiktok. The strike rate is robust and the energy is intense. They not only survive, they thrive and all is well in their world other than some users may suffer from a strong sense of  "I'm sure I've already seen that, I wonder where it was?" 

There are holes in the sky where the rain gets in but they're ever so small which is why the rain is thin. SM.

(Official Visualiser)

.

Welcome to the world of the official visualiser.

Apparently a thing that bands use these days.

Thinking of picking it up.

The use of brackets is optional.

 

"Pick up the things you love. Put down the things you don't. 

No matter where you are, that will feel like home."

I'm OK with this.