We have to have one of these on site! This is clearly a fine example of a Scottish Drndle. Note the Lutheran neckline.
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At the Oktoberfest Despite being Scottish, I rarely drink in the afternoon. Make Mine A Mass - oh and get us a packet of vinger crisps too. People have often asked me, when is the Oktoberfest and the surprising answers is the last two weeks of September and the first two weeks of October. This is such a popular festival that Bavarian television broadcasts the beer festival all day and then fills the news with Oktoberfest material. Now I would have thought that a tv broadcast about people drinking beer and eating Brezeln, Weiswurst and Senf (that's pretzels white sausage and mustard, although to compare any German Wurst to a sausage is a bit like comparing The Parthenon to a sandcastle) would not gather a large audience. But apparently all those elderly citizens, of which this country appears to have an inexhaustable supply, watch the fest on the telly. The broadcasts have a straightforward formula. Interviewer (who could be anyone as long as they are Bavarian) " Hello every...
It`s a small world I often tell my friends and German relations here, that back in Scotland there were so many members of my family that I couldn't walk along the high street without bumping into one of them or someone would say "Oh your Margaret's son, aren't you?" One of my cousins mentioned that she suspected we had at least 70 cousins and so to test this theory, I started to build my family tree on Genes Reunited. Hilariously the first person I found on it was my daughter, the second person was my neice who I think is living in England and the third person I found was one of my cousins living on the other side of the world. I you add this together, we could go on one of those round the world tickets now, cos I have an uncle in Hawaii, my best friend lives in Hong Kong and we have another Uncle in San Francisco. Just need some relatives in New York now and we are made!
To Bot, or not to bot. That is the question. Whether it is noble in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous bottery... It appears that my blog has been featured on some blog that looks at other blogs and therefore I am in some small way, almost totally Andy Warholled. I guess that the Booker Prize is not too far off, provided they actually get around to awarding prizes for mindless rambling. When I read the email, I have to admit that it does read as if written by a bot and the mention of my other web site - well that read as if it had been written by a bot too. Now pardon me if I am a cynical journalist (official) but I really wasn't impressed by any of it. I have a photo montage created by Chris Struthers from Merit magazine (-it's the last image) and the slogan from JFK's desk, but the review-bot seemed to think that this was a reference to space travel rather than the great mystery of the Lord's Creation. Hmmm. The message about my other blog read as...
Well, Jamesie, this looks a bit like... New Youth. Back in 1979 I used to manage the remants of The Fakes - New Youth and although I took lots of snaps, I gave the negatives to Jamesie when they split up. I do however have at least this pic taken in the backyard of some slum in Falkirk where they rehearsed and a couple o Johnny singing perhaps during their gig a le clique.
Mop Week - Breaking News Last week was our Mop Week, that marvellous institution created to save people money. As a fully paid up member I went ahead and swept the apartment foyer, the front path and the backyard. Susi mopped it later demonstrating how we Euro-Couples can easily work as a team. Now some of the neighbours on our side have taken to kehring for only half the area, as if there was a big checkpoint Charlie line down it. This is because they believe the other half of the apartment aren't as kehring as our side of the apartment is ( I guess we're not included in that group!). Now it is all very amusing to come down stairs and observe that one half of the foyer has been mopped, swept, tidied - but it is only funny once. After that it is just plain childish. So needless to say, I swept all of the area not just half. Of course I did spend at least five minutes extra doing this and I guess I will never, ever be able to recover the vast sum of lost wages. I am seriously co...
Set the controls for the heart of the sun I have lost count of the number of times I have installed Linux and then sadly uninstalled it. Last week, frustrated with MS Windows, I looked for anything new and exciting in Linux distros. It would be nice to put something on my old laptop that dovetailed nicely with all the open source software I already use. So, having tried Knoppix on a cd, I went ahead and tried to install Kubuntu. All went well and it all looked great apart from the fact that my wireless lan card would not work. Cue one week of reading crap about Ndiswrapper and a legion of other material. after lots of attempts I started to lose interest. Okay lets try installing Scribus. Hmm just exactly how many versions of Scribus installation packages are there? So I tried two Result: Failure. Surprise surprise. The biggest problem with Linux is that the whole process is geeked up to the max. Instructions for installing anything are often an experience similar to what used to happen...
Someone called me about three four months ago, and asked me how much I wanted for the pix of Jack McConnell reading the Beano. I quoted him a three figure sum - fairly reasonable I thought and he said he would call back... Guess I can stop holding my breath. So how does one get a photo of Jack McConnell, The First Minister or whatever is the odd name for the Scottish Prime Minister holding the Beano? Well this was one of the earliest photos I ever took for the Stirling News, back in 1987 or 1988 and that was when Jack was just Chair or vice chair of Leisure and Recreation so he had to be in all the photies. I think Eddie was the Chair at that time or it might have been John Hendry. Basically if you were an office bearer in L&R at Stirling District Council in those days you would be in at least five press releases per week minimum. So Jack was there with the big L&R Playbus and I managed to prize a Beano off one of the kids - no actually I took my own copy of the Beano just to b...
The First Minister reading the Beano. That little kid at the back was n't really grumpy honest. I could name him if only I had access to the old database. I told him to look like that. And Jack probably hasn't ever read the Beano. Well not the editorial section. I remember he mentioned the pix after it appeared in the paper and told me someone had suggested it was a bad idea. I'm not sure if it was one of the press officers - sorry can't name them or Mike Donnelly but you know, my suspect was closer to home. Anyway I told him that it was an excellent picture, that I had already made a 20 by 16 for my book! I had too.
Whee! Having identified exactly where the camera was on this ride at Euro Park, all we needed was bit of Austin Powers co-ordination. I am completely buttoned up (the back even!) because earlier, both me and Myriam were almost drowned in the Nordic Rafts. So not taking any chances this time. f8 at 60th of a second is my guess. Sort of wraparound lighting too. What do you expect for 6 Euros? Bailey?
Mop Week and Mob Week: The subtle difference. Well the our marvellous friendly neighbours (OMFN's) are oficially known as the Stolochnayas although I can't guarantee that the spelling of that famous international brand of vodka is correct. When it snowed heavily in February, they helpfully pointed out that our version of Mop Week (seriously, Kehr Woche, how can that be the description of an activity?) was NOT what they would call Mop Week. Actually only one of them said this and the other one stood as stiff and as quiet as someone would if they listened to this sort of crap day in, day out for more than forty years. Still being Anglo-Bavarian we are maintaining the farming version of the stiff upper lip (that's a potato in each cheek, I guess.) and paying no attention to them at all - well that's not completely accurate because one of them lost a pair of tights the other day, ( I'll leave it to your imagination to decide which one!) - they must have fallen from wh...
January - The Official Season of petty minded complaints
Perhaps it's the lack of certain green vegetables, but January seems to be the period when moaning reaches 747 noise levels here. Having spent the best part of a week preparing the sort of English exam that a five year old child could past, and despite providing them with all of the material prior to the exam and having an open book exam - some of them were still moaning.
Of course, no student in my experience in Britain ever complained to me personally that an exam was more difficult than it should have been but that's because students only complain when they believe an injustice has taken place - here students complain when they suspect they have failed - in fact any student who complains probably has failed and they are performing their own version of historical determinism in order to make it clear that it must surely be apparent, only the teachers can be responsible for failure.
Someone else always has t...