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Bespoilers Of Graves 266

Posted on November 03, 2024 by

From here, the top of the barrel is so far away that you can’t see so much as a pinprick of daylight through the most powerful pair of binoculars.

In a moving epitaph a few days ago, the widely-respected Professor James Mitchell of the University Of Glasgow noted of Alex Salmond that:

“He could be irascible and did not put up with fools […] He was impatient with lazy journalism […] and did not hide it. We can still see the consequences in some of the obituaries and commentary that reveal more about the writers than the subject”.

Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood magazine concurred, saying:

“In the clamour for commentators to vent their loathing, there have been too many sour column inches that have framed a man’s premature death around the egos of the journalists that have penned them.

Too great an appetite to rescue the words that were once filed and then spiked following a trial that didn’t give them the verdict they had prepared for. Too much haste to use his passing as the opportunity to seek revenge for a tongue-lashing or a put-down that they had never forgotten.”

And so, then, to Carlos Alba.

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The Skeleton Dance 73

Posted on November 02, 2024 by

That worth remembering 348

Posted on October 29, 2024 by

Alex Salmond will be laid to rest in the green turf of Aberdeenshire today in a quiet and dignified private ceremony. (A public celebration of his life will take place next month.)

Most of Scotland’s press and commentariat beclowned itself shamefully after his death just as it did during his life, but below is a (regrettably short) collection of those who did otherwise and who deserve to be noted honourably beside the man himself.

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A Delicate Art 255

Posted on October 26, 2024 by

Redaction is a tricky business, and comes with numerous pitfalls even if you’re being careful, which not everyone is. If you’re involved in creating a document you know will have to be redacted, there are a variety of safeguarding approaches you can adopt.

When I worked on a videogames magazine called Amiga Power in the 1990s, we ran a fun comedy feature about censorship. But because the company that published the magazine had had some unfortunate mishaps in the field, we took extra care by typing all the “offensive” words as random-length strings of Xs when we wrote the article.

And it was lucky that we did, because as you can see in the feature’s strapline, the art department misaligned the red redaction bar on some of them, and if there’d been a sweary in there it would have been easily identified.

Another way to go is to simply slap down some black ink and hope for the best.

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The Impostor 33

Posted on October 26, 2024 by


The 24 Official Genders Of Scotland 325

Posted on October 21, 2024 by

Are listed below:

Click the pic to enlarge, if you want to lose the will to live.

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In Times To Come 149

Posted on October 19, 2024 by

The fleas on the ticks on the midgets 310

Posted on October 16, 2024 by

Wherever you find giants, you also find parasites, bottom-feeders and carrion. When a mighty lion dies in the jungle, tiny creeping crawling maggots and insects and bacteria feast gleefully on its corpse for many days.

Which naturally brings us to the Scottish media.

The above paragraphs of cowardly innuendo and baseless speculative smearing were penned by Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks in the Guardian on Monday. (They’re not from the ironically-headed “Appreciation” that the same two hacks wrote for Sunday’s Observer, in which they audaciously claimed that Salmond’s success was down to Nicola Sturgeon).

They sneakily imply that Salmond was guilty not only of the sexual assaults of which he was cleared in court, but also of an unspecified number of unnamed others, and make assertions of “disturbing evidence about his personal conduct” without specifying what that evidence or conduct might have been.

Naively, we’d imagined that as repulsive as those lines are – though not surprising, as Brooks has always been a keen participant in the whispering campaign from allies of Sturgeon trying to discredit the trial verdict – they were as bad as things would get.

We weren’t even close.

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The Giant 462

Posted on October 13, 2024 by

It’s hard to write an obituary for someone you can’t quite believe is dead.

But we must look the truth in the eyes, and it is so.

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The King And Queen Of Cringe 262

Posted on October 11, 2024 by

Honestly not sure which of these is the most nauseating.

Click the pic to enlarge, if you can stomach it.

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Two Spaces 128

Posted on October 10, 2024 by

Everyone even remotely connected to Scottish politics has known for months that the below is the case. It’s an open secret.

But what’s playing out right now is something much bigger than the fate of one or two or three individuals. It’s the entire future of the credibility of Scotland’s justice system.

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Things happen slowly 102

Posted on October 06, 2024 by

When times are quiet in Scottish politics, as they currently are, our favourite genre of story is “mainstream press belatedly catches up with Wings Over Scotland”. And so to this morning’s front page splash in the Sunday Mail.

The rumour mill has been grinding about Operation Branchform developments again in the last few days, although we’ve seen too many false dawns now to get overly excited about that. But the Mail’s story sounded awfully familiar.

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    • robertkknight on Faces In Sand: “2014 Referendum Study Demographics Birth place: oUK: 57.1% No, 42.9% Yes rUK: 72.1% No, 27.9% Yes SCO: 47.3% No, 52.7%…” Oct 24, 21:35
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    • robertkknight on Faces In Sand: “Our learned misnomer talks about democracy. LOL. If all were fair, equal, democratic and meaningful, then EU Citizens, in addition…” Oct 24, 18:35
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