Our apologies for the lack of recent activity here, readers, but there’s just been nothing happening worth talking about. Meanwhile, here’s some more music.
See you soon, hopefully.
This really is grim, folks. Remember the days when there had to be overflow rooms for the leader’s speech at the SNP conference, in venues holding thousands? Now they can’t come close to filling 750 seats in a 2000-seat arena.
The reception afforded to Sturgeon yesterday, who left the party in the pile of wreckage that the hapless Yousaf is still trying to stumble through, was a symptom of desperate people clinging forlornly to the shadow of better times, like an abandoned dog seeking the last bits of warmth and scent from its owner’s chair.
But those days are gone, never to return. This is the barren, foreboding autumn of the SNP, the cold ground thickly carpeted in the lifeless, crumbling and silent remains of lost members fallen from branches.
The SNP put out this party political broadcast (PPB) last night.
And alert readers might already have noticed something odd.
I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.
They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.
There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:
(Warning: some adult content.)
Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.
Luckily, someone else has already said it for us.
The haunting words of a dead man, brought to you again on the exact anniversary of the day William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered at Smithfield in London for treason against the English crown.
Three deaths for the price of one. RIP.
We’ve used this video before, but it’s extra-apt today.
Humza Yousaf is played here by Morgan Freeman, the big plane carrying the bomb is the independence movement and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in the chopper.
Me talking about debanking on TalkTV earlier today.
At least, we assume there was a sizeable current being passed through it, as little else could explain the visibly uncomfortable half-hour experienced by hapless Stonewall chair Iain Anderson with Beth Rigby last night, or the seemingly random changes every few seconds in his facial expressions, body language and accent.
(Just about the only constant, other than his sweating top lip, was the deeply irritating modern phenomenon of stupid people starting every sentence with the word “So…”.)
If you’re a connoisseur of vacuous, nervous awkwardness you’re in for a real treat. If you want to see a human being actually answering any questions with even the tiniest shred of coherence, pertinence or honesty, maybe give it a miss.
It is our solemn duty to inform readers that deranged, shovel-handed Scottish Greens member and known associate of rapists and paedophiles Scott “Heather” Herbert has taken the hump at a Wings article from yesterday in which he was satirically featured.
He filed a malicious false copyright claim with YouTube which resulted in a silent video clip from the article showcasing his comically gigantic man-hands being scheduled for deletion, despite Herbert owning no copyright in the video (it’s the property of TalkTV, who have raised no objections to it) and having no legal standing to file any complaint.
But YouTube’s abysmal automated structures operate on the basis that all complaints are intrinsically valid, and allow absolutely no way for Wings to appeal this decision.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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