After it became the most-watched episode in the show’s history, the producers of The Alex Salmond Show made a double-length “Director’s Cut” of our recent interview, which you can watch below if you should feel so inclined.
Yesterday we reminded you of how Wings predicted Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister of the UK several years ago. But of course, other soothsayers are available, like this confident chap from August 2014:
In news that will come as a shock to absolutely no readers at all, McDougall wasn’t just lying, and wasn’t just wrong about one thing, but was both wrong and lying about pretty much everything he said.
Both of the Yes camp’s “scare stories” which were sneeringly mocked by McDougall during a BBC debate in Inverness actually came true – the Tories DID win the next election, and Johnson DID end up as leader of the party and then as Prime Minister.
(McDougall burst into tears at Scottish Labour HQ on the night of the 2015 election as his party lost 40 of its 41 seats despite his services as Jim Murphy’s speechwriter and adviser, his powers of chortling seemingly having deserted him.)
And it’s interesting to revisit the debate.
Let the bells ring out and rejoice.
Still, at least the Record hasn’t been so completely lacking in self-awareness as to point a finger at others in Scotland and say something like “far too many people who should know better are complicit in the tragedy”.
29 June 2016. Don’t say we don’t warn you, readers.
And this was February of the same year, when Barack Obama and David Cameron were still in charge of their respective nations:
You’ll always read it here first, folks. Even when you don’t want to.
We weren’t sure whether tomorrow’s Cairnstoon was going to be delayed by technical gremlins (it turns out it isn’t), so we prepared an emergency backup plan on the same theme and you may as well see it now as a sort of trailer.
It’ll be good every time they dig him up yet again in the future too.
(With profound apologies to Oliver Frey.)
From today’s lurid Scottish Daily Mail cover splash about a “£1 BILLION TAX BLACK HOLE” appearing in the Scottish budget “despite [imaginary] Nationalist tax hikes”:
But hang on a minute.
Last night, grudgingly, we watched the whole of the final Tory leadership debate, for a contest in which pretty much everyone believes Boris Johnson has already gathered enough votes to comfortably win even though there are several days of voting to go.
The headline outcome the media appears to be focusing on is that both candidates proclaimed the Irish backstop “dead”, to which the EU’s response will without a doubt be “Is it, aye?”
So where does that leave us? Let’s have an update.
Galaxy Wars, released by Universal in 1979, is one of the first wave of "proper" arcade videogames (defined here as coded on ROM chips rather than being semi-mechanical or solid-state like Pong).
Running on a hacked Space Invaders board (as most of the first wave did), it actually bears a lot of similarities to Taito's 1978 blockbuster. It's got UFOs running across the top of the screen, above a field of asteroids which move one way across the screen, then drop down a level when they reach the edge and start moving back across in the opposite direction.
The screen was a monochrome reflector – sometimes supplemented by sheets of coloured cellophane to mimic a colour display – and all the sound effects are ripped straight from Invaders.
It was a pretty dull game, and other than an inexplicable Japan-only SNES port in 1995 (which seems to have been the only ever licenced home version on any format) it made very little impact on posterity.
Until this week, when it suddenly threatened to become mildly interesting.
Hey readers, remember that time when England went to war with Germany?
You know, just England, under its Union Jack flag. Nobody else.
Things were different in 2009.
Of course, they meant if they LOST the first one. But readers might feel that a certain degree of irony has perhaps manifested itself since then, particularly in terms of people knowing “what they would be in for” after June 2016.
So just to recap the UK government’s rules for the Yes movement:
– If you win, you don’t really win and you have to go again in case things change.
– If you lose once, that’s it forever, no matter how much things change.
Always remember what we’re dealing with, folks. The rules are always whatever they say they are, regardless of what they might have said a minute ago, and no matter what happens we’re swimming against the sea.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
