There’s a remarkable piece in today’s Scotsman that we had to share with you:
And if you think that magnificent headline’s good, wait until you hear the rest.
When we knocked up this image in Paintshop for a bit of fun a month ago, we had no idea it was going to turn out to be quite so prophetic. The final act of the Rangers saga is going to play out just like the three-way Mexican standoff at the end of Reservoir Dogs, with Sevco, the SFA and the SPL all shouting furiously, pointing guns at each other and daring the other to crack first.
Charles Green’s consortium is still, at time of writing, thought to be refusing to accept the SPL’s right to pursue the dual-contracts investigation against Rangers Football Club PLC (in liquidation) and apply its findings to Sevco Scotland Limited. By doing so, it is in effect holding the whole of Scottish football to ransom. If our game is to survive the next 48 hours with any integrity and meaning whatsoever, the SPL, having (with massive reluctance) come this far, must not blink.
Because any Doctor Who fan will tell you what happens if you blink now.
Sometimes – okay, quite often – I'm rather jealous of my good chums over on the world-conquering PC gaming site/shopping list Rock, Papers, Hot Gun. I enviously eye their devoted millions-strong audience, weighty peer credibility and enormous paycheques, and think "If only Podgamer could have lasted more than three and a half hours without everyone stabbing each other", and other such wistful regrets.
Then I remember that if I was on RPS I'd have had to devote part of my one precious and irreplaceable life to playing Diablo 3, and everything's alright again.
A few of my favourite lines from this morning's Eurogamer coverage:
"What all the Diablo 3 Error messages mean, and what to do about them"
"UK launch video, images, Iain Lee, people in wizard costumes"
"Though the downloader may show 100%, please allow some time for it to fully complete."
"The server is full. This is likely due to high login traffic. The only solution is to keep trying to log in."
"If you're still running into this issue, there may be an error in your foreign language appdata files. Some players have found a workaround, but please be aware the steps they provide are not something we can currently support."
"Error 3004, 3006, 3007, or 300008 – There are a number of possible causes for these errors."
The future of videogaming, there, viewers. No thanks.
Yesterday we drew attention to a disgracefully untrue claim made by the leader of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To A Second Referendum Party at the day’s FMQs.
Davidson had attempted to pass off the personal views of just THREE members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors as representing the official position of the august and 125,000-strong body. It’s the sort of bare-faced lie we’re sadly accustomed to hearing from opposition leaders in the chamber, but it was also an illustration of a much wider and depressingly-growing phenomenon.
Let’s learn about it together.
So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.
In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.
Sorry, readers, we’ve been too busy boiling with rage at revolting, cretinous Americans for the last few days to trust ourselves with writing a full-length article, but we’ve just about calmed down enough in time for this month’s polling analysis.
Which is handy, because today is also the day of the Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester (fun fact: a seat we’d very likely have lived in ourselves if not for Osama bin Laden, but that’s another story), and that throws up some interesting parallels.
In politics, readers, evil and stupidity aren’t the same thing.
But nor are they exclusive.
The Sunday National’s front page today elicited a sigh of “So what?” from most.
We’ve already GOT a “pro-indy” majority at Holyrood and have done for the last 10 years, for all it’s been worth. But to be fair there was a paragraph in the article that at least raised a quizzical eyebrow.
Another month has passed, so we suppose it must be time for the third of our polling-analysis pieces for the Scottish Parliament election in May.
(Last time round we assessed the grotesque rank idiocy of voting SNP on the list if you want a pro-indy majority, and the time before that we considered the possible impact of Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party on seat numbers, which now looks rather less potentially semi-interesting than it did last summer.)
So what can we look at this time?
Well, what if Unionists were slightly less stupid and tribal than SNP voters?
Yesterday we noted in passing that independence support now outstrips that of the SNP by more than 20 points, making the party into a gigantic liability as the vehicle for enabling Scots to leave the UK. Put simply, even when voters want independence (as most now do), they’re not willing to vote SNP to get it.
(Not, of course, that they WOULD get it if they voted SNP – the party still having no coherent or credible strategy to achieve it – but more than 40% of would-be Yes voters are no longer prepared to even try giving them the benefit of yet another mandate.)
And since what everyone loves most of all on New Year’s Day is a good old wade in some political stats, we thought we’d take a little more detail on that.
There’s a post on the superwoke poll-analysis account Ballot Box Scotland today bemoaning the lack of interest in the forthcoming Scottish Parliament election from polling companies, and presenting it as some sort of anti-Scottish conspiracy.
The real reason nobody’s very interested, of course, is that as things stand the election is an obvious foregone conclusion in which the party that’s been in power for the previous 19 years will stay in power for another five, and nothing will change.
The only minor intrigue around the election is to be found at the edges and is only of real interest to politics nerds, but since we ARE politics nerds we may as well take a look at it.
For lack of anything more interesting to write about, we thought we might do a monthly rundown of polling in the leadup to next year’s Holyrood election, with seat projections from a neutral source, in the shape of the newish Devolved Elections website.
And very quickly, things got a bit weird.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
