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.
We don’t have much to say about this graph that it doesn’t say for itself.
The arrest of Peter Murrell on 5 April 2023, just a couple of weeks after his wife had realised the game was up and walked away before the cops came round and put a big blue tent up on their front garden, changed everything in Scottish politics.
Apologies for the slightly shonky quality of this video, readers, which is due to the fact that ITV are such monumental self-sabotaging clowns that it’s not actually possible to screencap any sort of digital broadcast of theirs – screw YOU, viral content! – so we had to do this by videoing our iPad with our iPhone.
Ouch. And speaking of monumental self-sabotaging clowns, Scottish Labour.
Last Friday’s edition of The National ran this guff:
And as we often are, we were put in mind of the greatest politics book ever written.
It is, if you’re a bit dim, almost possible to believe this.
But not for very long.
We were excited to discover this old footage of a very young John Swinney.
How thrilled he must be that he’s managed to make his dream come true.
To pass the time on (praise be to Baby Jeebus) the last day of the Holyrood election campaign, we thought we’d do a catch-up summary of all the seat projections we could find from last month and this month. Here it is.
Now, as it happens we think the potential seat ranges are significantly wider. There are so many factors of uncertainty that while there’s no credible doubt who’s going to be the biggest party, we reckon SNP seats could potentially be anywhere from about 47 to 68 (most likely the upper part of that range), with corresponding ramifications below.
But there’s one potentially interesting thing in that bottom half.
It’s nearly over, readers. Just one more week of this to endure.
The most miserable Holyrood election campaign of all time will end next Thursday with an election which will deliver Scotland’s most miserable devolved government of all time. Only the exact form, colour and shape of the misery remains to be determined.
So as the SNP promise through forked tongues to cut the cost of living with a pledge they know full well they have no chance of being able to actually implement, while using the powers they DO have to INCREASE the cost of everything that makes life WORTH living, let’s look at exactly what flavour of dog vomit we can expect to be choking down along with our state-approved organic broccoli and fat-free gruel for the next half-decade.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
