Diversification strategy 137
War, hide yourself 219
Granny’s at the gin again 220
We missed this on Sunday, because it was 17 minutes into on the short-lived and unlamented “Crossfire” (now binned for a Sunday edition of “Good Morning Scotland”) and therefore pretty much everyone in Scotland missed it. It’s former Labour minister Helen Liddell, or as we should properly address her, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke.
[audio http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/liddell-crossfire-21dec2014.mp3 ]We’ve spared you her subsequent painful bleating about a general election 35 years ago that she doesn’t seem to have quite gotten over, but we couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at her curious assessment of the referendum result, which we suspect fellow guest Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell was simply too stunned to react to.
Asymmetric warfare 68
From last night’s actually rather good “2014 – The Rory Review”:
BBC Scotland has 1,250 staff and an annual budget of just over £100 million. Yikes. We’re going to need a bigger fundraiser.
Would you like to play a game? 17
Since the demise of the Nintendo DS, I've done almost all of my videogaming on smartphones and tablets. A confluence of circumstances made traditional console formats less attractive for a variety of reasons, but also saw me spend more money on gaming than I had done in years. iOS and Android games offer a huge range of incredibly good titles at mindbogglingly tiny prices, almost all of them capable of fitting into whatever free time you have available.
(And not just because they're short, snappy arcade twitch games like Super Hexagon or Impossible Road. Classics like Civilisation and Shadowrun have been revived brilliantly to suit the format, and traditional genres such as scrolling shooters have actually been improved by touchscreen controls, with the likes of Dodonpachi and Raiden rendered far more player-friendly without reducing their fearsome difficulty one iota. Pinball games and others can finally get the aspect ratio they've always wanted.)
More to the point, it almost never takes 47 days to download one.
God loves an optimist 264
The Independent, 22 December 2014:
We can only admire Mr Murphy’s ambition.
The dangers of skimming 78
Libby Brooks in today’s Guardian:
The swing implied by the figures suggests that as many 10 Labour seats [sic] could fall to the SNP.”
But that’s not what the figures suggest at all.
The alpha ned 219
Fans of the bewildering in Scottish politics don’t look set to be disappointed in 2015.
Jim Murphy’s only been the Scottish Labour “leader” for a week, but already he seems hell-bent on hurling the party’s North British branch into the padded walls of its cell with more vigour than ever before, heroically ignoring the open door.
The Legacy 234
Iain Macwhirter in “Disunited Kingdom” (Cargo Publishing, 8 December 2014):
It’s a difficult assessment to dispute.
Behind the magic 158
We thought you might like a wee glimpse into the machinery.




















