A thousand-word metaphor 237
Posted on
September 02, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Assessing the earthquake 750
Posted on
September 02, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
If anyone was still harbouring any doubts as to the significance of last night’s poll news, they would surely have been dispelled by this serious, thought-provoking and perceptive analysis on the BBC news channel’s “The Papers” roundup last night.
Of course, the poll might be a rogue. It might just be a temporary bounce from the second Salmond-Darling debate. And it still shows No in front. The Yes campaign will have to redouble its efforts in the last couple of weeks, not start congratulating itself.
But the one thing we can surely all agree on, right across the political divides, is that the most important aspect is whether someone might at some point have been slightly rude to Andrew Lloyd Webber on Twitter or not.
A surprising development 286
Posted on
September 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The rather sour Times leader linked in the tweet doesn’t actually specify the numbers, and the poll isn’t officially released yet as we write this, but we’d been hearing rumours of a Y47 N53 (excl. DKs) for a little while beforehand, so it looks like they were true.
Less than a month ago, YG stood at Y39 N61. If these numbers are confirmed, that’s a colossal 8% swing in three weeks, from the most No-friendly pollster around.
Game, as they say, on.
Bringing the smackdown 123
Posted on
September 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We thought this deserved a wider audience after the Herald’s appalling front-page lead scare story today by Michael Settle and Kate Devlin, channelling Jim Murphy MP:
“SCOTTISH POLICE FEDERATION
5 Woodside Place, Glasgow, G3 7QFTo: News Editor
Date: 1 September 2014
Subject: Independence Referendum
Oooft. ‘Nuff said.
Brass neck polished again 130
Posted on
September 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The Daily Record, 27 Aug 2014:
And Mr Brown again in the Observer, 31 August 2014:
They want to cut corporation tax by 3p in the pound. That’s less for health and pensions, not more.”
Veteran readers will know where we’re going next.
A significant escalation 185
Posted on
September 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Last week, Yes voters only hated their families, not Scotland.
This week it’s both. Can you feel the fear, readers?
New volatility blow for Salmond 88
Posted on
September 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
34 months later 173
Posted on
September 01, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Wings Over Scotland officially launched on the 1st of November 2011, with a collection of posts imported from a personal blog. (The first original post didn’t appear until a week later.) It was meant just to be a small aggregator site of interesting stories from the newspapers with a short bit of commentary. That month we had 6,290 pageviews.
We’ve grown a bit since then.
Not waving but drowning 272
Posted on
August 31, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
So worn-down are we by the job of scrutinising Scotland’s exhaustingly terrible media for three years for you, our beloved readers, that we often can’t bring ourselves to watch current-affairs shows live any more, steeling ourselves to catch up with them on iPlayer only if people say there was something of particular note on them.
We’re glad we didn’t miss this, though. Because it might be the case that no politician in human history has ever been as hopelessly, pitiably, comically out of his depth as Willie Rennie was on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland.
Down in the tuba station at midnight 45
Posted on
August 31, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
After all the unpleasantness of recent days we thought you might enjoy a bit of lighter viewing for a Sunday afternoon, so here’s an excellent short documentary about the Wings card game, “The Last Voter In Scotland”, which is padded out with background footage of a bloke called Greg something.
We think he’s some sort of computer guy.
Almost at the limit 107
Posted on
August 31, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Thank goodness there are only 18 days of the independence campaign remaining. We’re not sure we have the capacity to absorb much more idiocy like the below.
Never knowingly unhysterical 126
Posted on
August 31, 2014 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
If you’ll forgive one of my very rare switches to the first-person view, readers, I’ve found the last few days in the independence referendum particularly weird.
That’s because my current life is curiously mirroring my previous one as a videogames journalist. The gaming community is at present mired in a convulsive orgy of the most mindboggling horror over something called “GamerGate”, which I couldn’t even begin to decribe adequately to you, because frankly you wouldn’t believe me and I’m not sure the words exist to do it justice anyway.
By way of illustration of that fact, this article on games website VG24/7 is, genuinely, by far the best, most accurate summary and analysis of the situation that I’ve read. (Twitter followers will already have seen me tweet a couple of random samples of what’s going on. I urge you, if you can, to endure the entirety of that second link, and note that it’s had almost FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND views.)
But while proving that the sort of abusive insanity pervading the world of videogames makes even the absolute worst of indyref name-calling look like two kittens with woolly hats on having a meow-off over who gets first shot at a saucer of milk, the core principles are the same – a tiny handful of total boneheads having their actions blown out of all proportion by the press in a shock-horror frenzy bearing no relation to the actual experiences of 99.9% of people.
