Thermal

Me too. Like when they advertise those jelly sweets that are pure sugar as being 100% fat free, or that ’1 serving’ of a breakfast cereal only contains 99 calories, then you see that 1 serving is the equivalent of some single atomic unit of measurement.

As an aside, what do you septics* call those jelly sweets, seeing as you call jam ‘jelly’? You know those chewy candies like, well, jelly beans. And why are they called ‘jelly’ beans when you can’t spread them on toast? One of life’s many mysteries…..

*Septics=Septic tanks = Yanks. Cockney rhyming slang, innit Mary Poppins?

The Loanhead of Daviot stone circle on a cold & frosty November dawn.

I would have liked to have got out to a few circles over Christmas but too much snow got in the way – maybe later in the month.

More circles on my Bigstones website.

I’ve got myself a Smith & Wesson – I’m going to teach some folks a lesson.

Henrietta Collins & The Wifebeating Childhaters

I know it’s human nature to see faces in abstract shapes, hence the many appearances of Jesus in a bagel (really, if you were omnipotent would you limit your tricks to food based pop-ups? I’d be firing lightning bolts at TV evangelists on a daily basis)but some of these are quite special: Faces In Places.

Smile!

Not a very promising title for a comedy show, but this was definitely one of the hidden gems of 2009. A whimsical Scottish-made comedy about 4 soldiers recently back from Iraq. Not sounding any better at that point, but it’s just the situation for the sit-com about 4 mates taking the piss out of each other and life in general.

Interspersing the show are little videos like this one supposedly shot on a mobile while in Iraq – the Osama Bin Laden one rating American fast food joints is hysterical but check out the Soldier Boys doing some moves….

I’m looking at the spam comments. Over ten thousand… What a waste of time and effort on everyones part. Mind you, I mainly blame the morons who click on spam links, buy ‘viagra’ etc. from them and make it worthwhile. Bah to the lot of you.

Still, many thanks for the 6,831 decent comments left by all of you and can you believe I’ve written over 1100 posts? And a couple of them were worth reading too.

Hopefully my blogging frequency will pick up in the year to come, and my new toy should help:

Blogging in front of the telly!

It’s a tool, not a toy honest…..

• This is actually the 4th year of this blog, though given that there was over a 1000 posts in the first year and about 4 since I’m not sure that counts.
• So many blogs in my feed reader have dried up it’s fairly depressing. Not that I can complain. Still, some have popped back up so I may as well join them.
• I feel like a change of direction, but inertia overwhelms me. A quote (by, of all people, a hobo to the youthful Henry Rollins) sticks with me: “I could have been a dancer, but I couldn’t get the shit off my shoes”.
• I am sick to death of empty-headed keyword spammers – these aren’t software bots, but actual real people leaving ‘nice post’ comments and thinking that I’m going to leave their links to ‘ultimate bowel cleansing’ up. Fuck Right Off.
• It’s been non-stop snow for a couple of weeks, with more to come, and due to the crapness of Britain the roads are so shocking I can’t go anywhere. Cabin fever sets in and my camera sits un-used…..
• I also know that my moans are trivial nonsense compared to that suffered by other people, but nonetheless, wah, boo-hoo, poor me.
• Happy New Year and all that

With thanks to the Curmudgeon for the prod, but he’s probably regretting that already….. How you keep up your quantity AND quality of posting is beyond me.

Some people should die – that’s just unconscious knowledge.

Perry Farrell, Nothings Shocking

Lots more like this at Yahoo! Answer Fail – you hope some of these are faked, but……

Growing tired of being slothful (ironic, no?) and wasting weekend mornings in bed, I ventured up at half five last Sunday morning and took the short drive to East Aquhorthies stone circle.

Dawn was due to break at just after 7 and when I parked the car with half an hour to spare, the sky was already lightening. A short walk up the farm track and I was at the 4000 year old prehistoric site and sorted out my tripod and camera. I am surprised by how un-spooky it is arriving at these places in the dark – you would think it would be creepy being in the middle of nowhere in the early hours, but I would definitely rather be there than walking the streets of a city at that time.

Nonetheless I could feel eyes boring in to my back as I waited for the sun to crest the horizon. Slowly turning I found myself face to face with a cow wearing the most human ‘what the f…. heck are you doing here?’ expression I have ever seen on an animal. Satisfied I didn’t want any of it’s grass it went back to chewing.

Dawn broke and I started firing off the camera. It’s amazing how fast the sun comes up once it’s made up its mind, and the light was continually changing as it advanced across the fields towards me. Pinks, oranges, reds and yellow all came through with varying intensity. Then, in less than 20 minutes, it was gone. The sun slipped above the clouds and wasn’t seen again for the rest of the day.

But I saw it:

More photos at my Stone Circle website, and you can see this photo larger on my Flickr page.