FOLLOW UP: Scotland's Suicide Poet

Who's been paying attention - there's a test at the end you know! Mind this one?

Stephen Watt has been appointed the Teuchter's very own Bard of warm baths and slit wrists.

Caledonia Calling wishes him well and offers this piece of sincere advice - get a haircut you fucking hippy.

Freedom! from pain for Scottish Lobsters

The Daily Record gets gets itself all boiled up about news that the Scottish Executive is thinking of adding crustaceans to the Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Bill. As a result we would no longer be allowed to boil lobsters alive.

Liberal Democrat MSP Nora Radcliffe suggests sticking a skewer between their eyes instead!

Never forget you're Scottish!

At first glance news that Scotland took the field as favourites in the world Elephant Polo Championships seems the perfect story for a Scottish blog. The Times however reveals the true scandal - only one member of the team is actually Scottish and worse still two of them are actually English!.

Team managers are desperately trying to track down a Scottish granny for one of the team Elephants.

The Aberdeen Cup

A liquid/hardware interface problem has recently curtailed my posting activity - this will be sorted when I can be arsed to get down the shops and buy a new keyboard. In the meantime I'll try and keep you up-to-date by bunking off work to write updates.

Let's kick the week off with the news that hardly anyone can be bothered reporting - Andy Murray and family won the Aberdeen Cup. After the jump - the Telegraph is unimpressed!

Ebay Watch

More Christmas gift ideas:

If you ain't tooled up, how do you expect to get yer freeeeeeeeeedom!

Scottish? Proud? Then fucking show it - without Saltire valve caps you're practically English.

This is just sick - I'll just bid on it to keep it out of the hands of children.

For the lover of "vin tonique" in your life.

All these items expire over the next couple of days so get bidding you dobbers.

A wee dram

At last I've found what I want for Christmas - a nice hip flask!

The Growler holds up to a gallon of your favourite tipple. Perfect for the grouse shoot, deer stalk...or Polmont gutter!

Stranraer - best pasta in the UK

Who'd of thunk it? Stranraer - not just good for catching the ferry to Belfast, also home to L'Apertif which has been voted the Best Pasta Restaurant in the UK.

Here also a Google cache of a report of the award in the Wigton Free Press - you have to scroll down a bit.

Coming Home to Roost!

Just don't fucking panic!


D'ya get the headline?

Scottish events this week

Get yersel down to Covent Garden, London on November 17 - the music will be pish, but the tree will be Scottish.

If you go down the Borders this week you're sure to get yersel bummed, sorry! I mean sure to come across something tasty. The Borders Food and Wine Encounter is going down at loads of venues from November 16 to 19. For more information, tel 01835 822261 (they don't have the internet in the Borders yet).

I'm um bongo for podcasting - Visit Scotland have put together a series of audio guides to Ed. Download to yer iPod and hit the streets - watching our for thieving neds.

Made in Scotland

Wur aye banging on about how inventive the Scots are but a while back I mentioned that I was unaware on any Scottish companies which had shown innovation in web services or products. I'm not looking for a Yahoo or Google here - a flickr, Web Logs Inc, Blinkx, Rojo, Friendster or any other type of secondary type of service would be magic.

Deloitte and Douche have recently published their list of Scotland's Fast 50. I'll be taking a closer look over the next few days to see what companies we have in there.

A right strammach

Glad to see Jim McLean being inducted into the Scottish football Hall of Fame - punching journalists is a fine tradition which all managers should follow!

As for Big 'Eck - no comment.

Money grabbing ned

Andrew Stimpson would have you believe he’s a medical miracle – he is in fact nothing but a wee ned from Largs. You’ll find dozens like him hanging around the amusements on the sea front.

Stimpson claims to have beaten HIV infection and promises he’ll do all he can to help others do the same. He seems to be going about this in a funny way though. So far he has:

- refused requests by his hospital to return for further tests.
- attempted to sue the NHS for getting the initial test wrong.
- sold his story to those august medical journals, the News of the World and Mail on Sunday.

Odds on he’ll be on Trisha within the week – fucking Plamf!

Teuchter Watch

It's Sunday, so here's a lazy trawl round Scotland for some local news:

Here's the heartwarming tale of Gallashield's Janet Mullen - her face ended up on Bank of Scotland 20 quid notes and she didn't even know it.

Inverness publicans announce their secret weapon in the battle to keep punters happy post public smoking ban.

Blairgowrie pupils have made it to the final of the Grab-5 cooking competition - which seems to involve peas.

Forres launch mult-pound campaign to raise support for tourism in the area. Despite the massive 250 quid being spent to promote the campaign's web site the Forres Gazette have managed to print the wrong URL!

More fines from Glasgow Council

As a recent victim of Glasgow's bye-laws I'm neither surprised nor very happy about the news that the council intends to fine drivers who sit with their engine idling. A few questions:

What evidence is there that engines idling is a problem?

Why is this such a problem in Glasgow? No-one else seems to be bothered about it.

What sort of accountability will there be? Will we see a full revenue and costs statement for the project? What happens if emissions are not cut - will the fines be dropped?

Has anyone taken into account the extra costs of having the police going around fining motorists?

Why are Glaswegians so happy to sit and let this bunch of numpties legislate so freely against them? Stop being such fucking sheep and tell Robert O'Neil to go fuck himself.

Whisky and Green Tea

Has anyone tried this? If so let me know.

Nice cup of tea....and a bit of cake

By the somewhat circuitous route of South Africa's Independent Online we hear that officials in Assam are searching for the descendents of Robert and Charles Bruce - the Scots credited with "discovering" Assam tea 180 years ago. The discovering bit involved some of the local population showing them where the bushes were - so we're not talking Indiana Jones action here!

"In the early 1830s, Charles Bruce set up the first tea plantation in eastern Assam's Sadiya town and shipped 12 chests of manufactured tea to London in 1838." About 450 million Kilos are now produced each year. The Indian Tea Association would like to invite any relatives of the Bruce Brothers round for a cuppa to say thanks.

They might even get a bit of Dundee Cake which the Dalai Lama is apparently mad for.

Scottish Music - London double header

Fantastic gig double header coming up in London Town.

It's the Old School versus the New Cool with Franz Ferdinand kicking things off on Wednesday November 30 at Ally Pally. It's sold out but - hey!, we can all Ebay -can't we? and London wages positively demand that we pay a tout premium anyway.

The very next night the Brothers Auchtermuchty play the Shepherds Bush Empire, tickets still on sale. Let's get pissed, get down the front, and gob all over each other as we shout "500 miles".

Monkey Shoulder

Found a bottle of Monkey Shoulder (which I mentioned a while ago) in my local Sainsburys of all places. Whisky has actually been pretty good at marketing itself through Supermarkets - while Tesco and Sainsburys both have a good range of malts it's pretty impossible to get, for example, a Bourbon other than Jack.

Anyway - forget about Monkey Shoulder - they've tried to make it palatable to non-whisky drinkers by making it way too sweet. The result is both pretty awful in the mouth with an even more cloying after-taste. The bottle came in handy for Hot Toddies when I caught the Bird-Flu though.

Scottish Events this week

Here's some truly random Scottish keech going down this week.

Heroes, Wyndham's Theatre, London.
Ken Stott, the man born to play Rebus, treads the West End boards. No idea if it's any good but in the unlikely event that Stott is bad you've got John Hurt riding shotgun.

The Real Thing, Theatre Royal, Glasgow till November 12.
Like the above this is by Tom Stoppard - Tom Conti stars. My Ma went on Monday night - she says it's mince and she left at the interval. This is a poor review indeed.

Skye Jazz Festival, on Skye (like duh), November 11 to 13.
This will quite possibly make you wish that they hadn't built the bridge - nice!

Petrolia, the Lighthouse, Cromarty on Saturday 12th November 2005 at 6.30 pm.
You'd have to be fucking mad or a publicly funded arts project to hold an open-air film screening in Scotland in mid-November. Guess which?

STOP PRESS - Sadly due to sudden illness the Australian String Quartet will no longer be playing in St Andrews this weekend. Tickets holders are politely informed that the replacement event will no longer be "bring your own".

Romanov the younger

Anyone else notice that Heart's new chairman looks about 15?


Guess that helps explain Graham Rix then.

The lady's not for turning!

I’ve not written about the Scottish Tories before – mainly because there’s no sport in kicking a sick dog.

Love them, or loath their sick, black, evil hearts – you’ve got to say that the national hunt for a Tory leader has been genuinely exciting, and that the process has potentially thrown up a real break-through candidate in the form of David Cameron.

In Scotland we get some daft old bat who stands uncontested and then starts banging on about wielding her handbag - will someone tell her that were in the 21st Century and that Maggie already has one foot in the grave (my dancing shoes are ready!!).

I knew devolved politics would be bad but God help us!

What the fuck are you looking at?

Meet Mark Webley and James Tant, the criminal masterminds behind a recent Glasgow shooting. Webley (on the left) fired five shots from an automatic pistol at some rival of his - I think he had a shinier tracky or something like that.

Of the five shots fired only one hit. Looking at the photo it's pretty obvious why his shooting is so bad - he's clearly mixed up about which finger to use on the trigger!

Both have been banged up for 11 years.

Cute and cuddly

Been off for a few days - I reckon I had this bird flu malarky but the wife insists it was just a cold and I was being a wimp.

On my return I find out that I've been getting some of my highest site traffic - I reckon everyone's been going bongo over the cat story. Fluffy animals would appear to be the best thing (next to naked women obviously) for traffic generation.

In that vein here's a picture of a random horse to mark the retirement of Trooper, one of Edinburgh's finest.