• watched Reno 911!: Miami (good in an extremely crude way)
• succeeded in soft-boiling an egg (bring water to a boil, turn off the flame, put eggs in for five minutes)
• crafted
• went for the ubiquitous fish and chips (well, I had scampi and chips — and peas)
• went to Carene’s birthday party (and promptly fell asleep on the couch when the party decanted to Brian and Carene’s house)
• went to have a KPO at Braehead Xscape (checked out Evans Cycles while I consider to buy a bike or not to buy a bike)
• watched Grey’s Anatomy (I missed the political leaders’ debate because I’d rather watch Grey’s)

I like how ‘boak’ is used like a Chinese word, it’s a verb and a noun all at once.

The most popular use appears to be, “_____ gave me The Boak.”

Here, clearly, it means _____ has given our speaker a feeling of nausea.

You can also say that someone (or yourself) Boaked. I have Boaked many times in my life, most notably in front of the church I used to attend (in the drain, lah, I’m not so disrespectful of other people’s property, even when I’m hammered).

Here is an image of The Boak:

Solomon the tiny turtle drank a lot of Edradour whisky, and it gave him The Boak. He Boaked, and got Boak all over the table.

I’ve never heard of someone Boaking, though.

I’m not all negative on stuff.

I agree with Alcohol Focus Scotland, who say that parents need to teach their children responsibility when it comes to consuming alcohol.

“Good parenting is the answer,” said Mr Law. “You would want parents to be responsible in introducing children to alcohol and I fear introducing legislation won’t solve the problem.

“Clearly, immature bodies cannot deal with alcohol like adult bodies. Parents can maybe introduce their children to alcohol by offering them a diluted drink of it at a family meal to give them a taste.

“What is also very important is that the parents act responsibly themselves by not getting drunk in front of their children.”

I don’t think it’s a huge deal if responsible parents occasionally get drunk and their kids see it, but it IS a big deal if their kids see them binge drinking regularly. There shouldn’t be an issue of letting kids and young teenagers try alcohol, as long as their parents set a good example of restraint and moderation.

Kids are going to experiment and rebel, no matter what parents do. My mother is not a drinker, and I wasn’t even into trying alcohol until I was 15 (when I had my first-ever drink). It’s my humble opinion that if parents led by example and their kids learned that everything they did had consequences, the general population WOULD experience a change in its drinking culture.

I’m glad to see an organisation being so sensible.

I’m usually pretty impressed by the stuff I read on Springwise. So many great business ideas I wish I’d thought of. However. There’s one recently featured called Postful, a service that will take an e-mail you send them, including the addressee’s details, and print and post it for you.

I can see how it would work well for things like party invitations and direct mail (or people who would find it difficult to write a letter), but you must be plumbing the depths of laziness if you’re e-mailing text to a company to send a personal letter.

In general, of course.

This could happen if your local council takes it on — you pay for how much rubbish you put in the bin. This is meant to encourage recycling.

Why I think it won’t work where we live:

The bastards are so fucking cheap I predict they will stay up late to dump rubbish in someone else’s bin. This has already happened to us when a skip was hired and Neil had been throwing stuff away all day, went inside for ten minutes and came back outside to find someone had sneaked over and dumped a carpet in it. As Neil says, if they had just come over and asked he would have said no problem, but to wait till he’d finished.

If the solution is to put a lock on the bin, that’s crazy, eh.

(I am very hopeful of getting a Green Cone composter anyway, so as little as possible is wasted.)

This morning, Alex Salmond got his chance to be interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland (should be on this page, Party leaders in the hot seat, soon). Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to listen to the call-in portion of the interview (pesky thing called work), but I did hear the initial interview.

Wow, what a difference from the quotes in the news and the party broadcasts. It reminds me of the time prior to Lee Hsien Loong assuming the prime ministership of Singapore — there was a PR offensive to portray his ‘kinder, gentler’ side. I suspect this is the effort to show that Mr Salmond is reasonable, rational, and altogether more statesmanlike than he has presented himself to be over the last few months.

What that tells me is he’s like every other politician. I am still extremely sceptical of their policies, so they will be getting that last preferential vote. Since I’ve gone through most of the manifesto documents, I know where my preferences lie.

When I remember to, I watch Meerkat Manor on the BBC. My mum and I love the meerkats. Mum has a plush meerkat posing on the bookshelf (I think the sloth I got her has more personality, though).

There was an episode of the programme ages ago that showed a subordinate male wandering off and trying to get lucky with a female from another tribe (he succeeded on his second or third attempt — I almost peed myself laughing at the 70s porn movie love moves). According to the New Scientist, this is regular behaviour.

Meerkats get their hole by pulling foreign birds. Hahaha!

There was a Singapore Day in New York? Did my sister go?

I love the reasons why Singaporeans won’t be protesting in NY even though the Americans love a good protest. My favourite?

Skarly MM see me protesting ministers’ salary, and I have to become a maid here – then how?

Heehee.

Hey, I’m not too keen on GM food either (I’m of the school of thought that if you fuck with Nature too much, Nature’s gonna bite back), but this is too funny:

The operation to sabotage the government’s GM potato trial was planned with care and under conditions of great secrecy. Two hundred and fifty protesters swooped on the 16-hectare site outside Hull, armed with shovels and filled with indignation.

They had the wrong field. They sabotaged a non-GM bean crop instead.

In a statement Mutatoes.org said: “With the information that we had and the short timescale available to us … we sincerely believed this to be the correct field. The public were not given sufficient information by the government, who supplied only a four-figure grid reference for the location of the trial.”

Hm. Government plans GM trial. GM protestors target GM trial. And they BLAME the government for not supplying complete information on its location?

Funny that.

Urrrrgghhhhhhh. The SHITE that comes from the SNP is maddening. I’m reading their manifesto (which, by the way, features a full-length portrait of the reluctant politician Alex Salmond on the cover), and my main question when I’ve read all the party’s manifestos is, Where are you going to get the money from?

They say they will deliver more efficiency. Perhaps they could give me an example where they would find efficiency savings. Which departments and using what processes. They say Scotland has all this income potential, but they’re basing it on prices that they cannot control (oil). They want to be independent of the Union, but are still planning on using money from the UK budget (I would like to see their plans for true financial and economic independence, and that includes NOT using the pound sterling). The most infuriating thing is that bloody local income tax. Business reliefs. WHERE WILL THEY GET THE MONEY FROM?

Independence, or the real possibility of independence, will bring uncertainty into the economic equation. Businesses don’t like uncertainty.

I hate these manifestos that promise the world AND lower tax for all. Do people realise, or do politicians count on people being so simple that we don’t understand that in order for one group to have more money, one group will have less (multiply by whatever factor of magnitude you like)?

Male osprey flies home to find out his bird (heh) has shacked up with another bloke — she’s even laid eggs for the other man!

Henry kicked the eggs out of the nest and observers had hope that he would believe two more that she laid were his - but he has now ejected them too.

If they were anthropomorphosised, there would be lots of glares and beers consumed in the same dank village pub. And murder trials. And fade-out sex scenes in council flats.

Did I mention we’ve finally got the central heating installed in Neil’s grandmother’s house? That it broke after a week and the plumber came back to fix it yesterday night?

Not that we’ve moved in yet or anything; the room that is to be the area known as LIVING IN SIN HQ still has an old fireplace lying on its face on the floor, which has had its carpet ripped up and I’m thinking we should do polished floorboards and a large rug because I’m so sensitive to dust. Also, every dust sheet / cloth / basically old curtains seems to have taken up residence in that room, and Neil wants to do something funky with the fireplace that needs to be bricked up because he found the original sandstone lintel.

Then we also need to furnish the room. There’s a store in Glasgow that has some mighty fine stuff, but we don’t really want to afford it unless they’re on sale, and they were on sale a month ago, and we haven’t been back since. So by the time we clean the room up it may be too late.

Then there are these chairs in the centre of the room, which are the main subject of this post. They were his gran’s, and he really wanted to keep one of them. I wanted to keep the other two. The thing is, they are upholstered in this very tired brown velvet burn out fabric, and need new coverings.

Most clever people would look up soft furnishings or upholsterers in the phone book. I’ve asked Craftster what to do. As if I’ve got the ability to re-upholster three armchairs myself. However, the first tip there says there’s no sewing involved, so maybe I can inspire Neil to visit Mandors or Remnant Kings to pick some suitable fabrics and we can DIY the chairs to our own specifications and be mega proud of ourselves. It would, indeed, be fucking brilliant.

Spent the weekend in Pitlochry, and we…

• checked into the Strathgarry Hotel (cosy, great, comfortable beds)
• wandered around the high street (there is only one, but two Indian takeaways)
• had dinner at Bistro No. 1
• walked around some more (along the loch — Faskally?) and then went back to the hotel
• woke early-ish (i.e. before noon) for breakfast and headed to the Pitlochry Dam and Fish Ladder
• walked to the Edradour Distillery through Moulin (went up via the stinkier East Moulin Road, and returned via the not stinky West Moulin Road), where Neil tried a few whiskies and bought a couple of the ones he liked (fire water, IMHO)
• had dinner at Victoria’s Restaurant
• walked around a little bit more, then went back to the hotel (finished reading Gold and watched Neil realise how bad the movie Swordfish is, and giggled at Wayne’s World)
• woke early-ish for brekkie and to check out
• went to the Soldier’s Leap at Killiecrankie (I’m still sceptical)
• drove to Blair Atholl and considered paying the £7.50 to visit Blair Castle but thought better of it
• paid our £7.50 to visit Scone Palace (pronounced skoon), which was quite worth it (it’s kind of sad or ironic that the nobility have to open their homes to the plebs in order to afford its maintenance)
• had dinner in Perth
• got home, had a shower, got into bed and started reading The Shadow in the North (a book purchased in MARCH when Jeff was visiting, and it’s the first time I’ve actually touched it — Jeff, I’ve only managed to read one issue of ReadyMade!)

Pictures will follow when I have the time to download. They is funny.

Two articles on the same topic in the same day. Two completely different countries are involved.

Will Britons be ‘paying for the convenience’ soon, or is it their right to get free plastic carrier bags? Hehe.

Since there are some details emerging about the South Korean shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre (I won’t bother to link as I’m sure everyone can find five billion stories reporting the same findings), some things have struck me.

Quite some time lapsed between the first and second shootings (official timeline), when Cho Seung Hui reportedly (I can’t find this anywhere but am quite sure I heard or saw this on the BBC) went back to his dorm room to get a second weapon and stock up on ammunition (thus this is unconfirmed). He may, on the other hand, have carried all the weapons and ammunition on him when setting out for his first target.

The thing I wonder — and we can all speculate as he’s dead and we’ll never know the truth — is if successfully carrying out the first killing emboldened him. I think if he had been identified and pursued immediately after shooting his first two victims, he might have shot himself or surrendered then. But he managed to get away, and that may have given him the psychological ‘push’ to continue and wreak as much havoc as he could (perhaps living a fantasy long played-out in his imagination).

There really isn’t enough known about him to work out what type of person he was, except ‘kinda fucked up’. Did he have an assassin-type personality (doesn’t strike me as the type)? What was the precipitating stressor? Was he organised or disorganised?

Could this have been prevented? Probably, if his issues had been dealt with in childhood. He doesn’t sound like a manipulative sociopath (the Ted Bundy type). Angry at the world, whatever incident ultimately pushed him over the edge made him believe it was time he punished the school / world for what it had done to him.

Yeah, I’m contributing to the hype. Sorry.

This says it all:

Their own leader, Alex Salmond, bounces above 40%, so the SNP are now fighting this campaign as if it were presidential. They have registered his name as an election “brand”, putting “Alex Salmond for first minister” beside the SNP logo on all ballot papers.

I knew about this ages ago. Alex Salmond is drooling after power and status as a legendary statesman. His ego has far outstripped his abilities. He is not sensible, and has demonstrated in recent days that he is as flexible on his ‘firm’ policy commitments as any other pollie.

How come his supporters don’t see that?

In affirmation of my lack of any knowledge or skill in the culinary arts, I’ve just had to look up instructions on how to soft-boil an egg.

I actually like the whites quite runny, so I would probably let it sit for only a few minutes! Neil and his mother think I’m absolutely gross and disgusting for sitting there and spooning runny eggs into my gaping maw. Hehe.

One of my fondest memories as a child who generally wouldn’t eat anything more than crisps and Coke is weekends with my grandparents (because my grandmother was a good cook), when Saturday (or was it Sunday) mornings meant waking up to a soft-boiled egg. It would sit there in its egg cup, quietly contemplating its last moments of existence. My grandmother would remove the top and add just the tiniest of dashes of Maggi Seasoning, then we would sit at the kitchen table, raise our tiny teaspoons, and dig in.

I don’t know if it’s a sign of my ‘just existing’ or general quarter- to mid-life ennui (because it’s so easy to exaggerate angst), but after decades of not indulging in runny soft-boiled eggs, I’ve got a serious hankering. Even after I attempted a not-so-successful egg boiling last weekend, I’m not daunted. I shall try again, and I WILL triumph over the egg.

Egg, you don’t scare me. I’m gonna get you. I’m gonna boil ya and slurp ya up without even a pitying thought for the chick you might have been if your mother wasn’t a battery hen and not allowed anywhere near a rooster.

I have more links of funny cats with captions!

• I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
• Flightpad.net
• Meme Cats

Via mental_floss magazine.

My own quite sad attempt:

Not much to say on the Virginia Tech shootings. It’s nasty.

My colleague asked why they had to emphasise that the shooter was Asian.

“Ban all brown and yellow people from buying guns and the problem is solved,” I said.

Haha.

It was, once again, heavily discussed on the radio and televion (BBC, I’m old-fashioned). I recall seeing an American journalist being interviewed and saying more gun controls should be put into place. A gun rights advocate rightly (heh) pointed out that criminals aren’t going to respect firearms legislation, no matter how much there is. He went on to say more about the RIGHT to bear arms (where was that cartoon of a person with bear arms??!!) — what he did not mention was that with rights come responsibilities.

Basically, there’s no point trying to eliminate guns from normal life (especially in the US). They’re here. Get used to it. Be responsible about gun ownership and accidental shootings will be minimised. There isn’t a damn thing you can do about deliberate shootings.