Philosophy is not so tough

These guys don't say much but their thoughts are priceless - Plato, Lao Tzu, Arther Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. They also double as fridge magnets but the door is overcrowded (see below), so they reside on a bookshelf adjacent to a digital radio, books and some useful "Believe in God" spray. It's really a utility shelf for existential emergencies. They crop up around here now and again.

I have a theory about famous philosophers: most if not all were hampered by having a malfunctioning sense of their own space. They were the kind of people who were never quite sure where and how they fitted in, sometimes they were in your face, on your elbow or just generally invading some other no-go zone. After some struggles with continually bumping into people and being a source of annoyance they retreated into their own private space to think and write heavy philosophical books hoping that one day once the books might be read and published. Then once they have established a philosophical and literary reputation they can come out of hiding and invade space again and start a series of pointless circular arguments nobody can really be bothered with - all because they never learned the extended elbow rule. Sad.

It may well be that you do not, as yet know the extended elbow rule, if that is the case then you might want to click here, or not as the case may be. Whatever you do be mindful that you have a choice.

Chocolate Swatch

Now I can tell the time accurately (shame about everything else)

Thanks (very much you thieving bastards) to getting robbed by the white van Druid, New Age Travelling Furry Freak and Chav Brothers Society a few months ago my lifetime assets have now increased by about 100%. I wisely spent all of my share of the money from the Victim Support Agency (only available in Scotland, read the small print if you can read) on a fine chocolate watch but one guaranteed not to melt Dali style. It's nicely chunky, bullet and bomb proof and without any noticeable ticks - ideal for all forms of time travel (one of my regular pursuits). I'll be completely happy with it as soon as I can discover how to get the tin opener blade and corkscrew out of the winder hole. Get it here on Amazon or any other participating South American waterway.

What to eat on a cold Sunday

Salad should of course always be served at room temperature as opposed to fridge temperature. The trick is getting rooms to room temperature and more importantly what is room temperature anyway, in darkest November here in the West Lothian outback?

Difficult dietary issues

We've finally established that donkeys don't get squished into UK cat food, neither do horses or kangaroos, however Japan sticks with a high fish content as you'd expect, not sure about the rest of the world. That got me thinking about the contents of burgers (but not hot dogs, that's too far) and what might be acceptable to the Scottish palette. I can't see any cultural or ethical reasons why they can't make it into the meaty part of cheeseburgers so I'll assume they are there and in order to maintain the fine balances required for my immune and digestive systems to operate I'll stick to one double CB a week.

P.S. Apologies for the excessive use of brackets above but they are my favourite punctuation and I'm not sorry at all.

Water on the moon

Wot? No sauce on those good looking chips?

A typical Saturday afternoon at Knockhill: Champers, chips and a trophy for the eventual winner of the 2009 Trumper virtual F1 Challenge, so the triumphant winning team leader (of the neatly named Zoom Zooms) enjoys a well earned cuppa tea. Meanwhile back in the pits and car park I think I want a Nissan Skyline, that's a pretty immature but predictable thought.

Meanwhile on the karting track there was a certain amount of wet weather mayhem, slips and skids but the Trumpers finished strongly running out clear winners. The Barclays however hoovered up the minor places mainly thanks to a decent fried breakfast and a strong sense of fear and fair play. Karting in bad light and rain is a challenge but he views are nice.

Nice to hear they've found ten buckets of water on the moon, I'd imagine the water came from some crashed asteroid, not sure about the buckets though.

Love at first bite

"I feel wonderful because I see that love light in your eyes..."

It was a relationship that I'd never have expected to see blossom but strangely enough the Light-Up HP Mouse and the Hamburger Phone do seem to be shaping up rather well in the early stages of their romance. They've spent quite a lot of time together, mostly alone in the quiet of the dining room getting to know one another but it has reached to the point where I'm feeling a bit odd walking in on them unannounced. Perhaps I should knock or just cough a little before slowly entering the room. Anyway they make a cute couple and despite a few fundamental differences in voltage, functions, circuitry and ethnic backgrounds (Hamamastu, Japan and Jiaxing, China respectively) I think they'll do fine. They've come along way to get this far and I just need to make sure that they don't meet up with the rather aggressive electric can opener residing in the kitchen.

So what about Meccano? James May seems to be to blame for this latest outburst of spanner and Allen Key activity (I recall when AK was a simple screwdriver). Unbridled nostalgia and a fair amount of boredom have resulted in experiments surrounding "roll-over" or "self-righting" go-carts made from Meccano's best. We need to do a bit more work on this but at least there is a prototype to experiment with. We're actually doing a trial run at Knockhill tomorrow.

As about to be featured on BBC's "Top Gear" - note the ironic lack of gears, cogs and mechanisms of any kind.

German cinema

The original soundtrack.

In a curious twist, caught in a spiral of slinky manoeuvres and non-mechanical skids, that old devil called Karma once again has dealt us an odd and unexpected hand. Our marvelous and free to air music is going to feature in a film documentary currently being put together in Germany, more details to follow. Did I ever tell you how much I love German cinema? See you at the Oscars (foreign language section).

Today the cat's discovered rotisserie chicken. They went mad, the civil war and diplomatic cat crisis came to a sudden and swift end as they shared a common goal, to get a piece of that hot and tasty chicken. Every cat has his or her price.

The day I downloaded myself

A day much like any other...

It’s a peculiar life being a minor musician or a songwriter in these digital times. The market is flooded with home made, self penned, desk top designed and published up material that each hopeful musician sees as his or her finest work. Most of it remains out there, undiscovered on the web, in dusty CD piles or trotted out occasionally for a live performance in the back room of some good humoured pub or community centre. Once in a while there will be a solitary sale, some feedback or a blog comment before the continued pursuit of vigorous anonymity resumes. If, as we are, you are content with this fate then really it’s ok, your small mark has been made, your time bomb has been planted and the fevered act of creation has now cooled into something substantial and complete though naturally now framed in obscurity. So if you want more how do you console yourself, how do you justify the effort, possible expenditure and the slow realisation that your works in a long queue to be heard and discovered? The still, small voice tells you that the odds of them being heard or appreciated by any kind of reasonable audience are lottery sized or worse.

One answer is to give it away, forget the prices, the costs, the penny a play sites and the rip-off merchants who charge you $100 to be stigmatized on some compilation that may or may not make the earshot of some mobile phone advertising exec. Just give it away, again and again. Life is too short to wait on the ting of the cash register and the lengthy delays from third party provider payouts or for some drunken punter to argue over £3 for a CD - and you don’t really need that pointless anxiety. In the last few months we’ve had over 3000 free listens and 100 free downloads compared to no CD sales, 1 itunes sale and a few cents of streaming money. Relax and give it away and enjoy the vicarious pleasure of having multitudes of unseen, singleton listeners – and even if things get tough you'll never ever feel you need to explain or justify another CD spectacle to friends or family.

Drivel from the fifth estate

So the relentless documentation of the trivial, the pointless and the terminally annoying goes on proving the deep truth that fiction is often more interesting than facts and that inspired fiction is often better than fact - and more accurate. Fellow members of the Fifth Estate (which you are if you are reading this) I salute you, half hearted as ever.

Today started badly thanks to a deep depression of ghostly fog that descended like fluffy frozen cheese over everything and most notably on my car, a classic Monday morning start, getting angry at frost. Weather anger is neither useful nor able to be channeled in a positive direction so it remains inside, pent up and throbbing on the twenty minute drive to work. In fog you cant help but notice that all drivers who have their hi-vis lights on in normal weather leave them switched off in fog as if in some perverse tribute. Some poor souls decided that to drive across the Forth Bridge in thick fog with no lights was a good idea, clearly these people are having a worse morning than me.

Coffee is a killer, please do not be fooled by the hype and step away from the Starbucks. It's bitter, powdered, milky crap hoovered up like wild cocaine from exploited farmers and served to irresponsible members of the public who cant understand the rules of engagement for their car's fog lights. It also makes you pee worse than cold German Lager with one cup resulting in at least a litres worth of foggy urine. Then when the warm, coffee rich urine hits the coastal sewage farm sprays and atomisers after its long journey from the city in cold weather...

Video games suck but I wish I had the basic skills and span of attention and concentration to play and complete one. Maybe it's more coffee I need.

Fray Bentos pie memory

Missie the cat looks down from her lofty fortress in the high basket country. (105 known mouse kills)

Anna, the new (old) kit in town. (1 known mouse kill)

Missie the cat woke be this morning with her muddy paws and a presentation pack containing a recently deceased mouse, nothing unusual there then. One thing did however arouse my slowly waking senses and that was the distinct aroma of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie that seemed to be hanging in the air around the still warm mouse cadaver.

I've a lot of happy memories associated with the old FB pies, once a staple part of my diet, so for a few moments I ignored the actual mouse and drifted back to those FB days (mid 70s I'd say). It goes like this: after a long shift in Paisley Gas works it was home to the cosy log cabin in Pollockshields for an FB pie, hot from the black black oven (no other superfluous foods were added) and a "screw tap" of Whitbread Pale Ale. This was followed by a fag and a relaxing listen to Little Feat's "Sailing Shoes" or possibly "The Grand Wazoo" by Frank V Zappa. Then down to the pub with Sheba the Alsatian for a tussle with the locals and some fairly spaced conversations. (Sheba didn't add much intellectual quality to the conversation but neither did I).

For a while I thought that Fray Bentos meant from "Bentos", then after staring into some school atlas I discovered that there was no actual "Bentos" but there was a Fray Bentos, stuck at the edge of the rain forest full of pie and corned beef factories, or so I imagined, there far away on the dreamy Brazilian coast or in the jungles of Uruguay - I can' remember. A place well worthy of a visit for any self respecting carnivore.

At this point the mist lifted from my eyes and I picked up the dead mouse in a tissue and disposed of it by flipping it over the hedge - funny about that pie-mouse smell though. It's left me wondering could I, would I ever eat another FB pie? It's been 35 long years...

Barclay Jnr scored a proper hat trick today (3 solo crackers in 15 minutes) against the best of Pittenweem. The reward? £5 cash up front, a large McD's vanilla shake and two salmon and cream cheese bagels (ex-Ali's kitchen).

Soccer Am in the afternoon

What a drag it is getting old. My first long lie in in a month and I couldn't hack it - there was a cat staring down at me from the top of the wardrobe. No sleep till Broxburn and I'm on the couch dozing through Soccer AM, the crossbar challenge and showboating. I feel like I'm staring at goats sometimes, trying to move from room to room, couch to couch and eating sausage sandwiches to the tune of Saturday morning TV.

Hopefully few of the garden birds suffer from nut allergies. There are now five dispensers of various nutty and warming products, all of which will produce warm feathers and bright eyes, pretty much one feeder for each little bird. God bless them these winter months, I hope they take advantage of the offer.

We hovered around the great Herris fence that is Edinburgh town centre, only for long enough to undertake essential transfers of currency and odd items from the great halls of Jenners and Co. Christmas is coming it seems but you can forget the trees. The bright lights of Morningside float past and light up a hundred interesting shops and restaurants, most of which we will never visit. Today I was a passenger.

20000 people standing in a field

The multitudes...

...are amazed by the pagan spectacle.

It's nice to get out and socialize once in a while, meet a few folks, compromise personal space and gasp at burning chemicals fizzing far above your head. So by the light of our faithful torches we crossed the fields to the gardens of Hopetoun and for about an hour stared into the burning sky. Phone pictures do not of course capture very much of the detail at all. For a few short moments it seemed as if the world was ending in a flash of bangs and in bangs of flashes, then there was some generous applause and we all trudged home (or back to your car if you were unfortunate enough to have brought one).

Ordinary things

Today I ate an upside down steak pie while standing up, quite normally but I may have been sitting at the time. Two Muller corners were consumed earlier in a bid to remove a small cloud of cold germs that were hovering close by. It was all rather ordinary but I admired the overall geometry and the general tick-over.

Tomorrow the huge bonfire at Hopetoun House has summoned us to it's fiery interior. We will make a rare and shadowy appearance in the winter darkness. Effigies will be burned, trees scorched and the cold earth made warm once again.

If you are feeling sinister

Now is the winter of our general, seasonal driven discontent and mood swings. The weather is playing havoc with football arrangements, sandbagging, buying petrol, driving conditions and generating nasty little drafts. We are keeping our heads down, enjoyed free bonfire tickets and living frugally on salad, seafood and cauliflower cheese as is the custom round these parts. I've also watched some strange movies, the best bits being falling asleep during chunks of the Exorcist. Not a patch on the Fantastic Mr Fox - go and see him today.

The cult of Lego frees a man from fear

Bow down, genuflect, worship at the firm and snappy temple to the Lego god we have made from..err...Lego. A veritable archangel thunderbird of acute angles, round bits and colours the names of which none dare speak. We are absorbed, self absorbed and ridiculously faithfully calm within our humble Lego shrine.

And so, at age 54 or thereabouts I now find myself better fed and probably better off than at any time since I was 53. I ask myself "when will all this riotous and uncontrolled progress come to and end?" Or I might say "is it that my life is spinning forward and onwards to some unreachable vanishing point masquerading within the curved/linear perspective that I suspect drives the universe along." As far as the idle and in my case detached viewer is concerned that could be a correct assumption anyway.

It's the one hearty meal a day that is creating this unusual situation and like most things it is not sustainable, which as I reflect on the fish, chicken and pasta, the green, green salads and the luxurious fulfilment of my basic needs is indeed fair enough.

Mr Cougar is looking fine and sitting square on the road sporting new suspension things, most likely they are called bushes, branches or arms or some other adopted natural name. I'd love to say that I notice the difference and that all my motoring moments are like sliding along a silk road on a sunny day but the fact is I've still got the same two slow punctures in the back that I first noticed in June. It thankfully passed the MoT mind you and all I need is the odd 20p to spend on free air and the steely will to avoid doing 140 on the motorway. Easy enough really.

Mostly listening to chill out stuff.

Bits of Abbey Road and Frightened Rabbit.

October

Artist's impression of grandchild No5 or a very primitive scan.

Fish playing in Aberdeen.

A bush surrounded by other bushes and growing things in Dunfermline or thereabouts.

A sunny view of the bridges from the rather rundown and shabby beachfront at St David's Bay. More facilities management funding please.

How not to cook

How not to cook cookbook.

By Aleksandra Mir for the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2009.

While the typical cookbook format gives you a recipe for obvious success it does not take into account the many ways in which its execution can fail due to the cook's lack of experience. Based on Aleksandra's personal history of cooking disasters, the project invites 1000 people from all around the world to give their advice of how NOT to cook. With this volume, any reader will be more than well equipped to avoid making the same mistakes in their kitchen.

Aleksandra is interested in how we are taught or teach ourselves through trial and error. By making our guilty failures public we may even be creating an original and subversive form of art, rather than simply be aspiring to obvious and repetitive results.

Kate Gray, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh

Strangely enough I find that I'm in this nice book (my name is on the credits!), I just can't remember the bit I contributed.

All roads lead...

The road and the miles to Glenrothes. A popular folk song round these parts.

Food: After resolving a brief misunderstanding with the trouser buttons on a new suit purchased for work I realised that an emergency diet was not now required. I celebrated with an apple, beer battered chips and some chicken nuggets and two episodes of the Simpsons.

Songwriting: Having a real piano in one room and a drum machine in the other both playing loudly may seem like an odd combination for instrumental locations but it seems to work. We tried it last night, the drums thundering at a stately 86 BPM in the dining room and the piano plunking away in the lounge, strange chords and melodies arose while I sat in the middle gently strumming on a dobro. In the end some good music was created and will be completed and recorded one fine day.

Priorities: These are things that tell you what you should be doing next but can never quite get round to, often people, time and cash dependant and subject to short notice changes and unplanned adjustment. It's nice when diet is less of a priority that piano plinking.

Dead pedals: Wasted two hours yesterday trying to figure a power failure in the pedal board - all it takes is one cable round the wrong way...blame in on the slow but steady expiring of various cherished brain cells.

South Queensferry daily photo

Business is booming as the good people of SQ flock to the local commercial sector.

The cultural and financial centre of the 'Ferry, part of the great Co-op Scotmid empire flanked by a Chinese restaurant, curry shop and peculiar clothing retailer. I always feel guilty about not using the apparently unloved Co-op, set in it's dreary car park and flanked by nothing in particular. It is compromised by being half a mile away from the larger Tesco that sells everything cheaper and is generally much busier, leaving the poor old Co-op forlorn and abandoned looking - but it does contain a proper post office. The trouble is you can never quite get the stuff you want in the Co-op, the TV ads portray nice green and ethical ranges but when you get in it's just miles of Irn-Bru promotions, stale looking cakes and very tired out and pale vegetables. I just have to learn to live with the guilt of regularly going elsewhere.

We watched "Burn after reading" last night, a fine portrayal of mid-life crisis, greed and paranoia with a lot of added laughs. Watch it and see numerous car crash situations come alive before your very eyes and then spontaneously combust. The names were no doubt changed to protect the innocent.

I uploaded three random tracks onto Amie Street last night, less than 24 hours later the money has already started rolling in, well almost. It's such fun being part of the modern, dynamic and completely unpredictable music industry.

Packaging and octaves

Some packaging we have been working on recently - no hazards here you would think.

Halfords White Spirit: Bought from this reputable store to clean paint brushes, easy enough to use you would think. It should all be so simple except for one basic problem. The two reasonably fit and sane adults in this household couldn't open the "safe and secure system" i.e. the bottle cap. I had no choice other than to breach numerous health and safety guidelines by attacking the bottle with a Swiss Army knife - it seemed like the easiest way to gain access to the precious contents, by now desperately needed to save the life of a quickly hardening paintbrush. Then the remaining spirit had to be decanted into a leftover Lenor bottle creating obvious comic possibilities and more potential for accidents. The list of things I can't easily open grows, these are the current Top 5 problem packs I'm struggling with:

1. (New at No1) Halfords White Spirit - you'll stink and the sink will be spattered.
2. Rice Crispies Breakfast Bars (all flavours) - finger gym workout needed before tackling these bad boys early in the morning.
3. Cellophane on CDs - want to hear a tune? You'll need a sharp knife first.
4. Tinned mackerel - try to get the lid open without spattering yourself with a fine selection of Omega 3 enriched oils.
5. Tesco Bread - sealed with a tiny bit of tape and a weird tab that the Incredible Hulk couldn't open.

P.S. Just noticed this on a Toilet Duck Brush pack, "If accidently swallowed, seek medical advice", once you've done that (swallowing a toilet brush) you can also sign up for a lucrative circus career I'd imagine.

50s style Les Paul bridge: Carefully adjust the Allen Key so that the string length allows clear fretting and that the octaves are accurate - maybe.

There is nothing more annoying than some twat tuning and fiddling with guitar strings, plinking and plonking around. This weekend it was my turn to re-tension the truss rod, file the frets, adjust the bridge and chase octaves up and down the neck. In the end I'd made no significant improvements but I hadn't broken anything either - something of a triumph I'd say.

and the tramp

Jonathan Meades eating a crab and making people crabbit.

A She-Hulk picture that I like but is not relevant to tramp and lady themes.

I woke up this morning (as has been said many times) with "the lady is a tramp" running around in my head (the song, not wide-eyed cartoon dogs). I realised, as my version of the lyrics replayed within the great grey place of thinking, that I didn't understand quite what the song is/was about at all. That same deep lack of knowledge applies to a load of other songs, aka the big pile of misunderstood or not understood songs and lyrics, not even my friends at Wikiland can help out. I remain as ever an ignorant and useless lyrical correspondent.

Some people were upset, angry or possibly spitting out their pies over Jonathan Meades' "Football Pools Towns" docu-babble on BBC4. "Negative and ill-informed and unbalanced" some said. Not me however, it's tone was a kick in the footballs for Fifers like me (we become used to that) but in other bits, particularly on council house architecture, the decline of community and the aftermath of the Scottish industrial decline it hit the penalty spot. Truth is sometimes best served up by itinerant strangers and then left with us, like an unexpected present or time bomb. After an appropriate period of reflection it may all make sense...

"She gets too angry for Corrie at eight, she likes the bingo, puts the sugar on the slate, she never bothers to clean out the grate, that's why the lady is a tramp."

Blog could do better

I'd forgotten what we'd left in the garage.

October at last with nineteen long days to unfold before one of my more regular birthdays occur, every year they come around, just like clockwork. Because of this and nothing else really I regard October with some more affection than any of the rest, it's my birthday month so it must be better than the other eleven sorry segments. I think my car needs MoT'd this month, a probe will be gingerly placed up it's exhaust pipe and the tyres kicked I'd imagine, but I'm staying in denial of this until I have to pick up the phone and book a test then hear the bad news that is due to break.

To celebrate the first day of my birthday month (after an irritating day at work, the kind where you realise you seldom ever get things right and your vocabulary is far too small for an adult) I bowled into the local Tesco in the vain hope of finding some tasty teatime bargain in the stacked and crowded shelves. As I joined the shuffling, shopping masses mortal indecision quickly set in robbing me of free will and the ability to choose. Ten minutes later the fruit of my labours was two bags full of nothing in particular and I'm £18.50 lighter only to realise that what I really wanted was an Indian take away. I came home to be presented with a useful free sample sachet of toothpaste in the mail and two dead mice curled up like Inca mummies on the door mat - I ate a pork pie and an overpriced Cumberland sausage and returned to the happy place near the back of my brain, happy MoT and birthday when it comes.