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Hillonearth

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Everything posted by Hillonearth

  1. Looks like it - north Africa's weird as it's just far enough from Europe that for the most part the birdlife has only changed subtly, so something like a bulbul that's quintessentially African is a good one to see. I was in Tunisia a while back and just hanging about the hotel we had Spanish sparrows, spotless starlings, palm doves, serins, slender-billed gulls, ultramarine tits, desert shrikes and so on....everything seemed to have a direct equivalent to something at home. Managed to see Eleonora's falcon down at the ruins at Carthage as well.
  2. Saw that old Burnistoun sketch recently where Iain Connell does an uncannily accurate impression of him pumping the ground re-enacting a wedding night before running screaming at a couple of hillwalkers to re-enact a clan attack. It seemed pretty restrained compared to the real thing nowadays. He's one short step away from calling himself Neil of the family Oliver...watch this space.
  3. With Indian food especially there seem to be so many variables that often it seems impossible to make exactly the same thing twice, and thus a lot of reviews might be based on a single time someone's tried the place. Last weekend I had a curry from one of the local small takeaways on the main street - a keema dhansak madras - and it was absolutely excellent with a really good kick. An easy 8 or 9 out of 10, and would recommend in a minute. Whether it was a a case of a different cook being on with his own ideas on how to make it, whether it was a different balance of ingredients or whatever, I got the same thing again last night and it was mediocre at best....maybe 5 or 6 out of 10 at a push. Based on those two occasions, the truth's probably somewhere in the middle of the two extremes...maybe a 6.5 or 7.
  4. It's strange that they seem to be proportionately better as you go down the pyramid and worse as you go up it...I was also hearing that Celtic often don't manage 2000 sales with crowds of close to 60000.
  5. I got one of those weird flights once that went Glasgow-Edinburgh-London and it was hilarious...you're only in the air less than ten minutes between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the smokers only got about two draws in between being told it was okay to smoke and the no-smoking light going on for the landing.
  6. It's flipped 180 degrees. A band used to tour to promote an album, now they'll record an album to promote a tour. Ticket prices used to be incredibly cheap accordingly...I'm one of those sad acts that has kept ticket stubs, and it's weird to look back...within the space of a few months in 1980 right at the start of my gig going career I saw both Rush and Sabbath with Dio for £2.50 a pop, while Judas Priest (with Iron Maiden opening) charged a mighty £3.25...allowing for inflation, the Priest gig cost maybe £12 and the other two less than a tenner.
  7. There's definitely a demographic bias towards older supporters in terms of who buys them, but the stereotype of the fanbases being a squad of old guys in bunnets is only true in a minority of cases these days...there are a few like that who still live up to the cliche, but the majority seem to be attracting a much wider cross-section these days.
  8. Definitely on their way out across the board...Hamilton are the latest to chuck doing one...apparently recently they've only been selling 50-100 to crowds of 12-1500.The only folk that are seemingly distraught are the "I, for one, won't be back" groundhopper types who seem to demand uniformity of experience everywhere they go once in their lifetime. Funnily enough, programme sales seem to have held up better at non-league level...I do ours and we'll probably sell one to every third or fourth person through the gates on crowds of 150-odd. I think a lot of is down to being a bit less corporate with less emphasis on big glossy photos.
  9. Used to hate it in restaurants - conversely I never minded it in pubs. I remember the night after the smoking ban came in I nipped into one of the hole-in-the-wall boozers in Partick on my way home to see how it was holding up. Smoke hid a multitude of sins...when you walked in, the smell from the bogs coupled with the honk of spilled beer nearly knocked me on my back.
  10. I suppose one way of looking at it is that if the gospels were an album, Mark would be a collection of rough early demos, Matthew would be the finished album with extra tracks added to the running order, Luke would be the 30th anniversary remaster and John would be a weird album of extended remixes.
  11. As you say, with a subject like this there are always a subset on either side of the fence who coming to it with a predetermined bias and are consequently overly-invested in coming to the "right" conclusion. When I say "consensus" I was attempting to ignore those commentators approaching the question with their minds already made up either way and to include the more dispassionate commentators without an axe to grind. I hadn't heard of Robinson, but he certainly seems to be something of an outlier in his conclusions. While it appears that there might be elements of eyewitness testimony in the case of Mark, and just possibly traces in John. the author of Luke (most likely the last-written) seems to happily admit he wasn't an eyewitness right from the get-go though: Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, Even in Mark though, there's clear evidence of tampering which fundamentally alters the story the author originally intended to tell...perhaps the most egregious being the much later addition of a longer ending which explicitly and anviliciously rams home the resurrection.
  12. You do get the odd one - normally someone new to the job or perhaps newly promoted and still at the trying to make an impression stage, but it's rare in my place. Earlier in the week I was called into a planning meeting and nobody batted an eyelid at the fact I happened to be wearing a Boards of Canada T-shirt, jeans and army boots that day. It's not like my input would have been intrinsically more valid if I'd worn a suit anyway.
  13. From what I understand, the current consensus is that Mark is the earliest-written of the four and there are some references in it that date it to no earlier than 66 or 67AD...interestingly, that's the one that doesn't mention a resurrection or indeed a virgin birth. Mark was used by the authors of Matthew and Luke as a source document, with the current guesstimates dating Matthew to 80-90ADish and Luke slightly later...maybe into the second century. I've purposely left John till last...it's a strange outlier, and the jury's still out. Small elements of it - though NOT the whole package, which was still being revised well into the second century - could conceivably be the earliest of the lot, and those elements might be the best bet for genuine eyewitness testimony. Parts of Mark could conceivably be as well, but the other two virtually certainly aren't.
  14. I dunno - they've been predicting that one for a long time and it hasn't happened yet, although it's clearly currently in a slump. There are certain forms of rock music - heavy metal is a good example - that appear to have turned into something almost along the lines of C&W, rarely mainstream but never in any real trouble of dying off completely.
  15. And while we're at it, no omipotent hyper-being would have ever "intelligently" designed the scrotum unless it was for a laugh.
  16. We're getting close to the point where at least some newspapers must be thinking about ceasing print editions completely. Generally, newspapers across the board are losing around 10% of their remaining sales every year. There eventually will come a time where there's no point doing a print run for the few thousand old codgers left that insist on a hard copy Daily Express or whatever. It's across the board as well...the gammon gazettes like the Heil and the S*n are going the same way sales-wise...the former's lost 20% of its sales in the last two years and the latter hasn't even published circulation figures in that time. Probably the biggest loser has been the Record which is only selling 60k-ish a day now, but a lot of that was obviously self-inflicted back in 2014.
  17. Perhaps the easiest disproved example of biblical literalism is the intelligent design v. evolution thing....I've got an interest in ornithology and can think of three examples off the top of my head of different kinds of evolution in action just among the birds you can encounter in Scotland. You've got evolution through dispersal...an ancestral population of gulls spread in all likelihood initially from the Baltic region both to the east and west over the subarctic northern hemisphere...by the time they'd made it all the way round the world and met up again in NW Europe they'd evolved into the two separate species called the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-Backed Gull which you can readily see by looking out of your window. There's also evolution by separation...the all-black Carrion Crow of the lowlands and the grey and black Hooded Crow of the Highlands were once a single taxon which ended up separated from each other during the last Ice Age during which time they genetically disconnected from each other sufficiently that they're now two separate species. The last one is evolution through hybridisation....there's a scarce seabird off our coasts called the Pomarine Skua for which there's absolutely no evidence of it having existed prior to as little as 1000 years ago...good luck getting two of them in the ark because they didn't exist back then. The hypothesis is that two pre-existing skua species freely interbred perhaps having been trapped due to an Arctic weather event, with the fertile offspring forming the basis for an entirely new species.
  18. I remember reading an anecdote in The Gulag Archipelago where Stalin was making some speech....the ovation went on for ten or fifteen minutes until a local party chief eventually took the initiative and sat down. He got lifted that night by the NKVD and was told "Never stop clapping first..." Probably similar vibes in Russia at the moment. A sure recipe for falling out a window would likely to be caught on camera giving it
  19. I've always found it distinctly worrying that anyone thinks they're getting the direct-from-the-tap version of the big message of Christianity from reading the bible, far less feel confident to pick and choose the bits they want to focus on. None of the four canonical gospels in the new testament were written prior to 70ADish at the earliest, and parts of them might even date to the second century, which would strongly suggest them to be at best garbled word-of-mouth rather than anything based on eyewitness accounts. Factor in the fact that what actually became Christianity was much more along the lines of St Paul's ideas....he freely admitted to never having met JC, but based his ideas on the big chap coming to him in a vision and telling him alone what he'd really meant the whole time, much of which was almost diametrically opposed to the more closely aligned to Judaism proto-Christianity being practiced by the people who'd actually known him. Finally, you have to take into account 2000 years of mistranslation and tweaking to suit contemporary political and theological needs...an obvious example was the mistranslation of the word mekhasheph...."You shall not suffer a poisoner to live" is a more accurate translation than the "You shall not suffer a herbalist to live" of the middle ages, which was eventually changed yet again to "witch." at a time when folk remedies were being equated with witchcraft by those in power. Accurate translation of that one word would probably have saved a lot of old wifies being burnt at the stake.
  20. Seems to be quite a few of them up that way - I've seen them at the Science Parks too. Probably won't be too long before they establish themselves throughout the leafier parts of suburbia like they have around London. They're already appearing here and there in the South Side and adjacent South Lanarkshire.
  21. One thing I remember was a couple of weeks in having to nip into town to pick up some stuff from work - went in about 10am and was the only passenger in a four carriage train. You normally don't notice the jakeys and junkies about the place, but at that point they were all that was around...genuine 28 Days Later vibe going on. Never paid much attention to the tier system...I'm walking distance from another health board area dnd it never stopped me. I remember it was a bit weird though being issued with a letter from the SFA which "allowed" me to travel as I was involved in the delivery of elite sport. Strange times.
  22. Depends where you're travelling from, but the X74 bus that goes to Dumfries from Glasgow and Hamilton has been a gamechanger in terms of being able to see the clubs down there compared to travelling by train which takes forever...sure, there are a wee knot of sides in the hinterland - Newton, Wigtown, St Cuthbert's, Creetown - that are difficult to get to, but the likes of Abbey Vale and Lochmaben are short local bus journeys away from Dumfries, while the bus literally stops at the end of the street Lochar play on and also in Moffat for Uppers. Mids and Nithsdale are also both easily do-able by train from Central.
  23. LTTs are great fun to watch....I remember one frosty morning seeing a big load of them exiting a nest box we had set up where they'd obviously been sleeping....looked like one of those videos where you try to cram as many folk in a VW Beetle as possible....must have been 15 or 20 of them scrunched up in there for heat.
  24. Somebody very audibly taking a shite during a work meeting was a highlight.
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