Hillonearth
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Posts posted by Hillonearth
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51 minutes ago, ICTChris said:
Reports today that a group of Ukrainian commandos operating independently did this, with the aid of a private sponsor who paid for it all - the hire of a yacht, the significant volume of explosives, the experienced divers etc.
The Times reported that a wealthy figure sponsored the operation and "left a peculiar calling card". Lawyers watching so we'd better not start roshen into judgement.
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20 hours ago, chomp my root said:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64860924
Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gary Rossington broon bread.
Deidbird.
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10 minutes ago, Billy Jean King said:
Wife is in Morocco with her pals. Sad I know but she sends me bird pics every day. A common Bulbul at breakfast this morning. Pretty sure it is, their guide was IDing for them
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.
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18 minutes ago, The Other Foot said:
^^^
P&B’s resident quisling once again being a nasty shit.
VidkunTON?
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15 minutes ago, Genuine Hibs Fan said:
I used to have classes with Tony Pollard, who did two men in a trench with him at the start of his TV career as they were pals then. He had a couple of very gentle swipes at unnamed "TV historians", would love to know what Tony thought of him now.
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.
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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.
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3 hours ago, Cosmic Joe said:
Strange that Accies sales are so low. East Fife sell 150 to 200 programmes on crowds of 500 - 600.
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.
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1 minute ago, TxRover said:
I remember the smoking section in the back of the plane…and big, nasty tar stains on the tail of the plane where the air exhausted.
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.
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11 hours ago, GAD said:
Yeah, I always feel when I was younger that stuff was expensive but doing things was much cheaper and I always think of music as a classic example. Bands used to go on tour to help sell records, now they pretty much give the music away to sell very expensive gig tickets. I found a couple of old tickets recently, Sonic Youth 2004 was £14, Bloc Party 2005 at King Tuts £6. A CD of their latest album would have been £10-15 then at least.
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.
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17 minutes ago, parsforlife said:
I don’t think so, though it may be a factor. Bigger factor id say is far less media coverage, therefore the program can still give unique coverage, something higher up is almost impossible, when I used to get a program match reports, player interviews, a managers preview, a stats section, squad lists, a detail into the opposition and then add in the glossy photos. After ads I’m not sure how much more space there’s to be filled. All of that is available easily online now. What’s the selling point after?
At non-league most of that isn’t instant and certainly not in one place, also need to consider that non-league has a stereotypical older fansbase.
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.
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17 minutes ago, Lyle Lanley said:
We haven't made a programme since 2021 due to low sales and now have a magazine coming out every few months.
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.
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5 minutes ago, effeffsee_the2nd said:
pretty much aye, there were a few who held out to the bitter end but the vast majority stopped it before the year 2000. part of the outcry about the 2006 ban which was pretty controversial at the time was that by that point it was pretty much down to just pubs and bookies where it was still allowed. everywhere else had already banned it on there own accord. from 1995 - 2000 smoking indoors went from almost everywhere to almost nowhere.
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.
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20 minutes ago, Aim Here said:
John writes his gospel (the one with high metaphysical ideas) with a fairly clear language that is good for learners. Doesn't mean his gospel is crude. Far from it. It means his language is clear and relatively concise, and the consensus is that the author is a native Greek speaker.
The crudest gospel, by far, in terms of language, is the gospel of Mark, which reads like a breathless run-on sentence from a non-native speaker - notice the way that most of the verses of the KJV (or any literalist translation) all start with 'And' (which matches kai in greek). The other 'badly written' book of the New Testament is the book of Revelation, and, like Mark, it's not considered among the easy passages. It's by *a* John, but not necessarily that John!
As for the Burns comparison - one thing is that a hundred and fifty years of Presbyterian educational doctrine meant that even farmer's boys in Ayrshire were generally sent off to school and could read and write in their own language. Rural Galileian fishermen in a society with ~1-5% literacy in the first century almost certainly couldn't, and even if they could, they wouldn't be reading and writing Greek, and even if they could, they wouldn't suddenly be turning into Neoplatonic philosophers in middle age.
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.
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1 hour ago, The_Kincardine said:
Eye-witness testimony is deeply flawed yet uniquely respected. "I saw it with my own eyes" counts for a lot - from football matches to the High Court.
It's reasonable to regard theology as a methodology, framework and series of lenses through which the building blocks of Christianity are assembled into a belief system. It is never neutral and one aspect that was never really explored when I was at Uni was the extent to which theologians got the answer they were looking for in the first place. In context, if you dislike/want to discount eye-witness testimony then the easiest way is to dilute it and the easiest way to do that is to date the Gospels as late as you can (reasonably) justify.
Not sure there is a consensus although the dates you suggested are probably quite popular. I'm not sure, either, that much concerted effort has gone into this area since John Death of God Robinson came out with his book claiming the whole NT was written before 70AD. I think the later dating of the NT is, generally, a product of laziness and casual assumption rather than hard research. Simpler times when casual dating meant something different...
Certainly, when I wrote essays on this I was more convinced by Robinson - a man with no particular axe to grind - than I was by alternative views. Few 'liberal arts' subjects ever have 'gotchas' but the absence of any mention of the fall of Jerusalem in the Gospels - purportedly written after said event - Is as close as you'll get.
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.
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6 minutes ago, Billy Jean King said:
I have chuckled a few times inside when the occasional tie wearing home worker appeared on teams meetings. I remember tie wearing coming to a head in my then work one hot summers day when female staff were strolling in wearing vest tops and flip flops as guys were in trousers, shirts and ties. From that day on it gradually fizzled out for me and it was never a big thing in offices I've worked in since. I haven't seen a tie even in an office situation for a few years now bar interviews.
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.
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16 minutes ago, The_Kincardine said:
It's far from cut and dried - and has been a debate for a long time - but a decent case can be made for the Synoptic Gospels all being complete by 70AD. It's also a decent bet that all of them draw on older sources, anecdotes, written accounts etc so there has to be an eyewitness element to them.
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.
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13 minutes ago, paranoid android said:
Rock music.
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.
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11 minutes ago, invergowrie arab said:
Not to mention human eyes. They are fucking rubbish.
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1
And while we're at it, no omipotent hyper-being would have ever "intelligently" designed the scrotum unless it was for a laugh.
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8 hours ago, Central Belt Caley said:
Physical Newspapers probably in my lifetime, I’m 26 and last time I bought one was 7/8 years ago for a train journey. Don’t know anyone my age that reads/buys them regularly, even my parents stopped getting papers delivered a few years back.
Mass use of diesel and petrol cars will die out in a few years with the new laws coming in soon too
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.
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16 minutes ago, coprolite said:
This is a good point and can probably apply similarly to the Old Testament.
The OT is similar in both the time that it was probably written down and in the time period that it purports to cover as the mythology of classical Greece. There’s probably archaeological evidence for biblical Jericho like there’s probably archaeological evidence for Troy. The Greek stories are probably more fantastical but the OT has its share of tall tales (parting the sea? Living in a whale?).
Classical Greece and the OT have both exerted influence on our western sense of morality through the ages.
The difference is that there isn’t really any group that refuses to move on from the ideas of Plato and insist on slavery or who will swear blind that snails grow out of the mud. But the other set of Bronze Age stories is treated by some as God’s instructions and by some (not as far as I know, on here) even as a literal natural history.
The flip side of that is that secular types probably underweight the OT’s influence on Western thought and give the Greeks too much credit.
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.
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19 hours ago, welshbairn said:
Looked to me like they were terrified of accidentally making the wrong expression on camera. There must have been a camera on overhead wires zooming around them for close ups.
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
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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.
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On 15/02/2023 at 16:54, Smurph said:
Excuse the poor photo but here’s a parakeet near Dawsholm Park in Glasgow
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.
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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.
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Favourite Billy Connolly quote
in The General Nonsense Forum
Posted
Upon being introduced to the then-current Miss England whose name was Sue Calf:
"Don't ever go to Scotland, hen..."