Hillonearth

It's like a Jedi mind trick played on an entire nation. I'd only ever heard of it through friends that live in the states up until about a decade ago, when seemingly overnight every retailer glommed on to the idea and suddenly people in work were talking about it as if it had always been a thing.

Totally - think of a seabird cliff like the Bass Rock. It's basically white with bird keech. Birds that nest colonially almost on top of each other are coming into contact constantly, and that's why it's hit them the hardest...auks, terns, gannets were the first, although most people wouldn't have noticed it unless they'd been walking along a beach near one of the colonies this summer. The general public are beginning to notice it now because winter visitors like geese and swans are bringing it down with them from the subarctic and infecting domestic poultry. I seem to live under a fairly big migration route for pink-footed geese flying down from Greenland and Iceland, and there's been noticeably fewer of them this autumn - they've clearly been ravaged all summer on their breeding grounds.

You've got to love estate agents' tenuous grasp of geography...classic examples are that huge swathe of housing estates out by Patterton station that they optimistically list as Newton Mearns, and advertising places out in Yoker or Knightswood as "five minutes from the vibrant west end" which would only be true if you were strapped to a cruise missile. Oh, and their insistence that anywhere in Kirkintilloch is actually Lenzie...

I liked the story of a visiting American officer who saw Wojtek lugging boxes of shells around and asked the Poles what the f**k was going on...the Pole that was with him hit back quick as a flash: "In America, you've got the right to bear arms...in Poland, we've got the right to arm bears."

I'm similar...there was no falling out as such, but once my paternal grandmother who seemed to be the glue that held the extended family together died, there was no real impetus to get together as there had been previously and everybody gradually stopped seeing each other as when it came down to nobody had all that much in common. Had a weird experience in one of the pubs in Yorkhill a while back when I was in with a couple of mates...a guy came over to me and asked me my name. Turned out he was a cousin I hadn't seen in more than a decade who was in because his girlfriend was having a kid up the road. It was fine to catch up for an hour or so, and we swapped numbers and said we'd keep in touch...neither of us did though. I know quite a few people who have those hyper-close extended families where they're constantly in and out of each other's houses and pockets, but it always seems pretty alien to me as that was never us.

Poland - Nasty lager and sunflower seeds.

Another one I remember trying and liking was Ethiopian food - the thing I had was called kitfo which is heavily spiced raw beef, kind of steak tartare vibe. The strangest thing about it is there aren't any plates or cutlery...they pap a big crepe/pancake effort called injeera on the table in front of you and you rip bits off it and eat the food with that.

Plus the pilot never did the classic three pubes on either side of the balls.

Just send a card with a robin on it next time, eh?

Aye, they did that too...I've never been convinced that at least some of the things on their menu weren't substitutions...their wild boar tasted suspiciously like normal pork and that shark was more than likely dogfish. This was like a self serve gaff where you picked the meats, took a bunch of spices to your taste and they'd flash fry it with rice while you waited. The only one that was truly bowfing was the zebra...I'd assumed it would be much the same as horse meat which I actually like, but it was rank.

Since the demise of Garfunkel's in the town, there's a gap in the market for a restaurant where couples specifically go to argue. That always used to be the one for some reason - you'd pass by and at every window there was a couple drawing daggers at each other. I'd always assumed that it was a case of he'd wanted to go for a curry, she'd wanted to go for an Italian and it was a compromise that neither of them wanted, but it seemed to be full of folk that hated each other.

It's more when they get bored and start running about like heat-seeking ferrets when problems can occur. We were in a place in Strathblane where there was a mother up the far end of the gaff in with her pals getting leathered...obviously the wean was bored shitless and started playing hide and seek under the tables that folk were eating at. All well and good until the wean either (more likely) ran full pelt into somebody's knee or (not beyond the realms of possibility) the guy concerned committed a professional foul as the wee guy ran under his table. Mother of the year was instantly up and in the guy's grid, but to his credit he told her to take a f**k to herself and at least pretend she gave a shit about what her kid was doing.

One that always sticks in my mind was a couple arguing a couple of tables away from us in a country pub somewhere...the volume gradually rose until she stood up and flounced out of the place. He initially went to follow her, but then you could actually see his thought process once he looked across at her barely touched steak pie and chips, thought "f**k it", sat back down and got wired into her dinner.

Harsh, but he probably was on the menu.

I've seen whale meat for sale in the big supermarket in Torshavn. Likewise that hakarl fermented shark stuff in Iceland...a lot of traditional Icelandic cuisine seems to have been inspired by a combination of starvation and Viking I-dare-you-to-eat-this. There used to be a lot of weird stuff on the go in Kublai Khan Mongolian BBQ in Glasgow - I've tried shark, snake, ostrich and zebra there.

Yeah - I remember seeing that one a couple of years ago. Somebody was claiming it was perfect social distancing in action...nope, it's just Finland. There probably wasn't even a pandemic on the go at the time.

They see people from the Anglosphere as being superficial and over-effusive and are uncomfortable with it, in much the same way we can feel uncomfortable with the way some Southern Europeans invade our personal space and cause us to spend a conversation gradually backing away from them into a corner. Not strictly Eastern European, but the kings of taciturnity have to be the Finns who seem to have taken a countrywide oath to patch the small talk...there's a long-standing saying that you know when you've finally made friends with a Finn...after about twenty years he'll stop looking at his own feet while he's talking to you and start looking at yours.

The inhabitants of the South Sandwich Islands are inconsolable:

"Tactical regrouping"

The rasputitsa has obviously started. Shite, no cover there either

I'm just off to the Bellshill Autonomous Okrug of the North Lanarkshire Oblast where the aim is annexation of a place in the last 16 of the cup.

Yeah, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast is the one that stuck out for me on that list - it essentially only exists on paper, as the Jewish population such as it was - it seems to have been a failed experiment from the start - has gradually been emigrating to Israel since the fall of the USSR. I'd read a book by the travel writer Colin Thubron written maybe 20 years ago where he struggled to find any Jews in Birobidzhan, the capital. There'll be even less now.

They tried it back in 1355: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot

Have to admit I never thought for a moment it would be him given his aristocratic background, but yeah - he went straight from school to Sandhurst, which you obviously can't do these days.

Major and Callaghan are the most recent two...dunno who the third one is.