Tales of Home

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Typo. Was meant to be duck. Changed it now.
Good job I looked.

I got similar sort of plants in my back yard Petty.- Chris

{{ Yours look a bit taller and lusher than our lot do Chris. And youd think with all the buckie gets spilled on their roots theyd be doing better! }}

chris63 wrote:,

Typo. Was meant to be duck. Changed it now.
Good job I looked.

So what was it the rest of us missed?   Doesn't take much effort to suss it out I suppose. Some letters are suggestively close on the keyboard.

F instead of a D.

🤭🤭

I think this girl from Poland nailed Texas.  She's mainly in the panhandle many hours north and west of where Lance will be, and I think made a good choice by sticking to smaller roads away from cities...though there are no cities in west texas, just large towns.

{{ When you go to your local corner shop and the owner, before you can say so much as "good morning" says, "in for your addiction?" is that the moment you're supposed to consider you might have a problem?! }}

One must ask what this "addiction" is. Might this be your bucky supplier?

Might be related to my addiction/battle with Little Debbie snack cakes. My corner grocery is not as small as your corner store, with many checkout ladies instead of a single proprietor, but I swear I see a knowing smile on their faces when that item comes up; try as I might to smother it with healthy vegetables and such.

{{ it is indeed nourishment of the liquid variety Halfy!
Worse bit is he's not even really technically local shop, he's my next nearest local shop, my back-up supplier. My local, local shop don't say anything they just have it sitting, waiting for me, on the counter when they see me weave into view. }}

{{ Short but to the point video covering the Highland Clearances. She's' in my neck of the woods for this one (well when she is in Argyll she is). You come across these abandoned crofts and villages all over, I can think of at least three within an hour or two of where I am now. I always find them somewhat sad, haunted places, theres a great sense of melancholy about them.



On the subject of the revival of Scottish Gaelic, I never learned, my grandfather on my dads side was the last in our family to natively speak it as he grew up on the islands, I only picked up a few phrases and swear words. It was never taught in our schools. I got offered French, German and Latin, but never my own nations language.
As a kid I got a clip round the ear from my Dad just for speaking Scots, let alone Gaelic (like many of his generation he grew up in an environment where even sounding too Scottish was considered a bad thing and damaging to your prospects, if you didn't speak 'proper' English it was heavily frowned upon).
Now my nieces (half-English) learned Gaelic from primary school, they are both fluent Gaelic speakers and just recently were off up north to Shetland on a Gaelic based school trip. All our place and road signs now have Gaelic and English on them. So she is right. Its getting better, largely down to devolution and the SNP promoting Gaelic and putting it back into the school curriculum and doing a lot to remove the stigma around sounding to Scottish. }}

She's got a lovely lilt to her voice, yet extremely clear to non Scottish speakers. Hopefully the return to learning Gaelic will help preserve that lovely accent.

{{ A look at the history of Dunan, or more commonly known round here, Camels Hump. I grew up in Sandbank on the Holy Loch and this was a go to place as a kid, spent many a happy day up here or down at the river at its foot where the old settlement was.
Elizabeth Rennie, the archaeologist he mentions a few times was also my teacher in primary school, in the late 70's. She used to take us out to stuff she was working on, and I actually got to dig the settlement site at the foot of Camels Hump aged about 7. She is directly responsible for sparking my love and interest in archaeology and local history. It all started right there for me.



One thing though, near start when he talks about how the hill would not have had the trees, he speaks as if it has not been that way for at least a hundred years. But in fact it was bare up until the early 80's when the land was given over to the Forestry Commission. This has been an annoyance of mine for 40 years!

It not only completely destroyed the existing habitat on the hillsides of heather and bracken, which supported all sorts of insect life notably at right time of year an abundance of dragon flies and small pools teeming with tadpoles. There were a perfusing of rabbits, and that meant birds of prey used to be a common sight circling and diving overhead. Now spotting a bird of prey is an event, when I was a kid there'd be several at any given time on the hunt to watch out the classroom window when bored. Curlews nested in the heather. Grass snakes, slow worms and adders basked on morning rocks, and we used to go newt hunting in the pools and boggy bits. Then came the trees, in regimented rows and no light and no heather, and everything collapsed.
And to top it all off the trees they planted, going so close to the summit meant that from ground level you could no longer see the top of Camels Hump, it was obscured completely by the tall trees. And a landmark you could see from the head of the Holy Loch to the West Bay of Dunoon was gone for a generation.
It's only in the last year they have cut those trees for production and the hilltop is once more revealed. }}

How cool to have a full blown archeologist as a teacher! Here it's common to have art and music professionals teach art and music (a precarious profession otherwise) but not so much other professionals.

{{ sadly the problem with being young is not fully appreciating, or making best use of such things Halfy. I loved the excavations and it certainly sparked my interest in local history, but there was so much more I could have learned from her if only had I the benefit of hindsight then. }}

Still winter here in Perth West Australia and it's a a lovely warm 28 degrees. How lucky are we

{{ We've only had a few days that hot here. And that's over summer! On the other hand Im not built for sun and heat I doubt I could cope. The good Lord Eru made me with drizzle and mist in mind the bastard! }}

{{ We had a good day yesterday, sunny, hot, blue skies, the oe and only day like that for about a month and a half.
As a result I got a message from my little brother last night lamenting his day out with his friends, he got sunburnt! See, Eru never made us for it. We're meant to exist in a permanent cloud of Scots (and scotch) Mist. With any luck be back to good old safe drizzle by tomorrow }}

{{ Informative vid this, the presenter is on tour and is playing my town soon but I only just found out and its not a huge venue, few hundred, so not sure if I can still get tickets. Hope so. }}

{ I was watching a vid by a guy that talks abut language and accents,

https://www.youtube.com/@metatronacademy/videos

some interesting stuff, and is vid on Glaswegian got me thinking about Scots accents I struggle to understand. Its mainly those on the east coast, and in particular around Aberdeen and where you get the local dialect of Doric. It can take me a few times to catch what a Doric speaker is saying, and quite often the word or phrase is so peculiar to Doric I haven't a clue.

I was looking for examples and a rather fun one oddly enough is in the Disney film Brave, so take your best guess and put it below and I'll give you my translation after. And as the Disney one is a bit watered down from the real thing, theres a second 'advanced Doric' to attempt if you are, pardon the pun feeling Brave. Good luck! (and no looking in the vids comments for anyone else who has probably translated it, you'll only spoil your own fun you know by cheating! Plus I'll find a way to come and kick your arse! }}





and a bonus poem, just because I really like it and agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment, something the English people never really understood they were doing I think (though those at the top did), the soft power of alienating a people from their own speech and language (my Dad used to whack me round the back of the head whenever I used any Scots around him, even though he spoke it all the time, but it was seem as a drawback to any future prospects, you had to speak 'proper' English to appear respectable, no one would want to hire you if you spoke Scots and sounded uncouth and uneducated, which was how it was viewed.) }}

{{ No takers?

Recorded this at work last night, the picture is just of the location, I recorded it about 2-3am last night so was pitch dark its sounds that are interesting. Any stabs to what it is? }}

The only thing I could make out from the spoken Doric was "and" and "so". The poem was better, maybe got a quarter of it.

As for your own recording that's clearly a sea going bandersnatch, as opposed to the more common forest variety. But it might be a walrus.

{{ Heres the translation of the Disney Doric-

Spoiler:

We dont get Walrus, however along with a heatwave you do have seals, minke whales and a humpback sighted. }}

{{ Vid on a 'secret' crash between US sub and Soviet at the Holy Loch. I was 3 when this took place but as a kid growing up everyone had heard of the time 'the Yanks crashed into the Russian sub', so not sure about secret.
I'll need to enquire of my Dad how often attractive Russian spy ladies tried to seduce secrets out of him, he'd have been a prime target as he worked for over 25 years with the US Navy in a fairly high position for a civilian (by end he was in charge of the supply depot for all US domestic and military goods coming and going, its now the Marina). We did used to get targeted, our phone used to get randomly tapped but it was the 80's then and the tech wasn't great so you could always tell when it was happening from the echoey sound the phone took on. That wouldn't have been the Russians though, that'd be our side. And we got targeted by the Peace Movement a few times at the house. That was interesting. I had a conflicted childhood on the subject of Americans, on the one hand half my friends were Americans, my Dad worked for them and I spent a lot of time on the Base which to a kid was just a place of weird American wonder, it had a bowling alley, and a basketball court full of impossibly tall and muscular black people (up till my teenage years I thought all black people were over 6ft tall and built like a brick shit house as they were only ones I'd ever seen, military in the testosterone fuelled 80's!) and exotic foods stuffs in the snackbar, genuine American hot dogs, cheeseburgers and shakes, and vending machines of wonder like Dr Pepper, Mountain Dew, and Root Beer, all unheard of at the time on these shores. And on the other hand I had CND people protesting and telling me how my father was helping to turn babies to ash when he wasn't helping mutate them with radiation in the womb, and at school we did the ridiculous 'how to survive a nuclear explosion at close range with pillows, doors leaned against a wall and painting the windows white' drill once every month, so the sense the world could end in a blinding flash of pain was very much front and centre. It was a strange time, some of which this vid captures. }}

{{ The BBC really does itself no favours sometimes when faced with the complaint it greatly exaggerates and over represents the diversity of the UK.
This is a classic example, Scotland's population has increased slightly, this was celebrated on the BBC news page with a photo of kids holding up the new total-



You may note something odd about it, there are only 2 white people in it. The black population of Scotland is 1%, the Indian population is 1.4% and the Pakistani population 1.2% for a grand total of 3.6%.

So how come in this photo, meant to reflect the Scottish population 80% of the kids are non-white? That's not what Scotland looks like. Its a lie, plain and simple. An image of diversity where such diversity simply does not exist. So why do this? Someone somewhere made a choice, someone had to go abut the school they were at and hunt out the minority kids for their photo, as like every other Scottish school the majority would be white. That makes it very hard for the BBC not to claim they are staging such photos to present a deliberate, and knowingly false image. And regardless of motivation, or the news story, a news channel staging photographs for news reports is a bad thing.}}