The inspection shelf is a German invention, though I first encountered one in Prague. The shelf extends above the waterline in a toilet, holding the fecal matter for a quick review before it’s flushed. Changes in the shape, consistency, or colour of bowel movements often indicate disease, so spot-checking the stool is a healthy Teutonic […]

In the pub last Sunday, an English friend told the tale of his teenage journey to the Edinburgh Festival, hitchhiking up from the Midlands to sleep rough in Princes Street Gardens. He was woken from his newspaper-wrapped slumber not by a rapist, a mugger, or the Lothian police, but by a friendly Scotsman handing him […]

Back in the early 1990’s, the European Cup stopped being a football tournament and became the Champions League. The raison d’etre of the rebranded competition: creation of an ever-expanding trough of filthy lucre to feed the pigs running European football’s biggest clubs. To their credit, UEFA do a shamelessly good job of quantifying exactly how […]

(LONDON, 11 Oct 2014) — Under-pressure Team GB manager Roberto Martinez declared himself “satisfied” with his team’s performance despite their 2-1 home defeat to Denmark yesterday in the first competitive match for the amalgamated British team. “We have only had a couple of friendlies to mould a team since the four national associations were combined […]

The draw for the 2014 World Cup qualifying groups will take place later tonight in Rio. Scotland are in pot 4 which means we could be in a Club Med group with Greece, Turkey and Israel or a Club Dread group with Spain, France and Ukraine. Details below.

If you’re looking for some off-season Billy, here’s a quick one – a Word Cloud I created from the McLeish Report. What’s a Word Cloud?  A visualisation of the relative frequency of words in a piece of text – which can give insights into that text. In this case, I cut and pasted the entire […]

Since June 1, 2009 we have published 890 articles about Scotland and the talented people who give us reasons to be proud of our country and ourselves. But a lot has changed in two years.

Mad Christian Harold Camping was reportedly “flabbergasted” that the Rapture didn’t take place last Saturday, May 21, as he had confidently predicted. I am similarly flabbergasted that Kilmarnock weren’t relegated, as I assuredly stated on August 12: “I can’t see them anywhere other than last place.” Camping is now saying the Rapture was spiritual, not […]

We’re in the middle of trophy season, so welcome to the inaugaural, and possibly only, GIRUY awards.  There are three categories of award: GIRUY, for an irritant or idiot; GIRFUY, for a person harming our game; and GIRFUY, YCY, for someone putting our game in mortal danger (the C doesn’t stand for “Clown”).