Wouldn’t it be nice if Cardiff City took the FA Cup out of England on Saturday?

Nothing against Portsmouth because if they win it takes it out of the big 4.

Me though?

I’m with my Celtic cousins.

“Fingers twitch over keyboard.

Mind wanders off to the wildreness of Arran.

As the prospect of conflict weighs heavy.

On the soul.

Bring it on.

The Auchrannie Quaich.

To the victor.  The spoils.”

Yes.  I’m off in search of the trophy.  Shame I’m pish at golf.

I will, of course, win best dressed man.

Ok.  Let’s get Raef out of the way early.

He dressed up like this…

…to sell thongs.

Prick.

He said “People who are size 16 are that size for a reason, because they eat cake.”  Well, as Marie Antoinette said “Let him eat cake.” Tittyboy. (She didn’t say the last bit).

Aside from that he was just your average run of the mill, run of the mill posh contestant.

Lucinda, on the other hand, rises above her poshness increasingly and is my current idea of the winner.

Claire has been on a “debooting” regime and is becoming not only marginally likeable but a contender too.

Michael Sophocles however is the real villian of the piece this, and pretty much every, week.

When, having gained a six hour “passion” for selling Wedding cakes, someone said no to his extremely hard sell approach that lacked entirely in sympathy, he exclaimed “You’re making a mistake.  I mean God above…” and then gave the camera a wee insight by claiming they were all “dum dums.”  Takes one to know one Michael.

Frankly there is only one word for this tosspot.

“Goodbye.”

I don’t like this little nyaf very much.  He has a habit of making you want to punch him, very hard, very often, in the testicles and follow that up with a bit of bashing them between breeze blocks.

Sarah had to go, in due course, but not this week.

Her only crime was averageness.

Whatever.

I can hardly believe that Tommy Burns has passed away. Tommy was not an old man (only 52) and was First team coach and head of the Celtic Youth Academy until he was taken ill. Tommy was certainly worthy of the title “Celtic legend” and was a thoroughly decent man. Who can forget him going a whole season undefeated (or maybe he lost only one game?) and yet not winning the title as Celtic manager during the reign of King Walter

It was well known that he had been suffering from cancer but I was unaware of how serious the situation was. What a terribly sad piece of news and it renders reports on last night’s Rangers match versus Zenit St Petersburg redundant.

Amy has worked incredibly hard for the last year in preparation for her exams and off she slunk at 8.45 this morning for her first Highers exam; English. She’s sitting five in total including Art, Maths, Geography and Chemistry.

Good luck Amy.

I’m not especially adept at Chinese, either written or spoken, myself; not having any Chinese clients and all that.  And the Chinese aren’t that good at English either, on the whole, so given that the world is about to descend on Bejing maybe these sorts of oversights might be better off fixed.

Things like this….

and this

and this

and this

My golf, as regular readers will know, is a mixture of disappointment and disaster mixed up with a smattering of anger, frustration and bad luck.

I am never, ever lucky and when push comes to shove I always lose on the last - like last week in the club doubles.  Add to this the fact that, on account of my putting so badly on Sunday, my putter is now in putter hospital (ICU) I was not feeling overly confident about beating my mate ‘Senor (El Bandirto ) Chris Rough’ in the Club Handicap championship first round

When he announced that, far from his handicap being cut because of his Mexican tendencies, it had just gone UP and consequently I was faced with the challenge of giving him a full six strokes my heart sank.

Disaster loomed.

Sure enough, I quickly surrendered an early lead to go one down but scrambled to the turn all square.

Neither of us were playing the beautiful game.  In fact it was like an East Stirling v Dumarton relegation play off match.  Huff, puff and a lot of fecking swearing.

But gradually Chris succumbed to my pressure (Actually he just drove like Nikki Lauda - on the burny day) and I found myself on the 16th tee two up.  Sure enough, he won the 16th to take it back to one and somehow I managed to grind out a half, despite giving him a stroke, on the 17th.

Dormy one.

All there to lose.

Chris hit his best drive of the night to the par three 18th (20 feet from the pin).  I hit a piece of shit to 40 yards, left, in the rough.  My second was so-so leaving me a 15 foot downhill putt from off the green.  Chris, meanwhile,  was 10 feet away from a three.

That was when life deviated from the script.  The pin removed; Gorman stood over the 15 footer, gently nudged the ball holeward and with the very final roll of the ball it dropped.

Victory.

Poor old Chris.  How will he ever live it down!

After all the fuss about referee Mike McCurry’s performance in the Rangers v Dundee Utd match last Saturday the SFA is in no position to defend his behaviour as this photo of the linesman demonstrates.

Doh!

Apparently a West Lothian councillor has had to apologise after claims she referred to Fauldhouse as a town of inbreeds.  Hailing from Broxburn, Councillor Ellen Glass was in safe territory as it takes one to know one.

Although I guess I shouldn’t say that as half of my family originated from Broxburn.

Apparently she raised the issue at a health meeting, saying she was worried because of inbreeding in the town, before being told to “shut it” by her colleagues.

What a cracker.

I’ve been itching to write about this for months but have been worried about displaying political niaivety. However, even I cannot be accused of that in the face of Wendy Alexander’s kindergarten politics

It would seem that in attempting to raise a referendum bill she is simply not permitted to do so by Holyrood protocol because Smiley Alec Salmond beat her to it! Now that’s a silly wee mistake to make. Just like accepting £900 of unrecorded political support was.

But by taking a personal independence agenda into the public domain at total odds with the Labour party in Millbank she has managed to piss off Gordon Brown and most of the National Executive of the Labour Party, the Scottish Labour Party, John Prescott, The Lib Dems - who may or may not be Labour’s allies - and most amusingly of all, the Scottish Tory Leader, Annabel Goldie, who sees her behaviour as tantamount to destroying the Union.

Needless to say Alex Salmond must think he’s died and gone to heaven.

But what underpins this ‘car crash’ politics? I think it must be ego. She is well known for having zero people skills and has dodged and ducked her way through political minefields for a while and bottled a leadership contest with Jack McConnell.

She’s just not good enough. Intellectually brilliant perhaps: as the author of the Smart Successful Scotland strategy I have to say I admired the way in which this document seemed to lucidly capture the issues facing the nation. But her job is not an academic one, it’s a political one and politics appears to be the least of her talents.

A bit of a handicap as a party political leader.

You know what Wendy?

As Sir Alan should be urging Big Goggsy to say…

“You’re fired!”

This was the scene that greeted us on the first at Dundas Parks Golf Course today as we teed up for the Club championship doubles.

Frankly, it was uninviting.

But we didn’t hesitate. Twice we had to come off the course as the lightning pelted the course left right and centre. But the game must go on.

And, sure, it rained a bit.

A lot actually.

Like Gladiators. myself and Dick Whittock, a nice older guy from Kirkliston (known locally as Cheesetown) built up a two hole advantage, ground out over the first ten holes only to play like a couple of fannies on the 11th to go back to one up.

By the 13th it was all square as Trevor Jones sank putt after putt. And his playing partner, Douglas was rock solid throughout.

And level was how it remained until the 17th when they snuck into the lead. The damage was done. A half on the 18th meant dreams of trophy lifting in the Greensomes will have to wait until 2009.

Bummer.

This is brilliant.  Click on the interview panel on the BBC sports page at this link.

Craig Levien, Dundee Utd’s manager, letting off steam after losing a crucial game to Rangers today. Now, when I say letting off steam I mean totally losing it. I like and respect Craig Levien - even if he is a Jambo - and I know exactly how he must feel

And oh what joy to find this old school photo of him on google…

And this one…

Yes, that’s right. It is yours truly on the left. A vision in black. And not overly gaylordish.

Now, we all know that referees favour Celtic and Rangers, but according to Levien, Mike McCurry’s performance today was nothing short of a scandal. He calls him a cheat - which will get him in big trouble with the numpties that run our game - but he is almost certainly right. I haven’t seen the incidents in question, but judging from this outburst I think he probably has a point.

Listening to discussion about it on Five Live’s 606-phone in a Rangers fan brushed it off by saying…

“They’re getting all excited about this one game. Maybe if they’d tried this hard all season against lesser teams this would be less of an issue.”

A neat body swerve I have to say, but, you know what? Totally true!

And that applies to every other team in this shitty league.

And Hibs are no exception.

They turn up for the old firm and Hearts matches and don’t bother their arses against the likes of Aberdeen, Motherwell, St Mirren…

That’s why I don’t go along any more.

This bad?  I found this on Steven Tait’s increasingly excellent blog and laughed out loud almost throughout it.

]

I was delighted with some recent shots I got of the Rail Bridge with a foreground of oil rapeseed.

Until that is, my Mate Doug Cook stuck one in the back of the net.

This is great photograh by anyone’s standards.

I rather like this ad to encourage kids to cycle to school.  It made me laugh out loud when I saw it.

The target audience, of course, will hate it because they won’t empathise with the geek in the shot.

I think the research was a bit misplaced too because we all know that green and yellow are Catholic School colours (indeed this was my school uniform at Holy Cross) and the ginger hair of the wee lad also has massive catholic symbolism.

Not smart.

So, The Apprentice would-bes get sent on a shopping trip to a Souk.

The perfect recipe for lies and ‘espionage’.

For me the episode revolved around Jen and Michael’s total disregard for honesty and decency - a pair of lying twats quite frankly. We’ve oft discussed Jen’s bootishness in the past on this site, but her decision to engulf herself in a pink headscarve only made her look like Miss Piggy on her dabs.

Now she looks like an ex-Apprentice.

Quite right.

(We can put the mirrors back up in the living room again.)

Her decision to try to boycott Team Alpha’s progress by stage whispering a pathetic bribe to a local tennis stringing ace was pathetic and for that reason alone she had to go.

Michael Sophocles survived somehow, despite being a wee wank. He makes Raef (amazingly no twit ups AT ALL this week) look like a normal member of society - in fact I’m beginning to think Raef might even be a contender!

The teams were great. It really was the battle of the boots and assholes versus the normals (and Raef).

Increasingly my money is piling onto Lucinda who put in another good performance. She even let slip a wee “Och” when she slipped running across a shopping centre forecourt in a subconscious attempt to prove that she is indeed a true blue Scot.

Lee’s leadership was mainly based on different ways of exclaiming ‘Fuck!” very loudly and encouraging his team mates to join in. They did. With gusto.

The highlight of the week followed the unravelling of Michael’s pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with Sir Alan by describing himself in his CV as a “good Jewish boy” when in reality he was only “Half Jewish” - which explained why he didn’t know what Kosher was. On hearing this Sir Alan suggesting Michael drop his pants to show if he’d circumcised his plonker.

I think he was just pulling it myself.

Oh and Jennifer got fired too. Fair enough. She was shite.

Breaking news.

Based on Rudyard Kipling’s iconic poem the new Irn Bru commercial has landed. Set in various locations across Scotland and somewhere abroad it features some lovely vignettes. Some work brilliantly, like the Loony Dooking pensioners (at 33 seconds) which struck a real chord with me, also the kissing Celtic and Rangers fans, the despondent Scotland fan with his wee lassie and the way folk choose the wrong descriptor for their meal times are all great.

Others are  less succesful and I’d question Martin Compston’s voiceover.

But three cheers for the choice of South Queensferry for two of the settings!

I feel the whole campaign suffers from being shackled by a weak strapline. Phenomenal does nothing for me. It’s unphenomenal frankly.

Overall it’s a nice, rather touching return to form.

But judge for yourselves.

]

So.

10,000 folk turn up at Hampden Park to audition for the X Factor yesterday, despite the fact that the programme producers knew, full well, that unlike Engerland the Scottish exam season is in full swing.

A friend of mine’s daughter got through to the judging stages - at the expense of her English Standard Grade exam. Same day, different place. (That’s the equivelant of an O grade if you happen to be an English X Factor producer).

It’s a fucking disgrace.

Enjoy watching the auditions when they come along and maybe you might think about how a slightly more sympathetic timing might have got someone’s son or daughter an extra qualification.

Then again…

(Actually, you know what?  That photo says it all.)

Jeana works at Suntrap Garden near Ratho.

So, I’d like to suggest that you make a date in your diary for a trip out for its Open Day on 25th May, 10.30 am - 4.30 pm.  If the weather stays like it is just now it’ll be a fantastic day out in a beautiful spot with money going to charity.

Here’s the link.

These shots were taken last year at the Open day.

A remake of The Shining. Really scary.

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