Apparently I have A Passing Resemblance To...

If I looked anything like Sophie I wouldn't be able to do anything for making love to the mirror every morning. So its just as well I don't.

Thick As Mince!

Lambs may look cute at this time of year but between you and me they stink a little bit, they are also a little bit stupid as I discovered this morning.

I woke up to the sound of sheep 'baaa, baaa, baaahhing', which isn't that unusual in these parts so I ignored it. Or tried to anyway and attempted to fall asleep again but there's nothing like the sound of bleating to make you count sheep over and over again without quite finding the ability to nod off. So I got up, showered, ate breakfast did the usual morning routine, checked emails etc etc and still I could hear sheep. I was tempted to shout out the window "Shut up and just eat the grass already!" But I didn't. For the simple reason being I don't think sheep listen to humans. Because I didn't do that I didn't bother to look out the window. I instead just carried on working on the deck plan that I was drawing. So it was a few hours later that I eventually finished what I was doing and went out to see a client. It was then I discovered what the racket was about. One of the lambs that grazes in the parkland outside had somehow managed to get into the garden despite the closed over gates but had got itself trapped in the goal netting of the 5 year old boy upstairs moveable football goal posts. In its desperation to escape it had dragged the goals all over the garden and in doing so had got itself even more entangled in the netting.

Of course I took pity on the poor thing and tried to set it free, but the lamb was so scared it was having none of it and tried to run. For all of 5 yards. By which time it had got itself so entangled in the netting that it couldn't move its legs. My first inclination was to cut the netting away from its neck with a knife or scissors but that wasn't workable due to the lamb moving too much. so I had to untangle the netting by hand. That was fun. Every time I managed to get a leg or the head free it thought it could make an escape and would promptly get itself stuck again. 40 minutes later I did however manage to set it free, but only after the lamb had made so much noise that the mother found a way into the garden and bit me in the leg for my troubles. That's gratitude for you. It wasn't too painful but I'm still going to enjoy my Sunday roast at the weekend. I just hope between birthing time and dinner plate, sheep actually develop brains because I don't fancy rescuing sheep on a daily basis.

Summer Comes, Summer Goes

Spaniards enjoying the summer sun in Glasgow.

I'm All For Freedom Of Speech, Even For Stupid People But....

Some people seem to think that since they have the ability to think and talk and type for themselves that they have to share whatever is on their pathetic little mind with the world. Me for example. Thanks for reading by the way. But seriously their is worse people than me out there. No seriously, there is. There is Ann Coulter for example. Ann Coulter is one of these people who have the ability to piss me off with the dumbass things she has to get off her chest. I know I shouldn't look but sometimes I just can't help myself. I find myself having times of my life where I have to have another look to see what stupid crap she has come up with now. It's like when you are driving across town going from A - B, enjoying the scenery and the lovely day, thinking that the world is a beautiful place but then you come across a level crossing and by sheer bad luck find that the engine fails when the car is halfway over the line. A spot of bad luck yes but its fine unless you look at the train that is heading right for you, at speed. If you do that its trouble, you hand may well be on the door handle that will lead to your escape but unless you can get a grip of yourself and look away from the speeding train and get your legs running then in a moment or two you will find yourself looking at a bright white light and maybe even your body below. That moment there is an Ann Coulter moment.

She's one of these people who think's she is clever, and maybe she is, I don't know. Intelligence can be an attractive quality but not on this creature. She seems to think she is better than others and that is one ugly personality trait.

This is some of the nonsense she comes up with....

At the precise moment in history when the U.S. has abondoned any attempt to transmit Anglo-Saxon virtues to its own citizens, much less to immigrants, George Bush wants to grant citizenship to hordes of immigrants who are here precisely because they are fleeing cultures that are atterly dysfunctional and ruinous for the humans that live in them. Yes, this country has absorbed huge migrations of illiterate peasants in the past - notably Italian immigrants at the turn of the last century. But also notably, half of them went back. We got the good ones. America was not yet a welfare state, guaranteeing room and board to the luckless, the lazy and the incompetant from cradle to grave.

And this...

The government does not allow us to stop supporting welfare recipiants in America, millions more of which it plans to import under Bush's bill. That's not a free market - it's a roach motel.
The author Samual P. Huntington asked "Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portugese Catholics. The Answer is no. It would not be America it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.
I don't want to live in Mexico, Quebec or Brazil, but now I guess I have no choice, since with "open borders" I can never leave.

See what I mean about the train wreck, she doesn't know when to shut up and worse I don't know when to look away.

Up until now I've not had a lot of time for George Bush and the politics he has inflicted on the world but if he has the power to upset Ms Coulter he's gone up a little on my book, not much, just a smidgen of a fraction, but up nonetheless.

When I read the phrase 'British Protestants' I, being Scottish and brought up as Protestant, felt an uncomfortable shudder work its way up my spine. I can't help feeling those Americans with Italian heritage might well have had a similar reaction. What Ann Coulter seems to forget that she too is a decendant of an immigrant. Or maybe she hasn't, maybe she just thinks she's one of the good ones.

Maybe all the new immigrants could gather together, join forces with their welfare state handouts and each put something aside for the Ann Coulter Fund Appeal. She no longers wishes to stay in the America of today so the Appeal Fund could get her a place on the next Russian Space Mission where a place can be bought for a few million dollars and with the mega bucks she has personally gifted in tax to immigrant coffers I'm sure they would be happy to donate to her cause. The price might even well be negotiated downwards for a one way ticket. Failing that this privileged white American could just kick herself out of the Immigrant made America , of course I'm not sure what country would welcome her and her kind. Quebec? Mexico? Brazil? Anyone?

I've just realised that I'm ageist

I'm sitting here watching the Isle Of Wight festival on Channel 4 and the Rolling Stones have come on stage, they still have it, they sound good and far better than most of the younger bands you will hear today. Yet I look at their faces and I can't stop myself from thinking about when they might retire. It's wrong and I'm not proud of myself for thinking it but damn they're old!
I always thought I was a believer in equal opportunities for all and yet here i'm thinking - 'go out gracefully!'
Of course maybe it's just because it the Rolling Stones, even when they were young they were scary, although I'm sure back then the drummer looked like he had teeth that wasn't left behind in a jar in the hotel.

Two Big Bands, Two Small Venues

It was quite a week in the Glasgow music scene. This week two of the biggest bands to come out of Scotland in the past decade both went back to their roots by playing small shows in Glasgow. It’s rare for musical artists when they hit the big time to go back to playing in the small venues that they had to play in earlier in their careers when they were just starting out, but this week two of them did just that.

The first show on Monday was Franz Ferdinand in the Grand Ole Opry, a band I’d never seen live, at a venue I had never been to before. On the next night Snow Patrol played in the tiny, but great, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, this is a band I’ve seen a couple of times live, once before they made it big, and once after, truth be told I wasn’t that impressed either time. So with that in mind I decided to pay to see Franz Ferdinand while a friend won tickets for the XFM Scotland Radio Snow Patrol session.

The successes of Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol came from entirely different paths. The former are a relatively new band, though lead singer Alex Kapranos and drummer Paul Thomson have been pillars of Glasgow's music scene for years. Both studied at the Glasgow School Of Art and started playing in a band for fun.

Franz were a band much whispered about the Glasgow music scene but for some reason I’d never taken the time to see them, then seemingly out of nowhere their debut album came out and little more than six months later Franz Ferdinand had become a household name.

Their music was fun - albeit of the arty, intelligent kind – but it was by no means certain that their music would make it mainstream. This was a band very much in touch with their Art School roots, they designed their own costumes, album cover even down to the font used, and wrote their own songs. Many of which have all the ingredients to sound pretentious when you know the background to them, one song was inspired by a cult Russian novel that the majority of their fans have never heard of, nevermind read, it shouldn’t really work but somehow when those guitars start strumming it does.

Snow Patrol, on the other hand, took their time. The band members may all hail from Northern Ireland but they all went to university in Glasgow and it was here for almost a decade, first under the guise of Polar Bear, and latterly as Snow Patrol that they learned their trade. They had mild success in the 1990s,when they were the Glasgow scene's perennial underachievers. By the time they released Final Straw, they were ready to call it a day if things didn't work out - there was a real desperation in that title but desperate men sometimes take the most rewarding risks. Final Straw's plangent ballads and chugging rockers propelled the band to sales of millions. Their follow-up, last year's Open Your Eyes, was even more successful - no album sold more copies in Britain last year.

Personally speaking, whenever I’ve seen Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody take to the stage I’ve not been impressed by his ability to command it and work the audience like a lead singer should. At the beginning of his career I put it down to the fact that most of the songs weren’t very well known, or that good to be honest, but I was expecting more after Final Straw came out, especially with songs such as Run, Chocolate, and How To be Dead making the radio airwaves as frequently as they did but somehow although it was a great studio album made for playing on the radio the performance I seen live that same year didn’t really translate on the night to a good gig. In contrast people who had seen Franz Ferdinand the same year as their debut album came out commented on how great they were at commanding the stage.

The venues, and the atmosphere at each of the gigs this week, speaks to the differences between the two bands. Franz continue to go their own way, by picking an unorthodox setting (a venue beloved of Glasgow's Hank Williams obsessives) and selling it out by hushed word-of-mouth alone, they turning the entire thing into a cowboy-ish singalong. (Kapranos even sported a natty cattle-rustler's checked handkerchief to go with his black shirt.) Snow Patrol's audience, on the other hand, are radio competition winners - die-hard fans, to be sure, but required to engage with the world of corporate sponsorship to attend. Not that I could hear Colin complaining. After all, seeing Snow Patrol in King Tut's once involved a tumbleweed-strewn dancefloor and weathering tuneful but derivative and noisy indie rock. Now it involved seeing one of the biggest bands in the world in a venue where he could see the whites of Gary Lightbody's eyes.

Musically, too, the bands are polar opposites. Franz Ferdinand specialise in high-octane burners such as Michael, with which they opened. New song Favourite Lie, like the four others they premiered on Monday, was markedly heavier on the keyboards than their previous stuff, but no less energetic - it finished with a rabid blast of Italo-house piano and a furious, pounding rhythm. Snow Patrol, meanwhile, stuck closer to the mainstream. Their biggest hits - all of which delivered with smiling gusto - are camera-phones-aloft ballads, made to be sung by fields full of thousands of fans. Their music is artfully crafted, for sure, but Snow Patrol don't do art quite in the it-should-be-so-pretentious Franz Ferdinand manner. I wasn’t there myself but I did get to hear some of the songs on the radio the next day and from what I heard it was clear that Lightbody has finally found the key that enables him to command the audience. Although that might have been down to the fact that the audience were made of radio listeners who have been subjected to the songs for the past three or four years, certainly when the band played an older favourite Post Punk Progression much of the audience that had been up to that point playing the game and singing along to more recent hits Run (dedicated to Biffy Clyro) and Spitting Games, suddenly stopped doing so. But you can’t blame the audience for that, Post Punk Progression was from an time before Snow Patrol made it onto radio playlists.

In the Grand Ole Opry Franz Ferdinand managed similar devotion from the audience. On Monday I must have been in touch with my feminine side because I found myself aggressively tapping my feet to the guitar strumming hits of their first album, an album once described by Alex Kapranos as music for women to dance to, but if that’s so I’m not too bothered, I certainly wasn’t the only one having fun. Even when they played songs such as Shopping For Blood – an acid tale of modern, conspicuous consumption - and sounding like a band of outsiders, snarling as Western civilisation declines they still were able to make the song fun for its audience. There's a genuinely menacing streak in that song's glam-rock stomp, that contrasts nicely with the adrenaline-fuelled ecstasy of Take Me Out, during which the crowd sang that deadly riff over and over again.

These two bands are as different in approach and end result as you're likely to get when talking about million-selling artists, but they're the defining facets of Scottish music: the arty and the commercial, the louche and the hard-working. In their wake have come bands and artists who fall on both sides of the divide, and the fact there is room for these upstarts in the mainstream is a product of their success. And never mind that Snow Patrol are all Northern Irish, or that only one member of Franz Ferdinand is a bona-fide Scot - they're both bands steeped in Glasgow, in Scotland, and belong there as much as apple pie has a place in the good ole U S of A.