- I'm a prince... sort of
- Top of the league!!!
- Get a grip, people
- Icky food, and where to get it
- News feed
- Baby Update
- I'm on to plums
- Milngavie to bid for Olympics
I'm a prince... sort of
This week I've been working my backside off in ways I've not even had to THINK about for many many years. I'm currently 3 days into a 5 day course which will hopefully see me becoming a certified PRINCE2 practitioner. What's that, you ask? A what now? It's basically a project management qualification. Not the most exciting perhaps, but surprisingly interesting, and definitely very useful from a work perspective.
UPDATE: Got my exam result today - I passed! Yay!
Top of the league!!!
Was at New Douglas Park last night, to see Hamilton Accies first top flight game for almost 20 years. And what a way to start!!! It doesn't get any better than beating the side everyone has been tipping to finish third 3-1, and go top of the league in the process.
Of course, there is a long, long way to go, and it would be incredibly naive to expect things to stay as good as this through til May. But for Accies, I think the goal this year has to be survival in the SPL, and in that respect this was definitely encouraging.
What impressed me most about the game was the fact that Accies didn't seem in the slightest bit fazed. Here is a club who not so many years ago were languishing in the lowest division in Scottish football, looking like they belong at the very top.
The biggest challenge this year might actually be hanging on to the players who've got us this far - the stands were full of other managers and scouts, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the likes of the Old Firm trying to prise away some of our top talent before too long.
But for now, I'm just basking in the reflected glory of last night's top performance.
'Mon the Accies!!!
Get a grip, people
Gordon Ramsey was in the news recently, getting abuse for killing puffins on TV. Now, I'm not going to argue that it was a pretty sight, and I'm not going to disagree that puffins are quite cute - I have fond memories of the Puffin Book Club from primary school - but is this seriously all people have to complain about?
I mean really... they might be on the decline in the UK, but world-wide NONE of the 3 sub-species of puffin are endangered. In fact, they're all in the "least at risk of extinction" category (I forget what it's called). And this was in Iceland, where there are so many of the things that they have an annual cull. And they had all the appropriate licenses. And it's not like they tortured the thing - quick neck break and it was all over.
We've seen plenty of things killed on the F Word over the series, and actually I think it's not a bad thing at all - we've all become a little too detached from the food that we eat and where it comes from. It's good to be reminded every once in a while that the pre-butchered piece of meat in the supermarket was once part of an animal that gambolled or wandered around a field all day. And that someone *shock horror* had to kill said animal, so that we could eat it.
OK it's not puffin, but the principle is the same. And anyway, he wasn't advocating that we all go and cook up some puffins for tea - apart from anything else, catching the things looked like too much hard work.
Icky food, and where to get it
I'm going to start this entry with a warning: IF YOU'RE EASILY PUT OFF YOUR FOOD, OR HAVE A WEAK STOMACH, DO NOT FOLLOW THIS LINK.
Gemma's brother, Ian, sent me the following link, to an article about disgusting foodstuffs:
Some truly vile stuff in there, at least to Western tastes. Which, I guess, is the key point to remember.
Every culture has a different set of values, and that applies just as much to food as it does to anything else. For example, most folk in the UK would never consider eating horse meat, and yet there's a considerable market for it just over the Channel in France.
See also dog. And beetles. And...
Well, you get the idea. But there are things WE eat that are downright repulsive to other cultures. You can't buy "proper" haggis in many parts of the world, including the USA, because some of the ingredients (sheep lungs, for instance) are considered unfit or even unsafe for human consumption. And yet people all over Scotland regularly enjoy "our national dish", albeit usually covered in batter and deep fried.
Come to think of it, I wonder how many Scots even know that there are mushed up lungs in their haggis supper. And would it make a difference?
My take on all this is that I'm willing to give pretty much anything a try - at least once. I honestly can't remember the last thing I refused to at least taste.
And on that note, I'm off to find out if there's anyone selling Balut in Glasgow. Or maybe not...
News feed
Today I've added an RSS news feed to the site. If you don't know what one of those is, don't worry.
If you DO know what one of those is, then you've probably already noticed the orange icon at the bottom of the article list.
It's something I've been meaning to do for a while now, but just hadn't got around to. Turned out to be fairly straightforward, though, which is always nice!
Armed with this new bit of functionality, I'm going to attempt to link the site up to my Facebook profile, so that the rubbish I write up here can be accessed as Facebook notes. At least that's my understanding of what I should be able to do.
Wish me luck...
[UPDATE: I seem to have got my Facebook account set up to pull in new articles from here on a regular basis - we'll see how that pans out. Sadly, though, there doesn't seem to be anything equivalent on Bebo. Bah!]