Friday Funny

One of the funniest books I own is a little volume called “Bride of Dark and Stormy”. It’s a collection of the best entries to the Bulwer-Lytton literary competition. Unlike once-funny TV shows like, say, M*A*S*H, this slim volume has never become dated and has always made me laugh.
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Alex MacMillan: It’s a Small World

It’s a small world must be one of the most often said bromides in the English language. But, surely for a reason: it is a small world. The top-of-the-small-world-pops in my family belongs to the story of my younger sister and her husband.

Here’s the scoop: After meeting and date number three or so they start talking a little about their families. He says to her something like, my Mum’s family comes from a little place in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland: Benbecula. Yikes, thinks my sister or something like that. That’s where my father’s mother comes from!
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The Secret to Finding Good Reeds?

Many of us have always wondered. The truth is out:
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Happy New Year! Keep Right on to the End of the Road

Happy New Year to one and all. Here’s a New Year’s prezzie:
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Gaelic College Fiddles with the Great Highland Bagpipe

Cape Breton is surely a beautiful part of the world – in the summer, anyway. I’ve spent a good few summer weeks in the past teaching at the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts in St. Ann’s. Happy times, for sure, with a hundred kids or so running up and down the hills with their chanter and pipes and plans aplenty for pranking (mostly) suspecting teaching staff. Though “from away”, as they say in CB, my time at the GC gifted me some truly great memories, lifelong friends and some modest insight into how things “go” in that part of the world.
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One Sunday Morning

Here’s a photo from the archives; one of my favourites. I especially like the soft light in this pic. Here we see mid-August morning sun stream through the great stretch of high windows squintifying the weary, mostly hungover band of friends. [apologies to Sister Wendy: I may’ve ripped off her commentary/patter there].
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Echoes of Remembrance

Today is Remembrance Day. They’re all important but maybe today notably so since we have a once-in-a-century day marker in 11/11/11.
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Halloween, Geisha Girls and Fat Bastard

I like Emily Post’s definition of good manners, “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter which fork you use.” I wonder sometimes if the whole phenomenon we know as “political correctness” is a hammer-over-the-head attempt to fill a good-manners gap.
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Can I Have Your Postal Code?

A whinge today. No two-ways about it. That’s what it is. And, a rarity, completely unrelated to bagpipes or pipe bands.
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Michaelmas

Today: A day of note if your name is Michael or you’re a Celtic-y, Druidish, retro-religous type; so I qualify on one count, anyway.
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