An incident in the football last night reminded me of the poster advert which WKD vodka is running to coincide with the World Cup.

It’s headed, “The offside rule for girls.”

Below is the punchline.

“If the flag’s up, it’s offside.”

Em….

Sorry WKD. Isn’t that the offside rule for boys as well?

The UK B-side to The Easybeats Friday On My Mind was called Made My Bed, Gotta Lie In It.

This is a recording of the band performing the song live, so the quality isn’t great. The singer’s voice is decidedly ropy. The song’s key is obviously outside his range.

Some prat on You Tube has titled another version of what seems to be this same clip Made My Bed, Now I Gotta Lay In It. It’s as if they were chickens….

Three episodes in and I’m magnificently underwhelmed.

It’s mainly bish-bosh action and rushing on. The dialogue isn’t coming over well, at least to me. Is it the actors’ diction, or too much background noise, or am I going deaf?

And Karen Gillan ought to have refused to utter the line, “Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?”

As a Scot she should have insisted on, “Well, I’m still here, amn’t I?”

Once a year Kirkcaldy Prom gets taken over for just over a week by what is known as the Links Market. It’s a name that’s now inappropriate. While it was once apparently a market, with stalls selling clothes and such, now it’s nothing more than a travelling fair.

The locals seem to think it’s a big thing. (Well it does claim the distinction of being Europe’s longest street fair.) Local children apparently save up all year for the opportunity to splurge all their cash within an hour or so. The football authorities also make sure Raith Rovers do not have a home game on the relevant Saturday. (Policing implications, doncha know. And Stark’s Park is only a long stone’s throw from the south end of the Prom.)

It even attracts interest from folks who live in Cowdenbeath and Dunfermline – “Ur ye goin’ tae the Links, sur?” – and probably Methil and Leven for all I know.

It’s actually a bit of a nuisance. Quite apart from the phenomenon known as market weather (or bucketing down as it is also called – mercifully suspended for this year, although it did rain overnight and earlier today) the road along the prom is closed off for the duration – plus a few days either side for setting up and taking down the rides – which leads to congestion on neighbouring streets, not to mention the fact that right now the air outside my house is thick with the amplified sounds of the fairground (even though the Prom is a few hundred metres away and they’re supposed to turn the volume down on Sundays.)

I’ve said before how boring Kirkcaldy prom usually is. This is a picture taken from the south end on a dreich day.

Here’s a photo taken today from near the same spot.

“The Market” might be a relatively big travelling fair but the fuss the locals make anyone would think no other town ever had a “Shows” (as we used to call them in Dumbarton – two a year, April and August, held on Dumbarton Common) turn up on their doorstep. Hell, Burntisland – only 4 miles from Kirkcaldy – has a permanent fairground site – at least during the summer months.

Still it’s only up and running Wednesday to Monday. Everything’ll be back to normal in a couple of days.

Inhabitants of the US tend to refer to themselves as American. This is of course factually correct as their country does lie within that continent (or those two continents if you prefer.)

However, they also tend to appropriate the phrase for themselves, to use it to mean a citizen of the United States. This is an implicit dismissal of the other countries in their hemisphere – possibly a linguistic reflection, or extension, of the Monroe Doctrine which explicitly regards the Americas as the USA’s backyard. The doctrine dresses itself up as anti-colonial but was of course in itself nothing but imperialist by appropriating to the US the right to interfere in the affairs of other continental – and Caribbean – states. (This right has sometimes been exerted whether the recipients of the benefit desired it or not.)

The terminology is also prevalent, though, on this side of the Atlantic. I may have used it myself at times, however much I try always to refer to the US or USA rather than “America.”

I believe, though, that it is a source of irritation to Canadians in particular and also I suspect to Mexicans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Costa Ricans, El Salvadoreans, Nicaraguans, Belizeans and Panamanians. Not to mention Uruguayans, Brazilians, Chileans, Bolivians, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Argentines, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Surinamese, Guyanese and Paraguayans – even French Guianese – all of whom are American in the wider sense.

I have seen the proposal that the description Columbian – after the continent’s “discoverer” – be used to replace American in the narrower sense. This would be the supreme irony, as what was Columbus if not a European imperialist?

It is unlikely to catch on, though, as US citizens would doubtless not wish to be confused with their fellow continentals from South America, ie Colombians.

As other options this would leave us with the rather unwieldy United Statesian. This could be shortened to USian (which may, though, be misread as Usian,) or Uessian, or even in these days of cavalier spelling, Youessian.

Any of these would at least have the merit of being specific (as well as unimperialist.)

Fulsome does not mean heartfelt – nor even complete.

It means overdone; excessive; fawning; perhaps even insincere – especially when describing a tribute.

I was checking my blog’s stats earlier this week.

It never fails to amaze me that a high number of visits to this blog seem to arise from my post about Mary Campbell Smith’s poem The Boy In The Train.

There are lots of hits for Art Deco too, which actually tend to predominate.

However what caught my eye this time was someone looking for the spelling of sulphur.

I accessed the search page they’d used and found this blog entry. Its last line is a beauty.

I do hope Jon Edwards from the RSC has looked at it (and at my reply to his comment on my take on the subject here.)

I note also that I was 22^nd equal in the general blog category in the Scotblog Awards and 67^th equal overall. Four votes plus a panel nomination was all that took. (I’ll need to tout for votes next year.)

Today I received a glossy four page flier (folded A3 size, then) – I think it came with my newspaper – calling itself Holyrood Magazine. Its strapline was, “Are you in the loop? Holyrood Magazine is Scotland’s award winning current affairs magazine.”

The banner headline was “Education in Scotland 2010″ about a conference to take place in Edinburgh on Tue 23^rd Feb.

The introduction to Session One: Scotland’s Education System started,
“It has now been 10 years since the power to make decisions was handed to Scotland and it’s administration.”

I stopped reading right there.

It was clearly written by someone who needs a bit more education him or herself. It was also not adequately proof-read.

Where’s the brick wall to bang my head against?

Well, we won’t make it to Jupiter this year. We haven’t even made it to Mars.

Just one more example of how the future wasn’t.

Happy New Year anyway; to one and all.

*Btw; I hope we’re all pronouncing this year as “twenty-ten.”

Another free Saturday, so a chance to say Nigella Lawson was on TV when I switched it on this morning.

And she mentioned liquorice, which she pronounced more-or-less as “likorish.”

Of course many Southerners do this but I don’t recall ever hearing this way of saying the word until I went to visit my cousins on England’s South Coast in nineteen hundred and long time ago. It’s bugged me ever since.

No-one, for example, says rice with a “sh” sound at the end.

Anyway, Nigella moved me to look the word up and my dictionary (Chambers Twentieth Century, 1972) gives the pronunciation as “lik’ ə-ris (in US also -rish)” so Nigella and all those Southerners are actually saying it the American way.

Why?

(Of course my Chambers was a Scottish publication but it doesn’t give lik’ ə-rish as an English form of pronunciation. It does also give the alternative spelling licorice.)