A Son of the Rock

This picture reminded me of a spirograph, which according to Wikipedia is still going.

It’s the path the Vela pulsar traces on the gamma-ray detector of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

For the details of why the image is not a static one but rather traces such a complex path see Astronomy Picture of the Day for 4/5/12.

SFL Div 2, The Rock, 5/5/12

Again I wasn’t at the game but this was a good win considering a lot of first team regulars were rested with the play-offs in mind.

Congratulations to Craig Dargo on his hat-trick and to Glen Thomson on his debut goal.

I note that the two goal margin means we didn’t finish the season on a negative goal difference. To do so while in third place would have been bizarre.

As it is it’s on to new territory. I doubt I’ll make Wednesday’s game but I have Gayfield pencilled in for Saturday. We don’t have a good record up there so we’ll need to get something midweek or we’re probably stuffed.

I heard Gordon Strachan on the news the other day referring to the Rangers situation. He said something along the lines of, “How can you let a club which all those players and managers have put so much into, with so much proud history, go to the wall? It wouldn’t be right.”

Well, Gordon. Airdrieonians were a club that players and managers had put a lot into and had a proud history – four Scottish Cup finals among that. They went to the wall.

The third Clydebank FC died as a result of Airdrieonians demise as they were taken over and moved to Airdrie to become Airdrie United. Lots of players and managers and maybe not so proud a history, but they did make it into the Premier Division and reached a Scottish Cup semi as a second tier team. Their fans were powerless to prevent the takeover but did set up a junior team.

Third Lanark were a club that players and managers had put a lot into and had an undeniably proud history – including a League Championship and two Scottish Cup wins. No one acted to save them.

Going further back St Bernard’s have a Scottish Cup win to their credit and ultimately went out of business due only to the untimely death of their main benefactor. No one helped them.

Was it right that these clubs were allowed to die, Gordon? Just because they were smaller clubs doesn’t mean their fans were any less passionate about them. Just because Rangers have a large following does not mean they should be extended concessions those clubs were not.

Gretna FC’s story is more akin to that of Rangers. Grossly overspending and over-reachinbg themselves they had to be bailed out to the end of their only SPL season and were then punted. They had a Scottish Cup final along the way, though, if that was something they could be proud of considering how they achieved it.

And as for Sandy Jardine’s vainglorious statement about Rangers fans taking action against other clubs this reminded me of the playground bully and is exactly the sort of thing we real football fans (as opposed to glory hunters) have come to expect from the institution that he is trying to defend. Sandy; you’ve done the crime, now do the time. Take your punishment like a man. At the least, this should mean expulsion from the SPL.

To those real fans of Rangers who recognise their club is in the wrong here and that its behaviour cannot be condoned nor encouraged in the future by any holding back of sanctions now, I offer my condolences and my apologies for the intemperate nature of the previous paragraph.

Last week saw the death of Levon Helm, one time drummer and singer with The Band, who were much more than Bob Dylan’s one-time backing band.

I’ve already posted the Band’s version of The Weight, their second biggest UK hit. Their biggest, curiously, was Rag Mama Rag.

Levon took lead vocal on this one, though.

Levon Helm: 26/5/1940-19/4/2012. So it goes.

This is Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court, a fine example of Victorian Scots baronial architecture.

I have been inside this building once. Not that I was accused of anything – I was called for jury duty. And there’s a curious tale there.

The details of the charge were read out (I forget now what it was – a minor drugs offence, perhaps) before the jurors were chosen. After the ballot, the successful/unlucky ones were asked if there was any reason why they could not try the case.

One woman stood up and said she couldn’t. On being asked why not she said, “I saw the accused … emmm ….” but did not finish her sentence, though her implication was clearly that she had seen the accused act in a criminal way.

The sheriff did not question her about it but merely told her she could go and another juror was chosen. It obviously had not occurred to him that her reason may not have been valid and that she may just have been trying to avoid jury service.

But a more important thought struck me. Hadn’t what she said possibly prejudiced the jury against the accused?

I don’t know if it did since I didn’t see the outcome of the case as the sheriff immediately then dismissed the other potential jurors. I had not been chosen so I left for home.

The Sheriff Court has a nice setting off the same square as Kirkcaldy Town House.

However, a less cropped picture shows the extension (built in the 1970s?)

What on Earth were they thinking? The two parts do not match at all.

Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court also used to feature in the BBC Scotland comedy series Chewin’ the Fat, though in name only as it was filmed in any likely location.

Here’s one of the clips.

Another extract (less suitable for work) is here. It features a Victorian building which isn’t, though, Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court.

This is the Home Connections shop in Buckhaven, Fife.

There are typical strong horizontals accentuated by the painting scheme. The thin white lines are a nice touch. Pity the replacement windows don’t follow Art Deco style.

Just a gap site away is this minor deco pair of shops.

Two more photos of Home Connections are on my flickr.

From vimeo.com via Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This is to the men of the Forth Royal Garrison Artillery who fell in the Great War.

It’s located in Hunter Street, Kirkcaldy, on the wall of the Territorial Army building there. The Terries (and the Artillery) now – along with all the other old Scottish regiments – have been amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland. I had to poke my camera through the railings to avoid metal bars in the shot.

This is a close-up on the plaque.

SFL Div 2, Forthbank Stadium, 28/4/12.

So for the second year in a row our post-season destiny is settled with a game to spare. And we’re in the play-offs!

This is an outstanding end to a campaign where I’m sure most Sons fans would have been happy with survival in the Division. Very well done to Manager Alan Adamson, the backroom staff and the players.

The game itself wasn’t a classic. There was perhaps too much riding on it with Stirling hoping to avoid relegation. We had the better of the first half with Pat Walker coming close twice early on, Brian Prunty almost converting a Scott Agnew cross-come-shot and Stirling only the one really threatening effort on goal.

Their goal was well taken if a little out of the blue. Stirling hadn’t really looked threatening with too many wrong decisions on the ball and misplaced passes or shots.

Arlan Mptata came on and looked skillful, if perhaps too inclined to elaborate a bit – at this level players sometimes get in the way by accident rather than design – but he glided past his defender with ease a couple of times.

Our equaliser was bizarre. It’s the sort of goal you lose when you’re bottom of the Division, nothing is going for you and you’re doomed to relegation. A cross was headed into the air by Stirling’s no 2, it looped up and the keeper grabbed it as it came down but it had carried over. The lino flagged straight away. The keeper was maybe hampered by the injury he’d sustained earlier in the half but both should have dealt with it better.

After that Stirling threw the kitchen sink at it, playing men up. They had a four on two at one point where the attacker still managed to let one of the two get in a tackle. They also had what looked a penalty from where I was sitting up the other end but the ref blew for a dive and booked the attacker. A let-off I thought, but seeing the footage on Sons Player the ref got it spot on.

Then in stoppage time, at a corner, sub Craig Dargo was left totally unmarked to head the winner. Third in the Division sewn up – our highest finish in the SFL since 2004.

So there’s a nothing game next week against Brechin but the boys need to keep focused.

Then the play-off with Arbroath. Not a team we have an especially good record against.

Orbit, 2010, 376p, plus author interview.

Since Christopher Priest’s bemoaning of the Clarke Award shortlist in which Halting State’s sequel Rule 34 is included I bumped this up my reading list.

The usual caveat applies to this review. I did see an early version of the first chapter or so, back in the day. The author is a fellow member of the East Coast Writers’ Group and of Writers’ Bloc.

The setting is a near future independent Republic of Scotland in 2016 or so. A bank in an on-line game is robbed, despite the levels of encryption involved. A panicked employee of Hayek Associates (the Edinburgh company overseeing the game) calls the local police. This leads to the involvement of our first viewpoint character, Detective Sergeant Sue Smith. The other two narrators are Elaine Barnaby, an insurance fraud investigator, and Jack Reed, an IT specialist just sacked from his previous job and on a bender in Amsterdam. An unusual facet of the book is that all three strands are written in the second person – a notoriously difficult authorial trick to pull off. Here the conceit is mostly effective. It only falls down a few times and after a while becomes almost unnoticeable. (Sue Smith’s narrative voice jars, though, at the times when USian creeps in – Defence with an “s,” “out back” for “out the back,” “fit” for “fitted.”) As the story proceeds layers of complication add in, as not all is what it seems, even in the real world.

The dangers of writing SF set in the near future are apparent even only four years after original publication (2008.) The banking-crash-induced recession and our present day austerity are entirely absent and the ubiquity of the location software, of driverless vehicles and so on feels a bit premature. Not to mention that a Scottish Republic is unlikely in the short term. However, if read as an Altered History (which will actually be necessary in five years’ time) these problems disappear.

Such technologies’ vulnerability to hacking/decryption is foregrounded, highlighting our growing dependence on such things. (I would add that they are equally vulnerable to a simple loss of electricity supply to servers etc.)

One of Christopher Priest’s complaints was that Stross uses “Och aye” dialogue. On this ground I acquit him. The book is set in Scotland after all. Not being Scots born it is more than commendable that Stross makes the effort to convey local speech – he still lives in Edinburgh – even if sometimes his ear is not perfectly attuned. (Oh, and the word dreich doesn’t have a “t” at the end.) He even has one of his narrators display the Edinburgher’s antipathy to all things Glaswegian.

The book is clearly aimed at a target audience of games players in addition to SF readers. Small portions consist of the MMORPG which was hacked into; these integrate well with the main thrust, as indeed does game playing. In this respect, pace Mr Priest, outright literary quality might be considered to be a drawback. Horses for courses. Halting State is not deep and not pretending to be, but I enjoyed it. Whether a “light” novel like this deserves an award, though, is surely a matter of subjectivity.