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?

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.

Fulsome does not mean heartfelt – nor even complete.

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

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?

I know the description is kind of metaphorical and reflects a Gosh-Wow! attitude to the phenomenon and that light can’t escape from below the event horizon.

But they aren’t…..

Black, that is.

Not always, anyway.

Certainly not if they are attracting material from nearby stars. Then they must be the biggest firework displays in the universe.

For example:-

The artist’s impression comes from
http://www.gwu.edu/~sps/Society%20of%20Physics%20Students%20%28SPS%29/Events/A136FC42-F9B5-46A5-A0CB-F0007B262E14_files/Black-hole.jpg.

Here’s another nice one showing material from a nearby star bleeding into the accretion disc.

That is from https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/images/nasa_black_hole.jpg.

Not at all bad for something that’s described as black.

Yesterday for the first time in ages I caught Countdown on Channel 4.

Jeff Stelling doesn’t seem right to me (but a lot better than Des O’Connor anyway.)

But the numbers game! The replacement for Carol Vorderman said “times it by.” Times it by!

She’s a grown woman, presumably with a Maths degree or something involving Maths at least.

She should know there is no such verb as “times it by.” It’s multiply.

Susie Dent in dictionary corner ought to be correcting her.

[Carol Vorderman also annoyed me with the way she set out the arithmetic as she would write things like:-
100/50 = 2 x 6 = (12 + 1) x 25 = 325. The "new" woman (I'm sorry, I don't know her name) did this sort of thing too.

Now, 100/50 = 2. It does not equal 2 x 6.
2 x 6 = 12; not (12 + 1) x 25.

It might seem like a little thing .......
but I get faced with such arithmetical rubbish on almost a daily basis in my day job.

Don't give the pupils any excuse, please.]

Gordon McDougall, chairman of Livingston Football Club, which was recently demoted two divisions for breaking insolvency rules, has complained that Brown McMaster, the Scottish Football League’s president, should resign as he is also in breach of SFL rules: to wit, he has a financial interest in two League clubs.

The rights and wrongs of this are not the subject of this post. What is, is the fact that McDougall says in the BBC clip (which I first saw on Reporting Scotland) that McMaster was “flaunting” the rules.

So, here is the image:-

Brown McMaster stands in front of the cameras with the rules held in his hand and says, “Here’s the rules. Get your rules here,” like the best street hawker.

Flaunt:- v. t. – To display ostentatiously; to make an impudent show of.

Flout:- v. t. – To mock or insult; to treat with contempt.

Do you think Mr McDougall might, just perhaps, actually have meant “flout” the rules?

When you are in a supermarket does anything make the heart sink quite so much as the above two words?

What they usually mean is “smaller” or “worse tasting because made with cheaper ingredients.”

Never in my experience do they actually mean the product concerned has been improved.

I’ve now been doing this blogging thingy for a full calendar year. (To my loyal readers it just feels like longer.)

In that time I’ve made 305 posts – nearly one a day I’m astonished to note – and had 323 legitimate comments (including pingbacks.) Thank you to all who have taken the time to read my ravings and to the smaller number who have contributed.

I’ve had visitors from the Americas (North and South) Europe, Australasia, and the Near and Far East as well as from the UK.

There have also been over 4,000 spam comments. Why are a lot of them in Cyrillic?

According to the stats, apart from Gordon Lennon’s sad death the most interest has been in my Art Deco posts. I keep finding new Deco buildings in Scotland to include so that’s an ever extending topic. I’ll be doing a series on Art Deco in Dunfermline (where I work) soon but I think the most comments on any one post have been about the poem “The Boy In The Train.” Amazing what a piece of doggerel can engender.

As to this post’s title, my elder son said to me recently, “You come across as a terrible pedant on your blog, Dad.” He was using the word terrible in the colloquial sense of excessive, of course, rather than meaning that I was not very good at being pedantic – or that my posts inspire fear.

Guilty as charged as far as pedantry is concerned. The good lady swears I could be pedantic for Scotland. She is long suffering it’s true.

I can’t promise I’ll be cutting it down in future, though.