Tag Archives: blogscratching

…there are wheel biters and road racers… F1 aficionados and stock car racing enthusiasts… folks whose day brightens up by the sound of an engine revving… I’m not one of them… indeed, as far back as more than forty years ago I successfully failed my sole attempt at an official DRIVING TEST in the UK… there was also a highly unflattering ‘incident’ of which I hasten to say I’m not proud, when yours truly, in possession of a Provisional Driving License (for learners, of course) was involved in one of the original ‘road rage’ episodes versus some other driver who unwittingly took his life in his hands by doing sum’thing rather stupid to me in the car I was then driving…

…the resultant metallic confrontation and ‘causing of supreme prejudicial assault on the other driver’s vehicle’ ended with a less than spiritually-uplifting court appearance and the recommendation from the magistrate that Master Gallacher should consider ‘never getting behind the wheel of a car again’, a view to which Master Gallacher fully subscribed… I was reminded of this earlier today when I was asked to be featured in a local publication’s piece on ‘what wheels I prefer and why’… my response mentioned NUTHIN about the ‘road rage’ contrepemps, but I felt obliged to repeat my dear Mama’s view that her favourite son was born to ’travel in the rear of limousines, the front of civil aircraft, and to ’test-drive’ five-star hotels and bordellos, and not necessarily in that order’.. over the past several decades, I’ve endeavoured to keep assiduously to dear Mama’s guidelines… therefore, to satisfy the request from the local publication’ s editor, and not to deviate from Mama’s ethos, as a back-seat driver only, my choice of wheels, unsurprisingly, is a 1930s version of the Rolls Royce…

…the attached photograph captures perfectly the elegance and élan of a sophisticated back-seat driver… special seating to be reserved for any and all Mama persons who align with this road travel philosophy… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…my predominant linguistic skills are in the area of talking Rubbish… added to that is a passing acquaintance with English, Celtic (Scots Gaelic), French (Glasgow Secondary School and London City International Foreign Exchange Dealing Room levels), Cantonese (Hong Kong Chinese), Tagalog (mainstream Filipino), and, of late, a smattering of localised Arabic… (a salaam a leikum, Jimmy)… I’ve been taken recently with a phrase initially attributed to that Roman guy who invented  the Salad called after him… Veni, Vidi, Bloggicci… in translation it means, I Veni-ied, I Vidi-ied, I Bloggicci-ied… if I had known way back when I began to do these blogs that the source would turn out to be a Roman general whose pals used his ribs as a dagger-sharpener, it may well have taken a different tone… to observe the ancient way of doing politics, where everybody stabs everybody else in the back, unlike the modern… oh, hang on a minute… let’s look at it from another direction… that such a venerated language as Latin should lend its name to a barista’s favourite product, Latte, just blows the mind, doesn’t it?… how far seeing they must have been in Mark Anthony‘s day… with the vision of Starbucksium ROOLING the WURLD…

…betcha that wee Liz Taylor lassie and young Dickie Burton never imagined they would be the forerunner role models for a coffee empire… their imperial centurions and plunderers of Britain all these millennia ago met their match when they encountered the hordes North of Watford Gap… the Scots required Hadrian’s Wall to stop them coming over the border and nicking the latte and croissant plates from the toga-touters… so the Celts up there merely generated their own stuff… hence the birth of Mcdonald’s…

…the Campbells were not allowed into the franchise after a wee bit of a misunderstanding about some Massacre in Glencoe… apparently they had failed to Deep Fry the Mars Bars… so there yeez go, a brief history of how Starbucks and McDonald’s were born… ye’re welcome… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…if there’s one thing yeez get to know the older yeez get… is that yeez know comparatively little… no one mind or brain holds all the intelligence and learning that civilisation has generated since time began… and the earlier this ol’ Jurassic understood that, the easier it became to get comfortable about not being the fount of all knowledge… but it doesn’t mean I stop trying to learn… as a relative newcomer to this wunnerful scribbling gig seven years or so ago, the learning curve has been necessarily steep… makes me dizzy sum’times, truth be told… NUTHIN stays the same for long, and the WURLD of publishing has seen changes over the past ten or twenty years that would normally have taken a century or more… but I note many of our fellow Lads and Lassies in Blog Land reluctant to get immersed in the realities of modern day Authorship… each to his/her own, of course, but the evidence to my eyes is persuasive… the need to be present on the SOSYAL NETWURKS is even more demanding to be ‘heard’ above the literary market ‘noise’…

…of course, just banging on about anything on the Web is kinda pointless… my approach is simple… I communicate as much as possible with people with like-minded writing interests… people with a sense of humour are also priceless… and I derive endless pleasure from supporting other quill-scrapers online… we all need our affirmations… our feathers stroked… the honest feedback from folks whose opinion yeez value… it’s all part and parcel of being ’aboard’… and there are still no free lunches…the cost of all of this is yer expended time, energy and focus… I regard it as the finest investment I’ve ever made… my acquired new creed is— ‘I write, I read, and I blog, therefore I am’… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…the clip above has been doing the rounds again on Facebook, and I have to ‘fess up, it hits me right in the ‘feels’… there’s sum’thing uplifting about the whole ‘Zorba music’ thing… and I’m aware that the video was made a coupla years ago… but given the turbulence and relative hardship that many of the Greek populace has undergone in recent times, I find it a singularly positive watch… most of the man-in-the-street Greeks are not responsible for the economic mismanagement and political sleight-of-hand that has brought such despair to families all over that country… like many of yeez Lads and Lassies of Blog Land, I visited Greece many years ago, I danced Zorba’s dance and indulged the ouzo, and had a terrific time with the locals… I wish them well… enjoy the thing once more, and let yer spirit and soul soar as mine has done watching it…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…coming as I do from the Land that gave yeez Fried Mars Bars, it’s hardly a surprise to know that chocolate features large in my own diet…

…like many of yeez Lads and Lassies chained as we are to the laptop on a regular basis, the cavalry arrives frequently with supplies of sustenance to keep the literary juices flowing… yeez can have yer wine— white, red, rose, or whatever… yeez may indulge chips, bonbons, and croissants… a few (and only a few, I understand) will nibble on healthy fruits, nuts and other such saintly fodder… these eating and drinking items are consumed at any and all hours of the day and night as yeez quill-scrapers tap away at yer tomes… but none of the prior menu items comes even close to chocolate…  it may take the guise of wee chunks broken from larger mother blocks… plain, milk, white, dark, pointy-Tobleroney-triangles, even if needs must, fruit and nut embedded as a passing nod to ‘health’…

…choco-chip cookies, half-coated digestive biscuits, Jaffa Cakes (who cares if sumb’dy argues whether or not these are cakes or biscuits—there’s chocolate on them…get stuck in), wafers, fingers, eclairs, wrapped-in-foil, Quality-Street-in-big-coloured-tins, all part of the endless stream of Author-grub… but NUTHIN, except NUTHIN, surpasses the ultimate luxury, the pinnacle of chocolate-dom, the uncounterfeitable Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers…

…apologies, after I typed that last wee bit I had to stand up and salute… yeez know how it is, right?… when all else fails, as Popeye would call for his spinach, as Bugs Bunny would indulge his carrots, as W.C.Fields would look to remove the cork from his lunch, then every sell-respecting scribbler in time of belly-filling need cries out to the Gods, ‘Bring Me Tunnocks Caramel Wafers, Or Bring Me Death’… I’m quite peckish now… must go and have a choccy snack… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!

…there can be little argument that Aunty Internet and the SOSYAL NETWURKS have transformed the publishing industry, for both self-publishing and traditional house publishing… the merits and demerits are discussed, lauded, moaned about, praised and pummelled in turn, depending on who’s point of view is currently in vogue… I’ll ‘fess up, I’m a full-bloodied fan of all of it… as a comparatively recent ‘joiner’ seven years ago into the wunnerful global scribbling family, the enthusiasm is still fresh with me… and the great beauty in all of this, is that everyone of us is entitled to our own opinions on just about anything on here to do with our writers’ craft… and as yeez prob’ly know, I’m not shy about sharing mine… my interest is being grabbed more and more by the ongoing Great God Amazon readers reviews debacle, about which I blogged the other day… and it occurs to me, that possibly a more important ‘sub-plot’ in there is the issue of ‘rankings’ for titles… ‘coz, ultimately, the reviews are an integral part of the whole pattern driving these amorphous numbers… maybe it’s time to take a wee breath and step back… undeniably, excellent ratings can help us to see more sales and downloads for our literary masterpieces… and it’s a tremendous ego trip to see one or more of yer babies sitting close to the top of its particular JONGGR’s charts… however, as they say in the classics, Mabel, ‘all this, too, shall pass’… even the  best of bestsellers seldom populate the top spot for any considerable length of time…

…when the book slips from #7 to #783,426 in a matter of a coupla months, yeez kinda get a better sense of balance… a wee bit of perspective on the nonsense about ‘rankings’… much better to count the actual number of copies moved, regardless of where it sits in the bestsellers lists… a lot of little makes a lot!… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!