A while back, a long while back, there were calls for Canada to boycott one of the Olympics. It could have been one of the Winter Olympics; Canada does better in them than in the Summer Games. Anyway, a Canadian contender was on the radio saying that there was no way the Government was going to stop her going to the Olympics. Fair enough, in a way. But only if she has repaid every penny of taxpayer money she's ever received in sports grants, etc. Then she's free to go for her dream of Olympic Gold.

A while back, a long while back, there were calls for Canada to boycott one of the Olympics. It could have been one of the Winter Olympics; Canada does better in them than in the Summer Games. Anyway, a Canadian contender was on the radio saying that there was no way the Government was going to stop her going to the Olympics. Fair enough, in a way. But only if she has repaid every penny of taxpayer money she's ever received in sports grants, etc. Then she's free to go for her dream of Olympic Gold.

I was appalled to learn that a Japanese campaign against nuclear weapons had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, there can't be many people who are in favour of using nuclear weapons. Why single out this Japanese group? What the award does is validate the feeling in Japan that the country is a victim of the Second World War. Does no-one there look back to what happened before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The invasion of China, the mass rapes and murders committed by the Imperial Japanese Army? The prisoners of war and slave labourers worked to death building railways and working in the mines? Well, apparently the Japanese do. Army officer Masanobu Tsuji was actively involved in many of the worst atrocities. He even dined on the liver of a downed US airman. The Japanese elected him as an MP and put up a statue of him. What kind of people do that?

Well, it's the first blog of the year. And that means........ The Book of the Year is announced. There was a good crop of good 'uns in 2024 and it came close to having joint winners. Very close. The tie breaker between two very well written books proved to be whether a candid first hand account beat out a second-hand one in which the author did a great job of teasing the facts from the actual participants. If you want to find out the verdict, go to Book of the Year

I had to pass a driving test in the UK and again after I came to Canada. I sat my first test in Shetland. I remember there was only one long stretch of road in Lerwick which was regarded as safe for the Emergency Stop - pretty much outside the gates of the Gilbert Bain Hospital. There were only one or two places in town for the reversing around a corner. In Alberta there was no reversing around corners. Instead there was reversing into a parking spot in the space between two cars. In Shetland there were no roundabouts. But there was one outside the ferry terminal in Aberdeen. Eventually, due to the number of smashes involving Shetland drivers fresh off the boat, Shetland Islands Council built an unnecessary, at least from a traffic point of view, roundabout at the north end of Lerwick into the Gremista Industrial Estate. I would hope

It's the Festive Season. The time of year when charities try to put the bite on a person. At least two of the food banks here have moved from distributing boxes of groceries over to letting folk wander the warehouse and pick out what they want. Less food waste. I always thought that if you were desperate enough go to a foodbank that you would be grateful for whatever you were given. Apparently not. I remember three people in my block of flats coming home bearing boxes from the foodbank. All three were No-Goodniks. One of them decided if he could get free groceries then he could spend his benefit money on drugs and alcohol instead. He died from liver failure. Sadly, some foodbanks are only interested in trumpeting how much food they distribute. They don't care who it is given to - or the consequences.

The State broadcaster here, CBC, sometimes highlights the work of PhD students. It's depressing. The level of intellectual curiosity and academic competence displayed would be lucky to earn a C in the old Scottish Higher Exams. The same seems to be true of standards south of the 49th Parallel too. I recently read a successful PhD paper that declared the imaginary First World War Scottish regiment in The First Hundred Thousand was a "thinly-fictionalized Black Watch". The newly created Doctor might have found out in the briefest of Internet searches that the book's author, John Beith writing as Ian Hay, had served in the real First Hundred Thousand, Kitchener's volunteers, as an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander. The picture opposite the title page in the first few editions showed the Argylls on the march. And the name of the fictional regiment was The Bruce and Wallace Highlanders. I think there was only one British Highland regiment with "and" in its title. Three facts that suggest maybe perhaps the book was not about the Black Watch. What else did this guy get way wrong on his way to a PhD? What were the people who awarded the PhD thinking? The rot is perpetuated.

Once long ago in a country far away there was a daily newspaper company which decided its reporters were getting too good deal. The answer was obviously to provoke a strike but keep publishing the paper throughout it. Now, this paper covered a wide geographic area and much of the content was written by freelancers. So, the management wrote to the freelancers saying it was going to cut its payments to them. The freelancers were outraged and turned to the paper's full time reporters for support. The area union branch was pretty much run by the paper's staffers. They weren't much interested in helping. The strike was then successfully provoked. The freelancers remembered how unhelpful the staffers had been. They kept contributing to the paper during the strike. The threatened cut in freelance rates never happened. Meanwhile, in preparation for the strike the company had hired a bunch of weekly newspaper reporters for a proposed new free sheet. Their employment contracts specified they had to work wherever in its publishing empire the company assigned them. So, they ended up as "accidental" strikebreakers. The free sheet never materialised and when the strike was over, they were all fired. Planning pays. We'll never know if worker solidarity would have.

Most days on the radio I hear at least one item that is prefaced with a warning that I may find the content disturbing. It never is. I’m left wondering if it really is genuinely felt to be disturbing, why it is being broadcast. I think maybe in these Everyone-is –in-Danger-of-PTSD times whether the broadcaster is just trying to cover themselves legally when it comes to liability. Much the same as warnings on coffee cups that the content may be hot.

When I was a primary school in the late 1960s we had the chance to Buy A Black Baby for six weekly payments of one old penny. We got some sort of card with six boxes and every penny payment made resulted in the teacher ticking one box. Or a rubber stamp may have been involved. I'm pretty sure it was explained to us that the payment of sixpence, a tanner, was not going to buy us a slave for life. The scheme was more about raising money to help with health care in Africa. But that tanner did supposedly give us the right to name an African baby. I always chose John. I wonder how many Johns there are in their mid-50s wandering Africa as you read this.

The BBC World Service had an item about AI generated current affairs content - fronted by AI generated presenters. The real life programme presenter simply fed in his notes and Notebook LM did the rest. I was impressed at first. Though the AI presenters did claim to be humans discussing AI programme hosting; naughty. But then I decided that the item said more about the general standard of broadcasting, terrible, than it did about AI. I mean, it was possible to mistake voices and content created by a soulless, unimaginative, uninquisitive plagiarism machine for real journalists. It doesn't say much for what passes these days for journalism. One presenter here literally doesn't usually know what day it is and another only becomes engaged when handbags or icecream flavours are being discussed. And unlike most of the publicly funded presenters the AI was at least able to read text without stumbling over words or badly mispronouncing them.

I think I'll post the photo of the dead kilties scattered across a battlefield in 1917 again. Just as a Remembrance Day reminder of how badly soldiering can turn out. For some reason I'm reminded of the Max Boyce joke when his mum says You Go Out and Play Rugby but If You Break Your Legs Don't You Come Running To Me. It's all good fun until someone loses an eye. Or their entire lower torso. Anyway, click here to see the photo  – War Dead

I saw a piece of newsreel film you don't get to see very often. It showed French people attacking Allied prisoners of war in a Normandy village in 1944. The villagers were obviously not happy about attempts to liberate them from the Germans. A lot of Allied soldiers reported that even after the Germans were driven out, the French did not seem too happy. Certainly, there wasn't the joy seen in Belgium or the Netherlands. Of course, Normandy took a hammering; a lot of war damage and civilian deaths. But maybe perhaps there were a lot of French who had done well under the Nazis. Despite later claims, not everyone was in the Resistance. It could even be that there were more men in the fascist police force, The Milice, than took up arms against the Germans. Most people, I suppose, just made the most of a bad job and tried to get on with life as best they could. But I wish we would stop pretending that the French were enthusiastic allies in the war against fascism. Of the 38,000 French troops captured by the Allies in Syria in 1941, only 6,000 opted to fight the Axis as members of the Free French forces. And let's not consider the British lives squandered rescuing French troops from Dunkirk in 1940, only for them to return to France after the surrender to work for the German war effort.

When I started at the Edmonton Sun the boss who prepared the shift rota wouldn't post it until the Friday before the Monday that it took effect. So, you didn't know if you were working on Monday until preceding Friday. Hard to plan a life. Which I suspect was the point. The uncertainty definitely made it very difficult to have much of a social life, never mind a marriage. Which in turn hurt the old Work-Life Balance. A new boss meant a new approach. On a five or six week cycle, you moved up a place in the rota and every week started an hour or so later than in the previous week. And you also knew well way ahead of time which weekends you would be working. The downside was that one week you were starting at, say 2pm, and finishing at 10pm then the following week as you moved to the beginning of the rota cycle again you were starting at 10am and finishing around 6pm. That's a big adjustment for a body clock to make. In fact it's a downright unhealthy adjustment. Swings and roundabouts.

I didn't know I used to be a Rangers supporter. I recently came across a photo of my third or fourth birthday party. And the cake is emblazoned with a Rangers player. That might make sense as the baby sitter's family were staunch, very staunch, Bluenoses. But I was still a little surprised. Rangers in those days refused to field any Catholic players. Kids can have a very strong sense of social justice and that kind of policy would trigger it. I would have known about the policy because of the joke about the Celtic fan boasting about the 1967 European Cup win in Lisbon. And the Rangers fan remarks "Aye, but you had five proddies playing for you". To which the reply was "Well, you've got eleven and f'all good it does you". Also, I would have been aware from the radio halftime scores that Rangers seemed to be losing after the first 45 minutes but then at full time they'd scored five or six goals and came out the winner. Even a four year old could work out that they were running the opposition into the ground in the second half due to their outstanding fitness. I think I heard that most of training sessions at Ibrox involved running up and down the stairs of the Clyde Tunnel rather than working on ball skills. Anyway, it turns out that maybe perhaps I wasn't a Ger's fan after all. But one of my grannies was and she would have brought the cake. I wish I still had the tinplate raygun, which had a spark wheel which span when the trigger was pressed, which I can be seen gripping in every photo from that long ago party no matter what I'm doing.

In middish September I heard a news item on the BBC World Service news about the 80th anniversary of the failed British/Polish airborne operation at Arnhem. Any resemblance with actual events was more good luck than good journalism. There were a damn sight more men involved than the 2,000 cited by the so-called journalist. The 1st British Airborne Division alone deployed 10,000 and the US 101st and 82nd divisions, also involved in Operation Market Garden would have had a sent in about the same number. I'm pretty sure the show presenter called it Market Gardez. But then she was a foreigner. Sadly, the fact is that education in the UK is now such a joke that I doubt if a Brit these days would have had much more background knowledge. But here's the thing. When I was a journalist it was expected that you would do some research for the article. Something the World Service obviously doesn't insist on in 2024. But the BBC is not alone in short-changing the taxpayer. The CBC in Canada reported that last Monday marked the first anniversary of the murder of 1,200 concert attendees in Israel. No wonder just under half of Canadians in a survey think the time has come to stop publicly funding of the CBC.

I was a little disappointed when the paper I worked for, the Edmonton Sun, was taken over in 1998 by a company called Quebecor, at that time one of the biggest commercial printers in the world. It was how that had become such a big deal in the world of printing that that worried me. They had gone into partnership with millionaire crook Robert Maxwell. It seemed to be me that either Quebcor had known that Maxwell was a crook and didn’t care. Or they didn’t know and they were idiots. Either way, I was not happy. The Department of Trade and Industry had warned back in 1971 that Maxwell should not be allowed to head a publicly quoted company. And here were his main business partners buying us. It was no great surprise when a few years later the Sun was sold off and absorbed by its rival The Edmonton Journal.

A lot of parents think their darling little kids are the greatest thing since sliced bread. That's fine - unless these parents are journalists and decide to interview their supposedly cute little darling on air. I think the rest of us quickly cotton onto the fact that little so-and-so isn't exactly genius material - or that cute. I don't think it's a co-incidence that the journalists involved are often also really really bad at their jobs. I can think of one who literally doesn't know what day it is and advises people to ignore traffic lights if the roads are quiet. He also frequently interviews his wife as a sort of Jill Average. And don't get me started on the Kenyan who talks on air like she just came from a Home Counties Pony Club meeting but when she interviewed her kid sounded like she came from ..... well, from Kenya. A sad case, I fear, of someone hired on the Never Mind the Quality, See the Colour principal. When someone benefits from so-called positive discrimination many others are discriminated against. And my bet is that with the implosion of professional journalism there were plenty of recently redundant British reporters who were more worthy of the job.

OK, I was wrong. The word Gotten is not yet another American bastardisation of the English Language. I found it in a Scottish book published in 1825. But I'm still agin Lived Experience. What other kind of experience is there? And Continue On. Where else would one continue? Would you take medical advice from a doctor who talks about something being pre-existing? Suggests muddled ignorant thinking to me. English is now an international pidgin language. But I balk at referring to a helicopter as Jesus Christ Big Mixmaster in the Sky. I can see why the arbiters of English as pidgin are American. It has always been a pidgin for them. Who remembers now that before the First World War the biggest single national minority were the Germans - closely followed by the Irish? And nowadays folk in the US can live their entire lives in Spanish.

I don't know what they called now but it used to be Tinkers or Travellers. The Bleeding Hearts say they get a hard time. Most, I'm sure, are good and decent people. But there are some who want a lifestyle which allows them to vanish overnight. Years ago such a band of such characters set up camp on the common land between two villages in the English Midlands. Their packs of savage dogs made it impossible to use the public right of way linking the two villages. This mob made their living from tarmacking driveways. I heard they showed up at homes of the vulnerable, elderly, stupid and the just plain greedy claiming to have some Tarmac left over from a construction job going on nearby. So, for cash in hand they could lay a new driveway for a bargain price. I wouldn't be surprised if the new driveway proved to be paper thin and cracked open within a month. But that wasn't the worst of what they did. Boiling up bitumen for the Tarmac creates a highly toxic cancer inducing thick tarry sludge. When these people vanished they left the stream between the two villages clogged with a toxic residue.