Archive for the ‘Scotland’ Category

Summer is here in Montreal and it’s hard to spend any free time at home in front of a desk, unless it’s to upload a fantastic picture of back home sent from your parents’ latest outing. Anybody thinking of holidaying in Scotland would be wise to get there ASAP while the two weeks where it doesn’t rain holds up.

I have many a fond memory of viewing beautiful scenes like this through rain-covered car windows, steamed up with a family’s-worth of impatient breath and opened flasks of tea, finally taking one triumphant run outside during a break in the clouds before driving back home again to our Sunday dinner and less weather-reliant pursuits of newspapers and videogames.

Recently Watchdog, (a UK consumer complaint show), ran an article on DS Brain Training / Brain Age supposedly discriminating against accents - especially those of Northern England and Scotland. As silly as this sounds, I actually found it to be entirely true when playing despite commanding a relatively well-spoken Scots tongue myself, though was impressed enough that the voice-recognition worked as well as it did. Nintendo were even thoughtful enough to allow the omission of the voice-recognition element from the Brain Age test.

The thing they don’t mention in the segment, however, is the blatant discrimination against a particular way of writing the number 4. In order to avoid being labeled with the mental age of a seventy year-old I had to relearn something that’s come naturally since childhood, with a numerical brainwashing so thorough I’ve never been able to go back to the old way since.

I wrote a post just a few weeks ago complaining about “back home”, but it’s easy to get homesick when your friend sends you pictures of his recent camping trip in Glencoe, Scotland.

The Canadian Rockies are majestic, the NY Adirondacks are incredibly fertile, but there’s something about the Scottish Highlands that’s just classic fairytale.

It’s not at all related to games or animation, but I just found this site claiming to relate local news from my hometown of Dundee, Scotland, in the local dialect.

While it’s far from regularly updated, they do have an iFrame displaying the local weather from an external site, which I’ve stolen and handily embedded below. It’s clear to see at least one of the reasons I left the UK as the weather certainly is shit right now - (This is an external link though so will likely be bright sunshine by the time anyone gets around to seeing this).

This is vaguely relevant because today, Marie-Jo informed me of a new twist on Speed-Dating that’s apparently catching on in the UK. Called “Speed-Hating”, socially awkward singles interact with one another in brief rotation, and in the great British tradition, complain about every facet of their miserable lives - a task presumably requiring more than just the few allotted minutes.