Kincaldrum Hill (NO 414436, 309m) Unnamed Point 315 (NO 411431, c350m) Finlarg Hill (NO 406419, 336m) 14 kilometres 370 metres of ascent Of the whole Sidlaws ridge, there was one last little section above the 300m contour that I hadn’t visited. I’d looked north-east across Lumley Den to Finlarg Hill when I was on Ironside … Continue reading Sidlaws: Kincaldrum to Finlarg
So this is the first part of my slow assembly of the Revell 1/96 Apollo Saturn V. One of several shortcomings in that kit is that the Apollo Command/Service Module provided is a Block I version. That kind of CSM only ever sat on top of a Saturn V for the unmanned Apollo 4 and … Continue reading RealSpace Models 1/96 Apollo Block II Command/Service Module: Part 1
After Isaac Asimov had written 99 books, he wrote Opus 100, which was a book about his previous books. That was … well, a very Asimov kind of thing to do. I was reminded of Asimov and Opus 100 when the WordPress software informed me I’d just made my 99th post to this blog. I find … Continue reading Opus 100
Mayar (NO 240737, 928m) Driesh (NO 271735, 947m) 15 kilometres 930 metres of ascent I had a short bagging trip this week, precipitated by a visit from our niece, who fancied taking in a couple of Munros on a day-trip from Dundee. In the car park at Glen Doll I was overtaken by a wave … Continue reading Glen Doll: Mayar and Driesh
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) That’s Johnson’s entry for the letter “S” in his famous dictionary, and it’s clear that there’s something amiss with his lower-case s—in its printed form it looks more like an f, most of the time. This feature of 18th-century writing and typography has led some people … Continue reading The Long “S”
The title of this post looks like it could be the name of a concept album by a pretentious prog-rock band. But it’s completely literal—I came across the spiral mirror in question while walking back from Tralee into Benderloch the other day. It was an outdoor ornament of the kind that seems to be called … Continue reading Reflections In A Spiral Mirror
Ever since first contact, when the Jackaroo kicked off a global war on Earth, and swindled the survivors out of rights to most of the solar system in exchange for a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking a couple of dozen lousy M-class red dwarf stars, aliens had been tricking, bamboozling, … Continue reading Paul McAuley: The “Jackaroo” Short Stories
Cnap Chaochan Aitinn (NJ 145099, 715m) 20 kilometres 700 metres of ascent One of those Gaelic tongue-twisters, I’m afraid. The cnap bit (meaning “lump”) is pronounced “crap”. (No, really.) The whole thing is ˈkraʰp ˈxɯ:xən ˈaʰtʲɪn, “lump of the juniper stream”. (If the phonetics move you no farther forward, you can listen to a Gael … Continue reading Cairngorms: Cnap Chaochan Aitinn
zɛnəˈfəʊbɪə xenophobia: a deep antipathy to foreigners Recent political events in the the USA, Europe and elsewhere have meant that this word keeps popping into my head. It comes from two Greek words: xenos, “stranger”, and phobos “fear”. In Greek myth, Phobos was the god of terror; a son of Mars, the god of war. … Continue reading Xenophobia
Robert Smith: Grampian WaysNeil Ramsay & Nate Pedersen: The Mounth Passes It is clear enough where the Grampians begin; no-one is certain where they end. The limits of the range have been as elastic as the whims of cartographers, so that the word “Grampian” has become an uncertain scrawl on many maps. Robert Smith Grampian … Continue reading Two Books About The Mounth Roads