Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Water Moles.
05/08/2007
“The Shadow of Farce Hangs Over The Scottish Parliament Once More”. I make no apology for pinching the above from a radio journalist speaking on the morning after our glorious election. The whole operation only proves once and for all that we British have been unable to organise a piss up in a brewery since the 1950’s. The blame can be placed firmly at the door of “Lucky” Jack McConnell (or “the liar” as his fellow university students christened him). As a Blairite sycophant and grasping the inevitability of a final defeat by the SNP, Lucky Jack came up with a voting system so complicated that even dearest Dottie had to ask for fresh papers before the dear had managed to use her six votes correctly, two ballot papers requiring crosses and the third needing numbers one to four in order of preference amongst a scattering of hopefuls. Not since universal suffrage has there been such a blatant attempt to mislead the voter and it is hardly surprising that 100,000 ballot papers have had to be set aside as “spoiled”. It seems a great shame that the wishes of these hundred thousand good men and true have had to be ignored, not for the old reasons of a vote being erroneously cast for the Pope or God, but just because it was too bloody confusing. The Nats did steal the show as forecast by yours truly; however, probably the most intriguing story comes from the damp votes from the loch side. The Americans may have invented swinging chads; however Argyll and Bute managed to shock the nation with extra “damp” votes. For some bizarre reason votes cast on one side of the loch must be carried by rowing boat to the other side for the count, rather than using the national road network. To cut a long story short not only did a hundred extra votes appear at the end of the ferry trip, but they were also damp, this being on the driest, warmest day of the year to date. Conspiracy theories abound, however the New Labour chump who has been ousted by a handful of votes is crying “foul” from the rooftops, although any fool knows that all parties suffer equally from voting balls ups. On this occasion the problem is not the whiff of fraud, but rather the fact that our splendid new electronic vote counting machines cannot cope with damp paper, in Scotland? Surely not, we must wait and see whether or not it all ends in tears.
My I.T. people keep banging on about Stats. I have only the vaguest of grip on all of this, and certainly do not understand most of it. However apparently one must constantly fret about the power of one’s web profile, it is not good enough that a Google enquiry about “Trollaigh” will bring you straight to this page; I am being urged to constantly update my meta tags and introduce some steamy prose. One thing that I have learnt is that several hundred of you do scan this drivel, and that most of you are agents of various government departments. The cat has been let out of the bag via a letter received from Scottish Water reminding me that “The current irrigation of The Great Lawn of Trollaigh, as described in your publication, requires an abstraction licence. An application form and scale of fees are enclosed with this letter to which you must reply by return, or cease said irrigation forthwith.” Thank God it has started raining again. Yours aye, Archie, The Baron Trollaigh.