To my amazement this morning when the mail arrived, my stuff from the Bank of Scotland arrived this morning after I had an afternoon meeting with them yesterday. Banks in the US are not even that fast (although, I do live in the city where they are headquartered). I am going to close out my Royal Bank of Scotland account tomorrow in the morning.

Otherwise, I had a test in Old Irish class. It was alright except that I had a massive headache. I think that I did alright but it is hard to tell through the haze of pain. Good thing that I do not get graded on this. I just took it so that I would get more practice. I know that I am a linguistic masochist.

I wanted to leave you with a Scottish word tonight. I did not hear this until I started making friends with Scottish people. When one wants to take a look at something, you say "dekko" as in "I will have a dekko at that later" which translates into American as "I will take a look at that in a minute" or, in more formal English, "I will look at that in a moment". Another interesting Scottish word for your pleasure.

I had my meeting with my Bank of Scotland person today. She was really nice and helpful which is a great change from the Royal Bank of Scotland. They were even able to get me a credit card here in the UK. I went ahead and got it even though I do not need another credit card. I should have understood what she was asking on the phone on Friday but I had half shaven my face when she called. By the end of the meeting, I had her laughing because of my jokes about the Royal Bank of Scotland. She particularly liked the "Royal Pain In The Ass of Scotland" line.

My roommate took the router down to the local computer place from which we bought it. He was very nice and gave us a new plug for it because it seemed to work fine. He also gave us a surge protector so it would not happen again. He said that if we still had problems that we could just return it for a new one. It is great working with a local supplier who knows what he is doing.

Otherwise, not much else is going on. It is nice to get the wireless back online so I am not stuck to the wall.

I hope that I did not bore you with my post yesterday. I, honestly, do not want this blog to become another political blog. While I definitely see the promise of political blogs, I just do not want to become that proficient in tracking stuff down so that I can comment on it. I have a PhD to do and I do not want to split my focus so much that I end up not doing a good job. In any case, this is supposed to be about my time in Scotland not the problems back home.

I did the dishes from the party yesterday. It was a nuisance but my roommate and I did them. The kitchen is so small it is hard to actually work in there. I wonder how the people who lived here before (there were three of them) worked out how to manage the kitchen situation. I think that and the stairs of doom are the only drawbacks from this flat.

In other news, we some how ended up frying the wireless router while we unplugged it and plugged it back in. This is rather confusing because we have done this before. I wonder if there was something wrong with the router when we bought it. My roommate is taking it back to the place we bought it from. I hope we do not have to buy another one because it was very expensive.

I have been reading lately that there could be a US dollar crisis because of China selling off the dollar. This is a direct consequence from large budget deficits. The idea that "deficits don't matter" is dangerous specially when we rely on the money of foreigners, in the form of treasury notes and bills (aka savings bonds). What is a savings bond? It is literally buying a part of someone else's debt. So when you buy a savings bond from the US government, you now own a part of the debt of the US government.

What does this have to do with the fall of the dollar in currency markets? Well, the dollar is not tied to gold like it was before Nixon's administration so it is not tied to the cost of a brick of gold (which is now $445 a troy ounce, the highest in 16 years) but our gold reserves do play a role. It is traded on the global currency markets which means that a US dollar is only worth as much as someone else deems it is worth. Thus when they start losing confidence that people will buy our debt, they will start selling their dollars trying to make sure that they do not lose their investment. This selling will drive down the perceived worth of the US dollar. When the dollar loses this perceived worth then inflation starts because people do not value the US dollar as much as they used to so they must have more of them to sustain their value in their eyes. This all means that your credit card interest rates will increase and all of your other interest rates will also increase across the board. This causes the economy to slow because people cannot borrow money they need to buy a home or start a new business. Even established businesses will be effected because they cannot borrow the money they need to expand or even to exist at all or even if they do, they will be hampered by high interest rates so they will not borrow as much.

What does this all mean? It means that "deficits do not matter" is a fallacy. They do matter. The only thing that cannot be predicted is how fast this will all happen but it will. The red flags are all there. I would venture that if China dumps a huge amount of US dollars onto the market, the dollar crisis will begin. Otherwise, it will be a war of attrition and cause sporadic economic instability which could be even more painful in the long run (of course, Republicans are not worried about that right now, they are more worried about their "moral superiority").

Ok, that is enough of that. I am sure that I have completely bored the pants off of you. In other news, I had a few friend over last night and there is a huge amount of dishes to do but I am lounging around in my sweats trying to ignore all of it.

One of the many conceits that I allow myself is a hot shave. Here in Scotland, it is easy to find a barber shop which gives hot shaves. I usually go to a Turkish one on the other side of Arthur's Seat but today I went to one on St. Patrick's street near the university.

I went inside and I talked to a Russian man whom I have seen there before. He said that he could do a hot shave for me. When he asked if I wanted a mustache, I told him that I did not want one but he did not understand me and started in with the view to having a mustache. Well, when you have a very large Russian guy with a very sharp implement in his hand over your face, you tend not to argue with him.

As part of the service, he gives a massage. Well, he was a bear of a man and he gave the most bone crushing massage that I have ever had. I guess in a way you have to have a bone crushing one since if he gave a more light one, it might be considered a sissy massage not a manly one.

Yesterday, I turned in an application for an account at the Bank of Scotland since I have become sick of the poor service of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Well, I was basically thinking that I would not hear from the Bank of Scotland for a while but I got a phone call today from them saying that they would be able to give me everything I wanted that the Royal Bank of Scotland had refused to me since I was an overseas student. Now that is what I call service. I will now be able to buy things from Europe and use my card instead of having cash in places where I do not want to have cash.

I had to go to the doctor today since my ears plugged up again (occasionally, my ears get clogged and I have to get them cleaned). So now the world is a very very loud place indeed. They were installing a new video camera system into our door locks while the washing was going. I thought the washer was going to explode. So I jumped up and looked around and there was nothing. It was pretty alarming.

Anyway, they installed this video camera system so that you can see who is at the door rather than trying to figure it out from the phone thingy they had before. Now I have this burning desire to hack into it with my pic and scare people with random sounds and stuff. It would be so much fun.

I got a call from my computer store (you always have to help out your local people) and they said that my 256 MB memory card for my new camera. So I went down there and got it. Now I can take 126 full color quality pictures and 22 minutes of video with sound. I think I am going to go to Sandy Bell's and try to get a good video of what it is like to hang out there.

I saw something very interesting last night at Sandy Bell's. I was sitting on a bench near the musician's table when a customer, whom I had seen on previous nights at Bell's, went rigid and fell directly on to the floor, pushing the musician's table out of the way as he went down. It was like watching a statue fall over. I stood up and looked down the bar for the staff to call an ambulance. Well, a bunch of people gathered around rather awe-struck at the suddenness of it all. After a few seconds, he just bounced up off the floor and said that he was fine. Someone pulled him up a chair and he continued drinking like nothing happened. I am very sure that he suffered a seizure but he seemed fine after his brief lie-down.

This was the first time that I had ever seen something like that. I have run into many different types of medical problems but I had never seen a person just fall over like that. He was walking and talking just a few seconds later. Anyway, he had a bloody nose and his face is probably going to hurt tomorrow.

I went on my first geocaching hunt today. It retraced the history of the famous Hare and Burke. It all started when a friend of mine from home was in the city for a few days. He stopped by my place and was talking about it (it has been a pastime of his for a while). I showed him around George Square then I was going to let him go but he said that he was going down into the Cowgate area, which is infamous as a no-go area for tourists so I decided that I would tag along. When you do geocaching you must have a GPS device to track the coordinates. So I decided that it would be easier for me to go with him (I did not think he needed to know about the advisory and it would be fun anyway). It was a fun chase across the Old Town Edinburgh. I felt like I was at least marginally useful in getting us fairly close to the exact spot. We did have trouble at the end with the slightly off coordinates but we made it in the end!

I could not let this go by uncommented upon. If you are in the US, you know about the fight in a professional basketball game a few nights ago. I read a blog from a New York bouncer about his experiences when doing security. He has a great article about the general decline in manners over the past decade. I thought it would make interesting reading.

Thanksgiving in the US is just around the corner so I thought that I would give some of my experience with this holiday from my perspective in Scotland. First of all, there is no thanksgiving here (I am sure you all knew that but I just wanted to make sure). Thus there are no cultural indicators of the holiday. It is interesting to reflect that my neglect of this holiday is in no way connected to any bad feelings associated with it, I merely forgot about it because no one was talking about it nor was it in the relevant local media. With none of the pressures or indicators from my local culture, it completely slipped my mind. I wonder what it is like for someone from Scotland to move to the US where they receive these messages? Do they begin to accept them or do they reject them? I guess it would have to do with how much they identified with US society or culture.

Wow. That is remarkably sensible since I have taken medication for a sinus headache. I hope it goes away soon.

I want to talk today about some of the pronunciation of the Gaelic name for Scotland "Alba". Most English speakers who are ignorant of Gaelic sound rules will often mispronounce Alba as Al-ba. In Gaelic, there is the idea of empathetic vowels, which are voiced in the word but for various reasons that I do not fully grasp yet, are not spelled in the word. This is true for most Gaelic words that begin with AL and AR. Thus, Alba is not pronounced AL-ba but is pronounced ALA-pah because "b" in Gaelic is the same as "p" (remember that Gaelic is q-Celtic language and thus does not have the letter "p" except for loan words so the letter "b" is both the sound /b/ and /p/ depending on where the stress of the word falls). This also happens for the Irish Gaelic word airgead. Because ai is a diphthong for the long vowel /ā/, the letter "i" is not sounded and if you remember from before the combination AR becomes ARA, thus airgead is not sounded AIR-ge-ad but instead is sounded ARA-gat ("d" and "t" are similar to "b" and "p" because they are sounded in the same area in the mouth and ea is a diphthong for the short /a/ sound in Gaelic).

The reason I wanted to talk about it is because I went up to the Royal Mile today to get my tickets for Hogmanay. I saw this t-shirt that had both "Alba" and "Scotland" on it and it triggered my memory of learning the word Alba and Airgead.

I wanted to leave you with something funny today. My roommate and I went down to our friends' place since they are re-decorating a room in their house. We were going to help put up wallpaper. Well, at the end of helping them, we talked about what they were going to do next. They started talking about the "Sparky" and I asked them what that meant. Well, here in the UK, they call electricians "Sparky". For example, "The sparky is going to go under the floorboards". They also have some interesting names for carpenters. They officially call them "Joiners". Unofficially, they call them "Chippies". This is not to be confused with the place where you get potato "chips" (known in America as "fries"). Just another thing you have to get used to when you live in Scotland (and honestly it is just plain funny to hear for the first time).

I was looking at the Amazon page of the Intellectual Impostures book that I linked yesterday. I noticed that in the US that you could only get it through someone called internationalbooks. Well, I have a feeling that it is not published in America, which is much to our shame since it would blow away many of the "relativist" school of the American intelligentsia. If you do not want to pay the $110 that the seller on Amazon is trying to sell it for, the ISBN of the book number is 1861971249. Drop by your local book seller and see if they can get it. If they cannot, those with my email address can drop me an email and I will see how much it is here. Honestly, I think it is really important to get this book into the US, especially, into the Universities.

While I am on the topic of books, I have another good one entitled Godless Morality, which I think should be required reading for anyone in the American left. It was written by the Episcopal Arch-Bishop of Edinburgh. The style he uses is highly readable and is not dry in the least. This makes it much more accessible than many other books on philosophy and social policy. With the Republicans getting everything they ever wanted now, this is a good way to hearten the discouraged liberal.

Otherwise, yesterday's hunting and gathering trip was successful. We now have a jar of this stuff sitting in our living room. It is hard not to want to play with it much like a child likes to play with a new toy. The stuff should be ready after Christmas but we are going to open it on Christmas day. It should be fine give or take a couple of days.

Also while I was out, I priced memory cards for my new digital camera. I settled for a 256 MB card for £30. I am not quite sure what to do about the Flickr account since I have to pay to be able to put more pictures up every month. Right now, I can upload (send to them) 10 MB of pictures every month. Since I have such a high resolution camera, that means I can only send 10 or so pictures every month. If you want to be able to upload more, you have to pay a yearly fee ($50/year) so that you can have 1 GB of upload per month. So until I pay the fee, you are going to get only 10 or so pictures a month on here. In any case, I get the card in about a week so I am not really worried about it yet.

Yesterday, while I was picking up books on theory, I ran across a book that anyone in the humanities should read. It is entitle Intellectual Impostures. It catalogs the abuse of science by some of the "great" French humanity and social "science" thinkers of the twentieth century. I really do think that everyone in the humanities should read it. I can now tell postmodernists to go take a flying leap. I had in the past, in any case, but now I can do it in a more forceful and well thought out way. In the same vein, my roommate found this little gem about intellectual fraud in the world of mathematics.

If you have read this blog for a while, you may have noticed that my spelling is rather bad. In the past, I used spell check to make sure that I had everything spelled right but then I got lazy about it. Especially when I was writing some of my travel entries because they were long and I did not want to sit through it. Well, I got fed up with the spelling errors so I went back through all of my entries from now until when I returned from home and fixed all the problems. I hope this makes it easier for many to read.

Today my roommate and I are going to go hunting and gathering for a Danish Christmas drink. Of course, this means alcoholic drink. For this to work you need: 1 fifth of Vodka, 40 coffee beans, 40 square sugar cubes, 1 Orange, which is washed well and pricked all over with a fork, 1 vanilla bean pod spilt down the middle. Put this into a canning jar, which has an open large enough to retrieve the orange at the end of the process. Put on a shelf for 40 days and tilt back and forth occasionally to keep the sugar from hardening. After 40 days, strain the liquid. My roommate also had the idea of taking the coffee beans and grinding them up to make some sort of strange coffee drink as well. We are going to try it once this is all done but for now we have to get the ingredients.

I have decided that I wanted to do some theoretical research on my topic. The prevalent theories out there are: Marxism, which I have talked about before and I am not fond of; Feminism, which, while I agree with many of their equality arguments, I am not fond of Radical Feminism or Ecofeminism; I am very partial to Jugian analysis but I really dislike the idea of Archetypes; there is always Freudian analysis but there again I always thought he was a crackpot; Lévi-Strauss was a choice and is being used by another student in the department but I really dislike his theories. This left me with a dearth of theoretical source material. Much of this dearth was my own fault since I cannot stand some of the others for various reasons. I was beginning to think that I was not going to get anywhere. Then, when I was thinking about it the other day, I remembered a theoretical approach which is not in use among the academic community recently nor is it used heavily in Celtic Studies. It is called Transactional Analysis. If you read the link, it will give you an overview of the technique as it is used clinically.

With this in mind, I went about looking for the books that I would need to support my interest. The problem with TA is that the founder of the theory was more interested in helping people than creating some grand theory. It seems from some of my searches that this has carried on. Some scripts from TA have a basis in fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm type. This gives me an opportunity to use this theory in a new way when I use it to analyze some stories from Celtic Studies. I just need to get around the whole practical aspects of the process since I cannot use them as the people who I am using this on never existed or if they existed, are mythologized in the literature.

I am not sure as of yet if I am going to use this as my PhD study because I really wanted to do linguistic stuff with a section of context of the piece in Early Ireland. The problem is that I am kind of frustrated at the moment and my progress as slowed to a crawl. This is partly my own fault since I sent in a lengthy email to my supervisors but, when I have heard nothing back, I have not pushed for a meeting. In fact, I have not met with them since I returned to Scotland. I honestly think that this is not a good sign. I have sent in a few long emails (about once every two or three weeks) describing my situation but I have not heard anything from them. I asked my supervisor whom I see every week in class if he received my email and he said that he was pondering it. I hope he hurries up.

Otherwise, I spent the day running around since the books on TA are only at Morray House, which is on the Royal Mile and also is where the School of Education is located. It is interesting that most of the books are down there or in the Psychiatry library. You would think with the Main Library trying to suck up all the others that this would have been sucked up too. Anyway, I forgot my backpack so it was a pain in the ass to get the books.

My roommate and I received quite a shock today when we received our power bill from our power company. It was over £500. That sent me into a shock that took me a while to get out of. As you may well know, I have been having problems with my power meter so this really should not have come as a surprise. In any case, I dreaded calling the power company because of the stuff that goes on in the US when you call any corporation about a bill. They almost always blame the customer and try to get them to pay the bill whether it was the company's fault or a faulty piece of equipment. After talking it over with my roommate, I gave the power company a call. Well, at first I was stuck using their automated telephone service. This did not bode well for a good outcome on anyone's side but I stuck with the automated phone service. I knew if I hung on long enough I would get a real person on the line. After waiting for what seemed like forever, I actually got a real live person. It was a lad from south of the border but he was very nice. I explained the situation to him and he put a hold on our account and got some information from our meter and agreed that there was a problem and they are sending a workman out to fix it as soon as they can. I said that someone was supposed to come by and he gave me the date and I had the wrong date so he came here but noone was home. The guy on the phone with me did not try to blame me or even chastise me for missing the appointment. He just calmly gave me a new appointment and made sure that I had it on my calendar and put a hold on my account. I do not have to pay the bill and they are going to see what is wrong with the meter. I was very impressed. The guy was even very nice while getting the information.

I worked phone support for Windows 95 at the launch of the product. We had defined times that we had to be under for each phone call and that created massive amounts of stress especially when you had difficult problems. This usually made us sound stressed and in a hurry. This guy was completely different. He listened and understood what I was trying to do. He did not sound like he was under a time limit. Also, I was not a fault for anything that happened. It was a customer service dream come true. An added bonus was that he spoke English, the Queen's English even. Some of you know about the problems that I had with customer service at Dell to know that this is important to me.

On another front, my passport came in from the Home Office today. They authorized me from now until the 31st of December 2007. They even put a really cool colored authorization that is pasted into my passport. I would post a picture of it but I do not want other's to find it and use it but it is really neat looking. Anyway, they cannot get rid of me now! Muahahaha!

Google did something interesting today as well. They just launched a service called Google Scholar, which allows you to search through scholarly journals and books. This will allow those of us who want to use Google in a constructive way for scholarly research to do so without getting all those crazy sites. This will be great for Celtic Studies since we seem to have an abundance of crazies who go off half-cocked on the web.

Anyway, I have some reading that I need to do.

Well, I just got back from Sandy Bell's. It is interesting to gauge the difference audiences on different nights. On Friday night, you usually get a large boisterous young crowd and the musicians reflect this audience. On other nights of the week, it has been my observation that the crowd is much less talkative and much more appreciative of the musicians. On this night, there were a few young musicians playing with older ones. We even had a young singer doing some highland ballads.

In another sense, it is interesting to note that in this setting I could definitely sit down and appreciate the ballads more than I ever could listening to a recording. As a recording, the singer is remote and not appealing. You never see her/him and it seems like they do not have any impact on your life. Whereas, rock or pop have much more impact since everyone is talking about it. Ballads/folk do not since they are presented as remote from your every day life. In this instance, her songs were in my life, affecting every about my life at that moment. I think that if you could connect people's real lives to the music you want them to listen to then they would be able to understand the feelings you get from that type of music.

On the other hand, there were some really rude French girls in the pub. They started talking in French, figuring no one could understand them. I think they needed to be a bit more careful with their words. They wanted this guy they were with to do highland dancing and were generally making fun of it. He obviously did not know French so he was just going along with the pretty girls. I generally have a high regard for French people since I have never run into rude French people. If you make an effort, they generally reciprocate the consideration. These girls were just drunk and rude. Oh well.

It is getting dark very early now. The sky is dark and it is about 5 pm. I would bet up in Orkney and Shetland that it is much darker. I heard a story one time about what is it like to live in Orkney. Basically, you work all summer while the sun is up nearly 24 hours a day and then in the winter everyone hibernates until the next summer. I like hibernating.

I was on my way back from getting tickets for Hogmanay for this year when I saw my first member of the British Royal Family. I had passed the spot earlier and a police person was on the sidewalk sitting on a motorcycle. When I came back that way, he had his lights on. Then I noticed more lights coming up Victoria Street. When I looked there were two motorcycle cops in front with a police car behind them then two very posh looking cars. The first of these cars was flying the Royal standard on the left hand side of the hood. Behind them was another cop car and two more motorcycle cops. I was not able to get a good look at the person in either of the cars because I was twenty feet up above them. Anyway, they turned the corner and were gone fairly quickly. My roommate who was with me wondered if it was Prince William back in town. I said it was probably Prince Harry in town to party.

Wow. I was going through the archives last night when I noticed that this blog has been in existence for an entire year. In fact, it was this week that I first started writing in this space. A few things have changed since then. I have finished my MSc degree and have started on my PhD and I have moved from my flat on the Royal Mile into a flat on Bristo Place. Other than those things not much has changed at all.

Today is so misty that you cannot see Arthur's Seat from my window. It is the kind of rain that chills to the bone. In any case, things are a bit slow right now. I have my list of texts but I need to pair them down even more so that I have a few good choices. I feel like things are going in slow motion though. Anyway, I need to get some food.

Ok, I know I have posted a bunch today but I thought of something else that I think would be of interest. I am sure you have heard about all the programming and technical jobs, which are being outsourced to India. Well, I have a great way of getting back at them. As soon as your company tells you that your job has moved overseas, you get together and pool your severance pay, if you have any, and create a partnership company which then buys stock in India of the company to which your company outsourced your job. This can also work if you hear rumors about outsourcing. You and several other potential victims create a partnership company and put away part of your paychecks each month into the partnership account. Then, when the hammer falls, you buy up the Indian company's stock. What is the point? Well, when the India company gives out dividends they give you money which was yours anyway. If you are really angry, you just buy up the stock until you own a controlling share in the Indian company. It is the economic equivalent of giving your short-sighted company the finger.

What you do after that is up to you and your partners. One thing to do would to reinvest the money into hiring US workers for a particular purpose that you decide on. In a software context, you can basically use the money your old company used to outsource to fuel a competitor in their market place. In essence, you are taking their money and using it to compete against them.

There is one thing working for you and one working against you in this senerio. The thing working for you is that India is looking for foreign investment and will not really scrutinize what you are doing. Also, the rupee is very very cheap compared to the dollar so you will be able to use that in your favor. The thing working against you is economic necessity and persistence. You have to be persistent in wanting to get back at them.

Hopefully, this will be the last post for today.

Well, my dad (bless his heart) has sent me a nice new digital camera. This brings with it many opportunities to share Scotland with every one back home and other international friends who like to keep up with me. It also brings some new challenges. This blog was really just for disseminating information to people back home. Now that I have a digital camera, I had to figure out a way to make my new digital pictures visible from my blog. Before I had all my pictures on a Yahoo account but I could not figure out a way of linking directly to any one picture. So I did a search around the internet and I think I found a place that will allow me to do that. This also brings up the nasty issues of digital copyrights. I do not want someone taking my photos and my writing and using them for something that I did not intend them to be used for. So, this blog has grown up a bit because of these considerations. First, I am placing all of my pictures and text here on my web site that I take under the Creative Commons copyright licensing scheme. This will help protect me against people using my stuff illegally. I know this may seem heavy-handed but I feel like I need to protect my work (especially, if I take some really good landscape pictures that someone may want to buy someday).

What does this all mean? It means you will see two new buttons at the top of this blog. The first is for all the text on this blog, which will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attributive/Non-Commercial License. All digital photographs which appear on this web site or are linked to my Flickr account are under the Creative Commons Attributive/Non-Commercial/Non-Derivative License.

In other news, I am still waiting for the power workman to show up since they said that he would be here between 7 am and 1 pm. Well, it is after 1 pm now and he has not shown up. I think I am going to have to call the power company tomorrow. This is just another part of the on-going saga of my flat. I really hate doing this. I hope we can get this resolved soon.

With all that explained, we can now get on with some of the pictures that I have recently taken with my new camera.

This picture was taking from my living room window. It has a spectacular view of Arthur's Seat in the afternoon. It is fun to sit by the window and watch the clouds roll over it. The only problem with it is the building that is in the foreground, known as Potterrow. It houses the Student Union stuff, the Chaplinancy, and the school Medical facilities. It is an ugly behemoth which squats right down in front of Arthur's Seat.

This picture was again taken from my living room window. This time down into Bristo Square. During the day you can usually see a bunch of hoodlums on bicycles and skateboards trying desperately to kill themselves. On the day I took this, it was very quiet. Also, on Friday and Saturday night it is filled with drunken hordes of students who pass through there on their way to the next boozer.

This picture from my living room is of the greatest building in Edinburgh. This is, of course, said with much sarcasm because this is one of the worst buildings ever created. And to think this is on the list! (the list in the UK is much like the historical register but with massive teeth attached) It is basically rotting and this is its good side (believe me the other side is MUCH worse).

This picture is of McEwan hall. This is where I will graduate in January. It was built in the 18th century with money donated by the McEwan brewery, which interestingly enough is still in business and its McEwan 80/- (there used to be an 80 pence tax by weight on this beer) is quite good with a nice sweet nutty flavor. In any case, I will get a better picture of it another day.

This picture is of the dome of the Old College of Edinburgh. This is the original buildings, which housed the University. I have posted other pictures of the courtyard before this.

If you look really closely at this picture, you will see the crown top of St. Giles Cathedral. I should go out some foggy night and get a good picture down the Royal Mile. In the foreground is the Scottish Museum and the Royal Scottish Museum.

This picture is of my living room. Nice, huh? Can you notice that my roommate decorated?

My central hallway. Not the greatest picture ever but it is a very cramped hallway. You can barely get two people to pass in there.

Ah, the infamous stairs of DOOM. My roommate is looking up at me from below. We were on our way to Sandy Bell's pub on a Friday night.

This blurry picture was taken the same night as the Stairs of Doom picture. My roommate's face got in the way a bit but this is a typical night at Sandy Bell's pub.

Flickr has a monthly upload limit, which I am very near. I took the landscape pictures on the highest setting so it ate up a bunch of space. In any case, I will up load more with commentary here later. If you go into my account and see more pictures, some I may not have commentary attached yet but let me know and I will link it here with commentary.

I have spend much time listening to traditional Scottish music while I have been living here. I have noticed some differences between American "folk" music and Scottish "Traditional" music that I think would be interesting for you to read. First, as I see American "folk" music as something that pretty much died when the sixties ended. Yes, if you watched the PBS special concert of folk musicians, you might have noticed that most of them were quiet old. There is not really a large amount of energy in it. I have not seen much movement in American "folk" music for quiet a while. In contrast, Scottish "traditional" music or as it is known here as "trad" (short a not a long a) music has more young people learning and participating in it than I have ever seen in the US. On a typical Sunday night at Sandy Bells, most of the musicians who play are under 30. There are a few older people but they are usually outnumbered by the younger crowd of musicians. This scene is replicated throughout Edinburgh's "trad" pubs. Techno/Dance places are generally more popular but I have never seen the kind of energy put into traditional music by the youth. This is even reflected in the government funding. Scottish Opera and "Classical" is in its death throws (they may close down next year) because most of the people want government funding to go into Scottish traditional music and for the most part they go to the traditional music shows rather than the more "high street" (as they say here) shows. I guess what I am trying to say is that music here is not a consumer item to be bought and sold unlike "Country and Western" music is at home. (as an aside why is it "Country and Western"? I hear more Rock in Seattle or on the West Coast than I ever hear "Country and Western". Hell Seattle is more "Western" than Montana so why in the hell is rock not "Western"?). In any case, this is getting long and boring so unlike American "folk" or "Country", Scottish "trad" is more alive and more "kickin'" than the more commercalized crap Nashville sends out every day or the moribund "folk" of the sixties.

I received an urgent notice in my portal in my lofty fortress of Bristo Castle (alright, Bristo Tower...Bristo "I have to walk up five flights of stairs" Tower). It stated that a magical item (incidentally with 6 +5 chocolate bars of healing) had been intercepted by the brigands known as Royal Mail and was being held in their fortress in the nest of villainy known as Leith Walk.

So I quickly devised a plan to rescue the +5 chocolate bars from their confinement. First, I rounded up my trusty henchwoman (aka my roommate) and we girdled our equipment. I, with my +2 wax cavas and wool armor and my backpack of holding (it can carry 20+ lbs. of groceries), and her, with her armor of "look at me; I am a walking target" wetness shielding. We set out from the center of the lovely city of Dún Eideann.

Luckily for us; my informant had left a crude sketch of the location of the fortress. We set out. The first part of our journey was uneventful as we made our way across the good city of Dún Eideann. It was marked by beautiful views of the Good Queen's Castle and Palace. However, with the good comes the bad as we crossed the boundary into the dreaded Leith Walk just across the Nor' Loch from the Good Queen's fair city.

We followed the crudely scratched map on the note until it failed us. I then rolled my navigation skill. Unfortunately for us, I failed the roll miserably. We wandered about for a while before my trusty henchwoman decided to ask a local for directions. Good thing I had a few pieces of local silver to help the denizen remember where the fortress was. Unfortunately, the dastardly old man took my silver and give us bad directions. We wandered about for a while longer until we again tried our luck with the locals. This time our bribery worked and we were given correct directions.

It was only then that we realized the large challenge that lay before us. The fortress was huge. Almost as big as the Good Queen's Castle. It had a moat with the most attentive sentries that I have ever seen. The fortress and moat was also ringed by a rather large iron fence. We decided to attempt to blend in as locals while probing their defenses for weaknesses. I rolled my disguise skill and it was successful. We were able to closely inspect the fence. After a few minutes, we found a crack in the fence. We slipped through and found a door into the fortress. We explored the small room for a bit then a servant employed by the brigands appeared. I thought quickly and decided to use some forged documents that I keep for just this occasion and rolled my deception skill, telling the servant that I was sent for the magic items. The servant studied my documents quickly and assented to my request. I waited until he returned with the magic items. He returned with the boxes which contained the items and bade me on my way. I and my henchwoman quickly removed ourselves from the fortress and made our way back to the fair city of Dún Eideann.

Once out of the dreaded Leith Walk, we made our way to celebrate in one of the many fine hostelries in the Queen's fair city. Once done, we returned to my tower abode joyous in our victory!

I unwittingly ended up on BBC 1 Scotland TV the other day. When I went to the afternoon radio show they had a camera man from BBC TV so my face got plastered all over the TV at the end of the new segment at 6 pm. Now if I had only known what the heck was going on. It is not like I wanted to be on TV. I thought that it was going to just be on the radio. Ah well.

Not much else going on today. I need to get started on pairing down the number of texts then choosing a final one.

Well, today was a very busy day for me. I stayed up until 1:30 am watching the results of the election. Then my internet went down until 4:30 so I kind of slept until then when I noticed that it came back on. I then got back on to watch it until 5:30 when I finally went to bed. I got up at 7:00 am to get ready to go to the BBC studios here in Edinburgh. I then waited outside my door to be picked up by the taxi they sent to get me. He took me down near the parliament building where I went into a tiny office with only a big screen TV, two studio booths, and a receptionist. A little while after I arrived a young lady came in and we were introduced. She was Janet and had voted for "W". The receptionist then put us in one of the booths with two head-sets and a microphone. He was kind enough to get me some coffee, which I needed badly. So we talked while waiting to do the debate. We chatted about the election and we decided that they probably wanted a fight so we were not going to give them one since one of the people on the radio was saying that the Americans were at each other's throats, which we both knew to be untrue. We wanted to project a rational and reasonable America to the Scottish people. After about 45 minutes, they finally had us on and it was for like five minutes. They mostly asked us about how much confidence we had in the elections in Ohio. We both agreed that we had confidence and that Bush had a good night. They asked me how I felt about the potential of another Bush administration and I told them that we should wait until the final votes were counted. After that we picked up our taxis and went home.

Once home, I took a nap until 11:30 then went to the large meeting of Americans on another BBC Radio Scotland show. I only spent the first hour there but we had a pretty crazy Republican lady but we were mostly polite to each other, which I think was a testament to how we are all taking this election. They had a political science lecturer on the program as well. When I was on the mic and started to talk about how there were so many investigations and that we really should look forward to those and how those investigations could allow the Democrats the ability to lay the ground work for a 2008 bid for the White House, she was nodding her head. I think that if the investigations, especially the one in the no-bid contract's with Hailliburton, pan out and the President gets caught red handed as the crook he is that the 2006 elections really could be the turning point that will allow the liberals to drive the agenda in a way not seen since the New Deal and the Great Society.

Anyway, my fifteen minutes of fame are up and I am very tired so I think I will go to bed soon. I am going to get a copy of the debate from them so I can burn a copy and send it to you so that you can hear what I and Janet had to say.

Well, I just got a very interesting phone call from BBC Radio Scotland. Originally, they were going to have a bunch of Americans on an afternoon political show. I just talked to a producer for BBC Radio Scotland who wants me to be on the morning show to debate against a Republican student from the University of Edinburgh. So now I am going to be on two different radio shows in one day where for one I will get the microphone to myself. FEAR IT. I will be now in the position to make a direct impact on how Scots view the American election. I hope I do not make an ass out of myself on a national radio program. I am really excited but they want to pick me up at 8 am and the election is not over until 2 am my time. I am going to be a bit of a mess but I hope that things will even out.

The last few days have been very busy. On Friday, I had my roommate's birthday so we had a few people over for a party. Not that many. I think there were seven of us in total. We played Trivial Pursuit and my team won. The only problem with the game was that they had UK oriented questions so you would get "What BBC program from the 1950's which was still in black and white and based on a book that was only published in the UK...". You get the idea. Those ones threw me.

The next day I volunteered to do the dishes, which was just about every dish in our flat. So I listened to Radio nan Gaidheal while I was doing the dishes. They had a very eclectic style. Unfortunately, they only broadcast a few hours a day since they cannot seem to get funding from the BBC. After that I went to help a friend take stuff to the dump. That was an interesting experience. We just drove in dropped our stuff off and left. They did not charge us for the privlege of dumping stuff off. That is much different than home where they will stiff you for every cent they can get.

The next day was Halloween so I went to my Highland Society meeting and we talked about stuff. I am going to redesign their web page so I am going to have them over on Wednesday to talk about it. In more exciting news, BBC Radio Scotland is going to have a talk with Americans on November 3rd. I am going to go along to see what is the fuss. Hopefully, we will not have a tidal wave of lawsuits and we will have a clear winner by then. Otherwise, it is going to be a very interesting show. They are having trouble finding Republicans. They have a slew of Democrats so they put out a call for Republicans.

Today I spent three hours in the National Library of Scotland, which is blessedly just down the street from my flat. Honestly, this flat is ass kicking. My local pub is the pub that I spend the most time in anyway and everything is within five minutes walk. The only disadvantage is the 4 floor stair climb that I have to do when I leave the flat. That sucks. Anyway, I need to get working.