Context – Third Wave of Covid Pandemic, now amidst the riots and looting of the KwaZuluNatal, South African, livelihoods. Gunshots have been ringing out beyond my window for 4 days now, with fewer shots starting on Saturday evening, to a more continuous stream this Tuesday morning. A WatsApp video showed police shooting at gatherers in my area to disperse them from a mall car park this morning. The government knew that this would be going down...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,976.91 ) Week - 21 I can see the Future! Well, some of it anyway... It’s not that big a trick really, almost anyone can do it. I was reminded of this when the young couple next door moved in, replacing the slightly older but still young couple who had moved out. Seeing the future only requires reaching an age in life where a younger person’s future is your own past. Oh the...

England can beat Italy and win the Euros. They’re playing at home and favourites. Even I’ll admit that. I’m not anti-English, and I don’t mind them winning the odd game. Although I was never there, I’ve telly memories of Scotland going to Wembley on the fitba specials, beating England, tartan clad hordes of Bay City Roller fans stealing the goalposts and ripping up the turf and eating it to show how hard we were. Payback for all those invasions...

I qualify for an Irish passport. My Da was born in Belfast, but lived his life in Glasgow, and fought in the second world war for Britain. When he married my mum, he moved to Clydebank. John Burrowes is telling us something we already know—many of us have much the same story. How many? Most folk find statistic boring. My Da was born in 1923. The Irish Free State was formed in 1921, with the six counties still part of Britain. Susan McKay 2021...

Professor James Hunter revisits a student historical dissertation to remind us that it wasn’t just Ireland that suffered from famine, after potato crops failed year after year in the late 1840s, but most of Europe suffered from the fungal spores of Phytophthora infestans . The poor people of the Scottish Highlands and Islands did not experience to the same scale as the Irish Holocaust, but many of the structural problems were the same. The...

I’d heard of V.S. Naipaul and even watched a BBC Imagine programme in which the author and Noble Prize Winner for literature was interviewed by Alan Yentob. I like to think of myself as a reader, but until I’d read A House for Mr Biswas I had read none of Naipaul’s books. A House for Mr Biswas is described as an ‘epic’ which is just another way of saying it’s quite long. With an Introduction, Epilogue and Afterword, written by Naipaul in 2011...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,821.84 ) Week - 20 Summertime and the Livin’ is Easy! Oh, your daddy's rich And your ma' is good lookin'... Full disclosure, only part of that lyric actually applies! Ma is good lookin’ but Daddy ain’t gettin’ rich this week. I keep looking for a floor but just keep finding another sub-basement level. I’m still hoping for a stairway to heaven or maybe a train bound for glory at...

Great to see that even with the easing of lockdown and the various sporting distractions going on, ABC Talers have still managed to find the time to post some brilliant work. Story of the Week is 'First Last Friday' by ice rivers. Like many of the best stories, it's deceptively simple. It's one of those pieces where nothing and everything happen at the same time. The ending might be heartbreaking, or it might be the start of something else...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000x9rg/out-of-blue Schrödinger’s cat, observational effect and superposition, the multiverse, and our place in the universe to the power of…Einstein’s God doesn’t throw dice. Enough quantum physics to fill half a teaspoon. This is the backdrop for a routine murder mystery, with unsolved serial killer cases and socialites Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) is called in to investigate as a possible...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$2,772.61 ) Week - 19 Summer Solstice! I don’t know why I take an interest in the Solstice. I’m not a practicing Druid or anything. Yet the movement of the planet in its steady, majestic procession around the sun evokes a feeling of reverence and awe within me. The Solstice coincides with my birth month and often causes me to ponder the very temporary nature of my existence as seen...