Not a Great Sign

I'm playing the piper's lament on Sunday, so I figured I should my pipes out this week to make sure that they're okay, and that I'm okay to play them. So I did so on Monday, and they're broadly fine.

What is of some concern, though, is that this was pretty much the first time I'd played them since the Mid Calder Gala Day in early June. And then, having planned to play them every night this week I failed to do so on Tuesday due to a stinking headache and on Wednesday due to taking Surprise! to rugby. I'm at band practice tonight, so I'll make sure we play the pipes at some time tonight, and then will try to play again tomorrow and Saturday to give myself the best chance.

But it's not a good sign. Especially since it looks like my other annual performance of the lament looks to be cancelled this year, our Christmas events are definitively off (both because the organizing committee doesn't exist any more and because we don't have a band to put out). Which means that the next time I have cause to play them may be as late as next June.

There are, of course, several reasons feeding in to this:

• Simple motivation is a factor. If we're not playing events, there's much less reason to make the effort. And morale at the band has dropped dramatically, so that's even harder.
• It suddenly became much harder to practice at home when Surprise! arrived. Oddly enough, that wasn't the case when Funsize was born, but I think the issue is that two kids really required attention from two adults so much more of the time, where one child allowed more of a tag-team approach. Adding Lion to the mix exacerbated the issue, as she's really not a fan.
• And then there comes the issue of it being a habit - as long as you're practicing daily it's relatively easy to keep practicing daily, but as soon as you stop...

It's all rather troubling, really.

What Now for America?

I see that the American mid-term elections have seen a major victory for the Democrats - they've gained control of both Congress and the Senate. And, based on my reading from Twitter, there seems to have been a significant rejection of Trump even from amongst MAGA.

All of which is good, probably. Except for one thing...

Politicians are remarkably terrible at learning the lessons from election results. And I fear that the Democrats are about to make the classic blunder, actually the same blunder made by Starmer's Labour party a couple of years ago, of reading a rejection of the incumbent as an endorsement of them and their agenda.

As far as I can see, the Republican defeat is largely a combination of three things:

• Democrat voters were motivated to turn out, in order to get rid of Republican incumbents.
• The majority Republican base, who have no great love for Trump but "always" vote Republican, were largely not motivated to go out and vote.
• Trump's own MAGA base are currently really angry. Not because they've rejected Trump's agenda, but rather because they feel betrayed that he hasn't done enough of it. And, in particular, they're angry about the war in Iran, which they don't feel should have happened anyway, and more important (to them) is driving gas prices upwards.

It's not at all clear how Trump will respond to any of this. It seems very unlikely we'll see a repeat of his attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020, for the reason that the various races don't seem to be particularly close - in theory a recount might "find" a couple of hundred extra votes, but not vast numbers. This means that he's going to be a lame duck president for the next two years, stymied by a legislative branch that he doesn't control.

The received wisdom seems to be that, as a deranged narcissist, he will therefore lash out, and double down, and it's all going to be absolutely awful. But maybe not - normally, in this situation he'd just declare bankruptcy, write off all the debts, and start over. I'm not sure what the political equivalent of that is. Maybe it just doesn't matter.

Of much more interest to me now is the question of who the two parties put forward as their candidates, and what they put forward as their agendas, for 2028.

I had assumed that the Republicans would go with J.D. Vance and, basically, more of the same, but Iran and these elections are potentially a game-changer. I think their best play is to stick with the agenda, but they then need to find a new candidate, someone who can credibly say, "no, we're actually going to do it this time." My gut feeling, though, is that they'll probably try to claim that with Vance in harness, and have it all blow up in their faces.

Meanwhile, I have a really hard time seeing who the Democrats can choose as their candidate. My fear, though, is that they'll revert to the exact same agenda as Hillary and Kamala attempted to push, potentially even with Kamala Harris as their candidate once again, and with similar results. (Conversely, I'd recommend finding a more moderate candidate and taking several large steps back towards a centrist position.)

Of course, the consequence of all of that is the I suspect both parties are going to put forward losing candidates paired with an agenda that doesn't work for them. But given that one of them has to win...

So it's going to be interesting, but perhaps a lot more hopeful than it has been for a very long time. Watch this space, I guess.

First Prime, now Picard...

2026 has been a rough year for celebrity deaths. A few days ago, the passing of Walter Koenig was particularly sad, marking the departure of a legend from "Star Trek" and "Babylon 5" - much as Pavel Chekov was a great character, his villainous turn as the Psi-Cop Bester was wonderful.

But then came the news of the passing of Patrick Stewart, the embodiment of Jean-Luc Picard and Professor X. That one hurts.

Of course, he has had many other roles, and brought many great performances: as Claudius opposite David Tennant's Hamlet, as Macbeth, as Number One, the leader of the Stonecutters in "The Simpsons"...

As Charles Xavier, though, and opposite Ian McKellen's Magneto, he served to elevate the material - because of those two and the gravitas they brought, those films weren't just superhero action spectaculars. Rather, they brought through the philosophical differences between the two that meant that they were both friends and deadly rivals.

And then there is Jean-Luc Picard, who alongside Optimus Prime stands as my model for how a leader should operate. His Captain was very different from Shatner's Kirk, and his Next Generation was therefore very different from the Original Series. And it was the better for it - and I say that not as a criticism of TOS, but rather because it made for a companion piece and a different spin, rather than just being a retread.

And so, with the passing of Stewart and Cullen, we see the passing of two great voices that have guided me. With the passing of Stewart and Koenig, we see the passing of two men of Enterprise. And, in all cases, it is terribly sad.

Eight weeks to go. I'm not sure I can take too many more...

Networking (or not)

Getting home from the holiday was the usual fun - drag everything in, unpack all the bags, put the washing in the baskets for the washing fairy to deal with... In addition, this time I had taken the cunning step of powering just about everything in the house off before we left, which meant that things like the heating and the internet needed switched back on. Which was all fine.

Except for one thing: my PC resolutely refused to connect to the internet. Everything else on the network was fine, but not that.

It's been a while since we had PC troubles, but they haven't become any more fun in the interim.

Debugging the problem quickly established that the issue was with both wired and wireless connections, and indeed applied both when using the home network and if I turned my phone into a mobile hotspot. That pointed to a software problem, or just possibly a problem with the motherboard.

Long story short, I finally isolated the problem to Norton Anti-virus, with the advice being to uninstall it and reinstall it. Which was great, except that Norton make it really hard to uninstall - there's a "why do you want to uninstall?" question, after which they send you a suggestion for something to try instead. Presumably, after that there's a "no, I still want to uninstall" option.

But, of course, the key problem with that is that the "suggestion for something to try instead" comes online, which requires that you be connected to the internet. Given that I was trying to uninstall because I couldn't connect to the internet, this was something of a problem.

Fortunately, if you reboot your PC in Safe Mode this then allows for an easier uninstall without those additional hoops to jump through. After which I could reinstall the program and whatever the problem was was cleared.

Still, that seems a really bizarre and annoying weakness in their systems - we'll gate your ability to solve the problem behind the problem!

Anyway, it's done now. Which is nice.

Day 300: Update on Goals

Day 300, so time for one more update on goals. This will be the last before the end-of-year round-up.

• Books: By Day 300 I should basically be at 29.59 books, so despite "The Witchwood Crown" taking an age to get through I'm reasonably far ahead of target. It's now a race to the finish - can I complete the remaining five books before the end of the year?
• Weight: It's now clear that this goal won't be achieved, but my intent is to do as much as I can between now and the end of the year. At the very least, I want to end the year weighing less than at the start, which at the time of writing isn't the case.
• Church Website: I've made a significant update since the previous post, such that this task is now done - I updated the remaining pages, removed our contact form and replaced it with links to Facebook (not ideal, but the best I could do), and generally made sure it was all up-to-date. There will be further updates to the website in future, but as with the garden these won't amount to specific goals.
• Garden: This is now done.
• Blog: Had I set a formal blogging goal, by Day 300 I should be at 98.63 posts. This is post 97, so I'm very slightly behind target, though I do expect to catch up in the next day or so.

Things are looking up from the previous update. Of the four formal goals, I have completed two and am on track to complete a third. The final not-quite-a-goal is also on track to be successful.

#31: "The Book of Lost Tales, Part One", by J.R.R. Tolkien

Experimental Cookery 2026: Loaded Jacket Potatoes (with Sausage Ragu)

Back when I was away in America, LC made up a Simple Sausage Ragu from the Tesco magazine. This was part of their "Cook Once, Eat Twice" feature, so had a reasonable amount of leftovers. Today's post is the second half of that feature, in which I combined the leftover ragu with breadcrumbs and cheese, and used it to fill jacket potatoes.

This was a quick and easy meal to put together, of course, hampered only with wanting to do it all quickly and therefore trying to scoop cooked potato out of fresh-from-the-oven baked potatoes - not a comfortable experience!

The resulting meal was... okay. There was nothing at all offensive about it, it was fine comfort food, but it just didn't really inspire. Which is true of the sausage ragu itself. The upshot, I think, is that we might have this once more (to get rid of the last of the ragu) and then we're unlikely to have either again. But I do have at least one other "loaded jacket potato" method that I might well try.

#30: "J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth", by Bradley Birzer

Scotland's Footballing Woes

I had the misfortune of having an unexpected free hour last night and chose to spend it watching the second half of Scotland's match against Slovenia. Oh dear.

First things first: congratulations to Slovenia who were very deserving winners - they won the match by being the better team, and I see absolutely no grounds for complaint about the defeat. There have been occasions in the past where Scotland have had grounds to complain about opponents diving or dodgy referee decisions, or whatever, but last night that was very much not the case. And it's not even that Scotland played badly (though we did) - Slovenia played the better game.

But regarding Scotland...

Firstly, I quite like the new style that Sébastien Pocognoli has put in place, at least in theory. One of the big problems Scotland had at the last major tournaments was that they played with very little passion and almost entirely defensively, and the new manager has made a big shift away from that. In theory, that's something I like to see.

But there are two big problems with it.

Firstly, it was very evident that the more attacking style is leaving some gaps at the back. That's probably inevitable, and something we'll just need to reckon with. But that means that when you get your chances going forward, you must take them. Scotland had six shots on target last night, but recorded one goal. That's a problem - if you're going to be wasteful at the back, you need to be ruthless up front.

The second problem is rather more worrying, and looks very much like the Wilfried Nancy situation at Celtic - like Pocognoli he had a very distinctive attacking style that, in theory, should have been easy on the eye and fun to watch. But the problem was that even in the few weeks he was here we saw, again and again, his Celtic team would look good in the first half but find themselves contained by an opposition who were good enough to do that for a while, and then over the course of that first half the opposition manager would get to grips with the style, make a couple of tweaks to their own style, and go out and beat it.

My fear with Pocognoli is that this may well be the case again - that Slovenia basically worked out the beating of Scotland in their first match, or in the first half of the second, and so in the second half last night they just cut Scotland open. And we had no reply.

I hope that's not the case, and that Pocognoli just needs a bit more time to get his ideas across and we can go forward. If not, Scotland may prove to be a team that looks good briefly, and is then decisively defeated by canny manangers.

Beyond that... this Nations League campaign was always something of a free hit - we weren't ever going to top the group, nor were we ever in danger of relegation, so we were always going to be in the same section next time. The one quirk was that coming second would have put us in Pot Two for Euro 2028 qualification, while we're now destined for Pot Three.

But that doesn't make a huge amount of difference, because we're co-hosts of Euro 2028.

The way qualification works (roughly) is this: there are 12 groups of 4 teams. The 12 winners and 8 best runners-up will qualify automatically. Then the top two out of England, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales who have not already qualified will be given reserved spots, and then there are playoffs for the remaining places.

What that effectively means is that we either need the Republic of Ireland or Wales to grab one of those winner/best runner-up spots (in which case we will definitely get one of the "reserved" spots) or we need to do better than one of those two teams (in which case, again, we'll get a "reserved" spot). (It should be fair to assume that England will top their group and so get qualification that way.)

All of which amounts to saying we'll need to be pretty unlucky to fail to qualify (or just rank rotten). Which is by no means a guarantee, of course, but such is the life of a Scotland fan.

#28: "Forged in Rome", by Conn Iggulden

#29: "Thomas the Tank Engine: The Complete Collection", by Rev. W. Awdry (a book for Surprise!)

Dear Disney...

I find myself more than a little perplexed by your recent actions. The thing is, via LC's subscription we have access to your "ad free" version of Disney+, only you've recently changed the terms and conditions to allow yourselves to show unskippable ads before and between shows. That's really annoying, but not actually what I'm about to talk about...

What I'd really like to know is what is the point of showing me unskippable ads for other things that are bundled into the very same Disney+ subscription that I already have? And, doubly so, what is the point of showing my unskippable ads for things that I have already watched through the very same subscription I already have? As far as I can see there is absolutely no benefit to you in this approach - you're actively annoying me while pushing me towards something that won't make you any more money.

I could, grudgingly, understand it if the adverts were for any of the infinite Disney merch that's out there, or for your upcoming cinema releases, or even for next month's upcoming shows - those all have a purpose that may put some more money into your hands (offensive as it remains to be putting ads in your "ad free" plans at all).

But to force adverts on us that very definitely aren't going to do that? What possible purpose does that serve?

(One other thing: the irony of all of this is that Disney+ was, and actually still is, the best value of all of our subscription services. Amazon Prime is good for everything that isn't Prime Video, while Netflix is rapidly dropping in my estimation. And as for NOW... But these recent shenanigans really put a dent in my appreciation for this particular service.)