Plenty of Nothing

An Uggsome Twalmonth

That's Scots for annus horribilis. The consensus is that 2010-11 was about as bad a year for Scottish football as you could possibly contrive. Winter took two months out of the schedule, abusive fans and managers drove the referees to strike action, Dundee FC was nearly liquidated, Queen of the South couldn't host a complete night game, players trooped through the courts, someone mailed letter bombs to Celtic, the national team was hopeless. All of which means that next year should be better, and less interesting.

And no one cleaned up the bottles! This shot of Buckfast and Tennent's empties comes from My Football Travels and was snapped at Beechwood Park, Auchinleck, East Ayrshire, after a junior game.

On the upside, Arbroath won the Third Division, the first time in 133 years that they have finished first in any division. And they have ambitions for next season.

Morton host Dunfermline today. The Pars can nail down first place with a win, so you know they'll be motivated.

And you know who else is motivated? Cowdenbeath is motivated. With two games to go they trail Ross County by three points. If Cowden win both remaining matches, and Ross County lose both of theirs, Cowden are in and County go to the relegation playoff. How likely is that? Well, today Ross County visit superior Falkirk, while the Blue Brazil host lowly Stirling. Then next week Ross County and Cowdenbeath meet. So it could happen.

Further proof that there is no off-season in soccer, the semi-finals of the Renfrewshire Cups take place midweek with Morton hosting Carlton YMCA on Tuesday and St Mirren playing Gourock Thistle Wednesday. The final should be played in July.

[Dunfermline win and clinch promotion. Ross County and Cowdenbeath both win. County have eighth spot sewn up, unless Cowden can beat them by 22 goals next Saturday. Dundee and Queen of the South both win, dropping Morton to seventh place. Morton can still finish fifth. Manita of the Week: Motherwell 0 - Rangers 5.]

The Kaiser!

This 1917 Conservative election poster condemns Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier for association with Quebec isolationist Henri Bourassa and by extension the Kaiser and by further extension beer, which the Tories made illegal after the election.

Donald Keene

Of the heroes that I had when I was twenty, it seems it's the translators who remain now that I'm fifty or so. I've been carrying around Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature to the Nineteenth Century all that time, and volume one of his A History of Japanese Literature is on the bedside table.

Keene has taught Japanese literature at Columbia for 55 years and now, at 88, he plans to emigrate and take out Japanese citizenship. There's little chance that the Japanese will turn him away, as they have already designated him a Person of Cultural Merit, making him one of only three Westerners to be granted that honour.

 (This is the 1500th Plenty of Nothing post.) D

Zinck Comix "Moloch!"

The Blind Leading the Blind

I had a copy of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Blind Leading the Blind (or La parabola dei ciechi as it is known in its home at the National Gallery in Naples) on my bulletin board as an undergrad at dear old Mount Allison so fair, many years ago. I liked its satirical quality, without having much idea how it worked as a composition. Nowadays I would be extremely proud to have come up with this group, especially the lurching figure second from the right, who would be played by Viggo Mortensen or Daniel Craig in the movie. What strikes me now, that I think I missed the first time around, is how much the landscape looks like Sackville, New Brunswick. Now I'm sitting here enjoying the thought of the Chancellor, President and Vice-Presidents of Mount Allison University staggering off Main Street into the waterfowl park. D

Coleman Anderson

The recent Cady Coleman/Ian Anderson flute duet in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight could be the Plenty of Nothing blog topic par excellence, combining outer space and classic Bach rock. Anderson gets the solos, and waggles the hell out of his eyebrows, but Coleman takes full advantage of weightless conditions to steal the show. D

Pâtisseries en plein air

A Partick Shot

Partick Thistle host Greenock Morton today in a unimportant match. Neither club can be promoted nor relegated at this late stage. It's really just about kicking a football around, and having fun. It's Derby Week in the SFL but because St Mirren are in the Premier League, Partick will have to do.

A more meaningful encounter is today's game between Fife rivals Dunfermline Athletic and Raith Rovers at Dunfermline's East End Park. The two are a point apart at the top of the division. One of them will be promoted and the other will not.

Last week I said that Tuesday would see the last of this season's midweek games, but I was wrong. Tuesday's game between Ross County and Queen of the South was called off two-thirds of the way through due to a blown fuse. This is the second time the lighting has failed at Palmerston this year, a sympton of the club's financial problems, and on both occasions it has resulted in the abandonment of a rescheduled match with County, who are trying to secure eighth place and are understandably irked, especially as the score was 2 - 0 for them when the lights went out. The match has been rescheduled for Tuesday, April 26th, at Queen of the South's field, after dark. [Later: the match has been moved to Stirling.] 

Frank Sidebottom has been on Match of the Day.

[Partick win 2 - 0. Dunfermline win. Falkirk win. Dundee beat Ross County, and Cowdenbeath tie QoS. Ross County and Cowdenbeath are now tied at 32 points, though County have a game in hand and a better goal difference. Dunfermline are now heavy favourites for promotion. Morton cannot finish better than fourth or worse than seventh.]

[Tuesday: Ross County get their win against Queen of the South, moving them three points up on Cowdenbeath.]

Gormenghast

I'm gradually working my way through Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, often at the rate of a paragraph per sitting, because Peake's richly visual prose rewards slow reading, and because I'll only be able to read the books for the first time once so I want to make them last. This year would have been Peake's hundredth birthday, so it's a good time to get them finally read. I should really have done this in my teens, so that I might have better appreciated, for instance, David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Lynch's vividly weird, disconnected characters owe more than a little to the vengeful dwellers of Castle Gormenghast. Doctor Prunesquallor and Cora and Clarice Groan would have fit right in at the Great Northern Hotel. Why is the first novel named Titus Groan and the second Gormenghast, and not the other way around? I don't know, but I hope to understand by end of Titus Alone. Part of the centenary celebrations will be the release of an unpublished fourth novel, Titus Awakes, begun by Peake and finished by his widow Maeve Gilmore.

[Review: Titus Groan: deft. Gormenghast: deft. Titus Alone: daft. It seems there is no good reason why the titles of the first two volumes are reversed. I suppose it's just one of those things that happens, and then it's too late to fix it. There are perhaps two good pages in the third volume.] D

Ellesmere Telescope

My only question being, why haven't we thought of this already?