Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

After all the OTT hoo-hah about alcoholic wife-beater and sometime Dunstable Town stalwart George Best finally carking it in the press over the past few days, the few seconds given to the untimely death of world champion rally driver Richard Burns on the BBC news yesterday was a bit rubbish, really. (Although maybe it’s just as well; it’s always kind of frightening to think of that sort of thing happening to somebody the same age as you.)

AOL might not get it, but personally, I’d pay extra to get into one of those cinemas, if they had them here… in fact, if they could just put a Faraday cage around the whole of Dublin so I never had to be annoyed by / walked into / driven into by some muppet on a mobile phone ever again, I’d be more than delighted.

Sounds like Linksys have finally admitted (to some people at least) that their new-ish WAG354G modem/router doesn’t work with the PS2. I’ve been trying to tell them that for months, but this post at linksysinfo.org is about the most informative (and least encouraging) I’ve seen about it so far.

I’m not completely hosed as I can still swap out the Linksys for my old ZyXEL modem (no router) and run a cable downstairs from that straight to the PS2, but that’s not quite the wireless utopia I was hoping for.

Got hold of Carl Sagan‘s Cosmos DVD boxed set today, which I managed to find on eBay a couple of weeks back for rather less than the $100+ that Amazon want for it.

When it was first aired in the 80s– and it’s never been repeated since in the UK, AFAIK, at least not on a terrestrial channel– I remember being blown away by the visual effects, the music (mostly from Vangelis’ Heaven & Hell album), and the suitably epic feel of the whole thing. I also remember missing the very last episode, about which I was rather upset at the time, so I’m looking forward to seeing it all again. (It should certainly help fill the pre-bedtime TV hole in our new house that’s still waiting for NTL to get off their cretinous arses and join two wires together in our living room.)

The first place I ever worked (if you don’t count a crappy summer job typing in the size of graveyard plots), the Logica office in Cambridge, is closing at the end of this month. They’re planning a reunion dinner there on Friday October 21st (not sure if I’ll be going over for it myself yet), but so far they’ve only tracked down about half the people who’ve worked there… so if you know anyone who did and would like to be involved, please ask them to contact Clifton Hughes at logicacmg.com.

Well, according to Lycos, anyway.

And here was me thinking Bastien was going to a proper uni… turns out it’s really just Battersea Poly

So, it looks like England are going to win some burned sticks of wood because, essentially, it rained a lot. According to the hype in the media, this is about as exciting as cricket gets, which says it all really.

Last week saw the 700th anniversary of the execution by the English of William Wallace, a cultural icon to Scots around the globe.

Forget what you saw in Braveheart; most of that was Hollywood tosh– if nothing else, Mel Gibson is about a foot shorter than the real thing. (Hence the in-joke in the movie about him “not being tall enough”.)

Wallace did lead the Scots to an unlikely victory over the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, but almost certainly without having painted a saltire on his face. The English won the return leg at Falkirk the following year, however, though Wallace escaped. In the aftermath, he relinquished his title of Guardian of the Kingdom of Scotland and Leader of its Armies, which had been deferred upon him by Robert the Bruce (later of spider fame) after Stirling Bridge. He was jointly succeeded by Robert himself.

In 1305, Wallace was betrayed by Scottish baron Sir John de Menteith, who delivered him to the English near Glasgow (in an area ironically called Robroyston). He was marched down to London, and tried for treason. “I cannot be a traitor”, Wallace said, “for I owe (Edward I) no allegiance. He is not my sovereign; he never received my homage.”

Unsurprisingly, Wallace was found guilty, and, at Smithfield, on August 23rd, 1305, he became only the second person to be hanged, drawn and quartered. His head adorned a spike on London Bridge, and his limbs were separately dispatched to Perth, Stirling, Berwick and Newcastle, so that no shrine would be available to his followers.

Needless to say, the Scots were a bit peeved about this, and in the following 10 years, under Robert the Bruce (who became King of Scotland in 1306 following another victory over Edward I), they finally saw off any English pretensions to control the northern British kingdom, most notably at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1328, the English conceded that Robert was king of an independent nation, which Scotland remained until 1603, a year which saw James I of England and VI of Scotland become the United Kingdom’s first monarch. Despite that small setback, we’re still just about holding ‘em off to this very day