A horse-drawn carriage, of which there were more than one

It’s the first Tuesday after the second Thursday in June, and everyone knows what that means.

What’s that? You aren’t familiar with the great significance of this day?

Admittedly, this is probably something that would never have mattered to me at all, had fate not sent me to live in the Ancient and Royal Burgh of Linlithgow. Such places are so old and steeped in history, that they are bound to develop eccentric mannerisms.

The particular oddity in this case is that it is a local holiday, all the shops closed, and people wished one another a “Happy Marches.”

Was this the inspiration for Lewis Carroll‘s mad March Hare? That is my theory at the moment, at any rate.

If you want to read more about the oddness, it is explained in detail over at the official Linlithgow Marches and Associated Madhatters website. If you click about a bit there are videos of previous years’ events to be found.

Alternatively, just have a look through the sample of the photos I took:

Recycle your textiles here!

Please separate your textiles from people before inserting. DO NOT INSERT PEOPLE

This is not the sort of warning sign that gets erected without a prior incident.

Squash-Pong? Table-Splat? I don't know what to call it

The Aloe Ridge hotel has an interesting use for its squash court.

Click to take The Wagical (Waffley) Wystery Tour

It appears that Angie is a bit of an anatomical anomaly.

Update: Seriously though, why are they using medical jargon on medication prescribed to patients. How about this translation: Insert one suppository into rectum twice daily?

How times have changed. More and more people are adopting the Custardy way of life.
Just the other day I persuaded my friend Rob, out from the UK, to give it a try. He added a little innovation of his own, first spreading strawberry jam on the toast for a treat most heavenly.
My brother Stuart has been converted, and has promised to evangelise about custard/toast combinations in Cape Town.

First they ignore the custard on toast, then they laugh at the custard on toast, then they attack the custard (with savoury spreads), then the custard on toast wins.

A little photography proof-of-concept that Quinn and I tried out with my dog Kelty.
We didn’t pay much attention to the background, which is why I removed it.
Nor did we worry too much about lighting, which is why the use of flash is obvious.

Kelty was not amused, so we didn’t eat him.

Yahoo! likely have a policy regarding dormant accounts. If the user fails to log in for a certain period of time, the account is tagged as ‘dormant.’ After a reasonable period of time,email in the dormant account is deleted. Perhaps Jimbo’s username is still kept in Yahoo!’s database, but for all intents and purposes Jimbo’s Yahoo! email account is as dead as he is.
Jimbo, being dead, stops posting comments on the Peculiarly Shaped Pieces of Dried Skin Forum. Nobody really notices since people’s true identities are not usually divulged in that kind of environment. If anyone does notice, they just conclude that Jimbo is no longer interested in strangely-shaped, dehydrated dermis (which is true in any case). The same is true for Jimbo’s other fora.
Jimbo stops logging on to AOL and MSN. Most of the people he interacted with here had met him in person, and hadn’t just got to know him through the internet. In all likelihood, these people know he’s dead, have attended his funeral, and are not surprised by his missing buddy-icon.
Jimbo stops logging on to MySpace, and stops adding stuff to his profile or his friends pages. This is where it all goes a bit weird.

Like the instant messaging technologies, people who knew Jimbo in the physical world interacted with him via social networking sites. These people went to his funeral and are saddened by his passing.
Unlike the instant messaging technologies, Jimbo’s MySpace profile is persistent (at least initially, since Jimbo was a very active user on the site). He doesn’t have to log into it for it to still be accessible by his friends and people who knew him. The friends still access his profile, and post public comments to him. They address the comments to him, and some talk to him as if he is still alive.

I hadn’t come across profiles of dead people before now. I’ve speculated about the stuff regarding email, forum, and instant messaging accounts. Thanks to an article in the Mail & Guardian, I am no longer speculating about MySpace accounts. A site exists which commemorates the deaths of MySpace users, and links to their MySpace profiles. It contains obituaries, which are mostly written quite tastefully.
Following links to the deceased person’s MySpace profile is where the oddness ensues. I found people wishing their dead friends a happy birthday, or happy Easter, a year and a half after the person’s death.
I suppose it is a way to express emotions and to be able to “talk” to a dead loved one, even though there will be no response. It feels like there might be, because interacting via MySpace (or Facebook) never required both participants to be present at the same time. Since the messages are visible to the public, it makes it feel like maybe the message will also get to the dead person. It’s unlikely that people would keep sending email to a dead person’s email account because no-one else will see that, and so how could you be certain that the communication ever took place at all. If there is no evidence of the communication, then the grieving party will have to accept more readily that their loved one is physically gone.
The presence of a dead person’s profile just seems to prolong the act of grieving. The profile is still there, just like it was when the deceased was alive. This is similar to the situation of a grieving parent keeping a dead child’s room just the way it was when the child died. Except, in the case of MySpace, the page is dynamic while the child’s bedroom is not. People keep posting to the page, keeping it alive, supporting the illusion that if the page is still alive, so is the person. The bedroom doesn’t do that. The bedroom is trapped in the past, and still a symbol of denial, but it’s quite clear that the living person is missing.
The MySpace profile of a dead person doesn’t show that. Although the dead person never responds, they didn’t respond when they were away on holiday either. Perhaps they’ve just taken a long holiday?

It took a while going through the various MySpace profiles linked to from MyDeathSpace before I found an error message, informing me that the profile did not exist or had been removed.
The profile was gone, in the same way the person was gone. This seemed much healthier to me.

Now I have.

Aren’t you glad you visited?