To a Mac

This weekend celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mr Robert Burns, Scottish poet, bard and lyricist. Burns was the closest thing to a Scottish rock star of medieval times. Scotland's biggest celebrity, touring the isles with his songs. The 25th of January is traditionally Burns night were all Scottish folk, or folk that pretend to be Scottish, gather for dinner, raise a dram in honour to the famed poet and eat haggis for dinner after addressing it in an odd, sacrificial like custom. In an official Burns night the haggis is always brought in to the room in a large dish following a piper. Burns' 'Address To a Haggis' is read out by the feast's delegate and at some point in the poem the speaker plunges a big knife into the bag of sheeps' meat, hearts, liver,lungs and any other odd end that had been lying about the butchers. When we were at school the idea of the Haggis being a bag of sheeps' brains was always popular. As long as I don't think about it too much I love the stuff though, even though reading the dishes ingredients is probably enough to turn you into a vegetarian for life.
No doubt we'll have some haggis over the weekend at some point after the other half comes back from her planned trip to the capital. Ka is off to Edinburgh to see Cinderella on Ice with her Sister, Mum and neice allowing me some glorious peace and quiet. Perhaps I'll do some painting, listen to some music, watch a few movies, finish my book or maybe just go out for a few drinks with whoever else is about.
Talking of birthdays the Apple Macintosh computer also celebrates it's 25th birthday on Saturday. Another cultural icon if ever there was one. Maybe I should have a ceremonial dinner for my iMac. Recite the manual and plunge a knife into a particularly big twin burger meal to the tune of something off my ipod? It should have been Scottish though with a name like that though. Disappointingly the Macintosh name came from an apple and not a Scottish designer famous for his Art School or even a Scottish designed raincoat (not sure if iMacs are waterproof anyway...). In Secondary school we had a computer room with around ten of the Macintosh Classics lining the walls and they could not do anything. I certainly cannot remember doing anything useful on them anyway. The only thing we did learn in that class was how to perform a decent golf swing, thanks to the computer teacher, Mr Morris. My home computers back then had been the ZX Spectrum followed, in the early nineties, by the Atari ST. The ZX Spectrum 128K was a classic. After plugging your cassette into it's deck and pressing play, you'd go away and have your dinner, or go out for a game of footie, allowing the screeching, grinding, noise of the Spectrum to howl out from the tv, moving with psychotic, garish lines and pixels, as it loaded your game. After an hour or so, on your return, the game would be loaded, and ready for action. With it's primary coloured pixel graphics you'd happily play away for approximately fifteen minutes only for it to crash or stall. At this point you'd hit the restart button and start the process all over again. Kenny and myself used to play a game involving an egg with a face, feet and hands, running about a fantasy land, dodging dragons, drowning in rivers, travelling by cloud and collecting stars, all to a tune that sounded like it had been composed by Kraftwerk on Ecstasy. In fact, looking back, I think the makers of the game had probably been on ecstasy.