I’m going to look this one up during the next visit to the bookstore.

In this book, instead of mindless aphorisms you get little mirthless nuggets such as:
“Be happy while yer liven fer yer a lang time deed”
- as offered up by the author’s grandparents and their generation.

Very funny, of course. And the author does not mock his ancestors, he just points out that times were different, were hard, that society did not allow men to express themselves emotionally.

Now if I could only find out who is laughing all the way to the bank with this one: http://scottishlaird.com/ :-)

For me, being Scottish (and, yes, I am a Scot) is little to do with geographical accidents of birth or family history and much to do with an attitude of mind. Do you want to be Scottish? Then….be Scottish. But don’t take yourself too seriously, and don’t step across that line where you begin to seek happiness for the sake of happiness – rather, seek to make your life worthwhile, contribute to the common good, maintain the trust of your family and friends, have an occasional drink (go on, you know you want to), don’t get neurotic about health and fitness, exercise your irony muscles whenever you can, and laugh out loud whenever there’s a bloody good reason to do so.

Maybe the guy who spoke to the Parliament just took himself a little too seriously?

Well, it appears that the originally quoted”research” and the ensuing “discussions” have caused a Caledonian coronary.

May the spirit of Groundskeeper Willie allow true Scots everywhere the space to revel in the happiness of a bad mood:-)

If only we could get a little soft lighting and elevator music while in hospital. . .:-)

On another note – I LOVE Scotland and Scottish people. They totally rule. Just like Grounds Keeper Willy says, “If it’s not Scottish, it’s CRAP!”

“Maybe they meant that their surgeries were totally successful (but the patients died later from neglect).”

Again, deja vu. The management here spent close to a million $$ on a Da Vinci surgical robot at the same time they were downsizing staff to catastrophic levels to “save money.” So I guess the idea was to have high-tech gizmos out of the Jetsons to impress the fraction of a percent of patients who could actually benefit them, after which they could experience the delightfully squalid Third World conditions of the Postoperative Care ward, where they might go five days without a bath or shit the bed waitng 45 minutes for a bedpan.

And BTW, an OR nurse told me those surgical robots did nothing that couldn’t be handled just as well by scrubbing in an extra nurse to hold a camera or scalpel or whatever. But the extra nurse wouldn’t be nearly as impressive to the gullible public, in those smarmy TV commercials they love to run with the soft lighting and elevator music.