This is taken from the Dumfries, Queen of the South! facebook page. It’s quite funny. I think I have taken out all the swear words.

Something I read awhile ago thats appropriate in here and so true!!! Enjoy and discuss….??Last year Pete Fortune and I wrote a book entitled ‘Dumfries a History and Celebration’. As possibly any book with such a flatulent title deserved, it attracted little publicity on its publication. It’s an attractive looking book with 5 chapters of largely plagiarised drooling about Dumfries and its rich History and, in the last of these, an upbeat assessment of Dumfries’ potential to re-invent itself and survive rather than do the decent thing and slide discreetly into the Solway. We were very much against the lunatic feeling of optimism that we were forced to inject into Chapter 5, so much so that I wrote a secret Chapter 6 as an antidote.??Here it is:

??Actually it’s a ****-hole isn’t it? All these famous people might have come from Dumfries but they all ****ed off as soon as they could, and no wonder. The only exceptions are folk who died prematurely before they could **** off. Walking through Dumfries on a Saturday afternoon is enough to make you weep. The streets are filled with junkies, knock-kneed whores, thieves, pedarasts, religious maniacs and Rangers supporters.??Every second shop is a ****ing Pound emporium selling glass paperweights made by Korean schoolchildren and umbrellas that break as you leave the premises, or a Tanning Salon where you can go to cultivate that particular orange complexion unique to the town’s tarts.

The streets are filthy, coated in chewing gum, the riverbanks covered in kebab boxes and the only people with the energy to complain are monomaniac serial letter writers who in any sensible community would be beaten to death or locked away in an upstairs room. The pubs are full of the same pissed old men or a legion of able-bodied drunkards on incapacity benefit, and the only pub entertainment is Sky Sports or watching some old dosser ***** himself.??At night the town fills with bottom feeders or fat old bags on hen-parties from Newcastle the only town in the world comparable to Dumfries in its subnormal and retarded inhabitants.

The town’s packed with inadequate single mothers on benefit and their cock-eyed boyfriends on crack although there is a huge population of middle class ****ers who live in overpriced encampments on the edge of town and depend on the burgeoning ranks of irredeemable scum for their livelihood.??800 years of History but you’d think the town had been designed by some humourless, possibly syphilitic, presbyterian.

Every building of any importance has been knocked down, or soon will be, apart from those associated with Robert Burns, the poet of choice for Scotlands masons and unionists. The football team’s ****, the leisure centre, if it ever gets built, will fill up with the town’s young, an under-educated mob of proto-criminals, and going to Tesco’s and making it back without being ambushed by some Sandside skip-rat will remain the highlight of everyone’s week. The council’s full of old bores or drunkards whose collective imagination would fit in the shell of a hazel nut.

The only tourists you see are here by mistake, or are disabled pensioners from East Kilbride who got the Mystery Tour Booby Prize.??The Crichton Campus is the university of choice for people with one C pass at Higher or saddos who can’t bear to leave their thick boyfriends and go to a proper University. Guid Neighbours is an orgy of drink fuelled violence with no origin in history at all, apart from an attempt in the 1930s to convince the townspeople they had a sense of community and heritage.

RocketDog – I’m not too sure – it’s all a bit er, vague and uncertain!

Ah OK – so that rules that one out.

I’l probably do a couple of rides when I get back from Wales next week to check my fitness, then maybe I’ll know a bit more about when I’m free.

I guess the one good thing is that Trekster’s hand should be much more healed!

Ahh – double post. Hopefully the mods will delete the other post and keep this one.

Pocket simon was a little one of these!

I think for the young-uns on here who grew up with playstations and the like, you need to know why Elite was so amazing. Basically us lot at school were stepping up from dross like this to 128 kilobytes of BBC micro heaven! Awesome days!

[/url]20th January[/url] by simon ralli[/url], on Flickr

How you get on will partially be based on your fitness. Even I can ride the black (ok – most of it), which is more about distance than anything really technical. There is a brilliant way of doing 2/3 ish of the black, which includes the monster descent Deliverance, then you can track back onto the red and finish on the blue. However, there are lots of other combinations too based on what you are after. You will have a brilliant time, especially mid week and if this amazing weather holds out for you. Have fun.

That was a really excellent video and a good choice of camera angles too. Looked like a great ride.

I was always a fan of Beatrice Dalle but I guess she doesn’t count.

[/url]IMG_0063[/url] by simon ralli[/url], on Flickr

Aiden – looked psycho! Great song tho.

You have to listen to Simon

“Embrace the madness!”

Yeti – I havent ridden for a while – to be honest I am probably much better at karaoke than I am at mountain biking but I like to have fun! Remember fun?? 😀 I’m watching it with my Mum.

Lots of nervy performances. The next two shows will separate out the wheat from the chaf!

Wow – Mary – what a performance! Best of the night so far 😯

Rocketdog deleted me from facebook 😳

Loving it! 😀

I don’t know if it still there, but there was a little club just off Oxford Street called The Office. They played 80s and 90s, but it was just like being at uni again, playing indie pop and all the stuff played at student nights. I know it probably isnt an option, but lets face it, it is hardly the worst thing in the world ay?!

I suppose the great thing about living in Dumfries is that not only are there great people up here to go riding with, but every so often you meet people up here for the riding. Yep – some fabulous peeps out there who are on here. As for sharing the love, I try my best. I think all my best rides have been with people off here 🙂

I love my MacPro, but I do find the 13″ screen quite small. It also took me a while to get to grips with the interface, as I had been on PCs for the previous 10 years. Once I am up and running with a job and earning money, I am sure to buy a screen, as I use my Mac with an external keyboard and mouse anyway.

We’ve had some fantastic days this week in Dumfries but I have been a bit gutted as I was going to check out Ae but been knocked out with a pretty major cold and am low on energy. Oh well.

Well you’d expect weasel words from a man who is married to one judging by recent photos posted here! 😀

As for me

Love

Always!

Come on chaps – you cannot let Druidh and surf matt rule the roost

Well I gave it my best shot for the ladies 😳

It is hard not being an awesome dude ay?

Well things could be worse I guess. It’s not as if the ladies of STW are going to create a powerpoint presentation judging everyone which then goes viral around the world, like that lass at that university.

Cynical-al – er – maybe that was a slight exaggeration 😀

Nah – this was when it was booked for what was a now legendary party hosted by Motorola for 200 mobile phone industry executives, including myself. I wont go into what happened, but they flew us by Concorde to Paris for one heck of a party.

Well I am going to ignore all the physics for a moment and wonder why this chap posted the video on line. Yes, he should probably have been further away, and yes, the lady’s anger is quite disturbing, but she seems like quite a litigious (is that the word) type, telling him he would pay for the damage to her bike. Makes me think it wasn’t a corporate day out. She seems like the type to sue for damages due to the stress of humiliation. I watched this last night and couldn’t sleep it was that upsetting!

I was in Concorde just the once and didn’t hear a thing!!!! No idea why!

Here’s what could be the cleanest pic of the day. Me in the jungle 🙂

[/url]19th July[/url] by simon ralli[/url], on Flickr

Molgrips

That is a fair comment, but I was trying to get at a definition of what life and living systems are. This is very much to do with us being fully a part of nature, and not separate, thinking of nature just as an economic resource to be exploited, If we change our consciousness about nature and our place in nature, then we re-define what nature and natural mean to us.

The lack is all mine though in not making myself clear.

A dissipative structure is one that operates far from equilibrium. It is a term that Prigogine used in his book “Order Out of Chaos” which is an excellent read.

Autopoesis is a term coined by Maturana and Varela, to show how unlike machines, a living system uses its own parts to continually re-create itself. The term can loosely be defined as ‘self-making.’

Fritjof Capra’s book “The Web of Life” is an excellent read and goes into many of these theories of life and living systems.

Some businesses are now looking at natural systems in order to be inspired as to how to both organise themselves, and also be inspired by how they develop their products. It could also be said that our economic dogma, which is based on the fallacy of unlimited growth, could certainly do with modelling itself on natural systems, which after all, have proved resilient over millions and millions of years, as opposed to our current modern age (the last 200 years) which in earth lifespan terms, is nothing more than a millions of a bat of an eyelid really.

I was going to jump in to this thread some time ago but everyone seems to be arguing about one small aspect. I’ll try and bypass that and point to Einstein’s famous quote about not being able to solve problems at the same level of consciousness that created them.

I am interested in this question. What exactly is that higher state of consciousness required?

Well I have just finished my masters degree in holistic science, and this has given me a very rich understanding of the many news ways of scientific thinking. We covered Gaia theory, complexity theory, emergence, dissipative structures, panarchy, autopeisis, you name it.

There are a number of aspects of what for me would be a new level of consciousness. These are

1) Understanding the nature of being from a phenomenological perspective – understanding how we bring this world into being through our senses.
2) Developing an understanding of the holistic a dynamic processes within nature that do not necessarily lend themselves to a reductionist level of analysis
3) Understanding the hidden orders not just within nature, but within scientific thinking, which can both enlighten us as well as restrain our thinking un-necessarily.

So yeah, a mouthful of garbage there that probably does not make sense. My fellow student Brenda has just published her dissertation on resilience, and I wrote a short overview on my new blog here:

Home Coming – Exploring ecological resilience and the farming communities of east-central Alberta

It’s a great read for anyone who is very much active in the world of sustainability, resilience and transition.

As for the deeper stuff, well you’ll have to wait until my book is published : ) But this is a fabulous book too covering much of what has inspired me:

Absolutely gorgeous up here and it would have been a perfect day riding in the sun but I have a cold and am v run down 🙁

I used to go raving in Sheffield and the area but not to clubs – I just followed the Smokescreen sound system. Some very happy memories 😀

Ferocious sample!

Did someone say rave 😀

[/url]img009[/url] by simon ralli[/url], on Flickr

I should though add a couple of tunes

Well it really isn’t like me to dissapoint all the lovely ladies on STW, but you will not be getting a topless shot of me this month as a couple of weeks ago I had to go to Dumfries hospital for one of those electrical tests where they attach diodes to your body. The nurse had to shave two patches on my chest as otherwise the diodes would not have worked, and to be honest, it would just look ridiculous. 😳

Maybe I will take a photo soon of me and my amazing abs on Copacabana beach in a few week’s time 8)

Mboy

I went to The Wag club in London in 1988 when acid house was hitting the scene – oh my god – you would not believe what it was like for an 18 year old from Buckingham to go down to London, be nervous about trying to get in, and then on getting in just having a mind blowing time. I think the thing about experiencing all these tunes the first time was that there really was no precedent – I was then at Nottingham University where Graham Park from the Hacienda would play, and then we were into much deeper house with the DiY sound system and free parties and all of that more tribal house. Loving all these tunes people are choosing.

Here’s my playlist 😀

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=8661EB56544027D8