Scottish New Year Quotes

It was the sort of pub Alan liked, furnished with wall- to-wall forty-five-year-old gin-and-tonic drinkers. A notice on the wall behind the bar read: Please do not ask for credit, as a punch in the mouth often causes offence.

In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish-American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends. Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future. “I’m worried about technological unemployment.” “Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.” “But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?” “I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.

It was so funny, I witnessed this with my own eyes, Andy and the screw were like two WWF wrestlers, we were locked behind the grill gates cheering Andy on, the chants started. The chant was to the tune of Jingle Bells and went like this: Stab a screw, stab a screw, stab a screw today, all that fun it is to stab a screw on New Year’s Day, but it was only 29 December.

In July 1997, the proposed new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh was estimated to cost up to £40 million. By June 1999, the budget for the building was £109 million. In April 2000, legislators imposed a £195 million “cap on costs.” By November 2001, they demanded an estimate of “final cost,” which was set at £241 million. That estimated final cost rose twice in 2002, ending the year at £294.6 million. It rose three times more in 2003, reaching £375.8 million by June. The building was finally completed in 2004 at an ultimate cost of roughly £431 million.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of palaeontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several productive years to making Gideon Mantell’s life hell. A double-tailed lizard, part of the vast collection of natural wonders and anatomical specimens collected by the Scottish-born surgeon John Hunter in the eighteenth century. After Hunter’s death in 1793, the collection passed to the Royal College of Surgeons. (credit 6.8) Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumes that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retrieved the head and rushed out again.

In the muddy area below, the men of Jamestown gathered. Their excitement was obvious in the way they greeted each other, the rapid pumping of arms and the boisterous slapping of backs. Heads nodded as they conversed and waited to mingle with the ladies who would soon be their help mates. These men had pioneer spirits and courage. They had travelled to an unknown land to make a new life for themselves in a country where even the climate could kill. When these adventurers had first arrived, trade had been established with the Powhatans. Then the fort had been built. Then another, after the Indian raids. Then, the men of God came, and disease came, and the first two women, followed by families, and then winter. Cold, deadly winter followed by four years of Indian wars, and the hollow ache of starvation. Still, year after year, the settlement had survived and one year after the ship, The White Lion, brought the first black people, the settlement was thought safe for women—European women. Wives! It was a glorious day, for now each hard-working man could claim his bounty in female flesh. Of course, there would be opportunities to talk to a woman before making a life-binding decision, and there would be a celebration meal, ale and, no doubt, a dance.

However, Pauling’s interest in these carotenoids and flavonoids was confined to their chemical structures and the influence of structure on optical properties; he did not address their health functions. In 1941 Pauling was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, or glomerulonephritis, which was at the time an often-fatal kidney disorder. On the advice of physicians at the Rockefeller Institute, he went to San Francisco for treatment by Thomas Addis, an innovative Stanford nephrologist. Addis prescribed a diet low in salt and protein, plenty of water, and supplementary vitamins and minerals that Pauling followed for nearly 14 years and completely recovered. This was dramatic firsthand experience of the therapeutic value of the diet. Revelations When Pauling cast about for a new research direction in the 1950s, he realized that mental illness was a significant public health problem that had not been sufficiently addressed by scientists. Perhaps his mother’s megaloblastic madness and premature death caused by B12 deficiency underlay this interest. At about this time, Pauling’s eldest son, Linus Jr., began a residency in psychiatry, which undoubtedly prompted Pauling to consider the nature of mental illness. Thanks to funding from the Ford Foundation, Pauling investigated the role of enzymes in brain function but made little progress. When he came across a copy of Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry (1962) by Abram Hoffer in 1965, Pauling was astonished to learn that simple substances needed in minute amounts to prevent deficiency diseases could have therapeutic application in unrelated diseases when given in very large amounts. This serendipitous and key event was critically responsible for Pauling’s seminal paper in his emergent medical field. Later, Pauling was especially excited by Hoffer’s observations on the survival of patients with advanced cancer who responded well to his micronutrient and dietary regimen, originally formulated to help schizophrenics manage their illness.19,20 The regimen includes large doses of B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, selenium, zinc, and other micronutrients. About 40 percent of patients treated adjunctively with Hoffer’s regimen lived, on average, five or more years, and about 60 percent survived four times longer than controls. These results were even better than those achieved by Scottish surgeon Ewan Cameron, Pauling’s close clinical collaborator, in Scotland. After a long and extremely productive career at Caltech,

FROM DETHRONEMENT TO DEMOCRACY After Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in his homemade telescope in 1610, religious critics decried his new sun-centered theory as a dethronement of man. They didn’t suspect that this was only the first dethronement of several. One hundred years later, the study of sedimentary layers by the Scottish farmer James Hutton toppled the Church’s estimate of the age of the Earth—making it eight hundred thousand times older. Not long afterward, Charles Darwin relegated humans to just another branch in the swarming animal kingdom. At the beginning of the 1900s, quantum mechanics irreparably altered our notion of the fabric of reality. In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson deciphered the structure of DNA, replacing the mysterious ghost of life with something that we can write down in sequences of four letters and store in a computer. And over the past century, neuroscience has shown that the conscious mind is not the one driving the boat. A mere four hundred years after our fall from the center of universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves. In the first chapter we saw that conscious access to the machinery under the hood is slow, and often doesn’t happen at all. We then learned that the way we see the world is not necessarily what’s out there: vision is a construction of the brain, and its only job is to generate a useful narrative at our scales of interactions (say, with ripe fruits, bears, and mates).

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

A moving story of shattered dreams in which Barbara March achieved international stardom adored for her dramatic soprano voice of unique beauty and passion. At the peak of her considerable powers adverse circumstances closed that chapter in her life and living with this regret haunted her deeply and emotionally throughout her life As her thoughts centred on the tragic death of her husband Edward feeling somewhat saddened as she approached her sixtieth birthday. Still glamourous and beautiful she decides to go on a cruise and another phase in her life was beginning and what that might hold for her she could only imagine and that was where she befriends Lord Marcus Logan the laird of Glen Haven Castle on the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2nd and in the weeks to come on-board ship the emotional attraction was established and strong. Her life was not over a new chapter had begun, a year later they were married. It soon becomes apparent to Marcus that in the shadows of Barbara's life going back into the past and having to recall the loss of her career had hurt her deeply and emotionally, that chapter was one subject on which she found it painful to cope with and she avoided it whenever she could. Glen Haven will take you on an enchanting journey with dear friends with heart-warming thoughts of all times and a great deal of nostalgia, you will never want to lose the stories spell or bid farewell to its wonderful characters. All that I could say of the story to any purpose I have endeavoured to say it.

A Family Affair: Essential Fatty Acids More chemical clues to the nature of alcoholism come from research focusing on alcoholics with at least one grandparent who was Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Scandinavian, or native American. Typically, these alcoholics have a history of depression going back to childhood and close relatives who suffered from depression or schizophrenia. Some may have relatives who committed suicide. There also may be a family history of eczema, cystic fibrosis, premenstrual syndrome, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, or benign breast disease. The common denominator here is a genetic abnormality in the way the body handles certain essential fatty acids (EFAs) derived from foods. Normally, these EFAs are converted in the brain to various metabolites such as prostaglandin E1 (PGE1), which plays a vital role in the prevention of depression, convulsions, and hyperexcitability. When the EFA conversion process is defective, brain levels of prostaglandin E1 are lower than normal, which results in depression. In affected individuals, alcohol acts as a double-edged sword. It activates the PGE1 within the brain, which immediately lifts depression and creates feelings of well-being. Because the brain cannot make new PGE1 efficiently, its meager supply of PGE1 is gradually depleted. Over time, the ability of alcohol to lift depression slowly diminishes. Several years ago, researchers hit upon a solution to this problem. They discovered that a natural substance, oil of evening primrose, contains large amounts of gamma-linolenic acid (GLA), which can help the brain convert EFAs to PGE1. The results are quite dramatic. In a recent study in Scotland, researcher David Horrobin, M.D., matched two groups of alcoholics whose EFA levels were 50 percent below normal. The first group got EFA replacement, the second, a placebo. Marked differences between the two groups emerged in the withdrawal stage. The group that got EFA replacement had far fewer symptoms, while the placebo group displayed the full range of withdrawal symptoms associated with prostaglandin deficiency: tremors, irritability, tension, hyperexcitability, and convulsions. At the outset of the study, members of both groups had some degree of alcohol-related liver damage. Three months later, the researchers found that liver function among the EFA replacement group was almost normal. There was no significant improvement among the placebo group. A year later, the placebo group was still deficient in the natural ability to convert essential fatty acids into PGE1. What’s more, only 28 percent of this group had remained sober; the rest had resumed drinking. Results were dramatically better among the EFA replacement group: 83 percent remained sober and depression free.

So grave were the interstate tensions over trade that Nathaniel Gorham, named president of Congress in 1786, feared that clashes between New York and its neighbors might degenerate into civil war. Similarly acrimonious trade disputes erupted between other states with major seaports and neighbors who imported goods through them. The states were arrogating a right that properly belonged to a central government: the right to formulate trade policy. This persuaded Hamilton that unless a new federal government with a monopoly on customs revenues was established, disunion would surely ensue. As individual states developed interests in their own taxes, they would be less and less likely to sacrifice for the common good. In April 1786, amid a worsening economic crisis, Hamilton agreed that the time had come to act and was elected to a one-year term in the New York Assembly. Later on, he told a Scottish relative that he had been involved in a lucrative legal practice “when the derangement of our public affairs by the feebleness of the general confederation drew me again reluctantly into public life.” His zeal for reform signaled anything but reluctance. He was seized with a crusading sense of purpose and had a momentous, long-term plan to enact. Hamilton told Troup he had stood for election because he planned to “render the next session” of the Assembly “subservient to the change he meditated” in the structure of the national government. Indeed, his election to the Assembly was a preliminary step in an extended sequence of events that led straight to the Constitutional Convention.

The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish text, which indeed elaborates on the cryptic verse from Genesis 6:4: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterwards—when the sons of God went into the daughters of men.” While scholars disagree about when the book was actually written (with some putting it at ca. 300 B.C.), the book is cited in the New Testament Letter of Jude and the First Letter of Peter, and copies of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book was clearly known to first-century Jews and Christians but was considered apocryphal by St. Augustine, among others, and disappeared for more than a thousand years. By the tenth century, the Book of Enoch would have been considered a lost work of scripture, only to be rediscovered centuries later, in 1773, by the Scottish explorer James Bruce during his travels in Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

How strange this all was to me, fresh from New York, where what matters is not where you come from but what you are doing there, not what happened years ago but what is happening now.

Gaelic ritual also moved eastwards and Gaelic bards remembered its atmosphere. The place name of Scone is itself a memory of ancient ceremony. Bards sang of Scoine Sciath-Airde, ‘Scone of the High Shields’, probably a reference to the habit of warriors raising up a new king on their shields. As this precarious rite proceeded, another bardic name added a soundtrack. Scoine Sciath-Bhinne means ‘Scone of the Singing Shields’, the shouts and chants of acclamation as lords and warriors roared approval and support for the king raised on the high shields. Here is what John of Hexham wrote about the coronation of Malcolm IV in 1153: ‘and so all the people of the land, raising up Malcolm, son of Earl Henry, King David’s son (a boy still only 12 years old), established him as king at Scone (as is the custom of the Scottish nation).

A restatement of the primary evidence may therefore be helpful in understanding what the experience of having the Roman Empire on the doorstep may have meant for the early Caledonians. Firstly, no matter how it is framed, this was no mere interlude in Scottish history. The Roman Iron Age in Scotland spanned over 300 years of many recorded episodes of interaction, mostly violent, with one of the world's most powerful and expansionist empires. A third of a millenium that saw the presence of one of the highest concentrations of Roman military personnel - it has been estimated that at the height of occupation, at least one in eight Roman soldiers was serving in North Britain. The building of two great walls, the larger of which was maintained for a 300-year period and both with offensive and defensive characteristics of a magnitude not shared by any other Roman fronteir of its size. Unlike other zones of interaction, there is little evidence of regular trade and no manifestation of any meaningful civic development.

It's easy to identify tourists on Edinburgh's Royal mile. They're the ones bound in knitted scarves, wearing puffa jackets and woolly hats no matter the time of the year. When the wind whistles around the New Town's handsome Georgian streets, their stoic faces show the effort of turning away from its bite.

14. He’s denied climate change. Then denied that he denied it.​​ Here’s Trump calling global warming a conspiracy created by the Chinese: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. @realDonaldTrump – 11:15 AM – 6 Nov 2012 More tweets of him calling global warming a hoax… NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? @realDonaldTrump – 3:48 PM – 25 Jan 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice @realDonaldTrump – 4:39 PM – 1 Jan 2014 Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! @realDonaldTrump – 7:13 AM – 6 Dec 2013 Then, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump denied that he said any of this. Here’s the video. Clinton says, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interrupts to say, “I do not say that. I do not say that.” Actually, Donald, you’ve said nothing else. Trump has also said, dozens of times in tweets like this, that global warming sounds like a great idea: It’s freezing and snowing in New York–we need global warming! @realDonaldTrump – 11:24 AM – 7 Nov 2012 Here he is hating wind turbines: It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster. @realDonaldTrump – 12:55 PM – 24 Aug 2012 Trump fought against a “really ugly” offshore wind farm in Scotland because it would mar the view from his Scottish golf resort. My new club on the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland will soon be one of the best in the World – and no-one will be looking into ugly wind turbines! @realDonaldTrump – 5:24 AM – 14 Feb 2014

Scottish Whigs had helped to defeat Jacobitism in order to give birth to a new enlightened Scotland. They got their wish— with a vengeance. The years after 1745 witnessed an explosion of cultural and economic activity all across Scotland, as if the collapse of the Jacobite and Highland threat had released a tremendous pent-up store of national energy. It was economic “takeoff” in the full modern sense.