Is there a name for that time immediately after "upgrading" a piece of software or other technology, when everything feels needlessly different and you find yourself loathing it? A sort of honeymoon period in reverse.

OK, legally minded people. Can any of you tell me how the precise border between Scotland and England is defined in law? AFAICS this wee pocket first appears on maps in the late C18th, changes shape a few times, and only settles down with the OS in the mid C19th.

A chunk of the rather battered facade of the Egyptian Halls emerging briefly from the scaffolding. (It is not known why the ancients put those wee spikes on everything they built. One theory is that it was a ritual to defend the building from maintenance.)

Would accessibility people please stop telling me "just use Bookdown"? I'm sure Bookdown is very nice and very useful for its purposes, but if you've been using proper LaTeX since the 1990s, it's like going from an organ to a kazoo.

Given that the only remaining function for which PCs are designed is updating themselves, it's remarkable that mine still can't do it without making sounds like an asthmatic dragon and radiating heat like someone who overdid the Ready Brek this morning.

Can we have our promised thunderstorm and clear the air a wee bit, please? (John Knox, The Nelson Monument on Glasgow Green Struck by Lightning; artuk.org/discover/art...)

We need a one-in, one-out policy on grimdark. Nobody gets to make a new grimdark show until they give us a Muppet musical version of one existing grimdark show.

Unexpected highlight of the day: the graduate who came up to say "thank you" because I once gave him a poke of throat sweeties when he had a coughing fit in an exam. It's a strange job, this, but sometimes not entirely unrewarding.

Important news: academic hoods now attach *with velcro*. This could be the greatest advance European universities have made since 1088.

You just *know* that someone is going to get this into a wellness slidedeck aimed at schools, and for years we'll be seeing students who are convinced they can't study unless they drink at least eight skeletons per day.

Looking at the temperature forecast for today's graduation and suddenly I'm a convert to radical ungrading practices. If we just announce "You've all graduated! Well done!" and fire a bunch of certificates into the crowd with some kind of trebuchet, it could be over before anybody faints.

Graduation ceremony today. Can anyone who's good at hoods and gowns tell me where this wee character studied?

Feasgar math dhuibh.

All the bickering about whether there is an ideological campaign against this or that discipline seems pretty hollow when you realise that the actual UK government believes that universities are grifters and there should be fewer of them.

Is it too much to ask of a UK-wide trade union to be aware that the Green parties in Scotland and in England & Wales are not the same party and have not been since 1990? Apparently so.

I love it when a new organisational Thing is launched with fanfare, acquires a shiny website, gets its name and logo into lots of material that will be difficult to update or replace, and is then quietly dissolved after a few years without ever having worked out what it was for.

Came home via the river. Stopped to take a look at an oddly shaped floating log; the oddly shaped floating log put its head up and looked back at me. Apparently the oddly shaped floating log was unimpressed by what it saw, because it turned onto its front and dived. Third urban otter of the year.

Once again I try to find a source for something I faintly remember, and the only source I can find was written by me. I appear to be turning into a Victorian antiquarian. Please send druids.

Gentlemen preparing to take the bike into work for the first time in months.

Anyway, happy Sunlit Uplands Day to every ostensibly left-wing idiot who thought that fostering xenophobia, imperilling a peace agreement, and locking in austerity for a generation was a price worth paying to say the word "neoliberal" in a smug voice. I hope you're proud.

"Look, I realise it's a bit warm in the office, but the alternative is spending the entire day on Teams."

Warning: we may be reaching the point of Cone Allusion Ouroboros.

Unsolicited career advice: do not become the Person In Your Workplace Who Is Presumed To Understand The UK Visa System. If necessary, pretend never to have heard of visas, the UK, or systems of any kind in general. This might help.

"Good lord! Wimsey of Balliol!"

I do think it is important to acknowledge that this has been the most successful left-wing government that Omelas has ever known.

An arts graduate is tipped to succeed a law graduate who succeeded a business graduate who succeeded an arts graduate who succeeded an arts graduate who succeeded a geography graduate who succeeded an arts graduate who succeeded an arts graduate, thus completing the STEM Takeover Of Everything.

For the rest of the day this website is going to have the calm and reflective quality that you'd get after chucking £5000 worth of Haribo into a toddlers' birthday party, isn't it?

This may be the saddest sentence I see on a web page today.

*tedious superfan voice* See, I remember when a PM resignation felt like a big deal in itself. Then they started building up these end-of-season special episodes and now a lectern's not enough: you need a million Daleks popping out of an interdimensional space egg or the audience will go to sleep.

Reading a transcript I've just learned the phrase "autodéfense intellectuelle", and could we please adopt this in place of "critical thinking"?

The base of Shaft 37 from Whithorn (800 CE or later). It is thought that these two figures represent the earliest depiction in Scottish religious art of door-to-door evangelism.

We were introduced earlier to a very nice dog who is part Labrador, part springer spaniel and part Jack Russell. Me: ... so, permanently hungry, boundlessly energetic, and incorrigibly criminal, then? Dog's human: That's about it. Dog: *trots off and returns with a toy he wishes us to see*

The heath spotted orchids seem to be doing quite well in the park this year.

Scottish soft-power strategy: give up on the football, and just pick a random world city every couple of years and send ten thousand folk in kilts to win hearts by drinking all their beer and putting things on top of other things. I don't understand _why_ it works, but the evidence is compelling.

Some... elegantly dismissive sympathy here from the director of the BnF's music department. (www.france24.com/en/culture/2...)

Post-industrial urban wasteland update, Saturday morning edition.

Went for an evening walk in the park and ran across an outdoor dance performance, because that is the kind of place this is.

It's like waking up one morning to discover that every single person above a certain pay grade now believes that cat vomit is yummy and nutritious, and cannot comprehend that not everyone agrees with them.

Please do not attempt to clap the giant demonic semi-skeletal Scotty dog that is currently guarding the entrance to the Necropolis, because having your soul torn from your body and worried like a stick often offends.

Get thee behind me, Clippy.

Musing: has anyone* ever won an election in the UK while dressed as a different species? * Other than Michael Gove, of course.

Good morning, everyone. I hope we are all having a good time picking our favourite numbers from a messy data set to confirm that we were correct about everything all along.

Going through some very old photos and I came across this. (I have been certain since this incident that shelties can read.)

Further grim news from the ongoing "changes" at Dundee.

POV: you are a Grand Old Man of English Letters; one evening at a party some swine sticks one of those new-fangled recording contraptions in front of you, and you discover with horror that you can't remember one of your own most famous poems. publicdomainreview.org/collection/r...

Could we maybe _not_ delegate potential life-or-death decisions to the racist vibes machine?

Why do publishers tell you "Your online article has been assigned a volume and page number" rather than "We have given to airy nothing a local habitation and a name"?

A little grebe in Queen's Park. You can generally identify a little grebe among the other waterfowl because it is (i) further away than the others and (ii) facing away from you.

Whitby, 664 AD. Colmán: Ionan computus! Wilfred: Roman computus! Me *stepping out of the time machine with a loaded gun*: I really don't care, but you jokers can both get it out the way of my revision lecture in week 10 next year.

I know I'm late to the Bluesky Marc Bloch party, but I love his quietly passionate defence of the humble footnote*. ("The Historian's Craft", tr. Peter Putnam, 1954) * Or endnote; for once that is not the argument here.