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Here’s one of my favourite jokes. A man walks into a bar and orders a drink. He looks at the other patrons and realises that the man next to him has a small orange for a head. “Excuse me,” he says. “I can’t help noticing that –” “I have a small orange for a head?”… [more]
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This is absolutely terrifying: YouTube has a “conspiracy ecosystem”. YouTube viewers who started searching for information on “crisis actors†— people who supposedly play roles as mass shooting survivors to push gun control — could soon find themselves tumbling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies about the the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the JFK assassination… [more]
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This is wonderful, and made me cry. It’s a phone ad, showing first wedding dances shot on iPhones. But what’s significant is that these weddings are in Australia, where equal marriage has just been made law. These are the first dances of the first Australian LGBT weddings. [more]
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I recently cancelled my long-standing subscription to The Times and Sunday Times because I was getting fed up with its selective reporting. As any writer knows, you can change a story by choosing what to include and what not to include – so if you leave out important details you can create a misleading impression.… [more]
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I was going to come to this one later in the series but given yesterday’s post on anti-depressants I thought I’d post it today. As the title suggests, this one’s about the drugs. As I’ve explained in the YouTube description, this is our Everybody Hurts, a song about keeping on when you feel that everything’s… [more]
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The BBC reports that a new study, published in The Lancet, finds that anti-depressants really do work. The study, which analysed data from 522 trials involving 116,477 people, found 21 common anti-depressants were all more effective at reducing symptoms of acute depression than dummy pills. It’s timely given the massive and largely uncritical publicity recently… [more]
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For those of you who aren’t of the Windows persuasion, a three-fingered salute (in this context) is the keyboard combination you press when a computer program crashes. This song began with David’s string part, which I really love: it set the mood and tone for the whole song. David is incredibly self-deprecating about his musical… [more]
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I wrote about posting personal songs yesterday, but I want to start with one that isn’t. This one’s called All Messed Up. I can’t remember who did what – David and I move between programming, keys, loops whenever we feel like it – but I love the way this sounds. There’s a thing I love… [more]
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One of the reasons I’m not a famous pop star, my stunning looks aside, is that it takes me an eternity to finish things. And when I do finish things, I tend to be shy about promoting them. Or I don’t promote them at all. For example, back in early 2016, I uploaded a bunch… [more]
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“So a tran walks into a bar…†I went to a comedy show last night, and the comedian didn’t make any jokes about trans people. I knew he wouldn’t – the comic, Jimeoin, doesn’t do that kind of joke – so I felt safe enough to go as me. By “as me†I mean as… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
