KindaGamey

If you’d like some thematic music for this post, here’s the man the Washington Times called “The Jimi Hendrix of the highland bagpipe”, Neil Anderson and his band Rathkeltair to put in one of your browser tabs.
Neil Anderson was formerly of Seven Nations. (Additional: Write up + Media)

They put on a hell of a show. The man played a pennywhistle and the bagpipe at the same time.  How? Bit of blowin, bit of squeezin if you get me drift.

Si Je Puis : If I Can
The Colquhoun Motto

My last name is Colquhoun. It’s a big one. Doesn’t fit well in Scantron bubble tests. Luckily, I don’t have to take those anymore.

So when someone asks for your last name, you know you’re going to be standing there for a while. When Dad used to make dinner reservations, especially at ESL establishments,  he used to sometimes just say it was “Smith” just to avoid confusion. I’ve always had a kind of sing-song response to anyone who asked for my last name. One standardized response is for spelling the letters and explaining the ones you don’t need to pronounce: “C-O-L-Q-U-H-O-U-N, and don’t pronounce the L-Q-U.” The other one is for the declaration of my name and heritage, has more flair to it; it’s just for showing off really: “We are the Colquhouns of Luss on the Banks of Loch Lomand,” that’s fun to say with a hint of an accent, and if I really want to tart it up I’ll add, “and we hates the MacGregors and we hates the French!” I stopped saying that one because I actually like the French.

Optional Tangent on France: Just went to see Robert Crumb talk the other night and he said that his wife, almost clairvoyantly, got them out of the United States three years before the movie Crumb was released. He said his life and precious solitude would have been hellish had they not moved. He was telling people how much he absolutely loved it until realizing his mistake, he backtracked, “Oh no, it’s awful there! Don’t go!” They live in a small village and no one cares that he is a famous American artist. They aren’t bombarded by corporations, advertising, and chain stores like we are here (he said that chain stores is a perfect name because you get chained down by the oppression of corporate america), simply because the French won’t have it! They get outraged, say no! They hold on tight to their way of life. As for health care, his daughter had a child and every medical cost was paid for, including midwives. And she got a load of vacation time to take care of the baby. He said that everyone in Europe just loves Obama and hopes that America can grow up now that an adult is in charge. They look in complete awe at Americans, “What is wrong wis zose people, why don’t zey vant health care?” I was proud that the Richmond audience was so receptive to all this, although admittedly the lifetime comic book reader is not likely your Richmond conservative type. One guy with a Southern accent did ask sort of challengingly and reduntantly (as they had already discussed it), “well tell us what you like about France and what makes it better than America?” but Crumb carried on as if the guy wasn’t still standing there ready to interject a verbal fist and his description of France really DID sound better, so there.

Ok, sorry about that, back to “and we hates the MacGregors and we hates the French!“: Dad used to make little jokes about the French (and the Germans) so I would let that one rip without remorse before I knew better. But not only was I wrong about the French, it turns out I was wrong about the MacGregors too.

Here’s a map of the lands to show where the Colquhouns and MacGregors were situated around Loch Lomand. Take note of the MacFarlanes whilst you’re looking, they’ll come up later:

Well, we did have a bit of a scuffle with the MacGregor’s back in the day. This details it here:

In 1589, the MacGregors killed a royal forester – an offence against the crown, which promptly issued letters of “fire and sword” against the clan, making it illegal to shelter or have any dealings with clan members. Various “fire and sword” orders were continually proclaimed against the MacGregors for the better part of 200 years – they simply couldn’t keep out of trouble. In 1603, after Clan Gregor trapped and murdered the Colquhouns, an Act was passed proscribing the very name MacGregor. This meant any member of Clan Gregor (if caught) could be beaten, robbed or killed without fear of punishment. Anyone with the name MacGregor was banned from the church (no marriages, burials, communion, etc.). It was complete ostracism for the entire clan.

What it glosses over there is the nasty Battle of Glen Fruin where the Colquhouns got routed pretty badly. We’ve scattered ourselves all over the Earth since, probably because people just love to kill us. You can find Colquhouns all over the world, some of the names have been changed to Cohoon, Calhoun, Calhoon, etc. (Many people couldn’t write back in the day, so if you came to a new land any scribe that took down your name would just spell it phonetically, hence all the wild versions of names.)

My father once told me a story of the Colquhouns and accidentally attributed it to the MacGregors, hence sealing our rivalry through the ages for me. It turns out that this story should be properly attributed to the MacFarlanes who, as you can see in the picture above, had lands right above the Colquhouns on Loch Lomand! I only just found out this year that I’ve had it wrong all the while!

The MacFarlanes were known for stealing our cattle and sheep, but it turns out the Colquhouns stole something worse. Around 1569, Lord Colquhoun and Lord MacFarlane left to help with a battle (I was told the crusades, but that doesn’t really fit the timeline) and Lord Colquhoun came back early and shagged Lord MacFarlane’s wife. When Lord MacFarlane returned he had Lord Colquhoun killed and his testicles removed. He then served them to his wife on a silver tray, garnished with lettuce, and made her eat them. They then set about a policy of killing Colquhouns as everyone is so fond of doing.

I just found an actual reference after a bit of a search:

For much of their history, the Macfarlanes were a turbulent lot. In 1589 the MacFarlanes caught Sir Humphrey Colquhoun of Luss having an affair with their then chief’s wife. They hunted him to Bannachra, set fire to his castle, and brought home to the poor lady an unspeakable portion of the Colquhoun chief’s corpse – serving it up to her on a wooden dish with the obscene jest ‘That is your share. You will understand yourself what it is.’ By the Act of the Estates of 1587 they were declared to be one of the clans for whom the chief was made responsible; by another act passed in 1594, they were denounced as being in the habit of committing theft, robbery, and oppression.

At the festival they even had this funny shirt made up, making light of their known thievery:

“MacFarlane Cattle Company: The Finest of the Colquhoun’s Herd”

This is the write up we found at their tent. This claims Colquhoun of Luss was killed in 1608:

Motto: “This I’ll defend.”

One of the men on stage at the Scottish festival said that they can almost guarantee that you have Scottish in you somewhere down the line. Well my girlfriend Mia’s mother’s maiden name is Miller and she has a Miller on her father’s side as well. So we went to find which Clan claims the name Miller:

Turns out it’s MacFarlane.

Of all the places, of all the clans she could have been connected to, her clan is right next to Clan Colquhoun on Loch Lomand? Astounding! Did I know this woman in a past life or something? Certainly is a nice fit. Guess the next crazy thing we need to do is a past life regression.

Wikipedia: Clan Colquhoun, Clan MacFarlane, Clan MacGregor

Another Synchronicity

At the Celtic Festival, she found a lovely smooth shiny black stone amongst a bunch of crushed white walkway rock. I didn’t even see it, but she stopped, reach down and plucked it up. It was as different from the surrounding stone as you could get. Maybe someone dropped it? Maybe it was already there when a dump truck deposited it and they raked it down the pathway? I don’t know. I put the stone in my pouch (sporran) and later kept it in my car for a while. Then put it ceremonially by the fireplace on the incense holder and used it for a meditation a few times.

A week or so after the festival, I was walking in the side alley by my house, which is also just regular old crushed gray stone, and I saw something and reached down and picked it up:

A perfectly smooth white stone, with almost the same angular appearance. I posted this picture to Facebook and people made a LOST (TV Show) connection: “Oh, just like Rose and Bernard!” There is a pretty significant black and white theme/stone in show, at least in the beginning, that they must have gotten bored of in later seasons.

ANYWAY, just another coincidence in the myriad of coincidences that dominate my life.
The coincidences certainly seem to like this girl. Luckily, I do too.

Pics
Here’s two sets of pics. One from a Celtic Festival near Williamsburg and one from the Highland Games at the new fairgrounds at King’s Dominion.

link

I’ve got enough pictures sent from other people to do a gallery spread of their observations.
So here it is! Thanks to everyone that sends me a little frame of their life’s motion picture.

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http://idiotsbooks.com/

One of the limitations in trying to assess the way society works is that, due to our limited perspectives, we fail to see the earth as a closed system. We see a world of “stuff” that is “out there” and we limit our mental simulations to only cover the parts we are investigating. The point of abstraction is doing exactly that, reduction to see the salient exchanges that affect the system. The problem is that the devil is usually in the details and beyond a certain level of resolution, no more can be abstracted out lest you lose the overall dependencies that define a system’s environment in the first place.

If I tell you a story about how I climbed the ladder of success and got better jobs, got paid more, started buying bigger things, consuming more resources — this is seen as a generally good thing as if the financial resources of the world were infinite and through my ingenuity and hard work, I tapped that rich vein. Whereas if one were looking at the system as a whole you would see how my success limited the options for other people. You would see how the game of financial ‘musical chairs’ actually worked, and how the opportunity for success was there for everybody, but not everybody could win. The game has compulsory “losers” built-in and by my success I removed a card from someone else’s hand. — You also may not see the other effects that the job may have had on my life. You wouldn’t realize that along with the $50k in salary increase, I had to deduct 25 happiness points from my tableau, and -15 time tokens that I could have spent with people I loved.

In our games and gaming simulations, we fashion them with the same short-sighted principles. If you get more points, guns, money, lives, they all come from this endless digital supply which will never run out. Even the basic concept of using randomness in games defeats a major universal principle of cause and effect – that some fixed set of rules determine the end result, not a weighted roll of digital dice. (As we know, computers can’t calculate “true” randomness anyway and randomness can lead to unrestrained resource bloat or deficit.)

So the challenge is: create a game that is a completely closed system. Like the Law of Conservation of Energy: “energy can never be created or destroyed, only changed into different forms.” The initial parameters and rules would have to be created in equilibrium and only injected with imbalance during the game’s set up, as the central conflict to overcome. There could be no randomness involved in any of the game’s elements aside from the starting conditions, and even those would be restricted to the resource limitations of the game. The intricacies of the game would be translatable illusions for the “energy” of the system: power, time, money, resources, distance, whatever – there would be options available to the player to convert one energetic “form” to another. With x amount of power, you can turn the cannon to a 45 degree angle and shoot the cannonball Y+ high, but only z- distance, or you can use a lower angle and shoot the cannonball Z distance, but only y- high. Every decision with its consequence, for the player as well as the system as a whole. Everything interconnected; as I believe life to really be.