Mottos, and also photos

I'll start with the photos. Firstly - something seems to have happened to those photos of my flat. Perhaps some sort of online tidying police. Or my Mum's a lot more web savvy than she appears and doesn't want her friends to know what a slattern I am.

Anyway, my life is too short to try and work out what's up and fix it. If you imagine that the first shows a very small, very messy bedroom, and the second shows a larger, less messy bedroom, then you'll get the picture. To continue our state-of-the-art mind's eye-o-cam, next imagine the second bedroom, only now a riot of haphazard cardboard boxes, piles of dirty clothes and empty crisp packets. Yes, kind of like the first room, only larger. Or, more precisely, like the second room, only messy. I'm pleased to note I have beaten my prediction by a whole week. Who says I'm not efficient?

In lieu of working photos of my own, I was going to link to a photo of the anti-war demo last weekend (as spotted by Geoff, on Urban 75, taken by a complete stranger, but happening to feature me in the background, looking remarkably pissed off, but then, war is bad, y'know?) but the photos have proved so popular that his bandwidth has been exceeded. You'll have to imagine them too - people, placards, pissed off me. This mind's eye-o-cam is pretty good, eh? And here's a photo of me receiving the Nobel Prize. With no wrinkles. But with a big pile of gold and a flat stomach.

Anyway, today's other news - I was browsing Wikipedia while at work today, as you do, and happened to be looking at the entry for Scotland. Did you know that the official motto of Scotland is "Nemo me impune lacessit"?

I thought that was just something it said on the side of pound coins sometimes. I didn't realise it was an official motto for Scotland. A tenner says 95% of people stopped in the street would not know their national motto, rendering the whole exercise somewhat pointless, no?

It means, "No one provokes me with impunity" in Latin. I think we could also render this, with no loss of accuracy, as, "Dinnae try it, pal" or perhaps, 'Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough'. Was Kenneth MacAlpin* from Glasgow, perchance? It also gives the Scots version as 'Wha daur meddle wi me?' which is even more nakedly an invitation to fight. I can't believe you're allowed to have stuff like that as your national motto. Cool, eh?

England's, it turns out, is 'Dieu et mon droit'**, or 'God and my right' - which manages to both be offensive (to me anyway) AND not really make any sense.

*It was also news to me that Scotland was unified by Kenneth I. Now come on, you can't have a King called Kenneth. Ethelred, clearly a much more sensible Kingly name.

**again, yes, I've seen it on pound coins but didn't realise it was supposed to be our national motto. I thought that was, 'Is this the queue?'