A spokesperson

for Edinburgh Zoo confirmed that a nursery would be built within the new panda enclosure at the zoo, to encourage the normally solitary animals to mate.

and so it begins...

(From The Scotsperson )
Hospital bids to be first to give patients surgery by robots

Published Date: 27 May 2011 By Frank Urquhart

A major campaign was launched yesterday to raise the £2.5 m needed to establish Scotland’s first “robotic”  surgical theatre at one of the country’s leading acute hospitals.

…. the fund raising drive has been launched to equip a theatre at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary with cutting edge equipment…

"This is going to hurt, a lot."

"Going into work later today then?"

How's that for volume? Do you want me to take a bit more off the sides? No? OK then, I'll just start drying it then. So, are you working today then? Oh, you're a scientist? That's posh, you must be dead brainy.  So do you work in a laboratory then? You do, sorry, but its in space? You work on the International Space Station? Do you really? And you'll be flying up there later today and you're all going to get interviewed via video-link by The Pope while you're on the space station in orbit and subject to zero-gravity?
Oh here, I bet you're glad you're getting your hair done....

BBC to increase opportunities for audience to continue not to watch

The BBC confirmed this week that radio stations on the digital, Freeview networks, previously under threat to make way for the digital introduction of Gaelic must- watch BBC Alba have been reprieved. 
A spokesputitonexpenses for The BBC told The JT: " We previously thought we might have a bandwith problem, that BBC Alba's massively increased audience share on the Freeview platform might overload the system. But, really who are we trying to kid?"


With current  satellite  audiences  for BBC Alba hovering in the low zeroes, it is thought that the move to Freeview is primarily aimed at boosting viewer numbers.

Our source elucidates :" When this idea fails, as it inevitably will, BBC Scotland will probably just have the production management for BBC Alba  go round to people's houses, talking backwards to people through their letterboxes, as the public steadfastly refuses to answer the door." 


Inside: This is true, among Scotland's cash-starved independent TV production community, BBC Alba is known as "Treasure Island"- an oasis of budgetary generosity in a desert of cost-cutting.

Royal Pudding

I know its a long shot, but for those few JT readers who do have access to the internet, can I suggest that you find a way of watching South Park's take on that wedding?
Its often remarked on and acknowledged by the SP guys how much they owe to Monty Python, Royal Pudding makes this debt very explicit. 
All Canadian readers should immediately access their box of faith. 
Out.

'Beath Bobbies Baffled

Police officers based in the picturesque Fife hamlet of Cowdenbeath confessed themselves baffled last night at the contents of 
(described by the BBC) as a "suspicious package" sent to Central Park, home to the town's football team.
A local polismun telt The JT: " The  package is fuhl o' the kind uh hing we've never seen in Cowdenbeath before like, ken."
Speculation as to the likely contents of the package has now focussed on two possibilities.
Either: 
                                                                             
                                                                                                                                                                  


Or:


 

"Easy mistake to make" dept

Police in Edinburgh admitted today that they hadn't been able to spot the house of the Hearts fan charged with assaulting Neil Lennon at Tynecastle. 
A spokesplod told The JT: " Houses in the area, Stenhouse, look very similar, and we just couldn't find anything that might lead us to suspect that the fan might live in a particular house."

I'm sure

that you, like me, dear reader, has often wondered what ever  happened to "Tom" from Father Ted.

Down with this sort of thing.

                                                                                                                                                                          
    








Well, if this  photo from BBC Scotland's news site is to be taken at face-value, it looks like he's apparently just about to do 3 months for racially-abusing a Rangers player...  

Careful now.

                                                                
                                                                          

Annabel Goldie

So farewell then Annabel. 
In announcing her intention to stand down as leader of the Scottish Conservatives she was really only bowing to the inevitable. But we shouldn't be too downhearted, there is life outside politics. There is, in Annabel's case, her life long love of classic British sit-coms.

The writer's pen beckons as Annabel sits down to re-imagine a 1950s holiday camp serving as a convenient metaphor for the current  fragile emotional state of the Conservative Party in Scotland.

"Lo-di-lo campers!"

Oh dearie me...

Among the high profile Labour casualties in the Holyrood elections we must number one Frank MacAveety, a source of much innocent amusement on the pages of The JT over the years.
 Frank, for whom the expression, "he rose without trace", might have been invented, famously enjoyed the odd sausage roll or six.So as one door, the MSPs entrance at Holyrood, closes, another, at least for Frank, opens. 

Mr Willshire at the conservatoire, with a hammer.

(From The Herald)

Academy rift denied as top teacher quits

EXCLUSIVE PHIL MILLER ARTS CORRESPONDENT

4 May 2011

SCOTLAND’S leading talent school has denied it is in turmoil after its head of music announced he wants to switch jobs and a top music teacher resigned.

Havilland Willshire, the Dean of Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) in Glasgow wishes to leave his current post and apply for a new post at the institution. Mr Willshire insisted he was not being compelled to leave his post, and was looking forward to applying for the new Director of Junior Conservatoire job.

While the rift is likely to occassion a great deal of debate in academic circles, Scots outside academia are thought to be asking "what kind of name's Havilland Willshire?"

Mr Willshire told The JT :" Yes, my name is unusual in the modern context but not where and when I come from:  upper-middle class English society sometime in the late 1920s." 

Mr Willshire confirmed that he regularly uses a  time machine to flit back and forth across the decades, " One day I could be threatening to resign from a senior post in an academic institution in contemporary West Central Scotland, the next I could be standing by an Adams fireplace in the drawing room of  a Surrey stately home sometime in 1928-ish looking dead fishy as I'm interrogated by Hercule Poirot."

It would appear that Mr Willshire is not the only staff member at the RSAMD with a funny name.

 " Most of the staff in here are English AND arty so you get a fair proportion of really great funny names" said Heid Jannie  Algernon Cuddle Flumpie.

Floor plan of new RSAMD extension.

And with

literally only a few  variously expressed intervals of time left before Scotland goes to the polls, the party leaders still found time to appear on any generic game show you can think of, if this set is anything to go by anyway...

"Trick question there contestants. The answer is, of course, you're ALL wankers."

Gentlemen,as of 7am this morning,

the headline writer on The Herald site has been officially upgraded from "surreal" to "just pure mental."