Guardian making itself look a bit silly (as per usual).

My radio-alarm clock is set to Radio 4, which I listen to as I drift back into consciousness. This morning, they quoted from a Guardian editorial, which seemed so far-fetched that I wasn't sure I hadn't imagined it.

Nope.They actually said this about a possible second Scottish indyref:

The choice facing voters in an independence referendum can be framed as one between the certain economic catastrophe of crashing out of the EU and the uncertain consequences of leaving the UK.

As is well known, Scotland's economic links with the rest of the UK outweigh Scotland's links with the rest of the EU by about four-to-one. By economic links I mean, cross-border investment, imports-exports, jobs and so on,

So whatever the disruption is when* the UK leaves the EU, it would be four times as bad for Scotland if they left the UK and tried to rejoin the EU.

* It's a great feeling finally being able to say "when" instead of "if".

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From yesterday's Metro (Scottish edition):

Made Of Tougher Stuff, I agree with you. I have been married for 40 years and my hubby has never once worn a hat, gloves, vest or pyjamas. He is a real man!

IK, Glasgow

I don't know what MOTS's original vicarious boast was, but this one could run and run, culminating with something like this…

I have been married for sixty years and my husband has never worn anything but underpants. When we are snowed in, he marches out and kills a polar bear with his bare hands so that we have something to eat.

EW, Lapland.

"E-cigarettes will lead to complete collapse of society"

From The Daily Mail:

E-cigarettes designed to help people quit smoking could act as a 'gateway' to addiction to illegal drugs, scientists have today warned. Like conventional cigarettes, the devices are said to raise the risk of addiction to banned substances including cannabis and cocaine.

Once users have become accustomed to purchasing banned substances, they will inevitably abandon their jobs, studies and families and become dealers themselves. This in turn will lead to an economic slump and an increase in gun-ownership and violent crime as well as more acquisitive crimes being committed by addicts to feed their habits.

Increased demand for cocaine will lead to mass deforestation in South America, with a knock-on effect for global warming, as drugs gangs clear swathes of the rain forest for coca plantations and millions of vulnerable children will fall prey to gangs of men who offer them drugs when luring them into a life of sex-slavery.

The research also found that as most terrorist organisations fund themselves by smuggling and selling weapons and drugs, they will become ever more powerful and wrest control of failing states, which will trigger small scale wars all over the globe which will eventually coalesce into a global struggle for survival.

Scientists concluded that taking that first puff on an e-cigarette is only the first step to being beheaded by Islamic militants or all-out nuclear warfare.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the married couple from Columbia University, New York, warned: "E-cigarettes will almost certainly lead to the end of the world as we know it and cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum and destroy the entire universe.

"Granted, that's a worse case scenario.

"The destruction might in fact be very localised, limited to merely our own galaxy."

"Teenage cousins are attacked by OTTER in scenes 'like something out of Jaws'"

From The Daily Mail:

* Kierra Clark, 13, and Matalyn Longtain, 11, were playing in Kalama River, WA, like in Stand By Me.
* They suddenly felt sharp pains in their legs and saw 'huge eyes reminiscent of ET' in the water
* Kierra says: 'It felt like somebody was stabbing me, like Janet Leigh in the shower'

Kierra Clark, 13, and Matalyn Longtain, 11, were playing in the Kalama River near their grandparents' home in Washington state, which bears a striking similarity to Brodie's in Homeland, when Kierra felt a sharp pain in her leg, a type of limb made famous by Betty Grable.

When she looked back she saw a river otter glaring back at her with 'huge eyes like ET or the crocodiles in Crocodile Dundee' popping out of the water, a substance which provided the backdrop to films such as 'Titanic' or 'Waterworld' and teeth she described as "as sharp and long as the android Bishop's knife in Aliens".

"At first it felt like somebody was just, like, grabbing onto my leg with their nails, like the Interferi in Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince, and then it felt like somebody was like stabbing me kind of, as if I were a door and the otter was Jack Nicholson," Kierra told Katu.com.

"It was probably one of the scariest things ever, even worse than the first time I saw The Exorcist. I didn't really know what was in the water at first, so that was like the worst thing ever because that's my biggest fear, apart from Dr Strangelove's Doomsday Machine, is to be attacked in the water. Or possibly being in a burning skyscraper with Alan Rickman on the loose."

As they swam faster they continued to feel bites on their legs and ankles. Kicking their assailants away in the style of Bruce Lee, they clambered onto a float of canoes like the one towards the end of Piranhas where they were dragged to the shore by their grandfather - a type of elderly relative usually assumed to be friendly, like the grandfather in The Princess Bride - Bob Schlecht Jr and his friend Fred Palmer, two otherwise minor characters who did not have time to develope a bromance sub-plot.

"It was terrifying," Kierra's grandmother, Arlita Schlecht, who helped in the rescue told Katu.com. "I could see she had blood streaming down her leg. (It was like) a scene out of Jaws."

The Daily News reports that fish biologist Craig Bartlett, probably played by Richard Dreyfuss, of the Washington Department of Film Similes & Metaphors said river otters are absolutely nothing like great white sharks, and frankly, the comparison was about as laughable as the stop-motion animation in the old Godzilla films.

"In their position I might have referred to Wind in the Willows or something and left it at that."

"This is not like blowing up the Taj Mahal or destroying the Acropolis"

From The Daily Mail:

The 11th-century minaret of a little known mosque that towered over Aleppo's old quarter was destroyed yesterday as fighting raged in the ancient Syrian city.

President Bashar Assad's government and the rebels trying to overthrow him accused each other of being to blame for the destruction to the Umayyad Mosque, inexplicably classified as a UNESCO world heritage site and the only structure of note in Aleppo's walled Old City.

"This is not like blowing up the Taj Mahal or destroying the Acropolis in Athens. This was just one pretty indifferent mosque among thousands," said Helga Seeden, a professor of archaeology at the American University of Beirut. "This is not a disaster like the recent earthquakes in Iran or China or that building collapsing in Dhaka. In terms of heritage, this is pretty much par for the course in Syria. I'm ever so slightly peeved but I think I'll get over it.

"Oh, I just did."

"Fall in crime in England and Wales may be exaggerated"

From the BBC:

A study of crime trends in England and Wales suggests the fall in offences recorded by police may have been exaggerated.

The Office for National Statistics said the "rate of reduction" in recorded crime "may overstate" the decrease.

It found police-recorded offences fell by 93%, compared with 17% by data.

"Families forced to trudge through Somme-like conditions..."

From The Daily Mail:

For many children the daily trudge to school is bad enough, but spare a thought for these youngsters and their parents as they make their way to lessons. Pupils at the newly-opened £4million Chaddesley Corbett primary school in Worcestershire have to wade their way through a mud-filled trench because no pedestrian footpath was built.

Comparing it to the scene at the end of a First World War battle, parents have reacted angrily to the lack of a proper access route to the school. The primary only opened on Monday and following heavy rain the track to the school has churned up making children filthy before they arrive and parents with buggies barely able to get there.

Mother-of-two Kate Foreman, 31, said that taking her three-year-old daughter Isabelle to school for her first day today would be a nightmare.

She said: "It's a mudbath, it's like the Battle Of The Somme. There are people without mechanised transport who have to march to school and they won't be able to get there. You need wellies and waterproofs it's so bad.

"You've got no chance if you've got a pushchair as well - the wheels would get stuck. It's a complete oversight. They spent all that money on the school but didn't think how people could get there. And if that weren't all bad enough, why did the local education authority decide to waste money on laying mines and installing a German machine gun nest on the high ground? Where are our kids going to play football now that the fields are needed for mass graves?"