We're back in the top flight and the first month was...interesting. There were fifteen goals in our league games, so here's fifteen things (in no particular order) worth remembering about August.
01. The Rangers Retail deal was even shadier than we had imagined (and that's saying something).
02. Police Scotland are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to excuse their behaviour, including but not limited to suggesting that fans might die if the police do their job properly. Hampden is now demonstrably an unsafe venue for major football matches.
03. The Scottish Football Association seem to value advertising hoardings more highly than the safety of players and officials at their most high profile showcase game.
04. World Soccer is not a credible source of info, commentary or analysis for Scottish football and should be ashamed of allowing Phil Gordon the chance to regurgitate some half-cut belches and Sevco burps from conversations over the past five years and present them as a season preview(!).
05. There was a noticeable shift in sections of the media towards positioning Celtic as 'Scotland's team' when it comes to all discussion of the Champions League; applying not only to suspiciously co-ordinated appeals to support them before the Hapoel Brewery game but evident also in many pieces on the future revamp of the tournament. And as for the PR afforded to and the excuses offered for the fans after their EIGHTH UEFA charge in five years? Sorry, but we're not falling for this.
06. Josephus may still be Josephus off the park but on the field he is, so far, more like Methuselah. But the sheer brutality of the challenges on him are going to lead to some serious problems. As of yet the condemnation regarding this level of premeditated thuggery sounds awfully like John Cage's 4'33".
07. The people who are experts on - and sexually aroused by - the music of the Beatles still seem unable or unwilling to admit to any knowledge of the Rolling Stones' songbook. Furthermore, but at a lower, common garden Yahoo level, those brave defenders of the faith so taken with giving the OBFA a severe malky seem to have forgotten their principles when it suits them more to turn into armchair Whitehouse grasses.
08. Alan Bissett will never get over 2014. And will never tire of using stereotypes about Rangers fans to make money.
09. Athens is closer to the Midlands than Glasgow, and medicals are closer to witchcraft than an examination.
10. Sir Kenneth Miller continues to make people on Twitter look like idiots, while continuing to prove that scoring goals causes temporary amnesia.
11. In a documentary series obsessed with - and constructed to represent - the social impact on and of Scottish football from the 1980s onwards, BBC Scotland could find no time (not a single mention) for the most disgusting display(s) of vile, raw racism towards a player our game has ever witnessed. Even during the Edinburgh festival period the performance art of the banana was deemed surplus to requirements.
12. Despite being three or four short of our ideal team (or at least in a position where injuries prevent our choices being much more interesting) a number of our fans have become a little carried away with the sky is falling in chat. That said, the problems so evident last term are as yet no better and many of the positive aspects that made last season so pleasurable have been nullified, in some cases deliberately, by personnel and formation decisions taken by the manager.
13. The BTTS coupon for our league matches was the closest thing to pritinting money since being allowed to bet on the under/over for Jim Spence's Twitter bio changes.
14. The Daily Record, under its present editor, should be shunned by fans and (crucially) club alike for its role in lying about the fans and compounding that deliberate smear by defending the lies and sectarian agenda of its now discredited reporter Mrs. Hamilton. No ifs, no buts: what the Record did was unforgiveable, and there has been no apology forthcoming.
15. We've got some fans' group elections coming up. Oh, fuck that.