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Scottish Picks: August 2000

Welcome to Scottish Picks, handpicked by our Scottish web connoisseur. If you have a
suggestion for a cool site you'd like to see included in a future edition, why not send us an email?

August means one inescapable thing, no make that two: football and festivals.

Football first: the Scottish Premier League just kicked off. If you are a footie buff then the recipe for the revamped SPL site will be a familiar one. Naturally, you can find latest match reports, news and a heap of statistics. The site is customisable - so you can set it up so your team news appears first when you revisit, and if you are looking for a completely partisan slant on fixtures, finding the official club site is easy - all the SPL club sites appear across the top of the page. If you have a faster connection, then you might also want to dip into the video library of 101 top SPL goals, or catch live audio commentary for one of the games online.

You can also catch near-live footage from that other mega event this month, the Edinburgh Festival at a new web site, Festivalcast.net. Thousands of performers have set up camp in Edinburgh for this month-long extravaganza of the arts. Everything from tightrope walking to opera singing, finger puppets to film will be showcasing in what is in fact a conglomerate of several different festivals. Festivalcast.net will be posting footage from the 6th August onwards for the various festivals, an hour after filming a performance. If you are the forgetful type, they are also offering a festival diary to help you remember what shows you are planning to go to.

Edinburgh may be one of the best-looking cities in Europe, but all its wynds, closes, and circuses can play havoc with one's sense of direction. It might help to view it from the air first at Earthetc.com. The actual site is not pretty at first glance, but it does one thing well: once you have installed the small plug-in, it allows you to roam large maps and photographs, in this case of Edinburgh. You can zoom in to the point where you can actually read the words "Parking" on the road. The site also carries a map of the Old Course at the home of golf, St Andrews, although you have to look hard for the toon's infamous streakers.

If none of those picks excite you, well, just go and drown yourself in a mountain of ice-cream. Mackies, luxury ice-cream makers, are giving away a prize of a year's supply of the cold stuff as part of one of their online competitions. The design is pretty cool too (sorry, couldn't resist the pun) and there are a few icy recipes to whet the appetite.

Finally, for an unconventional take on Scotland's national instrument take a visit to Bagpipes go to the Movies. This site, which has been around for a while now, is the definitive guide to pipes on film. The site is effectively one huge web page, so wait a few seconds for it to load, then you'll find more piping trivia than you can shake a chanter at: like the episode in which ex-Avenger Diana Rigg was filmed playing toy bagpipes, and the make of the bagpipes that appeared in Dead Poets' Society. One for serious piping anoraks.

Sites Featured in Scottish Picks:

Scottish Premier League - fitba latest.
Festivalcast.net - festival video streams.
Earthetc - aerial photography of Edinburgh.
Mackies - mmm, ice cream.
Bagpipes go to the Movies - pipespotting.

Previous Scottish Picks of the Month:

[ July 00 | June 00 | May 00 | April 00 ]