The Joys of St.Patrick’s Day

The new, revitalised Grassmarket (still not finished yet, despite what anyone says) got it’s first test of coping with mass drunkenness yesterday, as the hordes of pseudo-Irish took to the bevvy.

Huge amounts of noise, swearing, disruption; giant crowds outside the pubs (quite probably beyond their licenced limits) and, within a few minutes of my closing for the day, bright yellow vomit on the shop’s front step.
Wonderful.

Fortunately the council cleaned up most of the vomit before I had to open the following morning, but, just as I was feeling relieved that wouldn’t be my first job of the day, I saw my front door had been attacked with lurid green grafitti.
More wonderful.

At least it scrubbed off, but, really, hordes of drunken, noisy, vomiting vandals is almost exactly what we were told would be reduced by the last 18 months of hassle and noise as the Grassmarket scheme took shape.

Fame at last!

Fame at last!

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

A while back Jennifer Rardin e-mailed me to thank me for mentioning her latest book on the Transreal lists of books received; she also mentioned that she was aiming to set one of her books in Scotland…
I offered to assist with general knowledge and background info, thinking nothing would come of it

Time passes, and then the first request for help arrives… wouild a b&b maybe 20 minutes drive from Inverness have cable or satelite? Hmmm…
Which direction from Inverness, please, before I can answer!
And so it goes, slang, road surfaces, law, types of trees… no idea yet how much was useful beyond general background for her imagining the scenes, but I hope some of it was!

Alien Surfaces

After a fairly hectic last few days, we hung the exhibition on Thursday afternoon, labelled it, straightened it, etc. on Friday and this morning the web site got it’s content added!

It’s a sleeker, slimmer exhibition than last year’s 52 images; this year instead of a full deck, it’s merely a dozen pieces. Mainly photographic prints, but also others including a cyanotype-based illustration of Jack Vance’s Blue World and a large knitted (!) representation of how it’s residents perceive Christopher Priest’s Inverted World !

Our reward was an evening visit to the zoo last night (sponsors only!) with some good news about the tapirs (a very expectant female!) and a very bouncy wolverine! Also ourt first look at the Swamp Wallabies they’ve just acquired and a close-up encounter with Dylan the Armadillo…

Fifteen Years?

I was locking up a bit later than usual the other night when I heard somebody shout, ‘Hiya, Mike, how’re you doin’?’ I looked round and saw a bicycle zooming away around the corner but I recognised who was on it… Someone I haven’t seen for at least twelve to fifteen years! And he was gone before I could say anything.

Maybe I’ll see him again in a few more years and reply!

Prehistoric Creature Day 1

Prehistoric Creature Day 1

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

Apparently every Friday 13th is Prehistoric Creature Day and your dinos, mammoths, etc. should be given a treat or taken out for a meal!

This message board post explains it:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9205430&postcount=75

Of course, there wasn’t room on the photo for all of them…

…so there are more photos on my Flickr page…

Flatland the Movie – UK Premier!

We saw Flatland again last night – on a bigger screen than the tv we saw it on a few weeks ago… definitely preferred the big size, although the inter-titles became a little fuzzy round the edges. The animation stayed sharp, though.

It’s big and bright, with sometimes annoying voices (like in the book, but toned down quite a bit for some characters!). Very trippy at times, and the audience seemed to like it – M had thought the inter-titles a bit patronising, but they mainly got laughs – maybe because of their obviousness!

Only disappointment was that the nachos in the bar afterwards didn’t seem as good as they used to be!

Another Lecture! About Maths!!

Well, not really a lecture, more a casual talk. An event called Cafe Scientifique  takes place most months  in a bar at the Filmhouse (arthouse) cinema and last night’s was presented by a mathy friend of mine called Hannu. Ha was talking about the history and perception of dimensions, from points and planes to multi-dimensional string theory ones. A fair bit of it was related to the book Flatland – a film version of which I’m partly sponsoring when it’s shown at the cinema in a couple of weeks…

It was pretty interesting, pitched at a general audience, so I didn’t feel lost at all, with some good questions afterwards. And a couple of slightly weird ones! If I had been surer of some half-remembered stuff about recent developments, I might have asked one or two as well… kind of wish I had, as it would have given Hannu the chance to refute what I had heard and also talk about some original research he’s doing in the same area…

Quite interesting, but the beer was awfully expensive!

There’s a film we want to see being shown on Sunday, so we’ll be back spending £3.05 a pint for that, I expect!

End of the Old Year…

Bah!

If I hadn’t stuffed up something to do with the camera, I could have posted some relevant pics either here on the shop blog… as it is, they’ve all gone awol between the camera and the computer. Grr. A couple of them were even quite good, imo.

Rhinos hiding behind bushes and so on! Ducks.

Anyway, Happy New Year!

There she blows!

This was fun! It’s an incredibly condensed version of Moby Dick, done as a short graphic novel, but with pop-ups!

The Pequod has thread rigging, the harpoons have little ropes and all sorts of other details are there; the pop-upper learnt his craft from Sabada, the bloke who does the Prehistoric pop-up books of dinos, etc.

Must admit, it doesn’t have quite the depth of scholarship that the original does!

Insanely Twisted Rabbit!

Michel Gagne’s done some really good stuff – the collection Parables is pretty good value, and his site is neat, too… Anyway, I’ve had the latest statuette of one of his Insanely Twisted Rabbits looking out the window for a while now but today he hopped off to a new home! Or, at least was paid for and put aside to be picked up in a few days…

I just read Fade by Chris Wooding and was quite impressed, despite feeling that maybe the lead character would, or maybe should, have just given up the quest and gone back to doing their job. Might have been better in the long run, considering the ending! I’d read another book using the same background but I’m not sure I’d read a direct sequel… have to see, I guess!

But I might take a look again at the omnibus he had out recently of The Braided Path trilogy…