Hillonearth

He needs taken down a peg or two.

From what he said, they seemed to think an inch or two of snow would herald the breakdown of society. I mean, I get they're not used to it but bear in mind this was on the outskirts of what's meant to be the least rednecky city in the state. Christ knows what it was like in the heavy-duty Trumpy hinterland. I was talking to his missus shortly afterwards as well who said a lot of the neighbourhood women were hitting her up for advice since they seemed to think Scotland was inside the Arctic circle: "No water? Drink juice. No heating? Umm...put on a jumper...f**k knows. I'm from Bishopbriggs, not Greenland..."

Wouldn't surprise me. Guy I know lives in Austin which is probably the most chilled-out city in Texas. That time they had the snow a couple of years back, his neighbours asked him if he wanted to join their posse...they seemed to have decided that the fact that it had got cold meant that they had to organise a local defence force for some reason. They're just so eager to get shooty it's scary...was an eye-opener for him...when he said he didn't own a gun he said it was like he'd just admitted he didn't own a cock.

Of course, the true mark of a brain dead stupid c**t is to let them off in broad daylight. I imagine around 2.20pm today - whoever wins - we'll witness some brain dead stupid cuntery....it seems to be a thing now with fans of both cheeks.

Say what you like about the old nonce - he was quite good live. Ditto Gary Glitter - one of my mates worked for the band Girlschool's record company and sorted me out with a guest list/backstage pass for one time they were ahem...opening for him. Didn't bother using it though.

I have. Rolf Harris back when it was okay to say you liked him ironically. Some girl in work said we should go and see him in the Garage, so there were quite a few of us across the road watching the England 5 Germany 1 game on TV on a pub when somebody saw him walking down Sauchiehall St. We all piled out and got photos - I think I've still got the signed ticket somewhere.

Five and twelve people respectively clearly did.

I was sat next to Richard Attenborough on a shuttle flight from London to Glasgow once....we hit turbulence shortly after takeoff and he said something about it. I countered with: "Well, if this thing goes down I'm sure the news'll all be about you..." which seemed to endear me to to him. Ended up talking to him the rest of the flight - cool old guy actually. On the way off the plane he went into his carry-on bag and gave me a signed copy of a book he'd written. He was doing some sort of media thing up here and had brought some up to give to the people he'd be working with. I've met loads of bands over the years...went to see Kiss over in Edinburgh one time and a girl I knew was given an AAA pass by one of the crew because Gene Simmons had seen her in the crowd and wanted to "meet" her. After the gig she gave me it with the immortal words "Why would I want to go back and meet some creepy old man...?" Went backstage and told the story to the drummer at the time which gave him a laugh...he introduced me to Simmons who I ingratiated myself to by apologising for not being the brunette with big tits he was expecting.

Both EK and Cumbernauld (as well as Irvine, which everybody forgets was also a new town) were built onto existing villages...Cumbernauld village is maybe half an hour's walk from the centre right on the north edges of the town, whereas EK village is more central, sort of east of the rail station and north of the shopping centre. It's a weird setup in EK village though...it's like they've tried to preserve the original features but haven't got it quite right. It just feels a bit artificial and sterile - not unlike when you go through the England exhibit at Epcot and everything feels just that wee bit off.

Absolutely - there seems to be a wistfulness about old established names disappearing, almost like people wish town centres could be artificially kept open as nostalgia theme parks for the once in a blue moon they deign to visit them. Case in point was when Woolworth's closed...everybody seemed to be united in the view that it was "terrible" although they hadn't actually set foot in one for years. There was a kind of folk memory of pick & mix and record bars, whereas the truth was for decades the place had been an incoherent shithole of a shop that seemed to specialise in poor quality homeware that wasn't even that cheap. When you pointed that out it was always a case of "Still terrible though..."

When it comes down to it, I think a lot of people quite like the idea of everybody else continuing to shop the way they always did while they themselves shop online or visit retail parks/hypermarkets, which would allow the old-style shops to remain open as an exercise in nostalgia the once or twice a year they want to use them. It doesn't work when a critical mass of people are thinking the same way though. Record shops are the classic example...the vast majority of people either buy online, stream or download, and all that's left on the UK high street is HMV which itself is a bit of a basket case that has been in administration twice in the last ten years.

Under normal circumstances you'd be more likely to see them on open grassland - and car parks, which they seem to love - but cold weather can bring them into closer contact with humans and they can be surprisingly confiding.. During that long freeze in 2010 or whenever it was, there was one that would turn up on the window ledge of my city centre office block most days and wait for me to feed it...wouldn't let me hand feed it, but flitted a couple of windows down until I'd put the food out. Seemed to like tiny bits of canteen roll & sausage.

Similar - I was a having a pre-Xmas works bevvy which turned into something of a downer when we walked into a pub and saw everybody staring at the newsflash on TV. Got home and discovered the Clint film - it was actually Escape From Alcatraz which wasn't on TV much as opposed to Dirty Harry - had only recorded maybe an hour.

There's definitely far more good than bad - despite the shouty attention-seeking on display at times from a minority, there's also a genuine sense of community and a lot of empathy and concern shown in places like like the depression and living with cancer threads. It's like any neighbourhood...the vast majority of the people who live there are sound. Chances are there'll be a family of bams living somewhere on the street though.

Yeah, aside from those few developments of flats in Tradeston, the Broomielaw and a couple of bits of the Merchant City it's pretty much empty...you need to get to maybe Anderston or Townhead before you find actual residential areas. Given the scarcity of housing it must be worth a punt for a housing association to take over some of those old shops and convert them into flats....probably not in Sauchiehall St though when you consider how flammable that whole street seems to be. Down the line I don't think there's much future for city centres...the 5 days a week in the office thing is never coming back, and people seem to prefer to either shop online or go to retail parks rather than trail round the town. Folk maybe have a vague hankering for the city centre shops to remain open as long as THEY don't have to go there - I'm not sure if there's a similar fetishisation of "the high street" here that they seem to have such a boner for in England....that 1950s Ladybird book vision of a street of cutesy butchers, bakers and candlestick makers....you'll maybe see rows of shops like that in small affluent places like say Giffnock or Bearsden, but I don't think it's ever been the reality of our town centres.

That's exactly what I was meaning in terms of agility - a gradual move out of the city centre proper and closer to where people actually live. Conversely, if you run a sandwich shop that previously had a captive audience of a couple of big city centre businesses or a pub dependent on the post-work office crowd and have been doggedly sitting it out for more than two years waiting for people to come back, you might as well put out the lights now.

The transition to a more hybrid way of working was always likely to happen in the longer term, but the big bang nature of the switch to largely or even primarily WFH definitely caught a lot of businesses on the hop. The larger and more agile ones were more likely to have contigency plans in place, but it's likely a lot of smaller businesses and a fair amount of the city centre hospitality industry are doomed in the longer term. The genie's out the bottle now though, and regardless of how hard the 2019 Re-enactment Society like yer man from Aberdeen rage about getting everything back to "normal" it's not going back in. When the internal combustion engine came on the scene in a big way I'm sure there were a lot of blacksmiths and horse breeders fuming about how it was likely to put them out of business, but longer term that didn't make any difference either.

American subdivision housing has got to be the most sterile environment on the planet...a lot of the areas have comprehensive rulebooks on what you can and can't do with your own property, so it encourages uniformity and conformity....people end up not wanting to rock the boat or fall foul of neighbourhood committees who seem to have a lot more power than anything similar would here. It's almost devoid of wildlife too - I remember staying in the Virginia suburbs of DC for a week or two and thinking there was a good chance of seeing a lot of new species of birds to me around where I'd be. Almost f**k all...the odd American robin and a few mockingbirds and mourning doves were about it, and similar kinds of development seemed to stretch for miles.

They've probably just moved on from ballista or trebuchet Had a very long, boring meeting yesterday...the word the hive mind seem to have a hardon for at the moment is "space"....not in any fun Star Trekky way though....in a sense of working in "the digitisation space" for example as opposed to what normal people would call working in digitisation.

100% this. Folk stayed away in droves from the official one this year, which for some reason was actually held the Friday before last due to one of the bosses having the bright idea that they could maximise attendance by not having it in December so there would be less chance of people saying they couldn't afford it. Over the last few years the official one has had any fun progressively sooked out of by management trying to turn it into a stage-managed opportunity to talk about work, and there now seems to be a general consensus not to donate a minute of our own time or a penny of our own money on it. As an alternative, most folk have just organised informal section ones which promise to be a fucksight more fun.

Aye, they originally planned to make the Angels finger puppets but it just got too confusing and nobody was getting any work done.

Gerry Anderson's got a lot to answer for. And here's one of the pilots of the manned version:

Honestly, f**k being one of the guards in his dacha. You know this conversation was being had;

Unfortunately he was to die destitute after the failure of his scrotum carwash business venture. Forth - or The Forth - is setting the bar low in terms of what constitutes a town though...it's basically just a short main drag with what looks like a few streets from Easterhouse teleported into the middle of a moor.