A place to park those random thoughts, stolen images, hidden conversations and incoherent babble from beyond the wall of sleep. Odd bits of music and so-called worldly wisdom may creep in from time to time. Don't expect too much and you won't feel let down.
Better late than never I discover fast food Asian style at itsu. The strap line "Eat Beautiful" is aiming maybe too high as it's not quite what the entire experience is about. It's a high street food machine. Having said that I've not explored the whole menu and probably never will. What I did try was fine, touch screen ordered, served up hot and quickly and it looked and tasted good. Reasonably priced? Maybe not too bad for a quick meal served up in the middle of a rainy Edinburgh.
Only a few hundred feet up above the rolling Angus fields but it still feels like being on the roof of the world. A biting wind coming in from the North Sea like some icy invader doesn't help either. It's early April but never underestimate the Scottish weather conditions even at a modest altitude. It's an easy wee walk up here but the views are great and the sense of a ghostly history is almost overpowering. People chose to live in this space over 2000 years ago and made an enormous effort to make the hill top safe and habitable. Times were tough ...
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Better late than never: Went to see Dune II in the Bo'ness Hippodrome last night. I ate quite a lot of sweets there too. No spoons of actual blue eyed Spice were available to try in the foyer unfortunately, just candy and coffee. The film was noisy, disturbing and impressive. A spectacle. The threat of too much of an earth based and scripted allegory hangs in the air like a dangling sword. Technically advanced galactic warlords unable to detect and find people hiding a few inches under the sand. Religious overtones. Bloody and strange at times, but that's the Dune universe. Probably not everybody's cup of banana and antelope tea though.
Dune II, a roaring success with all the right, pretty and successful people making it into the cast: It's already made well over $500m million so everything is OK and the entertainment industry will survive at least until next year. I'll not see it again though, I seldom watch a film twice even if I really like it. Just seems like quite a difficult thing to do. The first cut, first punch etc. I know that not everyone is like this. My time is precious but I still waste it.
Nikola Tesla must look down in bafflement at the abuse and associations his good name gets now that it's risen to become a badge of honour, tech marketing and social division all across the world. Even David Bowie added his star to the Tesla myth. Tesla's resurrection towards some synthesis into pop culture and branded immortality is complete, (actually this applies to both Tesla and Bowie). Nicely wrapped up in a cult of redemption and ongoing significance long after death grows, and you can take a long drive in it.
So Tesla ownership is now much more affordable should you crave to become part of such a divisive and crazy but aspirational thing: £6.99 for four "Future" Gold AA Tesla batteries. I'm done.
*I know, nothing new here really.
Strolling along the footpath of the Union Canal today, low sun and vanilla drizzle. Chilly indeed. The canal is named after the infamous union of West West Lothian and East West Lothian that took place (on this day) in 1812ish, so unreliable versions of history tell us. Prior to that it was simply known as Onion Canal because of the numerous onion plantations in the area. For a long while West Lothian was the home of serious onion smuggling across this part of northern Europe until the Calvinists poisoned the soil. The other notorious and illegal union of clowns, chumps and parliaments (1707) has of course nothing to do with the name Union here.
Many strong willed, brave and reckless tattooed people have chosen to live upon these turbulent waters in narrow boats and canoes. These boat people are sometimes known as "Floaters" as in the sci-fi genre of beach combing. Some venture ashore at times to plant great field fulls of crops such as iceberg-blue-lettuce, sweet Chinese tobacco and liquorice root. While living in makeshift yurts along the canal banks these "Floaters" harvest their crops, steal nearby donkeys, burn damp logs and generally mess with the heads of local old people. They are story tellers and mystics. Their vegetative goods are then sold on at nearby markets, mostly to American tourists eagerly searching for recreational drugs and their family roots in what they term their "homeland" or "old country".
The canal winds it's way from Fountainbridge in the charming district of Edinburghshire to somewhere out there beyond the shape of Falkirk. No one I know has ever gone that far into the dark west and lived to tell the tale. The outline of Scotland and it's many warring counties and tribes has never been fully understood or recognized. Viewed from space it remains a vague and fuzzy enigma. Overall the Romans, who actually built the Onion Canal as a watery wall, seem to have done the best job of providing a ruling regime that at least worked for a time in a few regions. They are long gone now but fondly remembered in our many fish and chip and pizza establishments.
You'll always know us by a mix of our friendly but blank demeanor, the positively negative body language and the overuse of a poetic and over amplified drawl. There's trouble in using too many words too, apart from when swearing. Oh bother! We'll be badly dressed mostly, like somebody who's just come in from a day of picking potatoes in drizzle. History tells us that it'll all be fine once the oppression and the rain stops; then everything will be like the weather ... fine. Nothing new to see here.
Visited god's own country, the town of the green oak where quite a lot of faded engineering glory and heavy metal is on display. I'm there in order to witness and celebrate a narrow win for Dunfermline Athletic. Three valuable points as the struggle continues. A day of outandaboutery, sunshine, showers and a reasonably priced Lorne sausage roll at the game. Never actually seen the Pars beaten in Greenock.
In the interests of scientific experimentation I asked Alexa and some random AI bot that I met in a pub to "fill my head with rock". It was of course too vague an instruction and so fell upon deaf mechanical ears. My requests all just silently clattered into the great imaginary recycle bin in the sky. My head was not filled with rock or indeed any kind of music or any actual buried minerals or stones. I just can't seem to get through to these things and their adopted devices, it's as if I'm the one who isn't real. And that ladies and gentlemen may just be closer to the truth than any of us dare to imagine.
A once mandatory listening experience: Too old now that it hardly matters and with so many peculiar (and dead) people playing on it. Perhaps the AI culture feeders were doing me a favour or adhering to some censorship instruction from on high, but this was what I had in mind:
What's the point of the internet if you can't just moan about it? Ho hum.
On a busy morning there's nothing better than a nice cup of egg or two to slow down your highly active metabolic and thought processes. Take the stress out of the everyday ups and the polar opposite of everyday ups. Quite soon you will be your old laconic, chilled, dry mouthed but energized self again. Life is indeed a bowl of cherry flavoured yogurt that contains absolutely no real cherries but on the bright side, no stones either. You must seek the pathway of ... something vaguely reasonable or wholesome.
Failure to self medicate and so calm your unnatural inclinations can increase your chances of well-being related pompous grandiosity and arrogant long-termism and may even result in extreme cases of you becoming a high risk passenger aboard this sort of thing 🡇 ... the temperature on Mars sits at around -60C. A rather extreme alternative to living with global warming really, maybe just wake up and fix this planet first?
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Always a sucker for a good slab of spam so the pithy and attention grabbing title "Attention Visitor of Boots" had me right away. It's so hard to resist clicking further into such a well worded invitation and thereby gain access to world of digital and financial pain but somehow I avoided doing so. I chose to screen shot it and then delete it but what a promise ... just complete a simple survey involving only your bank account details and you shall receive what looks like a 1 litre bottle of j'adore. I presume that this isn't quaffable alcohol but something suitably exotic that you might splash all over your person after a hot or even mid temperature shower. What a deal! Truly hard to resist and of course the girl looks really pretty, happy and honest ... OK then, just take all of my personal info and send me the fancy red box.
Clarke Ladle, Emily Frankfurter and Dolby Enterprise.
Obscurity Knocks: They* were never really troubled by movie success or the dangers of over exposure and those airily intoxicating wafts of flickering fame. The mini boom in *Film Noir as a genre in the 90s was just that and always much more maximum mini than any kind of earth shattering boom. Still for a brief period of time there was some excitement generated by these folks but that quietly died away when something else more commercially successful and better written came along. So here are some of the potential great, forgotten would be stars of a valiant but failed Noir experiment. Do you remember any of them? Where are they all now?
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Another day spent out and about in the oblique world of Film Noir, taking the occasional picture of course. There's a cast of characters here but they don't really mean much to me. Some are badly written, some badly imagined. You can never tell. Everyone has a story. Everybody wants to get somewhere, maybe even out of this town. They all have weaknesses that will become obvious. Cigarettes and coffee. Desire, passion and money. The good old days. Personal clouds hang overhead. It's a spectacle of dank atmosphere. Tight shoes, neckties and rain. Forever rain.
Hear them whisper their dark and hungry motives out loud in the soundtrack's crackle. All set up to try to do bad things, things that they think will end well for them but they'll soon sleep with those silver fishes. They are as unreal as their monochrome images. Spectres and ghosts breathing, trying to sound sincere as they mouth their fictional lines at the counter in the joint. The audience long to dwell and become lost in this dramatic world, a world before smart phones and distractions.
Real names are for losers and only ever mentioned in the final credits, those blurred up things that nobody bothers to read. The state of the greasy hairdos is no one's business either and the music is as intense as a weighted blanket thrown from a third floor window. It was a cheap and grim production but I'd go again. I'm devoted. Silently we all leave the cinema and embrace the rain.
