Charles Rennie Mackintosh mural

I wasn’t able to get along for a look at the Charles Rennie Mackintosh mural mentioned some time ago in this story of a little problem with it. The mob in the Briggait blotted their records with this one, and didn’r even ‘man up’ with a statement afterwards. Maybe they wanted the job for their… ‘charity’.

As the chap behind the mural said:

“I can’t believe an arts organisation is objecting to a tribute to one of the world’s greatest ever artists.”

Green light for giant Mackintosh mural after planning row

I don’t know why people can’t get along these days, and every little thing has to be a ‘court case’.

Forget the folk next door, and enjoy the mural, which turned out rather well.

Given other events, is that a tear in the corner of one eye?

Maybe some smoke got in it.

Click for bigger.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh Mural

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Found cat – Bridgeton or Glasgow Green

Spotted this slightly different poster for a ‘Lost’ cat yesterday, hope it is a genuine one.

Not the usual ‘Lost Cat’ poster, but a ‘Found Cat’ this time.

Unfortunately, like many ‘lost cat’ posters, this one has no date, so there’s no way to tell if it’s new, recent, or old – other than by making a guess based on its condition under out lovely Scottish weather. But with the recent dry spell, it could still be weeks old.

Still, it can’t be that old, as this guessing came of age is often harder of the page is properly plastic laminated.

Some are put in plastic sleeves, but as these are really just unsealed plastic bags, they make things worse since they fill with rain water, which can’t then evaporate, and destroy the paper/print even faster as it never dries once it gets wet.

Assuming this is legit, hope the little tuxedo cat gets home.

Found Cat – Bridgeton or Glasgow Green

Another Glasgow fire!

Smokin’

Sauchiehall Street Smoker

Baillieston barber

I should dip into the shutter collection more often.

This from Baillieston.

I shouldn’t really analyse these, but sometimes the temptation is just too much to resist.

Note the apostrophe – even with the correctly formatted example above, the signwriter couldn’t get it right in the mural.

What are we to make of the head on the door shutter?

Neither option is reassuring.

It’s either a guy wearing something that has his head poking through a VERY unusual collar.

Or a disembodied head presented on a pile of leaves.

Baillieston Main Street Robert’s Barbers

Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery – at last!

This is really the image that should have been in last night’s ‘Riverside – at last!‘ post.

It wasn’t, simply because it was too late to carry on past Riverside, and get the pic I really wanted.

So, although it doesn’t make a great difference, I couldn’t have said this was the first day I could completed a trip that began on 05 June.

The special Mackintosh event is still running – I never expected to see that.

Just for fun, since I’m slowly mastering perspective correction, I thought I’d see how well I could correct a façade view of Kelvingrove’s entrance. It’s so high to the tips of the two spires that it’s almost guaranteed that even with a decently wide lens, you’ll still have to tip the camera back, even just slightly, to get it all in, and that brings the lovely converging verticals.

You also have to remember to make ‘best effort’ to maintain left/right symmetry/alignment.

I may be commenting on my own effort, but overall, even I’m impressed by how this one turned out. Ignore the black bit at bottom right – I didn’t claim it was perfect.

On the other hand, I am slowly beating my OCD into submission, and no longer wait for hours until there are no bodies in the pic!

Boy, does this save time.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery And Museum

Media is so disappointing nowadays

I remember the ‘Good Old Days’ – days when you could see police/ambulance congregating in a street, get home, look at the news, and find out what you’d been lucky to miss by not being there a few minutes earlier.

Now that we live in the days of supposedly ‘instant news’ I seem to find that this no longer works, and I have to go dig for such stuff, if it ever even gets mentioned.

I came home last night, expecting to see something online about some incident in Bridgeton that had closed off a street with two police cars, and two ambulances in conference between them, and, even today, the local female population leaning out of their windows saying meaningful things to one another (but not able to be heard at street level).

About the only useful thing I learned from this incident is how busy this apparently quiet street actually as, as an endless stream of cars tried to get along it, but had to back out. It was surprising to see how fast a reasonable backlog built up.

But mention online in media? Nope.

Bridgeton Cordon Police Ambulance

Stop lookin’ at mah damn butt hoomin!

Regulars will know my problem with most cats around here, most of them don’t hang around until you get near them, or stay still long enough for anything more than a pic of their butt as they wander off.

This guy looked tough enough to fend for himself, and stopped (or slowed down) long enough to turn a little and throw a warning glance behind as I was about to take my usual ‘catbutt’ pic.

Semi Catbutt

I haven’t been around the streets much (at all) during the recent warm spell, so don’t know if the cats came out.

I saw another couple before this one, but they managed to teleport during the few seconds needed to get to the camera.

Quantum entanglement has NOTHING on what the cats around here can do!

Clearly, they have all been tutored by Schrödinger’s cat.

Schrödinger Dead And Alive

The lost lampposts of Muirhead Road

I’ve had some pics of the realignment of Muirhead Road (at the back of Baillieston) made to accommodate all the new houses being built there ever since the zoo was closed and things like were swept away to clear the land.

It used to be a nice walk along there. There was even what appeared to be a small area of managed forest planted there, and looked as if it was intended to restore or manage trees in the area.

Somehow, even that was razed, destroying all the relatively new trees that had been growing there, together with the much older originals which had surrounded the fenced off and managed area.

I wonder if that was even legal?

To access the new houses built on the stolen sorry ‘reclaimed’ land, new roads had to be laid, and the old Muirhead Road was realigned and given a roundabout to join up with them.

One of the odd things that happened was the remodelling of the area which the old road had been on, converting it from tarmac to grass.

While this was completed and hid the route of the old road under new ‘greenness’, nobody bothered to remove the old lampposts which lit that original road.

The still stand there to this day, but now look as if they were planted in a field since the road they lit is no more.

I wasn’t happy with the pics I took, it’s just not possible to get high enough to show them, but this pic is not so bad.

You can see the new road and lighting to the left and centre of the pic, but if you look to the right you’ll see one of the abandoned lampposts. No longer lit, so not likely to act like the “wrecker’s lights” of old, and lure drivers into the field. Wreckers would plant false lights on clifftops to confuse sailing ships, taking the place of signal lights in the area, and intended to make the ships founder on rocks, after which they could steal the cargo as it washed ashore.

I wonder if they’ll ever remover them?

I don’t go there very often. Once an interesting walk on a Sunday morning, the road is just another bland, uninteresting, and featureless housing estate now.

Apart from these lampposts of course.

Click on the pic for a bigger version.

Baillieston Muirhead Road Realignment Lost Lamppost

Today is Space Exploration Day

20 July is Space Exploration Day.

Although obviously inspired by events taking place on the Moon on this date, the day is not intended to be just about that day, but is intended to pay homage to the incredible achievements of the past and create enthusiasm for the benefits of space exploration efforts to come in the future.

It has its own web site where more details can be found.

Space Exploration Day

It’s not something I might have bothered about a few years ago, until it became apparent that now that we are smart enough to start looking for asteroids that could wipe us out, we really do have to look for solutions to that problem, starting now.

The answer won’t be easy or fast, but the arrival of one those asteroids probably will be.

And then, it will be too late to say something like “Yep, we better start looking for an answer first thing tomorrow morning”.

Space Exploration Day

Today is Moon Day

20 July is Moon Day.

It’s fairly obvious how this came to be, even though the events of that day, when the first footprints were laid and left on the Moon, are long-lost in the past, were the Harbinger’s of Doom for the future of such projects.

While that first Moon landing may have captured the public’s interest, the public is a fickle audience, and when subsequent lunar explorations were apparently just repeat performances, that interest soon waned, plans were shelved, and missions cancelled.

Apollo 17 was the last, taking place in December 1972 – not really all that long after Apollo 11, 1969.

Perhaps the saddest legacy of the Moon landings are the many people prepared to spend hundreds of hours fabricating ‘evidence’ to prove they never happened, and that the Earth is, of course, flat.

Moon Landings

Riverside – at last!

No explanation behind this one, merely a pic I had to take to confirm arrival at Riverside last night (18 July for reference).

Why (take the pic)?

Let’s just say I started the trip on 05 June, but never arrived (with a following wind, I might have managed to throw a stone at the place).

And this was the first day I was able to complete the trip.

Riverside

European Championships 2018?

Apparently ANOTHER excuse for people who want to beg for handouts (aka sponsorship) to pay for them to play – while the good folk of Glasgow are further inconvenienced like we were during the dopey 2014 Commonwealth Games nonsense.

I can’t find any background – apparently this is the inaugural event for this sporting fiasco – as I’d like to know who pays!

In 2014, Glasgow had to find over £300 million to pay for the ‘privilege’ of hosting the Commonwealth Games – those lucky spongers behind it don’t have to pay the host for all the preparations, building, staffing, policing, etc, and just turn up and have all the venues and accommodation handed to them.

I really wish I hadn’t seen that sign nailed on front of Riverside.

At least I don’t seem to have heard anybody trying to tell me Glaswegian will benefit as this sort of event makes people take up sports, exercise, and get healthy.

That’s a lie – look at the record of similar events (and claims) around the world. Especially the Olympics – which could possibly be one of the greatest examples of corruption around. Search for abandoned venues, places now lying abandoned and derelict after being claimed ‘essential’. Those behind them like to tell you otherwise, but the figures recorded years later dispel the exercise myth.