When you forget your job was to drain the swamp

Some things are a real shame.

Like most people who have seen Elon Musk lose whatever moral compass he may have had, and align with the narcissistic orange fascist Hitler loving would be murderous dictator (I could go on, but to what end) Donald J Trump, I left Twitter some time ago – and will NOT refer to it as ‘X’, but will fall back to Xitter (and xits), after being told the Chinese pronunciation of ‘X’ is similar to ‘SH’, which seems to make the name just about right.

I’d wanted to get on to Blue Sky, but it was invitation only at that time, and I was irritated as the one of the few channels I wanted to follow had moved there much sooner, and it was ages before I got my invite, and got back to seeing their content.

This had become essential as they had completely moved away from Xitter.

So, there was a break of almost a few months before I got back to them.

Sad to say, they’d changed.

Not the content, that was, and still is great.

The problem comes from their attitude to trolls and haters.

While they’re generally best ignored, that’s NOT what this owner had chosen to do.

Instead, they argue with every troll, post rebuttals and disclaimers, and generally fuel them.

Eventually, they do block them, but then carry on debating theme with people who follow.

Apart from being tiresome for someone who just wants to follow the theme of their pics (I won’t name the source, but say only that their subject material is old pics), it’s sad to see someone descend into such a dark place, and almost pick a fight with everyone who express a view they don’t like.

I even fell foul (once) when I posted a funny pic that they claimed reinforced a derogatory stereotype, and wasn’t welcome.

I almost caught myself responding, but decided not to.

As I noted in opening, it’s a real shame.

The content is great, but the endless side issues are not.

It reminded me of the old ‘Forgetting the idea was to drain the swamp while you’re busy fighting the alligators’ joke.

Sadly, I couldn’t find it online, although I used to see cartoons illustrating it all over the place.

So, AI to the rescue again!

One of life’s little irritations – 360° views (need a viewer)

I normally just use my panoramic software for wider than normal views, usually when I can’t stand far enough back for some reason, so can’t fit the whole view into a single shot. At other times, the scene may just be too wide for a single shot, no matter how far back I can get.

However, it also allows me to take full 360° view, which I can rotate and view, and select what part I want to use.

Unfortunately, I can’t load or display that in WordPress. All it offers is images.

So, you’ll have to make do with this flat version of my 360° view of the central area created on the site of the former Western Infirmary.

In theory, I should be able to embed this, but even after following the instructions, WordPress just strip out all the embedded code as soon as I hit the ‘Publish’ button, just leaving the URL below.

If you follow that, you should end up at the flat panorama.

https://panoraven.com/en/embed/iQPWziEhEE

That seems to be the best I can do. I’ve more or less given up trying to embed anything that not WordPress’ own option.

Whatever I try, and I’ve tried more than once, WordPress just strips out all the HTML that should place the view inline.

The little known tale of the Battle of Harvies Dyke

This wasn’t a planned item, but seemed worth including after I grabbed a shot of the painting concerned while collecting ‘Last Chance’ goodies in the People’s Palace before it closed for yet another refurbishment.

This painting’s not on general view with the rest of the exhibits, but is up in the building’s viewpoint, overlooking Glasgow Green.

I’m not sure if many/any visitors know it’s there. I’ve always been the sole visitor, and have never met anyone arriving or leaving.

It wasn’t even signed some years ago, and I only knew about it because it was mentioned in an article about the building. I used to slip through the doors while no one was looking, just in case the tale was fantasy. It wasn’t, and a few years ago some proper ‘Viewpoint’ signs appeared.

It is a shame to miss the view, even if just for a quick glance, as it does overlook the whole area towards the west.

Harvies Dyke

(Apologies in advance – you will see spellings of ‘Harvie’ and ‘Harvey’ in the various accounts of this affair, so I’m afraid I have no idea which is correct.)

For a full account of the Harvies Dyke affair, and the little battle that took place over it, you could do worse than read the following account, which begins:

Thomas “Lang Tam” Harvey was a whisky distiller who lived at Westthorn on the outskirts of Parkhead. His grounds went down the bank of the Clyde and, in order to protect his privacy from people walking on the popular Clydeside footpath, he built walls at either end of his property to close off a one mile section to the public. In 1822 an angry mob principally composed of weavers and other operatives from Bridgeton and Parkhead, armed with piekaxes and crow-bars, laid siege to the obnoxious barrier tore down one wall and were pulling down the other when the Enniskillen Dragoons arrived to quell the disturbance.

HARVIES DYKE

Suffice to say that despite repeated confrontations, Harvey lost!

This painting and its associated are mounted in the viewing area, which is how I came to learn of Harvey, his dyke, and the confrontations.

Excuse the reflection, unavoidable thanks to the glass in the frame, the large glazed area, and white ironwork on the stairs.

Monument

The mention of a monument marking the spot “to this day” was really what caught my eye.

When I saw that, I immediately, and wrongly, thought of Allan’s Pen, but that is far from this place, almost nearing the city centre.

However, once I had tracked down the true location, and seen where it lay on old OS maps, realised this was the path leading down from London Road, past Westhorn (allotments) and down to the banks of the River Clyde.

It’s also a place I’ve passed through many times, both on foot and on bike, and can’t say I ever saw anything that looked like a monument, not even a small one.

Sadly, none of the online reference, or past reference photos, of the area and path show, or even refer to any monuments.

So, if there is anything there, I don’t even have a description to give me any idea of what to look for.

Perhaps it’s been lost/vandalised over the years, and there’s nothing left now.

I don’t know.

Does anybody know?

Handy comments area below if you do.

I think the washing machine saga has now become the jinxed washing machine repair

The saga of my washing machine sequencer repair is still underway, but seems to have become the tale of the jinxed washing machine repair instead, as I seem to encounter some new issue every time I think I’m ready to put things back together.

I’ve already described the problems caused by not dismantling the thing in the correct order, or by the crazy way the wires were all tangled during manufacture, or the fact that this thing was obviously NEVER intended to be serviced.

Now that I’m close to final reassembly, this has joined the set of items which leave me wondering how on earth they were even assembled in the factory, as they seem to need four, or more, hands to hold the bits, and then fit other parts into place,

Returning to the jinxing, I just spent two days trying to find the outer steel case of the sequencer, which apparently vanished from the bench. This was eventually found behind a box which had been moved to clear bench space for some welding prep.

Yesterday, I knocked a square plastic push-button cap from the bench onto a wooden floor. If you’ve never heard of old plastic becoming brittle, I can tell you this is a FACT! I couldn’t believe it when I picked up this button and found it had broken into two parts, just from a 1 metre drop onto wood, and will now need to be glued back together. Not a critical part, but very irritating.

Now that I have all the parts back together, and finally worked out the order in which they have to be reassembled (insert a part out of sequence and later parts won’t fit), I have to decide on the final fixing method.

This will probably be welding, of the heavy metal outer casing. The original was secured by deforming sections of the casing edges, creating a sort of linear rivet. However, this could not be undone as the metal is nearly 1 mm thick steel. No tools I have would even move the deformed metal clear of the slots it had been forced into, presumably using an air or hydraulic forming tool. Eventually, I had to grind out these tabs – so they are gone. Now, I need to be creative.

Storm reveals Kelvin Hall’s ‘secret’ trapdoor

While holding on to the bus stop across from the Kelvin Hall, during the crazy high winds visited on Glasgow by Storm Kathleen, I noticed a formerly unknown trapdoor on one of the Kelvin Hall’s towers was enjoying some unexpected freedom.

Usually applied to a church, but also public buildings when I checked the definition, it seems I should be referring to this as a steeple.

At least I feel safer not referring to spires, since they are pointy things, and these are fairly blunt, and topped by globes.

I had no idea this sort of access was available to these steeples, but I suppose it’s no great surprise. They wouldn’t be solid, as that would make then REALLY heavy, rather than just HEAVY, and they do only have support at their corners.

It does leave one wondering, if there is internal access all the way to the top, and if a head could be popped up into the space below the globe supports, and give a view of the surroundings.

Savoy Park Hotel, Burns Tam o’ Shanter character gate pillars

Sited on Ayr’s Racecourse Road are many large villas, once home to some of the wealthiest Scots of the day, who made their fortunes, then looked for a nice place to stay.

If you have a moment and are walking past them, probably better done on the green towards the sea, where it can be fun counting the chimneys.

Seriously, that number indicates the number of fireplaces within the building, and that leads to the number of staff the owner would have had to employ to keep all those fires going when it got cold. They were hardly going to run around the place and tend all those fireplaces themselves, were they?

And that gives a hint at how much cash they had to splash.

One of those villas is now the Savoy Park Hotel, previously known as the Red House.

My interest in this particular one is not the building, but its gate pillars.

For some reason, they carry the heads of Tam o’ Shanter and his friend, Souter Johnny -made famous in Burns’ epic poem of the same name.

Although I’ve seen references to the heads and gate pillars in listings referring to the building, so far, none of these have included a reason for their presence. They don’t even seem to give a period, so I can’t tell if they are original, or if someone just stuck them as a modern day marketing scam, to pull in the tourists.

The house and its entrance, complete with decorated gate pillars.

I didn’t notice this at first, but the paint on the pillars seems to have aged/weathered slightly differently, so they are not identical.

I only noticed this when processing the individual pics of the carvings, which also show significant differences in their ageing – although I suspect that may more understandable if they were carved from different pieces of stone, and not a common block which was split between them.

I’ve balanced the two, and placed them side by side, Souter Johnny on the left, Tam o’ Shanter on the right, as per their respective pillars.

Disclaimer

If you have ever tried to find a definitive spelling for Tam o’ Shanter, you probably came away as disappointed as me when I tried.

There are various variation and combination using upper and lower case letter ‘O’, and insertion of one, or more, apostrophes around it, and even variation on the spacing between the letters.

My hunt ranged from various Burns’ societies, and both national and local museums which tell the tale.

None seemed to be n agreement, or authoritative, while some varied the combination within their articles.

So, I picked the one that satisfied what I think to be the correct criteria, and stuck with it (I hope, I was getting confused).

I even tried to find a scan of the original manuscript.

I almost found one on a national museum website, but the (small) scanned section shown, even if original, failed to include the hero’s name.

The washing machine saga – good news spawns bad

I (foolishly, of course) thought I’d turned a corner after solving the problems noted last time, in Washing machine saga – not gone away, just got even slower

I managed to reassemble the sequencer switch block that had been separated from one of its contacts (left behind as they had welded it to the next during assembly), and a sprung contact prevented it from going back where it belonged. Learning from lock picking, I was able to make up some tools that fitted through holes, and was able to manipulate the spring to get it out of the way, and let that contact slide back into the space where it belonged.

Things seems to be going well, so I should have known better.

After making good the busbars I’d cut (for disassembly), as I reassembled the two contact blocks I discovered why the old Bakelite type material of the blocks smelt SO burnt – IT WAS!

As I’d had to do some reassembly under a magnifier, I spotted some discoloured areas. These were between terminals and, when I tried to clean this, found it was actually burnt material as the smell increased when I scraped the area.

It became obvious there had been leakage, or maybe even arcing across this surface between the terminals, although there was no obvious reason. The affected areas are on the underside, and nowhere near any water. The material may have been faulty, and slightly conductive, or condensation may have formed.

So, having taken two switch blocks off already, I was obliged to dismantle the next two, even though they were working fine – recall the first two had to come out to free some frozen cams.

While these had no bus bars or ‘hidden’ wires to be cut to free them, there was a major issue as many of the terminals had wires connected, and these ALL had to come off.

As noted back at the start, the wiring is a nightmare. Instead of being wired neatly, with slack or play to allow maintenance, the factory seems to have deliberately tangled the individual wires around one another, meaning that they are tightly and unnecessarily wound around one another, making them into a rat’s nest, and impossible to pull the terminals off cleanly.

Instead of being able to pull them in some sort of order, noting colours/location as you go, wires have to be pulled on the basis that they can be accessed, although even that effort can be thwarted as the terminal being pulled get stuck, as its very removal caused another wire to tighten on it, and you have to stop and find out why, and start pulling THAT terminal off instead.

Stupid and unnecessary.

I have to confess I’m sure this constant stopping and starting, and having to move to a second, or even third terminal/wire, to remove it and release the one I started on, has meant I have NOT made an accurate record.

I’m sure I have got things mixed up after having to juggle so many partly removed connections before getting the one I started on removed.

While this is probably not an electrical issue (I’m sure the wires are in the right order on each block, so are connected to the right kind of switching), I’m not so sure that they are on the right block – so that means the wrong item may be turned on or off at a given time. Guess we’ll see.

Now, I’m REALLY ticked off that the wiring was such a tangle that it was impossible to see them clearly when I tried taking a pic. The tangled mess from the factory meant that it was impossible to see under it, to see which terminal a wire finally arrived at.

I should have come up with some alternative – but didn’t realise I REALLY needed this until it was too late.

And this BEFORE I’ve even got the terminal blocks off the sequencer, so I can work on those burnt areas!

Oh well, there is ONE good thing about this.

I’ve learned some methods I’ve NEVER needed before, even on complex repairs, that are essential for some simple repairs.

Pity I’ll probably never have to use them (I hope).

Chance find – new shutter mural

With the alarming rise and coverage of moronic ‘Word Graffiti‘ I’ve watched arrive in the south and west of Glasgow recently, especially in anything that looks like an unoccupied shop (and not always necessarily unoccupied, such is the disrespect of the morons involved in some cases), it was a nice surprise to depart from my usual ‘beaten track’, and trip over a mural with a cat in it, which might be the only reason this particular one survived.

Despite its quality, I never caught a nearby one on similar premises, and that’s now lying derelict (maybe I should go back now).

Hope you can spot the black cat 🙂

Weird image too – normally, when I correct geometry/perspective to ‘square’ an oblique view, the proportions are pretty close, but this one wanted to be too narrow for some reason. I didn’t investigate, and just fixed a skew it had caught.

Classic cars and Glasgow tenements – can they live together?

Amazing as it may seem, my memory actually goes back far enough to remember the days we lived in a tenement AND had a car. But I won’t claim to be able to give any details.

However, as nice as a tenement flat can be, it’s not a detached property with a garden and garage, so no mater what kind of car you have, it’s going to be living on the street. For this post, I’ll ignore the possibility of after market garages that were built nearby. Mews or pends were another option, in some areas.

Having been a lifelong car nut of one type or another, I don’t know how I would have coped, or been able to amass four rusting heaps at the side of my house today.

I suppose I would have been upsetting everyone around me, and ended up with a collection like this singleton I chanced across in Partickhill.

For 33 years old, what can be seen looks in pretty good condition – but that is a 20-foot comment.

I had hands on a saloon of the period, also a straight six (supposedly the smart choice, the others were problematic), and have to say it was very nice, and great for long distances.

I once got a lift in an XJS then, in the back – let’s say the describing that as a +2 space could h have cost Jaguar a lot of money, had it been challenged in court. I thought the back of a Porsche was possibly a little bit small – compared to the Jag, it was a cavernous warehouse!

I’d have liked to have one for a while, since I managed to maintain all my cars myself, so the various engine options didn’t worry me. But there’s a limit to how many you can have, not actually drive, but still have to pay all the associated cost. So, never happened.

Just relax

While Ayr may have its ever-changing ‘Happy Windows‘, Glasgow has a different take.

I have to be honest and say the view from the top deck of my bus actually provides a better view than this ground level option, but this bear has been relaxing in this window for months, so has earned its place here.

Nice mural – shame it didn’t go with shawarma

Back in August 2022, I made the trip to Glasgow’s Gray Street to catch a mural I’d seen many times from the bus.

A wonderful Chinese themed image I would have built a wall around to keep safe, if only I had the talent to create something like this.

Enjoy my pics, because the premises came under new ownership a while ago, and the new owner wasn’t a fan.

They seem to prefer grey paint – possibly appropriate for Gray Street.

As was, 2022:

As is, 2024:

I wish my guts could tolerate that kind of food, just so I could boycott King Roj.

The pic’s not ALL bad.

That’s an AMG GT 63 S 4MATIC + AUTO parked in the middle.

Sadly, only having about 630 bhp compared to the Performance model, which comes with 830 bhp (thanks to the addition of some hybrid electric goodness) – but saving around £20 k from the wallet.

Downside is that this is now a 2 ton plus car, even if performance is close to 200 mph, and has a 0-60 dash around 3 seconds.

All the extras packed in to modern cars mean they lose most of the advantages over their older relatives, with pollution, emissions, and performance, although relatively impressive, not as good as they could be.

I did hear one car review make the same observation recently, and the speaker wasn’t a ‘Green Loony’, just some disappointed that savings etc had been offset by other changes.