It’s official – spring has hit Gorgie. Cue shirtless chavs, the foreboding jingle of ice cream vans, rammed buses, and a general increase in noise levels. I prefer the ghetto in winter because it sends these things back into the woodwork where they should remain. Happy Easter.
13 April, 2019 – Mojave Air and Space Port, time unknown to this writer.
The world’s largest ever plane by wingspan embarked upon its two-hour test flight, reaching an altitude of 17,000ft, coasting at a relatively underwhelming maximum speed of 189 mph. It’s just the beginning, though.
This is no Ryanair stinker. The Stratolaunch shall, as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen envisioned, lift rockets to 35,000ft before launching them into orbit, an air to launch alternative to a traditional rocket launch.
A higher launch point = less drag, and less cash pumped into proceedings, sub-orbital spaceflight the archaic aircraft carrying the Sputniks of the future.
Aesthetically, I don’t know what to make of this titanic bastard of an airplane. The Wright brothers were faffing around as universally mocked numpties in 1903; I’d like to think this, however ugly, was what they had in mind.
Further reading/viewing:
Saw this in the cinema when I was 16 and thought it was incredible, my generation’s bit of peak Bertolucci or something. It’s been a long hiatus but I caught it again the other day. My god, it’s fucking appalling, an arty-farty piece of silly, trivial gibberish, and unbelievably racist. The characters are one-note, self-obsessed twats, and the picture depicts the Japanese as a mass of hysterical idiots. About 20 minutes in I couldn’t believe what I was watching. It’s concocted anthropology à la Nanook of the North (1922). Never again. Sad!
Snapped from Brewers Fayre. There’s something of the Americana about this chain of venues, with the free soft drink refills and Hooters-esque staff uniforms. I was in Dunfermline’s version of one of these ‘restaurants’ a decade ago and found the experience most distressing; come to think of it, this might have actually been a Frankie & Benny’s. No matter, they’re all interchangeable: tacky décor, borderline violent eaters, screaming kids running amok.
Newhaven itself is a curious mix of the old and new; flats are *always* being developed, little ships will always have their presence, and eateries such as Brewers Fayre will continue to splatter the waterfront.
This used to be the home of the infamous Shell garage, a post-3:00 a.m. drunken haven. There was nothing quite like their chicken stuffing sandwiches, especially when one was off one’s proverbial tits on a Smörgåsbord of £1 voddy and cokes from Rush Bar in the Cowgate. And how I miss the mangled chat with the bloke behind the glass. He clearly wanted to die but I still bombarded him with my life thoughts. 2005-2013 was a good fucking time in my life.
Greenpeace protesters are protesting at Shell garages in Edinburgh as a result of Shell exploring in the Arctic 16 July 2012
Now it’s an empty space. Sad. The land that is; not my existence. These days I get free Wi-Fi at work. 24/7 Clockwork Winning.
Brande in Denmark has a meagre population of 7,000 and there is very little to distinguish it … until now.
The Danish clothing company Bestseller, its headquarters in the town, aims to put Brande ‘on the map’ with its construction of a 320-metre skyscraper, newspapers mockingly referring to it as the Tower of Sauron, this an all-seeing ‘evil thing’ in the Lord of the Rings works that didn’t quite make sense. And that wasn’t the end of the nonsensical with those movies – one could have summoned an eagle and had the fucker drop the ring in that volcano.
Anyway, back to Denmark. The skyscraper will house offices, a hotel, and some shops. More shite, just what an unspoiled landscape needs ….
Further reading:
https://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=2020721
Grim as fuck, this one. It smacks of the ’60s – poverty and deprivation in the so-called swinging era. It’s the type of building a skag head would chuck himself off. Some things need demolished; this is one of them. Yuk.
Writing is waterboarding of the mind, such is the rolling artillery barrage of stimuli out there. As a part-time aspiring Gonzo in the knock-off Hunter S. Thompson mould (I don’t do drugs for fear of dying before the real-life Matt Damon lands on Mars), I cannot construct a sentence if there is a Wi-Fi connection. Why pen anything when there is Wikipedia and a mammoth page dedicated to the Battle of Austerlitz (1805)?
One must be unplugged from The Matrix.
Here is my photographic … representation of even an attempt to write anything with a correctly placed comma. And all music must be Enya or Enigma or any other kind of chillout music, nothing too high-tempo.
This photo ripped an hour from my life, by the way.
It’s how I imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald carved his stuff when Zelda was out in Lalaland off her tits on cocktails galore.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 