Cheeky glider

The Edinburgh Evening News has a great story about a tourist who decided to take a dive off Salisbury Crags at Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano which rears up right inside the city, next to the Parliament and Holyrood Palace. He spent a pleasant ten minutes or so paragliding around above the area before spotting Royal Park Rangers following his movements below and so tried to set off and land elsewhere, coming down near the palace, only to be caught by the police. His friend came out with the excuse that the offending paraglider didn't actually jump, the pair of them had gone to the top of the Crags in full gear to perform ground training when he was caught by a gust. Ahem, yes, highly believable someone would climb up to this great height and lean over the edge of a large drop in full paragliding gear and chute without actually intending to leap off and glide. Presumably a flight of airborne pigs were spotted in the skies around the same time. I'm just annoyed I didn't get to take a picture of it all!

Stan 'the (watch) man' Lee

This won't make a lick of sense unless you are a comics fan, but this site by Kevin is cracked genius: he's remixed Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons seminal graphic novel Watchmen (which Time magazine listed as one of the best novels of the last 80 years) as if it had been written by a very different (but still brilliant) comics god, Stan Lee, with Alan's prose reworked into Stan's hyperbolic style brilliantly.

Fringe pics



You're terminated


Being on the Fringe can go to your head





Fringe office

And its my Asian puppeteering friends from the Fringe Sunday pics I posted a couple of weeks back

Peace out y'all!

I love that this guy wears a shirt and tie when juggling fire sticks




The latest result of Edinburgh council's mismanaged transport policy

As well as being a cool-looking temporary venue this also got rid of the pouting little skateboard kids who habitually haunt this square

This huge purple beast was right across from the Georgian splendour and pomp of McEwan Hall where my graduation ceremony was (many moons ago)

Final Shooting War

At last artist Dan Goldman dropped me a line to say that the final part of the webcomic incarnation of the bloody brilliant Shooting War is now online (poor Anthony writing it while moving into a new home and he still managed to put in topical references including one to recent Isreali attacks in the Lebanon). I was wondering how they would wrap it up without blowing the ending for the print version which is due in hardback next autumn, but they managed to do it in a way which leaves you begging to know more (the webcomic will be about a third of the finished print version I'm hearing).

Its got a good dose of tension, action and politics mixed with dark humour; a fundamentalist terrorist tells how he was about to shoot down the presidential plane years before but Allah appeared in a vision and told him this George Bush would be far more use to the cause of jihad if they let him live to cause trouble - funny but depressingly true at the same time. Its bloody good stuff and if you haven't tried it yet then go check it out, all the earlier parts are still up there on Smithmag.net.

Burger’n’blue

My mum and dad were through visiting tonight and decided we were going to go out for a bite. They’re not the most adventurous when it comes to different dishes; while I love Indian, Italian, Thai, Chinese etc they don’t care for them. All the more puzzling given how amazing a cook (and baker – mmm, those cakes and shortbreads…) my mum is and the different things she’s made for me over the years. So I always have to try and balance going somewhere where they will be okay with the food but I will still enjoy it too. Recently I read a review of a place on the Royal Mile, near the Fringe office, called Wannaburger, which sounded like somewhere I wanted to check out.

I passed it while taking pictures of the Fringe performers on the Mile during the Festival in August, but of course then it was incredibly busy as everything on the Royal Mile is at that time of year. With the Festival over and my folks through tonight it seemed like an opportune time to try it and we had a pleasant meander down the Mile on a late summer evening. A colleague at the Planet had mentioned he’d been in there several times and loved it, so I was even more eager to check it out – boy was it worth the wait!

There are three basic burgers – a big ass Scotch beef, a whole free range chicken breast and for we veggies a home-made beanburger. But that’s just the base – there’s a great range of combos you can have and a whole raft of them are vegetarian friendly. Mum had the basic chicken, dad the beef while I went for the beanburger with blue cheese and salad; they were both delighted with their burgers, both damned tasty and huge. I loved the beanburger with the blue cheese half-melted over the top of it with the salad, it gave the whole thing some bite and we had a couple of bowls of big, chunky fries (not those stupid little lukewarm skinny fries) between us. I’d heard that the shakes were damned good and indeed the chocolate milk shake utterly rocked; ice cream and real choccy pieces, just the right side of thickness so that you have to work to get it up through the straws but not too thick that you can’t quite manage.

The desserts looked pretty good but even I couldn’t fit anything else in, it was a damned good plateful and between the food and the really friendly service we left full and happy for a walk back past evening tourists and folks heading out on ghost walk tours. I’ll certainly be going back there for more (it is temptingly near work). Good meal and a nice night with my mum and dad; the simple pleasures are often the best, aren’t they? On the way back to my place we past where Mr Boni's wonderful ice cream parlour once stood; my mum and dad used to take me there from time to time when they were through visiting. One former colleague in my previous job hearing this commented that he thought it was a bit sad that a bloke in his 30s was being taken for ice cream sundaes by his mum and dad. Why? What the hell is wrong with that? I just told him straight, you just wish you could go for that sort of treat and enjoy it. Miserable bugger. Well, I can and I do! Damned right I do.

Josh makes bail

Some good news - Josh Wolf has been released from the gulag he was thrown into by Bush's Gestapo to protect American Democracy and the freedoms for which it stands from people who might actually exercise those rights. Josh has posted his first main piece on his blog since being bailed.

Some awards

I posted on some awards in the last few days over on the FPI blog. First off one of my favourite writers and a damned decent bloke, Ken MacLeod picked up his third Prometheus Award for his last novel, Learning the World. If you haven't read Ken before this is a standalone novel and a good spot to dip your toes into and with one of the central characters being a blogger it may have more resonance for our online community. On the classic fiction front the Prometheus (which is given for libertarian fiction) added David Lloyd and Alan Moore's V For Vendetta to the Hall of Fame while for the first time ever they gave an award to a film director/writer in the shape of the god-like Joss Whedon for Serenity for its portrayal of "resistance fighters struggling against oppressive collectivism."

This comes on the heels of Serenity winning a prestigious Hugo award at the Worldcon for Best Dramatic Presentation Longform (or movies as they are more often called). And at the same Worldcon in California the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Shortform (usually TV) was not won by one of the big-budget US shows but by Blighty's own little Doctor Who. A great result for the new show and also proof positive that the show appeals to far more than the traditional British audience. It pleased most of the fans of the old show, it pleased younger viewers new to the series and now it is conquering the world. Nice.