You might recall that I’ve written once or twice about some of the amusing vandalism that I’ve come across while trawling though Wikipedia. I also thought for some time about running a site or blog that collected copies of the vandalised pages for posterity. There are a few haphazard sites that do this already, but they’re not regularly updated unfortunately.
To spur things along I’ve been toying with the idea of editing a few of the biology pages and replacing the word ORGANISM with its Freudian twin: ORGASM…
One of the biggest problems with being out in the middle of nowhere is the unreliability of communications. As an adoptive city dweller I’ve become used to 24/7 availability and perfect performance on my mobile phone, internet service and television. Down at my folk’s house I’ve run into some interesting things though: My mobile only works properly from the evening till about lunchtime the following day. It splutters and breaks up a lot while the sun is high in the sky, the landline telephone is affected by crows perching on the line that takes it from the house to the telegraph pole and of course the ADSL suffers just the same.
Today however the internet didn’t just splutter, it self-destructed as well:
I’m going to put some messages in bottles and throw them into the River Irvine in the hopes of getting some help out here.
I’ve wandered out of the city for a short holiday/visit down at my ancestral home in Ayrshire. It’s good to get away from the constant barrage of traffic noise, jakes, air pollution and twenty-four hour party people that go around in Glasgow. It also gives me a chance to take things easy and recharge my batteries, especially with my birthday approaching tomorrow.
As per usual I’ve also rediscovered my talent for writing profusely, something that I seem to lose as soon as I return to Glasgow. That’s not really a good thing when writing is supposed to be one of my main hobbies.
It’s an odd thing, but I’ve always found it much easier to write while I’m at my folks than at any other place and I also find it easiest when it’s later in the evening.
I’m currently hammering out about a half a page or so an hour on my infamous “Secret Screenplay”. The Kat will know the one I’m talking about. I might even managed to get about a third of it done before it’s time to wander back to the big smoke.
I also found a story I started based on the music video for Special by the band Garbage, I might finish it while I’m here. Seemingly I started it on Boxing Day 2007 and it was last modified on the 2nd of January. That’s far too long a hiatus for writing, especially when I only managed four or five pages.
I’ve wandered out of the city for a short holiday/visit down at my ancestral home in Ayrshire. It’s good to get away from the constant barrage of traffic noise, jakes, air pollution and twenty-four hour party people that go around in Glasgow. It also gives me a chance to take things easy and recharge my batteries, especially with my birthday approaching tomorrow.
As per usual I’ve also rediscovered my talent for writing profusely, something that I seem to lose as soon as I return to Glasgow. That’s not really a good thing when writing is supposed to be one of my main hobbies.
It’s an odd thing, but I’ve always found it much easier to write while I’m at my folks than at any other place and I also find it easiest when it’s later in the evening.
I’m currently hammering out about a half a page or so an hour on my infamous “Secret Screenplay”. The Kat will know the one I’m talking about. I might even managed to get about a third of it done before it’s time to wander back to the big smoke.
I also found a story I started based on the music video for Special by the band Garbage, I might finish it while I’m here. Seemingly I started it on Boxing Day 2007 and it was last modified on the 2nd of January. That’s far too long a hiatus for writing, especially when I only managed four or five pages.
Quite by accident today I mistyped the URL for this site and omitted the www. at the start (http://greykodiak.co.uk instead of http://www.greykodiak.co.uk). Imagine my surprise when Firefox presented me with this masterpiece:
I’m on the edge of my seat here, I can wait to see what’s coming soon. I can only assume the KGB have decided to clone my site due to its runaway success…
Looks like the liberal left-wing protest movement is running out of funds again:
Wow, it must have cost them all of 0.01p to organise this viral protest campaign.
This may be the world’s creepiest ever figurine:
Zombie Teletubbie want brainssssss…..
Normally I don’t pay too much attention to the tub thumping jabber of The Sun newspaper but its front page headline drew my eye today. For those of you that missed it, here’s the story under the headline “WE’LL NUKE POLAND“. It seems that yet again some Russian hardliner has been mouthing off about the proposed US/NATO anti-missile shield.
Having had a read on other sites and in other less reactionary papers it seems to me that the Russians aren’t saying anything particularly new. General Anatoly Nogovitsy who made the statements is just repeating the same rhetoric that Russia has been spouting since the eighties. Lets be honest, this and the war in Georgia are less about Russia’s own defence and more about trying to remind the rest of the world that she’s still a power to be reckoned with.
No nation on Earth could possibly be foolish enough to use even a nuclear weapon over something so petty. The world could ill afford to allow such an act to go unpunished without inviting a repeat performance by other nations. I think it’s important for everyone to remember that Russia is on the diplomatic back foot right now. The developing conflict in Georgia has been roundly condemned almost the entire international community. If reports are true, even countries that are usually staunch supporters have said that the Russians have gone too far this time.
They call the twenty-first century the “Information Age” but history has often shown, sometimes dramatically and often tragically the effects of the distortion of the facts. It’s frightening to me that The Sun has a purported readership of almost eight million people and that a vast number of the people who read the sun will derive their information on international politics from its unbalanced, right-wing, tub-thumping, populist and middle-England centred viewpoint.
I won’t even get started about their so called “Scottish Sun”, mainly because it’s based around the corner from here and I might feel the urge to burn the place down.
Here’s a better headline: “The Sun Decides to stick to TITS and CELEBRITIES, world breathes a sigh of relief.”
I love the Glasgow Subway but its limited scope is seriously annoying at times. The fact that it doesn’t go any further south than Shields Road or any further north than Cowcaddens is a pain in the arse sometimes. It really gets on my goat that I can’t go all around the town on it the same was as those verdammant Londoners can on their tube. Lets face it people, public transport in Glasgow is overpriced and under invested. Last Glasgow Bus have just about got the city sown up and nobody seems to mind that an all day ticket is up to £3.20, that’s a growth of over 50% in the last two years.
You probably already know that the underground has two tunnels, the outer circle that runs clockwise and the inner circle which runs counter-clockwise. There are fifteen stations along the roughly oval route, eight north of the river and seven to the south. Nearly all of the north side stations are in the west end with only Cowcaddens, St. Enoch and Buchanan Street in the city centre. The south side stations are almost all clustered along the route of the M8 until it passes Ibrox, then it turns north towards Govan and the river. You can get a rough idea of where the subway passes on this crude map:
It might look like it covers a large area, but with only fifteen stations it leaves out a vast area in between. It hardly touches on the south side or the east end.
Naturally there have been a few proposals over the years to extend it, the latest one spurred by Glasgow successfully winning the bid to host the commonwealth games. This proposal only really suggests running an east to west tunnel that will run to towards the games sites in the east end. It doesn’t look like it’s a permanent solution to the city’s transport needs.
I’ve been thinking about how they could make a better system and in the first instance I came up with a simple spider’s web approach of lines radiating out from a central hub in the middle of the city. This seems like a good idea but I doubt it would be easy to co-ordinate in practice. Instead I think it would be a better approach to make a kind of clover leaf system. With four semi-independent sections all roughly the size and shape of the current system. The circles would meet a certain points for shared stations where punters could swap to another service. With two tunnels on each of the four “leaves” of the clover operating in opposite directions travel across the city would be very rapid.
I’ve knocked up a picture of what my system might look like, albeit with just the original subway drawing copied and mirrored along its two axes:
Interestingly a great many of the stations on the mirrored circles land at places I would have said would be great for a station to be built in real life. It’s just a shame I didn’t manage to extend it out to the really big attractions like Silverburn and Braehead, but at least it encircles the proposed Commonwealth Games sites, Parkhead and Hampden Park.
I love the Glasgow Subway but its limited scope is seriously annoying at times. The fact that it doesn’t go any further south than Shields Road or any further north than Cowcaddens is a pain in the arse sometimes. It really gets on my goat that I can’t go all around the town on it the same was as those verdammant Londoners can on their tube. Lets face it people, public transport in Glasgow is overpriced and under invested. Last Glasgow Bus have just about got the city sown up and nobody seems to mind that an all day ticket is up to £3.20, that’s a growth of over 50% in the last two years.
You probably already know that the underground has two tunnels, the outer circle that runs clockwise and the inner circle which runs counter-clockwise. There are fifteen stations along the roughly oval route, eight north of the river and seven to the south. Nearly all of the north side stations are in the west end with only Cowcaddens, St. Enoch and Buchanan Street in the city centre. The south side stations are almost all clustered along the route of the M8 until it passes Ibrox, then it turns north towards Govan and the river. You can get a rough idea of where the subway passes on this crude map:
It might look like it covers a large area, but with only fifteen stations it leaves out a vast area in between. It hardly touches on the south side or the east end.
Naturally there have been a few proposals over the years to extend it, the latest one spurred by Glasgow successfully winning the bid to host the commonwealth games. This proposal only really suggests running an east to west tunnel that will run to towards the games sites in the east end. It doesn’t look like it’s a permanent solution to the city’s transport needs.
I’ve been thinking about how they could make a better system and in the first instance I came up with a simple spider’s web approach of lines radiating out from a central hub in the middle of the city. This seems like a good idea but I doubt it would be easy to co-ordinate in practice. Instead I think it would be a better approach to make a kind of clover leaf system. With four semi-independent sections all roughly the size and shape of the current system. The circles would meet a certain points for shared stations where punters could swap to another service. With two tunnels on each of the four “leaves” of the clover operating in opposite directions travel across the city would be very rapid.
I’ve knocked up a picture of what my system might look like, albeit with just the original subway drawing copied and mirrored along its two axes:
Interestingly a great many of the stations on the mirrored circles land at places I would have said would be great for a station to be built in real life. It’s just a shame I didn’t manage to extend it out to the really big attractions like Silverburn and Braehead, but at least it encircles the proposed Commonwealth Games sites, Parkhead and Hampden Park.
