Scottish Snippets

11 October 2014

Number 669



The Scottish Snippets Newsletter in its original format began in April 1997 and continued in an unbroken series for 591 issues. Although no longer produced in that style, there is now this regular update on the new and updated pages on the Rampant Scotland site including "Scottie's Photo Diary From Scotland".

HotTo receive a text version of this newsletter as a reminder to look at these Web pages when they are published, just send an e-mail to Scottie@RampantScotland.com with "Subscribe Newsletter" in the subject line.


Ring Necked Parakeet in Glasgow

The parakeet in question is the first illustration in Scottie's Photo Diary. I took a picture of the bird in Hogganfield Loch Park. Such birds have been spotted elsewhere in the Glasgow area. Other graphics in the "Photo Diary" include Bell heather and Rudbeckia at Geilston House, a tall Acanthus plant (sometimes known as "Bear's Breeches") at Greenbank Gardens, the floral clock and Greyfriar's Bobby in Edinburgh. And I couldn't resist showing off my new camera which has a 70 times zoom lens. So there is a sequence of pictures from Culzean Country Park. It was also that camera that allowed me to get the picture of the ring necked parakeet at the top of a tall tree! See: Scottie's Photo Diary - August/September

Fire Museum

Edinburgh Fire Establishment was created in 1824 and is the oldest municipal fire brigade in the United Kingdom. It was very appropriate that when its former HQ was no longer required as an active fire station, it should be transformed into a "Fire Museum" to house a varied collection of fire engines, equipment, models and photographs which told the story not only of the development of fire fighting services but also honoured the heroic members of the fire service not just in Edinburgh but elsewhere as well. For example there is a plaque on the exterior of the museum commemorating the 343 firefighters killed on 9/11 in New York and models of old fire engines from USA. See: Fire Museum

trials and Tribulations

We all have PC problems from time to time and over the years I've had my share of them. But nothing like the last two weeks when my broadband data connection failed and I was bounced back and forward between British Telecom and my Internet Service Provider with the former saying "no fault" and the latter saying "line fault". Getting to speak with anyone in my ISP proved to be far more difficult than it should have been. Often I kept thinking of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland... Eventually, by a process of elimination, I identified myself that the problem was a BT data comm filter which connects the router to the phone line. I replaced that and had that wonderful euphoric moment when an intractable computer problem has been solved! But the wasted time on fruitless phone calls and working offline for two weeks has meant that although this newsletter has gone out on the scheduled date it is a bit shorter than usual! But as they say in Scotland "Guid gear goes in little bulk"!

Next Newsletter



The next newsletter is scheduled for 25 October and will be another mix of pages in the "Tam's Tall Tales" series. I suspect he will be following up on the aftermath of the Independence Referendum - and maybe the 100 years of the iconic "Sunday Post" newspaper - that's the cartoon characters from the "Broons" which have been read avidly in the paper since 1936.

Yours aye

Scottie

Previous editions of this Newsletter are available in an Archive. The Index to the other pages of the Rampant Scotland site is available here.



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