Flickrdump

Parking spaces can be hard to find in the New Town

Picture from The Scotsman.

"Today there was more than the usual excitement on North Castle Street.

Short version of story is that Car thief/ Joyrider steals car...drives up North Castle Street being hotly pursued by the polis...hangs a left into Thistle Street at speed and loses control...car ends up in the basement area of the building on the corner...My office is just about directly opposite this and I got some photos..."

Check out this Flickr set from graemeandsandra of the fun.

Headlines: proof that smoking wrecks lives

• A tale of woe from Tollcross, as those dastardly smokers force a man to fire his own mother. How do they sleep at night? The nicotine probably helps.


• The Romanov empire continues to expand - soon it'll eclipse the sun with its massed ranks of Lithuanian youngsters and ineffectual Brazilians.

United States of England: Then clearly there's no fire

United States of England: because you know you can go further north than Newcastle, right?

It's been, ooh, what - a year? - since Scotland's smoking ban came into effect. Of course, seeing as the English will be joining the party on July 1st, they're getting all interested. Hope they bring some decent wine this time.

Anyway, the article makes a couple of points that stood out at Dirty Old HQ:

Perhaps more than any other city in the UK, Edinburgh's identity is closely bound up with its dark, gloomy drinking dens - a fug of smoke always having hung inside them alongside the smell of hops and a murmur of Caledonian accents.

The presence of the word "fug" here leads us to suspect that the BBC won't employ a copy editor below the age of 74.

Next up, a quote from our stalwart enforcement officer regarding a friend...

"She worked as a barmaid in working men's clubs from the age of 20," he grimaces. "Never touched a cigarette in her life, but the doctors said they'd never seen a worse set of lungs.

"She was left with two stumps where her legs should have been. I don't have any trouble getting up in the morning when I think of her."

Just make sure that righteous anger ain't pointed at us. More towards to those bastardish, alleged limb-thieving tabacco companies, please.