Viva Glasvegas!: Shiny

Viva Glasvegas! celebrates Scotland's own East Coast/West Coast beef, one that's mainly lacking hip hop, violent death and, hell, much of the rivalry

There's an Apple Store opening near me (I say near; it's in Glasgow which is roughly the same distance from Edinburgh as any point of civilisation on the continental United States is from utter fucking wilderness). This is not a good thing, unless you happen to work at said Apple Store and get paid commission on every overdrawn geek you entrap.

Simple, really: stay out of Glasgow, stay out of debtor's prison.

Hurricane Dean

There's a lot of people in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico who won't be making this mistake right now, but everytime I see a reference to Hurricane Dean in the press, I just can't not think of dear ol' Howard.

Clearly there's a demographic that the mineral water industry doesn't cater for: alcoholics. Thankfully, the brains at Diageo are going to fill that void with shiny new Smirnoff Source - "the new premium malt beverage offering...that combines pure spring water with alcohol."

Lovely.

United States of England: There's really no point, is there?

At some point between the apocalyptic thunderstorms that have been lashing Auld Reekie, this year's Edinburgh International Festival Fringe officially kicked off, bringing exciting and diverse entertainments from around the world to our sleep little corner of Scotland. Also, Jimmy Carr.

Let's not forget the most important people in all this: London's Britain's cultural intelligensia who have decamped north en masse to sample pints of ale in Rebus' local, soak up the atmosphere in the world's first City of Literature and get in the way of the locals. The annual occupation more or less renders any coverage we'd be offering on the festival season irrelevant, except for those occasions when lame punning and excessive sarcasm are required, so we're just not going to bother.

A couple of hints, though, for the festival rookie - Spiegeltent is so 2005, all of the good parties are flat parties and you're not invited, and, whatever you do, don't heckle Daniel Kitson.

If you need us, we'll be in the Assembly Rooms Lane Bar.