Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it’s all one. It’s one energy.
Ram Dass
If you ever go to Edinburgh and find yourself in one of its countless excellent pubs, you may want to strike up a conversation with one of the grave looking, old guys at the bar drinking pints. If so, you will want to be able to hold a conversation while also not making a fanny of yourself or coming off as a wee bam.
Read on to get the low-down on Edinburgh slang (and to some extent all Scottish slang) which I managed to accumulate over years of being steamin in the Royal Oak, the Sheep’s Heid and other salubrious establishments in Old Reekie.
Aye: Used always in place of yes.
A Fanny: (a person either boy or girl) who is behaving like an idiot
Bairn: Child or baby
Bampot/ wee bam – an idiot, unhinged person, an imbecile.
Bannock: biscuit or a scone (old-fashioned)
Bawbag: Utter wanker, a guy who is a complete idiot, taken from scrotum sack/ball bag.
Boak/to boak: To vomit
Bonny/bonnie: Someone or something is beautiful, could refer to a view, a house, a person, a baby, anything.
Brambles/brambleberries: The Scottish name for wild blackberries.
Breeks: Trousers (old-fashioned)
Burn: A stream or creek
Burns supper: The annual celebration of the birthday of Scottish poet Rabbie Burns
Cairn: A man-made pile of stones erected as a monument or memorial at the top of a hill.
Cock-a-leekie: A chicken and leek soup
Cullen Skink: A creamy soup made of smoked haddock and potatoes.
Croft/crofter: A small farmhouse or farmer living in a remote village (more common in the Highlands)
Banoffee pie: Banana and caramel/toffee pie or tart
Blether/to have a blether: To have a chat or have a natter with someone.
Dae ye ken?/ken what I’m saying?: Do you understand me?
Dram/ a wee dram: A wee nip of whisky, sometimes drunk with a bit of water or straight. If you are in the pub don’t ever ask for coke or any other soda with it, you will be treated like the bampot you are.
Dreich: The weather is really gloomy and shit.
Fucking yaldi/yaldi: (something is) fucking brilliant, great
Glasgow kiss: When someone headbutts someone else, or glasses them with a pint glass in the face, this is known as a Glasgow kiss.
Gloaming: Dusk, the long period of time between night and day
Greeting/greetin’: Meaning to cry or sook, normally referring to a child. “That wee bairn has been greetin all night” (the child has been crying)
Haggis: A national dish with sweet meats and offal, herbs, spices and oats stuffed inside of a sheep’s stomach. There is a vegetarian variety that is essentially a vegetarian meatloaf, it’s delicious. Haggis is commonly added to a breakfast bap and had with tomato sauce for a morning breakfast on the go.
Hogmanay: New Year’s Eve
Hud yer whisht: be quiet, shut your mouth
I dinnae ken: I don’t understand
IRN-BRU: Orange flavoured soft drink that’s always eclipsed Coke in terms of popularity in Scotland. Also popular in the Scottish part of Canada.
Jakey: A person who is addicted to class A drugs or alcohol/ a tramp or drug addict
Jessie/A jessie: A sissy or a mumma’s boy. Usually said between men as an insult.”Drink more whisky, don’t be a fuckin jessie!”. “Try the haggis, don’t be a jessie”.
Kirk: A church or cathedral
Kelpie: A shape-shifting water spirit capable of taking human form and living in lochs and pools. Normally takes the form of a horse. (Unrelated to the dog breed, the Australian Kelpie).
Loan: A grassy strip leading to a farm or clearing. e.g. Duddingston Loan.
Munro: A Scottish mountain over 3,000 feet high.
Muir: A moor or field
Neds: Non educated delinquents, aka bogans.
Neeps: Turnips
Old Reekie/Auld Reekie: The name used with fondness for Edinburgh, referring to its reputation in the middle ages for having sewerage flowing through its streets. At the end of the Royal Mile and castle there was Old Town’ tenement housing. People used to throw the contents of bed pans out of their windows and say “Gardyloo”, a modified version of the French expression Gard a l’eau or watch out for the water. The name still lingers on today in various forms.
Oatcakes: Basically biscuits made of oats that are a traditional favourite in Scotland, eat lathered in jam or with eggs on top, as an Australian friend of mine liked to do…in vegemite.
Polis: The police
Pished/pished oot me heid: Very drunk
Pure raging : Really angry.
Pure baltic: Really freezing cold weather.
Pure minging/minging: (Something or someone is) really disgusting, really revolting.
Selkie: Selkies are mythological creatures found in Irish, Scottish, Faroese, and Icelandic folklore. They are said to live as seals and then shed their skin to become human on land.
Schemies: People who live in a housing scheme or a council flat.
Shite: Use instead of shit, means the same thing.
Steamin: Drunk
Tatties: Potatoes
The boabie: Term of endearment for a man’s penis, can also mean the Police.
To ken (something).: To know something
Tunnocks Tea Cakes: A cake brand that everyone loves in Scotland.
Weegie: Someone from Glasgow, from “Glaswegian”
Wee hen/hen: A term of endearment for a friend or a family member but typically child, girl or woman. Normally used by women to their friends or to their child.
Wee’un: Shortened version of wee one or child.
Whisky: It’s always Whisky without the e in it in Scotland, never write it Whiskey. Also it’s never called Scotch or Scotch Whiskey in Scotland. To call whisky Scotch in Scotland you will be asking for a Glasgow kiss or at least to be called a wee bam.
Yer a chancer: You’re pushing your luck right now
I hope you enjoyed this round up of Edinburgh slang (and to some extent Scottish slang, although I never lived anywhere else in Scotland so I can’t say for sure what words they use there). Let me know if I’ve missed anything, cheers! And see you doon the pub for a wee half of McEwans Ale.
This guy had the coolest hair in Tokyo. Him and his mate were so chill, just smoking and shooting the shit, talking about life in a back alley near Shibuya.
People in Tokyo tend to do wild things to their appearance to differentiate themselves from everyone else. As a result, nobody bats an eyelid if you’re dressed as Godzilla, a Samurai, Ninja or a Napoleonic General. It’s all quite normal to be abnormal. I love the relaxed way that the odd and strange parts of society coexist with the 9-5 norm here!
I’ve written a lot about gifs in the past and how they throw a comical light on old forms of art, when remixed with renaissance art and also discussed what makes a gif become a piece of art. I’ve looked at the intricate moving world of Paperholme, gif art which shows the whimsy of a paper-bound world of buildings. Here in this article I explore the mathematical perfection of geometric art as gifs. Which bears a lot of similarity to Op-Art, another favourite kind of art from the 1960’s.
Dave Whyte aka Bees and Bombs creates fluid geometry in motion. These gifs elevate the humble gif from a fun meme towards an intricate structural complexity and their minimal aesthetics.
Dave started Bees and Bombs in 2011 along with a friend Brian. Originally it was created as a selection of ‘idiotic joke pictures’. “About a month later I saw that there were people on Tumblr making cool abstract animations and so I started shamelessly imitating them and uploading my modest contributions to Bees and Bombs,” says Dave.
Starting with geometric art his work evolved out of the earlier simpler memes and satisfyingly minimalistic gifs.
“The reason I started out with the gif as a medium instead of full proper videos was simply because I didn’t have any software that could create videos. But I can see why it’s an appealing format in general. They’re short and small, they play automatically usually, they don’t have distracting sound. The format certainly has its flaws but for the kind of thing I do it’s a good match: they require a fairly limited colour palette. Also I think that there’s the expectation that a gif should loop smoothly, which forces me to think more about how any particular motion works,” Dave says.
Dave has a background in Theoretical Physics but insists that his deep understanding of the mathematical possibilities of shape and motion has no bearing on his animation work.
“I have always had a knack for maths as far as I can remember. I think my background in physics helps me in that I’m very comfortable with the basics of trigonometry. But my physics work is generally completely unrelated to my animation work.”
As far as I can remember, I vaguely recall playing with ‘Paintbrush’ which was what Paint was called before Windows 95. So that must have been quite a while ago.
Processing is the main piece of software I use. It’s basically a programming environment aimed at design. It’s free and there’s a lovely interactive video introduction at hello.processing.org. Before I heard about Processing I used Mathematica, which was software we were taught at college, which I realised had some quite nice graphics functions.
Charlie Deck is a friend of Daves who makes incredible geometric gifs in his own right. In 2013, Charlie discovered that there was a whole community of people who are passionate about the intersection and collusion of arts and technology.
“Turns out creative coding is a thing; generative design is a thing; media arts are a thing. Very exciting. I’d like to connect with more people interested in such things”, he says.
Charlie created Mode of Expression a few years ago. An independent studio that creates creative apps, cutting-edge web experiences, and unique games.
“I founded Mode of Expression in 2008 in San Francisco. Since then, I’ve written educational apps, musical instruments, music composition toys, WebGL things, and, most recently, games,” says Charlie.
“In late 2013, I began a gif-a-day project where I created a new animation daily as a way to focus on improving my design skills. After nearly two years, I’ve made more than 600 gifs, some obscure, some topping Reddit and earning 100,000s of likes. In late 2014, I moved to New York. With my developing design skills, and a pack of apps under my belt, I shifted my focus to game development.
He remains committed to being creatively weird. “I’m going to focus on the impractical, weird, serendipitous, and fun. I’ll be trying out new technologies and brushing up on old ones. I’ll throw in some of the old stuff, too—the best of my abandoned projects. Things I still wish I could work on, but can’t justify or imagine anyone actually using,” he says.
I am writing this post on the 5th of January and all going well, we will leave our current home and be residing somewhere else by the publishing date of this post at the end of March/April 2019. Back to the future indeed. Time passes so quickly and I’ve seen many sunsets on this planet so far. Life seems to be travelling at the blink of an eye and no that’s not our imagination playing tricks on us, technology definitely makes this so. As we say goodbye to yet another day and hello to another, I hope you, me and everyone else on this crazy little planet takes the time to watch and absorb the beauty of the world. It’s there when you take the time to stop and look.
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Annie Dillard
Something unexpected happened to me in Warsaw Zoo today. Instead of enjoying myself seeing all the animals I felt really sad. Why? Because they came across through my camera lens as being full of emotion, sensitivity and immense intelligence. I connected with them and their pain in the same way I would if I looked upon a human face in pain. It was the same pain of consciousness and existence, a pain of being a place they would rather not be.
Each animal is rendered unique here and you can see its personality shine through. I am aware that I may be anthropomorphising them. However, animals I believe and science bears out, are closer to us than we think. We should recall that many primates including chimps and bonobos share over 97% of the same DNA as us. That means their musculature, physiology and we could deduce – their psychology is like a primal version of our own. If we allow ourselves to feel their emotions closely, we are coming closer to what it means to be fully human and fully animal at the same time.
Ironically, we decided on Warsaw Zoo for our first day in the city because we were so tired and jet-lagged. Other options for a day out in the city include POLIN, the Jewish History Museum and the Warsaw Uprising Museum. Both of these sounded incredibly intense and emotionally demanding. And yet, going to the Zoo was also surprisingly heart-wrrenching too. On the bright side, we did get some lovely shots and videos in. And although freezing, the sun was shining.
Although it was cheery and great to see the animals, the enclosures were not clean or large enough and the animals. And for the most part, they were not cared for as well as they could be. It was like some kind of throw-back to Communist times. Although the animals, as you would expect were absolutely beautiful and a delight to capture. It all felt rather selfish, as though I was viewing them and enjoying them from a privileged place by virtue of me being born a homo sapien and not one of them.
But Warsaw is trying, and going from literally zero and being completely destroyed during WWII and then suffering under communism to becoming an economic powerhouse surely means some growing pains, stretch marks and old wounds needing to be healed. This is borne out by the most vulnerable members of society, the animals.
Anyway after that massive emo moan-fest…here are some terrific photos of some lovely, rare and exotic beasties.
Onwards now to more historical attractions in Warsaw
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
Sylvia Plath
Here’s another photo I took strolling around at night in Asakusa in Tokyo. In these little alleys, there is an air of intimate and cosy homeliness, I guess this is thanks to the locals. On a micro scale, these alleys had a really neighbourly and friendly vibe, this is completely contrary to what I thought it would be like – another cold and impersonal metropolis. Asakusa is one of the oldest parts of Tokyo and yet not far from here the Tokyo SkyTree stands sentry like a gigantic glittering UFO. The whole of Tokyo calls out for attention and it’s virtually impossible to absorb it all in one holiday….we will be back.
Like most things in Tokyo, I had only a vague notion of what the hell was going on here. It looks like a pancake van on cute steroids. Apparently to sell anything the best way to do it is to go over level 9000 on cuteness, sexiness or sexy cuteness. Anything less is totally pointless. It really works though. Read more on the aesthetics of cuteness, a topic of endless fascination for me.
Content Catnip
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