fire juggling

Now that the clocks have gone back to GMT its fully dark by the time I leave work. Coming home one evening when it was unusually mild (and dry!) I decided on a whim to take a different route and walk up the Royal Mile, digging my camera out of my bag thinking I may get a couple of street night shots; in a slice of pure lucky chance I happened on a fire juggler on the cobbled pedestrianised section of street outside the Fringe office. Obviously I've seen and taken plenty of pics of jugglers chucking around all sorts of things from knives to firesticks around this spot during the Festival, but not usually this late in the year and at night; certainly made the use of fire look far more dramatic being dark!








Of course as I was walking home from work I didn't have the tripod with me, so I had to make do; to be honest I think half the many night shots I have on my Flickr are improvised, spur of the moment affairs rather than done when I've gone out deliberately with the tripod to do some night work. One of the advantages of digital is you are willing to take chances improving a shot since you're not wasting money and film if it doesn't work. And in this case since he was moving around and the fiery ropes he was holding were also swirling around I doubt a tripod would have made much difference here, he and they would still be streaked and blurred, but even so its worth taking the shot for the subject even if the pic isn't as sharp as I'd normally try for; as Lee Harvey Oswald once said, sometimes you just have to take the shot. And its fun when the city offers up a little surprise like this; if I had gone home my normal route I'd never have seen this, it was just a sudden whim to go this way.

Fire

On the way home from the cinema tonight I saw a flickering orange light in the distance, silhouetting the distinctive towers of Donaldson's School for the Deaf over by Haymarket (where I once did a photo project back in my college days). Since Donaldson's is one of the few large buildings not lit up at night in Edinburgh it didn't take me long to realise the reason I could see the towers after nightfall must be because that glow must be from a fire behind the school. And from the size of Donaldson's I'm guessing it must be a fairly big damned fire to illuminate it light that.


(fire at or near Donaldson's School for the Deaf, Edinburgh - larger versions on the Woolamaloo Gazette Flickr set)

Too early for anything to be on the Scottish news yet and I have no idea from this distance if it was just a huge bonfire nearby (but who has a big bonfire just a few weeks before Guy Fawkes Night??) or an accidental conflagration, but I clambered up onto the wall near me, stuck the camera on the mini tripod stashed in my bag and snapped a couple of pictures - sorry, they are a bit blurred but it is impossible to focus when all the viewfinder shows is mostly black, so I had to just point it in the right direction, set the lens on night shot and let it go (I decided the subject matter outweighed the poor quality of the pics). Still, despite being a bit out of focus if there is a story here then I can say the Woolamaloo Gazette scooped it first! I do hope that it isn't something in the actual school though; it is a rare institution that helps a heck of a lot of hearing impaired kids and the day I spent doing my photo project there back at college was a great day, the kids being so friendly to this big old dumbo who couldn't even sign properly (yup, I was the odd one out there that day because I couldn't lip read or use sign language, so in effect I was the one with impaired senses).

Fire

Friday morning's ride to work was a pain; after being stuck in log-jammed traffic for a good while the bus finally inched towards the West End where we discovered there was a major fire on Princes Street, which had closed the whole thing down, forcing the buses to divert. Since so many go along Princes Street this made a real mess of city traffic and I ended up having to get out well away from work and walking the rest of the way. At least it was a nice morning for a change and not pouring down as usual. As I walked through the Meadows, trying to to be too distracted by a large-chested woman jogging past (the bounce was like the gas suspension on those old Citroens), I noticed some unusual marketing for a Fringe show - instead of flyers they had put chalk outlines of bodies, like a crime scene, on the paths with the show name and venue written inside.

Only partially successful as marketing though - I thought they were cool and passed several (if I hadn't been on a hurry to get to work before it was even later I'd have stopped for a pic, they've probably washed away in the rain now) but all I could recall of them ten minutes later was the cool chalk body outline, not the name of the show or venue. As one friend commented, it was a bit like the cool TV ad from a couple of years back where various components of a car all worked in pieces to make the next piece work - great visual ad, but neither of us can ever recall what make of car it was promoting (and didn't really care anyway).

I glimpsed smoke from the burning building as the bus turned up onto a diversion and could also see the tall ladder platform - it had a lot of firefighters there and was fairly major. It turned out to be Romanes and Paterson, a shop dealing in kilts and all sorts of Scottish material. Princes Street on the south side is a view to the Castle and Old Town, but the shop side is a real dog's breakfast of buildings, with a number of fine, old buildings and some truly hideous monstrosities that were allowed to be built there in the 60s and 70s (not architecture's finest eras) which utterly ruin that side of a major, historic street. And of course it was an old building from 1878 (which is actually new by Edinburgh standards, really) that caught light and not one of the brutally ugly 60s horrors which would be better suited to a shopping block in Murmansk. Couldn't the gods of architecture and fire have gotten together on this one?

Gag that cartoonist



Yvonne sent me a link to this Daily Dilbert by Scott Adams, which I am guessing may refer to the recent case of the cartoonist Matt who works on the webcomic Three Panel Soul with Ian who was fired from a government job because he and a colleague were talking about hobbies and he said he enjoys paper target shooting. As R Stevens from Dieselsweeties notes, he wasn't talking about guns and people, shooting people or anything of that nature, in fact he was saying he thought it would be good to have guns which would be harder to use to keep people safe. He was fired because his colleagues are now apparently scared of him.



That may sound like nonsense to some who will be thinking hey, he must have done something else, but given that since Columbine a number of US schools have expelled kids who have done nothing wrong except wear a black duster coats (thus probably alienating the kids and giving them a real grieveance to hold, ironically) and an English major at college was harassed by campus police because he had written a horror story so the dumb-ass rentacops on campus assumed he must be a homicidal maniac, and suddenly it looks a lot more plausible. The great American official logic at work - don't do anything to control access to weapons, just fire people you don't like; of course, if Matt was a violent gun nut then surely this would have provoked him to march down to his ex employer and shoot all the former co-workers who got him fired??? Behold the one thing scarier than nutters with guns - the average fucking idiot...

But as Yvonne points out, this Dilbert cartoon also has a certain resonance to something closer to home, about a certain bookselling blogger fired by his version of Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss, Evil Boss and his equally Evil Sandals, for mocking him and, of course, by firing him allowing him to step up the mocking to outright Defcon One Intercontinental Ballistic Lampooning launches. Stupidity rules, alas, but at least we can take the piss out those stupid smeggers!