Wandering About in Leith, Scotland

This notice is painted on the sidewalk all over the place but I suspect it would work better if dogs could read.

There are dogs all over the place here.  The big difference between these dogs and those in America is that I never hear them barking.  I also never see them running around loose.  My cuz will let Louie off the lead every so often and he will run a bit but he behaves pretty well.  What I mean is that there are no dogs running around out of control.  There are also no dogs locked away in backyards where they bark endlessly out of loneliness.  I ran into that many, many times in the America and I would get furious over it but there's nothing you can do without putting the owner up against a wall.  I don't have a solution for it, that's just a sad fact over there.

People walk a lot here but that's not because of a shortage of public transportation as it is excellent.  There are buses running constantly and they aren't all double-deckers but there are lots of them.  In America it's close to impossible but here you could live pretty easily without a car.


For most people when they get tired of viruses, shoddy Windows software, and blue screens, switching to Apple is usually enough and they live happily ever after.  For some people, that doesn't seem to be enough.

This reminds of a professor in the Biology Department at the University of California in Davis.  His name was Ledyard Stebbins and he had quite a good reputation in genetics but he had one little idiosyncrasy.  This was before people used word processors and he had a typewriter on his desk for writing his research, grant proposals, etc.

Stebbins was notorious for getting frustrated with the IBM Selectric which was one of the first electric typewriters.  They were much faster and more sensitive than the old Royal typewriters but they were much more prone to error and this is why this tiny idiosyncrasy would manifest itself.  For most people, when you get frustrated you'll get up from your desk and go bitch about politics around the coffee machine for a while.  But, noooooo, that wasn't enough.  He would pick up the typewriter and throw it out the window ... the second floor window.  Whoops, scratch any students below who weren't looking up.


Here's a sign I saw walking back from Belly Buster and this leads to some inevitable questions.

I don't know about you but my first question is what the hell is a top wash.  It goes beyond that as it implies that, for an extra cost, you can get a bottom wash.  So now you know where in Leith you can go if you want to get your top washed and, maybe for an extra treat, get your bottom washed.