Life Savers

RIVER CITY.

That’s the thing – when a river and a city meet, people can fall into the river.

When that happens, you run along the bank and find one of those life saving floats – dayglow orange rings – to throw out to the victim. Then you have to call for help to complete the rescue.

Getting help should be easy in a world of mobile cellphones, but things are not quite that simple

What happens is that you rush about in a panic to find that there are no life saver rings because some drunken neds have thrown them into the Clyde for a “laugh”. You use up all your phone credit and battery trying to find the correct “Emergency Service” — the coast guard? Er no!

Every time I cross the Clyde I check – and I reckon the rings only last a day or two before fools toss them into the river for someone to fish out and replace.

• Yet it would be so easy to solve all this, simply wire up each ring holder to an alarm.

In an emergency, you pull the ring out from it’s holder (setting off the alarm), and the emergency services arrive ASAP. How easy is that?

In cases of drunken foolishness, the fact that an important piece of emergency life-saving equipment has been lost, would be noted immediately – and the emergency services could catch the culprits and re-instate the ring into the holder, maintaining the emergency system’s integrity in a stroke.

There are emergency phones (that get vandalised), so the wiring and alarming of the emergency floats is not a new cost, this idea would be better, cheaper — and more important, would save lives (and reduce thoughtless hooliganism).

The Bad and the Ugly

COMMON SENSE seems to be lacking with architects, builders and the council’s planning dept. I mean to say, it doesn’t take a genius to see that this arrangement is both ugly and stupid. Look at this photograph of the close or front entrance to a block of flats (click to enlarge).

The first thing anyone would notice is the sheer height of the door! But that’s a LOT of glass, isn’t it? Bit risky considering the rough neighbourhood! They seem to have though about the poor people waiting outside and talking into the controlled entry intercom, for there is a large glass cover above! But it is all so silly when you stop and think for a minute.

• All they had to do was move the front door a little further in to the close corridor. That would provide visitors with shelter, it would improve the acoustics too, and would be a boon for people with prams, crutches or carrying furniture or parcels.

Then you notice the ramp for the disabled access. If the entrance door was further in, the ramp could have been incorporated, or at the very least, come from the side — saving a lot of railings!

And look at that new bus stop — could they not have attached the bus stop sign to the existing lamp post? Mind you – what a state that is in!

I know this can seem like whingeing for pedants, but it is so easy to do and to find — go out and snag the world around you — we have to live with what these idiots give us. They get the big bucks after all.

We pay them to THINK and design. If they cannot get the simplest things, the obvious things right, then gawd help us with the serious things like flooding, subsidence, and safety!

If we want a better world, if we want a nicer, better environment, we have to show these numpties that we are onto them, and that we will not accept their shite.

Holy Balcony!

SOMETIMES IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE WHAT ARCHITECTS AND BUILDERS GET AWAY WITH THESE DAYS. Look at the picture (click to enlarge as ever)…

… yes, that’s right, the balcony floor is perforated with holes!

Holes! Imagine a bloke in a kilt or a woman in a skirt — the folks below, and possibly on the street below could look right up and catch an eyeful!

Apart from that, though, what if you spilled your drink, dropped your cigarette or worse – what if you puked? Boy, the neighbours would love that!

In a rain-soaked British city, it makes no sense to have perforated verandas; there’s no shelter, no privacy and no sense to it — yet this is not merely confined to ugly new flats on Pollokshaws Road, but also to many supposedly-swanky riverside apartments!

Broken Buckie

I JUST HAD TO SNAP THIS PICTURE – why? because it was the sixth (yes that’s right the 6th) time I saw a smashed bottle of Buckfast wine on the pavement while out for my walk to the Post Office. Things are bad when people buy Buckfast in the first place, but things are getting worse when winos cannot even manage their alcoholism without dropping their bottles.

Which is worse – winos drinking on the streets or broken glass for the dogs and kids to cope with?

Anyway, why can’t winos make it to the glass recycling centres? selfish so-and-sos!

A Spell Round The Shops

ANOTHER PUBLIC SPELLING FAILURE…

As was stated here in How Queeeer, it is not the spelling in itself, but the lack of checking!

An apology with two Ps – “appologise” — amazing really, it was obviously done on a computer, so what is going on with the spell-check feature?

OK, this is the very same establishment, but this time it was not a computer, but a human hand and some chalk and no spell-check. “Celler” is the result — even funnier is that the large sign above has “Cellar” on it in large letters!

The above photograph is one of my all-time favourites; the pub is well-known for being called “Jeanie Deans” — and is clearly marked as such above the door, however, the canopy declares it to be “Jeannie Deans” — with an extra “n” (Click the picture to enlarge and see for yourself)!

One would have thought that such expensive items would be checked for spelling mistakes, but no; things are getting worse!