Debritz.net

The Daily Record has hired edgy Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle as a columnist, but it already seems he's a bit controversial for the family paper. In his first column, The Record has rendered the word "bastard" as "b*****d", shit as s*** and piss (I think) as p***. None of these words would be censored from most Australian papers these days, as long as the editor felt they were contextual - which they are here given Boyle's oeuvre. Stranger still is the fact that I have heard the F-word (which most Australian and British papers would not print in full) more on television - and, significantly, in the street - here in Scotland than I ever have in Australia.
PS: Boyle's column is subtitled, "He's the comic who can't be gagged".

A new publication, The Atlas of True Names, renames places "to reflect their origins and literal meaning". Thus London is Hillfort, Vladivostock is Dominate the east!, Edinburgh is Sloped Castle, New York is New Wild Boar Village, Paris is City of Boatmen, Chicago is Stink Onion and Glasgow is Green Hollow. Great Britain is Great Land of the Tattooed.

It's not just in Australia where waiters greet all customers with the catch-all term "guys". They're doing it in at least one Glasgow venue too.

A friend was looking at kilts in a Glasgow shop window and couldn't believe that the traditional Scots outfit and its accessories could cost as much as 700 pounds. "And look," she said, "they're all frayed along the edges." I'm afraid that's how they come ...

I've just encountered the worst busker I've ever heard, outside Woolworths in Glasgow's Argyle Street. If I were the manager, I'd give her money to go and sing outside Argos.

As well as being one of Lonely Planet's top 10 cities to visit, Glasgow is - for the fourth year running - also the second best place to shop in the UK outside of London's West End!

I love Glasgow, but it's not a place to be without a watch (or a mobile phone that tells the time). As far as I can tell, none of the old clocks in the inner city are actually working.

I raved about Glasgow in the Escape section of the Queensland Sunday Mail a few weeks ago; now it seems I'm not the only traveller to rate the city highly. Lonely Planet has just named Scotland's biggest city as one of the top 10 cities in the world, along with Antwerp, Beirut, Chicago, Lisbon, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Warsaw and Zurich.

Fireworks were banned in Queensland when I was still a child; but they are still on sale in China (no surprise) and in Scotland (big surprise to me). Of course, the companies selling them are very responsible, issuing lots of warnings about how to use them properly. Ijust hope that, come November 5*, the people using them are responsible too.
* The day after my birthday and, to a lesser extent, Guy Fawkes' Night.

Like many cities, Glasgow has a problem with bill posters - people who illegally paste advertisements, usually for musical performances, on walls and fences. Here, a lot of these posters have a red sticker placed across them saying "Cancelled". But these shows have not been cancelled, it's just somebody's rather clever way of neutralising the poster's actions.

Accents are in the ear of the beholder. I've always thought, somewhat arrogantly I suppose, that I have a "neutral" accent that is easy to understand no matter where English is spoken. I was chatting to a Polish woman today who was complaining about the Glasgow accent being difficult to comprehend, and I was tempted to agree with her - until I remembered that earlier in the day a railway ticket seller couldn't understand me. As a visitor here, it's my responsibility to speak so I can be understood, and to learn to listen properly so I can understand others.

Feelings over football run high in Glasgow. It's a city divided between supporters of Celtic and Rangers, and it's a serious business. So serious, in fact, that the soapie Coronation Street has changed its script after complaints from Rangers fans. The producers received "dozens" of negative comments from north of the border when Tony Gordon, a Scottish character in the Manchester-set series, said: "I could no more be interested in Rosie Webster than I could support Glasgow Rangers." A future, similar comment has now been axed.

In the past week I've received a can of soft drink, two packets of tea bags and a football simply for buying Glasgow's Evening Times from a street vendor. Bargain.

One thing that has been made perfectly clear to me since I have been in Glasgow is that I am a sinner. Fire-and-brimstone street preachers are everywhere around the city on the weekends, and they are apparently competing to convert the most heathens. Sadly, most of them seem to have had charisma bypasses. As Tom Lehrer almost said, if they really want to sell the product in this secular age, they've got to get with it.

I bought a computer printer yesterday and the salesman at Currys offered me a USB cable to link it to my Macbook for the knockdown bargain price of 14.99 pounds. I declined, because I thought I already had one. I didn't - but I went to a discount store and bought one for 1 pound. Somebody is making a killing on those cables.

So here I am in Glasgow, eating Vegemite on toast and reading brisbanetimes.com.au, and I notice this advertisement on the site's front page:

On the subject of coincidences, two weeks ago I stayed in room no. 328 at the Ibis Frankfurt Airport hotel. My room number at the Rennie Mackintosh Railway Hotel in Glasgow? 328, of course.

It's not unusual to run into a man named McGregor in Glasgow, but it is when the bloke who comes up from behind to ask you for directions is somebody you first met 30 years ago half a world away. Running into Brisbane journalist Adrian McGregor was one of two coincidences that have happened to me since I arrived in Scotland three days ago. The first happened after I emailed a Glaswegian friend in Shanghai about my plans to take a flat here, and he told me he owned an apartment that would be available next month. I couldn't wait that long, so I went to a letting agent. The first place I saw (and have applied to let) turned out to be in the same building as my friend's flat. His is No.2 on the sixth floor; this one is No.6 on the second floor!