Breaking news

The term ‘blue faced’, when it is not being used to describe a popular breed of longwool Leicester sheep, has an altogether more modern meaning with which many  readers will already be familiar.

Among hip people, like the Spurtle team, it refers to the practice of emailing or texting in such a way that the device used casts a blue-ish hue onto the face of the messager.

‘Hey, dude,’ we often say to each other at the start of the distribution process, ‘quit blue-facin. We’ve got to go and hit da hood with da ink.’

An unbuilt flat-pack chair sat gathering dust in our living room for several months. When built, it would transform our lives, or so I was told. In a way it did. 

I can’t stand flat-pack furniture. It’s probably the reason why I’ve never been to Sweden.

A couple of weeks ago, writes David Jackson Young, Spurtle encouraged readers unhappy with the post-festive state of St Andrew Square to contact Essential Edinburgh and copy the paper in on any correspondence (Breaking news, 18.1.15).

On 19 January I wrote to Essential Edinburgh via their website as follows:

Re: St Andrew Square Garden

The gushing Hose of News has been turned off.

The last article has been checked, corrected, rechecked and hand-burnished by craftspeople. No semicolons survive. The Editor is having a hissy fit. Spurtle’s legal adviser has gone to bed with two Ibuprofens and a bottle of whisky. All is well in the barony.

Issue 237 has now entered the eye-swivelling production stage and will be out on the streets of Broughton within days.

I have spent much of the past few months observing people’s bin behaviour, writes Fred Street of the New Town Clean Streets Campaign.

Not just communal bins – also gull bags, red and blue recycling boxes, food caddies, and trade waste bins. I've noted and plotted all sorts of psycho-social variables; performed extensive regression analyses; and have have now arrived at the following conclusion.

This New Town door to nowhere has long intrigued passers-by. It seemed to have no purpose. No-one ever came, no-one ever left. Only the graffiti changed.

Now, though, after years of neglect, the mysterious interior behind No. 134 Dundas Street will partially reopen to  public view.

A new shop – possibly called Smoking Hot but the staff member we spoke to wasn't sure – will open either tomorrow or on Wednesday, depending upon when the last of its stock is delivered.

A new work by Edinburgh figurative artist Deirdre Nicholls will go on show in Ayr next month.

The bust will form part of an exhibition organised by the Scottish National Trust, and is of Robert Burns.

Nicholls’s work is the product of careful research into written, painted and snipped accounts of the bard’s appearance, and may be the most accurate depiction of him ever seen.

However, this is an area fraught with difficulties, as will be realised by following this link. 

Are you at a loose end tomorrow?

More specifically … will you be at the loose end, holding a leash and expecting to see a bored, socially starved, sausage-shaped dog staring back at you from the other?

If so, you’re in luck.

Napier Bathrooms & Interiors in Canonmills are hosting an informal dachshund get-together on Sunday, involving more company, conviviality and dog-related conversation than you could possibly shake a chorizo at. 

The last good deed I did was in 2007, until two weeks ago.

I woke up and was in a good mood. The mother-in-law was due to leave in a few hours’ time, and today was going to be an excellent one.

She had one last thing to do before she left, and for reasons I can’t quite fathom, I said I would do it for her. 

That was my first mistake.

REVIEWED BY RHYS FULLERTON 

Beauty and the Right to the Ugly (BRU for short) is a major new work, conceived specifically for Collective’s City Dome on Calton Hill. 

It is presented as a three-channel film installation, and set in Het Karregat – a multifunctional community centre in Eindhoven. That Dutch building was designed by architect Frank Van Klingeren, who intended it as a way to enhance communal forms of living.