Stirling

The Straubhaars just can't get enough of castles in Scotland. Here you see my siblings Nola, Shirley (sister in law), Carol and Jack heading into Stirling Castle, which was very impressive.

It is across a valley from a tower monument to William Wallace, the Scots hero fictionalized in Braveheart, which you can see in the next photo.


Stirling Castle is also home to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment of Scots infantry. We went through their museum, which is sort of a historical trip through almost all of the U.K.'s imperial and overseas ventures. The next illustration is a painting, called the Thin Red Line, of one of their more famous stands, against a Russian charge at Balaclava.

It is interesting to me that Scotland, having been militarily re-conquered in a civil war as recent as 1746, when the Scots' Jacobite rebellion was put down very bloodily at Culloden (more on that later), now has one of the strongest military traditions of all the parts of the U.K. Not unlike the American South, which I am still trying to figure out.

Blackness claims Mel Gibson

After a day in Edinburgh, we headed the next day north toward Stirling and later Inverness. On the way, however, we were always game for a new castle or two. So we stopped at Blackness Castle, not far from the Edinburgh airport. Here you see the castle itself.

It was designed as a very strong, simple defensive castle -- not one of your fancy jobs that is more palace than castle. It held out pretty well against Oliver Cromwell, which is not true of many castles in England, Scotland or Ireland.


A nicer residence was added later, which you see here. The main castle has also been been used for several movies, including Mel Gibson's Hamlet.

The village of Blackness is a very cute place-- which you can see below. It not only has the castle, but a nice sailing ship harbor, a couple of pubs, a couple of bed and breakfast places, and a post office. It looked like a nice place to spend a quiet holiday, like finishing a book or something.

Vegetarian Haggis?

One of my favorite things in the whole world is the ever burgeoning supply of examples of global cultural hybridity. How else can you explain a sign in an Edinburgh pub window offering vegetarian haggis?

For you fortunately uninitiated into the mysteries of haggis, it is a sort of mealy sausage made of oatmeal stuffed into a sheep's stomach. (Yummers!)

It is often put out there as one of the definite parts of Scots cuisine, something very local and traditional. Interesting then, that someone wants to sell a vegetarian version to Scots and tourists who want to maintain their heritage while also joining the definitely non-traditional global move toward becoming vegetarian -- a very laudable trend, mind you, but not one I ever expected to see connected with haggis.

Edinburgh

Our second day in Scotland we explored Edinburgh. The first thing we all went to was Edinburgh Castle, which you can see here.

My sister Nola is crazy about castles, and as fans of most things medieval, Sandy, Chris and I are as well. In the next photo, you can see my sister Nola, Sandy, my brother Jack and his wife Shirley laughing uproariously at a cannon, for some reason ;<) Not really, but I did not hear the joke since I was too busy taking photos.

Sandy wanted to make immediately for the oldest part, an eleventh century chapel for Queen/Saint Margaret. You can see her in stained glass here from that chapel.

After that, we went to see an educational reenactment in the the castle's great hall by a man dressed up as an 18th century British sailor, who talked about how people got recruited into the Navy, using some young men in the audience, including Chris, as examples. You can see a photo of him checking out Chris' hands. Since Chris did not have too many calluses, he decided Chris might make a better blood-thirsty ship's Marine than a sailor.

After the castle, we wandered about getting people's tartan shopping needs taken care of, having lunch and seeing many churches and museums.

New Lanark

Sandy, Chris and I are touring around Scotland and Ireland for the next two weeks with three of my four brothers and sisters: Carol, Jack and his wife Shirley, and Nola. The first photo here shows my sister Nola and Sandy with our driver and tour guide, Mark. (We arranged the tour through Back Roads Tours of London, which will create a custom itinerary, provide a guide and driver-- leaving the driving, on the wrong side of narrow roads, to them.) Sandy is holding a bottle of Irn Bru (Iron Brew), Scotland's own soft drink.

Our first day, Mark picked us up at the Glasgow airport. That ironically let us also see the ancestral village of our Gardner ancestors (my mother's maiden name). The village they lived in for several hundred years, Bulgley Renfrew, is now underneath the Glasgow airport, so not too much left to see.

We also had ancestors in Lanark between Glasgow and Edinburgh, so we drove from the airport through the Clyde Valley, to Lanark. We stopped and looked at it and the utopian industrial community of New Lanark. The picture shows my sister Nola, Sandy, me, my sister Carol, my brother Jack and his wife Shirley on the hill above New Lanark.

New Lanark was where one rather benign industrialist, Robert Owen, created a cotton spinning industry to harness the falls on the River Clyde, and also deliberately designed a community where the workers got paid fairly decently, got good community housing and where their kids got an education. It lasted from the 1780s to 1960, and has been restored as a world heritage site.

Here is a view of New Lanark as we walked down toward it from the ridge (and parking lot) above.

The next picture shows a building which housed the education and leisure facilities for the community. Kids got basic education, adults could have dancing classes, adult literacy, etc. The statue supposedly shows a girl of the era.

Just up the Clyde River from New Lanark are some falls which show the vertical drop in the river that provided the water power for the cotton mills. There is a very nice nature walk along the river up toward the falls, so those of us who were feeling least jet-lagged, Jack, Sandy and me took a one kilometer hike up along the river, which you can see in the next photo.


The next photo shows the Corra Linn Falls, the first and most spectacular of three falls on the Clyde above Lanark. We got just about that far and discovered that we were a bit too jet lagged ourselves to keep going, so we went back and had lunch in New Lanark's cafeteria with the others. Then we motored on the rest of the way along the Clyde toward Edinburgh.

Why People Hate Hillary?

I have been and continue to be a major Obama fan this year. But I have also worried about some of the pretty blatant sexism that seems to seep out in many reactions to Hillary.

I have just never been able to figure out why many people hate her so much. Maybe this little best selling item reveals some of the reason.

Are there really many guys out there so insecure in their own masculinity that Hillary really threatens them? That seems sad, even tragic, all around--both for her and frankly for the guys who hate her.

For an interesting take on this see http://www.dailykos.com/

Why Clinton Lost: The Nutcracker.

by Trapper John

Sun Jun 08, 2008 at 09:07:01 PM PDT

RIP Alton Kelley

It sometimes seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far away, but San Francisco in the late 1960s was hugely significant in my own life, especially after I arrived at Palo Alto to go to school in August 1969, but also in the cultural life and imagery of the USA.

One of the things I tried to do was get up to as many concerts as I could. I saw lots of groups. But my favorite by far were the Grateful Dead, who I probably saw in concert 20 times in the four years in lived in the Bay Area.

Part of the appeal of the Dead and of the whole San Francisco concert scene was the poster art. I wish I had kept all the posters, handbills and illustrated tickets that went by in that four years. My favorite artists were Mouse and Alton Kelley, who designed the poster shown here that the Dead adopted as their official graphic image as well as an album cover.

One thing that was fun about them, which continues to enrich my life to this day, is that they did quite a bit of research on other graphics and design traditions and borrowed heavily from them, which often gives me a smile when I learn now about an artist who informed their work then.

You can see a picture of Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse here. Kelley just died at age 67. There were good stories about him in both the New York Times and NPR today. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91208912
and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/arts/design/04kelley.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

Here are a couple more of my favorite posters that Kelley and Mouse did. The first one is a good example of how they borrowed from famous designers, like Alphonse Mucha, of art nouveau fame.