Glasgow is supposed to be the coolest city in Britain according to some recent survey or other. I’m sure the results are flawed though. Half of the people surveyed probably thought that the coolness was the kind measured in fahrenheit and the other half were probably mental health outpatients.

That’s not to say that Glasgow isn’t cool. I think it’s cool. I think it’s cool like the inside of a fridge- cold and dark - and I think that it can be quite coool maaan sometimes too.

Some of the locals attempt to address the issue of climatic coolness by trying to pretend that Glasgow is actually really really sunny. They do this by spraying themselves orange on a regular basis. (Which unfortunately and not unironically has a direct and inversely proportional effect on their Fonzie-from-Happy-Days coolness). One such establishment for the oranging of the masses is the hip and cosmopolitan Miami Beach Club. (Yes that is barbed wire).

I was coming home drunk one night when I came across a big pile of bananas in the street. But I didn’t get a very good photograph because it was dark and I was wrecked and too busy being drunkenly amazed by the banana-based absurdity to get a good picture.

Hello Burning Salad. Here I am again. It’s been a while hasn’t it?

And so… the hiatus. Yes well I didn’t really plan that to happen, it was just the way things worked out. I didn’t post for a few days… then a week or so. And I was getting in an increasingly bad mood with the world at large. Then the sort of gnawing feeling I sometimes get when I don’t post for while went away and I just thought fuck it, I’m not going to post anything for a while and who cares. And then I thought maybe I won’t post anything ever again. (This made me feel better). And then I thought okay I better post something to say thanks, goodnight, Burning Salad is no more. But then it seemed better to just wait and see what happened, in case I missed it and decided to post something every now and then.

And then… time passed. And I got a kind of backlog of things that I would normally write about. And I didn’t write about them because starting doing something is always harder than actually doing it.

And here I am. The truth is, I was just getting a bit cheesed off with everything. But who cares about that now. Not I. Hello again.

The preceding three month Burning Salad hiatus will now be referred to as Black Spring. (There are a few Black Mondays out there; a bunch of Black Tuesdays; a Black Wednesday; an unbelievable number of Black Fridays; a smattering of Black Sundays, a clutch of Black Thursdays and more than a couple of Black Saturdays just to round things out).

Well nothing especially out of the ordinary happened during Black Spring but I’ve never really talked about anything out of the ordinary on here anyway, so there a few things worth mentioning. Actually quite a lot of things.

What now follows, in a sort of chrono-illogical order, is the ‘highlights’ of Black Spring…

Anyone who has tuned in over the last week will probably have noticed that the site has been playing up a bit. I noticed it myself recently. Every so often at random the site would become unreachable for anything from minutes to hours. And anyone who tried to visit yesterday would have found the site totally unreachable. Basically the server folded. That’s it in a nutshell. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but it did.  It just pulled down its pants and collapsed.

And unless you’re happy surfing the web as a series of blank white pages that each take 3 minutes to load, servers imploding is not a good thing. I didn’t think it was a good thing either. Luckily I had taken a backup. And I have to admit that although I do back up my data it’s not something I do perhaps as often as I should; so the fact that this is the second time things have gone into meltdown right after a full backup is surely some kind of omen. The gods of the internet reminding me who’s boss.

So anyway I still had to deal with the fact that the site was down and I had to do something about it. So I did. I switched servers. To cut a long and boring story short I stayed up waay past my bedtime fiddling around to get the site back up and online… from my flat in Glasgow I moved the site from somewhere in Texas to Portland Oregon. If you want to get technical about it, Burning Salad now comes to you via the Time Warner internet backbone from a Duel Xeon Dell PowerEdge server.

Anyway, I’m just really happy that I managed to get it sorted out. It could have potentially gone so wrong. There will no doubt still be a few gremlins here and there so if you spot something wonky or find something broken, drop me a comment to let me know. (And if you emailed me over the last 48 hours, it went into a black hole… you’ll have to resend it.)

I was just checking on some Wikipedia pages when I came across this photo of Mark Arm.

What a great picture. Mr. Arm- you win the competition for pictures of men sitting in chairs in their front gardens, hands down.