THE RUBBISH PARTY CLEANS UP THE VOTES

How refreshingly honest of Sally Cogley to call her political party Rubbish. Most rely on hyperbole and subterfuge. She formed it last March and two months later won a seat on East Ayrshire Council, pledging to clean up Irvine Valley of discarded litter and dog poo. Her slogan was “Vote Sally for a better Valley”.

The one-woman party even won more seats, rather seat, than Ukip. Sally may be excellent at getting volunteers to litter pick, but she’s not great on social media, in fact she’s rubbish. Her website was impossible to access when I tried, several times during the week, throwing up a 404 error, whatever that is.

Nonetheless her efforts to clean up her town, Galston, still continue, although it looks like a Sisyphean task, from what I could see. Among the principal litter louts are pupils at Galston Academy who happily discard their crisp and fag packets, drug wraps and other junk as they walk from the town to school.

So bad is it that the council employs two scaffies to follow them every school day picking up their detritus. In these enlightened PC times we can no longer just box their ears.

DUCK ME, IT’S AN ABOMINATION

Not content with burning down the poor man’s art school, twice, even more horror, contumely, disgrace and pure bad taste has been heaped upon Charles Rennie Mackintosh, this time by Glasgow City Council through its marketing arm Glasgow Life. Behold the Mackintosh Duck, or Quackintosh you might call it, sold at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which ought to know better.

This hideous, plastic monstrosity, priced ludicrously at £6.99, is a floating, nodding insult to everything Mackintosh believed in, excellence, good design and innovation. This is a crime against art and history.

FLIPPIN’ HECK IT’S THE REAL THING

Today sees the opening of the World Bog Snorkelling Championships where competitors swim or scrabble, twice, along a 60-yard muddy trench wearing flippers and a snorkel. This sounds exactly like the kind of S&M event some unnamed celebrities (you know who you are ...) might enjoy.

International Rocket Week also starts today. Nominate your own contestant. Donald Trump is too easy. And this week marks the 125 anniversary of the invention of Pepsi, a decade and a bit after Coke, and still trying to catch up.

GREAT TOMORROW’S WORLD FAILURES (1)

The long-running BBC show previewing the devices we’d be using in the future claimed that within a couple of years, and by now, we’d all be wearing paper underwear. That one was a load of pants.

THE GARDEN OF COSMIC DELIGHTS

Sadly I missed the one day a year the Garden of Cosmic Speculation is open. It was at the beginning of May, at Portrack House, near Dumfries. It’s a sculpture garden, the creation, over some 30 acres, of landscape architect and theorist Charles Jenks. From the pictures it looks amazing.

It’s inspired by science and mathematics, with 20 areas laid out as metaphors, such as the DNA garden, Quark Walk, Fractal terrace and Comet Bridge, and as well as the visual feast, apparently all the plants are edible.

The annual opening raises money for Maggie’s Centres, the cancer care charity named after Jencks’ late wife Maggie. Jencks, an American by birth, came up with the theory of post-modernism – no, I missed that too – and has written extensively about it.

The garden is near the place with the shortest place name in Britain, Ae, with around 200 inhabitants. According to one 19th century historian the villagers of Ae were “long famed for broils, battles and feats of activity”. Hopefully it has calmed down.

BRANSON AND THE NEW MEXICO PICKLE

Still on cosmic speculation there’s the sad case of the small New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences and Spaceport America, which was meant to be the base of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic – for $250,000 you could take a trip into space with his chief pilot, Helmsdale’s own Dave Mackay – but has turned into a multi-million dollar chimera. What was meant to host a thriving space industry and be a gateway to the stars has turned into a futurist tourist attraction, with a life-size replica of Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo (One was destroyed in the 2014 test flight) near to the company’s empty offices.

It was claimed to be the first purpose-built commercial spaceport on 18,000 acres of desert land, with Virgin the anchor tenant and although there have been some sub-orbital launches the facility is still an expensive white elephant and Branson has not shifted HQ from California.

In 2006, the then New Mexico governor Bill Richardson struck a deal with Branson to build the facility with Virgin Galactic’s headquarters there, which cost the state $220 million in public funds (with further subventions later). The place was meant to deliver $75m in taxes by 2029, but that looks a fond hope.

The wonderfully named Truth or Consequences, from where you travel to the spaceport, is in Sierra County, one of the poorest places in the US with more than one-in-four families below the poverty line. The town changed its name from Hot Springs in 1950, taking its new one, for some unfathomable reason, from a popular radio quiz show after the quizmaster vowed to broadcast once from any place that did. There's not much more truth to say about it. Bruce Springsteen mentions it in the song Last to Die, and part of an episode of Doctor Who was filmed there.

Virgin pilot Mackay’s ambition to become a spaceman was forged in the north of Scotland as a seven-year-old watching RAF pilots practising low flying over his home in Sutherland (while, no doubt, neighbours were complaining about the racket). He was one of the pilots involved in the fatal SpaceShipOne catastrophe, at the controls of the accompanying mother ship when it broke up in mid-air. Apparently, around 1,000 people, not put off, have signed up for Mackay to pilot them into space (if it ever happens). This clan member is not one of them.