Stop the bus

YAY! The Edinburgh Festival starts this week. But not everyone in our nation's capital is excited. As local Liam Rudden put it: "Okay, Edinburgh. Time to add 20 minutes to your bus journeys, as every tourist boarding mistakes the bus driver’s cab for a tourist information office."

And we like the explanation of stand-up Hayley Ellis whose show at The Mash House begins tomorrow. As she said: "It’s best to book tickets in advance, because last year I had to turn people away at the door to give the impression I’d actually sold out."

Stamp out

SOME performers, no matter how successful, always like to recall previous failures at the Edinburgh Fringe. We bump into absurdist comic Olaf Falafel – not his given name we suspect – appearing at the Laughing Horse who recalled: "Five years ago, I was doing a three-hander near Haymarket Station. We only had four in the audience. Halfway through during my bit two of them got up to leave so I checked what it was that I'd said to make them go. They replied that they were only in because they needed somewhere to wait while their passports were being processed. They'd just had a text saying they were ready to pick up leaving us with more comedians than audience. I asked the remaining two if they'd like us to carry on, and it turned out they were Italian and spoke very little English."

Coining it

GROWING old continued. A Knightswood reader tells us: "If I drop a 10p piece on the ground these days then it stays there. Bending down is a young man's game."

It sucks

DOING your bit for the environment can be tricky these days. A reader in a Glasgow cafe heard an auld fella question a sign on the counter saying that plastic straws were now banned. "We have to keep them out of the ocean," the young girl behind the counter earnestly explained when he asked. "Why's that?' replied the old chap. "Are they worried about a shark wi' a moothful o' straws sucking the blood out of some swimmer?"

Fizzing

A WEST End reader was unhappy with the amount of litter she saw scattered in Kelvingrove Park last week. "You would think," she phoned to tell us, "that people who drink those energy drinks would then have the energy to put the cans in the bins rather than leave them on the ground."

Jagged

GOODNESS, that Bettered League Cup is a bit complicated, trying to work out at the weekend which teams had qualified for the next round. As Partick Thistle foot-soldier Foster Evans puts it: "Being a Thistle fan: Saturday 4.45pm – fail to qualify, Sunday 4.45pm – qualify due to unexpected high scoring defeat of Inverness by Hearts, Sunday 5.15pm – draw Celtic in next round.

"Triumph is so fleeting."

All Greek

MORE on tour buses as Ian McLean in Hawick tells us: "While visiting the Acropolis on a bus tour of Athens we heard an American tourist say, as her husband was about to take a family photo with the Doric columns of the Parthenon in the background, 'Honey try and get some of them pole things in'.”

Pick up a penguin

EDINBURGH Zoo announced that their famous penguin Sir Nils Olav was 16 years old yesterday. It reminds a reader of the, no not old, but classic, yarn of the chap who found a penguin wandering the streets of Edinburgh, and when he asked a passing policeman what he should do with it, was told he should take it to Edinburgh Zoo. The next day the police officer spotted him still with the penguin and asked: "I thought you were taking it to the zoo?" "I did," he replied. "And today I thought we'd go to the beach at Portobello."

Hard to swallow

TODAY'S piece of daftness comes from a south side reader who emails: "To the thief who stole my anti-depressants - I hope you're happy now."