Tick

TRUMP supporters in America are calling for a boycott of Nike products after the company started using quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the first NFL player to kneel during the national anthem, in its advertisements. Nike might also run into problems in Scotland with its new range of Air Max hiking boots. The company has given them the name Bowfin not realising that Scots children shouting at their mates "Your trainers are bowfin" might not be such a good idea.

By George

TALKING of President Trump, we ask a reader in America what the current thinking is on the controversial leader and she tells us: "I just hope there's never a president who makes us look nostalgically at Trump the way Trump is making us look at George W Bush."

All in the past

GROWING old continued. Have you noticed that Facebook is sending us pictures from our past? Says Bill Russell: "Facebook has just sent me a memory I can't remember. If it cares for me that much why doesn't it tell me what it is?"

Tree-mendous

SAD to see that actress Jacqueline Pearce, who played the awesome Servelan in television series Blake's Seven has died. Glasgow photographer Wattie Cheung tells us he met her at a science fiction festival at Braehead a few years ago where he told her that he thought she was one of the sexiest ladies on the telly when he was growing up. She blew him a kiss then added: "Can I tell you a story? I was once being interviewed and was told that I was fantasy material for a whole generation of boys having their first sexual urges, something which I never knew."

She also helped run a monkey sanctuary in South Africa and once told the tale of being out in the wilds and needing the loo. She did what she had to do beside the trail then wrapped it up in a baby wipe and threw it into the undergrowth. Unfortunately it hit a tree and stuck there, so she felt it was scarring the view and reluctantly climbed up the tree to retrieve it.

It's a date

CAN also remember Jacqueline receiving a TV award, and while on stage she told the audience that she and many of her girlfriends had never been lucky in their choice of men. She then added: "One of my girlfriends phoned me the other day to say she was in bed with her boyfriend when her husband came home unexpectedly and shouted, 'What are you doing?'. She turned to her boyfriend and said, 'Didn't I tell you he wasn't very bright?'"

Smile

AH, technology. As broadcaster Lauren Laverne commented yesterday: "My 10-year-old just asked if he should brush his teeth 'electric or acoustic'."

Snow fair

JOHN Scott, the QC leading the Scottish Government inquiry into policing during the miners' strike, has urged former miners to speak about their experiences. It was a grim time the two-year strike but a reader did tell us once about the picketing miners who built a beautiful snowman to relieve the tedium at the picket line which was destroyed when a police van reversed into it. The next day the snowman was rebuilt with a fake police helmet on its head. Again a police driver drove into it. The snag was the miners had rebuilt it over a metal traffic bollard.

Bedtime story

TODAY'S piece of daftness comes from a reader who sends us an article on ghosts which relates: "The most common ghosts are the visions dressed in white sheets with flailing arms. These are people who died changing their duvets. They roam bedrooms, forever trying to find the corners."