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The earliest known figurative representation of the human form depicts an exaggeratedly proportioned pregnant woman carved from mammoth tusk.
That Hohle Fels Venus, discovered in 2008 in southern Germany, is at least 35,000 years old. According to its finder, Nicholas Conard, it ‘radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Palaeolithic art’.
Spurtle received a press release yesterday from Police Scotland. We reproduce it in full below.
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Officers in Edinburgh are appealing for the help of the public to establish the movements of a man whose body was found in the Water of Leith.
Beyond the fact that numbers of men are leaving the town for other work, nothing fresh transpires this morning in connection with this dispute from the men's point of view. The communication which came from Graham Hunter from the masters’ point of view has been referred to the Executive in Glasgow, and therefore, if the dispute is advanced a stage will come from that quarter. The strike roll now stands at about 550.
This interesting graffiti at the Broughton Street end of Albany Street Lane makes use of a pre-existing incision in a random flagstone.
At first glance it reads like a half-remembered song lyric, but in fact it loosely paraphrases part of Mao Zedong’s concluding speech to the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Party on 6 November 1938.
We thought it might be interesting today to quote from Zedong’s paradoxical Problems of War and Strategy at greater length.
Following our article about a (more interesting than expected) access cover on George Street, reader Sam Murray got in touch about another.
This one is situated on Clarendon Crescent, and includes the intriguing detail ‘BOYCE & JOHNSTON, BEAVER BANK FOUNDRY’. Murray and Spurtle investigated further.
W. D. Macgregor writes: The lecture by Judge Brown on Tuesday night on the housing of the Edinburgh poor has drawn attention to the condition of affairs in Greenside, and though it might perhaps be urged that the dark shadows in Judge Brown’s description are a trifle overdrawn, it will not be denied by anyone who knows the district that there is urgent need of improvement.
OK, let’s start by stating the obvious … Awwwwwwwwwwww!
Now we have your attention, we can move on. Are you thinking of buying a kitten?
If so, you’ll probably have noticed how hard they are to come by these days.
And those that are available tend to appear online at eye-boggling prices. A quick survey on Gumtree this morning showed prices ranging from £250 to £1,300. For a non-pedigree kitten, the average was £472.
These are prices hitherto almost unheard of.
Last night, the London Street Grocery closed its doors for the last time.
The shop – a staple of life in the barony for the last 53 years – is now shuttered and empty.
Business has dried up in the months since Covid struck, with many people staying at home and ordering deliveries to their doors. The prolonged suspension of Broughton’s restaurant trade (which the firm supplied with excellent fruit and veg) and the absence of Drummond pupils cannot have helped either.