The Scottish Snippets Newsletter in its original format began in April 1997 and continued in an unbroken series for 591 issues. Although no longer produced in that style, there is now this regular update on the new and updated pages on the Rampant Scotland site including "Scottie's Photo Diary From Scotland".
To receive a text version of this newsletter as a reminder to look at these Web pages when they are published, just send an e-mail to Scottie@RampantScotland.com with "Subscribe Newsletter" in the subject line.
Paisley Abbey
With daytime maximum temperatures reaching only 5C/41F at best and with strong cold winds from Siberia plus heavy snow falls, not just in the north and east but in the Isle of Arran off the west coast, leaving hundreds of homes with no power for over a week it seemed a good idea to find somewhere inside to visit! Paisley Abbey has been undergoing some refurbishment in anticipation of its 850th anniversary of its founding this year and its a while since I've been inside the impressive building. It is one of the longest churches in Scotland and the stained glass windows are a delight. As a result of my latest visit, I've updated and improved the "Places to Visit" page on Paisley Abbey and added a Web-based slide show of photos taken inside and outside the building. See Places to Visit - Paisley Abbey. There is a link to the slide show in that page.
Scottish Screensaver Graphics to Download
In the days of black and white cathode ray tube monitors, screensavers were initially designed to prevent phosphor burn-in on PC computer monitors by blanking the screen or filling it with moving images or patterns when the computer was not in use. When the need for such software became redundant, however, they had become popular for entertainment. In recent years, free software to display a user's own graphics have become widely available - even to the extent of Microsoft Windows including a screensaver as a standard part of their installation. But if you want a screensaver of pictures of Scotland (of course you do!) it's not easy to get large size graphics to fit. So I've started to create a selection of larger sized graphics have been compressed using Winzip software. The first two of these are available for download I hope that more will follow. The first batch of castles contains 32 graphics and the Zip file is 20.6mb. A collection of pictures of Glasgow has 33 graphics and is 23.9mb and a selection of Edinburgh graphics is in the pipeline. See the details on Scottish Screensaver Graphics to Download.
Scottish Place Names in St John, New Brunswick, Canada
Due to feedback and further research, Ian Kendall has been busy updating the pages in his series on Scottish place names found in towns and cities around the world. The latest revision is for St John, New Brunswick, Canada. Of the names of the 126 towns and neighbourhoods that have been identified to date in Greater Saint John, 32 (25.4%) can be found as place names in Scotland, or are based on Scottish family names and royal titles, or have some other form of connection with Scotland. Of course, some of these names are used in other parts of the British Isles as well, but at least 15 of them (11.9%) appear to have a unique connection with Scotland, whether directly or indirectly. For all the details, see Scottish Place Names in St John, New Brunswick, Canada.
Next Newsletter
The next newsletter is scheduled for 28 April. There will be more large size Sottish graphics - a collection of Edinburgh pictures will be the main feature. And although the forecasters are predicting that below average temperatures will continue to at least the middle of April, hopefully there will be more picture opportunities - even if it's only because the clocks change this weekend in the UK for "British Summer Time" and there's an extra hour of useful daylight!
Yours aye
Scottie
Previous editions of this Newsletter are available in an Archive. The Index to the other pages of the Rampant Scotland site is available here.
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