Growing up in North Idaho one of the best ways to get a girls attention was by having a really big four wheel drive truck. Big trucks with tall tires, loud pipes and a stereo blaring anything from Hank Williams Junior to Van Halen all the while getting two or three miles to the gallon. A lot of really good looking, shallow, slutting girls fell for those trucks god bless ‘em. I couldn’t afford a big truck or even a small truck. I had a Chevy Nova and tended to play things on my car stereo like The Surf Punks, Led Zeppelin and an unknown band for Idaho called The Specials. My friends and I never really got along very well with the people in the big trucks and always felt as if they drove such things to make up for other short comings in their lives personal or otherwise. This kind of rational has stuck with me through the years so when I arrived in Edinburgh for this year’s Festival I was amazed at the size of the posters being put up. Massive things that homeless people could use as shelter if they folded them in half and publicity driven art work that would make Don Draper from Mad Men green with envy. Posters that obviously could never be put up by one student but rather a team of laborers guided by a poster engineer making sure that the maximum amount of space is used and no other lesser posters would have room to gain purchase and encroach upon their territory. I saw one poster that was at least four paces long and well above head high with art work so detailed and elaborate and beautiful that I wasn’t really sure what the show it was advertising was about. Maybe if I went across the street in order to see it better? The smaller posters near it must have felt pushed out of the field of vision like long established residents of Palestine.  Smaller posters advertising shows about monkeys or dating or something I unfortunately can’t remember as the information RAM in my head was temporarily full with what the largest poster was trying to tell me. I can’t even imagine what these tarps cost and the ego is must prop up as a result. Hopefully when this festival is all over and the clean up begins some guy living rough on the streets can save one of these things from the bin and use to it to protect himself from this year’s winter. I’m sure it’ll come as great comfort to be sheltered from the elements all the while knowing the show he’s under got 5 stars in last year’s Guardian.