Weekend life: It's 48 hours 'til Monday

Scotland goes into cultural overdrive this weekend with a selection of goodies diverse enough to please everyone from the dome-headed aesthete to the bone-gnawing drooler. Those in the latter category will be wagging their tails at the thought of Cesar Milan's show at the SECC tomorrow night.

For those of you who haven't come across Cesar Milan, he is a Mexican dog trainer or, to use his stage vocabulary, a "dog whisperer" whose TV shows have made him a star in the States. No matter how unruly the pooch, Milan appears to be able to correct their errant behaviour. He is often pictured on roller skates being towed by a pack of hounds through the streets of Los Angeles. If only Barbara Woodhouse had employed a similar tactic then she might have been a global star.

As with all things dog-related, Milan's many fans are fiercely loyal to him and devoted to his methods. Some are so taken with his skills that they try to use them in their human relationships. I imagine that getting people to sit on command is easy enough. Training them to fetch sticks or proffer a paw before being allowed their din dins might be trickier.

There probably won't be much of a crossover between the dog whisperer's audience and those attending the final day of the Aye Write festival in Glasgow today. There are some light-hearted activities such as Anne Butler's Sticky Kids sing-along taking place but, later in the day, the big guns are wheeled out with Susie Orbach, David Aaronovitch and Germaine Greer all setting out their stalls.

If you would rather hear more off-colour gags than geopolitical analysis and gender theory then you are in luck as this is the first weekend of the Magners Glasgow International Comedy Festival. Possibly the biggest name playing this weekend is Jim Jeffries, whose bleak tales of drink-sodden misadventure and penile cancer, are, curiously, proving a big hit in the States. Jeffries will be hanging off his mic stand tomorrow evening, but less caustic fun can be had tonight when Henning Wehn plays a gig. The central conceit of Wehn's material is that he is the German comedy ambassador, in the UK on a mission to convince Albion that his country is not the humour-free land of legend.

Back on the east coast, The Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum in Dunfermline is currently hosting an exhibition of photography by the Fife industrialist Erskine Beveridge. The pictures show Victorian and Edwardian Scotland just as the country was about to undergo major social and economic upheavals. It's interesting to ponder how Cesar Milan might have fared in those days.

Visit www.cesarsway.com; www.ayewrite.com; www.glasgowcomedyfestival.com; www.nationalgalleries.org; www.carnegiebirthplace.com

• This article was first published in The Scotsman, Saturday March 13, 2010