Notes for Expats on Scottish bands touring internationally and features on Scottish music, sport, film and the life written by and for Scots around the world. More →
Imagine you are the financial controller of a multi-million pound corporation. You discover that your new boss might have forged tax invoices for payments that were never made. What do you do? I’d like to think I’d call the cops. But if you’re Ken Olverman, the man in charge of counting the diminished pile of [...]
In 1996, Madeline Albright, then Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, was asked if she thought the death of half a million Iraqi children due to United Nation sanctions was a price worth paying in the cold war against Saddam Hussein. Her answer, amid much humming and ha’ing, was basically: “Yes”. Albright later castigated herself for [...]
“The butterfly effect” is a classic illustration of chaos theory: an insect flapping its wings in Macau can, weeks later, cause a hurricane in Miami. The point is that in a complex system, a seemingly insignificant act can cause a major change at a faraway time and place. I think the butterfly effect helps explain [...]
There’s only one story in Scottish football at the moment, and it isn’t the aftermath of the Slovenia v Scotland friendly last week (decent performance, nothing to write home about). So I make no apologies for writing about Rangers again. The club has been in administration for almost a month now, and still speculation outweighs [...]
“I will admit there have been times when I have wished that I had never entertained the idea of taking over Rangers,” you said in a public statement on Wednesday. There are times when I wish the same: from the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep. A few weeks ago [...]
“I’m all out of love, what am I without you?” – Air Supply Hong Kong can’t live without Air Supply. Aging Aussie soft rock crooners Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock retain astonishing popularity in the city. Their most famous dirge frequently pollutes the public airwaves, and decades after their 1980’s heyday they regularly sell out [...]
You need a degree in accountancy to be a Rangers fan these days. On Tuesday, the Daily Record broke the story that Rangers’ owner Craig Whyte sold four years’ worth of Rangers season ticket sales to fund his takeover of the Govan club. Later that same day, Whyte released a statement admitting the deal happened [...]
Rangers owner Craig Whyte banned the BBC from Ibrox because he said a documentary they produced was “muckracking”. He should have banned them because it was just a pile of s**t. “Rangers: The Inside Story” was sensationalist and shoddy, a tangled mess of half facts and guilt-by-association. And it didn’t answer the most important question: [...]
Living in China, I’m used to reading stories of police wading into crowds to pull down banners deemed offensive to the authorities, and dragging away the ‘troublemakers’ who unfurl these slogans. Still, the most recent article I read about this was surprising.
