Maybe once upon a time tartans were something your granny used for her knee-rug. But not today! Tartans are now the hippest most happening way to bring a dash of pizazz to anything and everything that grabs your brainbox. And if you don’t believe me, just check out this quick run-down of the funkiest funniest plaids on the planet!!

10. Duck Under My Kilt

My friend MacDuck here just quacks me up. Bathtime will never be the same again now that I can bring a touch of tartan into my world of suds. Doesn’t he just make those plain yellow versions so… yesterday! Photo by Roger.The.Dodger

Read the rest of the ten funniest things in tartan…

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Scottish Culture minister Linda Fabiani revealed on the BBC yesterday that the Scottish Government (as which we all now should refer to the old Scottish Executive, after Alex Salmond correctly concluded that the old impenetrable name meant nothing to the public, having presumably been chosen by the London government with exactly that intent) intends to conduct an official audit of the Scots Language. Now, my first thought is to ask which Scots language?

It seems to me that one encounters a different Scots when travelling from Leith to Morningside (hell, Leith to Portobello!) let alone between

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In one of those about-turns best described as ‘better late than never’, the US Library of Congress has just reversed a rather unfortunate (not to say culturally ignorant) decision to reclassify all Scottish authors as “English”. The controversial proposal to extinguish the highly regarded contribution of Scottish literature as a distinctive entity from the official record met with a storm of protest from academics, politicians, and authors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Overnight, authors like John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson, poets such as Robert Burns and the great McGonagall, and modern day bestsellers from JK Rowling to Iain (M) Banks would all have been recategorised as belonging to the English canon. Playwright and Poet Laureate Liz Lochhead, in typically restrained language, had accused the American authorities of ‘cultural imperialism’. And even the British Library went way out on a limb to ‘welcome the decision’ when news of the reversed decision came through.

It seems that the original misguided intention stemmed partly from a widespread and basic misunderstanding of the nature of language and languages, which for example calls English a ‘language’ but Scots a ‘dialect’, when any specialist academic will confirm that both have equal claim to authority. Which gets called which is a political statement, and nothing to do with linguistics. But few in the world of literature would challenge the fact that Scottish literature has always, rightly, been regarded as its own tradition. And for now, fortunately, it can remain so in the US too.