My Top 10 Christmas Songs

When December begins, it’s time to dust off the old Christmas songs and let them be shuffled along with the rest of my iTunes library.  It’s a shame that these songs are confined to only a month of the year, with most of them being able to bring some cheer no matter what sort of day you’re having, but in the same vein it’s hard to enjoy a song singing of snow and Christmas cheer in the heat of July! Everybody has their favourite Christmas — Read more →

Songs of the Month: November 2014

It’s rather hard to believe that we’re already into December, with the momentous year of 2014 almost behind us.  This year’s been exceptionally good music-wise, and this month’s produced lots of great tunes as well.  Here’s a few of my favourites I’ve added to my iTunes this month: CHVRCHES – “Dead Air” A band that’s come to be one of my favourites in the short space of a year, yet again they’ve released a fantastic new track – this time featuring in the new Hunger — Read more →

More crumbs for Scotland

The much-heralded Smith Commission report into further devolution for Scotland was published today, with the results of a two-month five-party investigation on what powers to give the Scottish Parliament finally being set out. While the Smith Commission’s recommendations are definitely a step in the right direction, and definitely give Scotland more power than it has ever had within the Union, it does miss some vital opportunities to give real and meaningful devolution to the Scottish Parliament. Let’s start off with the good parts of the — Read more →

The National launches to support independence

Newspaper launches might be rare nowadays, but yesterday saw The National‘s first issue as it attempts to give a pro-independence voice in the print media.  It’s not quite got the esteem and weight of the bigger papers that dominate print journalism yet, but as a start it’s been more than promising. It’s now over two months since the referendum that encapsulated Scotland; but even though the result was a No vote by a margin of 55-45 percent, the Yes campaigners have not backed down in their — Read more →

The latest chapter in FIFA corruption saga

The FIFA circus continued last week as the much-awaited internal report into strongly alleged corruption within the organisation, specifically relating to the bids for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, was published.  FIFA was found innocent of any corruption and the only party admonished in the investigation was England, for their “disruption” of the bidding process by alleging that there was impropriety afoot on behalf of some of the bidders. The thing is though that the actual report wasn’t published, just a summary of it — Read more →