RIP Stanley Robertson, Human Archive

Stanley Robertson: storyteller, singer and writer | Times Online Obituary

When Stanley Robertson appeared in the Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Festival in Washington in 2004, it was a meeting between a bricks-andmortar cultural repository and its flesh-and-blood equivalent.

Robertson had hundreds of hours of folk tales and a vast repertoire of traditional ballads and songs committed to memory. Regarded as a national treasure in Scottish traditional music circles and revered in storytelling circles as far afield as Denmark and the US, where storytelling events attract audiences in their thousands, Robertson could hold schoolchildren, pensioners, folk clubs and university conference delegates alike in thrall.

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What's This Year's Insult to the Scots?

Op-Ed Contributor - Keep Your Hands Off Our Haggis - NYTimes.com

The insult to the Scots this year is that haggis, the Scottish national dish, is not really Scottish, but English. Now this may seem a matter of little consequence to Americans, but how would the United States react if apple pie and turkey with cranberry sauce were to be claimed as the products of, say, French cuisine? Or if somebody asserted that baseball was invented by the Romanians (which it was)? These things are a matter of national pride, and people should take great care when talking about them.

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