Five Things I have Learned This Week #13

1?—?Shohei Ohtani’s problems may have been solved if he had listened to the Dalai Lama.?

If you haven’t been following the story, Japanese ultra-super-mega-star baseball player Shohei Ohtani, one of two swings Major League Baseball has of making its sport interesting in the long run (the other being a well received and successful rule change to speed games up), has been ripped off by his interpretor.?

To be clear, Ohtani-san is the most important baseball player since Babe Ruth, 100 years ago. The MLB has changed rules to allow him to do all the things he can do in the same game…he pitches, he bats. (In cricketing terms, we would call him an all rounder, but baseball is different. Apparently.)?

But he has been caught in a fraud, whereby payments from his bank account have been made to a known bookmaker, Mathew Bowyer. I love this phrase, “known bookmaker”. It sounds so insiduous. Like when The Dude described Jackie Treehorn as a “known pornographer”.?

The general view is that the payments were made without Ohtani’s knowledge by his interpretor, who had a gambling problem. The interpretor, Ippei Mizuhara, has been Ohtani’s interpretor since 2017.?

I can understand someone landing in a foreign country, with a totally different alphabet, nodding and smiling as someone you trust (Ohtani had known Mizuhara for a few years prior to 2017) helps you fill out forms. And I want to believe the Ohtani story here, that Mizuhara was a bad actor who used privelaged access to his boss’s accounts he gave himself years ago to fund his gambling addiction.?

In 2014, the Dalai Lama visited Japan. In a trip to a school in Osaka, he was asked why Tibetans faced trouble. He replied that they “failed to use their intelligence at the appropriate time by paying attention to what was going on elsewhere in the world”. Japan, he went on, faced a similar threat, and he repeatedly encouraged the students in his audience to learn English to improve their international relations.?

If only Shohei Ohtani had been at that school.?

2?—?Bagpipers in Scotland have a very fixed repertoire. I don’t blame them, “Just Play The Hits” is a common and fair refrain from concert attendees to the band. Most of what pipers play is very “Scottish”, capital S. We’re talking “Scots Whe Hae”, “Scotland the Brave”, and my personal all time favourite?—?“Highland Cathedral”.?

But if you wander down Princes Street, you’ll often hear the theme tune from the Last of the Mohicans blasted out from the speakers. This is a tricky tune, so I can see why the kids giving their all on the pipes giving it a skip, but they shouldn’t!?

The Last of the Mohicans is set in the USA and has little to do with Scotland, but the main theme was a re-working of a melody by Scottish musician Dougie Maclean called “The Gael”. As a tune for the pipes, there are fewer more evocative choices that really give the bagpipes their best life.?

3?—?I’m not sure if you spotted, but Dougie Maclean is famous. In 1977, he wrote a song called “Caledonia”.?

When Ian and I started our plan to build a distillery, one of the things we really wanted was a video booth in the entrance lobby that showed Tennents adverts on loop. We grew up on Tennents ads, and they were amazing. More so that they were made in Leith, by the Leith Agency.?

But the best of them all was the Caledonia advert. I defy anyone to watch that advert without a tear in their eye. It’s about as perfect as it gets.?

The snippet of the song that appears in the advert was recorded by Frankie Miller in 1991, specifically for the advert. Miller only recorded the rest of the song after being inundated with requests.?

4?—?More hilariously, let’s talk about Highland Cathedral. As a child, I played the trumpet and my school had both an orchestra and a pipe band. Our best trick was to have the orchestra play a tune, and then unleash the pipe band who would march out into the aisles of the venue and compete with the orchestra for volume of playback. Highland Cathedral was a favourite.?

Let’s imagine this was 1999. Highland Cathedral was only composed in 1982 by Germans Ulrich Roever and Michael Korb for a Highland Games held in Germany. This makes our highly audible renditions of 1999 closer to the tune’s composition than today.?

Both Caledonia and Highland Cathedral have been suggested as alternative ideas for Scotland’s national anthem.?

5?—?Frankie Miller was born in Glasgow in 1949. From a 2024 perspective, his Spotify account is sparse…four songs over a million plays. And Caledonia only at 2.5m! But this disguises the real story. In 1994, he suffered a brain aneurism and was in a coma for five months. When he awoke, he couldn’t walk or talk.?

In 1998, after a period of rehabilition, a benefit concert was held at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh featuring fans of Miller’s including Bonnie Tyler and Jools Holland. In 2016, he released “Frankie Miller’s Double Take”, featuring collaborations with Elton John, Willie Nelson, Kid Rock, Rod Stewart, Huey Lewis…the list goes on.?

I find the music industry a black hole. Who is in, who is out…how albums are made. It’s a snake pit. But I always find it instructive to see who is willing to make time for other artists on, probably unprofitable, collab albums. And for Miller to have such a high calibre roster on his suggests we should spend more time listening to his music.?