Barack Obama last night gave his acceptance speech for the nomination as Presidential Candidate to a stadium packed with 75,000 supporters.
I've always been impressed by Barack Obama's oratory. I've also been impressed by his policies. His opponents claim he has none, but I don't agree. Just listen to the man!
After the last eight years of Bush, and some of the farcical shenanigans of Clinton, it can be easy to lose sight of how much power, energy and potential there remains in the USA. I've been dismayed to see such potential wasted under Bush and I have a lot of hope that Obama will turn things around as President.
I thought similar things about New Labour in 1997. I was horribly disappointed by that, and I think I will have any faith in the political classes crushed if Obama wins and willfully wastes the opportunity.
But so many things he says make me think he's genuine. How can you say something like this through a lie?
And you know what - it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.
I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don't fit the typical pedigree, and I haven't spent my career in the halls of Washington.
But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you.
Time, I suppose, will tell. In the interim, you can see his whole speech here:
Sadly, I have allergies and I react badly to many cats, but they seem to be fading. We figured that fostering would be a good way to go because we could see if we could tolerate being around the cat, see if we all got along, and perhaps keep the cat around if things worked out. Plus - we'll be helping look after abandoned animals, which is clearly good for the karma, if not so good for the dogma ('arf-'arf).
After a few hours of sniffing around and hiding in various places in the house, the little cat opened up and is super friendly as well as being quite a boisterous handful. I'm hoping we can sleep better tonight than we did last night.
I'm very pleased that the Orwell Prize is publishing his diaries in a blog format. Starting with August 9th, 1938, the diaries are going to be synchronised with the same dates 70 years later. This should be a fascinating view inside the head of a man I got to know through his mainstream published works only.
We've been chomping on salad from the garden for the last few weeks. It was incredibly easy to grow the salad:
Get a few growbags (£5)
Get some seeds (£3 - actually I got a load of Rocket seeds for Christmas)
Sprinkle the seeds onto the growbags
Sprinkle water on the growbags.
Forget about them for a while
Harvest
Eat!
My mum's neighbour, Collette, also gave me a packet of radish seeds. In French. I'm not a huge radish fan, but thought, "What the hell!" and threw them into a pot anyway. After 3-4 weeks they were huge!
Are we getting closer to the horror of the American redneck warehouse-style "Charismatic" Christian movement here in our beloved "Live and let live" UK?
Here's a fascinating documentary on the threat of Christian fundamentalism in the UK. It's on Youtube, so it's broken up into five parts.
There was all the usual stuff you'd expect with any documentary about religious fundamentalism:
Children getting indoctrinated and being educated off the National Curriculum: One child in particular sitting a "Science" test where the questions included, "How long did God take to create the Earth?" and "When did God create the Sun?"
Hatred of homosexuality and equating it with paedophilia and murder.
A victim complex, presumably for the purpose of galvanising the group to work harder against the perceived injustices of other people in the world living differently to them.
A vicious loathing of the big rival - Islam.
I really think that we should give our children the best possible start in life. That includes teaching them the facts of the world they live in and allowing them to explore knowledge with open minds. What I saw on this programme was tantamount to child abuse.
A load of beardy loons with placards and prayer is one thing, but warehouses full of thousands of evangelicals ready to support whatever they're told to support by their minister is quite another. The stated aim of these groups is to "Radically transform this nation for Christ's purposes". And they're getting advice and money from fundamentalists in the USA. Worse still, one scene in the documentary shows a fundamentalist lawyer handing an amendment to the recently-tabled abortion bill to Norman Tebbit, which he appears to have used verbatim in the process of lawmaking. This is the same lawyer who states her belief that the earth is 4,000 years old and that Islam is evil.
And it seems that these people have the foot in the door of the Conservative Party too. Nadine Dorries MP, who tabled the recent attempt to reduce a woman's right to choose, is backed by these groups. I suspect that if a Conservative Party revival takes place and they get in power, the fundamentalist Christian groups will enter Downing Street with them. I vote for my MP to represent my interests and their manifesto. I don't vote for my MP so that he or she can fall under the spell of a religious pressure group.
I really want to live and let live. I don't see these fundamentalists doing the same. In the end, it doesn't matter how rational and well-argued the reasonable voicce of atheism is. Against this sort of mass indoctrination, I fear we don't stand a chance unless we unify and agree that our country should be secular.
After my tomato crop was wiped out in the summer, I decided to plant some carrots and broccoli to grow during the autumn. The broccoli's almost ready to eat, and we've got the steamer on standby!
This stuff usually retails for quite a pretty penny, and it's usually best cooked fresh from the garden. We've also got rocket salad growing too, so with luck, we'll end up spending very little for tastless food at the supermarket this summer!
I'll nail my colours to the mast: I'm a big fan of Barack Obama. He's not perfect: he's a politician after all, but I can't help being moved by his increrdible rhetoric, and the apparent transparency and fair play his campaign demonstrates.
Having said all that, Obama's not only winning this, but Hillary's losing it as well:
She can't raise money anywhere near as effectively as Obama. In fact, some analysts claim that she only continues to run because she's in debt and needs to raise more money in a campaign to pay these debts off.
She played a very dirty game against Obama. He's played it passive-aggressively.
Obama might have similar faults, but I don't see him showing it yet. He has also turned a lot of the mud flung at him into positives, such as his "A More Perfect Union" speech.
Anyway - there's everything for Hillary to play for, according to this video:
Despite the snow today, summer's definitely coming. I can feel it in the air: there's this frisson of ozone. I can also hear it: the birds are singing. I can see it too: it's light when I go home (usually), and my flowerbed and veggies are starting to wake up.
Summer also means barbeques. Lots of them. It also means some experimentation at Nev's place. Last year we grilled pretty much everything we could lay our hands on, but there was always a trusted favourite that we keep coming back to: the Nev Burger.
Nev at work in his kitchen.
I call it the Nev burger, but chances are Nev found it somewhere else. I don't know and I'm not really sure I care. It's delicious.
Here's the recipe. You'll notice that it's a "guy" recipe, in that it doesn't rely on weights and measures in the same way that a "chick" recipe might. In "guy" land, measures are units of booze and weights are things you lift in the gym to pack the burgers you eat onto your Herculean physique.
Back to the recipe (feeds the guys you have over):
Some ground beef. Maybe half a kilo. Maybe more. Use your judgement.
Fresh Coriander
An onion or two
Garlic
Some buns
Lettuce
Beef Tomatoes
Creamed Horseradish
A pack of cheese slices (the plasticky kind)
Some chilli powder
Mayo
Ketchup
Mustard
Chop the onion and garlic, chuck them into a bowl with the beef. Add some chilli powder and creamed horseradish. The horseradish acts as a flavour enhancer and binder. Chop the coriander. Chuck it in. Chuck some more in. Salt and pepper the mix. Form into patties and chow down with the rest of the ingredients in traditional burger fashion.
Enjoy with a cool, crisp, refreshing beer or a mojito.
You may have read about the thrilling and gripping adventures I had in the garden last year here.
Well this year, I'm starting early. I had already prepared the frozen soil by digging it up in late February. Now, I've pulled together something that vaguely resembles a project plan for my garden.
Yesterday, I sauntered out of the house for my idea of retail therapy, the garden centre and bought:
Blight-resistant standard tomatoes (variety: Ferline F1)
And sunflowers to brighten up the house!
Here's a snap of the seedtray system I'm using. It will allow me to grow a lot of individual plants that I can quickly prick out. I've got about 120 seeds sown in 3 trays. I'm also using 20 "peat pots", which are designed to rot over time in the ground. The idea of this is to minimise the disturbance to the roots of the seedlings when transplanting. I read somewhere that this was especially important for sweetcorn
140 plants is a lot! My garden doesn't really have a huge amount of room. Last year I had about 15 tomato plants on the go and the garden was like a jungle. So I think this year, I'll be looking to pick a good mixture of seedlings to grow on to full plants and give the rest away. I didn't have any trouble finding homes for the dozens of tomato plants I raised from seed last year, so this year should be no different, and it seems that sweetcorn isn't all that tricky to grow either, so these should prove unusual and popular gifts too!
I've got the seeds germinating in the loft at the moment under the window. With any luck, I should see some shoots in a week or so!
I was at a work party the other day in the Barbican. We'd booked out one of the cinemas for the company pow-wow, followed by the arboretum for drinks and nibbles. Magicians and cartoonists worked the room and one of them drew this of me:
I'm as vain as the next guy, I suppose. I wanted a caricature for use on this blog and on Facebook, but I wanted it to look as if it were a caricature of me, rather than, say, Jude Law's Gigolo Joe from the movie A.I.
