Friday, 25 July 2008

Obama Does Europe

It would be fair to guess that even in his wildest dreams, Barack Obama never envisaged standing before 200,000 adoring Germans with euphoric applause washing over him.
I watched it live on TV and was genuinely surprised by the reception afforded to the Democrat nominee who was standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate delivering a message of mending fences between Europe and America.
The trip to this side of the Atlantic has been a resounding success which must really chime with the Republican Party who have been whistling in the wind at home for the past week as the focus has been on Obama who said all the right things at the right time in Berlin and Paris.
Tonight he was standing beside French President, Nicolas Sakorzy, decrying what he described as "caricatures" on both sides of the Atlantic, with Europeans viewing the US as militaristic in their foreign policy, and Americans viewing Europeans as unwilling "to get their hands dirty" in world affairs.
So just why has Europe gone crazy for Obama? The simple answer is that we see in Obama exactly what he hopes Americans will see in him when it comes to their trip to the voting booth in November, a complete and wholesale change from the Bush era.
Obama tops every poll in which Europeans choose between him and McCain for US President, but Obama is not standing here and we don't have a vote but his team will hope that it proves to watching Americans that he is a man who can confidently stride the world stage and regain his country the respect it has been leaking at an alarming rate for the past eight years.
Europeans know that America hold the key to war or peace, wielding enormous influence on dragging European governments into conflicts, Iraq is the only too painful evidence of that. It is no surprise that many Europeans are now crying out for a less aggressive, more altruistic America that they can look towards with fondness again.
If elected Obama will be facing some tricky decisions with regards to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Palestine and Israel, decisions that could yet rupture the good will he has built here but for now we are happy to heap praise and admiration on a man whose most favourable characteristic is that he is increasingly looking like the longed for antidote to George Bush.

Thursday, 24 July 2008

On Yer Bike Cameron

Whatever your views on capitalism are, the fact remains that taking something that doesn't belong to you is wrong and our sympathies should be with the victims. Unless it is Tory leader David Cameron getting his bike pinched from outside Tesco, then it is bloody hilarious.
The Conservative leader said he was "annoyed" and "pretty hacked off" at what had happened after he had left it locked outside a supermarket while he shopped near his home in west London.
"If anyone has seen this bicycle, I would like it back," he said, "I've reported it online... but I'm not holding my breath", the spoilsport added dashing the hopes of millions.
Cameron's two wheeled antics have been a rich source of amusement for us here. The limousine that followed behind him with his briefcase as he cycled to work to boast about his green credentials was funny and then there was the pictures of him gliding effortlessly through a red light to ride the wrong way down a one way street.
The bike is already open to offers on Ebay, presently going for £10.50 and described by the seller as being big and blue and despite looking quite well-balanced it leans oddly to the right and not exactly new but nearly new because it has only been used for a couple of photo-opportunities.

Wednesday, 23 July 2008

All Summer Long

We are fast approaching the end of July and Summer has finally arrived in Britain with temperatures hitting the high 20's which has allowed us to partake in our greatest past-time. Moaning about the weather. I don't dislike summer, there is much to be said for it but much more to be said that's bad about it.

1. Insects. In the ideal world you would sit on the grass and enjoy the summer ambiance. In reality you spend five minutes slapping ants off your legs before running away from a large bee that seems to mistake your head for a sunflower.
2. Sunburn. For those of us with milk bottle white skin, sun block is essential summer wear but it is not easy to spend the entire summer months reflecting the sun rays. At one point you will let your guard down and within ten minutes your face is as red as Santa's coat and you have a week of wincing every time you move before returning back to the colour of cotton wool.
3. Hot summer nights. A handy tip is to place your pillow in the refrigerator 30 mins before you go to bed which gives you a ten minute window to drop off to sleep on a cool pillow otherwise its hours of tossing, turning and thumping your pillow before giving up and going down stairs to watch Knight Rider at 4am.
4. Hot Car Interior. Park in sun and you get third degrees burn off the steering wheel and seats the second you sit inside it. Park under a tree and your car is treated to a lovely covering courtesy of every pigeon in the City.
5. Short Temper. Probably due to number 3, the heat makes people cranky and irritable. I often spend the summer months dreaming up inventive ways of causing bodily harm to the slow moving customers in front of me in the supermarket queue. Amazing how many ways you can think of hurting someone with a box of tea bags when you put your mind to it.
6. People saying 'Is it hot enough for ya?'. Yes it is, as it was when the other 46 people said the exact same thing me previously. Now get out my sight before i perform Grevious Bodily Harm on your persons with my box of PG Tips.

Luckily our Summer is not that long in the UK, a couple of weeks of stunningly hot temperatures and then it is all over. Then we all start moaning about how rubbish our summer was.

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

Brown Out On A Limb Backing US & Israel

You can't keep a good Prime Minister down. or even - it seems- Gordon Brown as he turns up in the Middle East and throws his weight around.
Palestine, Israel and Iran have all felt the rough edge of the unelected leaders tongue these last few days as well as handing out cash and declaring Israeli alliance's straight out of the mouths of the nominees for the American Presidential election.
Either willingly or by sheer ignorance, Brown has walked straight into the trap laid by Israel and the US into maneuvering Iran into the gun sights.
Brown's remarks could well be seen as a signal that Britain would be prepared to support a military strike against Iran and that is not going to play well with the electorate for two reasons.
The first is that as the coffins of our servicemen are still being dispatched
back from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, there is little taste for yet more wars.
Secondly, and more controversially, a majority of the British have mixed feelings about Israel and find their treatment of the Palestinians abhorrent. The ongoing drama to boycott Israeli academics is just one example of the strength of feeling it engineers and it isn't improved any by the pictures in the newspapers today of the IDF soldier shooting the blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian from a matter of feet away.
Brown may well be trying to soften us up for the next conflict with rhetoric and demonising Iran and its leader but hopefully we can see Brown for what he truly is. A drowning leader clutching at anything that he considers will give him a lift. By teaming up with the US and Israel in the 'let's threaten Iran' brigade, he has seriously over played his already weak hand. It may play well in the States with their religious voting block but Britain is a different kettle of fish.

Sunday, 20 July 2008

Everyone Wants To Be A Guitarist

What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A drummer. With the popularity of music games such as Guitar Hero, a commonly held suspicion among musicians has been confirmed. Of all the members of a band, the lead guitarist is the one everyone wants to be.
It is very rare that anyone stands in front of the mirror with a tennis racquet pretending to play bass or bop their parents upturned pots and pans with a wooden spoon aspiring to fill Roger Taylor's shoes.
It is either the singer or lead guitarist the vast majority of people dream of being, the charismatic ones at the front of the stage taking all the glory while the bass player and drummer mumble under their breath about how they could do that, they just don't wanna.
Not to underestimate bass players, there have been some great bass lines like The White Stripes '7 Nation Army', The Hives 'Because i wanna', Queen's 'Another One Bites The Dust' and the Jets 'Are ya gonna be my girl' but memorable bass lines are very few and far between and the same can be said for those in the drumming business.
'Smells like Teen Spirit' has an excellent drum beat and 'My Sharona' is about the only song i play drums to on the steering wheel as i drive along, but then i put My Sharona up as pretty much perfect in every aspect, especially the guitar solo in the long version, although the lyric 'I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind' is highly suspect.
Bass and drums are an integral part of any band but they are mainly there as the background noise for the likes of Slash, Hendrix, Kirk Hammet, Matthew Bellamy and Brian May to look cool.
There are kids and adults clutching their guitar shaped game pad and prancing about their living rooms all over pretending to be Slash although i defy anyone to do the thing he does with a cigarette, it takes a special type of person to be able to smoke a whole cigarette without removing it from their mouth and you won't see Mike Mills from REM do that.

Questions Over Bin Laden?

I love a good conspiracy theory whether it be about the moon landings or who shot Kennedy. The usual process is to listen to them and then dismiss them as fantasy but the conspiracy theories behind the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 keep bubbling up.
During a conversation with a friend it was mentioned that there is actually no evidence to connect Bin Laden to the events on September 11th. I scoffed until shown his FBI 10 most wanted poster printed from the Internet where his crimes are named as 'MURDER OF U.S. NATIONALS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES; CONSPIRACY TO MURDER U.S. NATIONALS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES; ATTACK ON A FEDERAL FACILITY RESULTING
IN DEATH'. See it for yourself here
His poster for Most Wanted Terrorist states the same crimes. See that one here
Interesting how he is wanted for events such as the 1998 US Embassy bombings and USS Cole but there is no mention of his involvement in the 2001 attacks.
Further digging has revealed that amazingly the reason the FBI haven't included his role as mastermind behind the attacks is because the FBI haves no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.
The obvious question is why was there enough evidence to invade Afghanistan but not enough evidence for the FBI to connect him to the September 11th attacks?
The US released a videotape that it said provided compelling evidence that Osama Bin Laden was behind the attacks. President Bush said of it that: "For those who see this tape, they'll realise that not only is he guilty of incredible murder, he has no conscience and no soul, that he represents the worst of civilisation," and the British Foreign Secretary at the time Jack Straw said: "By boasting about his involvement in the evil attacks, Bin Laden confirms his guilt."
Obviously the top man at the FBI is not as sure of who was responsible as his President who, if memory serves, was also certain that Saddam had WMD's and is pushing for armed conflict with Iran over its secret nuclear weapons programme.

Saturday, 19 July 2008

Dwain Chambers: The Right Decision

There is one thing that i can guarantee about this summers Olympics, there will be athletes caught taking performance enhancing drugs.
Britain has had its fair share of drug cheats and our Olympic Selection Committee has a hard and fast set of rules stating that if you are convicted of cheating, you are banned for life. Dwain Chambers knew this when he was caught taking a cocktail of anabolic drugs in 2003.
Britain and China are unique in that although they allow their athletes to compete in other competitions once their 2 or 4 year ban expires, they do not allow these athletes to represent them at the Olympics.
In his legal battle to overturn the selection committees decision and win a place on the British team, Chambers cited several examples of other athletes who have recently returned from drug bans to compete at this years Olympics including Ukrainian heptathlete Lyudmila Blonska and the US trio of Kenta Bell, Torri Edward and Damu Cherry but this failed to sway the High Court who upheld the Olympic ban.
Undoubtedly there will be athletes this time around who will slip through the net and win medals due to their ability to mask their cheating and that is up to the International Olympic Committee to stay ahead of the cheats and there attempts at concealing their deception.
Team GB has rightly avoided setting a dangerous precedent by insisting that our fastest 100m runner stays at home kicking his heels. All our athletes know that being banned from the Olympics for life is the consequence of using performance enhancing drugs and if they still take that route and get caught, it is heartwarming to know that we will put doing the right thing above our final position in the medal table.

Friday, 18 July 2008

The End Almost In Sight

Much to my surprise, this is my 450th blog post. I never realised i had written that many in the 18 months or so i had been here and if you add in the 200 odd i wrote on my first blog, i have been sticking my two penneth worth in on quite a few things over the last few years.
I did plan to hand over this blog a while back but the person who was due to take over changed his mind and so i stuck with it rather than just let it die. Now as i close in on 500 posts i am thinking that would be the perfect time to stand down.
There is always something happening in the World and always something for a current affairs blog like this to get worked up about but i am increasingly finding myself unable to do credit to the blog by writing proper pieces, falling into the habit of dashing out a quick post and whizzing around my Google reader, bookmarked blogs and emails at the end of the evening.
The blog has done quite well and the occasional post has featured on some pretty tasty media sites so rather than just shut up shop, pick up my ball and go home, i hope to have an excellent replacement lined up for when i hit that 500 mark. More on that nearer the time but for now i have 49 posts left to push my annoyingly hippy agenda out there on the internet.

Thursday, 17 July 2008

Johnny (Don't) B Goode

Mankind has created some mind-numbing pastimes in its short time but top of the list, A number 1 has to be Golf.
The Open Championship has started at Royal Birkdale and the TV schedules switch to watching men hit a ball and then walk 300 yards to hit the ball again. Viewers can either watch this over and over again or they can bang their head against the coffee table hard enough for unconsciousness to release them from the boredom.
Tiger Woods isn't present but let's be honest, he may be one of the best golfers ever to pull on a ridiculously embarrassing jumper but he was never going to miss a putt and in frustration wrap his putter around his caddies neck was he. But my new-found favourite golfer John Daly just might.
Obviously no stranger to the buffet table, the hard drinking and chain smoking Daly has the physique of a well fed hippopotamus and is known to throw tantrums that a particularly irksome two year old would be proud of.
Three stays in the Betty Ford clinic, four marriages and a refusal to visit the gym because he can't smoke in them makes me instantly warm to the man. Throw in the time that he gambled away $1.5m in one month on Las Vegas slot machines after winning half that amount at a tournament and you are almost willing Daly to be there at the end, standing on the podium and jubilantly holding up the pot. Hopefully half drunk and with a Benson & Hedges wedged in the side of his mouth although according to those in the know, his odds of winning are longer than a Taliban's beard.
Sport needs it colourful characters and heavens knows golf needs the likes of John Daly knocking about if only to save me having to re-varnish the coffee table.

Tuesday, 15 July 2008

Suppose You Gave A Funeral & Nobody Came

Margaret Thatcher isn't even dead yet, they are only planning her funeral and already there are so many people queueing up to dance on her grave that to keep up with demand they will have to build a disco on it.
Buckingham Palace are apparently mulling over granting the former Prime Minister the honour of a state funeral to 'acknowledge the exceptional impact of her 11-year premiership' although this kind of funeral is only usually reserved for the head of state.
There has been a few exceptions to this rule with Horatio Nelson granted one for his naval adventures which saw his body returned to England in a whiskey barrel and Winston Churchill who lived most of his adult-life in a whiskey barrel but does Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher deserve such an honour?
I would guess if you were a miner you would disagree as she attempted to close the pits at a cost of tens of thousands of jobs. A year long strike by miners later and the NUM conceded defeat and she proceeded to close all but 15 of the country's pits, which were then privatised.
The woman privatised everything she could get her grubby little hands on, selling off most of the large utilities once they had been made profitable enough for the City to be interested in them and sold off Council homes to tenants which would ensure a housing crisis that is still reverberating today.
Her high water mark was the Falklands War and the victory over the military junta in Argentina that invaded the Falklands Islands and often repeated clip of her losing her temper with a member of the public who had the temerity to refuse her explanation of the sinking of the Argentine General Belgrano.
She will be remembered primarily for the Falklands Islands and miners strike but two other events stick firmly in peoples minds. The decision to stop free milk for school aged children and the poll tax which was a form of local government taxation which led to riots in the streets and her being bundled out of Downing Street and whisked out of power in a taxi.
She is 82 now and seems in fine health for a woman of her age so they may have to wait a while before putting in that graveside dance floor but when she does finally curl up her toes it will be like the Glastonbury Festival in that cemetery.