Democracy and Email

Slightly misleading title for the post but what the heck.

Firstly, looks like the Taiwanese government has been doing their thing. I remember seeing a bit of video of their legislative body having a ruck over some bill or another a few years ago with chairs and punches being thrown. Seems like they've not learnt their lesson from the last time and decided to go for round 2 fighting over a budget. Awesome.

Jab, jab, left hook, vote!


I tell you this is the way to get kids interested in politics. I reckon that more youngsters would be interested in the current Labour leadership battle if all the candidates were set up in inflatable sumo suits and ordered to smack the crap out of each other on the lawn outside the Houses of Parliament. It's a real leveller wearing one of those things. To be honest I'd like my leader to be dextrous, problem solve quickly and been physically fit. It's a cracking idea and I might just email Tony Blair. I'm actually pretty sure he'd like to see Gordon Brown in a sumo suit anyway.

ROAR!


Secondly (and totally on a tangent) I've been getting loads of emails from friends recently. In fact a large proportion of the day has been spent writing responses and catching up today. It's been really nice to say hi to old school friends and work colleagues and people who I've bumped into over the years.

Email interweb thingy. Teknolojee iz wickid.


Really quality to hear how everyone's lives are coming along in which directions. A mate is going travelling to Africa, another has moved back from America to near where I used to live and one of my favourite people ever to work with has got a new house with their partner. It's minty cool and making me feel very happy that there's talk of people coming out for a holiday to say hello and do some climbing or walking around the mountains (and a few drinks!).

It might be from getting the emails from friends and family or the fact that the weather today has been beautiful blue skies with tufts of cloud around the mountain (it's been very rainy here for several days) or it could just be that the seratonin levels in my brain have risen again after a recent minor drop. But I feel really good today. Really happy.

Peace y'all.

Politicians lie!

Came into work this morning to get on with stuff and Cham was like the beginning of Vanilla Sky where Tom Cruise wanders about New York but there's no-one there. Was very weird.

So anyways, Chris pitched up a wee bit later and told me that it was a french national holiday. He rather humourously pointed out that Nicolas Sarkozy (new French President) had based a lot of his campaign on getting people back into work and working more than the 35 hours maximum they do here. Ironic I guess that his first day after victory in the elections happened to be a national holiday. Still, it's to be expected most likely.

I rightly had a look about to see what was the cause of this lack of activity and general siesta-ness and it's VE Day. Awesome stuff! So in true style have been reading up about WWII and the Battle of Britain. It's amazing how much cool stuff is out there in the ether available from one's own arm chair and I had a trippy few minutes digging around archives and finding bits of black and white video and photographs and articles and web pages. It's incredible what's gone online and the wealth and depth of information available.

(Housemate) Andy's just downloaded the recent "Have I Got News For You" and it's kind of getting me into this whole "keeping up with current affairs" thing. I always look over various news websites and subscribe to loads of news RSS feeds but now I'm kind of craving a newspaper morning every once in a while. Maybe I should just print out the Telegraph website every day and read that? Still I guess it's good enough to keep on the internet for a while and save the planet the the extra trees for my newspapers.

Rather funkily I also found out the word "news" originates from the Middle English "newes" as the plural of "new". I always used to think it was an acronym for "north, east, west, south" but apparently that's incorrect. Learn something new every day eh? =) I love words, me.

German bomber over London in WW2