And let us not forget what made Obama's victory possible - Money. Money in gobs, money in torrents, money in spectacular waterfalls. So much money that the political experts were left sitting around, slack-jawed in amazement, wordlessly pointing and gobbling. So much money that they literally couldn't figure out what to do with it all.
And not money from Big Business, or even (ha) Big Unions, but money in $10 and $20 and $50 contributions from an enormous range of people, people who would normally never be interested in politics, but who believed in Obama from the start, and showed their (our) belief in the most direct way.
As for me, well, I couldn't vote for him, but I could contribute my support, and gladly did.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Election Night
Free at last, Free at last, Great God A'mighty, free at last.
I didn't think they'd actually do it, polls or no polls, but damned if they haven't
I'm -still- not entirely convinced that something won't intervene: an assassin's bullet, a calamitous catastrophe, a big serious war, any excuse really.
But, it really appears, at last ... no more Bush. A shame he'll get to pardon all his cronies before he leaves office, but at least they'll finally be *out* of office.
And finally, a calm, level-headed man of ability - someone who could keep such tight discipline on his staff that they never leaked in 21 months of campaigning, someone who seems to have a quick eye for picking able subordinates, and above all, someone of temperament and caution. This is the America I remember, the America I want to be part of, at last.
I didn't think they'd actually do it, polls or no polls, but damned if they haven't
I'm -still- not entirely convinced that something won't intervene: an assassin's bullet, a calamitous catastrophe, a big serious war, any excuse really.
But, it really appears, at last ... no more Bush. A shame he'll get to pardon all his cronies before he leaves office, but at least they'll finally be *out* of office.
And finally, a calm, level-headed man of ability - someone who could keep such tight discipline on his staff that they never leaked in 21 months of campaigning, someone who seems to have a quick eye for picking able subordinates, and above all, someone of temperament and caution. This is the America I remember, the America I want to be part of, at last.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Another road trip
Well, another fairly successful trip - this time to Baton Rouge in Louisiana, to visit my friend Dudley and play a tournament in the city. We drove down on Thursday, a seven hour drive through southern Arkansas, a bit of Mississippi, and north Louisiana. The drive itself went smoothly, on the US65 & US 61 highways, but - man - some things surprised me. I've been told that Arkansas is the second poorest state, but Little Rock & the surrounding area all look pretty prosperous and well-kept - even the slums of South Little Rock look passably prosperous, even if incredibly threatening and dangerous (the lines of police yellow tape seem to be the common decoration for houses).
So, I thought, well, sure, Arkansas is poor by American standards, but that doesn't mean poor. Wow, was I wrong - southern Arkansas is rural poor, with a capital P - shacks I wouldn't put a dog in, ruinous 'mobile' home trailers, and squalor that reminded me of the worst bits of East Cape: actually, worse than that I think. Lots of the land seemed to be cultivated & unfenced, which (apparently) is due to being owned & farmed by big Agribusinesses, which I'm sure is economically efficient, but not so great for the individuals left living there. The bit of Mississippi we drove through looked much the same (not too surprising, as Mississippi is the one state poorer than Arkansas).
Funnily enough, once we crossed the state line into Louisiana (Loosyana), it changed like the click of fingers, and there were lots of fairly prosperous looking medium-sized farms, with neat, well-maintained farmhouses.
Staying with Dudley was, well, not exactly what we'd expected: Dudley was a Sergeant Major of Marines, and I guess I was expecting him to have carried their ferocious discipline to his home, but not so much. His wife was away (her annual trip back home to Oz) when we arrived, and he had 3 teenagers still at home to handle: I guess because they were stepkids, he was much gentler with them than I'd expected. Unfortunately, it also meant they had the usual teenage effect on the environment.
He'd kindly taken Friday off to get ready for the tournament, and to show us around the town, which was great - the capital building & the spot where Huey Long was assassinatied were particularly fascinating.
Saturday was 3 games (thru til 9 at night), plus one game on Sunday for the tournament. Hard going, and I lost my first game - being fairly rusty - but managed to win the other 3 games, and sneak into 3rd place (the guy that beat me wound up 4th, having gotten a draw in the last round). Reasonably pleased, but my position was mostly due to a moment's inattention by my 3rd opponent, and some truly heroic dicing on the part of my light horse, in the last game - I really didn't deserve to win that one.
After the Sunday game, we drove back home - for some reason, on the way back the GPS routed us through a ton of back roads and avoided both the highways we'd used to drive down. Cat got quite wrought at this & was convinced the GPS had gotten us lost, but I insisted it had just determined a fractionally faster route (which I think is correct, it saved us 5 or 6 minutes off the 7 hour trip). I wish there was some way of turning that option off, though, the extra stress it causes isn't worth the small saving of time, and the much greater concentration required on small, windy roads. Finally got back to LR around 8, then went to a local cafe for dinner, and home by 9.
Since then, I've had 3 days off work : I originally arranged for a week, as the original plan - truncated for financial considerations - was to take more time, and visit New Orleans as well. Oh well, next time we go there, I guess. Nice to have time to catch up on simple stuff, and goof off, too :)
So, I thought, well, sure, Arkansas is poor by American standards, but that doesn't mean poor. Wow, was I wrong - southern Arkansas is rural poor, with a capital P - shacks I wouldn't put a dog in, ruinous 'mobile' home trailers, and squalor that reminded me of the worst bits of East Cape: actually, worse than that I think. Lots of the land seemed to be cultivated & unfenced, which (apparently) is due to being owned & farmed by big Agribusinesses, which I'm sure is economically efficient, but not so great for the individuals left living there. The bit of Mississippi we drove through looked much the same (not too surprising, as Mississippi is the one state poorer than Arkansas).
Funnily enough, once we crossed the state line into Louisiana (Loosyana), it changed like the click of fingers, and there were lots of fairly prosperous looking medium-sized farms, with neat, well-maintained farmhouses.
Staying with Dudley was, well, not exactly what we'd expected: Dudley was a Sergeant Major of Marines, and I guess I was expecting him to have carried their ferocious discipline to his home, but not so much. His wife was away (her annual trip back home to Oz) when we arrived, and he had 3 teenagers still at home to handle: I guess because they were stepkids, he was much gentler with them than I'd expected. Unfortunately, it also meant they had the usual teenage effect on the environment.
He'd kindly taken Friday off to get ready for the tournament, and to show us around the town, which was great - the capital building & the spot where Huey Long was assassinatied were particularly fascinating.
Saturday was 3 games (thru til 9 at night), plus one game on Sunday for the tournament. Hard going, and I lost my first game - being fairly rusty - but managed to win the other 3 games, and sneak into 3rd place (the guy that beat me wound up 4th, having gotten a draw in the last round). Reasonably pleased, but my position was mostly due to a moment's inattention by my 3rd opponent, and some truly heroic dicing on the part of my light horse, in the last game - I really didn't deserve to win that one.
After the Sunday game, we drove back home - for some reason, on the way back the GPS routed us through a ton of back roads and avoided both the highways we'd used to drive down. Cat got quite wrought at this & was convinced the GPS had gotten us lost, but I insisted it had just determined a fractionally faster route (which I think is correct, it saved us 5 or 6 minutes off the 7 hour trip). I wish there was some way of turning that option off, though, the extra stress it causes isn't worth the small saving of time, and the much greater concentration required on small, windy roads. Finally got back to LR around 8, then went to a local cafe for dinner, and home by 9.
Since then, I've had 3 days off work : I originally arranged for a week, as the original plan - truncated for financial considerations - was to take more time, and visit New Orleans as well. Oh well, next time we go there, I guess. Nice to have time to catch up on simple stuff, and goof off, too :)
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Blecch
Sorry for the silence, another wretched summer cold has struck, & I've been flat on my back, snuffling snorting sneezing, and generally providing too many bodily fluids. Oh well, mostly over it now, and back at work (altho whether I'll last past lunch is a moot point so far).
On the bright side, we had another visit from Ray last weekend, which was really great for both of us: it's kinda weird to make such a good friend, at the age of 50, but we seem to have so many shared/overlapping experiences, it's like I've known him forever, without ever meeting: like some parallel dimension.
We did a couple of sessions of Runequest, so he could see what it played like: I was a bit lacking as GM, with a sore throat precluding much detailed descriptions, but it seemed to work pretty well overall, and gave him a fair picture of classic Gloranthan RQ.
Cat keeps getting snippets from NZ about her father's arrest, which has finally happened (thank ghu) - but then his idiot brother wants a 'family conference' to sort things out, i.e. help Ashley escape the just retribution coming his way; then the police were asking her whether she was interested in 'restorative' justice rather than 'punitive' justice ... I ask you, what is it he's going to restore, her childhood innocence? the years wasted in mental hospitals because her accusations were deemed to be psychotic fantasy? the years after that where she was miserable, offcentre, and self-hating? Fortunately, she didn't get sucked into that, and firmly expressed her opinion that there was no avenue for that with her, and the best restorative she could have was to see him rotting in prison at last.
Of course, all this has left her extremely upset, and depressed. I've gotten her to talk to her therapist in the UK, to try & identify a US therapist that might fit her, and she has, I think, some hints about what to loook for - hopefully she can find some help shortly. I do what I can, of course, but I'm hardly a trained therapist.
Well, back to work now, there's actually something for me to do today :)
On the bright side, we had another visit from Ray last weekend, which was really great for both of us: it's kinda weird to make such a good friend, at the age of 50, but we seem to have so many shared/overlapping experiences, it's like I've known him forever, without ever meeting: like some parallel dimension.
We did a couple of sessions of Runequest, so he could see what it played like: I was a bit lacking as GM, with a sore throat precluding much detailed descriptions, but it seemed to work pretty well overall, and gave him a fair picture of classic Gloranthan RQ.
Cat keeps getting snippets from NZ about her father's arrest, which has finally happened (thank ghu) - but then his idiot brother wants a 'family conference' to sort things out, i.e. help Ashley escape the just retribution coming his way; then the police were asking her whether she was interested in 'restorative' justice rather than 'punitive' justice ... I ask you, what is it he's going to restore, her childhood innocence? the years wasted in mental hospitals because her accusations were deemed to be psychotic fantasy? the years after that where she was miserable, offcentre, and self-hating? Fortunately, she didn't get sucked into that, and firmly expressed her opinion that there was no avenue for that with her, and the best restorative she could have was to see him rotting in prison at last.
Of course, all this has left her extremely upset, and depressed. I've gotten her to talk to her therapist in the UK, to try & identify a US therapist that might fit her, and she has, I think, some hints about what to loook for - hopefully she can find some help shortly. I do what I can, of course, but I'm hardly a trained therapist.
Well, back to work now, there's actually something for me to do today :)
Monday, September 8, 2008
Storms
Well, we survived the remnants of Hurricane Gustav pretty easily. Weds was quite stormy (even by Wellington-winter standards), and produced quite prodigious amounts of rain: enough to persuade me to stay & work from home for the day, rather than risk the car aquaplaning all over the road: but other than that, it wasn't too bad.
The creek in the back yard must have risen by 8 or 9 feet I guess - almost to the top of the banks - but that's no real threat to the house, as there's another 8 feet or so of elevation before it would get to the foundations (and much wider, of course). The dead tree out the front yard shed quite a lot of branches, and has kinda broken in half, with the upper half now dangling down in the fork of the bottom half - we're waiting for the landlords to fix this, lacking appropriate tools (a decent length of rope, essentially).
Parts of the city lost power for the day, but nowhere near us (they appear to be the, umm, poor parts of town, for whatever reason). We did have a lot of N'orleanois up working in our Little Rock office for the week, as it seems to have been moderately badly hit again.
And afterwards, we've had just a stunning few days of weather - warm, sunny, and with just enough wind to be pleasant.
We had Betty & Dennis over for lunch on Sunday - Betty works in the quilting shop that Cat goes to all the time, and is (of course) a keen quilter, and Dennis is her husband - an interesting mix of Texas hick and sophisticate. I think it went very well, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and the food seemed to work well : I made bacon&egg pie, and Cat made corn/cheese/onion muffins, neither of which they had ever had before - Muffins in the US seem to be exclusively of the cakey, very sweet, saturated with syrup variety, so savoury ones were a great surprise :)
Other than that, just trundling along, trying to find friends, and trying to fit in.
The creek in the back yard must have risen by 8 or 9 feet I guess - almost to the top of the banks - but that's no real threat to the house, as there's another 8 feet or so of elevation before it would get to the foundations (and much wider, of course). The dead tree out the front yard shed quite a lot of branches, and has kinda broken in half, with the upper half now dangling down in the fork of the bottom half - we're waiting for the landlords to fix this, lacking appropriate tools (a decent length of rope, essentially).
Parts of the city lost power for the day, but nowhere near us (they appear to be the, umm, poor parts of town, for whatever reason). We did have a lot of N'orleanois up working in our Little Rock office for the week, as it seems to have been moderately badly hit again.
And afterwards, we've had just a stunning few days of weather - warm, sunny, and with just enough wind to be pleasant.
We had Betty & Dennis over for lunch on Sunday - Betty works in the quilting shop that Cat goes to all the time, and is (of course) a keen quilter, and Dennis is her husband - an interesting mix of Texas hick and sophisticate. I think it went very well, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and the food seemed to work well : I made bacon&egg pie, and Cat made corn/cheese/onion muffins, neither of which they had ever had before - Muffins in the US seem to be exclusively of the cakey, very sweet, saturated with syrup variety, so savoury ones were a great surprise :)
Other than that, just trundling along, trying to find friends, and trying to fit in.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Good days
Well, last weekend Ray drove over from Oklahoma City & spent the weekend, which was really good: we had a game of Fields of Glory on Saturday and discovered we knew the rules a lot less well than we thought: went out for dinner and brunches to the best bits of Little Rock that we've discovered so far: and talked our heads off.
It's rather odd to find a friend, at age 50, who feels like you've known him since age 10. We seem to have had so many parallel experiences, between wargaming and roleplaying, and identify closely with many shared ideas and thoughts (everywhere except politics where he seems to be wrongheadedly and stubbornly Republican, which I just dont get - he'd doubtless say the same, in reverse :) Saturday night we were up talking til 3 o'clock, just chewing over ideas for roleplaying: it's a damn shame OKC is so far away, too far really to run a regular RPG group from Little Rock, or I'd definitely run a campaign: but 4-5 hours drive every weekend, or even every 2nd weekend, is just too much (time, and especially cash for gas - it must be $40 each way at least I guess).
It's not just with me, Cat and Ray also enjoy talking, about America & just generally: certainly made for a great weekend.
Oh, and Bridge last night was -scorching- I haven't seen the results yet, but I don't doubt that we placed top: some of the hands I got to play were just wonderful, so tricky, but yielding great results for the right approach - I had a 3NT contract making every trick, and a 5C contract that everyone else went down 2 on, where I managed to make it, with some very tricksy discards to fool the opposition: several others too, but those were the most memorable. Cat was bidding much more precisely, and delivered exactly as promised: and her defensive play was outstanding too, she seemed to read my mind for picking the right leads, and we had a couple of spectacular results that way - a 2NT contract that should make, went down 2 because Cat found the right lead to me twice, a 4H contract that went down 3 (altho that was partly just gross optimism by our opposition, because they insisted on bidding on over a sacrificial 3D I made, and then got excited by 3H) .. oh, and funniest of all in some ways, a 4NT contract that went spectacularly down 3, where it should have been 4S making 5 (due to their initial 3S followed by my preempt 4C throwing them into a panic).
Fun times :)
It's rather odd to find a friend, at age 50, who feels like you've known him since age 10. We seem to have had so many parallel experiences, between wargaming and roleplaying, and identify closely with many shared ideas and thoughts (everywhere except politics where he seems to be wrongheadedly and stubbornly Republican, which I just dont get - he'd doubtless say the same, in reverse :) Saturday night we were up talking til 3 o'clock, just chewing over ideas for roleplaying: it's a damn shame OKC is so far away, too far really to run a regular RPG group from Little Rock, or I'd definitely run a campaign: but 4-5 hours drive every weekend, or even every 2nd weekend, is just too much (time, and especially cash for gas - it must be $40 each way at least I guess).
It's not just with me, Cat and Ray also enjoy talking, about America & just generally: certainly made for a great weekend.
Oh, and Bridge last night was -scorching- I haven't seen the results yet, but I don't doubt that we placed top: some of the hands I got to play were just wonderful, so tricky, but yielding great results for the right approach - I had a 3NT contract making every trick, and a 5C contract that everyone else went down 2 on, where I managed to make it, with some very tricksy discards to fool the opposition: several others too, but those were the most memorable. Cat was bidding much more precisely, and delivered exactly as promised: and her defensive play was outstanding too, she seemed to read my mind for picking the right leads, and we had a couple of spectacular results that way - a 2NT contract that should make, went down 2 because Cat found the right lead to me twice, a 4H contract that went down 3 (altho that was partly just gross optimism by our opposition, because they insisted on bidding on over a sacrificial 3D I made, and then got excited by 3H) .. oh, and funniest of all in some ways, a 4NT contract that went spectacularly down 3, where it should have been 4S making 5 (due to their initial 3S followed by my preempt 4C throwing them into a panic).
Fun times :)
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
RPGs
On a brighter note, we've started playing with a local D&D group, after a 7 year hiatus. It's run out of a games shop - the owner has a whole mezzanine that he makes available to boardgamers and RPG'ers, as they all seem to do here. This group is us, plus 4 other players and the GM: we're trying out the (brand-new) 4th Edition of D&D which - I think - is fairly terminally silly, but at least a balanced game where all the classes get a decent chance of action at all times.
As with most RPG groups, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but at least noone too awfully immature, and a couple of the players are both skillful and worth knowing (probably above average), so overall it's a positive experience.
The first try at it was pretty rough, due to lots of breaks and delays, and people arriving late, but our second session was much better: smoothflowing and enjoyable. The only real problem was the volume of noise from the gamers upstairs, but that's probably just me being spoilt for playing at home, the other players didnt seem too bothered.
As with most RPG groups, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but at least noone too awfully immature, and a couple of the players are both skillful and worth knowing (probably above average), so overall it's a positive experience.
The first try at it was pretty rough, due to lots of breaks and delays, and people arriving late, but our second session was much better: smoothflowing and enjoyable. The only real problem was the volume of noise from the gamers upstairs, but that's probably just me being spoilt for playing at home, the other players didnt seem too bothered.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)