michael lambe's scrapbook

At the clinic this morning, one of the English conversation group’s was what chinese character would you choose to sum up this year? I chose the kanji for hope: 望. Barack Obama winning the American Presidency this week has given me hope. It’s the first really good news I can remember hearing for the last eight years. I was so happy I couldn’t even bring myself to blog about it for the last couple of days. The world just seems like such a better place knowing that the moronic Bush years are on their way out and somebody with intelligence and eloquence is on his way in.

Not that I am under any illusions that Obama will be anywhere near as progressive as I would wish him to be. But he is certainly a step in the right direction. And maybe if everyone who voted for change keeps pressuring for change, then we can keep on stepping that way. Writer Charlie Stross has a list up on his blog of the kind of changes he would like to see: LINK

And here’s a list of Obama’s actual campaign promises:

* Reduce the US’s carbon emissions 80% by 2050 and play a strong positive role in negotiating a binding global treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol
* Withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months and keep no permanent bases in the country
* Establish a clear goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons across the globe
* Close the Guantanamo Bay detention center
* Double US aid to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015 and accelerate the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculoses and Malaria
* Open diplomatic talks with countries like Iran and Syria, to pursue peaceful resolution of tensions
* De-politicize military intelligence to avoid ever repeating the kind of manipulation that led the US into Iraq
* Launch a major diplomatic effort to stop the killings in Darfur
* Only negotiate new trade agreements that contain labor and environmental protections
* Invest $150 billion over ten years to support renewable energy and get 1 million plug-in electric cars on the road by 2015 LINK to barackobama.com (via avaaz.org)

Now they don’t look too bad now, do they? Hopefully, if, during the remainder of his term, Bush can restrain himself from destroying the world entire in one last cataclysmic burst of incompetence, we can then see just how Obama keeps his promises. And here’s a couple of outstanding headlines from The Onion to help keep us from entering into a new era of smug self-satisfaction:

Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress

Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

Now for some happy music from Michael Franti:

Download the full album: All Rebel Rockers or order the album on CD from amazon JAPAN USA UK

So it’s been over a week since my last entry. I am of course back at work which means my life is no longer my own, again. This curious pink building is the people factory I’m at now. I have to write two lesson plans and a test by tomorrow and naturally I haven’t a clue what to do. So in a brave attempt at putting it off till the last minute, (which is when I get all my best ideas anyway) I’m writing this instead.

Anyway, here are some interesting links:

First an article from the Observer about Ray Winstone, famous for his hard-case roles in “Scum”, “Nil by Mouth” and erm… the beaver in the Narnia movie.

“Maybe, I wonder, he’d fallen in with a bad crowd? The News of the World once ran a photo of Winstone, aged 24, surrounded by a gang of jailbirds, who all seemed to be his best mates. One of them, Joey Pyle (six years for cocaine dealing, acquitted of murder), was quoted as saying, ‘I like to think Ray got a lot out of being out and about with us. He never seemed uncomfortable with what some of us had been up to.’ Did he really mix with all those gangsters? Winstone objects, ‘I don’t like the word gangsters.’ Well, criminals, then? ‘Yes. I went to school with criminals or people who turned out to be criminals. People you’ve liked don’t always do the things in life that you agree with. It’s a funny old world out there, you know? We didn’t live in Surrey. We had a community of people where it was fucking hard. I was born in 1957, 12 years after the Second World War, but there were still bombed houses round where I lived, and it wasn’t till the 1960s that they moved us all out and built those shitholes they call flats. It was just after rationing, the black market and all that. People want what they can’t have, and the only way to get it is on the black market, which creates villains.’”

More of that here: LINK.

And it seems that George Bush has a sense of humour…LINK

Oh, but then again, maybe he don’t…
LINK
Ouch!

And this looked kind of hopeful…(http://www.westpointgradsagainstthewar.org/)
…but there seems to be only three of them.

So I had this idea for all you budding writers. As those who know me are well aware I have a part-time job at a mental clinic on Saturday mornings. What I usually do each week is prepare some flash-cards to teach vocabulary items, then use them in card games and finally get the patients to build stories together using those same cards. So I was thinking, in the spirit of Italo Calvino’s “Castle of Crossed Destinies” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156154552/sr=8-1/qid=1147668522/ref=sr_1_1/002-1161996-3530412?%5Fencoding=UTF8), we could do something similar and I could put the best stories up here… Well, anyone who is interested, let me know and I’ll either mail the first set of pictures to you. Or maybe post them up here….

I suppose I’d better work now. Sheesh.