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All week I've been emailing people telling them how beautiful New Jersey looks this autumn - at least this particular corner of it. The colours of the leaves are vibrant shades of yellow, red, orange and even pink. I gather that New England is reknowned for its bright Fall leaves but I can't believe that it can get much better than what I've seen here in the last few weeks. Kyle tells me that this is "peak week" for the leaves, so when we get back from our two week holiday I expect to see that the trees are all bare.
I've finally discovered how to set things up to allow me to post photos from my account on Flickr directly to Blogger. I had kept going around and around in circles, looking up FAQs on both sites without any success, but the solution turned out to be embarrassingly straightforward - I'd simply failed to click on the correct link.
So this is a test post. (The picture isn't significant - I saw it last year in some rubble dumped behind my house and was intrigued by the green lady with the snake, I have no idea who or what she is.) I've had to do quite a bit of tweaking of the HTML generated by Flickr for the post and I'm not sure that it's worth the effort to be honest, but I'm happier now at least I've got it to work if I want it.
A friend back in the UK emailed me this morning asking what it was like to be in the US the day after the historic presidential election victory of Barack Obama. The campaigning had been going on for so long now and the coverage even back home was so intense, that I don't think that I'd really given it much thought until he asked, but it has certainly been interesting to have seen the election "up close".
One aspect I'd never really thought about were just the basic mechanics of the US electoral process. All along I'd somehow assumed it was essentially the same as a general election in the UK, but in fact there are significant differences: the UK prime minister is not elected directly (instead you vote for a member of Parliament) whereas here in the US, people get to vote directly for who they want to be president. These presidential votes are independent of who they want to represent them.
Also, each state is made up of a number of districts in each state, and the result for an state is dependent on the results from all the districts. Since the districts declare their results independently, the eventual winner in the state develops over a period of time (so the news networks would "project" the winner based on a subset of districts that had already declared).
Finally, not all states have equal weighting - some have more say than others in who becomes president (I guess based on the number of voters living there). So it's not a straight count of who won the most states.
Well, I imagine that this is all basic stuff for American voters. However I don't think that this is what my friend had in mind when he asked what it was like to be here for this historic election. The reality was that most of election day was pretty dull - there were no rallies on the streets around here, there were no long snaking lines when Kyle went to vote (she was done in about 4 minutes), and there were no results until the polls started to close (which of course didn't stop the TV networks providing non-stop pseudo-analysis and coverage).
Even when the results did start coming in, it didn't feel that exciting (but perhaps we were watching the wrong channel - we decided to watch the Daily Show's "Indecision 2008" programme). However at 11pm Jon Stewart announced that Barack Obama had been declared the winner (ok so we had to check with a real news channel before we really believed it), I think it started to dawn on me what a historic event this was. Also I hadn't fully appreciated how much race is still such a huge issue here.
Obviously the US and the world are facing enormous challenges, and getting elected is not the end but the beginning. However listening to Obama when he speaks is very inspiring, and he makes me believe that he really does speak for everyone and that maybe it is possible to overcome these global problems. Good luck to him, and us all.
It's November 4th and the autumn leaves are falling here in New Jersey. While most people here are electing the next president, I'm writing the first post for my blog. Not being entirely sure of what's involved in the whole blogging enterprise, I've decided to fall back on columnist Guy Browning's advice on "How to blog".
So, welcome to ironic button: No manifesto. No agenda. No content.
