Objective Spring

The arrival of a certain book has been keeping me busy. It's good to be getting a grip on the long postponed ambition at last. The sixth iPhone SDK downloads in the background too, indicating my intent.

Meanwhile though I should note that it's spring at last in Edinburgh. In truth it came a few weeks ago, and has crept back again today after mists and rain and all the rest. There's something about summers – more even than my allergies now ramped back up again – which I was reminded of when I found this article in the New York Times today. Interesting stuff for the politico-historians among us, especially those not even born until a decade later.

Roger Cohen's right about the chaos of ideals. Something certainly changed in the 1960's and remains so to this day; only it seemed to escape absolutely anyone's guess at the time. Also, I should point out that in my view similar things have happened several times before. The reaction – at last – to the Iraq fiasco bears great similarities with earlier American wars, and I doubt the veracity of the notion that the Cold War bore too much in common with the hottest war in history which led to it in the first place. I suspect the lessons we'll see made true again will be from different ages, intermixed. There's no doubting however that it will certainly be interesting.

When I was an impressionable and idealistic teen myself, I read and watched a lot about the supposed miracles of the sixties. Suiting my personality, the affair was actually courtesy of Hunter S. Thompson! Instead of believing too many song lyrics or the furthest reaches of idealistic old films – yet alone in the present day dross still murmured about Cuba – the good doctor's drug addled expeditions were what chimed true for me. Human nature has a habit of denying our equally natural dreams from coming anywhere near to fruition. Communism, revolution, free love (as in beer or in speech!?), and even the preoccupation with nuclear genocide … all have fizzled away back into the fantasies from which they came. Looking back on it, craning your neck to avoid the worst excesses of every involved party, you can't help but see the beauty in failed ideals. That history is littered with them is one of the lessons only age seems to bring to the mind who form them in the first place.

A blue sky gestures me to get on my bike. That I shall. Bearing in mind that it's only when we've made our mistakes we really get to learn!

Apples and Oranges

John Gruber dismisses the old Apple Adobe merger idea. Reasonable stuff. I stroked my chin and wondered something different a month ago, but even Microsoft's lurching gambit has evaporated in the meantime. The spring's couple was instead Apple and PA Semi, a deal whose consequences are no less than intriguing.

I'm more confident about this one!

Tail End of an Angry Dog

All right, so perhaps there is something about where this campaign's been going of late as identified by Fake Steve:

I guess I never realized this. But 80% of the people I talked to today I'm sure do not read a newspaper on a regular basis. Furthermore, many of them could not read a newspaper and comprehend the meaning of the stories. I don't mean that they're illiterate. They could probably read most of the words, as long as they didn't have more than three syllables. What I mean is they could not really understand what the stories mean. Also, I doubt most of them could focus long enough to finish an entire newspaper article.

And yet they vote. This terrifies me.

Actually, it's a view of middle America sadly popular over here in gleefully condescending Europe too, and although amusing it hardly rings as definitive. Instead, I'll turn to another liberal doyenne whose metaphor seems a touch more haunting:

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?

She’s so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

As for my own reaction to Indiana and North Carolina last night – or indeed the next morning over here – it's at least something Clinton didn't win them both. Ever since her resurgence in Ohio and into Pennsylvania I've been getting a bad feeling about this. Let's hope I'm wrong again!

It's just painfully obvious that all she needs to win is a single vote: Barack Obama's concession. The convention is still so long away and the race, no matter what now, helplessly deadlocked. Clinton's shown all the merciless determination. Worse yet, my gut feeling is that she'd be continuity president even above the overlooked recurring Republican rebel McCain.

Bloody Hell Boris

All right, so I was wrong. Phew.

Looking at the figures though, I was on to something. It did indeed go to a second round; and Boris got less transfers than Ken Livingstone. Fortunately it was still fairly close (48% to 52% by my numbers) and far too little to overturn his widely expected first round lead.

One of the BBC's better analysts, Nick Robinson, has an interesting take on Boris's victory.

I agree that this is a huge test for the Tories. Fascinating that it should be via their well known outlier, right in the media's very den. It's being said a lot at the moment that David Cameron may come to rue this particular success; I doubt that myself. People underestimate Boris. I think this could prove to be brilliant.

Certainly, the biggest political schism in terms of image and supposed clout, is now plain to see in Gordon Brown versus Boris Johnson. I just so happen to think that Boris's style and defiantly odd empathic talent will outshine and out-manoeuvre old Gordon in dramatic and even mythic terms the media won't be able to resist. One bites his lip and tries to usher public opinion about as though his pent-up anger weren't writhing in every motion. The other apparently bumbles on, ineffably affable, as though put there just to taunt him. Cameron may just have had his most effective lieutenant placed into position.

Now: is it Boris's dad who wins the by-election?

I've Got a Bad Feeling About This…

The polls close in the hour.

Not here, north of the border, but down in some of England and London in particular. The new yet old Prime Minister faces the usual round of presumed bad results; to be shrugged off by repetitive and disinterested lieutenants in the media tonight and tomorrow. Nothing ever changes there. Add to this however the London mayor election and what was otherwise just a teacup of a contest becomes, by the media's local eye at least, something of a storm.

I don't think Boris will win though.

I'd like him to. I've been voting against Labour (and their Liberal cohorts) for a decade now, ever since I was old enough to vote, and yet so often it's come to naught. Their social democratic whim – albeit sometimes held behind a supposedly Margaret Thatcher shaped fig leaf – went against my principles, and it still does. Their recent shift from governing hegemony to shaky angst, is not alas due to an ideological tide among the public. It's a simple absence of the one thing which made Labour New back in 1997, and which troubled them so once 2003 invited an issue called Iraq to stay. Tony Blair of course. Gordon Brown is no Tony Blair. He's not even the Gordon Brown many of his supporters inside and outside the media had talked up for years to a supposed fever pitch of expectation. Instead, after his first fumble so soon in office, he came across as exactly the grumbling, resentful, inarticulate and indeed stereotypical jealous Scotsman as his enemies had predicted. I never believed the former line of bullshit myself, but even I have been impressed with just how obvious is his fumbling and just how loathing is reaction to all those outside his inner coterie; electorate and all.

But today is no general election. It's just some locals, and a rivalry between Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone. Indeed, in London: if only it were just that. But as I understand it, there's proportional representation at work again. Howard Dean would be proud.

So, as its close, here's my prediction just before it's too late: Boris will get more votes, but just like Al Gore in 2000 and maybe even Barack Obama in 2008, the other guy will win.

Bloody Liberals.