Last week's hotel: Enclave suites, Orlando, Florida

Well, I really like it.  Ok it is clearly getting a bit worn and used, but it is literally 5 minutes drive from Universal Studios.  By which I mean 5 minutes after finally getting in your car in the Universal car park, you are pulling into the Enclave Suites car park.

The staff are pleasant enough if not exactly world leaders in customer service, the pool(s) are clean, the showers are good, the cleaner's really do clean, and it is really rather affordable.  For a family on any kind of a budget it was great.  My one real gripe is that the card keys were just as unreliable as anywhere, which meant a couple of trips to reception.  Oh, and though they were willing to let us have a mail order delivery they could not quite get with the programme about telling the mail order company that we were guests.  Perhaps I should have tipped more.

It is quite likely we shall return.

Sanity in the USA

The re-election of President Obama is a victory for common sense.  It is not that he is a perfect politican and therefore deserved to be re-elected without opposition.  It is that the opposition was so detached from reality, so racist and misogynist, so self-serving as to be a parody of the "conservative" and "Republican" traditions.

Even the celebrating Democrats are hoping it will lead to re-emergence of a more rational debate in which truth and facts (such as abortion and evolution) are not treated as opinions.

I hope that the UK Conservative party, who appear to have learned a lot from recent Republican strategies learn something from this election (and not just that you can do very well if you gerrymander the boundaries) and we start to have rational politics again too.

My particular bug bear (though I have many) is the immigration policy that isolates us from genuine students, with their skills, ambition, contacts and (rather importantly these days) money.  When even the Economist calls a policy crazy you have to consider your views if you claim to be a rational pro-business party.

 

Summer's gone

2 days back at school, and it feels like autumn. And what is with the need for Astronauts costumes?

The link about covers my views on the US Republican party - see here

The first thing I want to say is....

mandate, my ass.

Last night I watched Don Lett's documenatary about Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution will not be televised. It was on BBC Four, but is not available on i-player (presumably for rights reasons), but with luck it will be repeated.

Gil was on himself - clearly suffering from his cocaine addition and HIV. His teeth were poor and he looked even more gaunt than usual. But his humour and intelligence shone through. It is tempting to say what a shame it was that this man suffered from such a terrible and debilitating addiction which deprived us his talents for most of the past twenty or twenty five years. But he seemed to accept it, and his story deserves to be about what he did rather than what else he might have done. After all plenty of people never reach his heights in the first place.

As an aside, few people swear as well as Gil - the timing and usage of a poet. Never just for the sake of it, always for judged effect.

I saw him live twice. Both in his missing years in the late 80s and early 90s. I don't know whether the drugs came first, and lead to his decline, or whether as suggested by the programme the music world decided he was old hat and his decline lead to the drugs. Only last night did I realise what a comedown it must have been from touring the world with Stevie Wonder to touring the backrooms that I saw him in.

The first was in Boston, USA. It was my first trip to the USA and I was extending a business trip to take advantage. I have no idea what made me go to Boston, apart from the fact that I could stop there for free on the way from Cincinatti to New York. In the rental car I heard that Gil was playing at a club. I changed my plans immediately.

I'd loved his music since "B-movie" was on an NME tape, starting off with the quote above. Secrets, not one of his best known albums, was one of the soundtracks to my first serious relationship. But he was mythical - not the sort of person who ever toured. It seemed impossible to imagine ever seeing him live.

To give you an idea of how important it was, while waiting to go to the club a perfectly nice attractive young American girl offered to take me back to her place. I turned her down. Just so I could go to see Gil. Seriously, I've never done that for anyone else.

And then he let me down. He bad mouthed Britain, saying what a cold grey place it was. I was probably the only Brit there, and why would he think there was even one. He got big laughs, but it disappointed me.

I still went when he played the Riverside in Newcastle, and I got to meet him backstage when he signed a book of poems for me. He was polite, but clearly keen to get on to other things. But that time it was ok for me. I realised he was a man, not a hero - and indeed he would have laughed at people seeing him as a role model, or any kind of perfect creature.

It must have been tough going from big gigs to the Riverside, which was only about 250 people.

The documentary made me realise that there is music of his out there that I have not heard, and I want to. That is unusual for this sort of programme. Normally you just remember the hits. This made me want to go deeper. So it was a success. The thing about Gil was that the combination of poetry (because he genuinely was a poet, not just a lyric writer), jazz and politics was pretty rare - and still is.

When I was younger I would have thought he had a good innings dying at 62. Now I am creeping up on 50 I realise how young it was, and how young he was when he started doing all this great music. We were practically contemporaries.

RIP Gil Scott Heron.

The American Constitution

I'm a Brit, so I don't always understand American Culture - but I've become strangely interested in the logic of the Tea Party and other Republicans who have a fixation on the American Constitution. From here, in the land they broke away from to write the constitution (by a bunch of slave owners with holes in the ground for toilets as pointed out by Scott Adams of Dilbert), there seems to have a lot of people who believe all the answers and authority of the US government lies in the constitution as originally written. Now they have Amended the constitution. Does that mean the Tea Party think that all the Amendments should be withdrawn? Or do they accept the amendments? In which case their whole argument collapses (because obviously the original constitution was not perfect, and there is no obvious reason why the current version should be either). Just asking. It confuses me.
I am used to people having holes in their political beliefs (says a guy who is apparently to the left of 98% of the population on social matters, and to the right of 90% on economic matters) - but this seems more aligned with the views taken by religous cults than real politics.


In the UK we avoid this by not having a written constitution, which allows our politicians to make things up as they go along. Note that this doesn't seem to work either.
At some stage I shall get exercised by the government deciding that we can have an extra MEP, but not bothering to going to all the trouble and expense of holding an election - just appointing a Tory off the Midlands list. That is the sort of thing you expect in Egypt! Oh, we could have had an election but it would have cost money, so we decided not to bother...
Even if it is perfectly legal it shows a disregard for the democratic process which is staggering. As did the attempted coup when they pushed for a fixed term government that could not be defeated by a majority of the House of Commons but only a majority +5%. Again, in most countries we call that fixing the parliament.

Oh apparently I am going to rant about it now. Sorry.