Burn the catholic!

Wednesday morning started with a hangover and a bright sunny day; not my favourite combination.

But the throbbing I my head from too many Stellas was a minor inconvenience. The rain clouds were taking a break and there was a real feeling of joy in the air, similar to the day after the 1997 election. I just hope Obama lets us down more gently than Tony Blair did.

The day was a two parter. In the morning I was moderating a panel session on Web 2.0 at a major conference in the city. In the evening I was heading over to Muir Beach for a traditional November 5th tradition, burning a Catholic in effigy.

The morning went well. I moderated successfully, with only a few hiccups and my opener that it had been an historic 12 hours bought cheers and whoops. Obamamania is still running high.

But I was looking forward to the evening. There’s a sizable British contingent in San Francisco and even though I hadn’t been to a bonfire night in years I was looking forward to this one.

To those who don’t know November 5th is commonly known as Guy Fawkes, or Bonfire, Night, after an attempt in 1605 to blow up the English parliament. England was in the midst of religious wars that roared across Europe for hundreds of years – catholic against protestant.

In many ways the current situation is very similar to back then. Two religious groups who basically believe the same thing are fighting to the death over minor differences. Back then it was over accepting the primacy of the pope over the rights of common man. Now it’s fighting over whether Jesus was the son of god or just another prophet on a par with Moses or Mohammed.

Anyway, Fawkes was caught guarding gunpowder, the most potent explosives of the day, cached underneath the Palace of Westminster. The plan was to set it off and start a revolution. The plan was foiled by a leak in the team and Fawkes, after resisting torture for four days, was hung, drawn and quartered and began a UK tour, albeit in small pieces. He is remembered in the poetry:

“Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.”

It’s odd that someone who is ostensibly a terrorist should have achieved immortality in the public imagination not granted to kings or deserving leaders. But I have fond memories of bonfire nights; watching fireworks shooting into the sky, the warmth of the bonfire and roasting chestnuts with an old school master at Stancliffe in a metal dustbin lid. I even flew into London from a business trip once on November 5th and seeing fireworks from above was a memorable experience.

After a long and twisty drive down to the beach we stumbled out in the darkness towards the bonfire. It was quite a pile, something the builders were proud of, but a little pissed off as the beach officials had insisted it was out by 8:30pm and there was no way that pile of wood was going to burn in that time unless napalm was used.

There were also no fireworks but nevertheless it was a fun night out and after watching as five home-made guys were burnt we wandered along the beach watching the surf glistening in the light. The moon was out and it was a really lovely evening.

Then we wandered up to the Pelican Inn, an English themed hotel, for their buffet dinner. We feasted on fish and chips, bangers and mash and a shepherd’s pie that was a tad too heavy on the cheese and sweetcorn but very nice nevertheless. I also enjoyed a pint of ESB, bottled but still lovely and a good taste of home.

The hotel itself is the most English place I’ve found over here. This was partially down to the high number of Brits about but the place itself was very authentic. Lots of thick wood beams, horse brasses and rickety old stools gave a very nice atmosphere and the conversations on the football, why the MG is the best car in the history of motoring and why David Cameron is a slimy little toe rag reminded me strongly of home.

The end of a long road

It seems like the US presidential election has been going on for ever.

Serious campaigning has been going on for two years and quite frankly I’m sick of it all. The politicians must be too, and recently they all have a look in their eyes I see at day long press briefings that screams “OK, plaster on a smile and let’s go through this shit one more time.”

This is not my first election night and to be honest I was dreading it. In 2004 I was staying with my then girlfriend in New York. We went to an election night party and watched Kerry begin to sweep states and retired happily and drunkenly to bed.

The next morning I got up to make the tea and opened the laptop to find out that the world had four more years of the idiot in chief, America’s reputation in the world was massively damaged after electors confirmed the 2000 fiasco and the day was going to be spent talking to New Yorkers who were scared at what Bush was going to do to the city in retaliation.

The omens looked much better this time around. Obama’s people had run a good campaign and were outspending and out organising the opposition. Plus there were the candidates themselves.

Obama is a once in a generation public speaker, he really gets the hairs up on the back of the neck when he’s in full flow. Being a great speaker however doesn’t make one a good politician however. Enoch Powell was a great speaker, but a despicable race baiter as well, and Adolph Hitler apparently was inspirational in his native tongue.

What does make a good politician, and it’s something Obama has in spades, is intelligence. Unlike some in this country I don’t want a leader who would be a good person to have a beer with, although that’s always nice. I want the smartest person in the room, a philosopher king (or queen) who can make hard decisions even if they are unpopular and who thinks things through rather than bombing some brown people because it seems like a good idea at the time.

McCain is the best of a bad bunch to oppose him. An admirable service record, a genuine individual for most of his career and a man I admired until he started his run for the 2008 presidency. In 2000 he’d pulled no punches and fought for what he believed in, campaign finance reform that is still desperately needed, fairer taxation and American moral leadership. But in 2008 he binned all that and towed the party line, and lost all that he had gained in many people’s eyes.

There was also the Palin factor. McCain is over 70 and has had four bouts of cancer. To pick Palin as a running mate was a disastrous choice. Not only is she woefully inexperienced but her record as it stands isn’t good – turning budget surpluses into deficits, charging rape victims for evidence gathering and using official power to sort out family disputes. What few interviews she gave were painful to watch.

Now although the fact that Obama was running with a few points lead as we went into the final day I was far from confident. Opinion polls are a very inexact science and there are other factors to consider.

In the last eight years America has changing its voting system considerably. Electronic voting machines are widely used, and they are prone to failure and outright hacking. I’ve still got serious doubts about such systems. Paper and pencil ballots may seem primitive but they have definite advantages.

Firstly they are very difficult to fix. An electronic vote with no paper receipt is impossible to verify, where as paper ballots can be easily recounted. Secondly paper ballots are also very difficult to forge – you need an army of people writing fraudulent slips to swing an election and the chances of everyone keeping their mouths shut are minimal – as G Gordon Liddy said, the only conspiracy that works are when three people are involved and two of those are dead. Electronic votes can be forged with a couple of key strokes.

Then there’s the voter panic factor. In the UK in 1992 Labour was ahead in the polls but when people got to the actual ballot box they panicked over the thought of having to pay slightly higher taxes and voted in John Major. I was worried the same thing might happen, particularly with the ridiculous socialism campaign waged against Obama.

So let’s just say it was a tense day at work. We tried to get much of the day’s work done early, since the results from the East Coast wouldn’t start coming in until the middle of the afternoon. As the day wore on less and less work got done as everyone started hitting refresh on the results screens and waiting for the first states to be called.

The first result was the exit polls, but considering these had called the election for Kerry in 2004 they were taken with not so much a inch of salt as a tanker load of Saxa. They looked good for Obama, very good in fact. Almost too good…

As the day wore on the first calls started to come in, and news of each win was passed quickly round the office. People who barely spoke to each other on a normal day were eagerly sharing information, gossip and rumour.

By 5pm things were shaping up. In key states like Pennsylvania and Ohio Obama was looking very good and even Florida seemed to be in play. This was either shaping up to be a great result or a massive disappointment.

I left the office and hurried over to Si’s hotel, where we were going to watch the Daily Show’s roundup of the results over beer and pizza. By the time the (very funny) show had ended it looked like Obama had it in the bag. Ohio had turned blue and almost no Republican has ever become president without the state. We left for the Mad Dog in a state of high excitement.

As the taxi took us to the pub I began to notice more and more people in the streets, milling about and hanging around outside bars smoking, all with faces turned inwards at the TV screens within. Maybe I was imagining it but there seemed real tension in the air.

When we finally got there the pub was busier than I’d ever seen it. Not even standing room only, everyone was crushed in tight but the mood was jubilant. We’d missed it on the trip in but McCain had given a speech pretty much admitting defeat. People were hugging and kissing each other at the news and as we fought our way to the bar there was a pile of tips piling up for the staff (H made over $400 in tips that night).

I subsequently watched McCain’s speech on YouTube and it was him at his best. A few more like that on the campaign and Obama might not have won. It was gracious, honest and showed him to be a great patriot of the proper kind – not my country right or wrong, but genuine feeling for his land and a desire to make it better. His audience was much less gracious, and given some of the booing and shouting the Secret Service is going to be very busy protecting Obama.

Anyway, back in the bar and the news came on that Obama would give a speech at 9pm. Tensions mounted and everyone was glancing at the monitors to see if he was on the podium. When he stepped out from behind the curtains and strode forward the bar erupted into cheers, clapping and screams of delight. Then, as he stepped up to the bar the crowd fell silent and we strained to listen.

And then the sound failed, dead static filling the speakers. H behind the bar tried to fix it to shouts of frustration and what seemed like ages, but was just a few seconds, it came back on and the silence was deafening as we all heard his words.

What a speech it was. Inspiring to the extreme, measured and honourable in his treatment of McCain. He spoke to all Americans, no matter who they were, and asked that they join in making this country great again. I’m willing to bet there were even some hardened racists watching who found themselves getting a bit choked up. The crowd swung from silence to wild cheers during pauses and I found myself punching the air with delight and screaming with them.

But what really struck me was its realism. He didn’t sugar coat the tough road ahead. Sacrifices would need to be made. He’s coming into the worst economic crisis this country has faced in nearly a century, two wars are being waged and things are going to get bloody in the religious wars ahead.

But, as he repeated, “yes we can” a strange thing began to happen; we began repeating it too. Slowly, but with more and more people joining in, the refrain “yes we can” was repeated, again and again. It was kind of scary looking back on it, this is how mass movements begin, but it felt good at the same time.

As his last words faded away the bar erupted again but for myself I felt in a little island of calm. It was done, he was in, and America’s long national nightmare was over. While my friends and strangers both celebrated I retreated a little into myself and savoured the moment, and I’m not ashamed to say got a teeny bit moist around the eyes.

It’s a cliché to say that this was history in the making, but that’s because clichés only become that because they are the nuts and bolts of our language – they define the commonly expressed and felt. But there really was something special about this night.

Even three years ago if you’d have told me the next president wouldn’t be an old white man I’d have thought you were a hopeless idealist. OK, I’d have made an exception for Hillary Clinton, but she struck me as another Thatcher – a woman by genetics only. She’s the best president this country never had and frankly deserves to be in the White House but too many people hate her for that to happen. If this election proved anything it’s that sexism is stronger than racism in America.

But, as the crowd dispersed and we ordered another pitcher of beer, that warm fuzzy feeling lingered. The election is a turning point in American history. Not just the first black president, but a chance for America to regain its lost ground. Barring a revolution the next century belongs to China, America is at the zenith of its power and glory, but what a way to go out; holding true to the ideals it has for so long failed to live up to – that anyone can make it to the top if they have the intelligence and drive.

Bay Bridge

Went out tonight with glamorous friend Si, who’s over for the week covering a conference. I’m moderating a panel session for her so we went out for a business dinner (in expense account speak) to go over strategy.

Actually it was very good, the food and company excellent, and helped by views of the Bay Bridge, which to my mind is by far the most interesting bridge in the bay, and particularly pretty at night when it’s all lit up.

The Golden Gate Bridge gets far too much attention in my opinion. Yes, it’s an engineering masterpiece and without it San Francisco would be a non-entity dependent on a ferry services, like some godforsaken medieval village. Sure, without it people would pass the city by and go up the eastern side of the bay.

But it’s also really ugly in a lot of respects, particularly the off red colour and it’s so popular a suicide spot that the city has just voted to string a net underneath it to catch the depressed and give them a second chance to think it over before they crawl to the edge of the net and finish the job.

But the Bay Bridge is what connects the city to Berkeley, Oakland and, eventually, to the state capital Sacramento. It’s used by far more people (over a quarter of a million a day) and is something of a quiet engineering marvel itself. Not to mention that its real name is delightfully silly - The James "Sunny Jim" Rolph* Bridge - and thankfully is almost never used.

The tunnel connecting the two spans that bores through Yerba Buena Island is the largest bore tunnel in the world, at 76 feet (23 m) wide, 58 feet (18 m) high, and extends over half a kilometre. The contents of the tunnel were dumped on the other side of the island and now form the bedrock of the Treasure Island residential area, which has some of the best views in the city.

I briefly considered moving there myself, until some research showed that living on loose landfill in the middle of a frigid bay was not the smartest move in an earthquake zone, due to a phenomenon called ground liquefaction.

Because the bay is so deep, and the distance so great, entirely new engineering techniques were used to build it, and it is also twin level to allow two roadways, one outbound and one inbound. One of these suffered a partial collapse in the ’89 earthquake so the eastern span is being rebuilt, slowly but surely.

All in all it’s a fascinating, and very useful structure. But to the rest of the world it’s almost invisible, and Golden Gate is the icon of the city. It all seems a tad unfair, so if you do come to the city make sure you take a picture of it.


*James Rolph, the 27th governor of California and 18 year Mayor of the city, commissioned the bridge in 1931, but died before it was constructed. He also pardoned anyone involved in California’s last lynching – to my mind the bridge deserves a better name.

There’s only one Lewis Hamilton

Today was the last race of the Formula One (F1) season and in some ways this is a blessing; at least it felt that way when I dragged myself out of my warm bed at 8am to head down to the San Francisco F1 club bar to watch the race.

Sporting addiction is a curious thing and my excitement at today’s race puzzled me. I’ve never understood the almost religious following of teams that comes with football and while I can get excited about rugby it’s not to crushing if England crash out of a championship.

But F1 grabs me like no other sport. I don’t know what it is about it. The sheer engineering skill behind a car is something incredible – at full whack the engine pistons are firing off at 300 revolutions a second. I’m friendly with one of McLaren’s aerodynamicists and the computational power that goes into each body part is stunning. Plus if you’ve ever been in the garage with an F1 car with the engine running you’ll experience the sheer power of the thing; an engine that shakes your internal organs and screams like a Valkyrie chasing a barbarian soul.

Mum and Dad were both part time rally drivers, and out family once held a world speed record back in the 20s. I don’t like to think it’s genetic but one wonders.

Plus it’s still the sport of intervals. Yes, the engineering is critical but the sign of a truly great driver is that he can make a bad car beat a better one. James Hunt, for all his faults, could take a duff bit of kit and make it a winner. Senna had the skill, and so too, though it pains me to say it, did that cheat Schumacher. Anyway, onto the race.

Lewis Hamilton was in a good position to clinch the world championship and, as I’ve explained, I wouldn’t have missed this race for the world. When Mansell was in the same position I waited up until 4am to watch him in Australia and Lewis is a far more inspiring driver; more aggressive, better passing skills and he never blames the car, unlike walrus features.

Brazilian Felippe Massa was racing in his home grand prix and had to win to get the number one on his car next season, while Lewis just had to finish in fifth to get it. Given the shameful handicaps Lewis has had to suffer through from the Ferrari Insurance Association, sorry Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, we were all expecting a conservative race with no risks taken.

The weather was uncertain for the race, wet at he start with the promise of more to come. This always makes for a more interesting race, since tire selection becomes critical. To raise the adrenaline further the petulant Alonso, who had promised to do whatever he could to stuff Lewis, was right behind the British driver.

As a side bonus the race was delayed for ten minutes because of the weather, allowing me to choke down a grapefruit juice and a breakfast burrito before the excitement started. As it turns out the key players made it through the dangerous first lap without incident. Sadly David Coulthard, on his last ever F1 race, was taken out after a shunt. A sad end to a successful but uninspiring career. DC had the makings of a great driver but he just didn’t want it enough in my opinion.

The race progressed and Massa streaked away, driving the race of his career. He and his team called it perfectly and there was no chance, barring engine failure, that he wasn’t going to win in front of his own crowd and become the new Senna for his countrymen.

Lewis however was uninspiring. He hung onto his position, smart tactics as this race wasn’t about the glory of the podium, but winning the war. The second half passed uneventfully but then, in the final seven laps, it started to rain again. My heart was in my throat; it had looked like Lewis had it but was I celebrating too early.

All the leading cars changed tires but Lewis, lying in fifth, was being seriously pressed by Sebastian Vettel, who was on stonkingly good form. The two tussled it out and I and my fellow Lewis fans (of which there are a lot, he’s really popular over here) screamed at the screen like it would make a difference.

Lewis got out of the pits ahead of Vettel but with only a few laps to go he slipped past him after Lewis went pear shaped while cornering, and into sixth – a losing position. I have to admit there was a certain amount of bad language on my part at this point. My mother would not have been proud.

Try as he might, and believe me he was trying, Lewis couldn’t get past the German driver. He was achingly close on the straights but the Toro Rosso was so fast through the corners that Lewis didn’t have a chance.

The laps came down, three, two and finally the last lap. It was going to be yet another loss for Lewis, after last season’s disappointment. I was crushed, screaming at the TV for a miracle. And then one came along.

Timo Glock, lying in fourth, was still on dry tyres. On the last lap the rain came down really hard and he, like every other driver on slicks, was losing 15 seconds a lap as they fought for grip. Having driven a proper F1 simulator I can tell you that in perfect conditions the cars are almost impossible to handle. In the wet, with the wrong tires, I’m amazed the drivers don’t end up dead in a second.

Glock was trying to hold it together but there was no hope for him. Vettel shot past him as he was wrestling the car around the third to last bend. Far ahead Massa crossed the finishing line, winner of the race and the world championship on current placement. The Ferrari garage, which housed Massa’s father, erupted in celebration.

Then Lewis, with just two corners to go, squeaked in between Glock and the corner ridges to clinch fifth. The cameras missed it and I must confess I was too busy screaming to notice but a few seconds later he crossed the line and Hamilton P5 flashed up on the screen.

If this was a movie then the room would have fallen silent before erupting. However, back in the real world the Ferrari supporters were cheering and toasting each other while the Lewis crew were standing in shock. Then the room really erupted. The Ferrari boys were crying foul, we were screaming with joy. The next few minutes were spent shouting with joy and hugging complete strangers. Screw you Mosley and Eccleston, you tried to hold him down but failed.

In the post-race press conference Massa was a true sportsman. It must have been tough for him, having a few minutes of thinking he’d won the season only to be pipped at the post. He comported himself with honour and I found myself hoping he’d get the crown on a future season. Nothing shows someone’s character as how they face defeat.

We broke out the drinks and headed out to party. The grin didn’t come off my face all day. We headed up to my local and carried on the celebrations. It was a day to remember.