Four Minutes

Today, on 4th November 2008, America will vote for its 44th President. Will the majority of the votes go to Democrat candidate Obama or will they go to Republican candidate McCain? Will the Americans be brave and bold enough to set aside skin colour and ethnicity and elect the first mixed race President or will white supremacy continue to rule and the Bradley effect come into play again? Will America vote for a young, energetic, charismatic man in his 40s or will they opt for a septuagenarian (if only because of his skin colour)?

Lewis Hamilton finally broken the colour barrier when he became not only the youngest F1 driver to be world champion on Sunday but also the first non-white driver to do so, granted by the skin of his teeth. To think he could have done it a year earlier (where he lost - again by the skin of his teeth). I like him: to me he’s humble and full of humility - he was raised in a council housing estate after all – and his successes so far has not (yet) made him arrogant.

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There are some blogs/writings I don’t like to read:

1. Those with a lot of colloquialism and especially that that corrupt my mother tongue.
2. Those written in the form of text messaging language, e.g. ‘I hv to w8 4 d next 1’. I understand why we type our text that way because we can only type 160 characters in one message; anything exceeding that will be charged as a second text message. But why do that when typing a blog entry? Too lazy?
3. Those with a mixture of sentences written in small and capital letters typed alternately, e.g. ‘I hEaRt YoU’. Does alternately typing between small and capital letters add any value to the blog entry/sentence at all? I find it slows down my typing but maybe I’m just not one to type this way.
4. Those that mix British English and American English together without any qualm and any without inkling of the difference between the two.

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I have this unexplainable desire to visit the following countries (in no particular order): Kenya (OK, a friend is posted there for a year); Afghanistan (could it because of the Khaled Hosseini novels that I read or the Afghan treasure I read about?); Russia (despite the recent conflict in South Ossetia); and the ex-Russian states. Those besides Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and a dozen other countries.