So lets move the plot forward a month or so. In the mean time, our heroine has flown to NYC to attempt to get her UK Visa and renew her US passport. Of course she arrives just as the UK changes their visa rules! And what does the Consulate do? It cancels her appointment so they can close for training on the new rules!

Next, the US passport agency refuses to give her a prompt appointment to renew her passport - they offer an appointment 3 days after she is scheduled to return to the UK.

Arrrgh!!

At least I got to spend a few days with my sons. They are both absolutely lovely, amazing, wonderful young men and a delight to be with. I also got to meet my son Andrew's new girlfriend Joanna. What can I say about Joanna? That she is as lovely, as charming, as amazing, as wonderful as my son? OK, she is! Yes! I'm so happy for Andrew. And Joanna is also quite an artist as well, the painting she gave me is brilliant and I have it displayed prominantly on my living room wall.

So back I flew to London. All the US and UK changes are a nightmare BUT they did make a few small changes that allow me to wiggle things to apply for everything I need via mail. It requires a tiny bit of dodginess but I'll manage. At the moment my passport is in the hands of the US gov't as they process the renewal and I'm counting the days untill it is mailed back to me.

On April 18th we went up to Oxford for the ACCU conference. Six interesting if exhausting days. I made a deal with the Event Organizer where I would work as her assistant for the conference in exchange for our room and the Speakers dinner, etc. So we had a relatively cost free time.

When I returned to London on Sunday the Demon Internet starter kit for the new BICLP network had arrived. I'm scheduled to turn up the network for the BICLP on May 5th, the day after the election.

I find myself profoundly depressed lately and this is my excuse for not posting here. In fact, the depression seems to leave me with such apathy and lethargy that I do very little indeed. Sad, since I'm normally a cheerful and productive sort. It all comes down to this damn UK visa. It's a house of cards. I need to get to the US to get my visa. To do this I need to get the money to buy plane tickets. To get money, I need to work, but I can't work unless I get the UK Visa so I can get married and get permission to settle. Oh yes, did I mention getting married? This is the really crazy bit, you have to either be a citizen here or have a special UK Visa for them to allow you to get married. In the US, you just go get married but not here, oh no , no, no.

I feel like I am living in a nursury rhyme -

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

I have no idea what to do and my current visa waiver for the UK expires in 10 days.

How do you define despair?

I'm morbidly amused that Crash won the Best Picture Oscar last night. I thought it was a crap film, exploitative and boring. Same old, same old. I liked Brokeback Mountain, really enjoyed watching it. Brokeback Mountain had charm. at its heart it was an old fashioned love story with a perfect classic tragic ending. Memoirs of a Geisha had enormous style and beauty.

But this was the year of the Battle of the Minorities and one minority won out over the others. Sad in a way. Especially because for me, Brokeback Mountain was not about the tragedy of a hopeless homosexual love but about love, full stop.

Ah well, a pox upon the Academy Awards. I'm delighted that Wallace & Grummit's new film won Best Animation Feature. I hope it encourages more theatres to show it, more people to watch it and more to buy the DVD. Aardman films are delightful.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

wHY IS NO ONE PROTESTING? WHY ISN'T THE U.N. SCREAMING ABOUT THIS? WHY ISN'T AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL SCREAMING ABOUT THIS? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY ISN'T THE ENTIRE CIVILIZED WORLD BOYCOTTING THIS NATION?

Barb


Old horrors, young victims

I've covered horror stories across the African continent, and every time, I tell myself I've seen it all. But nothing could have prepared me for the scenes I witnessed in the tiny dusty town of Gulu in northern Uganda.

It is in this region that a rebel force -- the Lord's Resistance Army, which claims to base its principles on the Ten Commandments -- has waged a protracted 20-year war against the Ugandan government. The army is led by Joseph Kony, a 43-year-old so-called "Disciple," who is as elusive as he is mysterious. His modus operandi is to kidnap children from villages at night and indoctrinate them into his group. Reports from victims suggest he physically and mentally abuses them into submission. The United Nations says more than 30,000 children have been kidnapped in the last 10 years alone.

In a bid to escape danger over the past three years, every young child in every village surrounding Gulu makes a nightly trek from their village homes to the relative comfort of the town. The locals call them the "night commuters."

They're given shelter at several locations in Gulu -- a canvas roof; a cold, hard floor; and if they're lucky, a blanket. No food, no water, no showers are available. But at least they get to become kids again, knowing Joseph Kony would not attack the well-fortified town. In the morning, they get up and proceed to make the long commute back home, just lucky to be alive.

Those who are kidnapped by Kony's army live a life of horror. While reporting this story, we met Alice, a 19-year-old girl who recently managed to escape after eight years in captivity. She told me blood chilling stories of events no child deserves to witness. She spoke of how the group she was in was made to kill a child who tried to escape by biting him to death, of how she was made to cut up and cook the body of a village chief killed by the rebels and forced to eat the meat from his body, and of how she was raped and eventually had a child from the man who defiled her. She showed us the physical scars of her time as a child soldier -- bullet holes on her leg and shrapnel wounds on her chest.

The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant of arrest for Joseph Kony. Nonetheless, he's able to operate with relative impunity throughout the northern part of Uganda. As long as he's alive and leading his ragtag group of rebels, no child in northern Uganda will ever be safe.

By Jeff Koinange, CNN Correspondent: 1:44 PM
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/

Snowstorm photo album

Tom went out into the snow and took some photos and then he graciously sent me copies.

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A priest, a minister, and a rabbi were all sitting at a table, finishing dinner and discussing theology.

Suddenly an angel appeared before them. "I have been sent to grant each of you one wish," he said. "Who will go first?"

The catholic priest stood up. "I wish for the destruction of all protestants!"

Then the protestant minister bolted up. "I wish for the destruction of all catholics!"

The rabbi stayed seated and just smiled, so the angel asked, "How about you? What do you wish for, rabbi?"

The rabbi answered, "Well, if you're going to grant their wishes, I'll just settle for another cup of coffee."

Valentine's day

My old friend Bo sent me a lovely song and then phoned to wish me happy V day. Sweet man, a good friend

Alan dropped by this afternoon to return the washed, empty glass souffle dish the tiramisu was in. He had finished it off. We went out tonight with Ron & Hilary and Alan brought along a small portion of the tiramisu he had saved out for Hilary. She loved it. She was raving about it and only allowed Ron a small teaspoon of it, keeping the rest for herself. They thought it was perfect and absolutely not too much booze.

I'll have to make it again but next time I will make it when we're all having dinner together so we all get reasonable servings.

I spoke to Andrew and Joanne - they are just a delight - and Andrew is going to have a try at making a tiramisu soon I hope he enjoys it. The recipe book describes it as "Heaven in your mouth". It is.

The tiramisu was lovely and lush and silken - and very alcoholic. Mea Culpa, next time I will use less booze and a lower alcohol content version as well. I used a very high alcohol rum because that was all I had available. It was delicious anyway, but more suitable for Baba au rhum than tiramisu. It was still much better than anything commercial I've ever had in a restaurant.

My finace was moaning about it being too alcoholic but I completely discount that as he had eaten half the serving dish at that point and protested my taking even a single serving.

TIRAMISU - Don't try this at home kids!

Ok, I made it at home today. It's a special treat for my fiance. It can be very nice at restaurants that make it carefully, don't cut corners. But it's not sublime. I wanted to produce a sublime tiramisu. So I ignored all the easy-make, quick-step, derivative, and variations on tiramisu and looked for something that, given my knowledge of cooking , had the right feel to it. I found my perfect recipe in Lorenza di Medici's Basic Tiramisu. The recipe is:

Ingredients

* EGG YOLKS, 3

* EGG WHITES, 3

* SUGAR, superfine (castor), 4 tablespoons

* VIN SANTO, or MARSALA, or BRANDY, or RUM 1-1/3 cups (I used rum)

* ESPRESSO COFFEE, very strong, 1/2 cup

* MASCARPONE CHEESE, 8 ounces

* CREAM, 1 cup (This is UK double cream so in the US get heavy whipping cream. NOT UHT crap, please.)

* SAVOIARDI (LADY FINGERS), I believe I used 18 of them for the bowl I used.

* Cocoa powder - the highest quality, pure cocoa.

* dark chocolate - I used a super high quality bar of black african chocolate - 86% which is amazing since the highest I've ever previously seen was 72%. This was dark, silky, and sweetly intense.

You will need 3 mixing bowls for this and 1 large glass souffle dish or any glass serving dish with high, straight sides - I recommend 4" high.

Directions

1. Make a zabaglione by beating the egg yolks and 3 tablespoons sugar in the top of a double boiler until ivory colored. (I used a large pyrex mixing bowl with a handle over a pot of boiling water and a hand mixer.)

2. Add 1/3 cup liquor and whisk over gently simmering water until the mixture begins to thicken. Let it cool.

3. Stir about 1/4 cup coffee into the Mascarpone. Taste and add a teaspoon or so of sugar if desired, I did. I also added a bit more coffee to get the soft, silky texture I wanted.

4. Whip the cream to soft peaks.

5. Beat the egg whites until stiff. Fold the egg whites into the zabaglione.

6. Dip the lady fingers into the remaining liquor mixed with the remaining coffee and line the bottom of a 9-inch bowl or individual containers (wine glasses work well).

7. Cover them with half the Mascarpone, then half the zabaglione, then half the whipped cream.

7a. Dust with cocoa powder after the zabaglione layer before you add the cream.

8. Repeat the layers, starting with more dipped ladyfingers and finishing with the cream.

8a. Dust or sprinkle lightly with cocoa. Shave the chocolate bar over the top so chocolate curls/bits scatter all over it.

9. Refrigerate for several hours (4-24) before serving.

9a. Alan says add more shaved chocolate on top before serving.

Whew! I finished the tiramisu and it's now sitting quietly chilling in the fridge, the flavours maturing and mellowing.

We'll have it for dessert tonight. I'll know if my work paid off after we've tasted it. It looks gorgeous and smells gorgeous so I have high hopes.

If you have a dishwasher, this isn't any more than a horribly huge amount of fussy, careful, skilled work. If you have to wash it all up afterwards by hand, as I do, this is almost unspeakable. But one must suffer for beauty.

If you want quick and easy - get an "apple pie" at MacDonalds.

Bye-Bye Betty

Betty Frieden, one of the founders of American feminism, died Feb 4th, on her 85th birthday. I was still a child when her book The Feminiine Mystique was published. I remember older friends talking about the then radical idea that a woman might need, not just want but need more than a husband and children.

I had conflicting opinions back then and after decades I still have conflicting thoughts about the whole subject. Of course women want and need more than the narrow little role of wife and mother. I have no conflict with that. But what has always troubled me is how those who rejected traditional roles denigrated and condemned and ridiculed those who chose to retain the roles or attempted to integrate a wide variety of roles. Fundamentally it was just a switch in the gender of who was telling us how to live. So we discarded the male lifestyle direction of women for female lifestyle direction and surprise! the females trying to direct our lives were as uncaring of individual women's needs and wants as their previous taskmasters! Fourty years later stay at home mums still are not respected and people still ask them "do you intend to go back to work?". Ha! Anyone who asks that should be sentenced to raise 3 young children without extra household help for a few weeks. All women work. Some do it in the home and some in a office, but they all WORK. Dont ever fool yourself about this. The most high-pressure, techically difficult project management job I ever worked on was a freaking piece of cake compared to daily care for 3 children (or more sometimes).

So back to Betty. I always liked Betty and what she had to say. My arguement was with the come-latelies like Gloria Steinem. The ones who weren't interested in giving women a choice, the ones who kicked the concepts of equality to the side. My arguement was with the All-females-are-dykes-under-the-skin radical and men are the anti-christ crowd. The ones who imposed a conventionalism on the new feminism that was as narrow and confining in its own way as that previously imposed by men. Is it better for the gulag to be guarded by them or us? We are still in the gulag.

Bye Bye Betty. You fought the good fight.

I'm not too keen on any organized religion. Much like professional sports, organized religion is a machine. A business set up to empaower itself and control the rest of us.

I'm disgusted with Islam in the same way I am disgusted with Christianity. I have no problem with people practicing their beliefs in the privacy of their home on a fully consentual basis. But the moment anyone tries to impose their faith-based beliefs on me , I have absolutely no use for them left.

Dear muslims,

If you do not like my country, please leave.
If you do not like the way our women dress, please leave.
If you do not like our separation of politics and religion, please leave.
If you support violent responses to criticism of Islam, please leave.
If you support terrorism in any way, shape or form, please leave.
If you cannot accept satirical cartoons in our newspapers, please leave.
If you do not support democracy or the freedom of speech, please leave my country.

SBrant http://face-of-muhammed.blogspot.com/

Comment on the Danish cartoons

This said it well so I'm copying it-

Friday, February 03, 2006
A Moment of Truth

A new non-political international movement is rising.

4000 terror attacks after 9/11, the world was still slumbering. But 12 innocent satirical drawings in a Danish newspaper, the kind of cartoons printed daily by the thousands in newspapers all over the world, have changed the geopolitical situation.

Suddenly, a new understanding is emerging across political differences.

In recent years, the world crisis between Islam and the non-Muslim world has been discussed in thousands of books, countless television debates and millions of articles across the globe. It did nothing but divide us. Even former western allies were divided, and a wave of anti-Americanism has swept even the free western societies.

Now ridiculous circumstances have changed all that. A sense of humour has changed what all the debating could not.

For 1400 years, Islam has waged war on all surrounding non-Muslim civilizations. During the course of history, Christianity was reformed, Europe colonized the world and set it free again, dictators lived, reigned and died, and totalitarian regimes emerged and vanished.

But Islam stayed, unreformed. And today, it imprisons more than 1 billion people, moderate and radical souls alike, in a huge gap of difference to the rest of us. Across political divides, across national boundaries, across various degrees of freedom, across race, people or religion, black or white, rich or poor; it stands out as our opposite. Only Muslim reformists seek to lessen the gap. And their voices are quickly silenced.

In modern times, waves of immigrants from Muslim countries have entered Europe. All European countries have been subject to islamization; the process of slowly incorporating Islamic values and Muslim customs into our way of life. Far East countries like India, Thailand, Indonesia and China are experiencing the Muslim Jihad. Israel lives with it. America feels it. Africa suffers from it, and is too weak from disease and poverty to resist.

It is suddenly coming to our attention that Islam is not, cannot, and will not be integrated or assimilated to the values of freedom and democracy. Islam is not only a religion; it is a totalitarian and expansionistic political ideology.

It is now a moment of truth. The current events unfolding all over the world are opening our eyes. 12 cartoons have touched the soul of the free societies: The right to speak freely without fear.

The drawings did not cause this. But they catalyzed a world conflict dormant since the birth of Muhammed.

Now we know what his face looks like. And we are still in majority on this earth to stand up to it.

The current events will eventually lead to either a 3rd world war or finally some sort of Islamic self-realization that has been 1400 years in the making.

posted by sbrant

ITS SNOWING! IN LONDON!

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. This past Saturday was my birthday. Pretty crappy, actually.

I'm feeling trapped in a status quo prison of silence, with steep slippery slopes that have no possibility of escape.

I guess I've been a bit too depressed to write about anything here. This getting a VISA situation is a nightmare. Also things at home are not exactly brilliant. We ran out of coffee a few days ago and I feel really shitty not being able to have at least a cup of it in the morning. Not so much a caffiene addiction as the hopelessness of it all. If you can't buy coffee, you are really in trouble.

I have to rethink things and see what I can do to seperate myself from all crazy things domestic, get my Visa, get a job, get my own life back. I feel like I am becoming a non-person.

Today I received a brand new IBM Thinkpad T43. This was the end result of a whole long saga that started with Alan's IBM Thinkpad T23 dying last summer after 2 1/2 years of heavy use. I'll explain the whole megilla later. The Thinkpad is tres nift. I do need a mouse for it tho. Laptop pointing devices are still basically crap.

Hey Andrew and Adam - I miss you so much.

We're foster caring for 2 sweet kitty sisters while a local pet charity looks for a new home for them. They're black and white and have very lovely sweet personalities.

I'm still struggling to get the damn UK passport. Nightmare.

Wow almost the whole month of September has passed since I last posted here. What a nightmare this has been!

I've moved to London and in fact, today move into the new flat. Oh my god, I am so happy. Have to get the phone access sorted and the Sky TV and the Broadband internet, etc - all the utilities but that's a mere detail.

Have I mentioned how happy I am?

More later.

I've been gathering the paperwork for my UK visa. What a nightmare of bureaucracy this is. And insanely expensive! Over $500 for the application fee. Not exactly welcoming with open arms, are they?