Who can keep up? I had only heard of 2/10 of these photo editing softwares

My head is spinning at the idea of eight additional photo editing software tools that seem to have sprung up in the time since I was last able to download photos from the camera. Ok, so the laptop was on photo-download-hiatus from August to the beginning of November, but still. Here's the article.

A return to 'my' America

Mist on the Nazko, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

Watching early election results and the commanding lead Barack Obama established over John McCain and the lipstick-wearing [unkind word used to describe women who not only aren't feminists but are traitors to the cause and therefore that most contemptible of all things, historical revisionists], there was never any doubt in my mind that Obama would be the next president of the United States of America.

But there was doubt and fear amongst my American friends, those people who, for the entire duration of the Bush Jr./Dick Cheney era have been saying, when they felt free to speak openly, 'this is not my America.' One stolen election too many, it seems, less than a decade, one highly unpopular war and an administration that hasn't hesitated to curtail civil liberties and cast suspicion on every immigrant that isn't white, and thinking, feeling, informed, caring and educated Americans were losing hope.

If an Obama-Democrat victory is what it takes to get America out of its horribly paranoid, negatively aggressive and defeatedly blustering mindset, I'm all for it. On the sociological level, I am thrilled to see a member of Gen X in power rather than a baby boomer. At the tail end of the baby boom demographic myself, I have spent my entire life defined by that cohort but disadvantaged by it. Increasingly I wonder what the rest of the world must think of these aging children who were so obnoxiously upfront about their 'ideals' - which have translated, for the most part, into nine parts rhetoric and one part pure hedonism. As I watch ad after ad for adult diapers and erectile dysfunction drugs, I wonder what's wrong with making love like a 55 year old rather than insisting on doing it the way you did when you were 18. But then, one of my favourite expressions has always been the snidely muttered 'mutton dressed like lamb.'

If you weren't convinced by Michael Adams' book Fire and Ice that Canada and the US are diverging in their values rather than converging, take a look at the contrasts posed by the election results: with the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history, an apathetic country re-elected a Conservative minority government headed by an uncharismatic leader with a reputation for not being a 'team' player. With the highest voter turnout in 100 years of American history, a country that has been galvanized by hope elected a member of one of its previously despised minorities, whose battle cry is, essentially, getting to yes, as president.

I'm not asking to redo our election. I am wondering what those tired white boys who've announced they're planning to run for the Liberal leadership next May really think they have to offer the country or the world. There isn't a scrap of charisma amongst a half dozen of them. And I suspect that hope is made up of equal parts charisma, the courage of one's convictions, and blind faith.