It was the tail end of the summer...

(allodarlin, summer, ken, misery, boris, voting, amendment one)

I still haven’t entirely forgiven Allo Darlin’ for not playing Tallaluah. I’m sure I’ll get over it. Eventually.

However, it’s not the tail end of the Summer at all; instead, the temperature is ramping up for a Summer in the American South. Basically, I’m going to be slowly roasted over a period of months that will make me wish for the inevitable rain of the British holidays. Then I’ll go back to the UK for a week and realize, actually, it’s nice when it’s sunny. As long as I’ve got my Factor 100+ sunscreen, I should be okay.

I’ve also been getting myself back into a more political mood, as you may have seen during my breathless twittering during last week’s UK local elections. It was good to see Ken getting closer to Boris than the opinion polls were showing; maybe if he hadn’t been so blasé about his tax situation, it would have been closer still (though I still think that the London Mayor result showed how popular Boris is, rather than anything else. And while it’s premature to suggest he may attempt to take over from Cameron, let’s all remember how we laughed when we first heard he was running for Mayor. We’re not laughing any more, are we?).

That election may be over, but it’s about to hit crazy season here in the US as the primaries come to an end and the campaigns for President begin in full force. Before that, though, there’s a very important primary taking place tomorrow in my adopted home state, North Carolina. As well as a host of local primaries, voters tomorrow have the chance to say yes or no to an amendment to NC’s constitution, one which would make it against the law to recognize a same-sex union, whether it be a civil union, marriage, or even just common-law partnership. As a result, thousands of families across the state tomorrow are in danger of not just being discriminated against by banning such recognition, but of losing their benefits due to companies no longer being able to offer them legally.

If you vote yes to Amendment One tomorrow, then you’re no longer allowed to complain about Big Government ever again. Just saying.

For those wishing to follow the results tomorrow, I have whipped together a toy webapp that scrapes the data from the NC voting office website and produces a running set of bar graphs. I think my choice of colors is pretty apposite too. (it’s also a fairly responsive design, so it should adjust to fit the size of your browser window on mobile devices)

I know I’ve been saying this pretty much every time since I got back, but things are progressing with the Kickstarter. However, we’re thinking that we need to up our profile around town a little more before launching the campaign, so don’t expect to see it for another month or so. But we’re getting there, I swear.

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