So, my old chum and fellow Islington Conservative Boris Johnson MP has made it onto the shortlist of Tory candidates for Mayor of London. I'm not totally convinced that Boris can beat Ken Livingstone, but I'd hazard a guess that he'd fare better than the other Tory shortlisters.

Boris has caused a ruckus in the past with some less than friendly comments he's made about, well, things like Liverpool and Liverpudlians. However, he's a household name who regularly appears on one of my three favorite British TV shows, "Have I Got News For You?", and has a lot of appeal amongst younger voters, probably because even if it involves inserting his foot into his mouth occasionally, he says what he thinks and gets on with it. Of course, he's not an anti-Semite, a communist, or a bendy-bus/newt fanatic (like Ken Livingstone) so that also puts him in my good books. And did I mention that he lives in Islington, my former borough? And that he was born in the US?

Go Boris!

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OK, I'll come clean about it and publicly. I am not a Harry Potter fan. Not that I've ever actually read Harry Potter (because, well, I'm 29, not 8, so I don't see why I would).

So, scenes like this are just baffling to me.



Maybe I don't understand the Harry Potter phenomenon because I've never been a big fiction reader (I can probably count the number of fiction books I've read and actually enjoyed on two hands, and that's after spending four years of high school intensively-- and I mean intensively-- reading fiction and non-fiction alike, and spending two years of University studying French and Italian literature). But I don't get why adults (and I think the people in this picture are older than fifteen, most probably) are into books about a boy wizard who attends a weird boarding school in the hinterlands of England.

I don't have any objection to Harry Potter on content grounds-- well, OK, I was never into Dungeons and Dragons and so on, so I think the subject matter is a little bit lame, I'll grant you, but I don't think that Harry Potter fanaticism is bad because, say, it's going to lead to rampant Satanism or somesuch. But Harry Potter as a major, worldwide, transgenerational fan phenomenon, on a par with the Beatles? That just freaks me out.

Everyone deserves a bit of fun, and if this is the fun that people seek, then so be it. I just find it odd that so many adults revel in reading literature designed for people at least half their age.

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Today, Romney said he was scaling back his plans vis a vis the Ames Straw Poll, not wanting to "overwhelm" anyone.

Fat chance. Can anyone think of a straw poll in recent memory that Romney has not "overwhelmed" by inundating it with "supporters" paid to vote for him? Clearly, that's what happened with the YRNC Straw Poll in Miami a couple weeks ago, it's what happened at CPAC, and its what happened at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last year.

Romney's statement can be read as one of three things (I'll let readers choose):

a) he's realized that he got a buttload of bad press as a result of what went on in Miami, and even though everyone knows that Ames is fundamentally about packing supporters in-- often from out-of-state, not cultivating supporters in Iowa and then getting them to vote for you there, Romney doesn't want to look like the jerk who's buying votes on a grandiose scale yet again-- so he's saying he won't be "overwhelming" Ames in order to make people think he's not a complete bad seed where straw polls are concerned;

b) he's attempting to dampen down expectations of how much he will win by so that when his (thousands) of paid supporters show up to Ames to vote for him, delivering a large-scale win, it will look even less contrived, and even more like there really is a massive groundswell of support for his candidacy (which I maintain there is not, at least not on nearly the scale he wants people to believe); or

c) he's realized (finally) that without Rudy, Thompson or (duh) McCain participating, it really is a waste of his money to bother paying loads of Romneyites from out of state to get to Ames and vote. Because honestly, of the top 4, he's the only one playing there, and so there's really no reason why he shouldn't win Ames by a very respectable margin anyway.

I'll let readers take a guess what...

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