HK, see you after the election!

Then I tried this on.

Money!

Those who said: "Typhoon 8 can kiss my a$$, I'm not missing the show!"

Time to hit the stage.

"You people actually left your house in this weather?"

The art shot.

Huge sweat stains on back of shirt = goodtimes.

"Goodluck catching a cab home! I'm out!"

We The People

This concise yet comprehensive book provides a positive, lively, future-oriented narrative introduction to American government and politics. We the People presents material with a currency and relevancy that captures the vivid world of real-life politics. In addition, the text challenges readers to think critically; by giving contextual understanding of major concepts and issues, it encourages them to think about the implications for society and themselves. We the People delves deeper into the basics than most brief books, and each of the 17 chapters (including 3 policy chapters) concludes with a reading selection (each from a different paper around the country) and an extensive bibliography. The seventh edition has been thoroughly updated to capture recent developments, including the 2006 elections.

You know what I think? I think that they're the racist ones. Back then when the petition was first formed, Obama had been nominee for a little bit, and thats when everyone was swelling about a president that isn't white. That was when everyone who didn't support Obama was painted a racist, when white people basically had the choice of being racist or democrat. Maybe it's just my selection of contacts, but the race seems to have evolved more since a few months ago, the issues are getting hit now and people complaining about plans seems to be more commonplace than people complaining about appearance. Although, when Obama was an untouchable deity, one rogue network dared step to the democratic goliath...you bet it, those rascals at Fox.

The offense of the petition mostly consists of short 3 minute YouTube videos of select clips from FOX (mainly Hannity and Colmes, a more far right program than norm) of guests (you know, those non-affiliate people that get on shows but their views aren't controlled in any way by the network) usually being ignorant assholes - going around believing that people are equal and not starting racial arguments. Worst of all, they reported on Obama a few times without bending over to offer service to him. All of these clips are skillfully bound together with fearmongering extreme close-ups and dramatic music, weaved in flawlessly by super-liberal opinionist Robert Greenwald. I'm not going to lie, I didn't watch all of his anti-FOX videos, I watched 2. The sheer disgust from watching them made me fear my brain stem will dissolve if I ventured around to watch another.

It's people like this that fuel any racial tension in the mainstream. People that get so sensitive about issues that aren't there. Whenever someone says or does something that is remotely negative to someone of a different color/sex/whatever, they immediately take it upon themselves to launch an assault on their "racist/sexist/otherist views". It's almost like they won't be happy until all the races are segregated so no one can be offended. It's ridiculous, its repulsive, it's an outrage. FOX news, I, and all of America have the right to take a negative stance on Obama or any other non-white politician just as much as we do a white one.

FOX does lean right, it does show conservative views sometimes. I say kudos, in a media dominated by left-leans and a society dominated by what was basically an out-of-booth Bradley effect, FOX had the wherewithal to be different. To report on Obama critically instead of just praising a good public image. To let people express their opinions and cut off the people who try to make their unbased opinions fact. If FOX was truly racist, it would be off the air in seconds, and I've seen their "awful racist smears", its bullshit. When a conservative group shows more social progress than another group's skewed view of equality, you know they're screwed up. Send a message to all the people that use race to define political affiliation: Obama is not a tool in which to debunk any republican view with unbased discrimination charges, he's a political candidate that is just as subject to opinion and scrutiny - positive or negative - as McCain, Palin, and Obama. If you disagree and think he should be untouchable by the media, then you're probably more racist than the person you're calling a racist.

It feels like I'm listening to the story this way. Hillary couldn't put her opposition aside for a few minutes to declare her concern about Israel? It's like she thought they would be up there at the same time, sparring like it was Saturday Night Live. The very least they could do is make Palin give her speech after Clinton, that way she can just leave and cover her ears when Palin was talking. This is a common purpose rally, something everyone can find detestable, which is Iran's announcement of basically erasing something from the map as they attempt to progress their nuclear programs behind the public eye's reach. The fact that anyone would let party politics get in the way of it is completely egregious, and now she's ruined it for everyone.

There are some people that actually believe that Clinton made a smart political move by deciding to refuse sharing the stage with the Republican VP pick. Clinton isn't even running, what would she damage? Her endorsement of Obama? Who's going to watch a common purpose rally and see Clinton and Palin speaking at seperate times and think "wow, they must be friends"? Obama and McCain could share a stage during the 9/11 forum. Why can't Hillary set aside her pride for a couple hours to speak at the rally and strengthen the cause? Well, I don't know if Clinton is now going to the rally since Palin has been uninvited (I'm guessing she has been too), but I hope she's happy diminishing the point by bringing in partisan bickering. At least the McCain and Obama camps can jab at each other without worrying about losing their spot now, eh?

One can't help but think there was a better time for that, with attacks and gaffes coming in from both sides at a velocity that would make a NASCAR driver's head spin, and Wall Street is being destroyed by bankruptcies and mergers. All the while, John McCain is in battlegrounds, grabbing swing voters by the collar with strategic jabs, a neutralizing media, flaunting his experience and beauteous sidekick.

When did being a celebrity become bad? I mean, you get flashy cars, consistent media coverage and a big ass paycheck. If he loses, he could just get a leading role on a TV show and make millions! There are people that publicly embarassed themselves time and time again on tens of reality talent shows to be a celebrity, and he has his devoted fans attack McCain for calling him one? Sacrilege! If he won't assume his role, the least he could do is share it with some no-talent sap who's always yearned for the world of paparazzi stalkers. I digress.

I have very little doubt that Mr. Obama is the most well-recieved politician to ever have his name brought up in Hollywood. However, with events and endorsements like the ones he attends and accepts, he will never be able to shirk his celebrity status, something he's been trying to run from ever since McCain's highly (destructively) criticized ads. My point is, B-Ob is a celebrity, and he really couldn't have picked a worse time to have a high profile fundraiser...

However, I saw a vehement McCain supporter - wait, no, one of his advisors - attack Saturday Night Live over Tina Fey's spot-on impression of Sarah Palin. Are you kidding me? Is anyone going to believe that a female comedian is sexist against a female vice president nominee? Why wasn't Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton branded as sexist? That should be just as offensive if we're going to blow comedians out of proportion. The only thing that kept me from losing my cool was seeing that the actual Sarah Palin and her roving band of associates and press members watched the show and were seemingly all amused by Fey's performance. Even if they weren't amused, at least they didn't go blabbing about it. SNL is a comedy show, everyone has an equal opportunity to get burned, have some sense of humor.

Despite Palin taking the light-hearted fun in stride, it's time to end the discrimination factor in the election. I hated it when Obama was receiving race card defense, and I grow extremely weary of Palin recieving gender card defense. Stop the division along demographic lines, and start hitting the issues. The more this partisan, modernized bickering goes on about who's old and who's new, who's discriminative and who's fair, the more I want to cut up my driver's license and renounce my voting rights because I'm not hearing about anything that matters. Do we as Americans really want not only ourselves, but our new voters, and our children watching us learning that whether [X] is this race or this sex or [X] can't send an e-mail should be a deciding factor in the election of arguably the most powerful person in the world? I couldn't look forward to the debates any more, it better be time of crap cutting.

Well, the free market bit them in the ass. Gas went up, and we demanded less emissions and less usage. They let us search elsewhere, and they paid the billion dollar price. Now they expect our government to let up our tax money because they refused to follow the supply and demand? No. We shouldn't have to pay for big corporations because they refused to fluctuate their products as the demand fluctuated.

This all slingshots back to the environment in a tiny way. If Ford and GM disappeared, we lose jobs, but there will be no more Explorer driving soccer moms or testosterone-overloaded F150 drivers. Not to say that there will be no more SUVs or work trucks in the world, or that we don't need them, but there will be less fuel-blazing ones around. Hopefully, if Ford or GM should make it through the hard times, they'll cut wasteful production of enviro-killing trucks and start running along with the need for hybrid cars and trucks.

Back on topic, we have the housing bubble to thank for the constant crushing of mortgage and investment businesses. Lehman Brothers withstood the Great Depression, and now they're considering a complete liquidation of assets. Our economy is clearly in crisis, a perfect time for our presidential candidates to stop the attack ads and maybe hit the issues for a while. Let's see some unity here, guys!

...guys?

Before voting check out each candidate thoroughly....what is their record of activity?  How have they voted?  What is their experience......

Remember the past years......have those people followed through....have they made promises they did not keep????

Just a thought to ponder, if members of congress/senate and other public offices have million dollar houses, than what makes any of us think they can understand what the everyday person is going through; after all if they have those kind of homes, they are not worried about; gas prices, insurance prices, house payments prices......they donot understanding every day folks at all.....

People are more violent nowadays it seems, crime continues to rise as long as the population does. Prisons are oft overflowing and worse criminals are transported to lesser security prisons when higher security prisons fill up. The only non-religious case you can bring against the death penalty is that on very rare occurences, a person is found not guilty (usually years) after being executed. The ratio between those accidents and the disgusting, murdering, raping, stealing, robbing dirtbags dispatched is devastatingly one-sided. 

Indeed, rotting in jail would be a more fitting punishment, but we'd only deal out more taxes to pay for all the prisons that would have to go up for these sleazes. Capital punishment is totally awesome, don't be a wimp.

First, she was inexperienced. Then, she was a vote ploy. After, she was a hockey mom. Her identity continues to change as the Obama campaign and their supporters lampoon, besmirch, insult and attack the Alaskan governor, but the polls just continue to rise and stabilize for the Republican ticket. It seems the longer it takes for the Democrats to gun down McCain's #2, the more juvenile the jabs between parties become. I took a fine look in retrospect and realized the the hot topic yesterday and today was about interpreting a joke that Obama said in some low-profile speech. (Even though there have been more pathetic election turners, byah.)

Speaking of number twos, anyone seen Joe Biden lately? I think the liberal media needs to mount up a search party, because the democratic VP selection hasn't even been in a scope of focus since the DNC. I wonder why the McCain campaign hasn't launched a series of attacks on him? Oh, that's right, he's not running for president, and no one cares. So why would anyone be convinced just because of Palin?

Obama must've realized his mistake. Let's be realistic, if Obama selected Hillary as his running mate, the race would've been over. When McCain secured those female swing votes by picking the spunky Alaskan, Obama's eyes turned red with rage and jealousy, and the cannon was pointed towards the star that was destined to rise. The beauty (or lack) of it is that they are focusing all non-response bashes to Sarah, and I'm pretty certain everyone knows that John McCain is the presidential nominee. With no negative attention on him, he's looking pretty. On top of that, Obama's domination of the liberal news stations has been channeled to Palin now, even if it's almost all negative, it's bringing that much needed coverage to the Republican ticket.

If you ask me, the only way to snuff Palin's big bounce that she's giving McCain is to stop trying. Focus on slamming McCain, the actual candidate now. Sure, Palin was a part-time supporter of earmarking the bridge to nowhere, but researching that might just shed some light on Arizona's rock bottom earmark spending. While Obama slowly hurts his image destroying Palin's, McCain is making off almost completely prestine and on the offensive. Hopefully, when the debates come around we'll see some more worthy conversation, until then, we'll just watch the beauty queen's face get looped over and over.

Obama certainly didn't plan to make the joke, if he did, he's out of his mind. Some people say he was being sexist, some people say he was just making a personal attack. I can't speak for his brain, but I think he was using the joke to take attention away from his not-so-fluid speech. Maybe as a male, I can't be as ticked off about it as the women are, because the comment itself didn't make me so angry. A slight outrage was the lack of media response, I know that if the roles were reversed, and John McCain got even close to calling Biden a lipstick wearing pig, he'd be crucified by the news.

This morning, Obama dedicated an outstanding minute or two to addressing his flub. He threw a smoke bomb into the heart of the issue, saying that the media had blown it out of proportion and that McCain was avoiding the real issues when his campaign released a short (a whopping 37 seconds taken out of important time) internet video attacking his remarks. He said that these personality issues and potentially offensive jokes were diversions, and that enough was enough. I say enough of the generic topic changes. I realize he was at that speech to address education, but when you announce that you're addressing a different issue, you may want to actually address it.

If the controversy was so unimportant, why couldn't he just take responsibility and apologize? By changing the blame onto the media instead of explaining or apologizing, he forfeits any chance of the McCain campaign backing off or convincing the feminists he meant otherwise. If he maybe planned for more than a second for what'd he say about the controversy today and spent a couple minutes explaining what he meant and who it was directed to, maybe he would be plausible in taking the heat off him. Instead, we can expect the McCain campaign and probably the media (or at least FOX) to ride this wave for a couple days, extracting even more female votes away from the Democratic party.

Oops.

Click here for Obama's original remarks.
Click here for McCain's attack.

Skeptics can say there's not enough evidence to prove global warming is man-made or complain about alternative energy sources, but what are they scared of? Let's say, just for the sake of logic, everyone starts driving hybrids, recycling and conserving their energy. Just as things seem as they're taking effect and climate change recedes, a new study shows that global warming never existed, everyone was just turning into heat-sensitive sissies. What fools we will look like. Newly independent of oil, able to breathe the air without contracting lung disease from mercury traces in the oxygen, producing jobs with energy production inside the nation, and our coastal states not completely drowned out. The whole world will laugh at our foolishness.

Anyone who isn't a direct profiteer from huge oil companies has no real reason to oppose the environmental movement. People have been trying to kick this off for decades and now that there's a possible world-ending crisis heading towards us, it's a better time than ever. Even if you don't think anything is happening, we'll still have a safer future with near-plant pollution gone, water bodies not drying out, mountains getting snow capped again. Recycle, reuse, reduce - put out your cans every week, don't throw out something that works just because it's a bit dated, and stop running your AC 24/7 or holding your fridge open too long. Buy some swirly light bulbs, use a reusable shopping bag, and if you're daring, trade in your SUV for a sedan or hybrid. Be a rebel amongst the skeptics and do your part, no matter how nominal you think it is.

Montauban in France's south west brought us a great deal of pleasure - and lots of new friends. WeeR found some boys his own age (this is important when you're ten).

First off, there was JoJo. Alas, JoJo was exchanging houses with us for 3 weeks, so we were only able to spend a little time with him.

The boys were not at all perturbed by their language incompatibility - they shared so very much more in common - including the boy's favourite Lego.

Hopefully we'll be able to arrange for the boys to spend more time together in the future - perhaps on a language exchange to each other's homes. After all, they are already familiar with the territories...

Wee R and Théotime

Home exchange no 3 afforded us the opportunity to spend time with the family before we swapped houses, and it was great to spend time with and understand the family before we adopted their life for 3 weeks.

One of the added benefits was that Patricia and Jean Michel were able to introduce us to their friends Luc and Sandrine and their family. English language teachers (and true linguists), they made our visits very easy by speaking in flawless English.

Unfortunately their 10 year old ( and JoJo's friend) Théotime, spent most of our visit on holiday with his grandparents, but we were able to meet up the day before we left the region for a kayak adventure, organised by Sandrine.

In 30 + degree heat, we headed across some very flat country to the quite spectacular village of St Antonin Noble Val, where we were to set off down the Aveyron River and had an adventure to ourselves, with the addition of Corrine, Olivier, Olivier's 3 beautiful girls and Luc and Sandrine's eldest son and his German exchange student friend.

It was such a super day, and we exhausted ourselves paddling furiously down river and colliding into each other and getting stuck on the rocks and watching jumping fish and getting very very wet.

The last time we'd done this it was also in blistering heat down the Dordogne a few years back. It was much more fun to take the trip with a bunch of other folks, although we were completely hopeless and outshone by the 10 year olds.

Back on dry land, we learned a new children's game - "Tomate". Those kids play to win!

This is a game we can definitely take back home with us. All you need is a circle of friends and a ball. The aim of the game is to push the ball between your opponent's legs. Penalties are applied if you let the ball in, until eventually you're disqualified, with the winner the last person standing.

So after some serious Tomate, we headed home after dark and had to skip dinner in order to pack up for the next stage of the Adventure - 4 weeks on the Atlantic Coast in the Charente-Maritime.

New friends in new places. This Grand Adventure is enriching on so many levels.

Wish you were here
Julie

...

John Dau: Changing the World and Taking Names

Born in Sudan and at the young age of 12, he was separated from his family and forced to flee from the the Muslin-controlled government involved in the Second Sudanese Civil War who were fighting against the non-Muslims of the south. Dau was forced to travel on foot thousands of miles along with 27,000 others (most of them children). Dau himself led thousands of these "Lost Boys" across the arid African desert to relative safety in Ethiopia. More than half of these 27,000 "Lost Boys" would perish on the journey.

There were times where John and these Lost Boys would have to drink mud water for sustenance. They were constantly chased through the dangerous wilderness, often having to navigate through lands entrenched with lions or hyenas. Once, when being chased by gun-welding government forces, the Lost Boys had to swim through alligator-infested waters. John remembers about 3,000 people, many of them children, dying during that one event.

John lived in Ethiopia for four years until violence broke out once again in the region. Faced with disease, starvation, violence and seemingly insurmountable odds, he fled once again to Kenya where he eventually had the opportunity to attend school. In 2001, he would be among the 3,800 refugees that resettled in the United States.

Once in America, he worked 60 hours a week as a security guard to receive a post-secondary education at Onondaga Community College. John is currently pursuing a political science degree from Syracuse University. He has founded three non-profit organizations: the Sudanese Lost Boys Foundation of Central New York, Duk Lost Boys Clinic and the John Dau Sudan Foundation. Through the John Dau Sudan Foundation, he has been working towards bringing medical clinics that do not exist for most of the populations of Duk, Twic East and Bor South Counties in the State of Jonglei in Southern Sudan.

You may not have heard of him before, but people like John change the world. The things he has endured we here in North America may never experience, but that does not give us license to idly sit by.

The civil war in Sudan is a forgotten war, even though two million people lost their lives and many more are still affected by it. Now there is yet another war, in Darfur, and the typical American isn't even aware of it. The U.S. being a big melting pot, Americans can walk the streets without noticing all the different nationalities. That is a good thing. On the other hand, it means Americans stop asking questions about their neighbors and stop learning about their problems - John Dau

Read this interview with John here. Just take a moment to at least learn about someone who is larger than life and who has led a life that most others do not lead. People like John should be on the front page of the news or on magazines, but instead we have Britney Spears and her inability to take care of her children, Lindsay Lohan's first foray into lesbian relationships or Matthew Mcconaughey's new baby. Wake up people, everyone has parental problems, babies are born every second and lesbians aren't shocking.

People like John doesn't want to be a celebrity and nor does he request it. His focus is to show the importance of surviving against all odds and fighting for the human rights for all people (especially among the Sudanese people). He is the real hero, the real celebrity deserving of our attention. That will never happen, but in the meantime, we have the ability and the freedom to learn about the world around us and the real things that actually matter.

Changing the world can be done by everyone, the first step is to learn about the world around you. Changing the world doesn't require a certain age, sex, education, circumstance, environment or race. Changing the world starts with you choosing to change the world.

This was a time before the teacher-rapist nonsense, before every teacher was globally watched under the glaring eye of principals, parents, and others. I'm sure there were pedophile teachers back then, but they were few in number, and I had the pleasure of not having one. I 'suffer' from ADHD, a rather blown-out-of-proportion mental condition that makes me look at the shiny things around me more often than others. All of my teachers understood the condition, and adjusted accordingly privately and subtly. They were willing to help in after-school programs, meet with my parents, all of those things.

Getting to the point, my teachers never feared me. They never saw me as someone who could sue them to all hell, and as such they could have a more personalized and individualized teaching style that captured my attention and as well I'm sure the rest of my classes. Even most of my high school teachers were bareable in the personality category. They were people I could relate to as human beings. My history teacher in 9th grade was so awesome, he inspired me to study becoming a teacher when I started college.

Unfortunately for me, this was after a string of slutty, desperate teachers decided to start banging their students and having their case grow national. Since then, teaching has been a pressurized contest of "which teacher can go the longest without getting their school sued from a misunderstanding". My first ever textbook for an Education class made me sick to my stomach. The educational system is breeding the same kind of teachers I have the displeasure of seeing my younger brother learn from in middle and high school. Teachers become near-robotic lecturing machines with no interest in individual student cases from the cold ideas and abandoned psychology of the classroom the system is forcing on them. A parent and teacher conference has become more like a false sense of solace for parents, tricking them into believing that the teacher will recieve and adjust because of their concerns.

My textbook basically covered every fallacy and generalization forced upon our already dying culture and insisted that I incorporate them into my hypothetical methods. Like that black students will try to fail school even though they're good at it, so, I quote, they don't "act white". In a tangent on the race card, it went on to say that white people are naturally racked with guilt over what people centuries ago did to minorities. An elementary education class suggests to me that my white students will shiver in fear because of what their ancestors did. This had nothing to do with teaching, it was just making sure you knew the wild principle. I'm surprised it didn't go to "you should also give fried chicken to your African-American students so they like you enough to excel". As a teacher, I'm not supposed to try and have anything that could be considered a friendship or more with a student, that if by example, a kid gets beaten up by bullies on a playground and comes to me for advice, I shouldn't try to make them feel better, just bring the little retribution I can to his assailants, which I'd probably need evidence for anyway.

If this is the way teachers are being raised into the classrooms, to be constantly afraid of being misconcepted as a rapist and to understand and ne'er interfere with the feign racial hierachy of the elementary school classrooms, it doesn't surprise me that test scores are dropping. Combine this with decreasing funding and less teachers entering the market and we can extend a generation of government hating, authority overthrowing, anti-social drudgeries for decades. My sentence to the educational system and the education major teachers out there: Cut the political correct bullshit, train teachers to be personable and make the classrooms friendly again.

I think what people fail to see when they elect to be pro-life is that people don't have abortions for the hell of it. I'm not a woman, but I can tell you its a traumatizing experience for even a pro-choice woman to go through. The reason they turn to abortion is because they're desperate to right their mistakes. When people are desperate, they do things they wouldn't normally do. Abortion is one of those things.

Now, let's say abortion gets outlawed tomorrow. Hundreds of teenage girls are suddenly pressed against a wall, no way out of a situation that basically offs their opportunity of a higher education. The same amount of teenage boys are faced with the shameful decision of running for it or sacrificing the same for child care. Not to mention the unfortunate population of pregnant girls - especially teenagers - that are rape victims. What do they do now?

Well, if all of them were considering abortion, you would think they're out of options, which is a foolish assumption. Some of them are going to turn to back-alley abortionists. Yeah, the world of illegal abortion isn't a pretty one, and its claimed plenty of lives back when it was illegal from new reject doctors trying to be professionals.

The fact is, passing a law to make abortion illegal would be one of the stupidest, petty things to do. If you don't agree with abortion, don't get one and stop trying to make it illegal. It's not playing God, it's using the technology that God (or whatever you believe in) gave us so people with real, developed lives don't bring more undernourished, underprivileged lives into the world.

Click here for Republican nominee John McCain's stance on abortion.
Click here for Democratic nominee Barack Obama's stance on abortion.

If you're wondering who I am, then chances are you won't care. My name is Brandon and I live deep in the palm tree forests of Florida. I'm 19, single, and in college working on a Bachelor's in Education. Before I get into my interests, know that anything goes here, I'm targetting the obnoxious, the discriminative, the stupid and the plain pointless - anything from subtle to obvious, or from politics to popular culture.

Now, I have a "soft spot" for grotesque violence, so don't expect to see much about war or crazy disgusting media crap (I know, ironic). As a new voter, I'm getting more into politics - mostly national but I do check in on local things now and then - and not very happy about things. My views are moderate, some people say I lean right (my parents) and some people say I lean left (my friends), but I don't actually like to identify with a party since there's always something I'll differ on. I'm not a big religious person, I do believe in God but I don't get involved with debates about it or do a lot of things about it. I'll tap on it in a post coming soon so I can get my thoughts about that out of the way on here.

My preference for music is rock. My favorite TV/movie genre is comedy (even though good movies in that section are running slim). I do watch the news on occassion, you can tell when I do a lot when I have a long recent post coming up. I am a gamer, I play poker online (not great, but enough to break even most of the time) and own + play an Xbox 360 and PS2. I'll try not to hit the critical subject of video gaming too hard, but I promise nothing.

Click above to view video inteview

Those dark satanic mills.  They formed the backbone of northern towns such as Wigan but did Orwell faithfully capture life in working class Wigan?

Orwell's writings certainly painted a bleak picture of the industial towns and by all accounts they were also quite accurate.  Orwell interviewed many people during the course of his travels but no author writes without purpose so what should we make of Orwell's observations?

Without doubt, Orwell aimed to focus on the poorer side of life.  His observations center around working class hardships be they above the ground in the mills or deep below in the coal mines.  Orwell was less concerned with the minority and more concerned with the majority.  We don't read about the more well-to-do families from Wigan (such as the Lindsay family, owners of Haigh Hall) although Orwell does make passing mention of wealthy mill owners who were probably mentioned locally with an equal measure of hatred and affection.

Orwell's concern was not to capture a complete account of life in Wigan (or other towns) rather he focussed in on how such towns survived the depressive 1920's and how life went from day to day for the majority of the people who lived in mill houses dotted around the towns and villages.

Lets not leave it there though.  Traces of Wigan's industrial past can still be seen although little evidence of the mining industry survives.  We do well to remember how life was for the poorer residents in towns like Wigan as Orwell must have written some of his words to hopefully bring their poorer standard of life to the attention of those who could make a difference.

(photo credit: 'Wigan Mill' from mojo_black)