Londoners see the Light

Two weeks of costly firework displays don’t make Londoners change their minds: financing pyrotechnics is important, even in times of financial hardship.

“You have to keep people’s moral up”, says Elaine, 48, who came all the way from Putney to see the fireworks together with her family.

“The fireworks give the people a little bit of pleasure,

out of this total doom and gloom,” says Mr Whitmer, 63, from North Yorkshire while waiting for the start of the fireworks outside Temple station.

Judy from Maidenhead adds that ” [they] give a sense of celebration, of lifting spirit” which is “very important in these times.”

Hundreds of people gathered on both sides of the river near Watrloo Bridge to see the fireworks of the 2008 Lord Mayor’s Show. Many didn’t worry about the costs of the colourful display: “I’ve never thought about that,” admits Shaun, 28 from New Zealand. “But it’s been done for centuries, so I think the tradition should always be kept up.”

“We have fireworks once a year in New Zealand, but they’re not as big as this one,” adds his friend Mel, 31.

To mark the beginning of the mayoral year, more than half a ton of explosives were fired into the sky on the river Thames near Waterloo Bridge on Saturday. This event was one of the 27 public firework displays in and around London in the last two weeks.

Status updates on election night

The 56th USA presidential election gets everyone excited, especially on social networking sites. In the last 23 hours, 74 of my personal contacts updated their profile. 24 of them did this to highlight their view on the presidential election.

Many of the 314 contacts used Obama’s picture as their avatar in the past few weeks. Some go for the dug up Afro pictures or the cool cigarette photo, others prefer the baby pictures 1, 2.

Lots of them  “donated their status to remind everyone to vote for Barack Obama today”. The polls are closed as I type these lines, so I guess the status donations don’t play a big role anymore.

McCain seems hightly underrepresented in Facebook status and picture updates, but since most of my contacts are European, this might not be surprising.

Now, prepare your status updates, the Washington Post has just published first results!