Fast-forward 5 years and yesterday Steve Jobs announced the launch of the Mac iPad, “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.” It’s a computer that’s a book reader and a gigantic ipod that you can twiddle around with and do a bunch of things.

But that’s not the point. What were they thinking? If you watch the MadTV piss-take you see the gals plug-in in their iPads (not a salubrious sight) and dance around in silhouette with their iPads strapped on.

Silly executives, they had no women in the room when they came up with that Stupid Name.

So what else is new? We are starting off the second decade of the new century and the women are still almost never in the room for this part of the discussion. Ads, books, movies, every day culture still weighs heavily towards aiming at men.

Take American Pie, or Superbad, or Youth in Revolt, or anything by Seth Rogen or Ben Stiller. They are all a guy’s eye view of life. Hollywood’s version of a movie from a women’s point of view is Sex in the City. Which I quite liked. But while shoes are nice, they are not exactly worthy of a religion.

The point is, sexism is alive and well and creating our culture. Ideas, strategies, and creativity, are largely the purview of men, who are usually white (see The Obama Campaign Team). Somebody needs to remind them that women buy and vote and watch things too. Ahem, over half the population?

So watch iPad on YouTube and have a giggle. And maybe this will convince the powers that be that celebrating diversity is not only humane, but actually good for the economy. What better argument can there be in this great country of ours?—Pomerol

It’s easy to say no. Could you vote for a modified health care bill? No. Could you vote for an even more modifed health care bill? No. Would you like a doughnut? Well…

The filibuster power in the Senate is making the most successful politicians the ones that prevent anything getting done.

But even republicans acknowledge there is a problem. Health care costs are out of control, the number one cause of bankruptcies is catastrophic health bills, businesses are getting skewered by insurance costs. Turning around the Health Care Oil Tanker is difficult for anyone.

Their answer is that if we scupper enough democratic legislation, we will get in next time. Then we’ll do wonderful things.

Problem is that next time it’ll be the dems turn to Just Say No.

Then the Nobel Prizes roll around. Suddenly they are the people on everyone’s lips. Attention resounds and they get to have their own version of an Oscar moment, handing out prizes, ecstatic achievers on the other side of the dinner table, generally being patrician benificence dolers.

But its all a little passive. People who have already done something magnificent, for instance Paul Krugman who “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity", are celebrated and clapped on the back and given modest lottery-sized checks. They are the ones who have achieved something, the Norwegians are just clapping.

I think this time round they wanted to be more of part of what’s going on. Catch them young, point them in the right direction. Obama is just an innocent young president, set him on the right path and the Nobellers can give an encouraging shove along the way to salvation.

I mean face it, the U.S. President still has more power to affect more peoples’ lives than anyone else on the planet, why wait to see if he screws it up before giving him a prize?

Why not, gulp, help him out? I mean that’s what it’s about isn’t it? This human existence we have? This human existence that could very well come to a watery end if we can’t move as a species to change our habits and preserve our planet?

I think it’s great they gave his the prize. And I think we should all help him too.—Pomerol

Education is the lifeblood of society and democracy and enlightened life and so forth, not to mention a major contributor to my, Pomerol’s, employment. The various unions we educator types belong to, are stomping around saying we can’t cut education even if the economy is swirling down the drain, but any halfway sensible person can see there isn’t enough money out there.

So do I stomp along with everyone else because it only makes sense, or do I sit by the sidelines because there’s no way in the world that anyone will get anything anytime soon?

Not that my individual efforts will make a lot of difference, or so my grouchy lazy side says.

Did you notice the students demonstrating in California this afternoon? I’m amazed at how little outrage there has been about loss of livelihoods and futures. It was good to see, and probably a small taste of what’s too come.

Sigh. Guess that means I have to get out there and be outrageous.—Pomerol

It was festooned with logos. The stewardesses wore Don Air uniforms, carried Don Air trays with Don air coffee cups and pastries formed into the face of Don. The carpet had Don Air logos woven in, the seat backs were tricked out with Don Air doo dads, and the toilet seat had engraved Don Air logos which meant you walked around with Don Air embedded into your behind for the next half hour (a fitting statement).

Fast-forward to the mayoral election, and this syndrome seems to have taken over the entire city. Mike Bloomberg is projected to have spent $100 million dollars on his mayoral candidature, according to the New York Times. He has ads in newspapers, magazines, television channels, my poor aching mailbox, internet sites, internet videos, telephone messages, celebrity endorsements. Soon he will be shining his face onto clouds á la Batman, and foaming his message into daily cappuccinos.

This is 16 times more than his opponent, Bill Thompson. Thompson has been hopelessly outgunned by an uber-rich competitor.

Is this what we have come to? Not just purchasing your elected office (see The Regency Period), but doing it publicly?

I’m not a stick-in-the-mud about these things, if Bloomberg spent 2 times as much, or even 4 times as much, you can almost shrug it off. I even think he’s done a pretty good job. But 16 times? This is practically royal entitlement. It’s obscene.

Bill Thompson seems like a good guy, he has civilized ideas about education and taxing rich people (change, but not too much change). There’s no way IN THE WORLD that he will win this election.

But apart from my lifelong reluctance to ever vote for any republican anywhere, the main reason I am going to vote for Thompson it to get on with irritating Bloomberg.—Pomerol

Frankly it was a bit tedious. Speakers got up and read aloud reports that had been sent in about individuals who have been denied hospital care, or charged exhorbitantly. And though dreary to listen to, it’s all too true.

Being denied care is a horror. One 26-year-old had a heart condition and couldn’t quite make the insurance payments, but he made too much money and didn’t qualify for Medicaid. A lot of people are stuck in this worrying limbo.

This kind of common situation creates a whole class of uneasy worriers — middle class types who have decent jobs but still can’t afford to pay for health insurance. These people will never be free of nagging worries that when sickness strikes, your whole life will go up in flames.

Unhappily, the slipper and I are fast approaching this situation. We are — knock on wood — healthy at the moment, but keeping up with insurance premiums is becoming unaffordable.

So we may soon need to rely on the Knock On Wood health plan. Hope for the best and pretend everything is OK. Many thousands of Americans are already on the KOW plan. You could call this psychosis, denial, unhealthy psychological displacement activity, and you’d be right. The next move, in the truly American way, would be to go to a shrink. But I think KOW only covers a stiff drink and a sympathetic bartender.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. We need universal health care.—Pomerol

Living in different cultures is something everyone should do at one time or another. Even if you all speak the same language there’s no guarantee that you will be understood. For a Wine in the communication business (graphic design that is) it’s a useful exercise to need to try hard to get your point across.

In The Great Health Care Debate, the forces of evil seem to have grabbed the national spotlight. Using scare tactics, political meetings have become shouting matches where hysterical middle Americans say things like,"Tell the government to keep it’s hands off my Medicare!” as if Medicare was not a government program.

Where are the Democrats? Are they going to make this work, or what? Does anyone honestly want health care to go on the way it is right now? Apparently yes. This is not good enough.

They need to grab the spotlight, make the argument, try really hard to make it understood. I would suggest they all come to France for a training course, but they are probably here already, sunning themselves in Provence.

With my lousy healthcare package, and the $10,000 a year bill, I think we need more out of our elected representatives.—Pomerol

Sheep have a simple life. They eat and sleep, get shorn and occasionally get turned into dinner. They all do what each other is doing and rarely suffer from depression.

In order to jolt myself from this rural stupor, I indulge in the BBC longwave service, where you can get quite good international news.

The issues that strike me the most involve simple things: Courage, and Greed.

Greed keeps popping up. There are the Wall Street/CEO/Jersey politician-rabbis. There are the Rovian Neo-cons who scare civilians into thinking that single-payer healthcare will destroy civilization as we know it — for massive fees and pharmaceutical industry stock options. And there’s power-mongering lunatics like Ahmadenijad, Mugabe, the Burmese Generals.

Then there’s Courage. There’s the Iran protesters risking “medieval torture” to get their grotesque government to accept the real results of their recent election. There’s Aung San Suu Kyi being trotted out for her surreal and evil show-trial in Burma. There’s Lubna Ahmed Hussein in the Sudan who could have avoided arrest through her United Nations job, but chose to quit and go on trial for wearing trousers and risk 40 lashes. Apparently this is commonplace in that country.

Most of us are sheep, we follow the herd. Some stand out as true heroes. Some just want to burn down the farm.—Pomerol

Work has been thin on the ground, but a new class may be in the offing, nothing groundbreaking, but a further small hedge against economic collapse.

Being in France, all the news tends to be Brit-o-centric, and occassionally Paddy-o’centric. News in French seems to come in short bursts on the radio, in between nonsensical studio banter and truly anodyne French “Rock". So we veer towards BBC Longwave and a newly-found Irish station that mysteriously broadcasts this far.

But the New York Times website has been coming to the fore for checking out the latest Yank-o-centric follies. Most of it seems taken up with Sotomayor’s hearings. They have “How Will This Affect Future Possible Judges”, “Don’t Mess With The Judge”, and an almost plaintive, “Is This A Big Waste Of Time?” among others.

A bit of overkill, yes, but nice to know a gal is dominating the news, particularly since she isn’t Sarah Palin.

Happy July. — Pomerol

So good news, but no guarantees. This means the democrats will still have to make their case. Not a bad thing in a democracy.

Also nice to have a sense of humor in politics.

Congrats Senator Al.—Pomerol

Now, the French are used to waiting in lines at supermarkets. A little while ago they instigated something called the “35-hour week” — the logic being that with cut-back hours, corporations would logically hire more workers to pick up the slack. You know, logically.

Or course any idiot, or idiot as we frenchies say, could see what would happen: they didn’t hire more people, they just have longer lines at the supermarché.

In these circumstances, the French are go Zen Shopping Mode and talk amongst themselves.

But this time a slightly spryer old doll in front of me would have none of it. She leapt up and start loading and packing the groceries for the, as far as I could tell, ungrateful couple.

Once they had paid, using a check which took another 10 minutes to find and sign, this flightless old bird pulled out two jumpers which she had forgotten about, so the whole check routine had to start again.

Now having spent a lot of time in France over the years, I, Pomerol, have developed my own Zen Shopping Mode. The slipper was fortunately not there, otherwise blood would have been spilt. But the whole thing reminded me of the British government. The Royal Bank of Scotland, now 70%-tax-payer-owned, announced their new pick for governor or president or top financial wizard, who will be asked to struggle by on a starting salary of £1.2 million, plus another £2 million for hitting performance targets.

Sound familiar? The British government is like a couple of arrogant elderly pensioners who refuse to change their habits, even when the these actions drive shoppers and cashiers to near-murder and facilitate the destruction of international economies.

Changing the way people do things takes a long time. We don’t have time for this. The British, and American, governments really need to cut the crap and change the way they operate.—Pomerol

It’s interesting spending time abroad, you get to see America the way everyone else sees us. And at the moment we look like a bunch of cowards.

You figure after 9/11 the entire country reared up on it’s hind legs and roared about how tough we were, how we were going to kick other countries’ asses, how we were violent patriots, how everyone had to eat Freedom Fries, etc.

Eight years on we are finally presented with the chance to wind up Guantanamo Bay, freeing some prisoners, giving trials to others, imprisoning guilty ones.

But this is not an argument about how to deal with unrelenting possible terrorists, this is about the undoubtedly guilty ones.

No one wants them. Their countries of origin either don’t want them or will torture them. Friendly countries don’t want to deal with them. But more to the point, the United States of America is completely chickening out of their responsibility towards these prisoners.

All kinds of states keep whining about how they don’t want them in their back yards.

I would like to say that as a Brooklyn-based Wine, I, Pomerol, am happy to have those bastards in my back yard. We even have a currently un-used prison a couple of blocks from out apartment. I am happier knowing that these people are locked up, not blowing people up, not recruiting more acolytes, being punished as they should be, and not tortured in some distant grim prison.

Because thats kind of the deal. You want to keep the bad guys out, you gotta deal with the fallout. And yes, it’s distasteful to have men locked up in your neighborhood. Well 9/11 was a hell of a lot more distasteful than that.

Is that stupid? or naive? Or even courageous? Maybe it’s just being a grown-up American.—Pomerol

France is an interesting country with interesting food and wine, and interesting bureaucratic spiderwebs. Fortunately the slipper has superior language skills and all of these problems were worked out with a minimum of Pomerol-esque involvement- though I had to maintain a sympathetic look on my face.

When in doubt, look sympathetic. I think this is what 7 years of training for psychologists amounts to. You spill your guts, then a someone looks at you understandingly. You start to realize how rare this is in your normal life, burst into tears, then hand over a large check.

I could do that! In fact most bartenders do. I guess they make it all in tips.

Anywaze, welcome to France, and here’s hoping that Ahamdinejad loses. –Pomerol

I guess that’s what I like now, pleasantness. A morning in the sunshine, very pleasant. A light breakfast and a walk in the park, particularly pleasant. An economic meltdown and any children’s television show, not pleasant at all. One more Dick Cheney sighting, downright unpleasant.

So a summer of pleasantry looms. And you know the weird thing? Business is booming, in my small Pomerol-ish way. Pleasant manners get you places. Either that or everyone else is busy and I’m at the end of their list of graphic designers. See, the world of graphic design is filled with flesh-eating maniacs. Competition is cut-throat and the most blood-thirsty survive. So this recent flurry of work is very odd, but a pleasant surprise.

Think I’m sounding like a greeting card? You’re not wrong. But Chianti and I have been so fed up for so long that an occasional escape into pleasantvile can salve the psyche. Not to worry, I’ll be bonkers again soon enough.-Pomerol

Then one day a tiny Cesna plane arrived, literally out of the blue, to circle over Moscow, and finally glide into a gentle landing in the middle of Red Square.

According to “Today in History”, “The incident was unbelievable. Mathias Rust, an 18-year-old from the northern German town of Wedel, had violated Soviet air space without being hindered and had even flown into the prohibited Moscow airspace without being questioned.”

Heavens to betsey, what an uproar. This clueless youngster proved that the old guard were no longer up to their jobs, and Gorbachev sadly had to fire them all.

Fast forward to Britain today. The British government has been rocked by scandals involving members of Parliament fiddling their expenses. Well over half of the representatives are guilty of minor parliamentarian rip-offs and many are calling for heads to roll (no joke in a monarchy) and reforms to implemented (the irony being that none of these fiddles is for more than a five figure sum, peanuts in the era of Lehman Brothers and Bernie Madoff).

When pilot Rust violated Soviet airspace, Gorbachev had a legitimate reason to sack all the old generals and put in his own people. After decades of fusty, Communist favoritism, Gorbachev could grab the wheels of power and make well-needed changes in the system. It looks like the government of Britain is doing this kind of house-cleaning in a strangely unaware fashion. The petty thievery that has been going un-checked has actually enabled the British system to flush out the fools who have been cleaning their moats, papering their walls, and investing in real estate off the backs of the British tax payers.

Revolution used to involve guns and slaughter. Gorbachev’s revolution was a matter of luck (or was it?). These days revolution seems to have become weirdly administrative.

But who cares? Throw the bums out!- Pomerol