Nearly left on a jet plane

My whole plane-struggling-to-clear-a-forest-after-taking-off metaphor for life is an apt one. If I never mentioned it before, I am now. We’re off to Florida on Tuesday morning at 11.50am, arriving in Orlando around 9 hours later. Then we (hopefully) get one of these:

And OD history is made as Aidan and Becky, formerly of this parish, marry on the 24th. The next day, we’re off to New York for a week. And…….WE’RE GOING TO THE DAILY SHOW!!!!11 AND THE COLBERT REPORT!!!!!!!!!1

It’s an ambition of ours to be in the audience for one of these. But for two – and on consecutive days as well! We watched The Colbert Report on FX UK until they decided not to renew it after a year of showing it at midnight (might be the problem there), so we’ve resorted to some clever software that fools the Colbert website into allowing watch full episodes as if we’re living in America. And we watch it quite often; not every night but enough to watch Barack Obama order a general to shave Stephen Colbert’s head when he was doing shows from one of Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad.

Both Colbert and The Daily Show are off for a week now, so it was crazy to think that Thursday night’s episode was the last one before we go on it. So if you live in America, keep an eye on Comedy Central on Monday night, 26 October, you might see us!

And as for The Daily Show, that’s on More 4 here and it rocks. I’m a bit more of a Daily Show fan (although Colbert is a genius) and I’m almost emotional at the prospect of going to a recording of it. It’s the one show that keeps me aware that America has intelligent debate and satire, that it’s not all about vacuous blondes reading out scripted sentences on The Hills and the Wayans brothers making some load of cinematic jizz involving bad parodies of bad movies.

As much as Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is laughable (I think he should turn it down, it cheapens the whole thing), he is an extremely-capable person and the resistance to his work since being sworn-in only goes to show just how much of a choke-hold the right has on America’s vision of itself. Obama, the man who believes America is a country and not an idealogical exception to everything the planet has ever seen, has made the world love America again. And it’s exciting to think we’ll be in Obama’s America in a mere 75 hours’ time.

However we will miss the season 6 finale of Peep Show, which is an awful pity. Not enough reason to stay but still, last night’s one was one of the best laughs I’ve had in a while.