Читать книгу The Barack Obama Miscellany - Hundreds of Fascinating Facts About America's Great New President - Mark Hanks - Страница 5
ОглавлениеFavourite restaurant: Topolobampo in the River North section of Chicago, Illinois, serving Mexican and regional cuisine in a classy setting.
Favourite TV shows: MASH and The Wire.
Favourite drink: black forest berry iced tea.
Favourite suits: Hart Schaffner Marx costing $1,500 each.
Obama wears a Secret Service watch (made in China).
He gets a haircut every nine days at Zariff in Chicago at $21 per cut.
He has four identical pairs of black shoes, size 11.
Favourite children’s book: Where the Wild Things Are.
Casablanca and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest are two of his favourite films.
Obama loves to cook, and does a ‘mean chilli’.
The President collects comic books: Spider-Man is his favourite.
As a teenager, he worked at Baskin-Robbins and these days he can’t stand ice cream.
He doesn’t drink coffee or alcohol.
Favourite musicians include: Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Bach and the Fugees.
Barack is said to be a superb Scrabble player.
He is left-handed.
On his desk he keeps a carving of a wooden hand holding an egg, which in Kenya is a symbol of life’s fragility.
Favourite Books and Writers
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Robert Caro’s Power Broker, Studs Terkel’s Working, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, and also Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Friedrich Nietzsche, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.
Barack’s secret service codename is ‘Renegade’.
Obama carries a bracelet belonging to Sgt. Ryan David Jopek of Wisconsin, a soldier who was killed in Iraq.
His favourite dish is Michelle’s shrimp linguini.
While at Harvard, Barack was rejected by an all-female committee after trying out for a pin-up calendar.
He spent his first night in New York sleeping in an alley.
Barack is 6’ 1?” (1.87m) tall.
His star sign is Leo.
He read the entire Harry Potter series to his daughter Malia.
He can bench-press 200 pounds.
His desk in his Senate office once belonged to Robert Kennedy.
Had he not been a politician, Barack would have liked to have been an architect.
Barack means ‘blessed’ in Arabic.
He hates the youth trend for trousers that sag beneath the backside.
The Germans have paid tribute to President Barack Obama by rolling out some frozen chicken fingers bearing his name. A German frozen-food company has introduced Obama fingers. The tender, fried chicken bits come with ‘a tasty curry sauce’. But Spiegel Online reports the company, Sprehe, ‘was unaware of the possible racist overtones of the product’.
Of the billions of searches carried out on the portal Yahoo.com over 2008, Obama was third behind Britney Spears and World Wrestling Entertainment.
A ‘shy’ photographer in Indonesia is in great demand because of his resemblance to Obama. Ilham Anas, 34, is already a celebrity in Jakarta, where the President once lived, but his fame is spreading. He has appeared on Indonesia’s premier TV talk show, appeared in an advertisement as Obama, and received other marketing offers from companies in the region.
Barack is on Facebook.com, and has over 5.5 million friends (called supporters) who like to log on and poke the President. Martin Luther King provides Barack with his favourite quote: ‘The Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ Barack’s wall contains nearly 600,000 posts, and Barack has posted nearly 2000 notes.
His house in Chicago has four fireplaces.
According to Obama, his worst habit is constantly checking his BlackBerry.
He uses an Apple Mac laptop.
He drives a Ford Escape Hybrid, having ditched his gas-guzzling Chrysler 300.
During the presidential campaign, a huge range of merchandise became available – from Obama dolls, key rings, licence plates, earrings, stamps, wristbands to Obama wine, the list was endless. You could even buy Obama condoms – the packet bore the slogan ‘Hope is no Protection’. Funnier still, Obama nappies were available. They carried a picture of Obama and the words ‘Change we need’.
Around the world, 1.5 billion watched America’s first black President give his inaugural address.
Logistics for the swearing-in ceremony were difficult for the inaugural planners. Jumbotron TVs and 5,000 portable toilets were set up throughout the National Mall to accommodate the massive crowd. The number of toilets, as determined by the National Park Service, allowed one toilet for approximately every 300 people.
While a record number of people attended Obama’s inauguration, the overall cost was approximately $160 million. President Bush’s inauguration, by contrast, cost approximately $42 million and was attended by 400,000 people.
Gamblin’ Man
Barack loves playing poker. When he was a young state politician in Illinois, he used to attend weekly games at the home of Senator Terry Links, who has acknowledged that Barack played his cards right: ‘He had the stone face. He didn’t stay in hands if he didn’t think he had a chance of winning. Barack wasn’t one of those foolish gamblers who just thought all of a sudden that card in the middle was going to show up mysteriously. He’s as competitive in politics as he is in poker.’
Denny Jacobs, a former State Senator who also played poker with Mr Obama, said, ‘You find out a lot of things about a guy from the way he plays cards. Number one, Barack’s conservative with his money, which is always good. It’s hard to tell when he’s bluffing. In fact, I never could – that’s why he usually beat me.’
