Monday, July 4
Happy Independence Day
It is the fourth of July and I spent hours trapped in a room at the Heathrow Airport in London. We are en route to Edinburgh but we are supposed to have a press conference and pick up Bob Geldof, Natalie Imbruglia, R&B singer Estelle, and lots of African representatives.

I missed the press conference in order to get on to the tarmac at the airport. I snapped shots next to the photographer for People – nice guy. CBN and MSNBC are filming on the tarmac. I finally met Charmaine Yoest, a gracious and spunky conservative blogger at Reasoned Audacity. She's cool (pictured below). I know her mom.

Sir Bob Geldof is hilarious. This guy looks as if he just got roughed up in an alley, slept there, and wandered over to the Heathrow press conference. It appears that he is wearing some kind of Chairman Mao pajamas made of hemp. His hair looks as though he has been stranded with Robinson Crusoe. Good heavens, I think he is wearing his house slippers. I love this guy. Despite the fact that he looks as though he crawled out of an opium den, he has been one of the most steadfast and committed celebrities to the cause of the suffering. He has been serving on Tony Blair’s commission on Africa and doing the Lord’s work for the poor. He is a belligerent S.O.B. when it comes to negotiating with the politicians, yet he poured on the charm and caught a ton of flack for saying nice things about President Bush. A man has got to do what a man has got to do, and Bob will do whatever it takes. I like that.

My friend Tony Carnes with Christianity Today got a chance to ask Geldof a few questions. I was talking to some of the uber-cutie flight attendants that Virgin seems to have in truckloads. Anyway, Geldof said, “In the U.S. evangelicals are a huge force for change….People fail to understand how important a role religion takes in Africa.” You can read his article here.

On a completely different subject, let me bring up Natalie. Oh my, Natalie. Let’s just say it again: Natalie. Wow. Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia flew with us to Edinburgh to do a concert in support of the One campaign. She is ridiculously gorgeous – the same kind of top-shelf quality beauty that I saw when I bumped into Catherine Zeta Jones in the hallway at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. It takes your breath away and you are rendered to whispering incoherent absurdities.

She has recently been to both Nigeria and Ethiopia and witnessed the effects of the little-known childbirth complication called fistula – obstructed labor during childbirth. She has said, “It’s a horrendous problem which could be solved properly with proper medical care. But over there, they can’t go to a hospital. These women are in a hut by themselves in labor for up to four days. It must be terrifying.”

We picked up a lot of African delegates on the trip to Edinburgh, as well as a ton of the London press. This is the virgin voyage of Virgin Atlantic in to Scotland. Branson popped the bubbly and we are all clinking our glasses of mimosas. This is surreal.

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