It’s the little differences

After I had been in the US for nearly a week, a friend asked me what differences I had noticed.  What I noticed most on my first day was how similar everything is.  Not that I was under any illusions that things were going to be wildly different.  The US is not a foreign country to Australia.  We speak mostly the same language, eat the same types of food, watch a lot of the same television.... it’s not exactly the same as going deep into Asia and living in a hut with some local goat herders.  Each counts as travelling abroad but it’s obvious that I was taking the softest option while still technically being outside my own culture.  Okay, so they drive on the other side of the road and say “sidewalk,” instead of “footpath,”  but we already knew that. 

With my only mental image of America having been formed by television, magazines and the internet, what struck me most was how “real” everything seemed.  Mainly, because it is.  Being in a room there was just like being in a room anywhere else.  Not that I didn’t expect it to be, but it was interesting to see the US for the first time without the haze of television.  Because they use the NTSC colour system (known in the industry as Never The Same Colour), there is always a bit of a haze on US produced programs after it has been converted to PAL.  It was interesting to see how the US is actually a real place, not just a thing they have on TV. 

After confirming that America was real and tangible, I was again struck by how similar everything is, but then, if you’re seeing airports, freeways and hotels, there isn’t going to be that much difference.  I think they’re all pretty much the same everywhere.  It also made it fairly predictable that the first major difference I would notice would be at the hotel, and as strange as it may seem, the first major difference I noticed was how the toilets flushed.  I looked in the bathroom and mentioned to my dearest that we might have to call maintenance as there seemed to be something wrong with the toilet.  When she asked why, I showed her how the water was three quarters of the way up the bowl.  She said, “Um, yes.  And?”  The toilets I’m used to have the water level at the base of the bowl and the cistern water just piles on top of it to flush everything down.  What I discovered is that theirs lower the water first, and then a jet pushes it all around the S-bend before the bowl fills up again.

Okay, so it’s a pretty banal observation, but it’s honestly the first thing that struck me as different. 

The second thing was how hotel rooms don’t seem to have fridges unless you’re in a suite.  Often when I’m in Melbourne, I’ll just get an economy room at the Vic, since all I want to do in the hotel room is sleep.  These rooms don’t have a bathroom, but they still have a television and fridge.  What US hotels do have, is an ice bucket in every room and an ice machine on every floor.  In its own way, this does make more sense than running a fridge in every room, regardless of whether the room is occupied, and probably only used about half the time when it is occupied.  For the things most people would a hotel fridge for, an ice bucket is sufficient and much more economical, both financially and environmentally.  But then, the following week, our friend told us about how her mother needed a fridge in a hotel for her diabetes medication and they wanted to charge her $25 a night to hire one.  (In San Francisco, that would barely have paid the occupancy tax, but that’s another story)  After that, I was more torn on the pros and cons of not having a fridge in the room.  Perhaps they could keep some standard rooms with fridges for those who need them, and the rest without, in the same way that the Vic has cheaper rooms without bathrooms for those who really only want a bed for the night.

After taking in the hotel and getting some information about local transport, we got a shuttle bus back to the airport where we picked up a train in to the city centre.  Yes, San Francisco has rail transport that goes right to the airport!  What a simple but brilliant idea!  (For anyone who is confused, that sarcasm is directed squarely and Melbourne’s transport system)

We didn’t have time to do any real sightseeing, although we see them turn a cable car around on a turntable.  The main purpose of the excursion was to keep me awake until evening to minimise jet lag and make sure I got a good night’s sleep before getting up at sparrow-fart for the flights to New Orleans the next day.  During that time, we had a late lunch at Burger King to see if fast food really is the same the world over.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to do any more gratuitous Pulp Fiction quotes and rest assured, I did not stick to fast food for the whole trip.  I must confess that, in the interests of trying everything the place had to offer, my attempts at vegetarianism were put on hold for the duration of the journey.  If anyone wants to call me a hypocrite for that, it’s a fair cop.  I can also tell you that Whoppers are just as ordinary over there.

Another thing I discovered was something that I should have known all along but still wasn’t prepared for.  Morgan Spurlock was right; serving sizes are massive.  I usually go for the medium sized drink but found that in the US, ‘medium’ means a bucket as opposed to a vat – certainly bigger than a large size here.  I made a mental note to only order small drinks in future. 

On the way back to the hotel, through the stations and suburbs, we found that all the houses are a lot more densely packed but for the most part, lots of it could have been parts of Melbourne.  It didn’t help that the place is full of gum trees.

I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it's just – it's just there it's a little different.

The Rules: Fashion

Girls, if you're going to wear something that calls attention to your breasts, then I am going to look there.

If you don't want me to look there, then put them away and then we'll both know where we stand.

This also applies to any t-shirts that say "Stop starting at my tits!"
I'm a reading person.  I see a sign and I read it.  If it weren't for the slogan, chances are, I wouldn't be looking.

Cute bird photo of the month

Much like most other things, the seagulls are bigger in the US.

Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco 

And, just because it's beautiful,

Post St, San Francisco

Einstein was right

It’s been proven that as the faster you travel, the more time slows down.  I could go into detail about how and why, but for the purposes of this anecdote, I will ask you to kindly accept that it has been done in a relatively humble way.  I don’t agree that this amounts to time travel. It is merely time dilation - something that we can’t control, it simply happens. 

On Wednesday last week, I left Melbourne at 11:35am.  Three and a half hours later, I arrived in Auckland at 5:30pm.  That may seem like a negative gain (since in the age of newspeak, we can can only refer to positive word and expunge all negative words like “loss”), but it was a necessary loss as part of a greater investment.  Two hours later, at 7:30pm, I left Auckland.  Twelve hours, and roughly ten thousand kilometres later, I arrived in San Francisco at 10:30am.  It was still Wednesday.  

This has nothing to do any theories of time and velocity, it just sounds cool to try and put the two together.

I have masses to write about but feel my time here is better spent having the experiences than writing about them, so some of the observations are going to have to wait.  I’m sorry about that.  But I am writing and there will be more to come. 

Housekeeping

The next few posts may come by email from my 'phone, so i apologise in
advance if the formatting is a bit odd.

Why I write about American politics

I’m a bit surprised that it hasn’t come up here more often, but a question I’ve been asked off and on for years is,
Why do you always talk about American politics?  You’re not American.  What does it matter to you?

There are several ways I could approach this.  I could talk about how I am going to become an American-in-law and therefore what happens there affects me more than your average auslander, but that would simply be an argument of convenience.

The first answer is that it’s just so bloody interesting.  Travellers will say that there are certain places that have colours you don’t see anywhere else.  Similarly, in politics, the US will give time of day to arguments that would be laughed at in other parts of the world.  By schoolchildren.  And I find it fascinating.  Infuriating, but fascinating.  When people give serious airtime to the notion that public health cover is both a communist and a fascist policy, how can you not slow down and take a look?

The more serious answer is this:
If I were to use the expression, “The leader of the free world,” who would you think I was referring to?
If your answer was the president of the United States, then you just proved my point.

The last time I checked, I live in the free world, but I didn’t vote for him.  More importantly, I didn’t get a chance to vote against him.  It would seem to me that if the US were serious about leading the world, and about democracy, it should open its elections up to all regions that it expects to influence.

Okay, so that’s the abstract, debating-society argument.  But how do the actions of the US really affect me?  Well, you might have heard a bit about this global financial crisis that’s been going around.  Every government loves to call it a “global” crisis, since that means no-one really has to take responsibility for it.  Where did this crisis begin?  It wasn’t in Brussels.  It wasn’t in London or Hong Kong.  No, the credit meltdown happened as a direct result of US economic policy, which was based on the assumption that if government just got out of the way and allowed the market to do as it pleased, people would naturally act in their own best interest and everyone would be happy.  We know now, how that turned out.  Because of the interdependence of national economies, the ripple effects of the Wall Street meltdown spread around the world with devastating speed.  Other countries may have been aware that self-regulation is a contradiction in terms, but nothing they could do with their own markets was going to stop the domino effect started in the US.  Where is the recourse?  Where is the accountability?  Naturally, the US government has the right to conduct its own affairs as it sees fit, but when those affairs impact on the affairs of others who have no say in US policy, we at least have the right to comment.  If taxation without representation is tyranny, what do you call plunging half the world into recession without representation? 

Then there is the current brouhaha over health insurance in the US.  That’s a purely domestic issue.  Why should I have an opinion on that?  Well, granted, it’s no skin off my nose if America chooses to regard health care as a commodity to be bought and sold rather than a fundamental human right as most of the rest of the free world does.  It’s nothing to do with me.  Not unless you count the friend who, despite being fully insured, is being forced to wait up to three months to have the kind of procedure that I would expect to be able to get in my GP’s office on the first consultation.  And not if you count the other friends who live in the grey area where they earn too much to qualify to Medicare but not enough to be able to afford insurance.  But if you don’t count caring about friends, then I don’t have a horse in that race. 

What I do have, is a pretty low tolerance for bullshit – and some of the bullshit that has been coming out of this debate is trophy size.  And it does involve my country because some of the opponents of “socialised medicine” try to use the Australian system as an example of why it doesn’t work.  Australia has had universal public health care since 1975 and the current system has been in place since 1983.  I have friends and family who have gone through heart attacks and brain tumours and received sterling treatment with no out-of-pocket expenses or private insurance.  And if people would prefer to buy private insurance, you can do that too.  It’s a free country after all.  Do we pay extra tax for this?  Of course we do.  But it’s nothing compared to the cost of private insurance.  You will hear Australians complain that we are taxed too highly.  Here’s a news flash for you: Everyone thinks they’re taxed too highly.  You could have a tax rate of one dollar per year and there would still be people who say, “What, every year?”  So let’s just accept that people moaning about taxation is as inevitable as taxation itself.  But whatever the system, you get what you pay for.  We pay tax and in return we get services, like police, fire brigades, schools and hospitals.  As a Twitter comment defending the British NHS put it, “We have social health care because we are a society. God knows what the yanks are.”  So if our system is going to be used as an example of the tyrannical nature of looking after citizens, I’m going to have something to say about that.  It’s not that outsiders don’t have the right to comment on our system, just so long as it’s informed comment.

Let me put it this way: even if you’ve never agreed with a word I’ve said on politics, I think most people would agree that I’m a reasonably savvy customer when it comes to how we are governed.  So here’s my question:  If I had been living in a nightmarish socialist dystopia for the last 26 years.... don’t you think I would have noticed?

The final reason that I, and many others who might not initially appear to have an interest, express an opinion on US politics is because so much of the world’s news comes out of America now.  Of course, it’s not the US government’s fault that so many networks (mostly commercial ones, James!) have chosen to shut down their international bureaus in favour of getting it all on a feed out of Atlanta, but they should at least be aware that they are presenting themselves to the world. The whole world, not just the bits of it that play in the World Series.  And the more people hear a story, the more likely they are to form an opinion on something, whether it concerns them or not.  For example, there have been many and varied opinions expressed in recent weeks about how a golfer’s wife should best deal with his infidelity.  I don’t know what this has to do with anyone outside their family, but it’s all been reported and so everyone has an opinion on it. 

This is also the reason why Americans don’t comment on Australian politics as much.  (I only choose Australian politics because I am Australian.  It could just as easily be any other country, with a couple of exceptions)  They just don’t hear about it as much.  I welcome all views on how we run ourselves.  I might agree or I might disagree but I won’t pull out the “you don’t live here, what’s it to you?” argument.  Then again, if foreigners don’t have the right to comment on how other countries conduct themselves, maybe America doesn’t have the right to talk about how Iran, or Venezuela, or North Korea behave.  If America wants to hold itself up as an example to the world, that invites closer scrutiny.  What some people in the US should realise is that just because the actions of other governments don’t affect them doesn’t mean the actions of their government don’t affect others.  When they do, people are going to have things to say about it.

Headlines from Next Year

Why wait for the tragically predictable?


Apple drops the price of new iTablet by 25%, angering those who spent a week camped outside malls a month earlier in order to be the first to own them.

Sean Hannity demands DNA sample from Barack Obama to prove that he is human. Also questions whether the president is really over 35 and from planet Earth.

Microsoft assures users that upcoming release of SP1 will correct most issues with Windows 7.

Footballer placed on good behaviour bond for urinating in public says, “I just want to put it behind me and get on with my life."

Obama insists that despite the initial delay, Guantanamo Bay will be closed by January 2011.

Sarah Palin supporters blame “personal attacks by the TV ratings system” for the cancellation of her Fox News talk show.

The word “hashtag” added to Oxford English Dictionary.

CNN launches new flagship program, “Stuff we found on the internet.”

Owners of BitTorrent website abunchofthieves.com tell court “Who us? Steal? Never!”

Dick Cheney claims that thinking critical thoughts about him will cause the ground to open and swallow you up.

New social networking site moodring.com allows users to express themselves purely by colour.

Rock band says they hope to tour Australia “possibly next year.”

New Sacha Baron Cohen film to feature outrageous character who confuses unsuspecting Americans.

Administration backpedals on Iraq withdrawal date.

Speculation mounts about Abbott’s future as Liberal leader.

New online game Third Life allows socially awkward Second Life avatars to live out their fantasies.

Accusations of bribery and corruption in Olympic bidding process.

Local council attempts to create physical space inspired by online networking models. Working title for the project is “a park.”