While playing Scrabble last night with friends I realized there is a definite advantage to being in this country: Australian vocabulary. So when push came to shove and in the US I would have been trapped holding tiles: X V O H N K L, I quickly was able to form H-O-O-N in a spot with an available O.
Brrrr. Makes my blood run cold.
I used to think that happened right after Christmas, but I see that here in Australia it rather tends to be following Australia Day. Why? As one Aussie observed to me, "Australia Day is like Labor Day and 4th of July to you Americans but all rolled into one." That is, it celebrates the founding of Australia AND it's the last summer holiday weekend before school starts.
What I didn't think about, and this installment remarks on, is the fact that there is a significant percentage of Australians that left work before Christmas and today is their first day back. It's so common that a morning show was doing street interviews of them on their way to work. And as they arrived at my office looking all sleek, tan, and well fed the bonhomie of these workers, nevertheless once confronted with the MAG*, wilted under the glare of work like Betty Ramsey's wax tulips on that episode of I Love Lucy.
I can't believe that this is my second Australia Day in Adelaide. And Australia Day 2007 in Adelaide promises to be of such boring proportions that even last years festivities will seem like New Years in Times Square.
While watching my usual morning show on TV this morning, I was surprised to see the anchor that had been covering the terrible floods in Queensland back in the studio at the anchor desk. "What's this?" I wondered, "the floods are definitely not over. Hey, didn't I just see a story on the on-going flooding?" Then I realized, the story he had just reported was that the flood waters had crested and were, in fact, receding. His very earnest field stories had been on the "fear of the rising waters keeping poor Gladys up all night with worry" and documenting the obligatory dog stranded by flood waters in a tree. So I guess now that the waters were going down, there was no more misery to show and keep us riveted to the screen.
So, Hollywood actor turned GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson has thrown in the towel and given up the bid for his party's nomination after a humiliating show in the South Carolina primaries. While there will be much analysis as to why his campaign failed, I figured why not me too. I think he fell wrong by comparing himself to Ronald Reagan, a comparison inexplicably made by each of the other GOP candidates as well. So since Mr Thompson insisted, here is the Farmer Ted Tote Board to help us understand the differences:
DAY 1-THE TRIP
DAY 2-IN ROBE
DAY 3-GOING HOME
My American business colleagues landed yesterday, we all meeting up to talk about various topics and more importantly recalibrate after months of communicating by phone and e-mail. As we drank glasses of South Australia wine (provided by your Farmer) and caught up on each other's news I must admit I'd been a while since I'd felt at ease like this here in Australia. For just a few hours I could listen to chatter, make observations, and joke around knowing the complete context of everything. Not having to worry about things when I'm with a group of Australians like: did I hear the joke correctly? Should I laugh at this story or would they get offended because I think I know what it means? Do I have to explain the background of what I'm talking about so the listener "gets it"?
Now, to the average reader this pronouncement would be met with a shrug and a click-through to YouTube. But given it's summer. In Australia. This is met by your average denizen with whoops and shouts.
INCLUDE SOME INSTRUCTIONS, WILL YA! Ok, so I know it supposed to be intuitive-like and all but can we have a few more instructions included other than how to connect it all up? Once I did hook it up and then turned it on and marveled appropriately at the kickass apple icon, I was faced with the annoying fact that I didn't know f*ck all to do with the thing. So I just sat, feeling like a kid having been given the space shuttle for his 12th birthday and told, "See yaz latah!"
HEY, HOW ABOUT SOME USEFUL SOFTWARE? iLife, my eye! I'd like simple inexpensive programs that allow me to work with Microsoft created documents or simply view pictures in a slideshow without having to either import 'em or put a tag on 'em. This seems to be beyond the comprehension of the software engineers at Apple, who instead decided to unleash Safari on the Win world and so prove Win apps are better after all.
LESS LEFT-BRAIN, MORE LOGIC AS TO HOW THINGS WORK. Of course I like the softer way Macs work as well as the next person, but can we get some logic to its operation as well? For example in MacMail, I wanted to change my mail server. Thinking "Easy! I'll go in, delete the old mail server and put in the details for the new one." I startled koalas with my screams of anguish as at the same time MacMail proceeded to happily delete every single message I ever received or sent from my account. Weakly going to Apple support and looking up the topic there it was in black and white, "Deleting a mail server will delete all messages sent or received from that server." It was followed by another line which simply had on it, "Duh."
Sadly, my prediction has come true.
What I took to be a porcupine at first turned out to be an echidna. A very strange looking critter that seems to live by eating ants. I observed that it must be an endangered species since a) it was out in the daytime, which on an Australian summer day in the area can reach +40C (something that caused the expiration recently of a co-workers cat); and, 2) while it was obviously trying to hustle across the road, it was also evidently not all that fast, and definitely not speedy enough to avoid a moving vehicle.
The shed as a male cultural icon is so prevalent there is a book written about the phenomenon as well as a website for a support organization called (I kid you not) The Men's Sheds in Australia Association.
It's officially 40C here today. That's about 104F in the normal scale. Went out today and once the door opened it literally took my breath away.
Did you know koala bears look all cuddly and cute just like all the plush toys you've seen? Did you also know that those cuddly representation leave off a set of very lethal looking claws? Did you also know they make strong eucalyptus smelling urine and even spit when disturbed, possibly explaining why you've never seen a "live action" koala doll?
One thing I've discovered here on-station is that Australian Bureau of Meteorology (the US equivalent of the National Weather Service) is good at one thing: historical recording of the weather. When it comes to actually forecasting the weather they appear to have only two predictions, which are "completely wrong" and "partially wrong". This is particularly true when it 
comes to predicting rain, where the perception is that the BOM is accurate only 50% of the time. And this in a country where rain is so critical! To put it in other words, you could flip a coin and be just as accurate.
I can hear you thinking "What's so bad about a few flies?" Well, in Australia they are of the variety that the moment you step outside squadrons converge on you and head straight for your face. I'm talking of a quantity not seen since the 4th plague of Moses. They neither bite nor sting, just proceed to crawl all over your face and into your mouth, nose, and ears until you find yourself slapping visciously at your face like Curly of the The Three Stooges.
No Australian yet has been able to give me a satisfactory explanation as to why there are so many flies here, nor why they unerringly find you the moment you step out of any fly-free environment. Asking your average Australian gets you a puzzled frown as they start to dispute the question. Then they ruefully laugh, "Ya got me, mate. I have no idea," as they proceed to fan away the nearest flies - an action so common it's been called the Australian salute.
Well I'm on my way back Down Under today. I had a GREAT time in the US seeing family and friends for the holidays. Also got some cool gifts to bring back, especially some Pee-Wee Herman DVDs (thanks Froggy!).
While I'm looking forward to getting back, the one thing I'm not looking forward is the air travel getting there. Or more specifically, dealing with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees. So because I do tend to travel so much, I have a few suggestions for the TSA representatives that contact the general public:
Thinking back on the humble origins of the Queensland & Northern Territories Air Service (see! I'll bet there are plenty of Australians out there that had no idea that's what QANTAS stood for!) it was really started by a bunch of people who needed planes to get to the nearest Woolies for a pair of Y-fronts.
But it's not the lengths those intrepid pilots went through to fly, but rather the fact that the "seat of the pants/ any landing you walk away from is a good one" mentality I have a problem with. While US pilots sorta of have the feeling that landing should be more like a swan landing on a still lake, Qantas pilots seem to think that landing a plane is more like one of the Swedish Chef's "flappen-jacken" shot down off the ceiling. But what's more amazing is that the cargo of these erstwhile wrangler pilots is about 200 thoroughly complacent Aussies to whom this slap dash approach to getting on the ground seems to mean nothing to.
Here it is another year turns and another year of blogging! 2008 promises to be very momentous for Your Humble Farmer. As I settle in to watch a day of The Twilight Zone marathon, I do want to give a few shoutouts to the land down under:
