Oh, wait, that was exactly what it involved…

I know that most of my readers aren’t cricket fans but I choose to believe that this is due to ignorance rather than indifference*. I’m firmly convinced that if you are a generally a sports fan and someone takes the time to explain the Byzantine rules of cricket to you that you will become a fan of the game. If you’re not a sports fan, well I can’t help you.

Yes, it is slow paced. Yes, it can go on for days – by design. Yes, you can score 500 runs and still lose.  All of these things are true and they are only a few of the things that make cricket such a compelling sport.

And The Ashes? Well, the Ashes is cricket at its finest. Every couple of years since for the last 120 or so, the finest that Australia and England have taken the field for the summer to battle over the eponymous trophy, purportedly the ashes of a bail that represented the death of English cricket. A demise brought on by the first defeat of the English side by filthy colonials in 1882.

Over a century later, it is still the biggest sporting rivalry between England and her erstwhile colony. So much so that for several glorious weeks in December and January, ‘the cricket’ rules. Staff was pretty scarce on the ground at work on the first day of the Adelaide test last Friday and those of us cursed with meetings or other unavoidable work engagements spent a lot of time refreshing scoreboards on our phones.

Having lived in each country, having one son born in each, I have the advantage of neutrality in the series. This may be all the more advantageous this time around, because it looks as if barracking for Australia is going to be a hard slog.

And if all this doesn’t convince you to care about The Ashes, well, many of us know that The Ashes are “vitally important for the past, present and future safety of the Galaxy”.

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*That’s right, insulting your readers is bound to keep them coming back.

There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, very little good music about cricket. But Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy managed to put together a cracker of a side project concept album. The Duckworth Lewis Method is remarkably uncampy and a good listen for both the cricket fan and music lover alike. The Duckworth Lewis Method is available from .

…And if I weren’t a civil servant, I’d have a place in the colonies
We’d play croquet behind white-washed walls and drink our tea at four
Within intervention’s distance of the embassy
The midday air grows thicker with the heat
And drifts towards the line of trees…

This verse got my mind wandering around the word ‘colony’, which led to thinking about the British Empire. At its height, it was easily the largest empire the world has ever seen. And no matter how you feel about imperialism, that’s pretty damn impressive. And that got me thinking about a question that Arizaphale’s daughter raised over a year ago. One that’s been plaguing my mind for well over a year. I don’t remember the exact wording of the question, but the gist of it was that when the English arrived in the 1780’s to colonise Australia, the indigenous Australians were basically a Stone Age hunter-gatherer civilization. Why this disparity? Why was one civilization the most powerful and enlightened empire that the planet had yet seen and the other a motley collection of tribes scrabbling for survival?

I’ve been thinking about it off and on for over a year and I still don’t have a good answer. I’ve read books. I’ve consulted people smarter than myself. I’ve (unfortunately literally) laid awake in the middle of the night thinking about it.

Most people trace the rise of ‘Western’ civilization to the development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent around 12 – 14,000 years ago. With the birth of farming, people were able to stop wandering around constantly looking for food and to start forming semi-permanent settlements. As we became more sedentary, vacancies opened up for professional thinkers – inventors, scientists, philosophers – who started to develop the technologies that led to the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age and the glorious current Twitter Age. Those civilizations that independently developed farming - ones in the Middle East (and by extension, Europe), China and Central America – advanced much more quickly than those who didn’t – ones in North America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia.

That’s fine. But why did humans develop agriculture in the Middle East (and China and Central America) but not Australia? There are loads of theories, from racial superiority to extraterrestrial intervention, but I have yet to see one that I can really buy into 100%. Jared Diamond, in his excellent “Germs, Guns and Steel”, gives one of the most complete arguments I’ve read. In short, Diamond says that for a number of reasons – geographic, climactic, ecological – agriculture could only be developed in a few places. In North America and Australia, for example, there were no large mammal species and few plant species that could be domesticated. I’m not sure that I buy into his hypothesis completely. For one thing, there were a lot of large animal species in Australia and North America that may have been domesticable, but they went extinct shortly after humans arrived in these places – hunted and gathered to death. Perhaps if the Neolithic Americans and Australians hadn’t killed off these large mammals they could have been domesticated. Also, Diamond’s genetics are dodgy.*

Of course, all of this faff assumes that our Western culture is what all should aspire to – that Western civilization represents the height of human evolution. Whenever I turn on the TV, I become convinced that this is not the case. The mother of the daughter of Arizaphale proposed that these more ‘primitive’ cultures were just happy as they were and spurned technology. There’s evidence, for example, that the indigenous Australians were presented, by neighbors across the Torres Strait, with bows and arrows, but rejected the technology. “No thanks, but we’re happy with what we’ve got.” In other words, as hard as it is to believe, maybe everyone doesn’t want an iPhone.

The smell of burning batter pulled me out of my reverie. As I flipped the last pancake, I also wondered how the prim English ended up with the tasty but dull Pancake Tuesday rather than the “ancient celebration of boobs, beads and booze” that is Mardi Gras or Carnivale. Ah well. Who knows. But my pancakes were done cooking, the song was over and I had hungry humans to feed.

And we are rotting like a fruit underneath a rusting roof
We dream our dreams and sing our songs of the fecundity
Of life and love
Of life and love
Of life and love

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*Not his genetics. I’m not casting aspersions on his parentage. His use of genetics to make certain points.

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One of the few great albums of the ’80’s, Camper Van Beethoven’s “Key Lime Pie” is available from  .

Image credits:

British Empire

Cook in Australia

Palorchestes

I’ve always been most comfortable in libraries. In Junior High school, my best friend and I used to head to our small town public ‘library’ after school for a couple of hours until our parents finished at work. The Columbia County Public Library wasn’t a great one, wasn’t even a good one – but it was cool in the Florida heat and a respite of words in a part of the country that had little respect for them. In the pre-internet age, the library was the only source for the kind of information that we have at our fingertips today. I think I learned more about the world in those after school library sessions than I ever did in the classroom. One of the best things about the Columbia County Library was that it was just around the corner from a drug store that still had an old fashioned soda counter. Best vanilla Cokes ever.

I discovered the joy of the library scavenger hunt at the University of Georgia’s Science Library. Once I started doing upper level science courses, I began to have to search for journal articles and then references within. The internet was just starting to replace the card catalog and most of my research involved working my way back through decades of academic literature. Finding one article often began a search for another, older one. Sometimes I had to work through the stacks, sometimes through rolls of microfilm. But I loved the search, the hunt, and whiled away many an autumn afternoon in the science library, surrounded by smells of books and acetate and the sound of quiet.

By the time I started my doctorate, most scientific journals were online and I rarely had to leave my computer to do literature searches. But every now and again, I’d need some 1930’s agricultural pamphlet and would have to head over to Ellis Library and hit the stacks. And that’s where I discovered the graduate student cages. Little closet sized cells, separated from one another by chain link. Most of them were empty, but every now and again you’d find a bleary eyed history graduate student huddled inside, looking up nervously as you passed by. I couldn’t figure out what these odd fellows were doing; why lock yourself up in a windowless cell in the library away from friends and colleagues? One of my favorite things about graduate school was the social aspects of it – the friendships. Even when I was writing up my thesis, I did it in my shared office with fellow students bustling around me. When I finished it, I celebrated with the same people. But these library hermits seemed to be eschewing the best part of the graduate experience.

But I began to understand the need for a hermitage during my post-doctoral research. Oxford University’s Bodleian Library is one of the iconic landmarks of that city. But during my time there in the City of Dreaming Spires, I spent little time there. The Bodleian was more like a museum than a working library. I felt as if I should be wearing an academic gown. The librarians there probably would have preferred that I had. It was a gorgeous place to sit, but not a comfortable one.

I spent more time in our cozy little departmental library and it was there that I discovered the advantages of library as hideaway. Toward the end of my time at Oxford, I was a fairly disgruntled academic. I needed to keep turning up to work in order to fulfill the terms of my contract, but while I was there I was too busy being grumpy and miserable to spend much time doing work. One day I had a legitimate excuse to wander over to the library and as I was wandering through the stacks, thumbing through 17th century botanical texts, I discovered the reading room – ample natural light, deliciously comfortable chairs and empty. I spent the rest of that day hiding out in that room. From that point on, it became my sanctuary. When I wanted to get away from my boss or my co-workers or even myself, I’d head up to the library, grab something to read and claim one of those reading chairs until I was ready to deal with people again. The beauty of a library is that quiet is a mandate. Even if someone stumbled upon my hidey hole, universal library manners meant that a subtle nod was the extent of the required conversation.

Today, after a second or two of olfactory reverie, I wandered into the university library. Just for kicks. Ours’ is not a great library. My only experience with it to date was a brief and unsuccessful quest for an evolution text last year. As is the case with most libraries these days, there are nearly as many computers as there are books. There are no comfortable reading chairs, no graduate student cages, no airy reading rooms. But it is still a library. And wandering through the stacks today, I found the same sense of comfort that I’ve always found in libraries. These days, I have a private office and a job that I love. I get most books that I need free from textbook companies. When I need a journal article I find it online.

I’ve got no real need for the library these days, but I’m damn glad it’s there. I’m glad it’s there because someday I may need that sanctuary again. I’m glad that its there for my kids, I hope they get the joy, comfort and thirst for knowledge out of the library that I used to get.

And I’m glad it’s there for that smell – musty books. Comfort. Solace.

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Image credits:

Columbia County Library

Ellis Library at the University of Missouri

The Bodleian Library

City East Library

My Morning Jacket’s “Evil Urges” is available from .

But I was back at work for half a day today, which allowed me to clear the cobwebs from my head. With that clarity, I’ve decided that rather than posting cute photos of my sons or moaning about the hardships of life as a father of two, today I want to talk about race.

Yes, I know that after that prelude, I’ve gone and posted a picture of my kids. I was trying to get a good picture of my study, where I do a fair bit of my writing, for a different post – one that I’m no longer interested in writing. I decided to take this shot, however, as an illustration of why it is essentially impossible for me to work from home right now. Creaking bed springs and gurgling baby are not sounds conducive to writing a lecture on human evolution or a report on a new cancer drug.

Your eye was probably immediately drawn to the two flags on the wall and they are what I want to talk about.

My friend Jamie and I liberated the flag on the right, the banner of the State of Florida, from St. George Island State Park during a drug fueled midnight run to New Orleans. I’m pretty sure that we broke both state and federal laws that night and that’s one of the reasons I’m happy to be living outside the reach of the Florida and U.S. criminal justice systems. However, I’d be happy to assist authorities in the apprehension of my accomplice, who was in fact the criminal mastermind. And a Florida Gator fan, which ought to be a crime.

But let’s be honest, if you’re American your eye was drawn to the flag on the left. The old Georgia flag featuring the Confederate battle flag – one of the most potent and divisive symbols that we’ve got in the States. You were probably thinking to yourself,  “Well, I’ll be damned. I know A Free Man has a penchant for college football, but I didn’t realize he was a redneck. A racist. A (shudder) Republican.”

One of the things I don’t miss about the USA is societally mandated political correctness. American society has become so precious about race, gender, disabilities, religion, etc. that it was like a breath of fresh air when I landed in the slightly less PC United Kingdom and dramatically less PC Australia. It’s not that I want to walk the streets spouting racist or sexist diatribes. It has just gone too far in the United States. Gone so far, that a bad joke can get someone fired and exiled from polite society. Gone so far, that we’ve become humourless as a culture.

Gone so far, that legitimate political opposition to a black president is presumed to rooted in racism.

I don’t like the Far Right. I disagree with almost everything that they believe in. But they absolutely have the right to criticize the President. The same way that I, as a radical leftist, had the right to criticize President Bush. I’m sure there are some pissed off white supremacists out there who hate the president because he’s black. But most of the detractors on the right have, in their mind, legitimate political disagreements with Obama. Yes, some of them are being nasty and some are being dishonest. But I think back to 2002-3 when I began to realize that Bush was an incompetent at best or a liar at worse. I wasn’t very nice about him. Nor were a lot of the bomb throwers on the Left. But that had nothing to do with the fact that Bush was a white, Protestant from Texas. Just like the vast majority of the teabaggers’ problems don’t stem from President Obama’s skin color. Let’s get real.

But we need to talk about that Georgia flag. I bought it in 2001 after the state, under heavy political pressure, replaced it with a tepid politically neutral compromise. I picked it up, because at the time I thought Georgia was being cowardly by surrendering to the moral majority of the left – the forces of political correctness. And it was an incredibly unpopular decision in the state, leading to the election of the current governor – Sonny “Praying for Rain” Perdue. (Probably time to get off your knees, governor.) Perdue held a referendum which resulted in the replacement of one Confederate symbol with another one.

I never really ‘flew’ the flag when I was still living in the States. I’m sensitive to the divisiveness of the battle flag and the statement that it makes about an individual who displays it. But that has always annoyed me. Why does it mean I’m a racist if I choose to hang that flag on my wall? I’m kind of an amateur U.S. Civil War history buff and I’ve always had more sympathy for the Confederacy than the Union. I admired the spirit of the rebellious South, their gallant military leaders, their unwillingness to accept the reality that their lifestyle was untenable and their revolution was doomed.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m an advocate of slavery or even racial segregation. And, when it came down to brass tacks, that is what the Confederacy was about – the continuation of slavery. Unfortunately, the symbols of the Confederacy are inextricably tied up with racism.

Ignoring that part of Georgia’s past is nothing more than historical denial. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and the battles over segregation are part of what Georgia and the rest of the South are today. I don’t know if you need to fly the Confederate battle flag in front of the state house, but banishing it from the public eye doesn’t do any good either. One could argue that Georgia and the other ten states of the old Confederacy should be required to fly the battle flag lest they forget. It is so oft cited that is almost cliche, but George Santayana’s most famous quote rings true again – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Today, I don’t know what that flag means to me. I don’t know why, when I pulled it out of a box of stuff we had shipped from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia, I decided to hang it on the wall of my study. I like it. It doesn’t bear the heavy burdens here in Australia that it does in the U.S.  It reminds me of the five years I spent in Athens in the late 90’s. It reminds me that political correctness is a blunt, ineffective instrument for changing public opinion. But it also serves to remind me of the shameful legacy of race relations in a part of the United States that I love, both despite and because of its history.

It does not, however, mean that I’m a racist. Or a redneck. Or a Republican.

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The coolest man in Country, Dwight Yoakam’s classic 1988 LP “Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room” is available from .

Flag images from Wikipedia.

As an aside, I was listening to a podcast of the daily news on BBC’s Radio 4 and there was much unsettled discussion of the heat wave plaguing the south of England. Temperatures predicted to soar to a blistering 32°C (90°F). Now admittedly, this is warm for a city like London, but they had a guy who had spent time exploring the Sahara to offer advice on how to cope with the heat.

The high in Adelaide over the summer? 45°C (113°F). I’ve got your Sahara right here.

I felt hot in Oxford exactly once. The first summer we were there, there were a couple of days in July in which the thermometer breached the mid 30’s and with no A/C and a fair bit of humidity, I think I broke a sweat. Once. In nearly four years. 

Right, the Australian winter. That’s what I’m talking about. Yesterday was my weekly stay-at-home-dad day. I can’t stand actually staying at home on these days and having the boy tear the house down, so despite stormy conditions we headed out to our favorite little hideaway/playground.  Barreled up into the hills east of the city. The further up we got, the worse the weather got – horizontal rain, pea soup fog. There is something exhilirating in the vertigo of rounding a sharp corner - looking out of the car window and seeing that you are surrounded by a misty void – nothing in front of you, a rocky hillock to the right and a long drop of nothing to the left.

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As a footnote, Dr. O’C thinks I dress our son like a “redneck/chav/bogan”. (These are synonymous for those of you not fluent in multiple English dialects). Could you all please tell her that she’s wrong? Thanks.

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I’m in the midst of a passionate musical affair with Eels. They’re one of those bands that has always just been simmering below the surface for me and in the last few days I’ve gotten it. They’ve got a new full-length, “Hombre Lobo” out (), but it is “Electro-Shock Blues Show” that has been turning my crank lately. Buy it from .

UK advocacy group the Children’s Food Campaign released a report in May analyzing the nutritional information provided for 107 foods marketed toward babies and young children in Britain. They found that “several products contained levels of sugar or saturated fat higher than those in adult products considered ‘junk food’.”

The CFC used the British Food Standards Agency guidelines for healthy levels of saturated fats and sugars. For example, the FSA defines a product as ‘high’ in saturated fats if its level exceeds 5 g per 100g, for sugar the threshold is 15 g per 100 g. These are the levels are for adult foods, so for babies and young children these amounts should probably be lower.

The CFC was interested in saturated fats because they are often indicative of the presence of trans fats. The level of trans fats, which have been associated with coronary heart disease, are not required to be disclosed in the UK, so saturated fats are the best indicator for these. While children need a higher level of fat in their diets than adults, saturated fats are not necessary. Breast milk, for example, contains only 1 – 2% saturated fat.

The CFC was worried about sugar for obvious reasons. There is strong evidence that regular consumption of sugary foods makes it more likely that they will develop a taste for sweet foods. Excessive consumption of sugary foods is linked with obesity and tooth decay. Sugar levels in children’s food is tricky, because most fruits have naturally high levels of sugar. The CFC report makes a distinction between foods that have naturally high levels of sugar – banana puree for example – and those with unnecessary added sugar.

Now, to be fair, none of the foods that the CFC flagged as having worrying levels of sugar and fat were baby ‘meals’ – creamy chicken curry, for example – or pureed fruits. These products seem to be safe. The products that we should be concerned about are snack foods – biscuits (cookies), rusks, savoury snacks and desserts. The CFC found that the three major baby food manufacturers had at least one product that had high levels of sugar, saturated fat or both. Heinz was the worst offender with 25% of their products containing unhealthy levels of sugar or fat.

The CFC points out that a lot of these products make health claims that “while factually true, distract the consumers’ attention away from the less healthy attributes of the product”. In other words, baby food manufacturers are deliberately misleading consumers. What the CFC doesn’t point out is a pet peeve of mine. Some of the products that they flagged are ‘organic’. Folks, this is important – organic does not mean healthy.

After reading this report, my curiosity was piqued. Is this a UK problem or a world wide one? I decided to do a bit of research.

Because I live in Australia, I am more concerned with products marketed for children Down Under. I’m aware, however, that most of my readers are American but an exhaustive survey of the multitude of baby food brands available in the U.S. would require a significant investment of time. Nonetheless, a quick analysis of American baby foods reveals that the trends observed in the U.K. are also seen in U.S. products.

Most of the American baby food manufacturers do not publish complete nutritional information for their products online. Heinz, for example, publishes thorough information for all of their jarred food, but interestingly does not provide information for savory snacks, cookies and many dessert items. Beech Nut – didn’t Beech Nut used to be a type of chewing tobacco? – does not use a standard serving size for cookies and snacks, instead opting for providing nutritional information per cookie. This makes it difficult to determine how much sugar and saturated fat their products contain. Somehow I doubt that this is an accident. Gerber should be lauded for transparency if not for healthfulness of their products as they offer full and clear nutritional information on their company website. Virtually all of their Gerber Graduates line of snacks contain very high levels of sugar – up to 57g per 100g serving in their Yogurt Melts. To their credit, most of these products are low in saturated fat. However, it seems that the CFC’s findings regarding baby foods in the UK are very similar in the United States.

There are only a few major baby food manufacturers in Australia. Heinz has the major market share with Only Organic and Golden Circle fighting over the remainder. Only Organic is pretty good, with only a couple of products exceeding the recommended levels of sugar. Both of these products contained large amounts of sugars from fruit sources and thus are not likely a major concern. Only Organic does not produce a snack food line, however. The two companies that do, Heinz and Golden Circle, offer no useful nutritional information online and have not yet replied to requests for information. (I used my professional affiliation in the request thinking that association with a university and a school which includes a large Nutrition Science program would get their attention).

A quick trip to the closest Woolies, however, answered my questions in a disturbing way. As in the U.K. study, most of the baby food  ‘meals’ and fruit purees were fine with very few additives and fat and sugar levels well within acceptable boundaries. But almost every snack or dessert food on the baby food shelves contained well over the acceptable levels of sugar and saturated fat. Every item in the Heinz Little Kids line exceeds these recommendations with levels of saturated fat from 2.5 to 8.1 g per 100 g and sugar from 40 to 52 g per 100 g. These products make claims like 35% Less Sugar than the leading brand (Heinz is the leading brand of biscuits targeted to infants and toddlers), No Added Colours or Preservatives or my favorite – All Natural. Folks, lard is natural but you wouldn’t feed it to your infant, would you?

CHOICE Food for Kids, an excellent consumer website, has thorough information on a number of other foods targeted at the toddler market and provides more information about the unfortunate state . Some of the worst offenders are products that imply healthiness. Mother Earth Fruit Crumble Muesli Bars, for example, contain 6.7 g per 100 g saturated fat and 30 g per 100 g sugar. Go Natural Berry Pieces in Yoghurt are one of the worst products on the market, containing a whopping 18.2 g fat per 100 g and 58.1 g sugar per 100 g. While they are more than half sugar, these tasty treats contain neither real fruit nor real yogurt. Yummy, dig in kids!

Another insidious trend is using well known children’s entertainment characters. The cloyingly sweet, yet remarkably slender Wiggles are probably not eating a lot of their ABC Letter Biscuits (7.6 g of saturated fat per 100 g).

It isn’t just sweet treats. Heinz Little Kids Cheesymite Bread Sticks have an unacceptable level of saturated fat. Every kid’s favorite ‘cheese’ food, Kraft Singles, pack a whopping 13.9 g of saturated fat per 100 g and 1.4 g of sodium per 100 g.

In short, Australia is in the same boat as the UK. If we buy baby and toddler food off the shelf, with the assumption that they are safe and healthy products – as advertised – we’re feeding our kids crap.

The CFC report offers a number of recommendations, most of which are directed towards the companies and government regulators. I’ve got a few suggestions as a parent.

• No matter what country you live in, Heinz kid’s snacks are junk. Don’t buy them.
• Don’t believe anything you read on a box. The health claims are marketing tools and are often deceptive. Look at the nutritional information. The UK Food Standards Agency recommends healthy levels of no more than 5 g per 100g saturated fat, 15 g per 100 g sugar and 1.5 g per 100 g sodium in any food products. Bear in mind that these recommended levels are for adults, kids probably need less. If the nutritional information is incomplete, they are trying to hide something. Don’t buy those products.
• Don’t give kids cookies as a snack. The CFC recommends raw fruit or vegetables or natural yogurt. I know it is easier said than done. I’m guilty of taking the path of least resistance. Boy Z lived on those Heinz Little Kids ‘fruit bars’ for a while. I won’t be making the same mistake for baby #2. There are reasonably healthy packaged snack foods available. The CHOICE Food For Kids site is a good resource in Australia. If anyone knows of similar sites in the UK or US, let me know and I’ll link to them.

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“Nina Simone Sings the Blues” is available from .

Image credits:

Feeding baby

He’s sort of the forgotten member of the family these days. Quite literally sometimes when, for example, I stumble over a neglected empty water bowl or remember half an hour before bedtime that he hasn’t been walked. I feel bad for him sometimes, he’s been through a lot – with transcontinental moves and the like – and is watching his position in the pack slide as he gets older and this endless stream of hairless pups come aboard.

I got the dog – dubbed Timmins after the northern Ontario town that my parents called home -  in the late Spring of 2001. He was a husky puppy of questionable parentage acquired to serve as a calming influence to my unmanageable Siberian bitch. The bitch died a couple of months later, a victim of some poorly disposed antifreeze and her own unruliness. The idea of Timmins as stable pony would never have worked anyway as he turned out to have obedience issues of his own. For the first couple of years of his life, I spent countless hours chasing him and threatening violence upon him and any devil spawn that he may have been unlucky enough to create.

The dog was an escape artist. We moved into a wonderful old rambling house near downtown Columbia, Missouri. The landlord was generous enough to put up a brand new chain link fence around the surprisingly large back yard. Within a half hour of his release into his new domain, the dog was over the fence in a single leap and off in a cloud of white hair after some vermin (cat, squirrel or other). I coralled some of my work mates into taking an afternoon off to help me erect an electric wire around the top of the fence. The initial shock wore off in a couple of days with the realization that he could still clear the fence with a running jump and he was off again, me cursing in tow. Every single time we hosted a party in that Missouri house, not an infrequent event, one of the regular party games was one that I like to call ‘chase the damn dog around the neighborhood because some drunken moron left the front door open’.  I have scars – literal scars – from this particular game.

The damn dog was wild, more lupine than canine. Genetically, huskies and their ilk are more closely related to their wolf ancestors than other breeds and you could certainly see that in Timmins behavior. He wanted to hunt not play fetch, wanted to run with a pack not sit at my feet in front of the fireplace.

But our canine friends are ingenious at endearing themselves to us and when the time came for Dr. O’C and I to take the long trip over the Atlantic to Blighty, there was little talk of leaving the dog behind. So, six months and thousands of dollars later (not to mention a last minute trip back by your underwhelming correspondent to physically put the dog on the plane) Timmins was happily leaping the mouldering fences of Oxford. During his time in Britain, the dog developed quite the taste for British fauna that made me yearn for the days of chasing him around the neighborhood. The fact that he wasn’t shot by some angry English sheepherder is a miracle.

Actually, let me tell you that story. Dr. O’C and I, in the heady pre-Boy Z days, were off on a long ramble with the dog out in some pasture land on the west side of Oxford. We had him off lead as there wasn’t much out there and without distractions, he was pretty good off the lead.

I don’t remember which of us saw the herd of sheep first, but there was no time to respond before Timmins either got a whiff or a sight of pungent fluffy prey. In a way it was like watching a nature documentary – he was off at top speed, staying low along the fence line. He hurdled the fence without breaking stride and begand to bear down on his prey.  Sheep, being sheep, didn’t recognize danger until it was too late. The dog began circling the sheep, corralling them into a herd. He picked out the weakest – a young ewe – and struck, grabbing the sheep by the neck and pulled her down to the ground.

It took us a while to sort out the situation (actually I think Dr. O’C sorted out the situation as I recall). As there was no farmer or house to be seen, we took the easy way out and high-tailed it home. I rang my boss at the time, a landed Englishwoman with a couple of dogs that had been involved in livestock altercations in the past. She asked the obvious question, was the sheep dead? In our haste to leave the scene of the crime, we hadn’t spent much time evaluating the health of the sheep. We got on our bikes, may have changed clothes as well, and rode back to check on the sheep. It was gone. I chose then and choose now to believe that the sheep was merely stunned – a flesh wound, if you will.

Sheep killer (stunner) or no, we didn’t leave him in Columbia so we certainly weren’t going to leave him in Oxford. So 10,000 miles, 28 days in dog jail and thousands of pounds later Timmins set foot on his third continent in his short life a free dog. A Free Dog. Maybe it’s all the travel and the confinement associated with it, maybe he’s getting a bit longer in the tooth (he’s 8 this month) or maybe he’s just tired of the chase, but he’s a different dog these days. He’s trustworthy off the lead. He doesn’t jump fences. You’ve seen what he lets the kid do to him.

Every now and again he’ll go on a brief walkabout through a door left carelessly ajar. Occasionally some primal instinct, despite being neutered since he was a pup, will take over resulting in some embarrassment on beach walks.

For the most part, however, he stays in the yard. Contentedly sitting on the porch, keeping an eye out over his domain.

And now he resignedly lets a little boy sit on his back, pull his ears, smack him with a cricket bat and run a truck along his supine form. With another one on the way, his golden years are likely to be spent fending off a constant stream of attacks from two hairless pups rather than just the one.

It’s a little sad really. All I wanted when he was a younger dog was to extinguish that feral fire. I wanted a golden retriever, a dog that obeyed my commands and rested quietly at my feet when not needed.  Now that I’ve got that kind of dog, I kind of miss the wolf.

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I’ve got another great Swedish artist for you today from Omaha’s Series Two Records. Big Picture is singer-songwriter Mikael Salomonsson, currently based in Beijing. His self-titled debut came out last year and features guest appearances from Peter Gunnarsson (Suburban Kids With Biblical Names) and Lina Cullemark (Springfactory). If you like this track, the album is available from Chris at Series Two.

Probably a good thing, as the day of the DJ is long gone and I don’t really have the stomach to be a talk radio host. You see, after a week spent listening to Savage and Levin, I was all prepared to come out today guns a-blazing in my best impression of a talk jock. I was ready to spew vitriol and poorly researched opinions masked as fact. I was poised to skewer the American health care disaster, was itching to tear down the lies that have been spread surrounding tax rates in countries with socialized health care, was formulating a conceit about the mythical ‘Middle Class’ in America.

But then as I was walking to catch the bus this morning I asked myself “What’s the point?”

When I write political rants I basically only get myself upset. For the most part I’m preaching to the choir and if you disagree with me I’m not arrogant enough to believe that you’re going to change your mind. What’s the point? Post another picture of the boy and move on.

I mean, I know that I pay a lower tax rate in Australia (26% versus 28% plus) then I would (and did) in the US. It’s hard to gauge the quality of health care, but I know that the infant mortality rate is lower in Britain (4.8 per 1,000) and Australia (4.4) than it is in the US (6.3). I also know that life expectancy is higher in Britain (77.7) and Australia (79.8) than it is in the US (76.1). I know that, if you’re an American taxpayer, you’re getting screwed – that most of your taxes are going to pay for a ridiculously bloated and largely unnecessary military rather than the basic necessities for your survival. I know that I’ve gotten outstanding, compassionate medical care in all three countries. I know that the only difference is that in Australia and Britain I don’t pay for it and they make house calls.

I know all these things because I’ve experienced all three systems. I know what I prefer and I know that I wouldn’t even consider moving back to my homeland unless they sorted out the health care mess. I would much rather pay taxes that get reinvested in the health care system than pay insurance premiums that just line the pockets of insurance company executives. I can’t imagine going back to the States and relying on the fickle rules of some insurance company or my employment status for my son’s well being.

It’s not just health care – there’s education. In the Western European style social democracies, one of the responsibilities of the government is to offer affordable tertiary education to those who desire and have earned the opportunity. Therefore, university costs are heavily subsidized. In fact, a university education was free until very recently in the UK.The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in the last couple of decades in the U.S., pricing a lot of people out of the market and leaving the rest massively in debt after four years. I know from first-hand experience. It’s important to me that my kids have a shot at a university education, but another reason I would be reluctant to return to the States is that we should have started saving about five years ago in order to pay for it.

Let’s assume, as Dr. O’C prays, that Boy Z becomes a scholar. What would it cost to send him to the finest higher education institution in the three countries under discussion? We’ll focus on public institutions*, assume resident tuition and include all estimated living costs (food, housing, etc. all in U.S. dollars). To get a Bachelor’s degree from Oxford University would cost us about $45,000. The same degree from the Australian National University in Canberra would leave us about $41,000 poorer. But, if Boy Z decided to head to the Sodom of the Left Coast and got his degree from UC Berkeley, we’d be $114,000 in debt.  Even if he went to my alma mater, the finest university in the South – The University of Georgia, we’d still be down $68,000.

I’ve gone further with this than I intended – but with less ranting than originally planned at least. And this is where I ask again – what’s the point? If you’re reading this and aren’t living in Britain or Australia (or Canada or Sweden or France or Germany or Latvia or basically any other industrialized country) and you’re now convinced that a touch of socialism is a good thing, chances are you’re not packing your bags.

I guess the point is that the people who are telling you that socialized medicine doesn’t work are either liars or idiots. Or both. The people who are teabagging and telling you that higher taxes will break the back of the middle class are either dangerously deceitful or morons. The fact of the matter is that you, those of you who are residents of the US, are getting the shaft.

To be 100% honest, I really don’t think it’s going to change. This idea – that taxes and government are bad – is so ingrained in the American psyche that I don’t believe even the new administration with Democratic majorities in both houses is going to be able to sort it out. I did the same thing that a lot of you did – 52% in fact – voted for Obama and hoped that he would be able to change what is a broken system. I know it’s early, I know he has a year or so to take the big steps that need to be taken before the 2010 congressional races start up.

But listening to these guys on the Right and listening to the people that call in to their shows, I just don’t think it is going to happen.

Well, there’s some upbeat Friday reading for you, gentle readers. Y’all have a good weekend, you hear?

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* Just for kicks, I checked out Harvard – $208, 000.

The Killers’ “Hot Fuss” is a great record and is available from .

Image credits:

Maypole

Socialism cartoon

Socialism poster

My choice of funeral music: The Pogues‘ “Body of an American”. I’m going to ask you all to remember this in case Dr. O’C slips into dementia and forgets. And if any of you happen to be at my funeral and anyone tries to play James Blunt, please beat them senseless for me.

I came to love The Pogues a bit late. I had certainly heard some of their music along the way – “I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day” was on a mix CD with which I successfully wooed Dr. O’C – but I didn’t really come to love it until we moved to Britain. Dr. O’C and I were in a small pub in Oxford one night playing pool. I was scanning the jukebox and came across “Body of an American”. I don’t know if I had ever heard it before, but I heard it that night and I got it. It was early on in our time in Oxford and I was feeling displaced and a little bit homesick. Shane MacGowan’s raspy tale of the funeral of an Irish-American man’s last trip struck me to the quick that night and when I got home, I hit the iTunes store for all The Pogues I could find.

The B-side of “Body of an American” is the epic and dirge-like “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. Because I had enjoyed the A-side so much, I played the B. We nearly got kicked out of the pub as the bartender shouted “Bloody-fucking-hell! I get the “Body of an American” part, but did you have to play this shite?!” I guess we should have explained that Dr. O’C was Australian.

Since that immersion into the music of these Irish folk-punk troubadours, I’ve become a proper devotee of the music of MacGowan and Co. They came out of London in the late 1970’s, heavily influenced by The Ramones and The Clash. They put out three great records in the mid to late 80’s before MacGowan’s substance abuse started to tear the group apart. They’re still around and pop up for a reunion tour every now and again, but have never hit the creative peak that they were on in the 80’s. MacGowan himself is quite the character. If you want a cautionary tale about the perils of the rock and roll lifestyle, do a Google Image search. Never a handsome man, after thirty plus years of heavy drug and booze use, MacGowan is a walking anti-drug advertisement. It’s a shame, really, because the creative genius of the 80’s has been reduced to a parody of an Irish drunk in the 21st century.

But at their prime, The Pogues seamlessly recombined traditional Irish folk music with the nascent punk rock coming out of London and New York. You may not know it when you consider all the Pogues rip-off bands that followed – The Drop-Kick Murphys, Flogging Molly and the Real (?) McKenzies – but at the time this was a truly original musical style and a lot of people had trouble putting The Pogues in a musical box. What this means is that in their prime, The Pogues didn’t have a ton of commercial success. Most people, your underwhelming correspondent included, learned to love The Pogues after their time.

The thing that makes a band great for me is that they pop up frequently in the soundtrack of my life. And since my late discovery of The Pogues in 2004, they’ve featured more than nearly any other band. There’s “Fairytale of New York” to remind me that Christmas need not be about angels, mangers and Wal-Mart. The faintly ironic “Sunnyside of the Street” kept me sane through the gloomy British winters for a few years and “South Australia” was one of the tunes on repeat for the long trip Down Under. “Whiskey You’re The Devil” – well that’s a story for another day.

But it’s “Body of an American” that really makes The Pogues great for me.

This morning on the harbour
When I said goodbye to you
I remember how I swore
That I’d come back to you one day
And as the sunset came to meet
The evening on the hill
I told you I’d always love
I always did and I always will

Fare thee well gone away
There’s nothing left to say
‘cept to say adieu
To your eyes as blue
As the water in the bay
And to big Jim Dwyer
The man of wire
Who was often heard to say
I’m a free born man of the USA…

By no means is it a perfect song for me – I’m neither big nor blue-eyed, I have – in my time – had time for drink, and I certainly am not a fighter. But it’s that penultimate verse and the last few lines that get right to me and make this the song that I want played when I leave for my last trip.

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If you’re not already a fan, a good place to start with The Pogues is the 2001 greatest hits compilation “The Very Best of The Pogues”, which you can pick up at . There isn’t a bad track on the album.

Image credits:

The Pogues

Funeral March

But I’m pretty used to this kind of thing. As an American expatriate this is a common – and in this case, rather innocuous – type of exchange. My co-workers, colleagues, friends and random acquaintances often forget that I’m an American. I endeavor to be, with apologies to Graham Greene, a quiet American. Having made the decision to be a permanent expatriate – a migrant – I try hard to fit in to the culture that I’ve chosen. I don’t fit the caricature of the typical American that most of my colleagues have in their heads, so it’s easy for them to forget my citizenship and to express their true feelings about we Yanks in casual conversation.

A question I often get from my readers when describing these sometimes frustrating encounters is “Is that really what they think of us?” I always try to make people feel better. “No, only some of them. It’s not really that bad”, I soothe. The grim reality is that, in general, people in the countries which I have visited or lived  do not like Americans. There are exceptions – the occasional Americanophile, the folks that have lived in the States or met a number of American expats – but most of the rest of the Western world have quite strong feelings of antipathy toward us. The exchange I described at the beginning of this post is a mild one. The worst are when I’m faced with a strong-willed local and asked to justify American culture – one that I’m not really that happy with myself – or lectured at length about the wrongs perpetrated on the world by the U.S.A.

This is based in large part on our nation’s behavior in the last eight years. George Bush’s sledgehammer-as-diplomacy has alienated many of our allies. But it runs deeper than that. If you read the comments on my last post, a lot of non-Americans recoil at the spread of American culture and consumerism. This new brand of commercial imperialism has been more pervasive than Bush’s military incursions in the Middle East. The rest of the world is angry that there are probably only two or three countries in the world that lack a McDonalds, the fact that American chain stores have moved into Europe and Australia – cutting down local businesses in their wake. People in Perth, Manchester and Galway are disgusted that most of their television and movies now come with an American accent. Folks in Aberdeen and Adelaide are angry that American-style privitization of public services has gotten them more expensive and lower quality services.

Unfortunately it’s not just our political and economic policies. If you asked someone on the streets of York, Darwin or Christchurch what they thought of when they thought of an average American they would use words like fat, obnoxious, close-minded, high-maintenance, and – above all – ignorant. If you asked that same person how many Americans they knew, how many were in their close social circle, they would likely say zero to two. So where does this impression come from? TV, movies and tourists.

You see, we are doing ourselves a disservice. By exporting our crap television and our increasingly derivative movies, we are presenting an image of ourselves to the rest of the world that does not reflect reality. The bilge that we’re spewing into the world – and not just the environmental toxins – are a source of a lot of resentment from the rest of the world. Are Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears typical Americans? What about Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Keith Olbermann and Ann Coulter? What about George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin? Are any of these people like you or me? The tourist thing is a tricky one. I find a lot of my fellow Americans annoying when I run across them as tourists. There seems to be something in our psyche (the British are guilty of this as well) that demands that when visiting a foreign country it be as similar to our home as possible. What this means is that we get the reputation, fairly in my experience, of being loud, intractable, demanding and

But enough self-loathing. Here’s the thing, the thing that you (if you’re an American reading this blog) and I already know – we’re getting a bad rap. There are Americans that fit the stereotype – absolutely. I’ve met them. I’ve seen them in the Wal-Mart, yelling across the shop at their kids, waddling through the aisles filled with giant bags of potato chips in “No Spin Zone” or “These Colors Don’t Run” t-shirts, clinging desperately to their jiggling mounds of fat. You see them on the news – the media loves the extremes – you see them parodied in films and on the TV. But stereotypes are a dangerous thing. For example, if you based your opinion of Australians on what you’ve seen on films and TV you may think that Steve Irwin or Mick Dundee or The Sheepherders were typical Aussie blokes. Based on TV and movies, the streets of London would be populated with Mr. Beans, Edwinas and Pattys and Simon Cowells.

And this is what I find frustrating about living abroad – stereotypes. I’ve got as good a sense of humor as anyone, and if I’m talking to someone who has spent time in the States or has American friends, then I’m happy to play around with the stereotypes and throw them right back in their face. We used to have a great time in my lab in Oxford teasing each other about cultural stereotypes. With people from seven or eight different countries (depending on whether you consider Scotland a country) there was ample material to work with. But, when confronted with people that have never set foot in the United States, have never spent time with Americans yet have firm ideas about what we are like and who we are – that’s not in good fun. That is dealing with ignorance and ignorance is something for which I have very little tolerance, regardless of citizenship. I had a friend in Oxford who used to say that when you found something that you didn’t like in another person – “if you spot it, you got it”. In other words, we dislike in others what we dislike in ourselves. I think that this applies to this whole national psyche debate. Australians are getting fatter – blame the Americans pushing McDonalds down their throats. Brits are getting irrevocably into debt – blame the loose American-style credit regulations.

There is an old cliché about familiarity breeding contempt.  I think the converse is true here. Dr. O’C said it well in her comment on the last post – her experience in America gave her greater respect for Americans. My experience in Britain gave me greater respect for the wealth and depth of British culture. Meeting, working with and making friends with normal people from different countries has helped me transcend my personal stereotypes and prejudices about those nationalities. The only way to get past a stereotype or a prejudiced opinion is to get to know the people about whom you’ve formed a false opinion. That being the case, I’m like a frickin’ cultural ambassador for the U.S.A. – traveling the world showing just how mild-mannered, thoughtful, intelligent and modest Americans really are. I think that the State Department should consider giving me a stipend for spreading the truth about Americans – that we’re not all that different than anyone else – no better and certainly no worse.

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Image credits:

Typical American

Typical Aussie

Typical Brit

Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” is available from .