2 Texans Down Under

I’d call it déjà vu shock except that the stimulus has never before been quite like this.

I’m talking about the sheer size of some things I’m seeing here in Texas as we near the end of our holiday return “home.”

It hit me yesterday afternoon in a big-box store in a new shopping center development off Interstate 20 west of Fort Worth. I’d got off the highway and gone first to a home improvement store (Lowes, huge) and then to an adjacent Target store in search of a simple item I’ve been unable to find in Brisbane, Houston, or here in North Texas, Read the rest of this entry »

Ambivalence seems to characterize the discussion of immigration in both the US and Australia. A more cynical view would replace “ambivalence” with “hypocrisy.”

In our adopted country, where a “whites only” attitude prevailed for a long time, business and industry leaders are now clamoring for changes in laws to allow more non-Australians in to fill jobs, skilled and not-so skilled. That was true while former Prime Minister John Howard was arranging to keep political refugees away from Aussie shores and subtly injecting race issues into his attempts to get re-elected.

Here in the country of our birth, where Kristi and I are now visiting, legal and illegal immigrants are sometimes used as scapegoats for various problems, and candidates for President, Republican especially, seem to be vying with each other to see who can appear toughest (or meanest) on immigration issues.

Sending illegal immigrants home en masse tomorrow, though, might crash the US economy by New Years.

Eating places employ the largest number of immigrants, according to the National Restaurant Association, about 1.4 million of them, 70 per cent of whom are in the lowest-paying jobs: cleaning, dishwashing, and doing prep work.

Although I held a couple of dishwashing and bus-boy jobs before I started college, few chefs currently working have ever known of an American-born citizen Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this I am a passenger in a rented hybrid car passing through a forest of huge windmills generating electricity southwest of Sweetwater in West Texas. The three-bladed white giants are arranged in rows that stretch to the horizon on both sides of Highway 70. I’m told they are more than 20 stories tall.

This small area west of Abilene produces vast amounts of electricity in one of the cleanest possible ways, by harvesting it from wind.

The Hertz car rental agency near Love Field in Dallas let us have this Prius for $5 a day extra and it is getting between 45 and 50 miles per gallon of gasoline (or as our Aussie friends would say, petrol), saving us money when we stop to buy fuel that costs nearly $3 a gallon.

These rolling hills near Sweetwater have always been beautiful to my eyes, but now they seem useful as well. It is thrilling to see evidence of humankind’s attempts to adapt to the realities of economic and climatic change.

Kristi and I are encouraged by changes in our home state such as these windmills and the availability of relatively energy efficient cars, Read the rest of this entry »

The delay of a Qantas flight from Sydney to San Francisco on a Saturday recently caused me and my wife to miss a connecting flight and spend an extra eleven hours in traveling the 8,000 and some miles from Brisbane to the Dallas Fort Worth airport (DFW).

Instead of enjoying an evening with my daughter and her family in Texas, Kristi and I wandered around the Sydney airport’s international terminal for about eight hours, we flew for about 13 more across the Pacific Ocean, and then, for several additional hours, we walked the chilly, nighttime streets of San Francisco.

Because we had bags checked onto our delayed Qantas flight, we were told at the Sydney airport, we could not leave the secured area, so our thoughts of seeing Sydney’s sights on a pleasant summer afternoon were foiled.

Surprisingly, since airport security measures usually seem stricter in the US than in Australia, having our bags checked in for an American Airlines “red eye” flight to DFW did not require us to stay in the terminal, so we caught a train down to San Francisco’s harbor area.

Being tired and more than a little addled, though, we didn’t think of taking out winter jackets before we let our bags disappear on American Airlines conveyor belts. So, dressed for Aussie summer, we couldn’t really enjoy a brisk and windy December evening near Fisherman’s Wharf. Soon we returned reluctantly to the warmth of an airport lounge.

Does it sounds like I’m complaining? I have been doing some of that.

But I realize at the same time how trivial our delays were in the context of our getting to travel from one hemisphere to another to see friends and family. Such travel is a modern-day miracle even in difficult circumstances, one available only to the fortunate few, crowded though the airports seemed as we paced around in two of them.

Now, having seen news reports of a massive ice storm that struck Oklahoma, Kansas, and elsewhere a few hours after we arrived just to its south, I am grateful to be here at all. Airports in Oklahoma City and Tulsa were shut down completely for a time and perhaps a million  people — 600,000 in Oklahoma — are without power still, in freezing weather.

Twenty four deaths due to from the cold, the glaze, and thousands of falling trees have been reported. The misery of people without heat or hot food or lights is painful to contemplate, especially since some of these folks are people we know.

We humans make plans. Sometimes events, natural or otherwise, cancel those plans for us and leave us out in the cold, literally. Suddenly, 11 extra hours of travel time going from home in Australia to home in the US seem… well, that seems not so bad. Not so bad at all.

– Bob

Australia has a lottery called the Saturday Gold Lotto game and on television you can watch, if you wish, randomly selected ping pong balls with numbers on them jump around and then settle, one by one, into a chute. Many hundreds of people, I presume, are waiting each time to see if destiny is finally about to give them the wealth they have for so long so richly deserved.

I bought a lottery ticket once, back in Texas. It was one of those multi-million-jackpot nights when long lines of people were in front of every convenience store cash register, waiting to buy the fateful stubs by the handful. I succumbed. I bought one.

But then I got sleepy before the balls began to bounce on television, so I gave my ticket (100 per cent, no strings attached) to my son-in-law, Scott, and went off to bed. My generosity, after all, knows no bounds. At breakfast the next morning, the first thing Scott said to me was, “You didn’t have a single number right.”

Well, now, what are the odds of that?

Tuesday’s Brisbane “Courier Mail” newspaper ran a story on lottery statistics headlined, appropriately I thought, “Sorry, wrong number.” By Graham Readfearn and quoting frequently from Professor Rodney Wolff of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the story says the chances of a single ticket winning an Australian Saturday Gold Lotto jackpot are one in 14 million.

Okay, not quite that high. Wolff says the odds are actually Read the rest of this entry »

An English-speaking American living in English-speaking Australia gets the chance to learn a lot of new words. Today I learned “pashing.” I encountered it for the first time ever in the book review section of the most recent “The Weekend Australian.”

A literary critic named Stella Clark began her review of two novels by saying, “Spontaneous sex-change may be less alarming today than a man pashing his mother but many of us would, presumably, have trouble empathising with either sensation.”

Word usage here, for the non-native, requires some caution.

Despite the fact that there is a street not far from where we live called “Fanny Street” (and no others in all of Greater Brisbane), I have learned since moving here that one should not say, in polite company, f—y because f—y is a slang term for a very private part of human bodies that are female.

In addition, I have learned that “root” is, according to my Australian dictionary, a “course colloquialism” for an act of sexual intercourse. Not surprising, perhaps, but new to my ears, just as “pashing his mother” was new to my eyes when I read it this morning.

I suspected the worst, of course, even before I read further and saw Stella Clark’s reference to Sigmund Freud’s belief that beneath the surface Read the rest of this entry »