2 Texans Down Under

Maybe there should be an organization for people like me, people addicted to the famous short story published in 1901 by the writer some have called “the Mark Twain of Australia,” Henry Lawson.

I could go to meetings of others with my problem, stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m addicted to ‘The Loaded Dog.’” The group’s initials would be LDAA, for Loaded Dog Anonymous Association.

We could help each other control our impulses to memorize and recite key lines from the story of a friendly dog with a bomb in his mouth. We could petition governments to declare Mark Twain “the Henry Lawson of America.” We could be, well, not alone.

Sure, I could, maybe, just go cold turkey on the dog tale, but I began to doubt my inner strength this morning when I got an email from my friend, Glenn Turner, and followed up on what he told me: anyone can read this hilarious bit of writing at a web site he’s found.

Trouble is, he gave me the URL, and I clicked on it. I had a lot to get done this morning. I had a to-do list. But there they were, on my screen, the opening lines Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll be darn. I’ve been tagged. On line, I’ve been tagged.

The tagger is a good friend of mine who writes as “Granny,” thereby reminding us all that many young and vibrant people, these days, have grandchildren.

The “tag” she gave me is called the “Nearest Book Meme,” and there’s a drill that goes with it. Please read these instructions in case you’re one of the five I chose at the end. And, even if you’re not, feel free to consider yourself tagged by me, anyway, and proceed. (Sorry, Granny, if this violates any rules.)

Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book that is at least 123 pages long.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the 3 sentences immediately after that 5th sentence.
5. Tag five people by sending them the three sentences and these instructions.

I took “nearest” to mean “the one I’m currently reading” since, technically, the nearest is my “Oxford Pocket Australian Dictionary,” a useful book indeed, but one that’s a little short on plot.

What I’m reading is a thin volume from the Australian Literary Heritage Series entitled Humorous Stories of Henry Lawson. Born in 1867, Lawson wrote about the outback and “bush people” in ways that can, today, jar those of us who prefer to avoid stereotyping others.

Nevertheless, this collection contains the funniest short story I have ever read, “The Loaded Dog,” and it makes me laugh every time I read it.

Somewhat less funny are the three sentences following the fifth one on page 123, but, appropriately enough, the story in which those sentences appear is about an American, “a cute Yankee.”

I’m sure Lawson didn’t mean “cute” in any positive sense, or, Read the rest of this entry »

Western Australia may be the world hot-spot this week for discussion of the health and viability of democracy in the United States.

Two guests of the Perth Writer’s Festival who present disturbing but dissimilar views of America in an election year have been prominently featured in the media across this nation.

One is Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America and other best-selling books, and the other is Cullen Murphy, author of The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America.

Wolf has outlined ten steps that have characterized fascist dictatorships in the past and says Bush, Chaney, and crew have led the country a long way down those steps and away from democracy.

Murphy, editor-at-large of “Vanity Fair” and former managing editor of “The Atlantic Monthly,” sees much to worry about in the country today: paranoia about immigration, excessive privatization of services traditionally provided by governments, arrogant foreign policy, an over-stretched military, and other facets of Rome before its fall.

He is, however, more optimistic than Wolf about America’s future, and it appears that most Australians are, too.

Any review of legal changes during the current administration offers Read the rest of this entry »

Life is full of big decisions. Who should be the President of the United States? That’s one.

Life is also full of little decisions and we just made one of those. We cut loose from cable TV.

World changing? No, but we’ve improved our personal lives greatly by dumping Foxtel cable’s most basic plan that was costing us more than $55 a month and signing up for a steady supply of movies and American TV show reruns at a cost of only $20 a month.

Foxtel was frustrating in the extreme. Nearly every time we chose something from the schedule of programs in the Foxtel menu, we got a message saying, in effect, “Sorry, cheapskate. You have to pay more for this or be content with watching a re-run of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ for the third time.”

Quickflix is, as Aussies say, brilliant.

That means very, very good, which fits our experience of this company so far. I have no financial interest in Quickflix; I just like to give praise where praise is due.

We chose and ranked in order of preference 20 movies or TV show collections we’d like to see. Quickflix folk mailed us DVDs of our top two choices with Read the rest of this entry »

Australia’s top leaders officially said “sorry” today to the “stolen generation” and their families. All over the continent Indigenous people and the non-Indigenous gathered in crowds to listen, applaud, and shed tears of both happiness and sorrow.

For outsiders living here, it was like being present for a family event almost too personal for the eyes and ears of guests. One felt honoured to be able to listen and watch.

Kevin Rudd, elected Prime Minister in part because he promised to say the word his campaign opponent, John Howard, refused to say, “sorry,” spoke solemnly and without great flourish, but his message was powerful.

It is time, he said, to “deal with this unfinished business of the nation,” to “remove a great stain from the nation’s soul and in the true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land Australia.”

He said: People of European descent took Aboriginal and Torres Strait children forcibly from their parents and put them into institutions or foster homes and they did so for much of a century, finally ending the practice only in the 1970s. (Yes, the nineteen seventies.)

He said: Laws passed by previous Parliaments permitted this to happen and we, the Parliament of today, must say we are sorry. The resolution he offered used that word three times.

With 100 invited Indigenous leaders present and all major Read the rest of this entry »

Cities should be a habitats for people, first and foremost, Enrique Penalosa believes. Not for animals. Not for cars. For people.

And this former mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, would create his ideal city for people with the following beliefs in mind, each of which I have taken from my notes on his remarks at Griffith University last Thursday night.

1. People want to be with people. When parks are constructed with benches facing lakes or rivers or other scenes of natural beauty and with benches facing places where people walk or congregate, it is the people-oriented benches that get the most use.

2. People need to walk as surely as birds need to fly. And riding a bike, Penalosa said, “is just a more efficient means of walking.”

3. People want to be outside. If a neighbourhood is dangerous or uninviting, people huddle around their television sets indoors, but that does not make them healthy or happy. They want to be outside, and walking around in a mall is not being outside. “A shopping mall,” he said, Read the rest of this entry »

Enrique Penalosa spoke here in Brisbane last week and opened my eyes to new ways of seeing cities.

Mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, for three years until 2001, Penalosa made major improvements in the city’s transportation system, put in 300 kilometres (more than 180 miles) of bicycle and walking trails, and left behind a network of 1,200 parks and public spaces.

What are cities for, he asked a packed auditorium at Griffith University, cars or children?

A highway through a city is like a fence in a pasture, he said, separating people from each other. Highways also give special privileges to some people (car owners) and not others.

And, “A city is a collective work of art.”

His fundamental beliefs include at least these two: human beings should come first (“humans are sacred”) and democracy depends on providing both equality before the law and the chance for the poor to move as freely outdoors as the wealthy usually can.

Sidewalks, bike paths, parks, other open public spaces, and mass transportation can further democracy and make cities great. When precedence is given to cars and highways, democracy suffers and cities fall short of their potential.

“Every great city has at least one great public space where even rich people Read the rest of this entry »

“Parking is not a constitutional right,” the mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, told car-owning citizens of his third-world city a few years ago as he made them stop blocking sidewalks built for pedestrians.

That may be one reason Enrique Penalosa was a one-term mayor (1998-2001), but he did wonders for Bogotá and, last night in a fully-packed auditorium at Griffith University, I got to hear him talk about cars, parking, and what makes cities great.

His words, delivered with energy and passion, had particular force for me because I had just been reading squeals of protests about a sharp increase in fees for parking cars in our CBD (central business district).

“Brisbane parking prices are out of this world” according to a headline in the 7 February “City News,” the cover of which shows a concerned young woman holding car keys and pondering “why it costs you more to park in Brisbane than in New York.”

Inside, a story by Brooke Falvey says monthly parking fees have jumped 66 per cent and a reserved parking space in the CBD can cost “as much as $750 a month” while “long-term parking bays in downtown Manhattan” lease for $276 (US$250).

Falvey says the NY City Department of Transport provided that information and it appears that some parking lots in America’s largest city do have rates in that neighborhood, although most cost more.

By going to an Internet site that lists the prices and contact information for more than 700 commercial Manhattan purveyors of parking, www.bestparking.com, I found two parking lots offering rates lower than what a single line in the “City News” story lists as the lowest monthly rate in Brisbane, $180, or US$161.

One low-cost NY lot was at 10th Avenue and Harlem River Drive and the other was on 155th Street. Neither address means much to me, but, according to bestparking.com, Read the rest of this entry »

Having two homes — Australia and the United States of America — is wonderful for us, but it creates a problem for someone else, the person who receives and sorts our mail at our US address. Perhaps some of you can relate.

In our case it is Kristi’s patient mother who receives mail addressed to us in Houston and sorts through it to see what envelopes, flyers, magazines, and catalogues we need to see and what pieces of mail we’ll be happy to have her discard.

The third possibility is “maybe they want to see this, maybe not.” Mail with that designation goes into a pile we sort through when we next show up to visit. It can be a substantial pile.

We’ve sent lots of change-of-address and stop-and-desist cards and letters to companies, without much effect. We’ve always wanted a way to shut off the flow of fat, glossy catalogues we got, especially in the months before Christmas.

Today, thanks to the folks at Tidbits, producer of an email newsletter I read to stay current with Mac computer issues, I’ve found a solution, or at least something that may help.

It’s an organization called “Catalogue Choice,” and it provides an easy way Read the rest of this entry »

As I said yesterday, Aussies are paying close attention to Presidential election primaries and to fluctuations in the US economy.

The sharp drop in the share market that began here last month is attributed to fears of a recession growing out of policies shaped in Washington, D.C. The great majority of the well-informed here can hardly wait for a “regime change” in America and they expect the US to be on a saner course by this time next year.

But for hope of safety in rough economic seas, folks here are looking elsewhere, toward China.The supply of iron, alumina, coal, and other raw materials to China as its vast population moves up from poverty is buoying Australian prosperity now and is counted on to continue to do so.

The old economic health analogy, therefore, is applied to that country, not the US. An article in “The Australian” newspaper this week, headlined “China’s bubble quivers,” said, “If China catches a winter cold, Australia sneezes.”

Trade between these two countries topped $50 billion in the last financial year, the article by China correspondent Rowan Callick said, and nearly half of that amount came from the sale of resources from Australian mines.

“This dictates,” Callick wrote, the need to pay as much attention “to pronouncements from Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leaders’ citadel next to the Forbidden City, as from the Federal Reserve in Washington.”The importance of these pronouncements is heightened by the fact that Read the rest of this entry »