2 Texans Down Under

“Politicians are incentivised to … ”

A man being interviewed on ABC AM radio this morning spoke a sentence that began with those words.  I didn’t hear the rest of what he said because I was distracted by the sound of the new crack forming in the façade of civilization.

I don’t even know how to spell that word, with an “s” or a “z,” and I hope to never see it in print.  (Okay, after this.)  “Politicians have incentives to…” is a readily-available phrase and it’s shorter.  Why use such an awkward construction, putting a noun to work as an adverb?

To obsfuscate.  I think that’s the only logical explanation and I use that fancy word in both it’s primary dictionary meanings, “to obscure or confuse” and “to stupefy, bewilder.”

When you have a weak argument, use words people are not used to hearing, words people may not know but suspect they should.  And don’t define them.  Some of us will be stupefied and offended, but perhaps others will think, “Wow, this guy must be really smart.”

Maybe “obfuscate” should become more common in the vocabularies of us all.  Maybe it could remind us to be more alert to attempts to deliberately obscure and confuse.  Maybe we all need to become obfuscation detectors.

Of course, obfuscation doesn’t always require concocted terms or big words.

Soon after we arrived here in Australia in 2005, I began to notice public persuaders using, over and over, “at the end of the day.” I thought it was an Aussie usage, but I’ve since learned that the term is rampant in the United States, too, and that at least one poll shows it to be most people’s least favorite cliché.

It’s hard to imagine, but now it seems to me that a new phrase is being used even more often, here and probably back home, too.  It’s “get this right.”  Every public figure interviewed by the media is now devoted wholeheartedly to Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe “Sicko” is not a great name for an important and serious movie that all Americans should watch.  If I’d been judging by the name alone, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance.

Lots of people, of course, will know that it was made by Michael Moore and that it’s an expose of the medical care system in the United States, so by the time they’re in a video rental place, they’ll have decided, on grounds other than name appeal, whether they want to see it.

I wish everyone in America would watch it between now and the next time they get a chance to cast an election ballot.  Perhaps you should know that this wish comes from a person who, as a senior in high school, wrote a prize-winning essay opposing “socialized medicine.”  The statewide contest that gave me a cash award for second place was sponsored by the American Medical Association.  (Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned …)

Having now experienced health systems here in Australia and in the US, I have been positively impressed with the care I’ve received in both places.  I am alive and healthy today because of excellent doctors, technicians, and equipment provided to me a few years ago in Oklahoma and Texas.

I was, fortunately, well insured. Having insurance makes all the difference in the US.  A brother of mine had a heart attack a couple of months ago and had a pacemaker installed.  He’s fine, now.  If he had not been insured, he told me, “We simply couldn’t have afforded a pacemaker.”

As Moore’s movie points out, America is alone among developed countries in letting insurance issues and companies determine life and death health decisions for its citizens. I thought I already knew how dire the medical situation in my home country is (50 million without coverage, etc.), but “Sicko” showed me that things are even worse than I thought.

A few days after my partner and I watched Moore’s documentary, I stumbled onto an intense discussion between Australians about the American health care system and I found it fascinating to read the views of people who grew up with universal health care but, as expatriates, don’t have it now.

Their sometimes-heated discussion took place in a Yahoo group called Ozinamerica.  Over a period of days and after several thousand words, these articulate Aussies produced general agreement on at least a couple of points.

GENERAL AGREEMENT 1 – Insurance in the United States is expensive, but Read the rest of this entry »

A step-down transformer. That’s what I should have called the metal box I had in my carry-on luggage when we flew from DFW to Los Angeles and then to Brisbane three years ago.  Not knowing the term “step-down,” when I wrote about it, however, just plain “transformer” is what I called that 16-pound pain in the bag.

You need one of those (maybe a modern one that weighs only a pound or two) if you want to run most US appliances from Australian electrical current, I said in an issue of my email newsletter, OzAnswers.

Boy, I thought I was smart.  I’d bought my bargain transformer on eBay, lugged it here, and used it for my electric toothbrush and our bread-making machine.  Now I had heaps of useful, experience based information to share with folks thinking of moving down under.

And then I got an email from a reader named Nicky (not her real name; she has given me permission to quote what she wrote me but she prefers to be anonymous).

Nicky, with typical Aussie tact, began with praise for my newsletter and my take on Australian life, and then she gently suggested that my “instalment on electrical appliances lacked an important angle to the question of bringing equipment from one country to use in another.”

That angle, as some others of you probably knew but I didn’t until Nicky told me, has to do with “line frequency (aka Hertz) differences.”  Then she wrote five highly informative paragraphs that should be read with care by anyone moving from the US to Australia, or, I suppose, the other way.  Here they are, with numbers to remind you that these are Nicky’s five well-informed paragraphs, not mine:

1. Step-down transformers only convert voltage.  However, you still have to worry about the hertz differences.  US a/c power runs on 60hz and Australian power runs on 50hz.  This means that some appliances will not work correctly even with a step-down transformer.  For example, many clock radios use line frequency as calibration.  Running them on a different line frequency than they’re made for Read the rest of this entry »

Canada or Australia? If you were going to immigrate to one, which would be the best choice?

A blogger friend of mine recently decided to ask the universe for advice on this question. She did so by posting a long list of the pros and cons of both countries as she perceives them to be from her vantage point, a small English village.

At this time a little over three years ago, my partner and I were living in the United States and we had our own long list of questions about Australia. We’d traveled in Canada, but like Cath Lawson (http://cathlawson.com), neither of us had been down under. The few notions we had of what it would be like to live here were vague and not always accurate.

Now – after three years and lots of experiences on this island continent that looks so small on maps but is roughly the size of the continental United States — I found Cath’s Aussie pro-and-con list intriguing.

Some of the responses to Cath’s blog on this topic were insightful, I thought, and experienced based, especially those from a guy named Nick who has evidently lived in England and now lives where we do, in Brisbane.

Cath began her “pros” list with geography, noting Australia’s abundance of open spaces but said Read the rest of this entry »

Wonder what it costs to wander around in the “red center” of Australia these days?  Since we did that recently, I can give you a bit of information.

There are ways to do our trip for less than we spent, probably, especially if you’re a young backpacker travelling with friends.  And there are lots of ways to spend much more than we did if you choose the luxurious digs that claim to be five-star rated and if you accept their offers of $49 per person buffets and $30 breakfasts.

Packaged tours, which put you on a bus with others and with a guide, can cost plenty.  One three-day tour of Uluru (Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), and King’s Canyon was advertised for $540 per adult.  The two of us spend four nights in those places for less than half that.

Plus travel, of course.

We wanted to hike when and where we chose, so we rented (or in Aussie terms, “hired”) a car so we could be independent.  We made our arrangements by using the Internet and a fine travel agent here, Kim at Fairfield Travel.

Here are our travel costs for a full week:

Rental car — Hertz rented us a mid-size Toyota (a no-charge upgrade from the cheapest car on offer, which we’d reserved) with unlimited mileage at Ayers Rock Airport.  We drove it about a thousand kilometres or 600 miles and returned it seven days later to the Alice Springs Airport.  Cost: $630.

Fuel – Driving from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs via Kings Canyon and making side trips west of and east of Alice Springs to see the McDonnell Mountains, with the cost approaching AU$2 per liter or nearly US$7 per gallon, we spent $200 on petrol or gasoline.

Fees — The only park entry fee we encountered on this trip was for Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park: $25 per person, good for three days.  Our visit to the Alice Springs Telegraph Station museum cost us $7.50 each.

Certainly vacations such as this are a luxury, not something everyone can afford to take even if they live relatively close by, only half a continent away, as we now do.  We were worried about the news of Qantas flight cut-backs, but our plans held up.  This time.  Who knows how long such trips will be feasible for us or for anyone?

As is the case in the United States, where members of our families are spending more than $100 to fill their gas tanks sometimes with fuel costing US$4 per gallon, people here are worried about not only the cost of fuel, but also about Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine that you’ve been transported a century or more back in time and that you are riding a horse or walking or you’re leading a camel across rocky and arid plains in the Australian outback.

Summer or winter, you’d probably be thirsty or at least worried about how to replenish your water supplies in time to save your own life and that of your horse or camel.

Now imagine that you peer over the edge of a wide crack in the red ground and look down onto the tops of healthy trees growing alongside a small stream that ends in a pool of clear fresh water.

As you celebrated, you might well think you’d stumbled upon a Garden of Eden, and that is the name modern-day folks have given to a small, lush canyon which is part of the Watarrka National Park or Kings Canyon between Uluru and Alice Springs in the Northern Territories.

Even for day hikers like me and Kristi, with plenty of water and a Toyota waiting for us in the car park, the Garden of Eden was Read the rest of this entry »