2 Texans Down Under

Yesterday, I talked about three important considerations for predicting compatibility in relationships — sex, money, and degree of neatness — and speculated that these concerns could be important to the question of how compatible Australia and you might be. Could you move here and sustain a relationship with this continent?

I dealt with degrees of neatness first. Now you might want to be sure no one’s looking over your shoulder because I want us to consider s-e-x in the US and in AU.

SEX — I have no idea what single life here is like. (How embarrassing, to have to begin with a confession of ignorance, but then, knowledge isn’t a requirement of blogging, is it?)

I get the impression, though, that sexual mores are pretty relaxed here. Live together for a while and you’ll be seen, legally, as being in a “de facto relationship.” You may even be identified, a bit inelegantly, as “a de facto.”

On the positive side, some states allow same-sex and opposite-sex de facto couples to register with the state in order to get a certificate as verification of their commitment to each other.

More than US women, Australian women seem to have an easy-going attitude about the exposure of skin.

My wife has noticed, for example, that cleavage is much more common here Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

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 »

“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 »

Pardon me, please, while I name-drop a bit. I’ve met few famous people and one of them just died.

The other one was Lyndon Johnson and I made him angry once after a presidential press conference.

I was working part-time for Long News Service in Austin and I suppose its owner, Stuart Long, had something better to do that Saturday morning in 1964 or 1965 when he put me on a press bus and sent me to find out what LBJ was going to do with a retired fire truck donated to the Johnson Ranch by a nearby Texas town, Brady.

The nationally-televised event was held on the lawn in front of the ranch house and dealt with issues of somewhat greater substance. Afterward, I waited and watched as Johnson walked around shaking hands with every potential voter there. When he got to me I screwed up my courage and asked him two questions about the old red fire truck.

With my right hand in a firm grip, he smiled down at me during the entire minute or so of our conversation, but he told me Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine called my attention yesterday to the incredible story of Comcast and “the hammer lady,” Mona Shaw, 75, folk hero.

I won’t repeat the story of how she and her husband were misused by this huge corporation, or how she took matters into her own hands by smashing some Comcast equipment at their Manassas, Virginia, office. You probably know it already and if you don’t, you can type her name into a search engine and get, as I did, a page full of reports mostly about her action plus 350,000 other sites to check.

A highly successful consultant to business leaders, my friend Kathy wrote, “As someone who is a creator of ‘Marketing Messages’…. it is my worst nightmare that customers would begin to utter a catch phrase I’ve developed for a client as a profanity.”

But now something like that is happening. Just as “going postal” was born and then added to our language, the term “being comcastic” has been coined and launched. One day soon, dictionaries may list this entry: Comcastic – “adj., behaving with insensitivity to and disregard for the interests of customers.”

Mona Shaw, as my friend Joe in Houston tells me, is much revered by several members of his Unitarian Universalist Church who have had unfortunate dealings Read the rest of this entry »