Popo de Elefante

At the end of October we invited a few friends around for a light spot of Halloween cheer.  We even had a theme - worst nightmares in food and dress.
            Unfortunately for us, my "agoraphobia" costume suffered a fatal structural failure half an hour before the party started (the damned pigeon fell off my head), and on a warm October night, Mr "Arachnophobia" Tabubil flatly refused to wear 6 inches of fiberfill around his chest. To show willing, he hot glued a few wads of stuffing and a couple of spiders to and old t-shirt.  He looked a nightmare all right - a nightmare of last-minute design, and he lost his temper along with his stuffing.
            That's sort of how the evening went. Our friend Sal - rather a man's man - had found the food something of a stretch.  He's not a natural cook, so I set him a simple quiche - eggs, cheese and icky food coloring in a pre-made bought pastry shell.  Half an hour before the party (right when I was wrestling pigeons) he  called from the supermarket in a panic - the recipe had been in imperial measurements and he'd converted everything to grams to eight decimal places, but he was having trouble figuring out what sort of eggs he should buy - vitamin fortified?  Omega 3?  Grade AA?  Grade A?  Did he need to buy a baking dish?
            He arrived at the party 45 minutes late, looking cross and flustered.  He handed me a bag of chips and a jar of salsa.
            "The whole afternoon's been a horror show." He said sourly.  "I hate supermarkets. Why didn't you tell me that a quiche has too cook for an hour? Believe me, the chips count."*

*Speaking of horror shows, you wouldn't believe what a little pulverized walnut does to the look of  guacamole.  It's unspeakable.  Five stars and two hearty thumbs up. I recommend it for all your holiday parties.

And then there was the dessert.  Mr Tabubil and I own a recipe for chocolate mousse.  I may have mentioned it once or twice before, in passing. To do it right, you soak raisins in rum for an entire week beforehand and you use rather a lot of heavy cream  - 
           A triple batch of it makes a rather nice bowl of popo de elephante (elephant poop.): a voluptuous tureen of turds, studded with oozing alcoholic raisins, the heavy smell of rum rising up like drunken heat in summer* from the swirl of well-set soup -

*I might have used two full cups of rum in the raisins, and I might have tipped what was left in the bottle into the bowl as I stirred. Waste is a terrible thing.

After a couple of hours staring at the guacamole, our guests ate lots of it. With a pleasantly buzzy fruit drink on the side.  The blood-red ice hand floating in the punch bowl was a nifty touch. They giggled. And drank some more.  And ate a second helpings of the mousse  -
            Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of our guests got pished.
            One young lady had three glasses before we caught her.  She giggled, climbed carefully onto the sofa and closed her eyes -  right next to Sal - who is Bermudan and treats his relationship with rum like a religion, but who was lying with his head on the back of his chair and his feet up on hers, sort of snoring, and cradling his third bowl of elephant poop.

Post-script:
We really had radically overestimated how much mousse we'd need for a party of 12, and the next morning we still had a couple of liters of the stuff.  
            We gave it to our neighbors. They brought the bowl back the very next day - licked clean.
            Looking at us sort of anxiously, "That was the best dessert" they said "that we have ever had in our lives - would you like a plant?" 
            And they thrust a potted fern at our chests.

It must have been some seriously good mousse.

Six Shots, Three months, Sleep.

All of them, backdated to yesterday. Or there will be repercussions. Morning breath - lots of it. All the time.

via. catmoji

Second-rate Holly Jollies.

I am trapped in customer service telephone hell.
            I wouldn't mind so much if the infinite roll of Christmas carols they're playing at me weren't buried in so much static.  Or if they chose versions that weren't maudlin and lugubrious.  
            Stop singing about holly jolly holidays with a catch in your throat.  And if you're going to hang a star upon the highest bough, remember that only Judy ever got away with quavering like that. Your quivers, semi-quivers, demi-quivers and little achey-breachy wibble-wobble-whoopses will not be supplanting Judy as doleful holiday queen anytime soon, alright? Go try a jolly little jingle bells.  Go ahead, try it. Throw in that perky decant about snowflakes if you want, but above all, sing it cheery!  
            I've got a long wait and an epic argument ahead of me and i want to be in a fighting spirit. Not curled up sobbing underneath my Christmas tree while a second-rate celebrity sings a mournful dirge about snowmen.
            Please.  Thank you.  Please.

A Singing Taxi Driver

My morning started very badly.  
            You all know the sort of day - the sort where everything goes wrong right from the very beginning. My alarm didn't go off, so I overslept and rolled out of bed on the wrong side. The water in the shower wouldn't go hot and the yogurt in the fridge was past its date and tasted like stomach-aches later at lunchtime.  There were no clean shirts, my trousers needed a button sewn, and when I threw on a skirt instead and pulled my stockings up, a fingernail popped and ripped a ladder all the way from toe to thigh.
            In short, it was a perfect petty morning storm, with irritation running up and down my spine like needles raining down on a tin roof.  It felt so ground-in I reckoned I might fill those needles up with ink and run that funk right into my skin like a tattoo.
            And then I missed my bus. Of course I couldn't get a taxi -  taxis with passengers inside seemed to pause and gloat as they flew past, and when - at last - a free taxi stopped, it overshot, slamming to halt ten yards farther down the street.  I chased it down and stepped inside - and I was drowned, crushed beneath a wave of sound.  The driver spoke.  I couldn't hear.
            "Turn Your Music Down!" I yelled.
            "______!"
Accordions and violins rose and swelled.  My funk was flattened, crushed, beneath music like a fifty-foot monster swell off of an Alaskan surfing shore.
            "TURN YOUR MUSIC DOWN!"
He nodded and the music shrank in size to something more manageable  - a howling north-sea gale perhaps, and we shot out into the street, crossed three lanes of traffic without a single honk, and settled down to cruising comfortably in the inside lane.
The driver twisted in his seat and smiled at me. I hated him at once.
            "Good Mooooorning Senorita!"
And he rolled his rrrrr's.  With enthusiasm.  I hated him worse than ever. 
            "Where, Sennnorrrrita?"  He said, rolling worse.
I told him. He nodded, and turned the music back up.
            "You mind?" He shouted back at me.
Strangely enough, I found that I didn't.  It was tango music: thumping upright piano and accordion, with lots of sturm and drang.  It suited me and my funk right down to the ground.
            "The music's the best parrrrrt of the job!"  He shouted, clashing the gears horribly and braking sideways into a lane full of big orange buses.
            "Herrrrre in the taxi I can sing all day long.  Tango, cumbia, jazz, bossa-nova, opppperrrrrra-"
He rolled his rrrr's again, but the accordion was thumping and I found I didn't mind.  He twisted in his seat to look at me again, and we shot across a rather large cross-street on the red.
            "May I sing for you?"
            "Sure."  I said weakly. I held tight to the door handle.  "It's your taxi.  Feel free."
Flashing me a splendid smile, he turned back to the steering wheel, nudged the volume dial up to maximum, straightened his back, and sang.
He sang Dejame Asi by Alfredo de Angelis, and he sang it in a loud, clear tenor voice, all the way through to the end.  My bad mood melted away like snow beneath a summer sun, and I clapped and shouted out loud in pleasure.
            "Bravo!"  I cried, when he had finished.  "Wonderful!  Magnificent! Would you do another one?"
            "You mean it?"
            "Please."
So he did. He sang El Choclo - by de Angelis again, and then  he sang another one, and another -
He sang me all the way across town.
At the end of the ride, I tipped him the entire value of the fare.  As he nosed back out into the traffic to drive away, I reached out and tapped on his window.
            "Thank you."  I said.  "Thank you." 
And I reached back into my purse and gave him all the money I had in it.  If I miss my bus again this evening, I will be walking home.  That's all right - there's a big moon scheduled, and a clear sky, and I'll do it singing, imagining piano and accordion going at it hammer and tongs, all the way.

That's how my Friday has gone so far.  How's yours?

Painters All Over the Place

Our building is being painted.   For the last month, a flock of painters on bosuns chairs has been hanging all over the building at all hours of the day, painting half of something then going away again for a week or so while they paint a third of something else, then taking three days off, then showing up again at four pm on a Saturday afternoon for an odd hour or two- it's an odd method of working that leaves the building mostly piebald, and the residents live with curtains drawn, just in case the painters happen to show up outside a window when you'd rather they didn't.

            It's been a rather eventful month.  There was the day that the painters discovered that a series of drain spouts had filled up with wasps nests, and one of the painters was attacked by an entire hive - while hanging from a rope, six floors up.  Another day, a different painter forgot to eat his lunch and fainted on the job.  Fortunately, he was only half a storey up from the ground at the time, but it was a near thing.  Three quarters of the residents are not on speaking terms with ANY of the painters after a trivial little disagreement about drying times - the painters were being poetical and speaking in hypothetical absolutes, but there's a lady on the fifth floor whose mother's eighty-seventh birthday party turned out to involve quite a lot of dry cleaning for the guest of honor and several other people on the guest list when they all went out onto the balcony to admire the sun setting over the mountains.

            And the concierges, who have been resolutely neutral throughout the whole process, met me at the door  four days ago in a cloud of angry arms and exceedingly colloquial Spanish, after one particularly enterprising painter painted over all the water meters for all the apartments on building's south side.

Life is a constant adventure, full of surprise and mystery - and so will be our water bill this month; the meter-man was on deadline and didn't stay to wait for the paint to be scraped clear.

On taxis and Being from Elsewhere

"Oh for - !"

"WOULD you - ?"

"Puh-leeeeze!" 

Seven times in the space of two months, I have made taxi-drivers cranky before I've even said a word.  They looked at me with expressions of extreme pain and forbearance, but there was clearly a cultural gap of understanding that left both of us bewildered.

            And at last - twice in the past ten days, the mystery has been made clear.

            On Tuesday last, I climbed into a taxi, shut the car door, gave the  driver my address - and he winced, and turned in his seat and said:

            "A gringo, huh? Yup. I thought so. So can you please tell me, why for the love of God do all you gringos slam car doors so (redacted) hard?"

            I had to sit and think about that one. 

            And I realized that yes, I suppose that I do. I pull the door firmly shut when I get into a car, and I slam it decisively shut behind me when I get out.  And I do it without considering relativity - there is no softer than, or harder than, or any other way to do it - there is just the Firm Shut Door.

            "It may be good manners."  I said, thinking aloud.  "There's not an intent of force as much as there's an intent of sound- an audible signal to the driver that I'm in securely, that I haven't left the door flapping, and that it's safe to drive away." 
            I thought about it some more.

            "Believe it or not"  I said. "I think that we think that it's good manners."

The driver digested this and rejected it.

            "It's like you want to break the latch or tear the door off it's (redacted) hinges or something!  It doesn't matter where you're from, for God's sake - you all (redacted) do it!"

            And that was that.

            When he dropped me at my destination, I opened and closed the door with the slowest, softest whisper of air pressure imaginable, and had to lean closely on the door to make sure that it was closed at all.  The driver gave me a grudging nod through the drivers side window and sped off with unnecessary vim.

            That was last Tuesday.  On the Thursday, as I was sliding into the taxi's backseat, before I'd opened my mouth or even touched the door, the driver threw himself around in his seat and hissed "Softly, softly, for the love of God close that door softly- what is it with you gringos, huh?"

            Which opens a whole different kettle of onions, because clearly I read as 'other' even before I open my mouth. (I need to wear pointier shoes.  More scarves.  Less blue eyeliner.  Do something, anything, with my hair.  Maybe?)

            Ever since, I have gone in and out of taxis with such careful tenderness and solicitude that five out of six times (and counting) the door hasn't shut properly and I've had to go back for a do-over: a sharp wave-off to the driver as he peels back into the traffic, a solid, snicking gringo slam, and wildly un-Chilean thumbs-up to let him know that we're all good now. 

            Unmistakably a gringo at 50 paces.  That's me.

Travelling in Australia with a Baby who is Teething

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 
 

I have three words for you, and they are magic:  Australian Shearing Songs. 
            Australians don't have a wild west - not the way North America did. White Australia was a convict colony, pure and simple. There was no war for independence.  There was no indigenous populations sufficiently well enough organized to fight back against us.  We didn't need a manifest destiny.  
            We had Bushrangers for our outlaws, and because the police weren't always much nicer, we built them up a bit, but there wasn't anything more than wistful ambiguity about what those boys were up to. There was just the land - dry, dusty, marginal land spreading out everywhere you looked and with nothing we counted worth considering in our way, we spread out across it. With sheep.  We white folks sent sheep inland by the millions and colonized the continent on their wooly backs.

Guess what our folk songs are about?  Waltzing Matilda, Ryebuck Shearer, Click go the Shears, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport - they're all about those dusty, snaggle-backed sheep and the men who worked them. 
The songs have got Heroic Ringers, (the fastest shearers in the shed) and Dying Swaggers (the old worn-out men that hung around the place and died there, knowing the ways of the sheep and the shears through to their fingertips) but mostly, they've got the thousands of miles of dusty outback track that the shearers walked on their way between the stations.

            The Sproglet loved every single song.  Preferably played at fifty thousand decibels on the car stereo, with all of us singing along at the tops of our voices, waiting for the tired, grizzly howling to stop and the poor child to fall asleep.

            "Only two hundred more kilometers to Gundagai!"  We'd sing.  "'There's a track, Winding back, to an old-fashioned shack-"

One evening, at the end of a night cruise on the Katherine River, the Sproglet decided that she'd had enough.  Of everything.  Right on the edge of a dusty camping ground.  The smile vanished, the eyes squinched shut, the mouth opened and she roared.  She'd been battering around Australia strapped to a child seat in a van for weeks without any sort of proper schedule or proper bath-times and she wanted to tell us every single thing she thought about every single bit of it.

            It was late in the evening - almost nine o'clock. Australian camping demographic is mostly over 60. They tend to retire early.

            In a fit of desperation, I opened up my own mouth and joined her. 
            "Give me a home among the gum trees-"

            "-With lots of plum trees"  Pippa sang. Then Sandor, then Thea and Mr Tabubil  -

            " -A Sheep or Two and a Kangaroo-" 
            We belted the song out into the night. Fumbling with the door handle, Sandor wrenched open the driver-side door and rammed the key into the ignition slot -

            And fifty thousand decibels of bush band roared out of the car stereo across the darkened campsite

            "A CLOTHESLINE OUT THE BACK! VERANDAH OUT THE FRONT- "

            We staggered backward, stunned into silence by the sheer volume of the sound.
            "Bugger!"

            "Get in the car!"

            For a moment, her eyes popping with disbelief, even the Sproglet stopped howling, and then she opened her mouth again and let the world know.  

            "An OLD Rocking CHAIR" We bellowed right back at her, pitching her headfirst into her car seat and snapping the buckles shut.  Sandor turned on the car lights to look for the volume knob, and there we all were - spotlit like singing angels as we threw ourselves into the van, night-blind.  At any moment we expected mobs of campers with torches and pitchforks to surround us, screaming Australian imprecations and explaining what they thought of things.

            Pippa and Thea manhandled the van doors closed at the same time that Sandor found the volume knob and for the campsite, at least, the volume abruptly ceased.  Sandor wrestled the van into gear and we got the hell out of there in a choking cloud of Northern Territory Dust.

            And the Sproglet fell asleep. Just like that. While we wrung the sound out of our ears. It's a good life, being 14 months old.

Honey and Grandmothers

The fourteenth floor of an office building in St Kilda Road, Melbourne.
The offices of the Chilean consulate.
A frosted glass door, locked. 
An electric door buzzer.

We buzzed.

And, at length, we buzzed again.

At further length, there was a muted 'click'-ing sound, and the frosted glass door sagged slightly on its hinges. 

We passed through.

A room - small and square.  Four walls, two doors, six chrome chairs. A narrow blue filing cabinet with a potted plant drooping yellowly on top of it, and a large framed photograph of Presidente Pinera in his sash of office, beaming happily at the camera.

And the two of us, as well.  We knocked on both doors and were ignored, so we sat. 

From the other side of a wall we became aware of a voice.  It was a GOOD voice - soft and gentle, and suffused with the warmth of honey and grandmothers.

It's owner was engaged in a telephone call.

            "Como NO, senor - a SU consideration-!"  Of Course, Sir - at YOUR convenience!

The telephone receiver was replaced with a delicate click, and immediately it rang again.

            "Alo?" The voice coo'd. "Si?  De INMEDIATO, Senora!" Immediately, Madam!

Ring -

            "Que TENGA un BUEN dia -"  HAVE a GOOD day!!!
Liquid, golden laughter threaded through the wall. 

            "Con QUE le puedo ayudar?!" HOW can I help you?

Ring -

            "HASTA esta tarde, entonces.  Me ALEGRO de oir - " Until this afternoon, then.  I'm so HAPPY to hear -

The receiver was replaced again, and this time, there was silence.

A moment or two later, there was a soft shuttering sound, and a door opened in the wall that lay between us and the golden voice. 
Just a crack.
A woman slipped through. We looked up, eager to know the body that went with the voice, and there she was: middle height, middle age, slender, sleekly dressed in a pale blue suit, and her face -

She was scowling.  Her face was set - locked, nailed and bolted into a scowl as inexorable as a standing stone, and her eyes were cold.

 She swept them slowly across us, and fixed them solidly onto the wall above our heads.

 I saw Mr Tabubil turn slowly in his seat, tracking her gaze.  He lifted a finger, wonderingly.  RIGHT above our heads, then. Exactly three inches.

She pinched her lips together, and with her eyes still fixed firmly on the wall above our heads, she closed the door sharply behind her and SLID, with her back against the wall, around the corner to the second door.   Fumbling with the door handle, she forgot herself and dropped the ice-queen act, just for a moment.  With a wide smile, she opened the door, just enough to slip through, and closed it behind her with a decided clap.

Mr Tabubil puffed out his cheeks and let his breath out with an audible whoof.

We looked at each other.

We shrugged.

And two minutes later, she came back.  The same way - the scowl, the sidle, the intense absorption with the drywall -

The door closed behind her, and shortly, we heard her pick up the phone, and the golden, grandmotherly voice began again.

A tinkling, fairy chime laugh.
            "A SU consideracion, Senor.  Estamos aqui TODO el dia - cuandoquiera tenga tiempo -" At YOUR convenience, Senor.  We are here ALL day - whenever you have time -

We looked at each other.

We shrugged.

We pulled our our iphones and began a game of scrabble.

Three times in the next hour, supplicants buzzed at the doorbell.  Three times they were chastened and, eventually passed through.  Four times she sallied forth, putting us all firmly in our place with lifted chin and twisted lip and every single nerve and sinew in her body twanging to convey her personal disdain for ourselves and our petty diplomatic problems.

            Itchily, I was remembering the things that I had found enormously frustrating about living in Chile the last time around.  Why Oh why, can there never be a civil servant who chooses to display her rank and indifferent omnipotence by expediting and solving peoples problems really really quickly?*

            Looking for diversion, I studied the photograph of President Pinera on the wall beside the door.  Draped in a tricolor sash, he posed in front of a range of high Andean mountains, and beamed happily at the camera.

            My appreciation was critical.  We western European exports rather tend to expect our heads of state to show a somber, serious appreciation for the weights and balances and honors of their office. 

To what, in contrast, seemed our rather dour anglo-saxon standards, his transparent enthusiasm appeared almost indecent.  Awfully… latin, in fact. I decided that I rather liked it.

* "I know all.  I see all. Your petty desires are as naught to me, and being so, I shall grant  your visas  as swiftly as rice is scattered before the wind."**

** It's got to be happening SOMEWHERE.

A Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Travel Blog: A Rant in Three Acts

The last time we met I was in DC, watching my SIL marry my new BIL.  Today I'm flying back to Vancouver.  On United.

            What is it about a fully booked flight that reduces passengers and crew to bumbling physical ineptitude?  

            In an aisle seat on a half-empty flight you can snooze from takeoff to landing, unbothered and unbumped.  In the same seat on a full plane, people known coast-to-coast for their dexterity and grace will fall against your shoulders, drop bags on your head, step on your feet and drive beverage carts into your elbows.             I'm convinced it's a run-on effect.  A run-on effect of the comprehensive, system-wide incoherence that effects the entire bloody airline industry every time a plane is full.

            First of all, the airline charges for checked baggage.  Through the nose.  (Even for international connections, the stinkers.)

            Being charged for the privilege of clean underwear at your destination is enough to rattle anyone.  Discombobulated and lighter of pocket, you have to check your expensive suitcase yourself via a ticket machine,  a system which neither saves time nor confusion - certainly not once you learn that you've still got to queue up to leave your bag - and not with a person who has training and experience in checking bags and making up tickets, because she has been dumped in favor of a person with no understanding of the very concepts of  'bag' and 'connection' - which is an awful shame, because she's the only chance you have of trouble-shooting your multiple-connection ticket after the machine rejected it, firmly and emphatically, three times in a row and the wandering airline rep pretended he couldn't see you any more.

            Then you have to go through security.  I won't even mention that.  It's not the airline's fault.

            On the other side of security, you are tired and cross and want to find your gate so that you can sit down and close your eyes for a few moments, but instead, you need to got and and buy a sandwich before your flight boards; once you're airborne and captive, you'll be charged $7 for a straw filled with hummus, three dorito crackers and a fun-size packet of freeze-dried chickpeas.  Only payable by your credit card, which is no fun at all if you're traveling on an Australian card - the fees are worth more than the hummus. (Which has congealed in unexpected and un-hummus-like ways on the cardboard box your snak-pak came in, and is giving you disturbing second thoughts about your digestion.)

            But the fun really starts at the boarding gate.  The airline's policy of charging for baggage has been met by an not-entirely unpredictable response - passengers lug on board 'hand-luggage' the size and weight of compact European cars.  Strangely, this logical re-alignment of the situation seems to have left the airlines flummoxed.  There is no enforcement of hand-carry size limits, and if you have a seat near the back of the plane you're in real trouble.  The flight boards from the front (please don't ask) and by the time the plane is half boarded the flight attendants are on the intercom, utterly failing to be apologetic, and grumpily announcing that everyone at the back needs to check their hand luggage at the gate because all the overhead slots are full!

            And then there's the legroom issue.  Thanks to the to newly minted concept of Economy Plus class, if you're over five feet two inches tall, you seriously have to consider paying through the nose for the sort of space that used to be industry standard - and still is industry standard, I imagine, in a universe where we're expected to be able to evacuate the plane in less than an hour.             On board this particular flight, we'd used up all our budget on our suitcases and were flying curled up in the fetal position.  The seat pockets in the seats pressing my knees into my chest were stuffed with fliers announcing an upcoming merger between United and Delta.  Smiling white men with sober and reliable ties told us that the future was beer and skittles and flying cream-cakes and pillows of glory.

            And at this point, one gets faintly cross.  These same sober and reliable ties have recently re-cast as paid privelages my luggage, fun-size dorito packs, legroom, and any day now, I expect, the emergency oxygen. 

            I don’t know why they're wasting PR dollars on the merger.  The only thing you can be sure about is that it won't result in anything even vaguely of benefit to the paying passenger.

Sydney in Half a Day

We had half a day in Sydney before our flight across the Pacific. Neither of us had been to Sydney for years, and it felt like an auspicious beginning for our Big International Holiday - a chance to mooch a little around a city that is practically (if not geographically) speaking, right in our backyard.
            We left our bags at the Sydney Central YHA Hostel (wonderful place, would do it every time) and hopped a bus down to Circular Quay. Where we immediately took lots of photographs of ourselves with the Opera House right behind our shoulders to send back to the office at home on Mr. Tabubil's iphone. Sometimes you just have to be heartless.
            We had a good solid mooch around the Rocks. There were a lot of Halloween-y advertisements for ghost tours, but we didn't see any haunts. It must have been the wrong time of day. The Rocks is one of Sydney's oldest neighborhoods- the warehouses and flophouses and tenements of the old town, built all snug and tight against the rock cliff walls of the harbor. The buildings are sandstone, and caught about by narrow wynds and closes, now re-vamped with brick and steel and clever little water-courses.

Today the old buildings are mostly filled up with art galleries and Italian restaurants and DFX duty-free palaces, but coming around corners, you meet unexpected lanes that have been retrofitted for habitation, with washing lines and Volvos and banana trees squeezed into corners of the rock.

We wandered along the harbor wall under the big bridge. So many rivets. That's what you notice. The hundreds of thousands of millions of rivets that hold it together. There's a big fold-out picture book in the school library about the construction of the bridge; it’s an important revisionist history that focuses mostly on the advantages taken of the workforce, the institutionalized injustices and the apathy - and antagonism - of the government. There is much discussion of the terrible safety conditions and the hair-raising ways the men working on the bridge met their deaths. There were no safety line in the 1930s - a man who slipped and fell was drilled vertically into the mud, and pulled out with his clothes all ripped and shredded up about his ears.
            It's an important story,but even the most aggrieved and burning union man must have looked up at that bridge and seen something great - not in spite of the manner in which it was built, but because of it. A measure of the achievement of man, built one rivet at a time.
          Under the bridge, we climbed back up the hill into the Rocks again. The air shivered and we heard a horn.  The sound was so loud that the bridge and the hill blurred and furred and our sight grew thin and stretched around the edges. We turned back toward the water and saw a whole city block sailing past us. An absolutely massive cruise ship was sliding under the bridge and blocking out the sun. On the decks, people waved and shouted, their mouths moving soundlessly under the weight of the great sound. We waved and shouted and screamed back at them and exhilarated, we galloped up the hill and stood on a wall to watch the ship glide out past the Opera House on its way out of the harbor.
            When it was out of sight, we walked back down the hill and out along the Quay to the Opera House, and I got rather cross.
Who can't love the opera house? Light airy shells, swoopy curves - conceived and built architectural ages before the advent of computer-generated swoopy things, and done with the discipline and rigor that comes from the need to pull against the limits of traditional construction methods and calculate all the engineering yourself - no software or space age material shortcuts.
            What I loathe hate and abhor is the ghastly mid-century-brutalist plinth it sits on.
I mean, look at it:

I mean, Seriously.

This horrible pebble-brushed mountain is one of those misguided mid-century experiments in urban engineering, designed in a fashion so ghastly that you wonder if some future meta-architects were reaching back into a particular impressionable period of history to find out how swiftly you can divide and depopulate a cityscape.  Perhaps for a futuristic undergraduate seminar in Post-Apocalyptica.
            It's a fact that the bright shells can house only a fraction of the Opera House complex, but there's no straightforward plot from there to this - burying them out of sight under a gravel-washed nightmare.  Even the grand portico for arriving swishily in expensive cars on first nights is a dark and dingy underpass squashed underneath the horrible staircase.
            That staircase - purity of architectural line, my bottom. It's mid-century poverty of spirit. Sterilization kills more than germs.

 We climbed the stairs (me harrumphing and hephalumping all the way to the top) and found pretty seashells lying on a rather bare and uninteresting shore.

We went inside to look for the ticket office, and were directed down into the bowels of what looked like the locker-room and men's-toilets level of an Italian municipal bus terminal.
           And I got cross again.
            Raw concrete is a valid and rewarding medium of architectural expression, but there is a huge and aesthetically significant difference between raw concrete as a choice and "We haven’t got anything left in the budget so let's snake the electrical wires over the bare form-work and pretend we meant to do it like that. If we blow out a few light bulbs, no-one will even notice."
            "I love it when you fulminate like that." Mr Tabubil said breathily, and swooned across a rack of postcards.
          Harrumph.

We bought tickets to the evening's performance of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and went to find dinner. We didn't have very much time before the performance, so we wandered further into the bowels and popped out at a little bistro down at the waterline. We ate our dinner on the least interesting waterfront promenade in history, but nobody in Sydney had a better view for watching the sun set over the city.
They couldn’t find a way to mess with that.

The Pleasures of Renting

There was a knock on the door.
            "I've been told to come and look at your insulation." The man said. "What's wrong with it?"
            "We don't have any." I said. 
            He looked at me and blinked. "Yeah. Right. What's wrong with it?"
            "We don't have any." I said again.  "That's the problem."
            The inspector actually took a step backward. "What?" He said, shocked. "No insulation in your roof? None at all?"
            "None at all."
            "But it's 37 degrees outside!"
            "Yep."
            "And you've got a black tile roof!"
            "Yep."
            He looked at me in horror. "Why the hell did you do that for, then?"
            "We didn't." I said. "We're renting. After we moved in, let's say that certain... deficiencies in the building have become rather apparent. The insulation's written into the lease. The owners just won't install it."
            "You can't possibly have nothing up there." He said furiously. "Where's your access?"
            I pointed down the hall to the access hatch above the study door. "We don't have a ladder, but I can offer you a chair, if you like."
            He snorted and, grabbing the edges of the hole, chinned himself up for a look around.  His legs waggled furiously.
            "There really is nothing up there!" He said, chinning himself back down. He shook his head and whistled. "And look at that that." He said. "The front door frame's sloping sideways. How old is this place?"
            "About a year." I said, grinning.
He staggered again. " Who's your landlord? Who built this place? How the hell did the council even pass it?"

I was, in a quiet way, thoroughly enjoying myself. After we moved in and discovered just how badly our house had been built, the hot-weather contingency clauses we'd insisted in adding to our lease became rather important - or would have been, if our landlords had shown any intention of honoring the contract. We've been trying to have the insulation put in for six months now. And to have the flyscreens put in the windows - something more than critical here in the blowfly belt, at least if you plan on enjoying through-ventilation. The landlord's latest desperate avoidance tactic has been to go on holidays in Thailand, where they can't hear our bi-weekly pleas and imprecations. A tactic which makes his claims of being budget-strapped less than convincing.  The only reason we're even having an inspector come round is that the real-estate agent took advantage of the landlord being away and ordered it herself.
            The inspector looked around thoughtfully. "Where's your air-conditioning?"
            "Over there." I pointed.
He stomped over to the wall and squinted at the unit. "Half a kilowatt? Bloody hell! You're trying to cool a whole house with that?"
            "Oh, not all of it." I said. "Just all of it except the living room.  The living room's got a 2 kilowatt unit in the corner. It just doesn't reach any further than the living room door. The one you're looking at? We can't measure any effect farther than 8 feet away. We're sort of camping out in there under the big unit, mostly.  You see the mattress leaning against the wall there?"
He shook his head.
            "I need to come back with a ladder and have a proper look at this." He muttered and stomped back down the hall toward the sloping front door. "And I'm calling the council to find out who built this place. I'll be back."

Hollywood Accounting

My Hilarious Warner Brother Statement

A friend sent me link about accounting practices in the entertainment industry - how their accounting departments appear to deal with the writers and musicians who provide their source material.

Naturally, I went to Wikipedia (the first stop for a quick fix)

Color me far more naïve than I'd ever realised - how trite, how boring, how SMALL are the minds who come up with this stuff.

It's like owning a factory that produces all of the world's chocolate bars, and throwing a hair-pulling, heel-drumming rage when you're asked to pay the man who supplies your cocoa.
And once you've stopped pouting and screaming "You bad BAD mans for wanting MY cookies!" looking astonished when he chooses not to send you any more shipments.
"Mine Mine MINE!"

And a Lid to keep the rain off, Please.

I am at the beach again today.  To the west the sand flat dissolves, warm and muddy and smelling of old shoes, into the mangroves. To the east is the rock seawall of the marina - tinted orange-pink by the ubiquitous red dust. And almost in front of me is the most appalling piece of seafront architecture built since the eclipse of the Soviet and the demise of the late lamented Josef Stalin. (All Peace be upon Him.)
            The architectural brief was clear: a flight of stairs from the promenade down to the sand, a ramp for the less-able-bodied, and a lid to keep the rain off, please.
            This modest brief was answered by an insufferable concrete monolith that has more mass, and less attenuated grace, than the larger Egyptian pyramids.  There is indeed a staircase.  And there is indeed a ramp - for those extreme wheelchair enthusiasts who enjoy whizzing around three non-code-compliant hairpin bends and being pitched off a twelve inch lip into three boulders and a pile of decomposing seaweed.
            Everything about the behemoth is massive - the flight of Brobdingnagian steps suitable for a People's Palace of Culture in Pyongyang, fat concrete balustrades that would stop a mortar round, and a pitch on that ramp that would - and recently has - sent wheelchair-bound Vietnam veterans screaming toward front-page newspaper exposes with words like "Shock!" and "Damning!" in the headlines.  And the roof!  Sheets of unpainted corrugated tin lofted twenty five feet into the air, pitched to guarantee entree to the most meek and self-effacing of rain-showers.
           The thick gray paint that coats the vast and benighted enterprise stops half way down, giving way to an equally monolithic foundation, this one raw, ragged, chopped, pitted and scabbed, and ending in a cliff-hanger of a finish, where most of the sand and gravel has washed out from underneath. Visitors are prone to instinctive and violent reactions: they screw up their faces, bawling "What's the bloody point?" and hold their breaths until their faces turn purple.  It's a choice between a classical tantrum or an act of principled vandalism, and you couldn't dent the thing with a bulldozer.
           The thing is sea-side-ish in the same way that a supertanker is nautical.  Naturally, it is the winner of a major regional architecture award. I enjoy visualizing the committee, a row of solid soviet chins nodding above solid soviet suits, smiling solid soviet smiles of solid soviet satisfaction and saying "Da! The Monument to the People's Surf-fishing Industry will show the world the strength of our Recreational Blue-Swimmer-Crab-Catching Collective!”
            We brought The Architect to have a look at it when he was here. He stood on the beach and stared at it in silence for seventeen seconds, then his face turned red and he started bellowing the Internationale and went away to try and kick a seagull.

Yapping and Yowing All the Way Home

Our plans for our move were to hire a professional for the furniture and move the rest ourselves down the street to our new house: six doors away at the other end of our street.  Part of the same development as the house we are leaving, this house is brand new, so new that the owners have been busy there all this week, setting paving in the backyard and installing air-conditioning units in the living room.

The Big Move was scheduled for today, but yesterday our plans changed.
On Wednesday, a company representative for our town's one moving company came to give us a quote - and refused to offer us any insurance on the move.
            "Well, Absolutely Not."  She said, with almost creditable astonishment.  "Why would you even want it?!"
I explained - with visual aids.  (exhibit A - our dining room table. Thank You, O Moving Man with arms like hams and the hand-eye coordination of a concussed turtle.)
            "Really?" She said, wide-eyed and wondering.  "You've really seen personal effects being DAMAGED during a move?"
And she filled me with a bathtub's worth of utter nonsense about magical furniture movers who never in the whole of the company's history suffered one drop or spill or scratch, and then she about faced and beat it the hell out of there, promising over her shoulder to telephone with a quote later in the afternoon.
My sister let our her breath in a puff.  
            "WOW."  She said.
The woman never phoned back.  Yesterday, Mr Tabubil telephoned her, and she airily told him that she'd dropped the quote in our mailbox sometime during the night.We dug it out - and ther quote is twice the amount it should be for what they would be doing.
We found the whole situation rather… disquieting, and Mr Tabubil called U-Haul and rented a van instead, for Saturday.  And his friends at the office have all promised us their help until it is done.

This morning, Mr Tabubil called to set up our internet at the new place, and learned that as far as the telecomunications industry is concerned, our new house does not exist.  We're a bit worried about that.

Later in the morning I went over to the new house to see if all was in order and to see if the telephone had been connected.  Two horrible little dogs live next door - one aging chihuahua bitch and one deeply neurotic fluffy white football.  They escorted me to the front door with a sharp fusillade of yapping and yowing.  Not entirely unreasonable, I suppose.  They have no reason to know that there are new people living square in the middle of THEIR territory.

We don't have a phone line yet.  Bathroom and kitchen all okay.  The sliding glass doors to the back and side yards are so badly installed that with the doors closed and latched, the hanging venetian blinds swing back and forth in a stiff draft.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

When I left the house, the horrible little dogs trotted up the driveway and barked their little throats hoarse - from slightly less than a meter away from my shoes. Rotten manners, both of them.  They followed me halfway home, right at my heels, yapping and yowing and sniffing at my sandals whenever they stopped to take a breath.  The little horrors had better adjust to the new state of affairs fast, or they might find themselves being drop-kicked down the street.

Navigating the Olympics on Television

On the other hand, from the perspective of the rural Australian television viewer, there doesn't seem much point getting excited about the Olympic Games.  Channel 9 has the broadcast rights, but no broadcast tower out where we live - which is no podunk two-bit one-horse burg but a respectable rural center.

We manage. Because we have friends with VCRs who care.  We curl up on the sofa, turn on the TV and... become extremely confused, actually.  We saw the opening ceremony and there seemed to be an awful lot of countries represented out there, but when we sat down to watch the actual sporting events - did the athletes all come down with shin splints and go home?

The American and Australian teams must have fabulous sports physios with them - THEY'RE holding good. Same for the Canadians - I guess they're buoyed up on the strength of their national goodwill. During the women's mogul event, I believe two Japanese women managed to avoid the epidemic, but the rest of the skiers all seemed to have wandered off the hill.

The same thing happened during the last the Summer Olympics of '08.  I remember an American broadcast of the Platform Diving: we saw the Americans, the Chinese, a token Aussie, a token Spaniard- and when it came time for the medal ceremony - there were divers being given medals that we'd never actually seen compete.

The Olympics market themselves as an international goodwill festival - yes, yes, I know, cynical folks remind me that when you get down to base economics they're nothing of the sort, but the brand has stayed afloat, because, above all the petty machinations we still had the Athletes.

They were the real deal, mostly.

And the doping commissions are working on that as well.

So we hoot and holler and weep and cheer for those glorious men and women out there on the snow and the ice - or we would, but we can't find 'em.

One night we watched a European broadcast of the Men's Alpine skiing.   They showed the whole thing. Every single run. The commentators knew the course - every bend, every sweet spot.  They knew every skier - his strengths, weaknesses and historic times. I f they could've, they'd've been out there on the course to embrace every one of them at the end of each run in their sheer exuberant passion for the sport. *

Contrast that to the American footage of the moguls - a showdown: Canada vs USA!   Non-American competitors were pitched off the mountain in favor of long shots of American skiers huddled under umbrellas waiting for the weather to clear while the commentators nattered about … I genuinely can't remember a word they said.  What egg-head at the studio decided that the domestic American audience preferred empty hang time in their brief evening of Olympic highlights over a few extra runs?  Even if the athletes weren't on the home team?

All this soulful clatter about sacrifice and the depth of spirit that moveth man - We know the skiers have heart and soul and spirit beyond the bounds of normal ken. That's why they're up there at the head of the course! Move on, move along; show us that heart and soul in action on the mountain.**

And the ice skating - oh dear, the ice skating.   In a period of ninety minutes, the networks showed perhaps eight competitors - twenty four minutes of skating.  We saw the Americans, the Canadians, the Chinese, a token Aussie and the Russians.  The American channel was still fighting the good fight of the cold war; in their broadcast we saw the Russians perform but we have no idea what they were worth - the scores were cut in favor of lingering corridor shots of free world skaters limbering up in tracksuits.  When you've graciously granted the godless communists three and a half whole minutes of air-time, denying them an extra 10 seconds for a swift cut to their scores is infuriating- both to the athletes and the audience.

On an editing level, the whole thing was a mess.  They were clearly willing to cut and paste - why not cut a little further - cut those gratuitous corridor shots, the warm up periods between skating groups (in which we caught brief frustrating glimpses of the strange glittery costumes that never made it to the TV screen), the endless minutes between the routines and results of the pairs that the networks DID show in full - they could have shoehorned several more routines into their aimless production.***

Watching the sports live was something of an improvement.

Mum went up to Cyprus for the Men's moguls to watch the unedited version -

The event had all the disorganization one could expect at an event at which nine thousand people had spontaneously shown up without any warning whatsoever.  Once she had made it up the hill in the bus, she found impossible queues - and learned that no food or drink was permitted onto the mountain. (I'd have smuggled trail mix -in my bra if necessary, thank you.)  Registered refreshment vendors offered a queue 50 minutes long.  Up since dawn for her trip up the mountain, Mum waited it out - and on reaching the head of the line, she discovered that they'd Run Out.  Of everything except potato chips.  After waiting another half hour for a new shipment of snacks, she was the grateful purchaser of a soggy and overpriced hot dog.  To get back home, she faced a 90 minute wait in pouring rain to board her bus.

This show goes up every four years.  None of the organizational issues are unique.  I'd have sacked someone.

Mum said resignedly that "Well, the real money is in the TV - I understand that we don't mean as much to them." But "they" took her money, didn't they?   Don’t they owe something?  Competent recognition of basic health and comfort and pleasure in the occasion?

Frustratingly, it seems that "they" don't care about the TV viewers either.   By some lights, it would appear that both America's NBC and Australia's Channel 9 have paid heavily for the right NOT to show the Olympics.

Color me incredulous that this could be desired by the American or the Australian people - in fact I'm quite aware that it's not.  I understand that if you took an opinion poll, the Americans would have preferred ESPN - who offered Four whole channels in their bid.
Australians don’t have that option, but Channel 9 blew it just as large.  You really have to wonder what sort of calculations go through the minds of the IOC boffins when the bids come in - is a whanging great fee for a short term contract worth such a large amount of brand dilution?

2000 Sydney: I was in Boston, in university.  My roommate and I borrowed a TV and skipped classes for two weeks and watched the Olympics on public broadcast television all day long.

Fast forward to '10 - or even '08: a couple of hours of heavily redacted, time-delayed "highlights" broadcast after 8 pm.  It took a vast deal of personal effort to notice that they were happening.

I suspect that the IOC is squandering goodwill fast. When it comes down to basic economics, the Olympics don't mean nothing - no dollars and no cents, if no-one cares.  And how are we meant to care if we're not allowed to see them happen?

*On the other hand, the American commentator for the men's snowboard half-pipe was a joy all his own:

"...Here we have the first member of the Finland Mafia.  They're a bunch of guys from Finland who like to skate together - and speak Finnish, if you'll believe it."

Um, yes... yes we would.  Wonder how many half-pipes that commentator had smoked before he came out onto the mountain?

We liked him.  Yes we did.

**Burton logos forward - I can't parse the complex theological distinctions between prohibiting the Australian Kangaroo being flown in the Olympic village and the snowboarders pointedly holding the Burton logos on the bottom of their snowboards up to the TV cameras at the end of every run.

***Speaking of productions - Skating costumes are just a whole separate universe: one is forced to imagine a whole set of alternate dimensions to come up with a circumstance in which a whole committee of people thought that some of those spangles were the best of all possible options.