U.S. of A.

Updated 09JAN2000
Updated 15JAN2000 : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

It didn't take me long to come to this initial conclusion, and Ilene from Boston agrees with me, that the only way to get along with life in America is to ignore things. And the more you get into life, the more you have to ignore. (If I'm having a whale of a time in the Macworld Expo, I can't give a thought to the beggers on the traffic light outside). There are probably some genii in this country that can keep it all in their head at once and they probably scream ahead of the pack. But the US's sheer momentum seems to carry its middle-classes along, no matter how dim they are ... sometimes I can't help thinking, "How did these dumb guys get to live so well?" -- it's exactly the phenomenon that Homer Simpson was once criticised for having. (I found that show strangely un-funny when I watched it from within America, and I also found King of the Hill oddly relevant). Anyway, it's probably a country's complexity that makes it successful, because a really simple one won't be too busy doing disparate things. (Obtuse reference to people who say Australia gets too busy discussing the republic debate to do any other work).

Follow up: Therefore most people in America don't have time to make their own assessments of various issues in their lives. I can see exactly how useful those telephone-advice lines, provided free by the state, are to people; they discuss everything from changing your engine oil to plea-bargaining rights. (You can find them in the yellow pages under the government section). This is also why Dummies books are so useful; after all, there is honestly too much to know these days for a lot of people to cope. What sucks is how TV advertising takes advantage of this and feeds people opinions rather than facts. Just analyse some of the monologue and see how it doesn't actually tell you anything, except how you should feel about the product. You have to really hate this stuff if you're not going to believe the good-feeling emotion that the advertisements send you. Pretty soon you'll really believe that the News at Five team really will tell you all there is to know, and all is well on the streets outside. (Oh, maybe I just don't watch enough Monday Night Nitro pro-wrestling?? Soften my mind a bit? Yeah, that's it). It's no wonder that the "But what difference can I make?" ads from World Vision started here. Good old Rupert Murdoch takes this one step further, and targets people like me for his Fox News channel by advertising, "We give you the facts, then you decide." Rule #1 in cynical behaviour: Say you do one thing, do another.

Conclusion: I'm pretty sure I'm just bumping into (and chatting to) the typical PBS-set while I'm crossing America on the train (although ... how big can that group be? Hardly). After talking to the fourth person in a long conversation who was cynical about America's ideals, I asked if all Americans were so critical about their own country: He replied that yes they were, but they'd never live anywhere else. I think I felt offended until I realised that Australians probably have exactly the same thing (except more justified, IMHO!) Well there's certainly no reason for the typical Australian to be enticed to emigrate to America, unlike people from other countries; even east-coasters pining for the west-coast weather have more to entice them than the typical Australian who is used to that weather already. (Anyway, I said typical Australian: I know some who are big fans of the big-is-best country!)

Okay that was pretty heavy, unless you're one of those people I know who actually finds my conversations interesting :-)

Here's some idiosyncratic stuff (i.e. weird sh*t) that I've seen so far:

The taps and lights are all back to front ... at least in the hotel! You twist the light switch on my bedlight to turn it on (or off -- it's the same direction), and you push, or pull, or lift, or who knows, the tap on a sink ... they're all very different, and just when you sigh and think to yourself, "Ah, the electronic detector must be faulty", you discover that it's a mechanical motion that you just haven't seen before. Luckily I'm used to the left/right/up/down kind of tap.
Then there's the tap in my shower ... okay maybe any of you who've been to hotels before will have seen this, but this one you turned and it came on ... okay? Well ... if you like cold water. I assumed it would pre-mix warm and hot, since I've seen that before. Hmmm. Guess, you have to keep turning it, and it will go from cold to hot. Aaah, get it?
I saw my first mouse the other day ... I guess that means it's too cold for cockroaches? They're damn fast little guys. And it was in that "pearl" the Moscone, too. (By the way, you say "Mos-CONE-ey").
Quite a few people like to carry bags around ... who knows why it's so popular ... so many people, taking three, four, five or six bags, cloth ones that they own or generic plastic ones they brought from home. At least I think they have a home? I'm not sure if it's a matter of sheer disorganisation or circumstance (like what?) that makes them different to the majority of people who never ever do that kind of thing except at the January sales.
When you cross the road, take the right of way. You'll confuse the motorists, otherwise. If you're at a set of traffic lights, cross as soon as the light goes green, but don't join in if the crowd has already left the pavement. This is because the green man and the red man have not always worked out the best way to tell you "okay, keep crossing, but don't anyone else start, yeah?" If you come across an intersection devoid of pedestrians, and a green man is shining at you, forget it and wait until next time.
They're tough on smoking here ... banned almost everywhere you can think of, and the anti-smoking billboard ads are very blunt, very tongue-in-cheek and probably very effective. A lot of them I saw had a bare-faced ripoff of old famous billboard ads from real cigarrette companies.
The US television here is ... well, just like US television in Australia. I must complain: There's not enough imported stuff!! :-) In fact, the only example of that I've seen was at 2am or something, and they pulled the most pornographic stuff from around the world, and ... well never mind. (They showed the Steve Vizard clip with the naked-vision sunglasses, but naturally they got their facts all wrong ... and totally neglected to mention he was ripping off some other guy). When they screened a segment from BBC Choice, a widescreen digital channel, they just plonked it on horizontally compressed.
Which reminds me, they really really try hard to put Letterman and Jay Leno at the same time (and it's usually after 11pm). Not only do they start the shows at the same time, but they do the same intro routine at the same time. If you try hard enough, you can jump back and forth between their one-liners and catch them all, between applauses and jeers. What's more, they usually flow through the same topics for the day.
Actually, I'm surprised how undeveloped the TV stations are with their ad-break conventions. In Australia you get a nice fade-to-black at the start and end, and Channel 7 even does a nice back-announce with the cutsie 5-colour swatch (though I don't forgive them for the bug). Here, it's just break to commercial all of a sudden, and you're back without quite noticing it. Australian networks typically run a self-promotion just before the ad-break finishes. The only area where the American networks put any effort in is to destroy the closing credits, create their own scrolling credits in 1/4 of the screen, and use the rest of it for another precious self-promotion. (You get that a bit in Australia after the movies, but they only squeeze and/or speed up the original titles). What can be really annoying is that the opening credits rarely finish without going to an ad-break, which is something the Australian networks spoil us about.
There is also totally no station ID, fancy or otherwise. Everyone from Nine to SBS makes a big deal over it in Australia. The BBC also like to spend a little time over it. Okay I did find some in Washington, where I think ABC back-announced its shows.
They like to put their news on at 5pm, but that may have something to do with having national plus local bulletins (which Australians only see in the country).
Actually I did find CNN to be quite watchable. They have a "Headlines" channel which I saw on the west coast and Boston, but in Washington all I saw was their main service. The A&E channel, whatever that stands for, also had some good stuff.
HBO is also full of good stuff, but occasionally has some very, very voilent stuff that is just plain gratuitous. Stupid. Make love, not war? One of NBC's sketch shows had a spoof of HBO's two major series -- The Sopranos and Sex and the City -- basically combining the two plots into one.
On a slightly different note, the picture quality can sometimes really suck. I'm not just talking about NTSC quality, because sometimes that can make live studio video look good (though NBC Today really does look that blurry), the cartoons look sharpish, and film/movie sequences can look good. But sometimes they're really bad. Watching a brand new episode of Law & Order really did look much blurrier and stilted than on Australian TV after PAL conversion. (Except on A&E channel ... that was better; who knows why?) I think they must have a bad way of doing the film-to-NTSC 2-fields/3-fields telecine conversion (24fps to 60fps), and at other times a good way. But even then, it's nowhere near as smooth (and not as sharp) as the 2-fields conversion for film-to-PAL (24fps sped up to 25fps, then doubled to 50fps).

Okay and now let's talk about fast food ... always interesting to compare, what should essentially be the "same" ...

Pickles tend to be sloppier; maybe they're cut differently, but they certainly don't hold their shape. Probably the same goes for tomatoes.
The barbecue sauce has a different tang to it.
Sprite, apparently, isn't considered a "lemonade" in a generic sense. You ask for lemonade and look towards the Sprite button, and they won't know what you're talking about.
Now, I thought McDonald's brought to us the phrases "Eat In" and "Take Away". So why is it I have to say "Have Here" or "To Go"?? And while I'm here, what's happened to "Take Out"? I thought that was an American standard phrase. Hmmm maybe this is a west-coast thing? I'll find out soon. Apparently on the east coast they do use "Take Out", though I didn't eat enough junk food to find out for sure.
McDonald's is worse, yes. Their fries have a weird aftertaste, which is probably due to the oil, or possibly because they're not using nice Tasmianian potatoes. They're definitely shinier when they are served; and the "medium" (our "large") box says "America's Favorite Fries" which in a fit of dyslexia I thought said "Australia's Favourite Fries", as in, what I usually see. They've totally abandoned any vestige of "small" size selection, by the way. Their chicken burgers are more heavily promoted -- sometimes the standard McChicken is called "Cajun McChicken" (not sure why/when), and is like ours used to be, all crunchy; they also have a grilled chicken burger which is a lot like a KFC burger and not at all like that fake-grilled rubbish with the carrots we used to have before they got busted.
I think they still try to refer to burgers as sandwiches, whenever they get the chance to refer to them generically.
Subways, I'm sorry to say, is a bit lousy here. The chicken is very mushy when it gets microwaved and not at all "roasted"; the pickles and tomatoes also suffer the mushy fate. The lettuce is also cut differently, not sure about it; but all in all I prefer it the way I know. I can't find the Pizza Sub on the menus here but I am assured it exists elsewhere in the States. They had a BBQ chicken on special at one store in SanFran but it was prepared much more like the mushy Satay Chicken, in saucy chunks (think cat food) rather than the roasted chicken breast with BBQ sauce ... which, if I had asked, I could have bought. The Subway store at The Mission / Embarcadero takes credit cards.
Burger King ... well I was impressed. I always liked their chicken burger at home and this one was just as good, but bigger -- my only complaint would have been small size. However I did pay around $US5.50 for the meal, so I'm really getting less for my money than a $AUD5.25 equivalent product. Plus their chips (er, fries) are strangely better than everybody's :-)
Karl's Junior ... um let me start by saying, it's an indictment on American culture that this chain differentiates itself from the others by telling you they can make the slop which falls out of your burger green, not red. This means they use gaucomole, which is fine, which is probably yum. I guess they're going to try to become the ultimate combination of mexican food and classic burger bar. You can get tacos and stuff there but not me, if I know anything about the difference between the photo and the true result. But listen, I like it when I can eat my burger. Even the MacDonald's here seem to load their burgers with lettuce which is cut in just the wrong way to make it fall out at a rate of 50%.
Just watch out for that stupid bloody Californian sales tax.
Actually, it's a problem in all states. The stupid convention in this country is not to advertise tax-inclusive prices. And the people put up with it.

All in all, the Australian food health laws probably do make a difference.

Insert standard complaint about US coins and banknotes here ...

... and tipping ...

Insert standard comment about the differences in toilets ... no they do not flush anticlockwise in Australia, because they do not spin at all! They kinda, dovetail-flush, if you know what I mean.

Some accent / dialect difficulties (warning: list is not comprehensive):

"Abbatoir" apparently doesn't exist ... say "slaughter house"
I'm at Macworld Expo, playing with a Microsoft Intellimouse ...
Citizen: "What are you doing with that mouse?"
Me: "I'm trying it on different things ... see? It has no ball."
Citizen: "What?"
Me: "See underneath it? It's got no ball, no ball on the mouse."
Citizen: "IT'S WHAT?!"
Me: Sighs. Adopts American drawl. "Iyt's gart norw bahhl ..."
Citizen: "Oh, that's clever ..."
You get that a lot ... it's either "EXCUSE ME?!" or "IT'S WHAT?!"
I have no idea why, but saying "Lost and Found" didn't work on one security guard. Maybe it was because I was specially rounding my "ou", not despite.
The Marriott Hotel is pronounced "marry-OTT", which is as if it's a word they never use much.
There's a Melborne around here somewhere, so I can forgive them when they say "Mel-BORN".
But there's a Brisbane here in California and I find to find out if they say "Bris-BANE".

Um, that's about all for now ... I'm sure I've forgotten a few things, so I'll note them down and include them when I get to Boston or Washington.

Well I've finished this page off for good, except for photos maybe. All in all, America hasn't been too different from what I expected, and it hasn't really been worse than I thought or anything, despite the fact that I'm whinging about it here :-) Bottom line is that I knew what to expect, most of the time. I'd visit it again, especially anything in the New England area, but I don't think I want to live there.

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