Month: July 2006

Week Forty-Three: Hot and Heavy

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In an attempt to pretend that the current hot spell isn’t happening, I decided to pop down to the twice-weekly Davis Farmers’ Market after work today. It is a market that locals are very proud of, a place for the organic-conscious anti-big-box Davisites, where fresh and expensive fruit and veg rub shoulders with big, sticky pastries and stalls urging people to vote for something or other. It has been a Davis tradition for about thirty years, and no heat wave is going to scare those locals away. I didn’t stay long; for one thing, it’s not very big, and for someone who has lived in France the Davis Farmers’ Market is a pitiful display. Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare it with the markets I used to visit in Aix-en-Provence, but there does seem to be a sort of self-congratulatory manner about the people that shop there. The other reason I didn’t stay is because it was just too hot, and my shirt was feeling as sticky as one of those pastries. It was the eleventh day in a row that temperatures had topped a hundred degrees, and I just wanted to be somewhere cooler. Even in Davis it doesn’t usually get this hot.

It has been reported that at least eighty people have died in California as a result of the current heat wave, most of them elderly. Newspapers and TV stations are advising people to use their air-conditioning, while being mindful that the energy supply is being stretched to the limit right now. If you don’t have it at home, according to the SF Chronicle, you should go to the library, the movies, or the mall (not the Farmer’s Market, then). They also recommend that people ‘cut back on physical activity, such as walking’ – that shouldn’t be too difficult for the more sedentary of Americans (that’s not a dig – I’m becoming one, and my bike is collecting cobwebs; first it was too wet to cycle, then it was because of the allergies, now it’s just too hot). Somebody said to me that you’ve got to treat this heat wave like a Chicago blizzard – just hunker down and wait for it to go away.

It’s a dangerous time, and it’s not only affecting the human population. Thousands of Central Valley dairy cows have died in the high temperatures, and milk production has been hit accordingly. If the situation gets any worse, and the price of milk soars as much as the price of gas, they may have to consider invading Wisconsin. Crops too are suffering, and that doesn’t just affect the Farmers’ Market – California is the bread-basket of America. Power is being stretched to the limit, with the threat of rolling blackouts meaning little to those thousands who are already without electricity in many communities. There doesn’t seem to be any let-up in the blistering weather. With fewer people walking or cycling, perfectly air-conditioned cars are out in force, contributing to the dense, polluted hot Central Valley air. Down in the Bay they have initiated Spare the Air days, and people are being enticed to leave the automobile at home by offering days of free public transport on the BART system. Can you imagine the London Underground being free on hot days? Can you imagine how unbearable it would become? Well it wasn’t all that bearable on the BART, by all accounts, and crime on the network rose sharply on the days when it was free. When will it all cool down?

This weekend, they say. It may drop down to the 90s.

Week Forty-Two: California Burnin’

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So you’ve got a record-breaking heat wave back in Britain right now? The weather sites tell me that this weekend, temperatures will reach 111˚F (that’s about 44˚C in old money) in dusty old Davis. In that sort of heat, people won’t need their barbecues, they’ll be able to cook their steak and their corn-on-the-cobs off the pavement (subject to stringent health and safety laws, of course). Down in San Francisco, however, it is forecast to be about 77˚F (22˚C), which is actually fairly warm for the Bay Area. That’s a difference of almost forty degrees, in a little over an hour and a half’s drive. I know where I’m going this weekend.

It’s high summer in California; hot, dry, relentless. Air-conditioners are pumping, while electricity suppliers are urging consumers not to be too wasteful (presumably because they won’t know what to spend the extra massive profits on). In various parts of the state wildfires are burning, causing huge plumes of smoke to drift across the Sierras into Nevada like distress calls. The smoke cloud from this week’s Canyon fire in Stanislaus County was so vast it was visible from space. Firefighters are working overtime to control the blazes, but they know it’ll be a long hot summer. It’s thought that because we had an unusually wet winter, the brush has grown longer and thicker than normal this year. Now that it has been dried golden in the Sun, the thick brush has turned California into a giant tinder-box.

Wildfires have always been a problem for California, as elsewhere. I remember watching the news in Britain over the years, when they would show news of one wildfire or another attacking the hills around Los Angeles (such as the Cedar Fire of ‘03), images of wealthy movie executives watching helplessly as the flames reduced their secluded mansions to ash and insurance cash. One of the worst fires of recent years was the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm in the East Bay, which killed 25 people and caused $1.5 billion damage. Some of these fires are started by lightning strikes, others by small grass fires that are not contained, and others (as was the Cedar Fire) are started by human beings, be it carelessly or deliberately. Some of them destroy homes and businesses; others destroy some of the oldest and largest trees on the planet.

As if it wasn’t hot enough! I currently have three fans pointed in my direction (that’s already more than Cristiano Ronaldo has), and have had several trips to the fridge to get Sobes, sodas, cold water, Sudwerk beer. I may move on to artificially flavoured popsicles soon, or maybe go for a late evening swim. On the CD player is The Style Council, ‘Long Hot Summer’ (no, really). Clothes indoors are not an option. While my brain thinks only of ways to cool down my body, I keep running into one thought that brings me no end of cheer: at least I’m not on the Tube.

Week Forty-One: I’m Gonna Git You, Soccer

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As the 2006 World Cup blasts away into the history books, everybody’s talking about him. Well, a lot of people are talking about him. A bit. And most of them are foreigners. Yet there is a sense that, for a few shining moments, most people in America know who Zinedine Zidane is, that bald French guy who finished his soccer career by head butting an Italian square in the chest. “This is one Frenchie who doesn’t surrender!” Quite. Of course, now it’s all over, and the brief and unusual connection to the rest of the world’s reality has been immediately replaced with all of the arguments of why they don’t like football/soccer here anyway. My eyes were led to an article on the front of USA Today, that acme of journalism (or is it acne?), entitled “Why the United States doesn’t take to soccer.”

The usual arguments are bandied about – not enough scoring, not enough strategy, and what’s the deal with those ties? We want winners! While many Americans – usually of immigrant stock – follow the World Cup with a passion (if no other tournament), most are unimpressed, preferring to stick with what they know. Yet the article threw up other factors for the lack of American interest in the Beautiful Game: “Soccer has roots in Britain,” it states, “which exported the game to its colonies some 150 years ago. Little surprise we just said no.” Even though American Football has its origins in the rules of Rugby Union that came from, yup, Britain (source 1, 2). Another myth that the Brits for one love to uphold is that ‘soccer’ is an Americanism, yet it originated in the English press at the end of the last century as a shortening of ‘association football’, to prevent confusion with the pick-the-ball-up variety. The century-and-a-half argument between the hand and foot versions of the ball game did assert itself, when a sports pundit remarked that soccer lacked proficiency, and what skills are displayed are as irrelevant as plate-spinning: “God didn’t intend us to use our feet and our heads,” although I suspect he was actually referring to the sport of sitting in front of mind-numbingly bad TV.

‘Un-American’, ‘Not in our DNA’; let’s face it, footy, the US is Just Not That Into You. But I get the feeling that headlines like this are more of an attempt to reassure worried Americans that their traditional culture base is not under threat from the Sport of the Foreigner. Completely bypassing Budweiser-commercial irony, it is even suggested by one supposed academic that the sport might be accepted if they make some American-friendly changes, such as getting rid of those pesky goalkeepers. But it really does come down to what football does best, and that is simple tribal loyalty – you stick to what you grew up with. As long as the media paints soccer as ‘new to America’ and as the sport of the foreigner, people will never have the same attachments to it as their own sports, with their own long histories. History is important to this tribal loyalty, and many Americans don’t realize that their own country’s World Cup history stretches further back than England, and even current champions Italy. The US came joint-third in the first World Cup, and in England’s first ever appearance, in 1950, they lost – yes, lost – to the Americans.

Does the world even want America to be that good at football though? I get the impression outside of the US that football is better off without the ‘American touch’, and that too much American interest could damage the game and turn it into a soulless, corporate-suckling mega-financial madhouse where dollars talk more than loyalty and players care more for massive sponsorships than for trophies (whereas, what we have now, um… ). So why does America always tell itself that it’s on a planet outside the soccer world? It could be because of isolationist issues, let the world do their thing and we’ll do our thing; on the other hand it could be that they secretly want to be on the team, but feel nervous about their chances, not wanting to be the last kid left against the school-yard wall. Before the First World War, the US was not really a player globally, it preferred to be out there on its own. The twentieth century saw America take a centre-stage politically, before ultimately becoming the Brazil of global affairs. If the US takes the same initiatives on the football field as they have on the battlefield, they could dominate (though they’d probably score a lot more own-goals, and you wouldn’t want to be sent off against them, or you may be sent to an off-shore holding camp for ‘red-carded combatants’ ). This, I feel, may be an analogy too far (though I know there’s a joke in there about handing out green cards). Let’s just say for now that you watch football, I watch football, let’s call the whole thing off.

Week Forty: America’s Birthday

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I’m glad England doesn’t have a birthday. What would I get it? A World Cup, perhaps? They wouldn’t look after it; they lost the last one, and had to rely on a dog to find it. (Perhaps they should have a dog to manage the team, even a chihuahua would have had the sense to put more than one striker up front.) What’s more, what with the whole ‘United Kingdom’ thing, you couldn’t get a present for England and leave out Scotland or Wales, it really wouldn’t be fair. Still, at least a national birthday would give the English something to do with all those St.George’s flags they took down after Rooney trod on Portuguese balls.

Today was the Fourth of July; in fact it’s on the same date every year. Also known as Independence Day (I think it was named after a famous sci-fi movie; I wish there was a Star Wars Day as well). Over the past few days we have partaken in the barbecues, the cold beer, the discounted shopping, and, tonight, the fireworks. Hundreds (possibly millions, I can’t count in the dark) gathered as the sun set in the Davis Community Park, seated upon towels, deck-chairs or just the plain old grass, as if waiting for the Mother Ship to play them a bit of Jarre. The exploding colours began immediately, accompanied by no music (though local radio stations apparently play a soundtrack you can listen in on with headphones). The funny thing about fireworks is that sometimes, even if you’re unimpressed generally, you feel compelled to say ‘wow,’ and wonder at how the designers managed to get the shape of the explosion just so (well, they’ve had thousands of years to perfect it, maybe millions, I can’t count).

I managed to keep my ‘Independence for whom?’ views to myself as well. I had been a little nervous that, as a Brit, I’d be singled out for attention, them being the enemies in the American Revolution and all. I didn’t feel like getting into the whole thing about me having all Irish ancestry, about California being nowhere near part of the US at the time of the nation’s inception (it wasn’t colonised until much later; in fact, I think it’s about time this colony broke away from King George’s super-empire, those Federal taxes are not being spent as Californians think they should), about the fact it was the colonists and not the colonised who gained independence (it didn’t exactly get better for the Native Americans), or about the fact that most Americans celebrate something that their own ancestors were not part of, because they were immigrants – but that’s getting all messed up in Americana, and the psychology of what defines a country’s self. I’m not going there.

In fact, all I got was a comment on the fact I wore black today. “For us it’s a day of celebration, for you a day of mourning!” It took me a few moments to twig that he wasn’t talking about Beckham standing down as England captain. “But I always wear black,” I mumbled. I think it’s just better to let Americans celebrate their day, cheer for their fireworks, go to their sales, enjoy their barbecues, wave (or burn) their flags; at least they know when they were born, even if they divorced their parents. So Happy Birthday America – look at you, you’re getting bigger every year.