Category: old blog 2005-2008

Posts from my old blog, which I have moved over here. April 2005-April 2008

Week Fourteen: Wringing in the New Year

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Well, a hard rain fell. California is mopping up after a week of storms that brought floods, mudslides, power-outages and evacuations. Governor Arnie yesterday declared a state of emergency in seven counties, and even finally admitted that the levee system, which has suffered a few breaches in the recent storms, are in desperate need of repair. Both my TV and radio yesterday evening were interrupted by a peculiar (and incomprehensible) announcement warning of flash floods in Modesto and areas around Dry Creek. However, while many have been made homeless, everyone appears ready to admit that under the circumstances we got off pretty lightly. One weatherman said “we dodged the bullet – it could have been far worse.”

That wasn’t the only bullet that needed dodging over the New Year, however. The LAPD, among other police departments, issued a warning to people who follow the tradition of shooting a gun into the air at the stroke of midnight, saying they could face up to a year in prison. Shooting guns into the air! Can you believe this? Apparently it’s quite common in some areas. Have they not heard of ‘party poppers’?  

At least it was dry on New Year’s Eve. The storms gave everybody a window in which to party, so we took the cue and stayed in with a couple of videos. At midnight, we switched to a channel showing the New Year festivities, and I was hoping to see a wonderful firework display in San Francisco, a concert in LA, hell I would have settled for some kids shooting their guns in the air in Sacramento. But what we got was the annual Time Square celebration, thousands of people packed into the neon dungeon, waiting for a large crystal ball to drop (but not break). I was disappointed; you probably think, what a grouch, but the thing is, it happened three hours beforehand, and the TV stations had the cheek to say it was ‘Live’! As if Californians do not realize that New York is on the other side of the country. Now New York is a great city and I wish them no disrespect, but is it too much to ask that we see an actual live event from one of the equally great cities in our time zone.

I resolved to write a letter to the TV stations to complain. “I don’t care how old Dick Clarke is, I don’t care if it is tradition…” I started to imagine myself as a revolutionary, leading the secession of the West away from the Empire States, dumping boxes of party-poppers into the San Francisco Bay in protest. Then sleep overwhelmed me, and when I awoke the storms were back, the flood warnings in place, and I realized I didn’t care that much about New Year’s Eve. “I can’t believe it’s 2006,” I overhear imaginary people saying. Well I can; I’ve had a year to prepare for it after all.

Week Thirteen: A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

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My wife gave me a bike for Christmas, and I cannot wait to use it. Davis, being a college town (and flat as a pancake) is a bicycle haven, being the most two-wheel friendly city in the US. The bike lanes are bigger than the car lanes and run all over the place. I think I will have to wait until a little while for the maiden voyage though, because right now it is raining hard, and according to the news there is plenty more to come.

I swear to you, the news here in California is obsessed with the weather. The nightly headlines always open with the weather, promising downpours and showers, and warnings like “if you go outside, please bring an umbrella.” The local Sacramento station has a snazzy machine, the ‘Doppler Three’, a kind of radar which detects the stormclouds rolling in from the Pacific. Colourful images wash across the screen, commentated by excited forecasters on the verge of seizure. It is their favourite toy, and they play with it as much as possible.

A few weeks ago, the temperature actually dropped below freezing for about an hour or so. It happened overnight, but we had plenty of warning, telling us to “cover over plants” and “keeps pets indoors”. Meanwhile, in other parts of the US, ice-storms are ravaging communities and severe blizzards are blocking up roads and bringing down power-lines. Here in California though, it’s a little bit nippy – ooh, better watch out, better wear them gloves! The rest of the country must think Californians, so unused to adverse weather, are such babies.

It is easy to make fun, of course, and forget that the heavy rain is a serious issue in flood-threatened Sacramento valley. A lot of people are out on the roads over the Holiday Season, and the wet freeways can be very, very dangerous. Already this year California has seen more road-deaths over Christmas than last year – twenty-seven in all. But what gets me about the news service’s over-emphasis on the weather is that it provides a nice distraction from the real news. Shootings are reported every night in Sacramento; it’s like shotgun alley down there, but it almost always comes second to the weather. The other night it was briefly mentioned that President Bush managed to extend the heinous Patriot Act, while Dick Cheney was announcing ‘essential’ budget cuts to medicare and student loans. But it was all glossed over very quickly, because we had to get back to our report from Doppler Three, “Hey, where’s that rain?!”

Coming from the UK, I know about precipitation. It’s even in the national anthem (“Long To Rain Over Us…”). Part of me is even jealous of that Doppler machine – I bet Michael Fish wishes he had one of those back in ’87. But when there is real news going on in America, with its President conducting illegal wiretaps and members of his administration facing indictment after indictment, and when the weather in other states is beyond California’s wildest nightmares, I think it might be a good idea to step away from the Doppler. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go and try out my bike. Luckily, my wife bought me a rain jacket too.

Week Twelve: Santa’s Claws

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He has a long white beard, lives in a cave in the North Pole that nobody can find, he has hundreds of splinter cells in major cities around the world, he breaks into people’s houses and leaves unmarked packages about the place, and his elusiveness is causing many to question his very existence. I caught up with the man most Americans know as ‘Santa’ and most Brits call ‘Father Christmas’ recently, and asked him what he thought of the so-called ‘War On Christmas’ raging in the US.

“I’m not very Merry about it,” he grumbled. “For one thing, I’m the one who does all the work every year, sleighing all over the world, going up and down strange chimneys, delivering presents to orphans, but who gets the credit? Jesus! I mean, they don’t call it ‘Claus-mas’, do they?” He went on to complain that not only does America have no National Elf Service, but also has no mince pies. Surprisingly, he also revealed that he hates it when children leave him milk. “Don’t they know I’m lactose intolerant?”

So does he prefer to say ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’? “Holiday? Not for me, mate. Work my woolly hat off, I do.” Santa doesn’t mince his pies. “The whole Holiday Tree thing made me go ‘ho ho ho’, I tell you. Who are they offending? You don’t see Jewish people calling the Menorah a ‘Holiday Candlestick’, do you?” Well, there’s also Kwanzaa, I reminded him. “Oh yeah, Kwanzaa! What is that, exactly? Is it something Madonna’s doing?” Okay Santa, back to bed.

I admitted I wasn’t sure myself, but moved things along, asking him finally what list George W Bush was on this year – ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’. “It’s very close,” he revealed. “I think this one will go right up to Christmas Eve. It could all depend on Ohio.”

Originally posted 12/20/2005

Week Eleven: Revenge of the State

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As I write, news is coming out that Stanley Tookie Williams has just been executed at San Quentin prison California. A founding member of a notorious LA street gang, he has been on Death Row for 24 years, but has since become a reformed character, writing books for children urging them away from gang culture and brokering peace deals between warring gangs. As a model for rehabilitation he has nonetheless been a figure of debate, not least for the fact he has always denied committing the murders for which he was convicted. Today it fell to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency and offer Tookie a life rather than death sentence, but he chose to reprise his role as Terminator, and now Tookie Williams is dead, and redemption is rendered meaningless.

Out of the death-penalty states, California is not exactly major-league. Tookie was only the twelfth to receive capital punishment here – compare that with the 355 or so that Texas has killed (source: BBC). The US recently passed its 1000th execution mark – a thousand, that is, since the death penalty was reintroduced back in the seventies (Gary Gilmore was the first, him from that song by the Adverts). President Bush terminated many during his reign as Texas Governor, but of course not nearly as many as he has condemned to death since the invasion of Iraq. This weekend he finally addressed the mind-boggling number of Iraqi citizens who have perished since he ordered the troops in – about thirty thousand. Their ghosts would fill White Hart Lane (and probably make more noise, too). If he has few qualms about those sorts of figures, then sparing the lives of convicted killers is unlikely to keep him up at night. But what gives the State the right to commit what is effectively murder with an official name?

What’s more, it seems to be the Christian right-wing that is the strongest supporter of capital punishment, quoting ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. Surely as Christians they should be focusing more on the New Testament than the Old, on forgiveness rather than vengeance? Murder never solves murder, even for the families of the victims. Sure, the temptation to give in to base hatred is enormous when you have lost loved ones, but as a society aren’t we striving to rise above hate? Besides, if a man were to go out and kill in order to exact revenge, the State would class him as a murderer. Why then is the State not seen as a murderer when it carries out executions?

Because, as the Iraq conflict has shown, the State has no problem with being a murderer, none at all, and therein lies the problem. Why should we be surprised if there are people who want to kill us for the crimes of our State? We call them madmen, but our State is the one encouraging that kind of thinking. As one wise fellow standing outside San Quentin tonight lamented, “‘an eye for an eye…’ makes everyone blind and everyone toothless.” Murder does not appease Hate, it foments it.

Originally posted 12/13/2005

Week Ten: Do They Know It’s Christmas?

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We bought our Christmas Tree at the weekend, just a little one, very inoffensive – or so I thought. Apparently, some people are offended by the term ‘Christmas’ Tree, preferring to use the general term ‘Holiday’ Tree. It sounds trifling, I know, but this debate is gripping the nation. On one side, the anti-religious lobby and political correctionists argue that ‘Christmas’ offends those who aren’t Christian, despite the utter lack of Christian imagery anywhere in Christmas paraphernalia (were there candy canes and reindeer in Bethlehem? I doubt it). On the other, there are the reactionists, who have decided they will boycott stores who fail to use the term ‘Christmas’. Backlash and counter-backlash, as if Santa hasn’t got enough to deal with just working out who’s been naughty and nice.

I bet they are laughing at this in other countries. For one thing, to call it the ‘Holiday’ season is kind of a misnomer – they don’t even get Boxing Day off here. Most people have to go back to work while still under the influence of turkey, unlike at Thanksgiving. Secondly, if ‘Holiday’ is such a safe alternative, how come nobody has realised that its etymology is ‘holy day’? Isn’t that, you know, religious? While we are on the subject why don’t we change the names of the days of the week? I mean, ‘Thursday’, I don’t want to offend people who don’t worship Thor. The whole ‘separation of church and state’ thing here has become so divisive that it has lost all perspective. I don’t know anybody that would seriously be ‘offended’ if I wished them a ‘Merry Christmas’, and not a ‘Happy Holiday’. If I wanted to offend, I could do a lot worse.

We could just call it ‘Yule’. They still do in Scandinavia (cf. Danish ‘jul’). The French seem happy with ‘Noël’, and the Germans are content with ‘Weihnacht’ (‘holy night’). They, from whom we adopted the tradition, call their trees ‘Tannenbaums’. I find it incredible that in American English the word ‘Christ’ should suddenly cause so much offense at this time of year. But I am not American. I understand that this country does have issues where religion is concerned.

Which leaves us with the whole problem of Jesus’ birthday. Those who advocate ‘Christmas’ over Holidays for reasons of the nativity will argue tooth and nail that as Christ’s birthday, it should be named as such. Now I know that the day was chosen by the Church many years ago because it coincided with the holy day of Mithras, celebrated by the Romans. But I never understood why Christians hold so fast to the belief that Jesus was actually born on the 25th of December, when surely (if all years begin from his birth) it should have been January 1st? I tell you, after all this tiring debate, everyone needs a Holiday.

Originally posted 12/6/2005

Week Nine: Turkey Day

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In the UK people complain about Christmas getting earlier every year, to the tune of Wizzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”. In the US, however, Christmas comes when it is told – that is, on the day after Thanksgiving, announced on calendars as ‘The Biggest Shopping Day Of The Year’. Across fifty states, while the turkey, the cranberries and the pumpkin pie are settling down for the night, coupons are carefully cut out of colossal piles of newspaper adverts, while alarms are set for thankless wee hours, all for the pleasure of braving the November elements and the restless lines outside Best Buy. Most people have their Christmas shopping done by about midday, if they survive the crowds fighting over the last half-price laptop. Tensions run so high that in one news report, one Wal-Mart customer said he would be bringing a gun for security next year. There’s no need, you can buy one while you’re there.

The rush to the shops ushers in the green-and-red coloured (green money, red accounts) season, drawing a close to what is surely America’s Favourite Holiday. It is also perhaps its purest, unsurprising given Thanksgiving’s supposedly puritan origins. The pressure of Gift-Giving is utterly absent, as is the boring seasonal complaint about the commercialisation of a religious feast. Unlike at Christmas time, Hollywood churns out no big awful Thanksgiving movies. It is unsullied and simple, yet wholly American – this is one holiday the US feels no need to share with the world (except the Canadians, who hold their own Thanksgiving a month earlier). It is a family feast, and boy is it a feast.

It all begins on Wednesday afternoon, aka “One Of The Biggest Travel Days Of The Year” (the other being the Sunday after). TV is pretty much limited to live reports from airports and congested freeways, interspersed with tips on cooking the turkey and stories about the Pilgrims. If anybody actually makes it to the family homestead in time for Thanksgiving morning, they can expect to watch the quite dreadful Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live from New York. If you have watched any New York-based comedy, you will know that this parade is huge, and consists largely of enormous themed balloons of characters such as Garfield or Ronald McDonald. In those shows something ‘hilarious’ always goes wrong, such as Porky Pig floats away or collapses onto a crowd. This year, for real (as Ali G might put it), one balloon actually did fall down, injuring a small girl. Now I know I always found such events ridiculously corny as a sitcom joke, but in real life I must admit I found it pretty amusing. Much more amusing than the American Football, which is the other Thanksgiving televisual tradition, but by then I was well into the pre-meal snacks.

Now according to the American public broadcasting channel, whose opinion I value over all other US channels (which is not saying very much, really), Thanksgiving was meant to be a fast, until Benjamin Franklin came along with his bag of vowels and said it should be made a feast. An extra point in Scrabble for one thing. I don’t know how true that is, nor do I care, but let me tell you, if it’s done to tradition it’s the biggest dinner you’ll ever eat. The turkey is generally gigantic and takes about a month to cook. Dessert this year consisted of a showdown: pumpkin pie (excellently cooked by my wife) vs apple pie (wonderfully baked by her mom). We aren’t talking Blur vs Oasis here; I had both, and my stomach wasn’t complaining. Where pie is concerned, there is always room at the inn.

I washed it all down with a few glasses of local hefe-weizen beer, and put my feet up to watch the evening movie. Sadly, it was a repeat of the seriously dated Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I knew Santa was already on his way, bringing his bad movie tv with him. While watching the scene of the big mothership with my belly making strange alien noises, a thought occurred to me: I’m glad it isn’t Thanksgiving Every Day. If it were, the average American would be a whole lot fatter – now there’s something to give thanks for.

Originally posted 11/29/2005

Week Eight: Cold Call California

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The phone rang yesterday morning, disturbing me from a particularly exciting dream. I was waiting for my warm beer at a work-soiled North London pub, when the entire floor fell away, and all of the pub fell into the Underground. When I told them I didn’t want my beer any more and could I have my money back, they told me I could, but would have to wait while they rebuilt. While I was waiting, the incessant ringing prompted me out of my warm sheets, and I was greeted with a loud and bright southern accent, asking for Mister Scully. I wanted to tell him he was dead and I was his ghost, but he pressed on regardless, claiming to be a ‘courtesy call’ from some Police organization. “Ah jus’ wanna thank y’all for buckling up in your automobiles, sir,” he beamed.

“Do what?” I replied, confused, still half-expecting my warm beer refund to arrive any moment. The southern accent continued. “We are offering you the opportunity to make a donation to us, sir, of only fifteen dollars…” I had to ask him to repeat himself several times (a good enough tactic with cold-callers – try it, it is great fun) for, linguist though I am, I just couldn’t understand. Give me ancient Gothic any day. I told him I didn’t want to give him any money. “Well how about ten dollars then?” he retorted. “How about I poo all over your desk?” I retorted bravely, admittedly after I had hung up.

The cold-caller problem here is ridiculous. I know it can be bad in Britain, but here it is truly incessant. We never sign up for anything that might mean extra junk emails or phone calls, and I always check the little boxes saying ‘bugger off with your adverts’. It does not stop them getting through to me. The other day one called, from an unnamed company, telling me that “somebody in your family entered our competition and you have WON one of our prizes!” I wanted to say, oh well I’ll give you my date of birth, it was yesterday. The prizes? $50K cash, $25K cash, a car, or an unspecified prize (likely to be a loaf of stale bread). How can they lie so blatantly? Maybe because a lot of people actually do believe all this shit. This is America after all, the land of commercials. If they say it in an advert, it must be true. That is why American Presidents act like they are selling washing powder most of the time (as opposed to ethnic cleansing powder, I suppose…).

Nevertheless, I am going to gracefully embrace this culture, and take full advantage. I am going to get a phonebook, and call people randomly, saying “Hiya Mister Aardvark! My name’s Pete calling from Scully Industries and I have selected YOU as our WINNER, all you need to do is send me twenty bucks to go down the pub, no strings attached, once in a lifetime offer!” It’s bound to work at least once, and then I can get that drink. Hopefully the floor will stay where it is this time.

 

Originally posted 11/22/2005

Week Seven: Murder is Meat

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When I lived in France there was a restaurant chain called ‘Flunch’. I always thought it was a bit dangerous naming your eatery after the noise made by vomit hitting the bottom of a bucket, but then I remembered that the ‘Happy Eater’ restaurants, which once graced many a dual carriageway roadside across Britain, chose an icon of somebody putting their fingers down their throat as their corporate image. It was a kind of disclaimer, or so they told me as a child when I spilled my insides all over the slide in the play-area.

America seems to have also taken the name game seriously. In California there is a chain of fast-food restaurants called ‘In-n-out Burger’. As they only serve burgers, I do not go in there, but it’s probably just as well. However, my new favourite place in Davis is the little 50’s style diner known to locals as ‘Murder Burger’. Their tagline reads ‘So Good, They’re To Die For’, and they really are. I had an ostrich burger (while staff made possibly real noises of slaughtering an ostrich in the kitchen) and a huge, ultra-thick peanut-butter milkshake. It was an overwhelming experience. Their title dish is a massive 1lb burger called ‘Annihilation’, that if I ate red meat I would try, but it would probably kill me.

Their sign no longer reads ‘Murder Burger’, but goes by the moniker ‘Redrum Burger’. When they opened a second branch about eight years ago in a different town (one less liberal than Davis), some locals complained about the name, so they held a poll among their faithful customers to change the name. The winner, by a mile, was actually ‘Murder Burger’, but they went with the runner-up. Of course, nobody in Davis ever calls it ‘Redrum’; that would be so, like, not cool.

In a world of Taco Bells (read: ambulance sirens) and Burger Kings (read: throne up), Murder Burger sits comfortably, even if the clientele doesn’t.

 

Originally posted 11/15/2005

Week Six: Show Me The Levees

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Yesterday was California’s ‘Special Election Day’. Voters went to the polls not to elect a new President or oust an old Governor, but to vote on eight ‘Propositions’, changes to the state law. Popular referenda are more commonplace here than in the UK, but the advertising campaigns that accompany them are vitriolic to say the least, usually sponsored by special interest groups such as ‘parents against Prop 73’, with slogans like ‘another bad idea from the Governor’. As it turns out, the public turned down all eight measures, leaving Arnie in a bit of a sticky situation. But the problem that is really worrying Sacramento right now is not the seismic events at the ballot box, but the threat of a catastrophic flood caused by unrepaired levees in the wake of the ineviteble Big Earthquake.

We have all, after New Orleans, heard about levees. We all know what happens if governments ignore their state of disrepair. Last weekend we moved to Davis, in the greater Sacramento area. Reading the Sunday newspapers, I have discovered that not only is the Sacramento Delta considered one of the most likely places in the US to suffer a massive flood, but that governments do not want to face the problem, the ‘big, dark secret that no one wants to talk about’ (as a UC Davis geologist has put it). The levees protecting the Delta dams need updating, and fast.

Everybody knows that California has long been expecting the ‘Big One’. It suffers tiny quakes every single day, but the state is splitting apart, geologically speaking. The Central Valley will eventually become a huge Bay (probably forcing the prices of houses up rather than down). If a large earthquake strikes – it could strike tomorrow, for all we know – it is likely that the levees will fail and FEMA will once more be pulling people from rooftops. And it may not even need to be a quake that triggers it – the Sacramento Bee is equally concerned with the threat of a ‘Pineapple Express’ storm, presumably from the south. But worse than that, such a catastrophe would destroy the water supply for two-thirds of California’s population for anything up to a year. We’d need more than Arnie to get us out of that.

So when we moved into our flat (sorry, ‘apartment’), I made sure that we were placed on the second floor. When that Big Quake comes, and the floodwaters invade, the roof will be ours! I’ve already started making my sign; it reads, ‘Food, Water and Football Results Urgently Needed!’

 

Originally posted 11/10/2005

Week Five: Scary Monsters, Super Treats

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A couple of weeks ago an announcer on the Weather Channel enthusiastically noted: “the London version of Hallowe’en is called Guy Fawkes Day, and they actually burn effigies of Guy Fawkes on top of bonfires; I think our own Hallowe’en is much more civilized.” Naturally I forgive her of her ignorance of British culture (and the history of Hallowe’en), and I certainly wouldn’t expect her to add that this year is the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, but calling American Hallowe’ens civilized? Now that is really taking the candy.

Since I arrived here I have been overwhelmed by the amount of costume superstores that spring up magically around every city and town. They sell everything from sexy nurse outifts to Jar-Jar Binks masks, even costumes for your pet dog. People go all out here. Houses are decked with all manner of cobwebs, skeletons, and jack o’lanterns, while gardens are filled with comical tombstones. Grocery stores prepare way in advance for the panic-buying of candy. The TV shows endless repeats of hammy old horror movies for a fortnight beforehand. Hallowe’en is truly one of the big American celebrations: commercial, overblown and utterly saccharine. And I got right into the spirit, eagerly carving my pumpkin and displaying it on the doorstep.

I was rather nervous about the impending onslaught of trick-or-treaters, though. Hallowe’en in an American town is spooky enough to anybody who grew up watching Michael Myers hack his way through doors, but I was worried about what would happen to us if we ran out of candy. Would we fall foul of ‘tricks’? Now we aren’t talking about card tricks here. I had heard that the night before Hallowe’en is sometimes known here as Devil’s Night, when youths would routinely smash windows and set fire to things (in my native Burnt Oak that is known simply as Saturday night). The TV spoke of the possibility of having flaming dog-poo left on the doorstep, or being toliet-papered, that is, having your tree or house covered in rolls of Andrex (soft, strong, and very very wrong). What sort of society is this that has bred such an atmosphere of retribution? The whole notion of ‘trick-or-treat’ is basically extortion – give us sweets, or the porch gets it.

I took no chances. We stocked up on candy – little packs of M&Ms, ‘fun-size’ Snickers bars, that sort of thing (by the way, there’s nothing ‘fun’ about a chocolate bar the size of your big toe). You cannot give them home-made treats such as cookies or apple pie here, nor even fruit. A few years back, there were a few cases of apples being poisoned (surely in the spirit of Snow White?), and razor-blades being inserted into candy. To this day, hospitals all over America offer a free x-ray service on Hallowe’en to check sweets for razors – they really have taken the fun out of the fear factor here, haven’t they. Anyway, the trick-or-treaters started knocking as soon as the Sun went down, pint-sized candy-addicts in badly thought-out costumes, most of them Mexican, all of them sugar-crazed. One girl had made no effort at all, dressing in her pyjamas and putting colored glitter on her cheeks. Does that deserve a candy? She had a pillow-case with her, expecting to fill it; to be honest, she looked like she usually did fill it, and empty it just as quickly. But on the whole the children were far more imaginative than the ‘bin-liner cloak’ witches costumes of my own and many other Brits’ childhoods. Thankfully, however, we suffered no ‘tricks’ (that I know of…), and I still have a few sweets to nibble on. The night of fear is over.

Yet there are some, apparently, who feel that it would be better to pretend that Hallowe’en does not exist at all. I don’t mean those who turn out the lights, close the blinds and wait for the doorbell to stop ringing. I have been told that there are now many schools which refuse to acknowledge Hallowe’en at all, and have cancelled the costume-wearing traditions seen by many American schoolchildren as a rite of passage. It is now celebrated as ‘Harvest Day’, and all of the ghosts and scary stories have been removed. Now that is what I call uncivilized.

 

Originally posted 11/1/2005