coffee grounds

Well-educated pigeons

Hard men drink ginger beer

(full version, Dominion Post, Tuesday 6 May 2008, B1)

Show and tell

Scenes from recent travels. Remember a picture is worth a thousand words :)

Seen at Auckland Airport, international terminal

Is there a better phrase than double entendre for this? Double entendre implies the speaker/writer is knowingly aware of the double meaning of their words. I am guessing that the American producers of this cereal don't know that that Cafe Fanny is even more hilarious to British-influenced speakers of English. Even in American English it's funny to think of eating your "Cafe Butt" granola. Surely Alice Waters knows these things!

This week's sign of the apocalypse

Athletics NZ has a quote from Newt Gingrich on their homepage. Newt Gingrich, well-known American athlete ... oh, wait!

An update on the New Zealanders with Disabilities Act

Two years ago I reported how we'd seen a man in a wheelchair being loaded onto a plane in a forklift, and this spectacle was publicly announced as the reason for the delay with the flight. It's a good story, though "good" does not mean reflecting well on my home country, or being the desirable way to help people in wheelchairs get onto planes. Good as in unique and distinctive, and certain to raise your attention.

Now I can update this story, and report that there are well signposted lifts/elevators in the Auckland domestic terminal. They may even be functioning, but I didn't check that. There was also no sign that people in wheelchairs were prohibited from using the lift, and had to wait for the forklift. For the sake of New Zealand's reputation, I am relieved ...

Pamela

No ... One of the perennial [trivial] challenges of my life is keeping straight when to use New Zealand and when to use United States English. In this case I'm writing a book review about a New Zealand book for a journal published in the United States, so I have set the language of the text in Microsoft Word to U.S. English. But then I have to use New Zealand words and phrases which get marked with the dreaded red squiggle.

This is what God created copy editors for ...

(Pakeha. Or shorter)

Girls, girls, girls

This will get a lot of unintended hits ...

I went to the track for the first time in 5 months today. That isn't to say that I ran on the track. It's school sports season in Wellington. This means—one rubber track in the city—that occasionally the track is occupied by high school students doing track and field events. I had a premonition this was going to be the case as I jogged up there, seeing a lot of girls in colorful outfits heading up to the park.

So I did my workout on the soccer field above the track. This was less than ideal, with some tight turns; but first interval workout in 5 months it was probably OK not to know I was a couple of seconds off the pace. The long side of a soccer field is 100m, so you can check your pace. As I jogged around in between my 5 x 1000m and 4 x 400m repeats I got to watch the Wellington East Girls sports get started. Nowadays, befitting its location "East" is a very multi-cultural school with Maori, Pacific Island, Asian, Somali, and European students. But it also has "houses," which American readers may or may not be familiar with. Houses are vertical divisions of a school (as opposed to horizontal grade/age divisions), sometimes reflecting literally where the students slept, if it was a boarding school. But for most purposes "houses" in schools were to organize competitive sports and culture. Few modern schools in New Zealand have houses. The high school I attended, started well into the 1950s, didn't have them. But any school originating before World War II probably did, and maybe still does, like Wellington East. Well, the funny thing, after all that explanation, is that East is very multicultural, but the house names commemorate long-deceased, British-born governors of New Zealand. So, as I ambled around the soccer field I got to hear a diversity of accents screaming "Go Onslow," "Go Bledisloe," "Go Jellicoe! The girls were really getting into the spirit of things, and as they started the 60m sprint the gun fired, and then the gun fired again. False start, I knew, even from the top field. But not most of the girls in the race, who tore off down to the finish, while one girl stopped, and waited for the others to stop. The girls in the stands just kept on cheering for the dead Lords and Governors. This commotion caused the announcer to cry out "Girls, girls, girls, you have to be quiet when the races are starting!!!" And then they ran the race again ...

Department of too-easy targets

Quite apart from the humor of reading this with the British understanding of bonk (I think we will all agree, often its own reward), how many [in the American sense] bonk in a 5km? I've always thought that bonk was synonymous with hitting the wall, the [near] total exhaustion of your muscle glycogen. You can certainly struggle to the end of a 5km, but it's a different process entirely ...

What is Waitangi Day?

Re-using an old entry, I answer a question that people ask me in person or by email every year. Not the same people, mind you, because then they know ... The question arises from calendars that have international holidays noted on them, which show February 6 to be "Waitangi Day (NZ)."

Waitangi Day is New Zealand's national day. Now, here's the catch for American readers! Whereas in America, and [I think] most of the non-white Commonwealth, the national day is the day the country became independent of Britain , in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the national day celebrates when the British formalised their status as colonizers. This says quite something about the political and social culture of those countries. [The Commonwealth: that's what the British Empire has become, a free Commonwealth of independent ex-colonies, and Britain]

Anyhow, Waitangi Day is always February 6. It's never Monday-ised, so when it falls on a weekend, sorry, no day off!

Waitangi is pronounced why-tungee.

It's also a place, and the Treaty House, outside of which the Treaty was signed is still there. It's in good shape.

The day remembers -- celebrates is probably the wrong word now -- the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which gave the British "governorship" of New Zealand, but left the [indigenous] Maori population with sovereignty.

As you can guess, it's been a mess ever since trying to work out how you can divide governance and sovereignty! Indeed, there's a whole government tribunal that's devoted to doing just that. Understandably they cop it from both sides.

Your next opportunity to learn about strange Antipodean holidays will come on April 25 with ANZAC Day ...

Foreign students in U.S. college sports

Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only, sorry) about foreign players in U.S college sports. The issue is summed up by two quotes:

Recruiting foreign athletes may well help attract nonathlete students from the same countries," says Matt Mitten, a professor of law at Marquette University

Mark Wetmore, who coaches track and field at the University of Colorado: "As a state institution, we have a responsibility to Colorado and U.S. taxpayers to make sure their sons and daughters have first priority," he says. "Imagine if after 18 years of paying taxes in the state of Colorado, or Maine, or Florida, your daughter has been able to throw the shot put 42 feet, but your state institution does not make an athletics scholarship available to her because they can get someone from Iceland who can throw 43 feet."

The openness of U.S higher education to spending money on foreign students, whether graduate students or athletes, is a huge credit to America. Its persistence over the decades and consistency across institutions speaks to a generosity to the world in American life that many foreigners don't appreciate. But, as ever, the question is that mealy-mouthed word "balance." American "kids" shouldn't see college sports as a benefit for foreigners. The Chronicle article suggests that across the whole country the balance is probably achieved pretty well.

Happy New Year

The cat gets comfortable with the wine glasses

Drunk driving dames

The same cautionary holiday season tale makes its way into papers in Auckland and Minneapolis ...

Homeland security

At a Flying J gas station in Evansdale, IA

Draw your own implications, but I was struck by the effort that had gone into making the sign in the first place, indicative of the concern with terrorism after 9/11 ... and now it's turned off. Guess we don't need to be worry anymore! Moreover, Evansdale, IA is not a known major target of terrorists.

Minneapolis at night

Beautiful clear night with a full moon behind the Prospect Park watertower

While taking this photo of the Minneapolis skyline I didn't notice the prominence of the lights from the university buildings (right foreground) but there they are ... the downtown skyline seems further away than I imagined it to be.

The lamps in Prospect Park and on Tower hill park always remind me of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

The snow makes me think not

For the New Zealand readers ...

In London they have this magazine called In London aimed at the expat Australian/New Zealander/South African population. In the back they have advertisements for property back home. This was one of the New Zealand ones, it's advertised as Whangarei, but the snow and the mountains in the back suggest it's probably not. My guess is it's Queenstown or Wanaka.

Bradman still the best

Cricket has lagged behind baseball in generating more sophisticated measures of players contributions to the game that incorporate variance and conditional measures of performance. This research from the University of Queensland is a step in the right direction:

Batsmen in cricket are invariably ranked according to their batting average. Such a ranking suffers from two defects. First, it does not take into account the consistency of scores across innings: a batsman might have a high career average but with low scores interspersed with high scores; another might have a lower average but with much less variation in his scores. Second, it pays no attention to the “value” of the player’s runs to the team: arguably, a century, when the total score is 600, has less value compared to a half-century in an innings total of, say, 200. The purpose of this paper is to suggest new ways of computing batting averages which, by addressing these deficiencies, complement the existing method and present a more complete picture of batsmen’s performance. Based on these “new” averages, the paper offers a “new” ranking of the top 50 batsmen in the history of Test Cricket.

(PDF)

Typographical errors of the week

You'd hope the Transportation Security Administration would proofread their signs better. At least they're not in the accomodation business too ...

The Minnesota Daily credits Chris Lundstrom with a truly insane, or just really slow, training schedule. (And they spell his name as "Lunsford" in the introduction to the article).

(Images clickable for full sign/article)

Subtle differences

Here is an advertisement that has been getting a lot of airtime on New Zealand television (YouTube embedding disallowed, you'll have to click through, but it's worth it). I point to this ad as an example of the kind of subtle differences between New Zealand and the United States. I don't think you'd see an ad like this in the United States. Now, admittedly it is the American car manufacturers who can only sell cars with reference to scenery, children asleep in minivans, cash rebates and finance terms. The foreign car ads in the United States are more innovative. But even the foreign ads often focus on the car. The connection between the car and the advertisement in "New Lancer, New Life" is subtle, at best. But funny.

Variable weather in New Zealand

What counts for major temperature fluctuations in New Zealand.

Temperatures fluctuated between 8C (45F) and 16C (62F).

To be fair, the clothes needed at 8 and 16 can be quite different. But this is not Minnesota temperature variation.

Lighting up the Dominion

Today is the 100th anniversary of New Zealand becoming a somewhat independent Dominion in the British Empire, as opposed to the even less independent self-governing colony it was before, and the more independent nation it would become even later in the twentieth century. In commemoration they've lit the Parliamentary Library a bit like it was 100 years ago. The actual parliament that was around at the time burned down shortly after, and was replaced by the building below.

As well as lights, there are lectures, including this symposium on "Concepts of Nationhood" I will go to today.

Upstaged

After coming/going back to Minnesota for the last two weeks of August I had to return to Wellington and teach. Such are the obligations of being employed to do just that. On account of a Saturday wedding in Minnesota I booked my ticket back to Wellington for Sunday. After flying over the dateline I was scheduled to get to Wellington at 8am on Tuesday. Having booked the ticket before I knew my teaching schedule I was effectively taking a 1/5 chance I'd miss a class, and a 1/5 chance I'd fly in and have to teach that day.

I got lucky, and my scheduled arrival time of 8am and lecture at 11am gave me 3 luxurious hours before I had to front up and tell my students about the Progressive era and the New Zealand Liberal government, and how modern life began in about December 1910 (at least, according to Virginia Woolf). While I was in America I got absurdly astonished reactions from people who thought that this plan to travel for 27 hours, and then give a lecture was a little too brave. While I'm using my New Zealand-United States comparative history class as an opportunity to impart the wisdom that you shouldn't rush to generalizations about national character, I will. Courtesy of New Zealand's isolation, long plane flights are a fact of life, and New Zealand people just get somewhat used to the idea of jetting in from halfway across the world, and working straight away. Most Americans aren't used to the idea that a 12 hour plane flight is just normal. Indeed, one of my colleagues, having done a similar thing a few weeks ago, told me that the lecture is easy, it's the discussion section/seminar/tutorial where you have to think on your feet that will get you ...

Two weeks of astonished Americans later I got back to Auckland airport, fortified with their astonishment, and determined to show that I was hard core enough to front up to class 3 hours after my 27 hour journey across the world. But I bumped into a colleague at Auckland airport who was just off the plane from Chicago, and heading for Wellington too, and it turned out that he was lecturing at 10am ... I wasn't even the most hard-core-traveling-lecturing person on the plane!

Lectures are easy. You just read a piece of paper and remember to cue up the next Powerpoint slide. Discussions are harder with mild jetlag. That's why you watch a video in the afternoon discussion section, so you only have to discuss articles for 45 minutes, rather than 2 hours.

All in all the arriving at 8, lecturing at 11 idea went very well, so well that I'll do it again when I have the chance.

Reality is better than fiction

You couldn't make up a story as good as this from today's StarTribune. We were at the Fair shortly after this happened, and the commotion had all died down.

University challenge

When it's a cold southerly my office gets cold enough that I need to wear fingerless gloves to keep my hands warm. My question for readers is, can I ask my employer to reimburse me for this expenditure? Or, are the many other perquisites of academic employment such that I should just accept the $25 capital cost for my merino and possum fur gloves that should last a few years? (=suck it up ...)

Avoiding disaster

Public photo from flickr user MosesImages

What can you say? On 9/11 I was in England, not America. When the bridge fell, I was in Wellington, not Minneapolis. I shouldn't voice the thought that I've avoided being on location for these disasters because the next disaster will now follow me.

One of the oddities of life is that I feel like I have two homes. Home is all about feeling, not fixed criteria like location. Hearing about the 35-W bridge collapse made this very clear to me. It felt so intensely local, yet to many of the people round me in Wellington it was all rather abstract. Perhaps if I'd been there I would have been one of the thousands that tried to see the remains of the bridge from up close, or at least a proximate bridge. As it was, I probably had a better view obsessively scouring the internet for photos.

Although the bridge was quite close to our place, I quite rarely drove over it. For me, the 35W bridge will always be one I associate with winter hill repeats. In the Minnesota winter with the prevailing wind being a northwesterly I found the West River Road parkway under 35W to be one of the better hills around. I'd run up the hill into the wind, and then amble slowly back down with the wind behind me. This way I would never get too cold on the downward jog. It was an interesting and unique looking bridge from underneath, and ambling down I always looked up at it. Earlier this year I had one memorable session of 10 repeats up the hill in sub-zero (farenheit) weather. With only the slightest breeze and the sun out, it was quite comfortable and the amazing light of a clear Minnesota winter morning made the scene quite pretty. The muted rush of the Mississippi in winter gurgled downstream as the cars rushed past above on their way to work. It was a good workout, on a good day.

Even without the connection to the now-fallen bridge it would be one of those training runs I'd remember for a while anyway. Returning to Wellington and its hills made me reflective of the hill repeats anyway. And that session on the cold day stood out amongst a winter of hill repeats. An hour's recovery run in Wellington involves more elevation change than a hill session in Minneapolis. Hill repeats are a necessary evil for many runners, but to me they seem even worse mentally because I know that elsewhere in the world--my other home--there's a more scenic path to fitness up the hills.

There's another hill on the West River Road, under the I-94 bridge. That bridge looks more solid. I'll have to trust it stays up this winter.

Be happy with what you have ...

Which is worse? Running in July in Wellington, or Minneapolis

Running in July in Minneapolis was for the most part not great. The heat, the humidity, the ozone days, the bugs. You make do, enjoy the chance to take it slowly 6 days out of 7, and run on a schedule dictated by the weather. Running in July in Wellington can have few charms too. I'm of the opinion that there's no good clothing for rain and 40°F/5°C. I just put on polypropelene on my top and hands, and go for it. If the southerly makes it too cold for the legs to warm up you don't run quickly and risk pulling a muscle, you just get out there and run, and wait for the weather to change, which it will do in a day. That's the good thing about a maritime climate. The cold and rain rarely stick around for more than a couple of days in a row. In short, my question when I left Minneapolis for Wellington, was which would be worse, cold and rain or hot and muggy.

In general and in respect of running I try—if not always successfully—to be happy with what I have. No point in raging against the weather. Those caveats aside, I think I'm now in a position to judge this slightly ridiculous question.

After 20 miles over Makara Peak and the Skyline Track in intermittent rain and hail below 40°F/5°C, the trails more than make up for the 30mph wind with 50mph gusts, and the rain. You have to pick your trails more carefully in the winter but 80% of the hundreds of miles of trails in the city are runnable even in the winter. You come round the corner and get glorious view of the Pacific Ocean or the city or the regenerating bush. I almost forgot that my legs were red with cold ...

Reading recommendation: Matthew Engel discusses month-by-month moves for the best weather in the world.

And in other news ...

... starting a new job keeps you busy. Not that I'm complaining. Quite the contrary.

Amongst the thousands of minor linguistic differences between New Zealand and the United States I had not happened upon the word "scheme" having different connotations. With the introduction of KiwiSaver (like IRAs) there is much talk of "retirement savings schemes." Apparently, this makes Americans think of retirement savings conspiracies and plots. Scheme has more innocent connotations in New Zealand.

In the course of trying to learn more about this "scheme," I learned that you shouldn't go to personal finance seminars with academics. It was the worst example of specific ignorance on the topic at hand combined with general certitude of righteousness and knowledge I've seen in a long time ... I will say no more, and name no names, but you can probably guess what it was like. What made it odder was that I was by far the youngest person at this seminar. Most of the people there to learn about Kiwisaver were north of 40, probably most of them north of 50 years old, and were mostly concerned about the overlap with their existing retirement savings conspiracies (or schemes). This seemed to be missing the point of the KiwiSaver policy, which is mostly not to help people who are 62 top up their savings, but to change the mindset of younger people, and by offering blandishments from employers and the government get the relatively young saving a little bit early on.

I went from there to the first two hour seminar/tutorial I've ever done as the professor/lecturer/person who claims to know what they're talking about. Done it many times from the other side of the table. This was kinda exhausting, not because of the class who were great, but because facilitating discussion for two hours is tiring. Luckily I did not think "this is the first 2 hour seminar I'll ever do" beforehand. However, I think Tuesday might become a double-run day on account of the hour of general lassitude that a 2 hour seminar induces. Maybe that ratio will rise (seminar:lassitude) over time. Gradual adaptation to stress. Everything in life is like running ...

You're not in Guatemala now, Dr. Ropata

Happy 4th of July! Outside America, and in winter, you don't miss it except as a memory.

Today's title will either be instantly recognizable, or totally meaningless.

If it's totally meaningless, this classic dialog is from the first episode of the New Zealand soap opera Shortland St. The dashing Dr. Ropata is upbraided for bringing his crazy foreign experiences and assumptions back to New Zealand.

There's a great deal of absurdity in moving back to your home town and complaining about the weather. Actually, it wasn't so much the weather as the weather forecast. I opined this morning that one of the great things about America was the relatively accurate hourly forecast that allows you to, for example, plan your run for the coolest, warmest or driest time of the day. My mother upbraided me for this comment by saying "you're not living in the middle of a large continent now, you're living on an island in the middle of an ocean where the weather is quite unpredictable." It's not the forecast, it's the weather itself.

If I was in America I would say that I "lucked out" this morning. If I was in New Zealand I wouldn't because the phrase means the opposite. The rain lifted 20 minutes in to the run, and I got the most glorious view of the city from Tinakori Hill (really, click the link, it's a beautiful city), a view that is relatively recent after a storm a couple of years ago necessitated the removal of many trees. That green house in the bottom right corner of the photo is the Prime Minister's house. What a quaint country. You can run up the hill behind the Prime Minister's house and look into her backyard.

It's both the truth and the politic thing to say that the unpredictable weather is all I can complain about after five days back in Wellington. The coffee is good. The trail running is excellent. I've almost adjusted to hearing New Zealand accents again. When I got off the plane in Auckland I thought "they speak funny here." I'm trying to keep the best parts of the Midwestern inflection on my New Zealand accent. The mid-Pacific accent is not nearly as common as the mid-Atlantic accent, but perhaps I'll make it famous in time.

One of the truisms of international moving is that moving home is never quite as easy as people naively imagine. Both place and person have changed. When I moved to Minneapolis I tried to tell myself that the inevitable minor frustrations of moving were not all about America, which is the easy way out for foreigners in America. Oh to be sure, there are some unique things about America including some things that are annoying, and others it's just fun to tease the locals about, but when you're moving you're not moving from country to country, you're moving from city to city, from neighborhood to neighborhood. You'd have the same frustrations moving in your home country, of not knowing the bus timetable or where the best stores or restaurants were, etc, etc ...

Moving home there is none little of that. Some things have changed, but mostly I know my way round—though I have forgotten the names of many streets I know where I am, I just couldn't describe it to the emergency services if I called them out of sight of a street sign—and I find myself more surprised that things have not changed. I have seen strangers on the bus that I saw on the same bus route when I was in high school.

The truism is that both place and person change. But both would have changed if I'd stayed here, the personal relationship to place evolving gradually over time. What they call the shock of re-entry is that all those changes appear to have taken place at once. So I ask when something occurred, and the locals look at me oddly, not remembering (for example) if that new building went up in 2002 or 2003. Not that it really matters. It's there now, and so am I.

Crossing the Pacific

This is true. The Pacific is a great body of water.

Parochialism

No, really, that's all there is to the story. They met in New Zealand. Hence the headline in the New Zealand Herald.

These kinds of stories are probably universal. I never fail to be amused by them. I'd say there's an interesting project for someone to look at how often these types of articles appear in papers in different places.

Cafe standards

A U.S. acronym doesn't survive the Guardian's editing.

I believe that the café standards for fuel efficiency are to drink at local cafés which you can walk or bike to, rather than driving. Very fuel efficient. Rigorous CAFÉ standards would probably ban drive-through "coffee."

Hapless cricket teams

Sports that do poorly in cricket are often called "hapless." My hypothesis was that this would be mostly associated with the English cricket team. In the interests of the social studies of sport I did a Google search of +"hapless <country>" +cricket today and these were the results. I think they speak for themselves ... or they speak for themselves, if you follow international cricket ... Crucial qualification. Might I remind my American readers, cricket's about as popular as baseball worldwide, and they both look funny and have funny rules.

No doubt more sophisticated "analyses" could be done, perhaps adjusting for the population speaking English in each country. Now while it's a little surprising to see Bangladesh and Zimbabwe getting more "hapless" mentions than England, those countries have better excuses than England for not fielding a good cricket team. I threw Canada--yes, they were playing in the World Cup--into the mix as a "control" group.

Nappy-headed means different things to different people

Where I come from (and in some other countries) "nappy" means diaper. So this week's news coverage of "nappy headed hos" leaves me with quite a different mental image of the Rutgers basketball team than most people get from that phrase. I'm slow on the uptake, have only seen one photo of the team, and until now I'd never heard this alternative American use of the word "nappy." So it's surprisingly hard to displace the mental image of women playing basketball with diapers on their heads every time I hear about Don Imus.

(I should hardly need to add the disclaimer that this is not some contorted defense of Don Imus, but the sensitivity of the topic etc ... compel me to state the obvious)

The sound I'm going for

"his New Zealand accent worked nicely on the witness stand; it made him sound erudite without being pompous."

From a Wall Street Journal profile of Berkeley professor, David Teece.

That's the sound I try to cultivate. As an historian I doubt I'll make the kind of money Teece does. The accent isn't everything!

Limited [intelligence] government

There's a common perception, internationally and at home, that Americans are fond of limited government. Now, I think that's a little too simple, but you still have the fact that people believe in the myth anyway. It's in the face of that perception that I laugh at stories like these:

• A New York state senator wants to "to ban the use of gadgets such as Blackberry devices and video games while crossing the street ... [or] face a US$100 ($149) fine."
  
• "A Minneapolis city ordinance makes it illegal for an owner to leave a vehicle running unattended. The fine for violating the ordinance is $34."
  

And this is just what I've noticed in the last two days ... The common element is that there's already pretty sharp incentives to do the right thing here: look both ways when crossing the street (you might die!), don't leave your car idling on a cold morning (it might get stolden!). If someone isn't motivated by their own personal safety or losing their car, a comparatively trivial fine isn't going to change their behavior.

I hasten to add that these kinds of silly laws may be just as prevalent abroad. Minor political office, minor intellect and major ego lead to these kinds of things everywhere, not just in America. But the multiple layers of government in America give, perhaps, a little more scope for laws like this.

Swedish-Australasian relations

This pairing on a cookie box of Swedish and Australasian cookies touched my little Antipodean-born, Swedophilic heart.

Kylie

If you knew the history of Australia claiming the talents of New Zealand born and bred musicians (only this one web reference on a hasty google search) then the above, from Minneapolis' Electric Fetus will be perversely amusing.

Be kind to the blind and the seeing

American money, specifically the bills, are visually unappealing. This has always struck me as a little odd, since Americans tend to do the ceremonial and decorative aspects of public life quite nicely.

For example, the American flag is very nice; the national anthem is uplifting if overplayed and sung in a key that renders it often done badly. I guess it really is the thought that counts is what I think when I hear people mangle the Star Spangled Banner; American public architecture is, on average, much better than where I came from. I've rarely seen a New Zealand post office building that inspired, but some of the American post offices in small towns and large cities are fine examples of functional and beautiful public buildings.

Perhaps the unappealing money is part of the same trend that makes American stamps hit-or-miss. There are some great ones out there, but then there's the poorly done American flag stamp, and some other insipid ones that manage to poorly render inspiring artefacts like the Statue of Liberty.

But anyway, the bank notes. I'd occasionally wondered, as apparently foreigners from many countries do, what the visually impaired do to distinguish the bills all of the same size and all of the same basic color scheme. Clearly the truly blind don't care what the bills look like--perhaps only that they are of different shapes--but the partially sighted apparently find it functional to have bills of different colors.

In any case, the blind are a small minority in American life. Multi-colored currency with attractive, varied designs is a pleasant if minor way of enhancing everyone's life. A little bit of public artwork everytime you open your wallet. The best American bank note is the $2 bill, which along with its portrait of Jefferson has a rendition of the Declaration of Independence on the obverse. But when did you last get a $2 bill? This is way better than the succession of similar looking classical revival buildings on the flipside of most of the notes.

But things change slowly in public life in America. A country founded in a revolutionary moment now goes with the instinct to conserve what its founders might have the impulse to change were they around today. Clearly (clearly!) I'm not the person to lobby for changing the color of the money. Foreigner and all that. Yet even if I were, I can hear the attacks now. Do I not like George Washington? What do I have against the Lincoln Memorial? Etc etc ... Actually, I think Washington should stay. But Ulysses Grant on the $50! There must be better candidates, even from within the pantheon of 38 other presidents not already on the money.

Google maps fun

What would make Google Maps great for runners? How about if Google mapped trails? Well, now they do. For New Zealand. As best as I can tell they've digitized the 1:50,000 scale topographic maps and included the four wheel drive trails and "single track" trails you can run, walk, and sometimes mountainbike.

The picture below (follow the link to see for yourself) is of my old stamping grounds of Wilton's Bush and the Skyline trail.

Not all of the trails that exist on the ground are there. 1:50,000 is still quite large scale, and no doubt some of the trails on the ground are non-official. Nevertheless, what an amazing thing to have added to Google maps. If you happened to find yourself in Wellington or Auckland and wanted to go trail running you could start planning before you hit the ground.

The other semi-useful thing about Google Maps for New Zealand which you can see if you click on "Map" on the linked image are property boundaries. Those boundaries in between the roads when you get in close enough appears to correspond to people's houses and yards. Something you can't yet see in Google Maps for America.

Down with the glace cherries

The neon-green fruit to which this article refers are glace cherries, and they are rarely popular in fruit cake. American distaste for fruitcakes is a rightful distaste for bad fruitcakes. Done well with lots of alcohol they're something else again.

Shopping your ideas

Earlier this week the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that there was no governmental purpose in denying same-sex couples the benefits of marriage, and that the state had six months to remedy this. Gay marriage, per se, did not have to be one of the remedies, civil unions would also do.

In passing I'll note that this ruling has attracted much less public attention than previous rulings in Massachusetts and Vermont, which might suggest that American politics is heading towards some kind of compromise on this.

While there has been less debate about the decision you don't have to look hard to find [mostly Republican and right-leaning] people criticizing the courts for making this decision. It's telling that the conservative response is to criticize the venue of the decision—the courts— and not (entirely) the decision itself. It's fair to say that until very recently conservative parties in Anglo-American democracies saw the courts as the bulwark of tradition and order against populist change.

It's striking that in America there is a populist right that sees the judiciary and the common law as anti-democratic and revolutionary. Historically conservatives saw the courts as a bulwark against populist democratic change. There are traces of this attitude in Australasia, Canada and Britain, but it's less pronounced because social movements have not used the courts to try and achieve social change quite as much. Perhaps that is for the better, since changes are achieved with democratic support, but I suspect that it reflects rationally different choices in political strategy contingent on legislative and judicial structure.

Now, I'm no lawyer, but one of the defining characteristics of Anglo-American government is that laws are made both by the legislative/executive branches (statue law), and by judges interpreting the law in cases (common law). In almost every setting groups seeking social change use both mechanisms to try and affect change. This is such an established, bipartisan part of our broad political heritage that current critiques of it by people opposed to gay marriage are, I suspect, largely disengenuous.

For the sake of argument, wandering away from the issue at hand, look at the movement for the 8 hour day. Unions campaigned for this at three levels

• Trying to achieve it through contracts with individual employers
  
• Multi-employer contract negotiations (particularly the Australian and New Zealand arbitration systems
  
• Legislative restrictions on working hours.
  

Venue shopping by political and social movements is an inherent part of the Anglo-American political and legal structure. If some groups really do feel those rules of the "game" are unfair and should be changed, that's a problem, but I'm inclined to guess that for now they're being disengenuous and will happily shop their own ideas round whatever sympathetic legislature or court they feel will take them.

Party politics

I got this email today:

Dear <redacted> member,
Do you ever wish you could quit your day job and work to take back Congress? Well, on Election Day, you can come close: Take the day off work on Tuesday, November 7th and be part of something big.

Skip your annoying commute. Skip those endless meetings. This election is the best chance we've had in years to change the direction of our country. And we have a plan to put dozens of races over the top by making hundreds of thousands of get-out-the-vote phone calls on Election Day—but we can't do it without your help.

Can you take the day off work on Tuesday, November 7th to help win this historic election?

It made me think again why making an election day a holiday is a good idea. It's fair to assume that being able to take a solitary day off for the election is not something everyone can do. It's probably easier if you are a professional worker not serving other people. Hard to say how that affects Democrats and Republicans. Teachers can't take a day off, and they tend to vote Democratic. Soldiers probably can't take the day off, and they tend to vote Republican. Now, it's clearly not the case that election day being a work day is the reason that turnout in American elections is low, since many other countries have their elections on a weekday and manage significantly higher turnout than in the United States. Moreover, the wide variation between the different American states in turnout, none of which have holidays for election day, must indicate that other factors are at work.

All those caveats aside making election day a public holiday is still the right thing to do. Everyone is legally entitled to take time off to vote, but to help turnout the vote and participate in other aspects of an election requires you to take your holidays off. In a country that celebrates and proclaims its democratic traditions, wouldn't one day off in the year to take part in democracy be small but symblic. America does its nationalistic public holidays very well (Memorial Day, July 4th and Thanksgiving specifically) but what could be more American than to participate in the nation's democratic events?

If you look at the history of American election days it's quite clear that election days used to be opportunities for boisterous public displays, and not a lot of working. Making election day a non-work day again would return to a grand American tradition. In the 19th century Minnesota made election day a public holiday by legislation. It's been done before.

The other good reason for making election day a public holiday (or a weekend) is that then you can have an election night party. The election night party is, I think, a small but important part of Australasian culture that derives from the convenience of having elections on Saturdays, and being able to sleep in the next morning with nothing to do (for most people).

Having elections on a Tuesday when you have to work makes voting like running to the store after work. You do it. You go home. You make sure you have everything ready for Wednesday at work. There is a better way. Make election day a holiday.

That 70s show

This sentence in the New York Times:

And in a month in which Republicans have sought to discredit Democratic challengers as advocates of big spending and high taxes, 52 percent of respondents said that Democrats would make the right decisions on how to spend taxpayers' money, while 29 percent said Republicans would.

The emphasis here is on deficit spending. Like the various Labo[u]r parties around the world, it's a fair characterization that liberal, social democratic, populist leaning parties spend a little more than right-leaning parties do. But deficit spending? Not so much. Go back to the 1930s and you see Labour and Democratic parties spending more to get out of the Depression, but given the circumstances, perhaps not deficit spending enough. It took the deficit financed World War II to get most of the western countries out of the depression and back to full employment. War, of course, is a perennial historical justification for deficits. If you win. If you're borrowing good money to fund a war gone wrong, that becomes unpopular.

Like Vietnam. This, I would guess, was the beginning of the perception that Democrats were weak on national security, and couldn't control the budget. The two are related -- I'm not sure that that gets enough attention. Then you have the oil crises of the 1970s, and the Australasian and British Labour parties, the Canadian Liberals, and the Democrats were all in power during at least one of the oil shocks of the 1970s. That was when government deficits became a problem for western countries, and the Labour/Liberal/Democratic parties were all, unfortunately, for them left standing when the music oil stopped. Would conservative parties have done any better at adjusting government spending in the midst of the oil crisis? I don't know.

Going back to the Great Depression suggests an answer. In Britain and Australia where the Labour parties held the finance ministry at the start of the Depression "responsible" balanced budgeting was the order of the day, and it saddled both parties with responsibility for the Depression that the Republicans, and the New Zealand Reform (conservative) party also experienced. The somewhat unfair perception that left voters with, was that the conservative governments were responsible for most of the misery of the Depression. Somewhat unfair, because it reinforced stereotypes that were already out there that conservative governments were less likely to spend on the poor.

Conservative governments would probably also have run up large deficits during the oil shocks (and did, later in the 1970s in Australia and New Zealand). But conservatives running budget deficits doesn't reinforce stereotypes already out there, while it does for liberals.

Not original, but effective

At the risk of losing readers by making my first sentence here in a week a reference to obscure, foreign elections ... I'll do it anyway. In 1972 the Australian and New Zealand (remember, different countries!) Labo[u]r parties won elections in succeeding weeks after being out of power and irrelevant for decades. They used the same slogan. "It's Time for A Change".

This was an effective slogan because it captured the spirit of the time, and was a phrase that you might use yourself in everyday life. The idea in the slogan, because it captured a mood already out there and easily picked up in polls and by journalists, was reinforced by its repetition and simplicity. None of these things can be said about the lame-o slogan of the Democratic Party for the 2006 elections "Together, America can do better."

Now I confess that not being American myself I may lack some crucial insights into the way Americans think and vote, but I'm pretty sure no one is out there thinking "Together, America can do better" on their own. Perhaps "We can do better," but not "Together, America can do better." It's the comma, you see. It is probably not written down anywhere, but one of the first rules of effective slogans is "No commas." Now I was about to expand that and write "No punctuation," but that's wrong. A question mark (preferably for a rhetorical question) or an exclamation mark, where appropriate, are fine. Perhaps no punctuation that qualifies your statement. "It's Time For a Change" is not original, but it would do far better service for the Democrats that "Together, America can do better."

In the interests of fair play I would offer some advice to the Republican Party from Australasian political history. But the GOP don't appear to need it. After winning office in 1975 both Labo[u]r parties lost in 1975. The New Zealand National Party put out one of the most effective political ads ever, the [in]famous Dancing Cossacks ad which implied Labour's superannuation scheme would lead to creeping Communism.

Of course, no American politician would ever imply their opponents were Communists, would they?

Update (5:37pm): Another alliterative slogan that did good service for its creators was "compassionate conservatism," which they're discussing in a review of Bush's presidency over at TPM Cafe. For the purposes of this discussion, who cares that it was a crock and has scarcely been uttered by Bush since the campaign. The phrase apparently resonated with what a crucial (if perhaps small) part of the electorate was looking for, and summed up what Bush chose to emphasize as his priorities during the 2000 campaign.

Foreign accent thing

Reason no. 269 I want all call-centers out-sourced to India right now ...

I called a firm today, and lacking my ID number took the automated voice up on the option of saying and spelling my name to confirm my identity. The courteous automated voice then asked

Have I got that right?
Last name: R-A-B-B-I-T
First name: E-V-A-M

How cute. When you say "EVAM" it does sound like you are speaking with a lisp like we imagine rabbits do.

They write letters

Check it!

The Star Tribune's columnists say what I feel about people who bring wheelie suitcases onto planes with more panache than I could. Basically, don't do it. Check it, for everyone's sake.

Having traveled on both third world (Vietnamese) buses and American planes, the similarities are surprising. In both cases, people bring on board far more than they need for the journey and far more than can reasonably fit in the space available. I can understand this on Vietnamese buses, there's no secure protocol for checking your bags and getting them back at the other end. But the bizarre practice Americans have of bringing their suitcase into the cabin is a bit of an example of a tragedy of the commons. Everyone thinks they're saving themselves some time by not checking the bags, but by the time we've all waited for people to find a space for their over-stuffed roller bag and several people have wandered fruitlessly up and down the aisle without finding a space, and had to check it anyway, the time saved is minimal, if not evaporated. If you don't need spare underpants during the flight you can check that bag.

While the proportion of the traveling public that reads this is, ah, minimal, to put it mildly, I trust that those who do read will take note ... the Star Tribune of Minneapolis tells you to check your bag too.

It means something else too

Good article in Runner's World about nutrition for runners. Why is Runner's World on the web so much better than Runner's World in print?

Of course I titter whenever I hear the word bonking.

The alleged Northern Hemisphere

From an otherwise great interview with Nick Willis on Runners World.

"Nort