A Bit Meta

Posted on January 23, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

This being a Presidential election year, and us having cable, I have now watched more Republican presidential debates than I ever really wanted to in my life*, especially since the various candidates routinely put our television in severe danger. (There are things I can listen to with impunity, including wildly differing political views, but people suggesting they’d be happy with bans on contraception – i.e. threatening my ability to have a career – are not one of them.)

*I could turn them off, but I’d have to wrestle for the remote and there’s always the hope that one of them will say something exceptionally stupid or try to crowd-surf or both.

What I find just as interesting as the politics, though – which isn’t hard because the politics are more a matter of entertainment than actual information, at this stage – is the advertisements which go along with them. I remember blogging about the sheer bulk of pharmaceutical ads in this country, and that’s still staggering. But there’s also a lot of other groups which simply don’t advertise on New Zealand television – because they’re American-specific, and/or because their New Zealand counterparts just don’t attempt popular support in the same way – that range from the bewildering to the extremely very slightly insidious.

“Bewildering” definitely covers all the various stock-investment ads. Having never had enough money at any one point to consider investing it in anything more than a high-interest savings account (for what passes as “high interest” in this economic climate – I sadly remember the days when I was getting eight percent on one of my Kiwibank accounts) the range of investment ads is both curious and unnerving. It’s not just companies seeking to manage people’s “401Ks” (basically the equivalent of Kiwisaver, but tied to employers rather than the government and a staple of retirement planning here); it’s things like iPad apps for when you just have to trade that stock right now, which seems like an incitement to losing your money except under very specific circumstances, but then, the people advertising them are interested in brokers’ fees, not your long term savings. They all appeal, I think, to the American drive for independence, to the idea that everyone owns their future, financial or otherwise. The idea that, despite everything that’s happened to the economy, your financial stability is something you can control. Maybe because of everything.

Then there’s the plethora of fossil-fuel ads. These are carefully disguised as appeals to “vote for jobs” and “vote for America”, but all end up at one place: the declaration that the only thing that can solve America’s myriad problems is a renewed dedication to the use of coal, and oil, and natural gas. They’ve been around for the eighteen months we’ve been here, but with the election machine gearing up they’ve gone into overdrive. Phrases like “clean coal” are used in a way that would have the ASA driven to drink by the number of complaints they would engender. The viewpoint is pounded on, constantly, that to be against the greater use of fossil fuels isn’t just economic suicide, it’s somehow anti-American. They are counterpointed, entertainingly, by BP’s attempts to emphasise that everything on the Gulf Coast is just fine and it’s like Deepwater Hor- uh, that thing, you know, it never even – what thing was that we were talking about? Anyway, the Gulf Coast is just amazing, and BP is still there. And is always going to be there. Aren’t you reassured?

The one thing there aren’t many – or any, really – of, yet, is actual direct pro-or-anti-political-candidate ads. A little early for that, except in primary states, and Massachusetts isn’t due for its Republican primaries for quite some time and – in any case – isn’t likely to be much of a battleground, because all three Republicans in Massachusetts will vote for Romney. (I jest. All six.)

But in some ways it seems like what people say on the actual political programmes – whether the Sunday interview shows, the MSNBC/Fox/CNN/etc-style talkshows, or the debates – is matched in importance by the advertising that surrounds them. The ads aren’t just about selling things to a certain demographic; they shape a narrative, together, the ads and the shows. It’s almost hypnotic. None of these ads are directly political, remember. They’re not telling you to vote for certain people. Or even parties. A lot of them aren’t even “vote for” ads, that’s mostly the NATURAL GAS IS YOUR BEST FRIEND JOBS JOBS JOBS ads. They’re just – deliberately, carefully – shaping how you hear those people and parties in the bits in between the ads.

The problem with American TV, in terms of politics, isn’t that you watch it and become less informed (unless all you watch is certain channels, and no, I don’t just mean Fox – if all people watched was MSNBC they’d be pretty under-informed.) It’s that you need to be pre-informed by other media to watch it, because there’s a meta-narrative going on that changes the direct messages of the main narrative, if you’re aware of it.

Frankly it’s all a bit exhausting. Much easier to just go read something.

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Te Ao Nui

Posted on January 15, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

The non-graduate-student members of the department are gradually starting to drift back in from their winter holidays (the university shuts down for a month, but most grad students take about a week off, if that) to a slightly-more-snowy-but-not-really Massachusetts.

We have also been upgraded to Really Expletive Cold (a.k.a Too Cold To Go Outside Unless You Have No Other Options.)

Our lab has expanded precipitously in the last six months; over the summer, when one of my labmates was away for six weeks, it was possible for me to go days at a time without actually talking to anyone else in the department, despite being in the lab during regular working hours every weekday, because I was the only person in the lab. Since then we’ve picked up an exchange student, a new (to our lab) PhD student, a postdoctoral researcher, last year’s two undergrads returned for the fall semester, and a new undergrad is going on trial this spring. (Working with me. You may all sympathise. With him.) It’s put something of a premium on desk space, but is otherwise working excellently.

What is remarkable, though, is that even with this expansion, and although I am living in the United States it is also quite possible for me to spend a day at work without talking to an American. (See, sure; have a conversation with, no, if the extent of seeing is “passing in the corridor”.) The undergraduate population of UMass is overwhelmingly domestic, but the graduate student population – especially in our department – is highly international.

This isn’t that surprising, because science is, inherently, an international field. Your research may be most similar to someone at an institution on another continent. Your research may be done somewhere far-flung from your institution, for that matter; I remember that one of the biology lecturers at Canterbury studied African forests, and our lab’s main field site is off the West Coast of the US, thousands of kilometres away. It’s certainly common to go a respectable distance when you’re studying, or teaching. I got grilled by my Honours supervisor about why I wanted to stay at Canterbury for another year instead of going somewhere else. When I finish my PhD and move to postdoctoral positions, they will almost certainly be outside New Zealand.

The flags of all the countries from which people have come to our lab (except for NZ, Sweden, and South Korea, because we're lazy and haven't put them up yet.)

Between seven people currently working in our lab, we cover five continents. Our department covers them all, except Antarctica. (And Australia, technically, since the sole Australian postdoc returned home, but I’m going to call it “Oceania” and say I cover it.)  The vast majority of the faculty and a solid majority of the students are American, but it’s pretty mixed.

The positive in this is that there is always someone up for a round of What Were They Thinking (most common theme: healthcare, followed by visas). It also means that I’m not just being exposed to American culture, but a whole number of them; I’ve learned about what sort of sweets Swedes make for Christmas (tasty ones), how often it snows in South Korea (about as much as NZ), and how expensive magazines are in Swaziland (very). And it makes for some seriously impressive spreads when we hold potluck lunches or dinners, across the department or within the lab.

It also lends itself to a curious sort of banding together; we may have backgrounds less similar to one another than we are individually to Americans, but we share the experience of being Not From Around Here (actually, on that score, the Americans in my lab are in a strict sense Not From Around Here, but that’s not quite the same thing.) And if you want to look at it another way, it takes a certain level of socio-economic privilege to be able to come to America for a PhD or Master’s degree; we also all share the experience of being, relatively, in the top something-very-small-percent of the world’s population. Wherever we’re from.

Ultimately, I think, this is a good thing for America, in terms of the cultural dominance it achieves by being a centre of scientific research and training; we may be coming together from a whole range of countries and occasionally bonding over not being Americans, but we’re interacting through American culture – and, obviously, with American students as well as fellow international students. There are no more than two or three students in our department from any one country; day-to-day, we can’t retreat to our own cultures even if we want to.

I like this part of scientific culture, of being a student of science. Even if I wasn’t part of the Fulbright program – which obviously encourages and entails a lot of cross-cultural interaction – the international nature of science would still be part of my life. To go on to graduate study in the sciences, you have to have at least some innate curiosity about the world. When you’re headfirst in research, it can be easy to let that shrink to whatever small part of it you’re studying. (Because we rarely have time to read even the work that’s relevant to our studies, let alone other areas.) Working with people who differ from you in fundamental cultural ways keeps you paying attention to the greater world. And I like that, a lot.

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Reverse Psychology And Weather Systems

Posted on January 9, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

As far as I can tell from the Stuff and NZ Herald websites, it’s been so wet in New Zealand that you should all be thinking of ark-building. Sounds like business as usual for a New Zealand summer, then. Massachusetts, however, is having a most unusual winter – insomuch as it’s a winter at all.

You might remember that back in October it looked like this outside in Western Massachusetts (and large stretches of the Northeast):

Admittedly it didn't still look like this the afternoon of the day I took this picture, but two feet of snow did fall.

Well, it’s the first week of January – the coldest part of the year, normally, and by “coldest” I mean “generally doesn’t get above freezing for weeks at a time” – and not only does it not look like it did this time last year…

So technically this picture is from early February, but trust me when I say it's a good approximation.

…it looks like this.

Really. Like this. The blue sky isn't even cunningly deceptive. Some days have been actually genuinely warm.

There has been one day this winter when it has failed to climb above freezing. The lowest low has been about -13C. Last year it was around -30C. I’m still biking to university – no ice, no snow, and as long as it’s -5C or above it’s a perfectly pleasant ride. Nor is it just Massachusetts; high-temperature records are falling all over America, and ski resorts are barely keeping the slopes open, so little snow has fallen. Admittedly, there’s still a good three months left to go of potential winter weather, so panic is not yet due, but compared to last year’s record snowfall it’s bizarre.

It isn’t even that snow is falling and then melting; it isn’t falling at all. When it precipitates, it rains. This is somewhat vexing in that the great swath of newly-dumped dirt outside our front door which got trekked muddily into our house all autumn, instead of freezing and then being snowed over, is bringing forward the anticipated spring mud by about four months. Except without the possibility of grass growing on it. It’s like eternal late November. Thanksgiving aside, I’m not so thrilled with late November when it is late November. Late November all winter seems a bit much.

There’s also the bit when it is below -5C and I go to put my bike on the bus at the main road and discover the pull-down bike racks have frozen to the bus, which is not so much fun and especially not so much fun when it’s winter break and the buses are on the reduced forty-minute schedule. I could take a can of CRC (WD-40 to Americans) with me, but a) I’m not sure it’d work and b) I’m not sure how the bus people would feel about me oiling their racks. (And that doesn’t sound weirdly euphemistic at all. Right.)

Mostly, everyone has the thoroughly illogical but nevertheless creeping feeling that sooner or later we’re going to get a whole winter’s worth of snow all at once. I have an abstract due to a conference at the end of January and more than one experiment to do before I hand it in; if the snow could hold off until then, that would be brilliant. You hear me, weather? NO SNOW. NONE.

(Reverse psychology works on continental weather systems, right?)

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In Hindsight

Posted on January 3, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

2011 was, overall, a year the like of which we will not see again soon. I know most of my friends in New Zealand couldn’t wait to see the end of it. For various reasons, a lot of people I know over here couldn’t either. And there’s not a few parts of it – the economy, the election, the earthquake, the earthquake, the earthquake – that I will be glad to put in the past, even if their effects linger on.

But, bittersweetly, 2011 has, on a purely personal level, been one of the best and most successful years of my life, and I think of Mike’s, too. It’s been the year we settled in to our lives over here, the year in which, in so many ways, we got everything we could possibly have wanted – financial security, professional validation and achievement, new experiences. We transitioned from near-poverty studenthood to a secure existence; we visited, between us, many of America’s great cities; we made friends; we did good work. Mike turned his technical expertise into a job he loves, and I got a NASA fellowship for my research, something I’ve been working at, in some ways, for half my life. For all the small (and not-so-small) frustrations, America has been good to us in 2011.

And yet. Drunk on the cheap subscriptions here (The Economist, $70 a year!), we get half a dozen political and financial magazines, more than we can read, honestly; they pile up around the house in guilt-inducing drifts. I’d demand we get them in online format only,  but that’s either not possible or more expensive than getting the hard copies as well.

All of them had end-of-year summaries, forecasts for 2012. They didn’t mention Christchurch, or gave it only a single line. I had a conversation, two or three months ago, with an American scientist who has traveled frequently through Christchurch to Antarctica, which included the sentence “Wasn’t there an earthquake or something?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that. The quake fundamentally shapes everything that has happened in New Zealand this year, almost every conversation I have about home. Over here, it might as well have never happened – but it has changed New Zealand forever. (Don’t even bother asking about the Rugby World Cup. That didn’t happen either.)

In light of that, I finally went back and looked at my notes from a course I took in my first year at university, 2005: Environmental Geohazards. It focused, naturally, on Christchurch and its environs. I threw out the accompanying booklet when I left Christchurch, certain I’d never need a map of Christchurch’s liquefaction potential, or any of my other accumulated notes from five years of university. I was wrong, as it happens, but fortunately, in 2005 I was young and mad enough to type up all the hand-written notes I took in class. (This was – be shocked – before it was quite acceptable to take laptops to class, though only by about a year.) And so I know what I was told, six years before the quake, about what might happen to Christchurch. It makes for interesting reading.

Continue reading →

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A Little Lamb

Posted on December 27, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

We had a very pleasant Christmas, though apparently the Halloween snowstorm used up our snow quota for some time – I saw maybe three or four flakes on Christmas morning, but by and large the past two months have been a tale of unfulfilled threats of snow. (If it could stay that way until my road test, I’d be much obliged.) Otherwise, presents were exchanged, a lot of food was cooked and eaten, and very long-distance Skype calls were made. As Christmases go, not bad.

The cat, realising she was not the centre of attention for once, endeavoured to reposition herself in it.

The main obstacle to the Christmas I envisioned was getting my hands on the cut of lamb I wanted. My knowledge of American lamb-eating habits was formed, before I came here, largely by the memory of protests against tariffs imposed on Australian and New Zealand lamb imports back around the turn of the millennium – at the time, I walked past the American embassy to school every day, so news about people protesting outside it (they generally didn’t do so before eight in the morning, when I was passing by) caught my attention. The American embassy is notable in Wellington for being the only embassy you’d need an army to get into, built in the high Cold War Bunker style of architecture. Other embassies range from “high-class hotel security” to “a quick jump over the nominal fence”, making razor-wire-topped three-metre-high-fences and a mad scientist’s worth of satellite dishes rather noticeable.

I assumed, naturally, that lamb was something Americans actually ate. As it turns out, however, the tariffs appear to have been imposed because American lamb farmers were fighting for a very small market indeed. According to the USDA, most Americans eat no lamb at all. The average consumption is 0.74 pounds per person per year, which is basically one or two chops, or would be if they regularly sold chops, which they don’t. This is reflected in our local supermarket, which generally has  a few whole legs of (largely Australian) lamb, frenched racks, the occasional cheap packet of neck chops, and very rarely some horrendously expensive leg chops. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is significantly more turkey than lamb. And there’s no mutton whatsoever (though rabbit quite often makes an appearance, and trout, which isn’t even legal to sell in supermarkets back home if I recall correctly, so there you go.)

Up until we got here, I hadn’t actually realised how much I liked lamb. It’s customary in New Zealand to complain often about how expensive lamb is and how it’s all sent overseas and we can’t afford to ever eat it, not like in the Good Old Days (which has a lot of truth to it; I’ve seen New Zealand lamb in Britain cheaper, on a cost-of-living basis, than in New Zealand supermarkets, and according to the USDA fact page above we export 80% of our lamb.) But we still eat a lot more of it than Americans; the latest firm statistic I could find was for 2001, in which we ate, on average, about 10kg of lamb and 7kg of mutton each a year. Leaving aside the mutton, that’s nearly thirty times more lamb than the average American. I don’t think I ate that much lamb, and I definitely wasn’t eating that much mutton, but between mince and stewed neck chops and the odd barbeque and very occasionally a roast, we were consuming a respectable quantity. I’d just not noticed.

Now I can’t actually get lamb, unless I want to eat very large quantities of it or I’m lucky enough to find it when they have more reasonably-sized cuts (we’ve actually ended up buying a whole leg and chopping it into two-person-sized quantities ourselves, because it’s the only semi-economical way to go about things) I miss it. Naturally, this meant I determined I would cook an old family favourite recipe for Christmas which called for a butterflied lamb shoulder. I went looking; I figured that the supermarket might be deficient, but there had to be somewhere stocking it.

Our local area is – oddly enough – devoid of specialist butchers (or greengrocers, come to that), and even the more specialist-organic-hippie places like Trader Joe’s have very little lamb indeed (I didn’t check Whole Foods, but that’s because Mike refuses to set foot in the place after our first visit, an attitude I have some sympathy with.)

We even drove down to a Mad Butcher-style place in the Springfield area; no dice. They had even less lamb than the supermarket. Lamb, at least in this area, is just not a goer. I ended up settling for what did show up in the supermarket a week before Christmas – a butterflied lamb leg, which to be honest cooked up just as well as the shoulder would have. And it was delicious.

The problem is – it’s the holiday season, the time of year (weather aside) that we’d normally be having barbeques…now I have a terrible craving for chops. One more reason to make plans to visit home, I think. (Or possibly the western US, where they farm all the lamb. Surely there’s some out there.)

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Buying Local

Posted on December 19, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

I have in the past made some rather harsh comments about the quality of American beer (best summed up as “Don’t”.) To be strictly fair, these should only be applied to the mass-market stuff; there are in fact a number of very good microbreweries around the country, and their output can be purchased in local liquor stores. It’s just damn difficult to work out, without expending a lot of time and effort on trying all of them (and this isn’t a bad plan, but I only have so much time in the week for trying new types of alcohol) which ones are drinkable. The alternative, of course, is to make friends with people knowledgeable in this area, but as I haven’t made a habit of quizzing people about their alcohol preferences prior to befriending them, this is also nonviable.

Generally, up until this point, I’ve wandered in, looked at all the microbrewery beer, looked at the selection of reliably drinkable European beer with which I am familiar, and bought a reliably drinkable European beer. Or hit our cupboard for a Steinlager, after we bought mumblety-dozen that one time they appeared in the local store. I think we’re never going to run out. Possibly they’re breeding. I haven’t dug far enough back in the cupboard to tell. At any rate, if I do want a slightly-boring-but-perfectly-adequate-lager, it’s there.

This has largely also been my approach to wine-buying, as there is enough New Zealand wine over here to drown in as long as – and this is something of a caveat – you are happy to drink nothing but Marlborough savignon blanc, or very occasionally chardonnay. As far as I can tell Massachusetts liquor stores have not worked out that New Zealand produces red wine (with the noble exception of 2011 Oyster Bay Merlot.) Or anything that’s not savignon blanc.  Of course, the alternative – trying to work out what Californian wine I’d drink – runs up against the same problem as the beer: so many wines, so little time (and money, and, let’s be honest, capacity for alcohol, mixed with a reluctance to throw out wine I have paid for even if it’s frankly pretty awful.)

Last weekend, however, we went on an official Microbiology Graduate Student Group trip (because brewing uses yeast and yeast is a microorganism and in fact we have one whole lab in the department working on yeast genetics so it’s totally relevant, yes?) to the Berkshire Brewing Company . This is a Western Massachusetts microbrewery which has been around for going on twenty years, mostly selling in southern New England – that’s the other thing about American microbreweries, they’re very regional, because the country is just so damn big.

They took us on a detailed tour of the entire facility, from where they bring in and mill the grain, right to bottling. It was made rather merrier by the fact that they offer free samples. What I hadn’t realised before I went on the tour was that “free samples” meant “three full cups of beer”, which, if you take them up on it, is an awful lot of merriment for 1pm on a Saturday afternoon, especially if one happens to not be driving and can take them up on it. (My road test is scheduled for the first week of January; I can’t work out whether I’m looking forward more to being able to drive myself around or not having to take my passport whenever I want to purchase or publicly consume alcohol. It’s like being nineteen ALL OVER AGAIN, except, oh, wait, at age nineteen my learner’s licence constituted legal ID and my Massachusetts learner’s permit is a piece of paper which doesn’t constitute anything legal except permission to drive with a supervisor, grumble.)

The tour was informative – I did, in the long-ago mists of my bachelor’s degree, learn about the process of making beer, so I could basically follow along the biochemical processes – and interesting to see industrial microbiology at play. I spend so much time in my day-to-day lab work trying to coax organisms from volcanoes at the bottom of the sea to grow in test-tubes that I tend to get a bit divorced from the fascinating concept of things that grow at room temperature, on actual human-type food. I doubt I’m ever going to end up working for a brewery, but it’s frankly a more relevant part of microbiology to people’s daily lives than my whole extremophiles and astrobiology bit. Also tastier.

Most of my tank pictures came out blurry and unusable, but if you've ever wondered what they brew beer in, this is it.

These are the whiskey barrels they age some of the beer in. Interesting idea - I'd never heard of it before, but apparently they do it for several varieties.

I'm not sure how the chilly bins aid in the bottling process, but they look awesomely No-8-wired.

The "sampling" room demonstrates that these people are very serious about their beer memorabilia.

In any event, it turns out that the BBC (we had a lot of fun in the days leading up to the trip when someone would turn around and ask “but where is the BBC?” and a bunch of other people would say “…London?”) makes some very good beer. I wasn’t sure about the one aged in whiskey barrels, which was a bit sour, but their lager and porter were very tasty, as well as their seasonal winter beer. And they sell it in entertaining-night-in-sized bottles. What more could you want, really?

An entertaining night in for two to three people, I hasten to add.

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A Winter Solstice Holiday

Posted on December 11, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

We’re still snow-free here in Massachusetts (after the remnants of the Halloween Snowpocalypse melted away) but it is, nevertheless, almost Christmas. It’s like it happens every year or something.

This week, my attention was particularly caught by one of the latest XKCD comics (I’m assuming most of you read XKCD – and if not, why not?), depicting the 20 most popular Christmas songs on American radio by decade of release (conclusion: it’s still the Baby Boomers’ fault, just like everything else.)

There’s a few notable things about it. Firstly, there are a whole lot of songs on there I don’t even recognise, let alone remember ever hearing. “Blue Christmas”? Christmas is pretty well colour-coded, and blue isn’t one of them. “Holly Jolly Christmas”? Are you actually serious? “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas”, for which I mysteriously know the tune to that one line but am totally blank on the rest of the song, if indeed there *is* a rest of the song. Etcetera.

Secondly, at least half these songs don’t get airtime during your regular New Zealand Christmas period. Some of these are for obvious reasons. Songs which are specifically winter-related, rather than Christmas related, just don’t work when it’s nearly the longest day of the year. (I would say “summer”, but as I believe most people back home right now can attest, New Zealand has very special weather patterns whereby it warms up nicely over November – there is a reason we had our wedding in mid-November – and then goes to crap sometime in early December, as if the weather is vainly struggling to conform to the Northern Hemisphere celebration we’re closing in on. This doesn’t happen every year or in every part of the country – Christmas 2009 was absolutely gorgeous, weather-wise – but it’s pretty regular. “Christmas on the Beach”, as a song, is not actually all that accurate.) Other songs are just not popular for whatever reason, whereas some Christmas songs which are quite popular in NZ (I’m thinking “Fairytale of New York”, although that might be less played here because of that one grating bit of homophobia in the middle of the song) don’t appear to be as popular in America, again for probably fairly random reasons.

But what really strikes me is how unrelentingly secular a playlist this is. I may just be mixing up memories of school Christmas concerts and so forth with songs on the radio, and am happy to be corrected, but I’m fairly sure I remember Christmas songs on the radio in NZ including at least some Christmas carols. I have no truck whatsoever with religion in general, let alone Christianity in particular, but I know a great many very religious carols and can and do sing them with gusto over the Christmas season, I think because I imprinted on them at too young an age to know about their connotations, resulting in a very special kind of compartmentalisation in my brain that allows me to sing and listen to them without considering the actual words. (This does lead to the odd awkward moment when I’m doing the dishes during December and belting out “O Holy Night” and stop and listen to what I’m singing, but whatever, I’m resigned to being contradictory.)

America, on the other hand, seems to have perfected the Christmas song, as separate from the Christmas carol – a sort of generic celebration of Christmas as a concept, or even just having fun with your family in wintertime as a concept, without actually touching the religious connotations of the holiday. There really are a mind-boggling number of Christmas-season songs that don’t even mention Christmas specifically; “Let It Snow”, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, “Winter Wonderland”, etcetera.

Let it never be said that I agree with Fox News on anything, but if I were, say, convinced that any celebration of Christmas which did not remind everyone that it had a history as a Christian holiday at every possible moment was an affront to my religion, I could kind of see where the bizarre “War on Christmas” meme came from. If I was an alien who’d just landed in America, I would have to be paying pretty close attention to realise that one particular religion had done its best to co-opt the winter solstice holiday gig in the Western world, Puritan complaints aside. This doesn’t make the complaining any less tedious or petulant, but it’s an interesting thought.

We have also acquired a real Christmas tree this year, and I am forced to admit that the Douglas fir is a far superior tree to dear old Pinus radiata when it comes to Christmas tree duty, primarily because it holds ornaments with its short stiff needles very well, in a way that P. radiata manifestly does not. The flipside being that, since artificial trees are largely modeled after this sort of conifer, when I’m not looking directly at our real tree it looks like our artificial one.

We also got a tree stand. I am ashamed we did not improvise, but it was easier than finding rocks and a bucket. (We do have buckets, but are rock-deficient.)

The whole getting-a-live-tree enterprise was the subject of much wrangling with Mike, who has never bought one and doesn’t understand why anyone would, and especially why anyone would tie one to the roof of their car, a practice he refused to believe was commonplace until the nice lady at the local garden centre offered to help us do so. (We managed to fit it in the boot, because the ceiling in our living room was sized for very small people and our tree just couldn’t be that tall. I had to measure to check what size tree we could get away with.) I had to promise faithfully to vacuum the car and the living room and do all the watering myself, sort of like getting a pet. A very short-term pet. Which I also have to get rid of myself. And that went to a weirdly gruesome place.

But that is for after Christmas, and right now it is before Christmas, so I will sit back, admire our definitely not artificial tree, put on some Christmas music of whatever sort iTunes comes up with, and try and work out where I can find a lamb shoulder for Christmas dinner.

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Tests of Patience

Posted on December 4, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

You may remember my feelings about the rigamarole the US puts drivers with foreign licences through in order for them to acquire US state licences. It is apparently based on the notion that for a year after arriving in the country foreign drivers are competent and safe, and then, on the 366th day, they forget everything they know and must be put through the same tests as American sixteen-year-olds in order to be allowed to drive again. Or leave the country, in which case the border crossing will spontaneously restore all knowledge to them. It’s like they think it’s magic. Maybe crossing the border is magic. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t done it yet.

In principle, I hasten to add, I fully understand the requirement for the theoretical test; I just object to the period in between it and the road test during which I am required, if I drive, to be supervised by someone over 21. 21-year-olds are still undergraduates. I’m dubiously in favour of undergraduates being allowed to drive, period.

(There are ads on UMass buses proclaiming that “95% of UMass students use a sober driver!”. There are over 20,000 undergraduate students at UMass. I can do maths, so when I see that sign, I don’t think “Oh, how responsible,” or “Gosh, peer pressure indicates I should also not try and kill myself by driving drunk, how about that!” or even “Wow, people really are reluctant to be honest about their bad habits on surveys”, I think “Where are the ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE in this relatively small area not only driving drunk but so blase about it they admit to doing so, and how can I avoid them?”)

I also object to the road test on the principle that if I was going to kill someone driving around America I would have done it by now, and because it requires me to parallel park, and if I was running the world I would legislate such that no-one should ever have to undergo a road test of their parallel parking skills more than once in their life, and I already did it. Eight years ago. I may or may not have used the skill since.

Furthermore, the American RMV (or DMV, I believe, depending upon the state) is a place of despair and doom and very long queues which is only open 9-5 on weekdays, in a highly intelligent strategy to save the state money by making everyone take unpaid days off work (and yes, you need a full day) to register their cars and so forth. You take a number. You get in line. This is not a metaphor.

I took a number, I got in line, I waited. The closest RMV to us is in a gorgeous old factory building, with polished wooden floors and high brick walls – the towns around here are full of them, factories that boomed during the Industrial Revolution and are now dying, towns powered by waterwheels now defunct, farms gone to nothing more than tumbling stone walls in forests. New England is a study in a landscape abandoned for greener fields and lusher pastures, in the Midwest and beyond; colonised for proximity, then returned to forest. It’s sort of sad and sort of interestingly historical. The high poverty and crime rates in the towns that once depended upon these factories are more sort of depressing and/or horrifying, but that’s another blog post altogether.

The really terrifying thing about RMVs is the staff, who like interrogating you about why your visa is expired, despite not being responsible for immigration services (and my legal status in the country being, well, perfectly legal), and telling you that you can’t drive on your foreign licence (not true) when you’re in the middle of registering your new car.  This one upbraided me about handing her a folder full of paperwork because she “only needed to see the relevant documents”. The folder was, in fact, the relevant documents, but that was apparently so unlikely a scenario as to be ignored. I had a question for her, but forgot it in the haze of wanting to be done and onto the test as quickly as possible, and also being slightly afraid she’d actually just throw me out if I annoyed her.

The permit test itself is computerised (of which I approve – I still have a grudge about the question I “got wrong” on my learner’s licence test in NZ because there was a nick about the size of a grain of sand on an extra scratch-off panel, thus meaning I had “answered the question twice”). What’s weird, in my situation, is that it’s the same test given to sixteen-year-olds and thus full of questions like “what offence will you be convicted of if you drive without a parent/guardian after dark?” to which the answers that spring to mind – for me – are things like “nothing” and “Do you have any idea how far away my parents are?”, neither of which is correct.

Or ones like “How many Americans, over their lifetimes, will be seriously injured or killed in car accidents?” (Answer: “Lots, okay, I get it, dying is bad”.)

Out of twenty-five questions, maybe half tested my knowledge of road rules and signs; the others were things like “How long are drivers under 18 suspended from their licences for drag racing on the second offence?” (Answer: I’m not a lawyer, under 18, or the parent of a child under 18, manifestly NOT MY PROBLEM) and the classic “Is it safe to drive when you’ve been smoking marijuana?” (Answer: I really want to say yes to screw with you, but you’re a computer program, so I can’t.)

Fortunately Mike had warned me that the test was far more worried about my understanding of the penalties for doing stupid things while being under 18 than my understanding of the actual rules of the road, so I’d studied up on this stuff. I now know the reinstatement fines and suspension periods for a vast number of driving offences if committed while on a permit or licence under 18 or 21 respectively. I foresee no situation in which it’s ever going to be useful to me, but there you go. It wouldn’t be the first time I absorbed a bunch of information I had no intention of remembering to pass a test. It might very well be the last, though. (I only have one required class left in my PhD, and I’m not even sure it has tests per se.)

Next step: the road test (requires a over-21 Massachusetts-licence-holding maybe-for-a-year supervisor, a day off work, and the car, so will take some organising.) Then I’ll be all legal to drive again…just in time for winter. Oh, well.

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Originality

Posted on November 27, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

So I hear New Zealand had a general election the other day, which I did not cajole my American friends into staying up until 4am watching the results of and am not deeply depressed over. (On the other hand: Mike’s sudden thing about being able to make any cocktail he wants at home came in very, very handy.)

Because I am seriously just too furious-slash-apathetic over the whole thing to talk about it, instead I’m going to talk about one of the unintendedly hilarious spin-offs of a country with eleventy-billion cable channels: Original Movies.

Because you have to get fifty cable channels to get one, we now have approximately ninety-three-billion cable channels (that’s smaller than eleventy.) These channels run twenty-four hours a day, and thus must have content twenty-four hours a day. Because there are only so many reality show concepts in existence – though, believe me, every possible niche is exploited – and American TV channels are reluctant to stoop to showing things made in other countries (the odd British show works its way in, but mostly via BBC America) many channels turn to making what they call Original Movies, known in better days as made-for-TV.

And boy, oh boy, they’re bad.

One particularly egregious offender in these stakes is the SyFy channel, which in days gone by used to be called SciFi and, weirdly enough, made and showed science fiction. (In particular, the Stargate franchise was big for them.) Now their main reality show is called Ghost Hunters. This may give you some indication of where they’ve done (and why they changed the spelling, because SciFi was too intimidating or something.)

Now, any of my friends will tell you that I am an unashamed aficionado of disaster movies. A large American city is destroyed on film by the forces of nature? I’M THERE. I’m not sure what it says that this bad habit has survived the actual forces of nature, but it has. (I was kinda worried about that. The whole Christchurch/Extreme Weather Event Checklist thing has been sucky enough without it taking away a hobby.)

SyFy specialises in producing this sort of story. They do it by stripping away every possible resemblance the storyline could have to actual science or actual fiction and leaving a lurching, wailing monster of a 90-minute movie staffed by actors known better for other things. They have names like “Ice Twister” and “Storm War”. The formula seems to be: Totally Implausible Disaster + Paper-Thin Story About A Scientist Derided By His Colleagues + Bad Special Effects = Win. Imagine, oh, Twister, that mid-nineties OMG TORNADOES ARE BAD movie with Jodie Foster or whoever it was. Now imagine it worse. No, worse than that. No, I mean really, really bad. Yeah.

About there.

New Zealand viewers can only imagine the mind-numbing awfulness, because as far as I remember from when I lived in a house with Sky, the availability of programming from multiple countries allows some filtering out of the dreck. This is filler TV in all its terrible, terrible glory. The ninety-hundredth repeat of some mediocre action movie on Monday night cannot come close.

Sadly, this apparently works for them in terms of viewership, because here I am, on a Saturday night, watching something called “Stonehenge Apocalypse“(LINK). It has it all; actors I vaguely recognise from better, actual science fiction; a mish-mash of Disaster Concepts (“Say, uh, Stonehenge was really an ancient terraforming device, and it could, like, fry people with electromagnetic waves, because that’s scary and scientific, and it made volcanoes explode, oh, and there was a pyramid in – where do we wanna go on vacation this year? – oh, right, Maine. A pyramid in Maine. BEST THING EVER, amirite?”); very babbly technobabble; a map with lots of string on it, because maps with string on them are SCIENCE. Actors stumble around, mostly required only to stare in horror at green-screens or computer monitors. Scenes take place in totally implausible locations (as I speak, someone is being  interrogated in a school gymnasium, uh, just because, and delivering lines like “Don’t you know that Pyrodictium oxygenated the atmosphere?”, a line approximately as plausible as “Don’t you know that elephants burp up rainbows?”) It’s terrible, but in the way that a long, slow, trainwreck is terrible; you can’t help watching to see if it’s gonna go down the way you think it is.

Although that moment quoted above jumped the proverbial shark for me, insomuch as this aquatic-predator-leaping-show could do so once; I don’t work with Pyrodictium but I know people who do, and every single fact they stated about it was, as they say, not even close enough to be wrong, but not even in an entertaining way, like if they’d made into The Next Thing Worse Than Swine Flu or something. (Also when the only non-white characters turned out to be evil. I won’t even go into the multitude of fail that involves.)

In a way it’s kind of like Mills and Boone. No-one reads Mills and Boone (I presume, my closest exposure was my weekly mocking of the covers at Pak’N'Save checkouts) because they want a great and insightful story of romantic drama. They read it because they want a fill-in-the-blanks story, and/or porn. People watch these because they provide a fill-in-the-blanks story (Scientist Knows Stuff, They Say He’s Wrong (Yes, It’s Always a He), Stuff Blows Up, He’s Right, He Saves The World, He Kisses The Girl, The End) and/or disaster porn. In a way they’ve perfected it; they’ve stripped away all the useless bits where characters are made out to be actual human beings with people they care about (e.g. the whole family plot of The Day After Tomorrow – family drama, dull, massive ice storms, HELL YEAH.) It’s the junk food of a certain genre of movie.

But you know what? Bad as it is, it’s still a whole lot less depressing than the reality of three more years of John Key smiling, waving, and selling my country’s state assets.

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In The Dark

Posted on November 21, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

The only thing we can really be grateful for about the Great Halloween Power Outage is that it didn’t happen a week later, after the end of daylight savings. Because then we really would have been in trouble.

You see, aside from the whole thing where “standard time” only lasts four months of the year here (Peter Dunne, eat your heart out), Massachusetts’ location in the far east of our time zone leads to another problem: it gets dark ridiculously early. (I know, I know, people in Scandinavia and Alaska and over-wintering in Antarctica and so on are laughing at me right now, but we all have our #firstworldproblems, okay?)

Bear in mind, the shortest day here is some half-hour longer than the shortest day in Christchurch. Because New Zealand is the Land of the Long White Cloud, we have a significant day-length differential between Auckland and Invercargill (about an hour’s difference on the longest day, which I hadn’t realised), but there’s no particular difference between, say, Gisbourne and New Plymouth – when daylight saving comes to an end, the day ends at basically the same, quite reasonable, time. Five-ish. Five-ish is a good time for the day to end. It’s the beginning of the evening, for one thing. It’s a perfectly reasonable time to open an alcoholic beverage. That sort of thing.

Here in the US it’s a bit different – time zones cover great swathes of continent that people actually inhabit, and the Eastern Standard Time zone stretches from Massachusetts to the western border of Indiana, which is nearly the length of New Zealand, or, in an obvious piece of logic: equivalent to a one-hour difference in sunset/sunrise. What this means, in practice, is that while the end of daylight savings brings sunrise to a reasonable hour for the good people of Indiana – at around 8am on the shortest day of the year, much like most of New Zealand -  it puts our Massachusetts sunset, even now, a month out from the shortest day – at around four-thirty pm. It will get earlier. This, not to put too fine a point on it, is stupid. Four-thirty is, like, the middle of the afternoon. (Yes, by my prior logic, the beginning and middle of the afternoon are a lot longer than the end of it. That’s just how it is.)

I had not ascertained the full extent of this stupidity last year because I was catching the bus. Now I’m biking, it’s suddenly bleedingly obvious that having to leave by 4pm in order to bike home safely – or earlier if it’s cloudy – is really not the best possible state of affairs. The day length is actually about fifteen minutes longer than it is in Christchurch, and about the same as Wellington, but that half-hour sunset/sunrise timeshift makes all the difference.

On the other hand, I could get up early and arrive at work before 8am and then go home early, but, well, in two weeks Mike’s starting working from home and the smugness if I’m leaving the house before he’s even out of bed will be unbearable, so, no. (Turns out you can Earn $$$ Working In Your Own Home, you just need a postgraduate degree in a highly technical, computer-related, and under-serviced field to do so. Funny how that works.)

This problem is not just due to the light levels, of course. The road I go down to get from home to uni – at least for a large section – is unlit, narrow, and rich with potholes. If potholes were a form of currency, this road would be wearing a suit, sipping a latte, and complaining about how it used to eat lunch in Zuccotti Park before all those jobless people showed up to ruin it. Frankly it can be a bit dodgy at midday on a bike, or even in a car at night. On a bike in the dark it doesn’t bear thinking about. This is of course the reality of semi-rural living – and of a very, very active road degradation environment – but I’d forgotten just how aggravating it is to have to pack up and dash to make a bus schedule instead of hopping on my bike, especially since I’d got it stuck in my head that the only thing standing between me and a year-round efficient fitness strategy (travel time stays the same, daily exercise achieved instantly!) was snow, and the aforesaid Great Halloween Mayhem aside, we shouldn’t be getting any big, bike-endangering dumps of snow for at least another few weeks.

All of which is to say: come this time of year, this survey result on drinking rates in New England is very, very understandable.

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