Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Like everyone, I get my fair share of email spam, and most of the time my filters do a good job of directing straight into the trash.
But once in a while, something sneaks into my inbox. It’s not much of a hassle, except when you don’t know what you’re being sold.
Take today’s cheery piece of Asian spam. What the hell do they want me to buy?
Answers on a postcard, or a comment, please.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Regular readers will know my passion for The Archers, the long-running BBC Radio 4 drama (or soap, if you’re being nasty). That I can listen to it over the internet is a Very Good Thing.
But yesterday I was struck even more firmly by the distance-destroying impact new technology has had on ex-pat life. I was sitting in the office listening to England winning the Ashes, just as I would have been if I’d been working in Wycombe or Dublin (that’s cricket, and a rare victory over the mighty Australians, for those on this side of the water).
CMJ, Jonathan Agnew and Bill the grumpy statistician – all in my office on E. Palace in Santa Fe. Fantastic.
Then I’m home in the afternoon for my stint of Fionnuala watching. With Finn asleep, I’m wandering through the channels and there’s West Ham vs Villa live – the Monday evening Premiership match (that’s footbal).
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that it’s much easier to feel connected to life in the UK or Ireland while living in New Mexico than it was even seven years ago, during my spell in Kansas. And then, it was much easier than it would have been five years previously.
Obviously, spending all my time immersed in sport and media from back there would be pretty unhealthy, but being able to dip in every now and again – especially when England are just about to reclaim the Ashes – really makes a difference.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
I’m beginning to think Douglas Rushkoff has it right, I’m afraid:
What those who are afraid of civil society breaking down don’t realize is that civil society has already broken down! This is not a civil society we live in, but a profiteering, every-man-for-himself, oligarchy. The democratic process is broken if not rigged; the largest-ever redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich occurred over the last six years under the guise of economic stimulus; fear and disinformation were used to put the poorest of Americans onto a battlefield under false pretenses; those who seek to engage the current administration in meaningful dialogue are terminated.
Watching Shrub this morning talking about how much love he’s showing for the victims in the Gulf area didn’t help.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Amid all the horrors of hurricane Katrina and the subsequent deluge in New Orleans – hell and high water indeed – Wal-Mart deserve a special mention.
At the same time as Wal-Mart officials were standing beside President Bush, announcing a $15 million donation to disaster relief, they were cutting off the pay of their displaced workers.
As NPR reported this morning, while some major employers have undertaken to pay people for 90 days while they try and sort our their shattered lives, Wal-Mart cut off their associates after 3 days.
They’ve mumbled something about trying to find them work in other stores, but it seems they won’t get any wages until they start work. Nice.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Normally I’m suspicious of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ as a force for good. The whole idea that everyone flourishes in a free market is so clearly nonsense that you forget that sometimes it actually works.
A great article on immigration in this week’s Santa Fe Reporter (that now I can link to, because they finally sorted their website out) argues that large US corporations are way ahead of government policy in recognising undocumented Mexican migrant workers, and giving them the sort of services that ordinary people deserve.
So Wells Fargo and Bank of America will let you open a bank account with your Mexican ID card (which is very handy, as it stops you getting mugged on your way home on Friday night with a pocket full of cash). Citibank and some credit unions will also give you a loan for a house, so you can get out of that dodgy rented place you were in.
Oh, and you’re paying your taxes too. The IRS allows you to apply for a Tax Payer ID number, even if you don’t have a social security number, and many people have done just that, thinking that if ever there’s an amnesty and a chance to get full legal status, having been an upstanding tax payer (if not actually a legal resident) will stand to them.
Of course the reason the IRS and the other organisations are doing this is not because they’re selfless souls with a progressive stance on immigration reform. It’s because, as Adam Smith would point out, they want your money. These aren’t people who are just coming to the US for a summer and then leaving – they’re part of the community, they’re raising families (with their children as US citizens, of course), and they’re here for the long haul.
The economic certainties that bring migrant workers here in the first place (11 million and counting, according to the SFR story) are the same ones that mean companies are going to provide services to them when they’re here: there are plenty of low-wage jobs here that need doing, and plenty of hard-working people willing to do them. Bush’s surprisingly moderate stance on immigration issues (to the chagrin of the hard-liners in his own party) is based on the understanding that the US needs these workers as much as the workers need the US.
As an immigrant myself (albeit a legally documented one), I have a great deal of sympathy for people arriving here looking for work, and it’s good to see that there are moves afoot to acknowledge the permanence of their lives here. It would be nice if the sweeping immigration reform needed to create a path to permanent legal status for them, would at the same time drastically simplify the Kafka-esque hassles we went through to get a spousal visa.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Something very strange is happening to American TV – it’s come over all English.
We’re used to the sporadic attempts to remake British sit-coms for the US market – from Sanford and Son (Steptoe and Son in the UK), via an ill-advised attempt at Fawlty Towers, through to Coupling and the Office.
Most of the time these don’t work, with the standard explanations given that American audiences don’t like the cruel streak of English humour (the US versions of Absolutely Fabulous and Men Behaving Badly were so bland as to be unwatchable), and that the team approach of US sit-coms (needed because each season is so long) doesn’t sit well with the lone creator style preferred in the UK.
But if comedies don’t often work, it’s a different story with reality TV. Most Americans don’t know that Pop Idol started in England, along with Wife Swap, Nanny 911, What Not to Wear and Trading Places (the US Changing Rooms, because here changing rooms are called locker rooms so the pun doesn’t work).
There are also US versions of Airport, How Clean is Your House, Property Ladder, Antiques Roadshow, Brat Camp, Celebrity Come Dancing, Hit Me Baby One More Time and Life Laundry. Basically, any mildy watchable piece of cheap reality TV you’ve ever seen in Britain has reached our colonial cousins.
So the formats translate pretty well (I’d even argue that What Not to Wear is better here), but recently the personnel have also made it over here, with some weird results.
I’m not sure what the Amercian audiences make of Vernon Kaye’s flat vowels as the host of Hit Me Baby . . . , but everybody loves Gordon Ramsey.
Continuing the theme of British villains (Anne Robinson hosting The Weakest Link, Simon Cowell making hopefuls cry in Idol), it seems the folks here can’t get enough of Ramsey’s rants. The US version of Hell’s Kitchen involved real people rather than celebrities, competing to win a restaurant. It was riveting stuff.
And I switched on ABC the other night to see Johnny Vaughan presenting a frantic game show that looked a little like Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, but with a bigger budget.
Throw in the fey northerner Cash Peters on the Travel Channel’s Stranded, and you’ll see there are plenty of my countrymen on TV over here.
And that’s without watching BBC America, where I can currently get my fill of Little Britain, Teachers and the rest.
How long before Des Lynam’s introducing baseball games, and Paxo’s replacing the sadly departed Peter Jennings as the host of ABC’s flagship news programme?
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
So here’s the plan: I currently drink maybe four coffees a week from one or other of the cafes within walking distance of the office. I rotate my choices, based on a range of factors. If I also need a breakfast burrito, then it’s the Meridien (where they wisely offer a cyclists’ discount if you’ve come on the bike).
If I riding, but have already breakfasted, then I’ll swing by the Holy Spirit coffee stand round the corner from the Eldorado Hotel, and carefully ride through the Plaza with my coffee stuck in the bottle cage.
If I’m on foot, it’ll maybe be Sage’s coffee stand on Marcy, and now the new Caffe e Gelato place near the library (although I haven’t made up my mind about the quality there).
At each place, I’ll drop $2.50 – $3.00 maybe on the coffee, which got me thinking. If I cut it down to one or two coffees a week and put the difference in David’s Gaggia Fund, then pretty soon I’ll be on the way to something nice for the kitchen at home (plus a burr grinder which my new friends at coffeegeek.com assure me is almost as important as the espresso machine itself).
Of course I could just go out and buy the damn machine, stop drinking coffee out altogether, and have recouped my outlay even quicker, but the saving up somehow seems more moral, especially as your own espresso machine is such a ridiculous luxury anyway. I have to earn it somehow.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Although I’m currently on a decaf kick (helps me wake at odd hours of the night, when Fionnuala calls), I’ve always had a yen for a good espresso machine.
Over at Engagdet, there’s some spirited debate on the topic.
It seems the Rancilio Silva (shown) has a lot of admirers. And it looks like a bit of an Italian submarine. Which is interesting, given the rather spectacular efforts now underway to move just such an item from Cremona to downtown Milan.
But given the Euro/Dollar exchange rate, it sure is pricey (the espresso machine, that is, not the submarine).
Update: I think I may have got into something I can’t stop: http://www.coffeegeek.com/
Friday, July 22, 2005
So there was something good in the mail today, when we came back from lunch at Counter Culture, the locals’ haunt.
From Mesquite, Texas came my Green Card. I’m now a permanent US resident for the next two years, if that makes any sense.
(It’s actually a conditional green card, the condition being that Buendia still says she’ll support me in two years’ time. 90 days before it expires, we send away to get it turned into an unconditional green card.)
The first thing to note about it is that it’s not green.
It is a card, though, and there’s a flash of green on the back, next to a weird panel that looks like undeveloped film, but has my name and photo and other stuff sublimated in it somehow. The front is white and pretty straightforward, though – photo, fingerprint and the like.
So that’s me converted from my spousal visa to the heady status of green card holder. If I were younger, this would mean I’d have to register to be called up if there was ever a draft (weird how legal aliens can’t vote in the US, but they can die for their adoptive country). Fortunately, being older and a family man and all that, they’re not going to ask me any time soon. (Although Buendia and I met a guy from Limerick in The Palace in Dublin who had come over to work in the US and ended up serving in Vietnam. He then returned to Ireland, and must have been the only student ever to go through the University of Limerick on the GI Bill).
Now if it would only stop being ridiculously hot here. The monsoon rains are over two weeks late, and it’s been in the 90s for longer than that (that’s 30-something in Euro temps).
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Here’s what I did today: walked down the driveway, along the road about 20 yards and collected the mail from the box.
That’s it.
I also changed Fionnuala a few times, and burped her a few times, made lunch and watched some bad daytime TV, but that’s really stretching it.
And with Buendia here too that’s pretty much the sum total of all our efforts, since about 7am this morning.
I’m not entirely sure what happened to all those hours, but for two people so used to be reasonably productive, this is quite a change.
Consider the last three years. In that time, either together or apart, we’ve:
And now the six-pound mistress of the house thwarts us in our modest plan to all head into town and eat ice-cream on the Plaza.
And the weird thing is, we don’t really care.