USA

American Phive-Oh #2

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The first time I flew United was in the early 1990’s, around about the time United planes used to lose parts of their fuselage mid-flight, like luggage hold doors and wing flaps. We used to joke that you could get to Australia from the Us without auto pilot – just follow the debris trail across the Pacific. But now, as then, all went smoothly and acceptably if you count hurricanes as acts of God. So we are here.

I’ve decided after about three hours, that New Orleans is my spiritual home. That three hours comprised 1 hour to get our (unlost, thankfully) luggage at the airport and drive into town to our hotel on Bourbon Street. Then get into the hotel and get out of the clothes we’ve been in for the last couple of days (1 hour) and get into the street and check the place out. So late afternoon/early evening there are numerous bands playing a wide variety of music in numerous bars and clubs they tend to go from mid afternoon to about 6.00pm then someone else takes over. The early shift comprise a lot of children of the sixties and seventies (Iike me) and grey ponytails are ubiquitous. Hence the spiritual home reference. I could retire and do that for the rest of my days no worries. Of course, that’s in another life in a parallel universe because other commitments tend to mitigate against this. But one can dream.

Wandering down Bourbon Street was an experience. We had been told that crime is rife here (we were told the same about Capetown) and there were plenty of layabouts making pretty pathetic attempts to get their scams going but they mostly left us alone. Even I could see that there were eminently more muggable people wandering the streets than us. I had left my glasses in the room as I only had two pockets (wallet and phone) and it was sunny so the sunglasses won. So even staring at a street menu like Mr Magoo trying to distinguish letters from numbers, didn’t attract unsavoury attention.

The souvenir shops here are insane. Our driver, coming in from the airport, told us there are pretty much no rules in this place. If you have to act a certain way elsewhere, reverse it here. So the souvenir shop had plastic models of a girl blowing a crocodile and the crocodile doing unmentionable things to her from behind. Someone I know is getting one of these. And I have only seen similar messages to the ones here on t-shirts in Korea but the artwork here is infinitely more ornate.

This place is a critical cultural observer’s (that’s what I call myself) paradise. So plenty more to come.

American Phive-Oh #1

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It’s Wednesday morning and the child bride and I have much to look forward to. Friday, September 13th is the 50th anniversary of our first (blind) date. It was a Friday the 13th back then also. We’ve always considered it our lucky day since, having twice in that 50 year interim, won meat tray raffles in pubs on a Friday the 13th. Put a circle round that date. I can’t remember which pubs or when however. This Friday the 13th has Hurricane Francine blocking our way as we all head towards Louisiana for what I anticipate to be a rather uncomfortable likely flight-cancelling juxtaposition. I suspect we’ll be pretty familiar with San Francisco airport by the time we get our connecting flight to New Orleans.
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Got that right. Our San Fran to New Orleans flight has just been cancelled and we haven’t even left Brisbane yet. Looks like a night in San Fran then a flight to Denver and hopefully a connection to New Orleans. We get there on the 12th instead of the 11th so will still make our date on the 13th. It’s times like this you realise the value in booking through an agent (not something I normally do) and lashing out occasionally to sit at the front of the plane. By the time we heard our flight to New Orleans had been cancelled we were minutes away from boarding – just enough time to ring the agent to get our hotel booking changed and our lift from the airport rearranged, not something I could have done myself. I’m assuming United will put us up in a hotel in San Fran although it’s been an hour since I ordered that red wine so the jury’s still out.

This airline also seems to leave the seatbelt sign on for an inordinate amount of time, even when it’s so calm it feels like we’re standing still. There maybe a reason for this – see previous paragraph – regarding giving the flight attendants hours of time for necessary gossip. Or it could be because Boeing planes have been rather inconveniently losing doors and wheels recently. This plane’s a 787 Dreamliner which leads nicely into this. Already the lights are off, the shades are down and people are pretending it’s night time. It’s the middle of the bloody afternoon and I’m going to chase that glass of red, seatbelt sign or no seatbelt sign.
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We’re now in a hotel in San Francisco (with flowers in our hair). Haven’t encountered any homeless or drug addicts (or both) or been mugged yet, but we’ve only been here a couple of hours most of which was spent wandering aimlessly round the deserted airport like the Walking Dead trying to find someone to talk to. Here was me thinking someone from United would meet us off the plane with a hotel voucher and new boarding passes. How naive. How old-school. Those passes and vouchers do exist because we eventually located them but not without a bit of Poirot and a very helpful United lady who I’m sure wasn’t expecting to be problem solving for idiot foreign tourists at that hour.

Very early start tomorrow. Our New Orleans flight via Denver is confirmed and will arrive hopefully, after the worst of the hurricane has passed through and hopefully leaving some of the bars intact and unflooded. For now we are in our hotel in south San Fran. Not quite Silicon Valley, which is a bit further down the road, but with pretensions – lots of shiny office buildings and no houses. Maybe that’s why the bar and restaurant in our hotel are permanently closed – the nerd community doesn’t drink.

This was going to be a prologue but we’ve sort of stumbled into the holiday proper, albeit in entirely the wrong location. Hopefully have something more interesting to write about in the coming days.

Hashtag This

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Now that the Mueller Report is out, I believe it should be safe to publish this. I wrote it a couple of months ago and filed it away for future reference. The future is now and I feel ever so slightly vindicated because I think I have already  heard one or two mea culpas . Read on to find out what this is all about.

Alright blog, what do you think of this? The Spectator magazine is running an essay competition and the topic is “The Next Great Hashtag”. I’d love to enter. I’ve been threatening to submit something or other to one of these competitions or to a magazine for ages but it’s unlikely to happen here sadly because I’m not familiar with the mythical (to me) power of the hashtag or indeed why it isn’t still just that little sign you put in front of a number to indicate that it is a number, as in #3 or “number three”. There’s a degree of redundancy there you’d have to admit so someone somewhere has decided that # is being grossly under-utilised so is in need of a higher purpose. So dear blog, to continue concealing my hipness ignorance (“hignorance’ or “hipnorance” – could have invented a new word there) from the rest of the world because only three people regularly read you, I’ll subject you to a discourse on the topic at hand.

I’m a child mostly of the previous century so the significance or indeed the aforementioned power of a hashtag eludes me. My football mad relatives write comments on Facebook followed by #ManU  #Football  #SirAlex or such like. Why? What’s the point? Does this magically transport the comment to …..somewhere or someone? That Twitter thing uses them a lot but I don’t wallow in that sewer so am none the wiser there. I remember a picture of a pouting, frowny faced Michelle Obama holding up a sign with “#Bring Back Our Girls” written on it. The parodies were hilarious which just goes to show that unless you can genuinely fake sincerity then forget success (attrib. George Burns or someone called Jean Giraudoux or someone else). Come to think of it, Michelle Obama’s fake sincerity doesn’t seem to have held her back. Neither has Bill Shorten’s for that matter – once more with feeling Bill, the director might shout. But why is that noughts and crosses thing needed at the start of the comment?

So not understanding the authority of a hashtag makes me eminently qualified to expound prophetically on the next “big thing”. If it’s okay for humanities professors to lecture me on climate change and get away with it, then cop this.

No, I can’t do it. My curiosity has got the better of me and I’m going to have to do a bit of research.

Later that day……………..

Apparently, according to that fount of all knowledge Wikipedia, a hashtag links messages with a common theme, much like a common theme used to. During my in-depth research I went onto Facebook and clicked on a hashtag to see what would happen and bugger me, all of these Facebook entries appeared and all were related to the same, wait for it, theme. So there’s the clue. The Next Great Hashtag has to be linked to today’s most ubiquitous, prevailing (“trending”?) theme. And what might that be, said he, asking the most obvious question in the world?

Before I answer that question, let me say that I follow American politics reasonably closely. Closely enough to not have to read the numerous articles written by the work experience kids who populate some of our online “news” websites. You know the ones – they regularly point out where Donald Trump continues to go wrong or expound on the five reasons he will be impeached or resign or somehow or other be kicked out of office in the next three or six or nine months. This has been going on for more than two years. Predictions of his downfall or at least that he would achieve nothing and be the worst president since the last one have come and gone like so many climate tipping points.

Consequently I’m predicting that The Next Great Hashtag will be #Iwaswrong as in I was wrong to underestimate, demonise, mock (pick any number of abusive adjectives) Donald Trump and not give any credit where credit is due, which is all Donald Trump (and the rest of us for that matter) can ask for. I accept that this will be a stretch for those suffering the most chronic, incurable strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome, because let’s face it, there’s a lot of face to lose here. Mea culpa’s of the “It’s a fair cop, Your Honour; guilty as charged. I was wrong” type, will need to be levered out of CNN for example, with a crowbar.

In a parallel universe a casual observer might feel sympathy for someone who has put the bank account, the house, the car, the wife, the kids, the credibility and the beer can collection on a sure bet like Hillary Clinton who then rather unsportingly loses. If not for the billions squirrelled away in the Clinton Foundation, you’d almost believe that the fix was in. And the flashing red lights were there for everyone to see. Fortunately the “someones” in question in our universe are celebrities lite, 90% of the media, the self proclaimed elites of the bureaucracy and academia plus random undergraduates with nothing to lose and as would have happened with a different election result, nothing to gain. So they get no sympathy.

These clowns (for want of a better word) painted themselves into such a tight corner with their samurai-like commitment to Hillary, the only way out for some of them if she lost was the Hollywood version of hara-kiri – moving to Canada. When this level of devotion takes you to your own version of Jonestown, there is no backing down. The only way out, up to now, has been to totally discredit everything Donald Trump said, says, did and does, past present and future, so that upon his downfall they can say “See, I was right all along. It just took a bit longer than I thought to play out.”

Sadly for them, it’s not playing out. Consequently we have the tragically pathetic sight (and sound) of an actor at the top of his game (debatable, I know), Robert De Niro contributing a philosophical “F…Trump” to the discourse thereby proving that even the most inspirational actors are orally vacuous unless someone else puts words into their mouths. In fact the two years of Trump’s presidency have played out like the speeded up versions of left-slanting news shows on CNN and MSNBC on election night which are preserved for posterity on YouTube  – initially euphoria but morphing into equal parts feral aggression and despair. If the leader of the free world didn’t have such a profound and ongoing impact on global machinations, those shows would have represented the pinnacle of Trump’s presidency before it even started.

Now we know most of the Trump opposition is of the left; not exclusively but predominantly. And we know that leftists like collectives because, let’s face it, most of them don’t have the courage of their convictions when confronted by arguments which rely on facts, logic, common sense and human nature. They need a protective outer cloak of like minded automatons. Watching Ben Shapiro or Brendan O’Neill or Jordan Petersen or the late Christopher Hitchens skewer emotive half-baked arguments with these axioms, even though a couple of those people mentioned would not necessarily consider themselves to be of the right (socially and/or economically), is a latter day version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, such is the mirth-making.

Returning to the hashtag, the aforementioned emotive collective (“emective” perhaps – I’m on a roll with these new words) has nowhere to go especially if the Mueller probe into God knows what turns up nothing of significance and the now Democrat dominated House of Representatives turns out to be, as expected, all piss and wind.  I’m predicting that the dam will break when one prominent leftist admits they erred in condemning everything Trumpian and tweets #Iwaswrong. Collectivists being what they are will initially try to isolate this clearly deranged outlier until someone else realises that maybe he/she is right. Then other collectivists, because they are, will want to join the party to show how woke they are and hey presto, the trend is on its way.

Incidentally I was torn between #Iwaswrong  and #Wewerewrong but such is the power of #, I have found, it doesn’t matter because in social media world # is the great gatherer or more appropriately collector, if we want to stick to our leftist shtick. It turns out the armour provided by “we” won’t be required.

Now I’d love to do a piece on the “Green New Deal” but it would look something  like this byooooootvglsek5bvdktgb,bsc              after I fall face first into the keyboard laughing like a drain.

Whoops

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If you asked the average Ellen DeGeneres audience or a random selection of current Ivy League college students in the United States to raise their hand if they knew that Vienna is the capital of Australia, I bet half of them would.

I see an Airbus A380 threw a shoe somewhere over the Atlantic yesterday. That’s pilot lingo for a catastrophic and explosive engine failure. Actually I made the “lingo” thing up. Fortunately these planes have three spares so despite an unscheduled pit-stop in some godforsaken, frozen wasteland called Goose Bay in outback Canada, just up the road from Mud Lake, all’s well.

What is the connection between these two statements? You may well ask. It may take me a little while to get there but here goes.

One of the many dates I chose to start writing my travel book was July 1st 1992. This date was very marginally auspicious because my flight had just touched down in Tokyo. Nothing special about that you may well posit, but the particular airline which was benefiting from my custom that day was rather infamous at the time for bits falling off their planes. It was and is one of the largest airlines in the world which was just as well because they regularly needed to replace parts which they kept losing, in-flight rather alarmingly. Nothing serious like a wing you understand, just the occasional door or engine or wing flap. This did however raise serious issues of safety like do I keep my seatbelt on and go out with the seat or should I attempt to grab whatever is locked down before being sucked though the rather disconcerting hole in the fuselage. So surviving this flight was for me, rather auspicious. I resisted the urge to belabour this point by making an “I survived the ride on Flight—— “ t-shirt.

The airline is question was an American airline and not long after the date of my safe arrival in Tokyo, a number of American airlines began pulling out of the Australian route. There’s a joke there that Australians will understand and Americans won’t. One airline remained loyal to the trans-Pacific corridor and here’s where we link the first two apparently unrelated sentences in this piece.

Despite the fact that most Americans don’t know where Australia is, back then their planes could find us by following the debris trail across the Pacific. Ta daaaa.