Big Brothering

I am not ashamed to admit my fascination with Big Brother. Our household always has had a "thing" for the rats in the lab reality TV phenomenon. It brings us together. A ritual of people-watching over dinner - and onwards since one or other of us usually has it streaming on the computer.
The Aussie BB is vastly different from the American version which I find very hard to watch and even harder to care about. The American production pits the housemates against each other and encourages factions and power games. A great deal of energy is expended on expressions of hatred, one housemate for another. It is all very bitter, backstabbing and ambitious, the eye always on the money at the end.
The Aussies, on the other hand, seem to bond in the house. The big problem they have is finding reasons to nominate each other for eviction and quite often their nominations are accompanied by apology. They weep buckets whenever one of their number is evicted. They put up affectionate little memorials to them. There may be disputes in the house, but mainly it turns into an almost filial love fest.
And thus are our cultures different. Just as we can't produce the sort of characters who populate the Jerry Springer Show, we can't produce a BB house of nastiness. Does this mean we are a nicer culture? Perhaps. Certainly a less uptight one.

Going Mac-wards

Pooh. The pic blogger bot is only for PCs. We Maccies are out in the cold. And I so wanted to do a piccie thing.

Pax on earth

Salam Pax has charmed his way around Australia. Poor man has not seen much of the country or the culture. Emily Booth, his publisher publicist, has given him a heavy schedule which means that if you ask him what he thinks of the country he will reply: "Your hotels are very good. Room service is good." He has mainly seen the insides of bookshops and CD stores, he says. And radio and TV studios. And, for us tonight, a large hall where the Salam Pax Big Book Club event attracted an enthusiastic capacity crowd.
Salam arrived and gratefully accepted a glass of white wine, mingling easily, albeit slightly confused when one gentleman came to deliver him greetings from a certain sheik in London. That man, like several others in the audience, had been to Iraq. But he had serious dealings with the redevelopment of the country. I don't think Salam realised this but, then again, there were so many people vying for his attention.
Having interviewed him on the phone for the Saturday magazine feature, we were already relaxed and on a kindred wavelength with blogging in common. For this event, we sat together at a table on stage - the interview process being more relaxed and conversational.
Salam was a deleriously easy interview, although he says he finds the "being interviewed" process very weird indeed. Our format makes it more like a chat - and it felt very comfortable. Salam says he hates being made into some sort of pundit on the politics of Iraq, but of course his insights are craved. I had to ask at least some questions about war and peace, for this is what has made him so famous. But he was most at home enthusing about the blogsphere.
I had a show of hands on bloggers in the audience. Only four. We think there will be more tonight - since we have encouraged them to come here to blogger and get into it, now they understand that it is another rich world of communications and self-expression.
Salam was a little taller than I had expected. I don't know why. He is pleasant looking, balding, with a neat, groomed beard. He is slightly rounded in physique - and makes clear, honest eye-contact when talking with one. His English is superb - with an interesting, cultured accent. Of course he was educated in Vienna.
The audience was absolutely rapt with interest in all he had to say. It is magnificent to look out on a sea of sentient faces. Gives one hope for the world. And having Salam was, I observed, like having a little window through which to see into the real Iraq. Not that he is a typical Iraqi, as he is first to admit. But his European education forced him to examine his culture and see it through an objective lens. This makes him no less of a patriot. He is a brilliant ambassador for his country. He tries to assert a sense of optimism for it, grateful that Saddam is gone, adamant that the coalition should listen to more Iraqis. He communicates well the sense of disruption and fear in which the people live, saying that when a car backfired in Sydney, he immediately felt a flashback to Iraq and feared where the bullets were going.
He also is funny - a lovely, ironic humor, familiar to all of us who have read his blog.
Our evening with him ran over time. Everyone had questions to ask. We did not want to let him go. So much we want to know.
Bravo, Salam. You are a delightful man and it was simply marvellous to connect in person with you. In your wake go waves of new understanding.
Please don't stop blogging.

Salam Pax

What a pleasure to interview the Baghdad Blogger as I did on the phone today to write the forward feature for his impending visit. What a cherub he is. Lively, bubbly and interesting. Immensely likeable. He said that he never for a moment imagined, as he tapped out that historic blog from the crumbling chaos of falling Baghdad, that he would end up talking to the likes of me. And I have to say that, as I checked in to that famous Baghdad blog during those terrible times, I, too, never imagined that I would be talking to its author.

car car car

It's big deal. Just a few times in a lifetime. For some, never. So I have been pretty excited about taking delivery of my very own brand new car. It's a Subaru Forester, green. I have had my eye on this model of car for several years and test driving two of the latest Foresters last year sealed my resolve that this was "the" car for me and us. I held off and held off, until the ancient Subaru Liberty I call Wanda was making me nervous - that gnawing feeling that she may not get me where I was going. And I stood on my little hind legs, so to speak, and asserted that I would not and could not add stress about a car to the many demands in life. I am past it. I am at a time of life when one must and will have certain civilized and comfortable facilities - i.e. a safe and dependable car. Fortunately, my darling Bruce concurred. And so the deed is done.
Yesterday I collected the car from Eblens where they made an extended celebratory ritual of the purchase - and off I drove, all pristine and only 16 klicks on the dial. I have to run her in, of course. Or is it him? I have yet to give the car its identity.
At present I mainly gaze upon it with a sense of incredulity and delight. Waiting for the weekend when I can take her out to the country and really spend some time with her. And I will really have to make the most of that because for the rest of the week I will not be able to drive her. I will be test driving the new Mazda3 for the paper.

A rumpled office

Rain rattles against the window and I see my banana palms lurching in the stormy wind. Brrr. This old house has no heating and I stay in bed rather than turn on a heater. My bed, now I am wireless, has become an office - piled with books and, of course, the ever-handy laptop. I made coffee at 6 am, when it was still dark, and went on reading the book version of Salam Pax, cross-referencing to websites he mentions. I don't know why, as a dedicated netizen, I stick to the book and do not return to his website, which, after all, is the "real" world. But I am engrossed in this retrospective which is all the more fascinating now, with all the wisdoms of hindsight. Of course I can make notations in the book - things which I can use as I spread the word to the blogless population.

I am annoyed that I have never been to Iraq and that I get confused by the cultural/tribal complexities. I am a shallow student - always skimming information in an effort to keep broadly informed. Coping with the information overload as best I can. Who can work and cook and wash and shop - and also keep abreast of a zillion news sources and blogs?
Let alone write a meaningful blog? Well, I am not competing with the champion bloggers. I have words to churn elsewhere - and I am way more fascinated with what other bloggers have to say than with musings of my own.

I will have to go to work soon - that lively place with its diverse "family" of co-workers. We are a bit nervous about the demolition beside our building. We look forward to the end product which will be our state-of-the-art new premises - but we worry that the shaking of our old building will dislodge the asbestos. They have put in monitors to check this out.
Meanwhile, I dread going out in the rain and getting into my old car with its leaking sunroof. Water will dump on me the moment I start moving. I had hoped to get my new car before the rains. But with just one day to go, fate spites me with a deluge and I shall drive to work draped in towels and with a cap on my head.
A petty hardship when I contemplate Iraq. How pitiful of me to dare to complain.

Sweet Adelaide

Riven between my two worlds, I have been trying to adjust to being back in Adelaide through a process of immersion. Going for walks as a cultural sponge. Loosening the thought processes and allowing the body to be a sensory receptor.
A neurasthenic approach, perhaps.
Perhaps just a wallow.
My favorite place is the central market where on Saturday I firstly lunched on fish curry and then, soothed by the comfort of familiar Asian food, I meandered among the stalls where the stallholders were shouting down the prices. "Dollar, dollar, dollar," rang through the air from all directions and people huddled around barrows freshly loaded with the end-of-week bargains. And into the fish market I roamed where people clustered around the high counters waiting for the shout-down specials. And the shouts roared from the fish counters and from the poultry stands and the people, laden with bags of provisions, jostled and called back. And it was raucous and jubilant and wildly alive. I stood in the midst of it all and let it reverberate through my body. Lovely. A dose of vibrant humanity. Like floating in delicious people soup.
The Continental delicatessan was shouting down prices, too. I bought some extravagant custard confections for a song - and a batard. I was not there for shopping, after all. Just the ambience. And I wandered on among the fresh fruit and veg, the colors and fragrances. Barrows of vivid sliced watermelon, piles of salad vegetables, boxes of pears, citrus....
The Asian groceries with their mountains of greens.
And, of course, the sense that we now are also an Asian market, for our population is now strongly Asian. Which makes me feel comfortable and optimistic for our country.

Where is Raed?

I will ask that question, since Raed has always been somewhere else. But Salam Pax will be here - promoting the book of his famous blog, doing the world book tour thing. It has been chosen as our paper's Big Book Club feature for May.
I have been sitting up in bed with jet lag and the book. I have, of course, made periodic visits to the blog over the years - and it is a strange thing but blogs seem better to me in blog form. As a book it is bitsy and somehow cold and distant. Perhaps one of potentcies of blogs is the sense that they are alive and shared online, that others are reading them at the same time as oneself. That they are part of the great connectivity. That we online readers constitute some sort of community and that there is an immediacy and intimacy in blog communications.
But even though I have written innumerable column recommendations of various blogs and even an extensive magazine feature on the world of blogging, I find a world out there which has never heard the word "blog". So putting the Pax blog into print form will cerrtainly broaden awareness among those whose online reach extends no further than email.

The Pax assignment was my greeting back to work on Thursday - when I arrived in the office straight from the epic flight from Boston. It was a good trip as such world crossings go. My frequent flyer points had earned me an upgrade to Business - and it divine to be able to extend the legs, not to mention have power for the laptop, which is not available in the cheap seats.
Pax, the publicist tells me, is having a far more difficult and epic journey from Baghdad. Many days and a circuitous route. He arrives in Sydney on Monday and on Tuesday faces a non-stop barrage of media interviews, mine among them. Poor bastard. But I get a second, more leisurely, slice of his cake when he comes to Adelaide for the Book Club and I conduct a live interview in front of an audience.

Administrative contrition

Hearing Donald Rumsfelt oozing contrition about the mistreatment of Iraqi POWs is nothing more than irritating. It is all too late. It is after the fact.
The culture was already established. First an administration which outsources POW guarding. Outsources!!!!! Employs contractors. Civilians. And who adopts such contracts? Rednecks, of course
But the redneck culture is entrenched in the military anyway. Never clearer when I met the marines on R&R in Darwin and hearing their savage attacks on war veterans. How Vietnam Vets and Gulf War Vets were cowardly and soft. Unlike the services of today who know how to "kick butt".
Somewhere these young people are being drilled in this attitude. It is part of the culture of toughness. It is the attitude of the government of the day.

I hear people on IRC saying how tough is this country and how it will show the other countries. It needs no friends. The rest of the world is irrelevent.
This attitude, also conditioned by the propaganda of the present administration, is suicidal in terms of world politics let alone Islamic psychology. The loathing of Islam is fuelled by the atrocities in Iraq. One hears the American contractor who escaped from detention with the Iraqis saying that he was given civilized treatment during his imprisonment. What an irony.
The next lot of kidnapped westerners will not fare as well, methinks.

Meanwhile, I realise why so many of the devotees of Nostradamus now are circulating the email with reminders of his prophecies.

Kindred Strangers

This is a fascinating apartment complex. Some 600 apartments spread through a vast acreage of New Hampshire woodlands and streams - set out as a mock Tudor village complete with beams and round turrets, winding roads, some along high restraining walls. Squirrels and chipmunks scuttle around the place. It's all quite charming. The buildings are just three-storeys tall. We are in a middle floor apartment with a wee balcony which gets next to no sun but manges at least to grow impatiens in pots during summer.
Today, with the sun at last out, I was playing my favourite Chieftans CD, rather loudly, and there was that wonderful anthem, Long Journey Home. Suddenly various pennies dropped - as I thought of how far away was my other home. And I glanced out the window and saw two strapping young Brazilian men with pails and mops, coming to wash the laundry. They are far from home, too, beginning at the bottom for a new life, I pondered. They were talking in Portugese. Just as the Latino groundsmen who swarm around the property with fertilisers and leaf blowers seem only to talk in Spanish. None of these workers seems to have any English at all. Unlike the Indians who live in most of the apartments. Their English is exemplary, for India is the last bastion of English at its most correct. The Indian women swan around the compound in vivid saris while their high tech PhD husbands are at work and tantalising scents of curries waft onto the apartment landings. And they, too, are far from home. As are the Chinese and Taiwanese who also live in this complex. And the few Swiss and Germans. For, indeed, this is the truest form of multicultural community. There are more foreigners than Americans in this bit of America. We are all far from home - strangers in every sense of the word, for we don't know each other more than to nod on passing. And yet, in many senses, this is American grassroots - for the country long has absorbed the people of the world in mind-boggling numbers. There's one helluva lot of people here. Actually, it's a pretty mind-boggling place.

Converted

For years I have stepped back from the American passion for peanut butter. I never cared for the stuff and was appalled at the idea of having it with jelly.
Then, one day, I was lured into eating some Reece's Pieces. "You won't be able to eat just one," said step-daughter, Cathy. She was right. Peanut butter and chocolate, for heaven's sake. Disgusting idea. Delicious result.
Now I've succumbed to cheese cracker biscuits with peanut butter filling. Yum.
Where will it all end?

Here comes the sun

The last night of frost tonight, says the weather forecast. The sun has come out. Crocuses are peeking up. Squirrels, looking plump and fluffy in their winter coats, are vigorously foraging everywhere. The female Canada goose on the lake has made herself a little downy nest on the shore and sits patiently while her male cruises up and down bullying the ducks away. Green buds are bursting on the first trees.
My days are passing terrifyingly fast. I am busy as anything - and yet I don't feel productive. Many hours vanish on email alone. I just filed two columns - and still I feel as if I have not done enough. Stircrazy, perhaps?

With time to read

Rainy days help. But it is a treat to be able to sit down with a book during the daytime. I've never been good at it. Almost any time I sit down with a book I am consumed with guilt and mental listings of things I really should be doing - as if reading is some sort of self-indulgent sin. And, within 15 minutes or so, I am usually up and doing some chore or other. Always as a quick preface to the reading session, something I will just get out of the way now there is the chance. I do some of my best housework whenever I try to read a book in the daytime.
But here we are with some real time and most of the chores done. That's the big plus of apartment living. I have finished the books I am reviewing and have come to the magic moment when I get to choose some reading matter.
First choice was Richard Clark's "Against All Enemies". What an engrossing and disturbing read. But this is the moment for such a book. This book fills in many of the spaces in the jigsaw of media coverage - by going under the skin of events, behind the scenes of bureaucracy and politics. It teaches and reminds one of the history of recent years - spreads out a decade of interlocking events and makes it all make sense. And it leaves one even more worried and frustrated - but at least advisedly so.

April Fool's Day

The year's April 1 marked 19 years of my working for my paper. Nothing funny about that. Scarey - the years rolling by so easily, busy weeks skittering from beneath me. I don't regret. It has been richly interesting and, in many ways it has defined my identity. Of course there have been frustrations and times of stress. Hell, the job, by deadline definition, is pressured. But it also has been fun - none more, I realise, than in the days when I was the one who played the April Fool's Day pranks in the paper.
In these earnest years, April Fool pranks have gone out of style. Howard Stern played a doozey this year, removing himself from the air. And John Kerry's team did a lovely mock press release announcing that George Bush was outsourcing the national debt.
They reminded me of my favorite prank - the year I declared, with particularly ugly artist illustrations, that the city's handsome old Town Hall clock was going digital.
There was a wonderful outcry of indignation among those who had not noticed what day it was. The switchboard was jammed. The Lord Mayor was ropable. He was out for my hide. Ahh..it was a most successful jape.
Those were the days.