ThorHulk

Today we caught a bus into downtown San Jose. From the window I saw a man at a street corner holding a sign. He also had two flags I didn't recognise sticking out of his backpack. To those motorists who acknowledged him he waved and saluted with two fingers held out, Winston Churchill style. The sign said "Bring our troops home". In Seattle we frequently went past a man with a similar sign but his sign said "Guns and Ammo" and had a giant arrow pointing at his shop.

We got off the bus at the Convention Centre in downtown. A comic book fan convention was happening and the square outside the convention centre was packed with realistically costumed teenagers and adults who weren't concerned with being mistaken for Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. No I mustn' be too critical - I used to like comics when I was a young 30 years old. Who knows, If I had known there were comics conventions I too might have made a giant polystyrene foam hammer and dressed up like the son of Thor and the Hulk. (Apologies to comics fans who actually know who this character is).

We also visited the Tech Museum of Innovation. This turned out to be collection of interactive displays for children.

I am sure these interactive displays are great for teaching kids about science but whenever I visit one of these museums, the kids are monopolising all the cool things to do and usually smashing them to bits without seeming to learn anything. In my science museum the coolest interactive exhibitions would be reserved for certain select adults namely me.

Land of the Squirrels

We are living with Lena's aunt and uncle in San Jose. Like Seattle, this part of the world was once covered by forest. In San Jose - redwood trees dominated. Today the Bay Area is a vast megalopolis consisting of grids of suburbs and only pockets of these mighty giants remain. You can however, see the odd redwood on a street.

The squirrels are still here though and very active right now as it's Spring. Imagine if squirrels had an oral history passed down through the generations in squirrelese. What would they be saying? Maybe, "Sure there's plenty of food now what with all these wasteful humans but I do miss the trees".

In the supermarket we were buying a bottle of wine for personal consumption. An elderly lady accosted us and asked where the Pinot wine was. We showed her a bottle of Pinot Noir from Australia. Her horrified reply was, "I was looking for something from California or Oregon. This is from Saath Orrstraalia!" To my South Australian readers, I can imagine your outrage reading this. I also showed her a Californian Pinot Grigio and explained to her what it was but she looked at me as if I had just climbed out of my alien spacecraft and vomited all over the broccoli in her shopping trolley.

Next as we were buying alcohol, the checkout lady asked me for my ID. I told her she was very kind to ask for my ID (it hasn't come up as a subject in this context for over twenty five years now) and she replied (rudely I thought), "We'll see how kind I am," as she minutely examined my Queensland driver's licence. She was quite polite afterwards. People are strange here or perhaps it's we who are the strange ones.

This is a winery we visited in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Scientists calculate that this is the average daily quantity of wine one needs to drink to avoid heart problems. I usually drink more than this to be safe.

Seattle TV

We have been saying "American TV is crap" quite a lot since we came here. But how would we change it? The first thing I would do is change the ratio of advertisements to programming. One of the reasons people watch DVDs and go to the cinema must be so they can watch something uninterrupted. This would probably improve people's ability to concentrate and probably raise the IQ of the general population. Make longer ad breaks but less frequently.

And is there no social consciousness or control of advertising here? America is concerned about increasing obesity and global warming yet in the typical ad break we'll see three different fast food chains promoting their latest greasy burger and another for a tractor lawn mower. After you've eaten your pizzas and burgers you can go out and mow your twenty square feet of lawn using a machine that in another country would be used to harvest the annual food crop.

Secondly, I would change the censorship rules. Censorship here means nudity, gratuitous violence and profanity is unacceptable on TV. This results in a ridiculous blurring out of women's breasts and buttocks if a woman is wearing say a thong bikini. If someone raises a middle finger in a rude gesture, the offending digit is blurred. One is left curious as to what next the censors will consider overtly sexual or inappropriate. Maybe a jiggling man boob.

Perhaps the use of blurring has a benefit in that it forces us to use our imaginations already rendered sluggish from watching too much television.

Dialogue that includes words such as "hell", and "damn" are dubbed so that an unconvincing "heck" and "darn" are substituted. Entire key scenes in films featuring sex or graphic violence are removed. For viewers who have seen the uncut work it feels like pedantry at its most pointless and absurd. In place of this I would use ratings such as are in place in Australia - for example, "the following film contains nudity and graphic violence" and leave it to parents to control their children's TV access rights.

Thirdly, and probably most significantly I would place stricter controls on the actual quality of programming and what is allowed to be produced and broadcast. American television shows what happens when you have a completely unregulated market: the quality drops and so does our darn IQs.

Orcas Island - famous for its lack of television

Seattle Life

How green is America today? Green issues are talked a lot about in the liberal media (not Fox news). Unfortunately the streets are still full of cars that look bigger than those in most European or Asian countries and the streets are wider too - all that arable land lost forever beneath asphalt. There are also no cycle ways on the streets (or at least bits of road painted green or blue) as there are in Europe or Australia.

Water here in Seattle is still perceived as a limitless quantity rather than as a finite precious resource but then Seattle is surrounded by snow capped mountains and gets a heck of a lot of rain. The noisy and annoying man who lives in the apartment above us has ten minute showers at 6.30am every day and we can hear every squeak of his bathtub as his moves around.

This man is a weekend Dad. Every weekend he takes custody of his two small children and they run around in his little flat above us with their fat little legs pounding through our ceiling. I take out my frustrations on the people below us by pounding my fat little legs on our floor and hopefully these tenants do the same to the reception area below them who are the ones ultimately responsible for placing this man above us.

We have a housekeeper who knocks on the door and appears with a trolley of cleaning equipment outside our door every Tuesday. She changes sheets, vacuums and cleans the bathroom. She comes from Mexico. In the gym I started talking to another tenant, Dan from Virginia. Dan is an engineer and his work has taken him all over the world. He was more relaxed at meeting a foreigner. Dan told me there are on some estimates 20 million illegals here mostly from Mexico. But our cleaner later told me she was married to an American so maybe she wasn't one of the 20 million. What do I care anyway - I'm just like her, trying to survive on the edges of the system.

Later I met Dan's moody Columbian wife Lina. When we all went for a drive in Dan's car to find Bill Gates house, she turned out to be more fond of dogs than people (just like the Queen). Anyway when Dan and Lina left to drive around the US they gave us a whole bunch of appliances they didn't want - deep fat frier, portable oven, toaster, crock pot, laundry basket and a huge box full of tupperware containers.

Now that we're leaving we've decided to give all this stuff to our cleaner. When we told her this - I think her name is Blanca - she told us fine but that she would have to smuggle them out soon. She told us the reception guys would take everything a tenant left behind even if it was left specifically for the cleaners. I shall stamp my legs an extra twenty minutes today.

And we didn't find Bill's house - secretive bastard. All I wanted was a few million and a job.

Humour in America
The funniest show in America today has to be the The Colbert Report - it has the most cutting edge writers and segments. In spite of the "special relationship" between the two countries, the perceptions of British culture are limited. It's strange watching British comedians appearing on Colbert or the Jon Stewart Show trying to make Americans laugh. It's like watching the Mr Bean movie or the American version of The Office. Honestly it's funnier to just watch Stephen Colbert here because there is an authenticity and integrity to the writing than trying to watch a British comic make it work stateside.

Recently, we visited the San Juan islands a lovely spot that I would like to settle down in one day. On the way there we pulled over in our rental car to a gas station near Everett, the place where Boeing makes its jets. Operating an American gas pump for the first time proved problematic.

I inserted the nozzle and pulled the trigger but like the crucial moment when the hero has got the drop on the bad guy in a movie, nothing happened. I decided to ask another motorist who had just arrived what the procedure was. When I told her I didn't know to operate a gas pump, she asked me if I was from Oregon. Not Mexico, or Asia or Australia but Oregon.

Here is a wild deer on Orcas Island that we ran over and ate for dinner.

Seattle Parks

Have you ever noticed the colours of leaves and flowers in Spring. Especially on a clear day. It's as if Gaia has taken her brightest set of paints and splashed them infinitely carefully across a wall.

I have been complaining about the ability of my decrepit and rusty camera to capture this vividness. It's really an excuse to buy a new camera but if I did buy a new camera we would have to go without food. Someone famous used to buy books instead of food but he probably died of starvation whilst trying to eat his books.

I took these photos at the Washington Park Arboretum which is a gorgeous park on the only completely clear day in Seattle since recorded history.

During a ten kilometre walk in the Discovery Park the next day, due to poor planning we were forced to subsist off the land, eating wild raspberries and rose petals to supplement our meagre supplies of one small muesli bar and a mandarin each.








Seattle's skyline is dominated by Mt Rainier. On clear days like this as you sit on the 271 crossing the world's longest floating bridge across Lake Washington it's like a sculpted blob of Haagen Das Five vanilla ice cream sitting hugely on the horizon just waiting for you to head over and stick your teaspoon into it. Unfortunately there's no picture -I don't have a good zoom lens. I'm sure you can google for one.

Seattle Blues

It's a grey cold morning here in Seattle. In the side alley below my apartment window a cop is sitting in his cruiser waiting to pull over speeders. A couple of weeks ago there was a minor incident on the road outside involving two cars. It seemed no more than scraped paintwork but the entire Bellevue police department showed up for it.

What can I tell you about Seattle? Well nothing 'cause we live in Bellevue. Bellevue is a satellite city. There are modern office buildings and landscaped terraces.

Our days here consist of constantly heading to Safeway and searching the shelves for specials; days spent in the library to escape the noise of the construction that surrounds the hotel on three sides and the days when we take a bus to see the sights.

We're neither tourists nor locals. I'm a job seeker but also a traveller. I'm neither an illegal nor a resident or are they the same thing? I don't have a green card but my passport now has a document stapled to it that says I can work here - I even have a social security number now.

The cop car is gone. Time for breakfast.