Rain

Today it is raining, grey and cloudy and is predicted to be so for the rest of the day. Isn't it nice for the weather to make me feel so at home?

Newer, but is it better?

Today I bought the Lonely Planet's guide to New England. And then it struck me the name of the region is a little odd. Is it meant to be like England, but newer? And what does that mean? If I buy a new pair of shoes, they're probably going to be quite like what my old shoes looked like 6 months ago. But if I buy a new computer, it'll be a lot better than my old one, now or ever. So which is it for New England?

The juicer it gets

No longer is it enough for ABC to drag out Lost ever longer by skipping weeks with no warning. And it's obviously not enough to spend the first five minutes of the show with "previously on Lost...", but now they're offering up "special episodes" which turn out to be nothing more than a load of old clips stuck together with a creepy voice-over and a spooky name like "Revelation" or "Reckoning".

And it's not just Lost. They did the same on Desperate Housewives this week too. Is this national memory-loss week or something? Do they really think the American public are forgetful enough to be interested in a program summarising the current plot of a show that really isn't all that complicated in the first place? No, they don't. They're just money-grabbing bastards.

Great things

Great lake:


Great gate:

Oats and beans and barley grow

You don't have to travel very far out of Chicago into Illinois before the horizon becomes littered with grain silos:

It took me a while to work out why these looked so odd to me, but I think I've got it now. Firstly, farms here don't have any hedgerows, so the whole scenery looks a bit different. Secondly, having spent my formative years in the garden of England that is the county of Kent, I have oast houses stuck in my brain as the primary method of drying/storing grains.

And aren't they pretty?

Indiana

Yesterday I made an out-of-state trip to the Indiana State Dune Park. It was a very pleasant and enjoyable trip, not least because the trains were on time, and cheap. Our train journey took a total of 2 hours (plus a connection time in the middle) and cost a total of $16. Trying to find a comparable journey in the UK, I picked Harlow - Brighton; a two hour journey, with a cheap day return fare on a Saturday of 24 GBP. And probably the trains in England would have been late.

Gas!

At approximately 11am this morning, a strange, natural gas-like odour became apparent in my office. Having checked with a colleague that I wasn't going crazy, we went to tell the secretary, but she was already on the phone to facilities following a complaint from the department chair. It turned out that they were being flooded with calls from all over the building - whatever was causing the smell was being pumped around the building's air conditioning system. So the call came to evacuate - oo, how exciting! We were allowed back into the building several hours later - after noticing that the electricity had been switched off throughout the local area, causing havoc with the traffic - yet another point in favour of roundabouts.

Current theories/rumours for the source of the smell include (a) an as yet unspecified chemical spill in the nano-technology building, and (b) a spill of the (harmless) chemical they use to make natural gas smell bad. I guess we'll know if it's (a) if we wake up tomorrow as piles of grey goo.

Although this episode was all quite exciting, and meant an extra long lunchbreak in the sun, it brought to my attention the fact that the windows of my office don't open. It seems the University are more worried about my ruining their precious climate control with a bit of fresh air than my safety should said climate control system get contaminated with dangerous chemicals (think 24 and Sentox nerve gas or scary biological agent).

Corollary

So it turns out that some people here are really amused by the way I say "corollary". Further to this, in the reports that my students got to write about my lectures, there were far more comments about my accent than I expected. Answers to the question "What are the primary teaching strengths of the instructor?" included:

"I like British accent."
"British accent made me pay attention."
"Ehh... British accent?"
"The occasional British humor lightened the course."
"She has a British accent, which is easy on the ears."

But my favourite is the student who wrote:

"She has a really cool British accent which kept me awake."

Now I know calculus is never going to be the most exciting subject to Engineers, but I would actually be worried if they really thought my "primary teaching strength" was my accent. Oh well.

Tips

Last weekend, I had my hair cut in America for the first time. I had been putting it off because I was a bit scared about the whole tipping process. When to do it, how much to give etc. etc. Hairdressers are generally scary places in any case. When have you ever said "No that's crap" when the hairdresser asks you if what you've ended up with is ok? But it turned out not to be so bad after all. When I went to pay, the receptionist asked me if I wanted to add the tip to my credit card, and that was that. Although I suppose there was always an assumption that I was going to give a tip. I'm not sure what would have happened if I hadn't...

Not fries

I just have one thing to say tonight.

These:

are chips, and these:

are crisps.

Thank-you.

Go Jack!

I don't want to make it seem like I'm totally obsessed with TV shows, but 24 really is getting rather exciting. But I'm getting rather annoyed with the way the TV channels try and drag you into watching the next program either by not showing any adverts between shows and rushing straight into the next one, or tempting you with "Scenes from next week's all new 24" after the break. I have to be strong though, and switch off immediately. My TV schedule is full enough already.

Washington

Why do the Americans have such an attachment to the dollar bill?


The English lost the pound note in 1984, and at current exchange rates one dollar is worth 57p. Our smallest note is worth almost 10 times that. Also, the Americans only have four different coins, the British have eight. Why is this? Are the Americans not as adept at handling cash? The largest American coin is a quarter, worth a measly 14 pence. The British two pound coin is worth fourteen times that. Apparently there do exist such things as dollar and half-dollar coins, but people just don't use them. It's incredibly frustrating when your wallet is full of notes, so you assume you have a lot of cash, but they all turn out to be one dollar bills. And why do they not name their coins by their worth? What's all this dime and nickel business? Is it all just a trick to confuse tourists?

Eggs

Continuing the theme of Easter, despite the lack of holidays, I think I am glad to be away from England at this time. I have just spent a good hour in a supermarket, and I didn't see a single chocolate egg. It's amazing. And fabulous. Thank-you America.

Good ...day

Slightly disappointingly, it turns out that Americans don't get Good Friday and Easter Monday off work. In relation to this I find the whole American "separation of church and state" a bit odd. In my (albeit limited) experience, I have found that probably more Americans consider themselves "religious" than back at home. And they go and write "In God we trust" on all their money and make school children say a load of stuff including "One nation, under God etc etc" first thing every morning. But they won't give us a day off work because the only son of said God sacrificed himself for the good of mankind. Odd.

A quandary

It is very clear to me that spelling mistakes are a sign of unprofessionalism, but what is not clear to me is what one should do in the situation of being British, but living in America. Whilst I was teaching I steadfastly stuck to British spellings, asking the students to compute the centre of mass of a glass of water modelled as follows... But now I wonder if perhaps that was the wrong thing to do. If I was working in any non-English speaking country, I would of course write exams/papers in their language, if it was required, and use their spellings. But somehow switching to American spellings just seems so wrong.

I am now writing something jointly with my boss, an American, and I am wondering if perhaps I should be considering the stabilization of traveling waves. But it looks so ugly! What should I do?

Really quite ridiculous

Everyone will have heard moans about how Mother's Day / Valentine's Day / Easter are becoming overly commercial festivals promoted only by Hallmark in order to boost card sales. Well yesterday I was shopping for a birthday card, and what I saw really takes the biscuit. Apparently April 26th is "Administrative Professional's Day" and there are cards you can buy to send to your nearest and dearest administrative professional. Oh my god.

Robber

The Settlers of Catan is a fantastic game that I have managed (without too much trouble, it has to be said) to get all my new american friends addicted to.

Causing much hilarity has been the robber. Apparantley, when I say 'robber', they hear 'rubber'. And being Americans, a rubber is not something one uses to erase pencil markings.

My solution to this is to make a new robber out of india rubber and then we can all call it the 'rubber robber' and all will be well.

Posters

Whilst I can't claim to be an expert on the advertising methods of undergraduate students in either the UK or the USA I have noticed a very marked difference at least between Cambridge and Northwestern. The students here seem to treat the ground as some sort of massive billboard. Every day new pieces of paper appear taped to the floor in front of my building, advertising everything from St Patrick's Day parties to performances of the Vagina Monologues. They also have a great affinity for chalk on the pavements/sidewalks, and I have recently learned that there are some student elections coming up soon, and I should vote for "Anna" for VP. If only I could.

Paper or plastic?

Nice as it is that supermarkets (grocery stores) have these little people at the end of each aisle who neatly put all your shopping in bags for you, well, in fact, it's not nice at all. For a start, they always use far too many bags - as if you might injure yourself carrying a bag with more than one pint of milk in it.
But what really annoys me is that when I go to the supermarket on my bike, and I want to put all my shopping in my rucksack, it is impossible to get these people to leave me alone. For a start, often they don't understand when I say "I'm just going to put it in here" and gesture to my bag. Then if they do, they want to put the stuff in themselves. They can't pack properly, so I always end up having to take the stuff out again to fit everything in, at the same time as trying to pay the cashier. And then sometimes they seem to expect a tip for the inconvenience. Leave me alone!

The birds

So, bird flu has finally reached Britain. The BBC are certainly making a big deal of it, but over here no-one is even batting an eyelid. The BBC seem really rather worried about it, and have a tendency to end all of their articles with something like:

"The H5N1 strain of the virus ... does not pose a large-scale threat to humans, as it cannot pass easily from one person to another. However, experts fear the virus could mutate to gain this ability, and in its new form trigger a flu pandemic, potentially putting millions of human lives at risk."

Experts. Well, if it's experts, then maybe we should all be worried. Get your Tamiflu quick.

I'm a little surprised by the lack of similar scare-mongering among the American media. Maybe it's because scaring people about an avian virus doesn't give the government an excuse to go and bomb a random Middle-Eastern country.

Round-about

I know I've ranted about American drivers before, but this is more a complaint about the whole system, and its "I'm not going to change even if it makes life easier" attitude.

This is a four-way stop intersection:

And it does exactly what it says on the tin: everyone must stop when they approach it. Fine if you're the only car there, but if there are others, then they get to go in the order in which they arrived. If more than one car arrives simultaneously the rules of who gets to go first are not exactly simple.

And as a pedestrian, it's equally confusing. Do I have to follow the "whoever gets there first" rule? Or do I always get right-of-way? Or will I get run down by someone turning right and paying absolutely no attention to the road?

All of this would be solved with the simple insertion of a mini-roundabout, which I'll include a picture of for those Americans who've never seen one before:

They don't do duvets

As far as I can gather, the average American won't have a duvet on their bed. They'll have sheets, blankets, and a "comforter". I tend to associate sheets and blankets with hotels or my Grandma's house. Odd.

Softball

Yesterday afternoon I was introduced to the delights of softball. It turns out that I'm not very good at it. This is to be expected, as I was never very good at rounders, which I think is the nearest English equivalent. At primary school, I was the reserve for the school team. I got to play once, at second base. Then I ended up twisting my ankle trying to run fast enough to get a rounder. I had to go to hospital. It was horrible.

Of course, all these sports are really derivatives of cricket. But I guess cricket is just too slow paced for the Americans so they had to mess with it to make it easier for the American public to digest. And probably also so they could fit in more adverts, since that currently seems to be the main aim when determining the structure of American sports.

Saving daylight

I expect most people will agree that British summer / daylight saving time is in general a good thing. Long light evenings and all that. But most people will also agree that changing over to it is a very bad thing. An hour of your life disappears into nowhere. Well this year, because Europe and America can't agree on when these changes should happen, I've had to do it twice. Which is not fair. At all. And coupled with seven hours jetlag, my body has absolutly no idea what time it should be getting up any more.

And it also makes no sense - fair enough if they want to change months apart, but to differ by one week - what is the point? There must have be a lot of confused international businesses over the last week.

The obvious solution is just that we stay an hour ahead all year round, but apparently that'll upset the Scottish farmers.

Intelligence?

Blimey. Now they've really gone and done it...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4547734.stm