Severe weather warning

Yet again, www.weather.com has been predicting thunderstorms in Evanston all day and I still have yet to see a single one. I'm wondering if the nature of American weather forecasts is affected by the consumer population's need for continual stimulation and excitement. I'm imagining the conversation in the forecasting room: "Looks like we're going to be having a nice sunny day today, with slightly increasing cloud cover in the afternoon", "No, we can't have that, it's nowhere near exciting enough, we'll never get the revenue from the advertisers, better stick in a few thunderstorms to keep them coming back for updates. And add in a severe weather warning for good measure."

Heat

It's hot. Very hot. I can walk around at 2am wearing only a T-shirt and shorts. I feel like I'm on holiday. This is not conducive to working. Luckily, my office is so ridiculously over air-conditioned that it's impossible to dress in any way which doesn't mean I'll either bake in the heat on the way to work or freeze as I'm sitting at my desk staring out at the wonderful blue lake.

Where does reality end?

Going to the cinema in America is something of an experience. Especially when you do it on or near opening night and the theatre is near full. They really live it.

When something scary happens, they'll scream; when the bad guy gets a one-up, they'll boo, and when the good guy gets betrayed, they'll mutter 'you bastard' rather loudly. It's almost as if they don't realise that the film isn't real.

Eagerness

Yet again, I come back to the inadequacies of American drivers. Something I've noticed for a long time is their eagerness to get away at traffic lights - edging forward minutes before they change to green. They are also incredibly trigger-happy with their horns (which they either honk or hoot depending on which side of the pond you're from).

But the most distressing thing I've noticed recently is their attitude towards fire-engines, ambulances, or anything else with a siren: they don't give way! I've seen fire-engines having to almost barge their way across traffic lights with the cross traffic taking no notice of them at all. I guess so long as it's not their house burning down it's not important...

Weather

The website www.weather.com has been predicting 'isolated thunderstorms' in Evanston for the last couple of hours. I'm beginning to wonder if the site's gone all mathematical on us, and the storms truly are isolated in space and time, because as yet there's been no sight of them.

Buoy

I've just started a sailing course, which is great fun. The most amusing thing is the way Americans pronounce "buoy". As in, to rhyme with "pooey". Crazy fools.

Fact of the day

Hoods sell cinema tickets:


Anakin Skywalker?



The monk Silas?

Overhead

I believe that this is a universal truth.

In any mathematics department, if a speaker wants to connect a laptop to an overhead projector, in the first instance, it will not work. At least three people will emerge from the audience, claiming to know the solution to the problem, either by pressing buttons on the projector or by some bizarre combinations of keystrokes on the computer. This will not work. The solution will be found approximately 10 minutes into the allocated time for the talk and it will be one of two things:

a) restart the computer.

b) put the talk onto a different computer and start again.

Aadvantage

I recommend that you go to the American Airlines website, and click on the link to enroll in the AA air miles scheme, or AAdvantage. You'll find they have an impressively large selection of possible prefixes for your name.

Have a good look. I imagine you'll find it quite amusing...

Is this crazy or what?

I'm looking into renting a car in San Francisco for 6 days in June and I have discovered something amazing.

If you go to www.hertz.co.uk and get a quote for the cheapest car (Hyundai Accent or similar) from 13th-19th June, you should get a price of 109 of your British pounds. And that includes Loss Damage Wavier and all that marlarky.

Alternatively, you can go to www.hertz.com and enter the same dates, location and car. This will give you a quote of $279.78 but this does not include liability insurance, LDW or personal accident insurance. I wouldn't want to go without these things as you never know what will happen if you smash up a rental car without full coverage, and this brings up the grand total to $438.48 for the pleasure.

Even at the current poor state of the dollar (worth 53 pence at the last count) this is more than twice as much as the quote from the British site.

What is going on?

Side effects

One of the things I found quite surprising when I moved to the US was the fact that drug companies are allowed to advertise their products in all forms of media. There's always a lot of qualification - 'Ask your doctor if Zentox is right for you!", and I presume for legal reasons, they always spend the last half of the advert listing the side effects - 'Side effects may include dizziness, nausea, vomiting, headaches and a large hole in your wallet'.

What amuses me is when this is followed by an advert for some sickening fast food outlet, and what they really need is something tacked onto the end: 'side effects may include rapid weight gain, indigestion and obesity'.

Softball, again

I know it's not exactly in the tone of this blog, but I just need to say that tonight we won our softball game! 12-6. Hurrah for us! Yes, we've been playing matches for a month already, and up till now we've not been very good, but tonight we were awesome. As they say. I'd give you a full and detailed match report, but probably you're not all that interested.

The coming of the end

It seems that it is "end of season" season now on American TV. All the big budget dramas are coming to an end over the next week or so. What will we watch in the summer?

Bananas

I don't actually have a lot to say about bananas in America, they seem pretty normal. However, if you want to say anything about bananas, banana guards or any other banana paraphernalia in the UK or anywhere else around the world, this would be the place to do it.

Dairy

There is something very odd about dairy products in the US, in that, they last forever. I find it slightly creepy, I can't bring myself to drink milk that's been in the fridge for more than two weeks, even if it doesn't smell bad. And I'm rather worried about what this means for what's actually in the milk. If something goes moldy in a couple of days, I'll be annoyed, but I least I know it isn't packed full of preservatives. In this case, who knows?

Final destination

Something else I was introduced to over the weekend was the joys of internal US flights. It really is a bit like getting on a bus. If you don't need to check in any bags, you turn up maybe one hour, although even that is probably a bit too long, beforehand, swipe your credit card in a handy machine, and it prints out your boarding card. None of this "Did you pack your bags yourself?" business.

Security gave my passport a cursory glance, but the main sign that they're not at all convinced by their own security procedures was the "destination check" just before the plane pulls back from the gate. An announcement comes over the tannoy: "This is a destination check - this is United Airways flight 877 to Chicago O'Hare". OK, very good. But how could I possible have got this far onto the wrong flight? Are they expecting people to jump up saying "Oh shit, no, I'm meant to be going to LA - you must have failed completely to read that boarding card I just showed you in order to get on the plane..."?

HOV

The ring road around Boston has this wonderful thing called a High Occupancy Vehicle lane (affectionately known as a HOV) which you are only allowed to drive in if you have two or more people in your car. (I wouldn't really think half full counts as high, but that's by the by). Anyway, this morning, the cars in the single HOV lane were moving significantly faster than the rest of the carriageway, which means there are more than three times as many people so ridiculously attached to their cars that they can't give up a tiny bit of freedom to share a car.

Surfaces

Last week I bought myself a bicycle, and have started cycling to work. This has brought to my attention the appalling state of the Evanston roads. There are cracks and potholes everywhere, and no-one is doing anything about it. The continual roadworks we suffer in England can't exactly be thought of as a good thing, but at least our roads are flat.

Now, the fact that my $20 second- (possible third-) hand bike has no suspension and no padding in the saddle clearly doesn't help things, but these bike rides to work are actually become quite painful in the posterior.

High fructose crap

In a blog such as this, it seems only right that I should point out the new results on the difference in health between the British and the Americans. It turns out that the British are healthier, despite spending less on healthcare per capita. The survey claims that the differences cannot be attributed to the higher levels of obesity in the US, or even differences in lifestyle factors. This BBC article appears to be at a complete loss to explain the differences.

Well, I have the answer. In almost every sweet product in the US you will find High Fructose Corn Syrup listed in the ingredients. I had never heard of it before I came here, it doesn't occur in any foods in the UK and it sounds absolutely horrible. Its consumption is linked to a host of medical problems, including diabetes and obesity.

Basically, it's a no-brainer.

Txts, again

So, the text message debate came up again at the weekend. I'm not going to rant on again about why text message are clearly a good thing, because I've figured out what the phone companies are up to. This is their evil plan: they make two completely different types of call plan, on one side, the contract phones, where you get almost unlimited minutes so making and recieving calls costs nothing, but they charge through the nose to make or recieve text messages. On the other side are the prepaid/pay-as-you go phones where texts are only 5 cents to send and nothing to recieve, but calls are expensive to make and recieve. This dichotomy encourages arguments at drunken parties and what ensues is the sending and recieving of pointless texts and phonecalls just to make a point and cost the other person money, which falls straight into the lap of the chief executive of such-and-such phone company.

Please don't think that I think all American companies are merely out to con people out of their hard earned cash...

Frats

Now, I can't admit to knowing much, if anything, about American university "Fraternity Houses" - I understand they're like big clubs for rich poncey people (sorry if I've offended anyone, I might be wrong on this count). The thing I find very strange is their use of Greek letters for their names. What's that all about? This morning someone jogged past me wearing a T-shirt that said

"PSI UPSILON"

This must be one of the lower class of frat houses, I mean, 'upsilon'? No-one uses that letter for anything, surely?