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hay fifa So after a week or so of singing in Vegas, showers in the snowy Sierras, scorching in Sacramento, fog in San Francisco and downright drinking in Davis, Tel has left the building, and I'm back to work, my first official days on the job. And then... son-of-a-BOOM! son-of-a-BAM! and my hay fever kicks into gear, first day of May, the eyes are itching, the nose is bitching, shares in Kleenex are going up-up-and-away. Part of me had hoped that, being in a new country, I might escape the annual sneezing season, for a year at least. After all, I'd barely gotten it at all in Provence, where I suspect the Mistral just blew all the bad allergens across the sea to Africa. Not here. The Central Valley heat has begun, and the rains have gone away. The grass is still lush green, but within a month will be the colour of Weetabix. just a couple of weeks ago we were complaining about the bloody rain, and now we're up in the late 80s and early 90s (but without the Stone Roses). But Phew! What A Scorcher, I'm assured, is yet to come, and the spiders and other bugs are already out in force. The thought occured today, that I could keep a diary of my hay-fever. Count how many sneezes I sneeze every day, how many tissues I use, the level of eye-redness (one year I went totally Sith, I don't care, it was cool), so I can compare, year-by-year, how good or bad my hay-fever/dust allergies are getting. But then I thought, hang on, I have a life, I work 54 damn hours a week, who am I, Cosmo Kramer? And what's going on with the England footy team? Who's gonna be the new manager? Scolari turned them down, Wenger laughed in their faces, so it looks like McLaren will probably get it, the job nobody who's anybody wants. And then there's Rooney - he can't be injured, surely! We were so looking forward to watching young big-ears in the World Cup. Oh well. At least Spurs are in Europe. |
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2.5.06 07:31 |
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Week Thirty-one: Don't Give Me Your Huddled Masses The key issue here this week is immigration. Actually, it's not, it's the criminal President and his criminal war, but the news channels don't want to tell us about that any more. On Monday there was a national protest known as "the day without immigrants", when immigrants both legal and illegal showed solidarity for one another and took the day off work, just to show everybody how much America depends on them. This is a country founded by immigrants, they cry, and they have a damn valid point. As a recent immigrant myself I'm with them all the way. But the immigration debate is a minefield. In Britain, tabloid headlines rarely distinguish between "asylum seekers", "economic migrants" and "illegal immigrants". The consequence is that the public lumps them all in together, and treats them just the same. The same arguments people use in the UK are being used by people here, namely "they are coming over here and taking our jobs" and complaining that with them here, wages will be forced down because they will work for much less than a local. And so they become victimised, and scapegoats. Hang on a minute, though - where are all the jobs really going? Big corporations are outsourcing their industries abroad, to Asia and elsewhere, because they can pay lower wages there. Are we then to blame the Chinese and the Indians for that? Why don't we blame the corporations? We seem to be quick to pick on the worker, to pick on the poor sods who bust their bottoms all day and night for a pittance, just because it is a better life than what they left behind. Why are people so quick to attack them? They come to America because they have to - it's supposed to be the richest country, and everyone wants to take part in the American Dream. Oh yeah, remember that? And then there is the whole language debate. "They come over here from Mexico, they don't even want to learn English!" People talk of forcing everyone to learn English, as if in a society dominated by English-language media they wouldn't anyway. And was Spanish not spoken in California way before English? and the Native American languages before that? It is quite ridiculous that California can support the "English First" policy (whereby they make English the sole official language, thus 'protecting' it), when almost all its major cities have Spanish names (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego - hardly Anglo-Saxon). I'd say that, truthfully, the English-speakers were the immigrants, wouldn't you? I didn't take the day off, though (it being my first day on the new job proper), though I did stay away from the shops. The immigration debate is big and sticky, and all sides have real concerns (even the language concerns have some validity). But I think it must be remembered that people come here because there are opportunities denied to them at home, it's that simple. |
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3.5.06 21:11 |
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we don't want to play juventus anyway Oh goddam it, this would happen. Spurs spend most of the season in 4th place, then lose out on the Champions League to the Scum on the last day. You know whoever gave the Tottenham players that dodgy lasagne at the hotel was an Arsenal fan, talk about a set-up. But hey, we got fifth, highest ever Premiership finish, we got into Europe, we don't do that every day - and still we moan, 'cos we are Tottenham, super Tottenham, super Tottenham of the Lane. And then Sven picks the strangest England squad of all time - he's never even seen Theo Walcott play (ie, is he even in the latest version of Championship Manager?). Leaving out Defoe? And Ledley King? And they are bringing the crocked Rooney. Oh this is going to be a great World Cup. |
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9.5.06 07:20 |
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personally i blaine the parents David Blaine came out of his watery New York bubble earlier, his latest stunt, and ooh, didn't he look shaky, didn't he look ill, ooh I hope he'll be alright. Isn't he meant to be a magician? Call that magic? Fucking Jar-Jar Binks can do that all day, he's not a bleeding wizard, is he? He likes to test his endurance. He should spend two weeks trapped in a box with nothing but a TV screen playing only the bits of the news shows where the gathered panel of presenters make their little brainless comments to each other between news stories. (Earlier on CBS13 one said to another, with empty-headed sagesse, "well that's what happens when people fall on hard times, they turn straight to crime, again and again..") That would be endurance, mate. Blaine: go back to the card tricks. You used to be so good! Going up to kids on the street, pulling the ace of clubs out of people's arses and from inside old basketballs. In fact, if you want to be the ultimate escape artist, try escaping from the public eye. Go on, just give it a try, for your sake. |
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9.5.06 07:31 |
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Week Thirty-Two: On the Road Going from northern to southern California usually requires a motorcycle, a head full of poetry and the famous Big Sur coastline. You leave the foggy Bay Area behind, and head for the palm trees and suntans of the Los Angeles beaches. For us, however, the north-south jaunt took us down Interstate-5 from the rising heat of Davis down the agricultural furnace called the Central Valley, over the Grapevine mountains (turn off the a/c, folks), and into the traffic and cooling smog of LA and Orange County, the 'OC'. We were going there for the wedding of a friend who, a century ago in Aix-en-Provence, introduced me to my wife; ultimately, you could say, it is because of said friend that I now live in the US. We stocked up the ice-chest with Sobes and sandwiches, filled up the iPod shuffle with Jack, Art and Joni, and head off down the highway. America is all about its roads, and some of the most memorable Americana springs from that. I've never read Kerouac, and despite many visits to the City Lights store in SF, I probably never will; I have seen Convoy, though, which is why every time I see a helicopter or police light aircraft while out on the sun-washed freeway I announce that there's a 'bear in the air'. As we speed past a backdrop of already browning hills, I get a sense of just how massive America really is; though it is not one country, but many. You have to travel among them to tell the difference, a lot of the time. Even the States, who make their presence felt in the license plate game (when I wonder to myself what story brought that SUV down from the distant grey shores of New Jersey), are not particularly real entities, and passing over the mountains into the land of LA, I get the feeling that, yes we're in California, but this is a different country, and the road has brought us here. Yes, the sun is clearly getting to me, so I splash a bit more sunscreen onto my arms. We eventually roll into the rich country of the OC, strolling by the Balboa Island waterfront, shopping and eating in Newport Beach. The wedding was beautiful, a mixture of Irish America and colourful Persia, in the spectacularly Mediterranean Laguna Beach. It wasn't the only wedding in town, though; down on the shores of the Pacific, other Happy Couples were snapping photos with long sunset shadows and shimmering waves. We wandered among the palm trees and tuxedoes for a bit, before retiring to the hotel, to finish off the previous night's cheesecake. And then back on the road, the very next day. Back over the mountains, back into the Valley, watching the thermometer rise from the early 70s to the late 80s (completely bypassing both punk and new romantic). I noticed that in the supposedly smoggy OC/LA area, my hay fever and related allergies actually cleared up. No sniffling and sneezing for me (I was all ready to put it down to tears at the wedding, too). It took less time to get back to our part of the world than it had taken to go south - or at least it did, until just as we were getting into Sacramento, our car threw a flat tyre, forcing us onto the side of the freeway. We had to wait to be rescued, while juggernauts and Sunday drivers whizzed by at speeds that made the ground shake. An ironically fitting end to a road trip - stuck on the side of the road. At least we weren't far from home. |
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9.5.06 07:45 |
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sand people
sunset, sand, southern california |
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10.5.06 04:46 |
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it's easy to be sneezy I am a holy man. Honestly, over the past few days I have become the most blessed man in Davis. I am Saint Pete. Everywhere I go, people bless me, whether I'm cycling past the trees, eating my lunch, or just blowing my nose. My hay fever is kicking in like an angry mule, and the hot pollenated Yolo County air is not helping one little bit. Over the weekend, in the smoggy LA area, I was actually fine - it completely cleared up. Not a sniffle. Now I learn that Davis, in the bowl of California's Central Valley, is one of the worst places imaginable for allergies. Oh, brilliant. What are you taking for it, they ask, but allergy medicines do not work on me. I'm trying a new herbal nose-spray, called XClear, which by the name sounds like the stuff they are giving X-Men to cure them of their mutancy in the new movie. So far the effects have been fairly minimal. My body feels like I've been beaten up, which effectively I have, by a bunch of weeds. And then, the final irony, in one of my training classes today I actually won a prize - some flowers. Nice, thanks for that. And I've got another month of this I'm sure. Better say me prayers. |
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12.5.06 01:56 |
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Week Thirty-Three: If You Can't Take the Heat Yesterday, someone said something that gave me the impression that they thought it was still Spring. I told them, look, if it's nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, that means it is Summer. I was assured that this is indeed still Spring, and that I will be looking back on the days when it was only in the 90s like some bygone cold spell. In Davis - in the Central Valley generally - it gets hot, and I mean HOT. Not that I can go outside, of course. The hay fever is especially bad right now, and I'm tired of everyone asking me what I'm taking for it. Nothing works for me, and anything medicated makes me ridiculously drowsy. I've realised that the best thing for me is to just stay inside, in the safe insulated bubble of my office. I don't have a window, so I don't see how sunny it is, but my spies tell me it's glorious right now. I read somewhere that California got it's name from the Spanish words 'cali', meaning 'hot', and 'fornia', meaning 'oven'. Hot Oven. I don't know about that folk etymology, but it's a pretty good description. The hottest place in the world is in California, down in Death Valley. It is, of course, a 'dry heat', which means that you won't sweat to death in desperate humidity as you might in the South. It also means that air-conditioning is essential, or plenty of fans at least. In our apartment, for example, we have more fans than Milton Keynes Dons. And so all that was recently green is already golden brown, and the flooded plains that stretch from Davis to Sacramento have already all but dried up. The snowmelt from the Sierras is causing some Foothills rivers to rage violently, with frequent warnings about going anywhere near the icy cold torrents. Over on the East Coast, however, they are having some terrible rainstorms. By all accounts we in Davis have had our rain now, that's it, that's all we get until the winter. Not for Pete though - I'll be back in London in just under a fortnight. Better bring me brolly. |
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16.5.06 06:55 |
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break for the border So King George is sending thousands of National Guard troops to the Mexican border, in a bid to secure it from the urgently dangerous threat of poverty-stricken economic migrants braving the river waters and desert sands to be part the richest country in the world. Bands of gun-totin' vigilante redneck Americans already sit out on deck-chairs near the frontier, waiting patiently for Mexicans to set foot on US soil, waiting for an opportunity to shoot holes in them for daring to trespass on their free democratic land. Clueless George thinks they need some back-up. All of a sudden, he thinks, there is a need for six-thousand troops to stop illegal immigrants from entering a nation that is not only founded on immigration (we won't mention founded on greed and imperialism), but has such an economy that requires immigrants to keep it afloat. "I don' care, if they ain' legal, send 'em all home!" More of an official line than anyhing else. Many people are well aware that illegal, paid-under-the-table workers are the backbone of any capitalist society. There will always be people willing to pay employees cash-in-hand as long as they offer no legal rights and protection, and there will always be people who will take those jobs because it is quick and easy money that stays in their pocket. It's a fact of life, and if this black economy were truly expunged, we would live in a scoiety where things aint so cheap. Don't get me wrong. I'm on the side of the workers here. I would love all workers to have full legal rights, so that if they were out on the farm and they lost a foot in the blades of a plough, they could take their negligent employers to court and at the very least get severance pay. Whoops, I mean, disability pay. An illegal alien, however does not want to be discovered, and therefore recieves no help at all. And yet, he still takes the jobs, knowing that if things go wrong he won't have a leg to stand on (sorry, I do apologise). Why? Because it's easy money, and he thinks it is worth the risk. I'm a legal alien. I came here through all the right channels, and utterly by choice. Many other people from much poorer countries than Britaindo not have that choice - they go where the work is, irrespective of legality. They are not coming here to bring down the government, or to burn American cities, but to work, to do the shitty jobs that nobody in America wants any more. They have my support. But now, waiting for them at the border, is the most sophisticated army in the world, locked and loaded and ready to put bullets in them for simply wanting to come and work. |
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18.5.06 04:20 |
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blood and nuts I'm so looking forward to the new X-Men movie, coming out next week. Anyway this week I discovered what my mutant ability is. I have a supernatural ability to detect when food is out of date. I was eating some peanut M&Ms, when I noticed an odd aftertaste. I checked the date on the packet - and discovered there was none. Most odd. So I tried another - yes, definitely some nastiness there. I've always been good at it. Ever since I was a kid and I had some bad milk that made me throw up all over my cornflakes, I've been very careful to notice even the slightest hint of gone-off-ness. I will stop eating a loaf of bread days before anyone else does. I can always tell if soft drinks (or 'sodas', as they call them here) are nearing expiration, while others drink them in happy ignorance. And I just knew something was up with these M&Ms - but with no date, how could I test it? So I tried to cut one open with a big pair of scissors. And ended up cutting right into my thumb. Blood went all over the M&M, and I proceeded to destroy the rest of them by jumping up and down on the packet in revenge. So the moral of the story is, always check the sell-by-date, don't try to cut open a peanut M&M with scissors. |
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18.5.06 04:34 |
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