Live from Austin!

Live near Minneapolis? Bush supporter? The FBI are looking for people to infiltrate sinister vegan potluck gatherings and report on any terrorist planning activities that happen there, so they can be ready for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Remember, loyal Americans eat steak!

Minneapolis airport had a Dyson Airblade installed in the men’s bathroom, perhaps in order to give Republicans one less thing to wait for while tapping their feet.

What can I say? It works. I put my wet hands in, and the device started blowing quietly. I pulled my hands out slowly over the course of about 10 seconds, and when they emerged they were dry. The device shut off automatically. The air it blew was cold, not hot. There was no pain or unpleasantness, and no rubbing of hands was needed.

Pretty awesome. I look forward to the day when they’re cheap enough to put in homes. Yes, I’m a compulsive hand-washer.

It wasn’t too bad when the wind stopped–only about -3 to -6 Celsius. When we arrived in Minneapolis, it was actually slightly above freezing.

I managed to screw up my back somehow en route. I’m not sure how. I think it was a combination of nasty airplane seats, improvised pillows, five hours of journey, and cold gray weather.

We managed to rent a Prius. The logic was that although it isn’t 4 wheel drive, on icy roads it’s better to know exactly how the car will handle and how effective the brakes are.

I can’t help wishing that the in-laws lived in one of the pretty parts of Minnesota, like the north east. Down in the south east it’s basically flat and empty.

There are quite a few Mexican businesses. What must it be like to move from Mexico to Minnesota?

On Christmas Day I was laying on the sofa at sara’s grandmother’s house. In my head was “Nation” by Colourbox. I remembered buying the CD in London, sitting on the train at Baker Street and unwrapping it. It must have been 20 years ago. Why remember it now? I have no idea.

We spent a week in the city, staying with the gracious Gavin. Here are some ways in which Austin is a better place than Cambridge/Somerville:

• People are friendly.

  Example: We were looking at some new houses, and suddenly found ourselves talking to one of the builders—a native Texan—about how he got into the trade after his time in the military, how they constructed the houses, why they did things the way they did, trade-offs of different kinds of construction, and so on. He not only told us how to get in touch with the sales agent, he offered to call her up on the office phone, right there and then, so we could talk to her. I could be wrong, but I suspect this kind of behavior is not typical of New England construction workers.

  If you’ve lived all your life in New England—or the southern part of the original one—you might not have experienced friendliness. In which case, you should try it, you might like it.

• Drivers are polite. We did all the usual “not from around here” things—we made last minute direction changes, paused to think at green traffic lights, and so on. In spite of this, I don’t recall hearing a single car horn directed at us.

  On the other hand, the taxi driver who took us home from Logan paused for literally under a second after a light went green, and the masshole behind felt the need to lay on the horn.

• Groceries are cheap. Food appears to cost around 60% of what it does in Cambridge. The online cost of living comparators had told me this, but I didn’t believe it until I actually saw it for myself. This is even true of fancy imported foreign goods, like the can of Irn Bru I bought.

• Houses are cheap. We can afford one. In fact, with our projected budget we’ll have a wide choice. We won’t have to live miles from civilization either.

• It’s not Generica. The first morning, we walked off in search of coffee. We’d gone several blocks when I suddenly got that Twilight Zone feeling… Sure enough, I checked, and we hadn’t passed a single chain store. No Starbucks, no GAP, no Borders. Just lots of locally owned independent stores.

  There’s a “Keep Austin Weird” campaign which encourages people to buy from local stores. What’s astonishing is that it appears to be working. Yes, you can find chains if you head out to the strip malls in suburbia, but the city itself fails to be the same as every other American city.

• On a related note, there are lots of cool coffee shops. Sure, Davis Square has Diesel and the Someday, and there’s that new place in Union Square, but Austin has more funky and unique coffee houses than I could keep count of.

• Cheap Tex-Mex.

• There’s an amazing supermarket. I was surprised to find a local supermarket listed in the tourist guide. Then we went there, and I understood why. I had no idea there were that many varieties of olives. Poor sheltered fool that I am, I thought there were just black and green ones, and maybe a third kind called plum. But no, they have two entire salad bars of just olives.

• Streets are labeled. Almost always at both ends, too. Whereas the whole street sign thing is a new-fangled invention which Boston folk view with great suspicion.

• There are lizards everywhere. Little green ones. They scamper along the deck and try to look inconspicuous in bushes.

• It rarely dips below freezing. sara thinks that’s freakish and wrong, but I think it’s a good thing and I’m the one writing this.

Now for the bad things:

• Drivers are polite…but many are incompetent.

  We were warned, and yes it’s true—many Texans seem to feel that learning to operate a vehicle safely is one of those things they can put off for a later date.

• It gets really hot in summer. Though there’s still some controversy over whether it’s even as bad as Minneapolis.

• We’ll need a car. And I’ll have to learn to drive. Hopefully not like a Texan.

So on the whole, the benefits seem to far outweigh the negatives.

After some controversy over just how bad the weather gets in Austin, I decided to go pick up some actual historical data from the NOAA web site.

First, the monthly averages, in turn averaged for 1931-2000:

Of course, averages don’t tell the whole story—so I took the last ten years of monthly maximum temperatures, and found the maximum of the maxima for each of three locations…

Now we’re watching “Insomniac” with Dave Atell. By some strange quirk of fate Dave’s in Austin in this episode. I must say, sara seems to approve of the all-female roller derby…

1. The DARPA Total Information Awareness Office logo
2. Bad Badtz-maru
3. The International Rescue logo
4. The Designers Republic Angryman
5. The giant spoon and cherry in Minneapolis
6. The words DON’T PANIC from the front of the Hitchhiker’s Guide
7. The Davis Square cow weathervane
8. The Red Bull logo
9. The Yellow Submarine
10. A set of color TV test bands

If I wanted snow in October, I’d move to Minneapolis.

I guess Mark was right… it’s going to be a long, cold winter.

Well, it was a strange Christmas. Strange for me, anyway: to keep sara’s parents happy, we went to church in the morning. They’re Lutherans—and not just any old Lutheran, either. It has to be a specific conservative Lutheran synod, not those ecumenical ELCA types.

I sat quietly, and stood at the appropriate points. I was there, but I didn’t sing or pray. I couldn’t have anyway—of the four hymns I actually recognized, two had totally different words, one had a completely different tune, and the third goes way too high for my post-teenage voice. There were another four or five hymns I didn’t recognize at all.

The entire experience left me with a strange mixture of nostalgia (for my C of E childhood) and extreme alienation. Here I was, in a frozen wasteland surrounded by strangers singing mutated alien versions of familiar hymns.

After church it was off to visit some relatives. I wasn’t terribly talkative given my mood—but then, we’re talking about Minnesotans, and most of the men weren’t very talkative either, unless it was about caring for twenty year old cars or discussing crop prices.

I haven’t seen any other men with earrings outside Minneapolis, but nobody has said anything. Or at least, nobody has said anything to me… Oh well. Tomorrow we’ll be back home amongst the freaks and I’ll be able to relax.

[Previously “friends only"]

Even you haven’t been on a plane since September, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the entire experience was awful.

It started at the airport, where less than half the check-in booths were staffed, and even the e-ticket counters had a long line of people. The terminal had been rearranged, and new walls added, to funnel everyone through one security checkpoint. Naturally there were only two scanners operating, resulting in more long lines. In addition to scanning, I was patted down, checked with the metal-detector wand, and my bag was drug-tested.

When they started boarding the plane, they checked everyone’s paperwork and ID cards a third time, and used the metal detector wand (again) on a few randomly-selected victims. Naturally they only had one person checking, and didn’t allow any extra time for the process—just the usual fifteen minutes. Hence the plane was guaranteed to be late taking off.

Leafing through the in-flight magazine, I learned that for security reasons we wouldn’t be served a meal, or coffee. Presumably it’s just too much of a risk that someone might take over the plane, armed with a plastic fork and a flimsy polystyrene cup of hot liquid.

When we arrived in Minneapolis, there was another twenty minute wait for the baggage to be unloaded. When it finally appeared, it appeared a few bags at a time, stretched over another twenty minutes or so. After a long time, it became clear that one of our suitcases wasn’t going to turn up. We joined another long queue to talk to the lost baggage staff, and gave them the relevant details.

We then tried to leave the airport. More than half of the exit ramps from the car park were unstaffed, and we had to sit in the car, inching forwards, for another twenty to twenty-five minutes.

The common element, of course, is drastic cost-cutting and massive understaffing—the result of the huge layoffs after September 11th. You might be given to wonder what happened to all the bailout money we (the taxpayers) gave the airlines—the tickets weren’t any cheaper than usual, clearly they didn’t spend it so that they could keep adequate staffing levels, and none of it went to the people laid off, so the only possible conclusion is that it’s going straight into the pockets of high-level management at the various airlines.

The next day, I called to see if they’d found the missing suitcase. The automatic voicemail message said to press 1 if I was calling about baggage I’d left on a plane less than five weeks ago, or to press 2 if I was calling about baggage I’d left on a plane more than five weeks ago. Conspicuously absent was an option to push if the damn airline had lost my suitcase.

Calling the local airport in Rochester was more successful; it has such a small staff anyway that presumably there wasn’t anyone they could lay off. We got to talk to an actual human being, who said my case was there. We went and collected it. They’d given me a voucher worth $25 off a flight, but only if spent before May. Gee, thanks.

Ely apparently attracts a lot of Birkenstock-wearing nature lovers, and we’d found it comparatively civilized. Vegetarian food had been easy to find, espresso was everywhere, and the local store had even stocked Red Bull. This changed rapidly as we headed west southwest towards the Iron Range and the Minnesotan accents became thicker.

We stopped off at the Soudan mine. Once an active location for deep mining of high grade iron ore, it’s now a museum and scientific laboratory. The museum part consists of a tour of the mine.

I’ve been down a deep mine before—a coal mine in England. (We used to have them before Thatcher.) Soudan was different, though. Because of the stability of the rock, they had simply hollowed out vast caverns which needed no support structure whatsoever. It was almost like being in a big adventure game.

Naturally, the tour included that compulsory part of every mine tour—turning off all the lights and allowing people to experience total darkness, probably for the first time in their lives. We also got to ride a converted ore wagon.

Being so deep underground, the mine stays a consistent (cold) temperature, and is very moist—so it attracts bats. So I also had a couple of close bat experiences. I flinched the first time I saw something flying towards me, but once I worked out it was just a bat, I was fine. As we emerged blinking into the sunlight, we saw where they nest just inside the lip of the pit.

Our next major stop was at Itasca State Park. Lake Itasca (pronounced eye-tass-cuh) is the origin of the Mississippi river. Legend has it that if you cross the river there, you get good luck. It’s harder than it looks; there’s a path of partially-submerged rocks, but the water flows quite quickly, and the rocks are often slippery with algae.

The trees were very tall; it reminded me almost of the Pacific Northwest, although it was sunnier and less damp…

We stayed in Bemidji (rhymes with “squidgy”), home of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. Unfortunately, the good luck we’d had on the rest of the journey meant that there was a lot of accumulated bad luck that needed to be discharged. The process started with heavy rain in Bemidji. I’d been hoping to pet a raccoon at the Paul Bunyan animal world (no, really), but we decided to head back to Minneapolis instead and relax a bit before having dinner with Sara’s family.

The bad luck continued with the flight home, which was delayed two hours. And finally, the taxi back home from the airport broke down in the middle of the highway. Electrical systems died, and the engine wouldn’t start. Another passing taxi stopped, and we moved our stuff to that one for the rest of the journey. I took pity on the driver of the first taxi, and paid him what I remembered the meter having read the last time I’d looked at it. He seemed to be having a hard time believing I wanted to give him money, but I felt he had enough problems to be dealing with without getting stiffed on the fare too.