Over here, there are millions of slimming products, and weight-loss is a status symbol. Walking around town all the hottest bodies belong to the women in their late 30’s onwards. I figure they’re the ones who can really afford all the supplements, videos, exercise gizmos, personal trainers, wacky foodstuffs etc that are toted all over the 70 cable channels I’ve seen. Everyone over here is bonkers crazy over the Atkins diet, and eliminating Carbs from their intake. You can even get lo-carb burgers where you get lettuce instead of a bun. You still get half a mashed cow and a slab of cheese, mayo, etc…
Since I have been here, I have broken Pete Bradshaw’s First Law of Eating three or four times. For those not familiar with this law, it’s stated below in full:
“Never try to eat anything bigger than your head”
Meals here are huge! I’ve never felt my stomach nudge on my ribcage before, especially not as a result of eating a tortilla wrap. So by adding a few guidelines to Bradshaw’s First Rule I plan to come up with the Carter diet (sorry Pete, I just decided it sounded snappier). In draft form, it goes something like this:
1. When eating out, always throw away 1/3 of what you’ve been given before eating.
2. Check that what you have would fit on an eight-inch plate. If not, throw more away until it does.
3. Never forget Bradshaw’s First Rule
This would instantly solve 50% of obesity problems in this country. Of course there is no guideline saying you must limit yourself to 3 or 4 meals a day, nor that breakfast should not be eggs benedict with hash browns, burgers, steak and a basket of onion rings. The reason for this is Darwin did a lot of hard work setting out the basics of Natural Selection and I don’t want to do anything to counter such good work.
OK this entry is one for the geeks. What do you call the # symbol? I call it “hash”, always have. I’ve heard it called “cross-hatch” which I can accept, but I prefer “hash”. According to some websites “octothorpe” is the correct name. The less said about that the better. British phone people seem to call it “square” which is wrong, but you can see it from the point of view of the phone user-interface. You don’t want your automated ticket booking system saying “please enter your credit card number then press octothorpe. If you don’t know what octothorpe is, please press asterisk for an explanation”… so “square” and “star” win there.
Americans call it “pound”. WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG!
Here’s my (largely correct :-) ) theory why:
In the ’70s bits were expensive. A bit is a binary digit. Every time you add a bit, you can represent twice as many symbols but you have to add a LOT of wire. Bug me for a tutorial on this if you’re interested, it’s a fun subject to try to explain in layman’s terms. Anyhow. People figured 7 bits of information were enough to represent everything you needed to know - all the letters, digits, punctuation and other squiggles, plus helpful technical symbols like “End of Transmission” “Acknowledge” etc. They came up with and published a ‘character set‘ that they thought reasonable. This was called ASCII (american standard code for information interchange) and was a Good Thing. Of course, this was done in the US, and characters like ö, å, ¥ etc. were not thought important at the time.
In Britain, there was one very important character that wasn’t in ASCII. That was £. UK computer users had a few choices. You couldn’t just add £ to the existing set without modifying every computer in the country, and every computer, printer, and network you wanted to talk to… It was a lot cheaper to simply have a local dialect of ASCII that included this important character. It would also be handy if it was in a sensible place on the keyboard. I guess $ was too important to throw away, so they ended up taking character 33, which had the little-used symbol # attached to it, and putting £ in its place.
So it went on, right through the 80’s, this mostly worked. If you’d told your computer it was british, then opened a file from another such computer, you’d see that a few hundred shares in Sinclair Research has shifted for £10 each recently. Someone had typed £10, the computer faithfully stored 33, 49, 48 on the floppy, and your computer looked it up in the ASCII table and showed you £10. You printed it off and got #10. Why? Cos the printer didn’t know it was British. It knew character 33 as #.
So if you’re in America in the ’80s and you want to buy something from the UK, the conversation goes something like this…
(US)how much are SR shares? -> (UK)how much are SR shares?
(UK)£10 each. at current exchange rates £1=$4.33 -> (US)#10 each. at current exchange rates #1=$4.33
So that, lady geeks and gentleman geeks, is why I believe these people call ‘#’ pound.
(On the subject of the ’60s)
“You got a sort elvis guy over there huh? Clive something?”
“Oh yeah, cliff richard?”
“Is he still around?”
” Yeah, he brings out a Christmas song on the 22nd Dec every year and thousands of 45-year old women go crazy.”
“We’ve got a guy a bit like that, called Tom Jones”
“Tom Jones is Welsh!”
“Yeah, but he’s Vegas now”
Today it was foggy. The “marine layer” it’s called. When the desert, the other side of the mountains, heats up, it draws the ocean air inland and everything goes gray. I must say it helps to ease the homesickness, but it does stymie the photography a bit. Apparently as a side effect, cars rust from the top down here rather than from underneath like in the UK.
Ok, having had a qualified failure at getting any jobs done yesterday, I made a short list this morning, procrastinated till noon, then threw it away and went for a hike, grabbing lunch on the way.
Lunch was ‘french omelette’ which was good, and came with sauteed potatoes, apple, orange, three types of melon, bananas, and whole wheat bread. The bread came on a side plate. The main plate was fairly evenly divided down the middle with savoury to one side and fruit to the other, and after declining the offer of ketchup or tobasco, I started at the savoury end and maintained a strict divide between the two…
Walked along the carpinteria bluffs overlooking a seal sanctuary where a bunch of the blubbery little buggers were loafing around, not even deigning to jump through hoops or whistle the star spangled banner. No wonder they’re so fat. Got some OK photos. I came over all gursky and took this, then half an hour later discovered I’d been set to 640×480 resolution. Fat use that’ll be as a poster or desktop image :-(
Wandered along the bluffs to more Tar Pits. I finally saw one properly oozing, so now I’m happy. It’s weird, but some of it looks like badly-made footpaths until you realise it’s just oozed out of the ground then set like tarmac. There were some great pebbles on the beach, from finely-stratified white-and-pink to ones with dozens of large burrows in them.
The walk took in a row of eucalyptus trees. I’d pulled a leaf off and the aroma took me back to being about 4, when we had a eucalyptus bush in our front garden and mum would give it to us in boiling water to breathe when we got colds. Managed to get practically everything I’d failed to do the day before done, then on the way back up to the condo, the Eagles came on the radio. I should be ashamed to admit it, but the Eagles have a special place in my heart as, along with ’70s Fleetwood mac, it was the soundtrack to my pre-school years. I had to park up in the garage for a bit while the track played out and I tried to figure how I got from the front room in Whitwick 1976 to a garage half way up a hill in Santa Barbara 28 years later.
In the mornings the condo clock-radio gives me an hour of kiss FM to wake up to. It’s the john-jay emmerich (or something) show, which is the merkin equivalent to Steve Wright (the uk 80’s DJ, not the US comedian) in the afternoon. There are two quite funny guys and a girl who is basically their patsy, poor thing. This morning they were having a big hoo-hah because of her conduct at the weekend. She had become pregnant at 15 and thus missed out on a lot of childhood stuff blah blah… anyway that weekend she’d got the opportunity to go out for once and she’d gone out and some bartender had happily served her 13 tequilas. She ended up getting stretchered out of the club, at which her employers, the radio show, were presenting something or other. The big discussion was whether she should lose her job or not. People were phoning in and saying “what you did was WRONG ok?” etc. Cos it was giving out a bad message to the kids etc. Nobody expressed sympathy for the girl, and nobody pointed out that getting stretchered out of a nightclub in full public view sends a pretty strong anti-drink message…
Anyhow. Then they moved on. The next feature was a phone-in “What is the biggest crime you’ve gotten away with?” the callers variously stole $17000 from the security firm they worked for, got away with counts of grand theft auto, and got away with running from the police in their car… But at least none of them were DRINKING.
Having a good time actually. Finally got my act together and arranged a trip to see chunky in L.A. he’s been there a year and a half and it seems would give a gonad to get back to the U.K. Apparently he misses rain. I can see his point, but don’t share his feelings just yet. It was good to be around an English accent for a couple of days. After a few hours Americans started sounding funny again, which was reassuring.
We went to see the “tar pits” which I became aware of thru the simpsons as folklorically being responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. In fact the tar pits at la brea are the richest source of pleistocene (~30k years ago) creatures… so animals like saber-toothed tigers, ground sloths, mastodons etc, which were around at the same time as cavemen. The tar pits are formed by crude oil and asphalt oozing to the surface. Once in a while, some creature would get stuck in the tar. Then its body would attract carnivores and scavangers, who would also become trapped. The scientists reckon about 30,000 fossilized skellingtons are in there. Pretty cool in a geeky science-project sort of way.
Then we went down hollywood boulevard. As we approached, I said, where did the oscars take place? Must’ve been somewhere around here… Chunky said “Dunno” so we parked up in the basement of the Kodak Theater and wandered about a bit. I took a perverse pleasure in spotting stars in the pavement naming people I had never heard of among clusters of very famous people. We looked in the trashy gift shops but they were no less trashy than those in Scarborough or Skegness, so no purchases were made. We also found a magic shop and got a slice of hollywood in the guise of a middle-aged woman who’d gone in there to get as much magic stuff as she could for $15 and chat up the guy behind the counter and anyone else who’s looking receptive.
A stop in a sports bar (the first bar I’ve been to in the US and with a distinctly batchelor feel to it) trying to put my eyes anywhere other than straight into those of the barmaid, and on to see the rocky horror picture show (accompanied by live action verbatim miming and orchestrated heckling) in the Nuart theater on Santa Monica boulevard which was interesting. I was a virgin but managed to avoid getting lipstick all over my face… one girl had bright red lipstick on, so they wrote a C on her right cheek and a CK on her left. At 3:30 we went for food and my body clock went “oo, I recongnize this!” so as a result last night I was knackered at 8pm and woke at 2 am.
Sunday morning we tried to make venice beach but there was no parking (they only park on the streets - no multistoreys) so we just stopped at a diner and I had Salmon Benedict and Root Beer (which I think is dandelion and burdock by another name), then I headed back up the ventura freeway to Santa Barbara in time for Viswanadh’s cousin Kumar to take us for a hike up to Inspiration Point. It certainly was inspiring but I forgot my camera so you guys don’t get to share, sorry! I’ll probably go back as there were a couple of sights I’d like to keep.
I went to my first proper tango class last night. Wow, it’s really different to salsa, you can lead without touching your partner, but at the same time the concentration by both leader and follower is intense. Basically you need to keep your chests at equal distance and your shoulders square, and the guy can lead the girl to turn or to step or to just change weight to the other foot on the spot. It’s quite a trip to have a woman paying so much attention for once :-)
In other news, we had a ‘teambuilding’ meeting last night during which I discovered how expensive scotch is in Santa Barbara, at least it is if you pick an 18-yr-old single malt and your boss is paying (oops).
A funny old day today, I got dragged out of the office for a morning walk, a lunchtime walk and an afternoon ‘teambuilding’ and every single time I was on the verge of unserstanding what I was trying to do. I’m here, slightly inebriated, slightly after hours, and trying to make sense of the fevered notes I made just before heading of to hotel El Encanto (which is a great place to go if you don’t mind selling one of your yachts to afford the suite) for the meeting. Tonight’s Viswanadh’s and my weekly trip out for a curry, and though it’s salsa I think I’m all danced out from the tango last night.
Oh I forgot to mention: the tango teacher mentioned there was live music and dancing at cafe buenos aires so I went there for food and had the first bread that tasted right since getting here! I don’t know what they do to everything here, but I’ve found the flavours really odd for a week or so… come to think of it I stopped smelling the outside air so maybe I’ve just acclimatised now.