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I had an chat with a man named Murray who runs Melbourne’s Best Bicycle Tours yesterday. We sat by the Yarra river and sipped lattes and talked about how much people get paid here. Then we asked the waitress how much she made, and she wasn’t at all shy. “$18 […]
“I’m sorry.” These words are everything to Australia’s Aborigine community, and just a month ago, they were uttered by Australia’s new liberal prime minister Kevin Rudd. For more than a decade, the conservatives have ruled, and they were not about to apologize for what the white man has done to […]
Melbourne has the prosperous feel of a city on the up and up. I got this sense right after we got off the plane and stood in a line waiting for customs. As a cute blond Labrador was walked through the line, sniffing every passenger’s feet and luggage, posters up […]
I sat next to two young women on the long flight to Melbourne. One of the things they told me I should see while I was here was Australian Rules Football. So despite the jetlag, I took the tram down to Melbourne Cricket Grounds and soon I was holding a […]
Dean Torrance admitted that he did have a few regrets. This came after I asked him if he’d ever met any of the Beatles. Torrance is the Dean in Jan and Dean, the surf music band that had its heyday in the early sixties, when their songs like “Surf City” […]
Today I met a surfer named Charlos Bentley, who took me out to the big waves to teach me some techniques. “You’ll be taking some water, but don’t worry, it will be ok,” he counseled. After a few hours, I got off the board and nearly fell on the beach […]
I’m looking out at the oil drilling rigs and the misty pacific ocean from the Sun ‘n Sands Motel in Huntington Beach. This is the place that I got after requesting something with ‘character,’ and made my host Wendy say in email that ‘of course you’d think it was marvelous, […]
I tossed and turned last night, having dreams that I forgot to blog, or missed a flight, or some other figment of my imagination as I contemplate the nine days of travel ahead of me. Like so many other times, the nervous nellie in me makes packing, planning and actually […]
Last night I read a story in the WSJ by Anita Raghavan about men who receive alimony–and don’t feel a bit bad about it. The story profiled a group of men whose high-earning wives paid them thousands of dollars a month, and resented the hell out of it. One producer […]
Ah the joy, the sweet utter joy, of ridding your lawn of the detrius that builds up over the long New England winter. I have been looking at the sticks, pine needles, and leaves that pile up and make my house look like a suburban ghetto. I have seen them […]
On Saturday night, we had apple pie with a charming woman who said she doesn’t have many dates. It was surprising, because she was so much fun, and attractive, and she had what most men would want in a woman. As our pie plates were cleaned, the conversation topic turned […]
It’s frustratingly cold, snow is on the lawn, and we’re heading to VT for a surprise 50th birthday. But I still had time this morning to read a few nuggets in my favorite newspaper, the WSJ. In India, there are milkmen who punch in to work every morning at the […]