Who is Online

We have 51 guests and no members online

Washington DC

 

We stayed in Georgetown a pretty part of Washington that was a pleasant stroll along the Potomac, past the Watergate hotel, to the Lincoln memorial.  Alternatively you can take the subway or a local bus into town, past the White House.  Washington is home to the National Museum of Art and the National Air and Space Museum as well as the Smithsonian and the National Museum of Natural History.  It is commonly thought that Washington was laid out by the founding fathers along Masonic Lines, an idea further popularised by Dan Brown in his latest book.  It abounds in grand vistas triangularly arranged.

The trip down was a wonderful demonstration of the cultural and intellectual diversity of the United States.  As you leave New York the car radio can still pick up the classical music stations, jazz or classic rock.  But very soon the only music available is country.  Or as they say in the Blues Brothers Movie there are two kinds of music in non-urban America: country; and western.  This is interspersed with shock jock talk shows; becoming more and more ‘born again’ as you go south.  The topic of the day, subject to vitriolic abuse, was a New York school that had undertaken a disaster recovery exercise based on a scenario of the school being taken over by a Christian extremist group.  The shock jocks and their listeners of course claimed that this was political correctness gone mad.  Obviously a Muslim extremist group had been transposed into a Christian one for reasons of political correctness.  None of the phone-ins made the obvious point that Oklahoma bombing; and numerous school shooting sprees have been the work of nominal Christians; or remarked on the dangerous nature of religious extremist groups of all kinds. 

The highway Service Centres were another eye opener.  It was like being on the set of ‘Roxanne’ or ‘Married with Children’,  except the out of control children were not very amusing and one wondered how long the hugely obese, yet often quite young, parents and their screaming, ill spoken children, would survive a heart attack.

 

The surprising thing is that when you are in a major city in the United States the majority of the people in the street look relatively slim and healthy; and children are well behaved in restaurants and other public places.  If anything, children in New York seem prematurely adult.

 

The United States is confronting other ways too.  For a large part of the population religious fundamentalism appears to be a way of life.  Yet the United States has some of the finest brains in the world.  On the way down to Washington we were listening to people, with some apparent authority amongst their flock, who clearly believe that the world is no more than 6,000 years old.  Yet in Washington itself there are museums the proclaim the life of the universe to be 13.7 billion years, so far, and that display the United States’ amazing achievements in space exploration,  astronomy,  geology, anthropology and so on.  It as if two, or perhaps two hundred, different worlds coexist with little or no crossover. 

 

After a pleasant couple of days seeing the sights: the White House; Arlington cemetery; the Lincoln Memorial; the Washington Monument; the Capitol; visiting the museums; and the enjoying the restaurants and coffee shops of Georgetown; we set out for Boston.  But on the way I wanted to visit Baltimore and perhaps Philadelphia.  Although Baltimore Harbour was interesting it’s not an exciting city.  On the way out I found the road system confusing.  I got lost.  Then we found ourselves in an area where the people were unhelpful and one ot two made aggressive gestures.  We both felt tourists like us were not welcome there.  Perhaps our skin was the wrong colour. I quickly turned the car around and retraced my steps. Eventually I found a way out but we had lost so much time that we could do little more than drive quickly through Philadelphia on the highway.  No Liberty Bell for us.

 

 

 

No comments

Travel

Canada and the United States - Part2

 

 

In Part1, in July 2023, Wendy and I travelled north from Los Angeles to Seattle, Washington, and then Vancouver, in Canada, from where we made our way east to Montreal.

In Part2, in August 2023, we flew from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, down to Miami, Florida, then Ubered to Fort Lauderdale, where we joined a western Caribbean cruise.

At the end of the cruise, we flew all the way back up to Boston.

From Boston we hired another car to drive, down the coast, to New York.

After New York we flew to Salt Lake City, Nevada, then on to Los Angeles, California, before returning to Sydney.

Read more: Canada and the United States - Part2

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Cloud

 

 

 

 

 Chapter 1 - The Party

 

 

 

This morning Miranda had an inspiration - real candles!  We'll have real candles - made from real beeswax and scented with real bergamot for my final party as a celebration of my life and my death. This brief candle indeed!

In other circumstances she would be turning 60 next birthday.  With her classic figure, clear skin and dark lustrous hair, by the standards of last century she looks half her age, barely thirty, the result of a good education; modern scientific and medical knowledge; a healthy diet and lifestyle and the elimination of inherited diseases before the ban on such medical interventions. 

It's ironical that except as a result of accidents, skiing, rock climbing, paragliding and so on, Miranda's seldom had need of a doctor.  She's a beneficiary of (once legal) genetic selection and unlike some people she's never had to resort to an illegal back-yard operation to extend her life. 

Read more: The Cloud

Opinions and Philosophy

Jihad

  

 

In my novella The Cloud I have given one of the characters an opinion about 'goodness' in which he dismisses 'original sin' as a cause of evil and suffering and proposes instead 'original goodness'.

Most sane people want to 'do good', in other words to follow that ethical system they were taught at their proverbial 'mother's knee' (all those family and extended influences that form our childhood world view).

That's the reason we now have jihadists raging, seemingly out of control, across areas of Syria and Iraq and threatening the entire Middle East with their version of 'goodness'. 

Read more: Jihad

Terms of Use

Terms of Use                                                                    Copyright