Enormity and power

Everything is HUGE in the USA. Walk into a store, of just about any kind, and it will be seven times the size of any Aus­tralian equivalent.

This does mean more of everything. It’s a guzz­ling cul­ture of unbe­liev­able mag­nitude. And I can see how it seems hard to resist it some­times. Free­ways are every­where. Malls are huge, stores are packed to the rafters with so many choices it seems the only choice is between options rather than refusal. I got sucked into the BevMo “five cents for the second bottle” sale and forgot to look for organic wine. I now have two T‑shirts from Hot­Topic (with cute fair­ies on them) because I was out shop­ping for a prom dress with a 16 year old. They’re still 100% cotton, but chances are they’re sweat­shop cent­ral. Doug tells me that even when it says “Made in the USA,” that can mean Guam, where the US labor laws don’t apply.

I did find an audio book­shop for ricky­buchanan which has 5000 books for sale and rental. Check it out and tell us if you need any­thing, okay? It does­n’t look like they ship to Oz but they do have the whole cata­log on the site. 

As for the power part of this post, that relates to puz­zle­ment over the whole “polar­ized plugs” thing, which, it turned out, has noth­ing to do with polar­iz­a­tion of elec­tri­city in the positive/negative sense (thanks for the con­fu­sion, grmph). I spent some of this morn­ing poring over Wiki­pe­dia and other online ref­er­ences trying to under­stand why some US plugs are polar­ized (have a larger pin [1] on one side than the other) and some don’t. I already knew that some plugs here have no ‘earth’ (what they call the ground here). It turns out that one pin is ‘live’ (the Amer­ic­ans call it ‘hot’ while the Aus­sies call it ‘active’ appar­ently) and the other pin is actu­ally neut­ral in most places, and the neut­ral pin is con­nec­ted to the ground, appar­ently. So, the polar­ized plug grounds the power. Why you would­n’t do this at all times, I have no idea, but then I come from the land of 240 volt power and plugs you can only put in at a par­tic­u­lar angle with per­man­ent ground pins on most plugs and added switches at the wall for extra safety. My under­stand­ing today is that Aus­tralian and UK sock­ets won’t even send live cur­rent unless the ground pin opens the socket up ready for it. Nice work. Yes, I am a geek. What can I say? I like learn­ing new things.

Annoy­ances include the Voda­fone mobile (cell phone) that was sup­posed to be unlocked and isn’t, so I won’t have a mobile for a few more weeks, the news that I can’t use my Aus­tralian pre­scrip­tion for con­tact lenses here and that a US pre­scrip­tion would cost me a fortune(but OPSM deliv­ers inter­na­tion­ally, so that’s an option), and feel­ing very left out of the last minute organ­iz­a­tion of the Mel­bourne Social Forum. You should all go! And also that I still haven’t posted about Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai (def­in­itely go if you haven’t already) and the last few days in Mel­bourne town which will now be posted and back-dated, it seems. Sigh.

Oh, and people kill each other here with alarm­ing reg­u­lar­ity. And the war. It scared me from afar, the way this pres­id­ent talked. It scares me more from close up. This is Unsur­pris­ing. On the other hand, we have decided to name our dish­washer Dubya as it also makes a lot of noise without actu­ally achiev­ing much and no matter how much it pre­tends, noth­ing asso­ci­ated with it ever truly seems *clean*.

Good things include spot­ting a guy at the local den of caf­feine with a red tri­angle across the back of his black Mac­Book and making his day when I became the first person to recog­nize it as the anarcho-syn­dic­al­ist flag. Chat­ted with him and he seems like a good polit­ical con­tact to have. Tech geek, act­iv­ist, the usual.

[1] They call it a blade here.