Australia was largely settled by England (voluntarily or otherwise) and the stamp of British culture is obvious throughout the country. For example, every single place we stayed while in Australia, from a posh resort to a bare-bones tent, had an electric kettle in it. God forbid you should ever find yourself in a position where you couldn’t have tea. But I digress.

We spent the day driving around the Clare and Barossa valleys, two of South Australia’s premiere wine-growing regions. The countryside was beautiful, with long vistas of rolling green hills dotted with gum trees, and a spectacular blue sky. As I said earlier, I’ll take winter in Australia any day.

For lunch we met several of J’s companions at Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop, in Nuriootpa. Maggie Beer seems to be Australia’s version of Martha Stewart, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. She has her own television show where she champions the use of verjuice (the juice of unripe grapes) in cooking, as well as her own pheasant farm, and a large selection of branded gourmet foods. At her Farm Shop in the Barossa valley, you can buy her salsas, her chutneys, and her verjuice; and you can get “picnic fare”, which means pheasant terrine, bread, cheese, and other goodies. It was a memorable lunch, particularly the dessert — Burnt Fig Jam, Honeycomb, and Caramel Ice Cream. My God, talk about decadent! It was like eating gold velvet.

Near the end of the day we drove up to the Spring Gully Conservation Park to enjoy the view of the Clare valley. It was spectacular.

Next time — Feral Feast and Flinders

After dropping our bags off at J’s place, he immediately dragged us off to a luncheon as guests of the Norwood Redlegs Football club, more specifically, we were guests of club President Joe Tripodi who was a wonderful host, a football enthusiast, and the Redlegs’ biggest supporter. The Redlegs play Australian Rules Football, or “footy”, and it is wildly popular in South Australia. As guests of Joe, were treated to an excellent lunch, and then escorted out to the President’s Box for the game. For two guys that were brain-dead and exhausted, it was perfect. The day was clear and cool, and footy is great fun to sit and watch. By the end of the game, we almost had a handle on the rules. Even better, when the closing horn sounded the hometown Redlegs were triumphant.

         

When I said it was clear and cool, please bear in mind that July is midwinter in Adelaide. Coming from a string of 90 degree days in Portland, the 40’s and 50’s during the day felt wonderful. All you needed was a light jacket and you were good to go. For Adelaide, however, this was freezing. The summer temperatures in South Australia can hover around 104 F, and in a million little ways the architecture reflects this; buildings are masonry, with broad eaves and high ceilings. A lot of rooms had ceiling fans. A lot of places did NOT have central heat. So it shouldn’t have been surprising that In the middle of July, the locals were bundled up in their heavy winter coats and complaining about the cold.

Given the choice between 104 degree Aussie summers and northwest winters that sometimes dip into the 20s, I’ll take the winters thank you very much.

After the game, we packed up our gear and drove up into the Clare Valley, one of south Australia’s premiere wine-growing regions. By the time we finally crashed for the night, the reality was soaking in on a visceral level. Everyone had an accent, and they drove on the wrong side of the road. The sun crossed the northern half of the sky. And we had somehow exchanged summer for winter. We truly were on the other side of the world from home, almost as far as we could go and remain on the same planet.

What an adventure.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence…

Read the whole article at the New York Times online.

Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats’ Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider — someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology — says about America, helps all of us better understand how America’s toxic partisan-politics “holy war” is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish.

Stockman’s thesis is that the GOP’s policy doctrines have caused “four great deformations of the national economy” that will prevent a conventional recovery from the recession, but lead to “a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing.”

Read the article at MarketWatch.

“To revitalize America’s engine of entrepreneurship — and create as many as 2.5 million jobs in the next three years — Congress should, first, give the patent office a $1 billion surge to restore it to proper functioning. This would enable the agency to upgrade its outmoded computer systems and hire and train additional examiners to deal with the threefold increase in patent applications over the past 20 years. Congress should also pass pending legislation that would prohibit any more diverting of patent fees and give the office the authority to set its own fees.”

“Congress should also offer small businesses a tax credit of up to $19,000 for every patent they receive, enabling them to recoup half of the average $38,000 in patent office and lawyers’ fees spent to obtain a patent.”

Interesting Op-Ed from the New York Times by a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the chief executive of a technology miniaturization firm.

Dalton Ghetti carefully crafts the tips of pencils into amazing micro sculptures. These miniature masterpieces are a side project for the professional carpenter, who has been perfecting this art for the last 25 years. Dalton uses a razor blade, sewing needle, a sculpting knife, a steady hand and lots of patience to meticulously carve the graphite which can take anywhere between a few months to a few years.

See More Amazing Examples of Pencil-Tip Art

For example, people were very good about detecting a hydrophobic amino acid when it stuck out from the protein’s surface, instead of being buried internally, and they were willing to rearrange the structure’s internals in order to tuck the offending amino acid back inside. Those sorts of extensive rearrangements were beyond Rosetta’s abilities, since the energy changes involved in the transitions are so large.

Read the story at Ars Technica

The noise was incredible, as friends yelled back and forth at each other, got up and changed seats, laughed, shrieked, etc. etc. It didn’t help that I was wedged into a center seat and had to sit with my shoulders rolled to keep from butting into my neighbors on either side.

The best part of the flight was watching all those teenage girls struggling with the instruction to turn off their cellphones for takeoff. You’d think they had been asked to disconnect their mother’s life support. Phones were held surreptitiously to one side as last-minute texts were sent, flight attendants gave warnings, then second warnings, and then finally the neutron bomb of warnings: “The plane will not take off until you turn off your phone.” Amazing. But I digress.

As the plane descended into an unusually gray and cool Los Angeles, I heard one of the girls say “I’d rather be in a cloudy LA than a sunny Portland!” What a coincidence! I would also rather you were in a cloudy LA than a sunny Portland.

Leaving the plane, I saw my faithful friend and now travelling companion S waiting for me. After a quick and greasy dinner, we checked in with V Australia, and boarded the massive 777-300ER. How big was it? This big. So big that first class didn’t just get drinks, they had a BAR they sat at to drink them. So big that it had a flight crew rest area over first class, and a cabin crew rest area over the passenger cabin. REALLY freakin’ big.

Positives first: The food was really very good, especially by airline standards. We even got a little glass ‘o wine with dinner. The entertainment system was pretty awesome. You had your own little display in the back of the seat in front of you, with a largish variety of music, television programs, and movies on demand. But all of that, as nice as it was, was not enough. Not nearly enough. Because you still had to endure The Flight That Would Not End.

On paper, the flight from LA to Sydney was supposed to last just under 13 hours. In reality, it took at least a week. It’s hard to tell with any accuracy, because it was dark throughout the entire flight. Yup, we took off in the last dim light of twilight, and landed just as the sky was lightening, almost 13 hours later.

It messes with your head.

We eventually landed, staggered off the plane, and headed off to customs where my passport got its first official stamp. Then we had to shuffle slowly through an incredible line and take a bus in order to get to our flight on Virgin Blue. The flight to Adelaide was uneventful, but we arrived having spent approximately 17 of the previous 21 hours on airplanes. And we felt like it, too.

Next time: Footy!

See the photos at Gizmodo.

Thought you might find my Lyric for Every Day of the Year Project (launched today) interesting and, if so, you might do an item on it.

You can find it here:

Lyric for Every Day of the Year Project

Here’s the description:

The object of the Lyric for Every Day of the Year Project is to come up with songs that mention every single one of the 366 days of the (leap) year. The aim is nothing more than simply coming up with a really cool, really long list of song titles.

So, he has to come up with a song that references a specific day of the year, for every single day of the year. My first thought was the day the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, but someone had already beat me to it.

Want to play? Then head on over and help Rich out.