News values

A friend with a healthy interest in news and current affairs said, when he returned from six months or so in the Antipodes, that one of the most interesting things about the experience was the different perspective it gave on news values. In the UK, we perhaps flatter ourselves that we take a fairly international perspective. What was striking down under, apparently, was that what we regard as 'international' news hardly ever featured - walk-outs in France, corruption in Italy, that kind of thing. Instead, there was far more of the day-to-day news from Indonesia, Malaysia, and so forth - places that only ever feature in the UK in the event of a coup or natural disaster or similar. The point being, the news one gets in a given country is filtered by proximity; us first, neighbours second, distant places last.

The US media, of course, are notoriously parochial, and in fact don't quite follow that model. It's more like: USA first; other countries that the US is currently interested in fighting/bullying/making peace with/being sucked up to by second; everyone else, a remote third. You can watch the national networks for a week without Canada or Mexico being mentioned, except perhaps the the latter in an immigration debate. Iran and Iraq figure, in predictable terms; France got a mention recently following Sarkozy's nauseating visit to Congress. Other than that, it's interminable coverage of presidential primaries and forensic analysis of the latest fall from grace of a sportsman, celebrity, or congressman. Same with the newspapers; only the NY Times seems to have anything like an internationalist outlook.

But, as I'm constantly being told in many contexts, Miami is very different from the rest of the States, and looking at the news values here is one way of getting a handle on dissimilarity. The main local papers are the Miami Herald, a daily of vaguely liberal tendencies, and the Miami New Times, a weekly free sheet with slightly more overt pinko sympathies. Both often feature international news prominently. The Herald - which also publishes a Spanish language edition - has had more than one front page article on Venezuela in the last week or so. The New Times, which concentrates more on 'colour' pieces than hard news, last week ran long stories about the new wave of Venezuelan immigrants to Miami, and the plight of Haitian boat people.

This focus is in some sense more international than that of the national media, but viewed through a different lens, it's also just as parochial. One of the things that makes Miami so different is its status as the destination of choice for political refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean; and the international element of the local news is almost exclusively concerned with whichever countries in those areas are tending most towards the Left at the moment, hence the recent interest in Venezuela. Cuba, naturally, is a constant. The New Times piece on the Haitian immigrants was an exception, a provocative article questioning why the 100 or so dirt poor migrants fleeing persecution who washed up on the beaches of South Florida recently are treated so differently from their Cuban counterparts.

The answer is precedent and protocol. So far as Cuba goes, America's antipathy is firmly established, and the route from Havana to here has been well-trodden since the 1959 revolution. The first wave of immigrants mostly consisted in the rich who stood to lose most in Castro's country. Subsequent immigration, which has waxed and waned, has been from all social classes. The most famous influx was the Mariel boatlift in 1980; 125 000 Cubans, mostly economic rather than political refugees, were allowed to leave by Cuba and promised sanctuary by the US. The majority ended up in or near Miami. Still today, a Cuban of whatever status arriving in Miami is almost guaranteed the right to remain, in part for fear of upsetting the vocal community here who regard all Cuban expats as brothers and braves in the struggle against Castro.

Venezuelans are in a similar situation. Although there has been no mass migration on the scale of Mariel, since Chavez took over there Miami has seen a steady stream of mostly political exiles; middle-class journalists, army officers, and of course the rich. Since America is so openly hostile to Chavez, it can't help but offer asylum to all these people if its policy is to seem consistent. This is the difference between the Venezuelans and the Haitians; since the US is officially friendly with Haiti, no such laissez faire attitude to immigration from there exists. It's also been noted that the Haitian refugees tend to be poor and black.

All this highlights two factors in Miami's make-up. The first is the massive and continuing influence of waves of Latin American immigration. Initially through proximity to Cuba, Miami is the place to be for Hispanic exiles. And, because of the peculiar position the US has on Cuba and other countries, these Latins aren't illegal migrants like the Mexicans in the West; they're full members of society.

The second is the gulf between the rich and poor here, which is truly astonishing. The first Cuban exiles, and those from other Latin American countries since, were rich, often enormously so, and contributed to the millionaire's playground element of the city. They also brought a particular political culture in which money can buy influence, and this is now part of the fabric of South Florida life. Subsequent immigrants, though, have often tended towards the poor, dirt-poor; and enormous influxes like the Mariel boatlift have put tremendous strain on public finances and services. A Republican Congressman from Colorado got in trouble a year ago for calling Miami a 'third world country', but many feel he had a point. There's that same ridiculous disparity of wealth, shocking slums rubbing up against glittering high rises, that one associates with such places; and the same sense that the rich run the place in their favour. Joan Didion's book 'Miami', which I read just before coming here, is in some ways outdated; it's a mid-eighties piece of journalism, and some of the contemporary references are now hopelessly obscure. But the picture it paints of of the city, seething with barely submerged undercurrents of shady deals, horrible disparity, and pervasive, murky links to the politics of countries far from here, is as accurate now as it was then.

Christmas travel

A quick note to inform of my travel plans at Christmas:

Dec 19: Arrive at Heathrow at 6:20am and make my weary jetlagged way across London and up to Durham. Hang around there complaining about the cold until:

Dec 28: Fly from Newcastle to Amsterdam and then train to Rotterdam, to spend a few days with some friends there.

Jan 1: Fly back to Newcastle. That is not going to be a fun flight.

Jan 6: Take a train down to London and stay there overnight, in preparation for

Jan 7: Heathrow again, and back to MIA.

I've no plans for the periods Dec 20 -27 (apart from the obvious) and Jan 2-5, so I'm somewhat open to suggestion; but I'm unlikely to want, or be able to afford, to spend much of that time traipsing up and down the country. Summer, I think, is going to be better for seeing people... More light, you see. Anyway, I hope I'll see at least some of you soon.

Black steel

There's two reasons why my posts here have become less frequent. One is that I am working very, very hard, and so are most of my friends. So the supply of interesting events to relate has dried up somewhat. I've done some fun things in the last couple of weeks or so; but I don't think anyone would benefit from my amateur criticism of an exhibition of Goya drawings, and there's only so much you can say about occasional drinking.

The other reason is that, without exactly getting used to the place, I'm gradually reaching a kind of accommodation with Miami. Though it still regularly strikes me as deeply alien - the palm trees, the alligators in the university lake, the November sun that warms the bones rather than warning of frost - I've lost the wide-eyed sense of wonder that encouraged me, at first, to write about everything I saw.

Every now and then, though, something occurs that reminds me what a thoroughly strange and unfamiliar country, state, city this is. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Even were I American, I think I would be ambivalent about the day. What, exactly, are thanks been given for? The survival of some of the early colonies; and, by extension, the subjugation of the indigenous population and establishment of the good old USA. Hmmmm. Leaving aside that perhaps ungraceful point, a compulsory family gathering within a month of Christmas seems particularly cruel. I dodged two invitations to spend the day with large extended families and spent it
hiding in the philosophy grad 'work room' - a poky space, apparently once a small apartment, that makes the eleventh floor of Sheffield's arts tower seem well-appointed.

Only a cynic would say that the day after Thanksgiving is a more apposite expression of the American way of life. Today is 'Black Friday'. The name has nothing to do with stock market crashes, massacres, or the like. Instead, it's (probably incorrectly, but very nicely) said to derive from the fact that it's first day of the financial year on which the figures on the retailers' bottom lines can be penned in black rather than red (The American fiscal year begins on Oct 1). The discounts are, apparently, massive, and the queues enormous; the whole nation hits the shops and does their bit for the national economy.

Another strange thing happened recently. I can't resist the quotation: I got a letter from the government the other day, I opened and read it, it said they were suckers. They wanted me for their army or whatever. Imagine me giving a damn, I said never.

Yes, I was informed by mail that I had been registered for the Selective Service System. This is a compulsory scheme under which every male between the ages of 18 and 30 are registered so that, if a military draft is deemed necessary, the process can be conducted fairly, efficiently, and quickly. I was briefly worried, given that the American military is so far short of its recruitment targets that conscription is being seriously mooted by some. Luckily, my registration is an administrative error, an automatically produced document linked to my registration for a social security number. As a 'resident alien', I can de-register easily. No Arabian nights for me any time soon.

So, dubious holidays, rampant consumerism, and worrying intimations of military service. It's the American way, and it's still, reassuringly, very peculiar indeed.

mergers of acquisitions

With South Florida cowering before tropical storm Noel (could they not have given it a more aggressive name?), I thought I ought to post some kind of valedictory message before I'm blown in to the mid-Atlantic. Now, the reason things on here have been a bit quiet is that I've been - brace yourselves - working hard, very hard, and so have all the other grads. This means that I've been spending enough time in front of computers already, and also that I've been doing very little fun to report about.

The hard work seems set to continue for at least the next fortnight, but I have a new and welcome distraction. I managed, finally, a couple of weeks ago, to get a second hand mixer and pair of decks for a decent price. [Warning: slightly geeky tech speak for next 50 wds). Technics 1200M3D, Allen and Heath Xone32. The decks are in sparkly condition, even the 45 adaptors are there. The mixer is a handsome beastie, and has a built-in filter unit - so I can add LFO wobble to anything insufficiently squelchy. Only complaint: would it have been so hard to put a sharp cut on the crossfader curve control, given that they've put one on at all? Makes scratching a little less easy than it might be.

Anyway, those secured, the next task was to get some records, and here's how I've done:

70-odd 7" singles by completely obscure American artists on utterly recherche labels. Bought for buttons from Ebay. Still going through them: about half country of various degrees of nuttiness, one quarter sixties-style surf-pop, and one quarter soul gems.

20 assorted jazz LPS. Ebay, again. who doesn't need 8 Herbie Hancock albums? How did I manage without? I bought 14 records from the same guy, again for buttons, and he kindly threw in six extra. I'm grateful for the Billy Cobham, and slightly scared of the John Klemmer. Never heard of him, but it looks awful. Mind, Joe Zawinul's hardly less alarming on the sleeve of 'Heavy Weather'.

The cherry-picked highlights of a massive collection I rifled through on Saturday. I answered a classified ad that mentioned a record collection for sale and a few artists from the mid-90s Rawkus golden age, secured the necessary lift, and on arrival, was greeted with 20 crates of vinyl. Deep breath, send my chauffeur to read a book in the car ('this could take me a while'), dive in. I was very restrained and selective, and resisted the temptation to get copies of things I already had in the UK, but still came away with two boxes, mostly of hip hop 12"s and LPs, a few other bits and pieces mixed in - couple of Portishead LPs, some Femi Kuti, and so on. The crates were a goldmine of hip hop from the mid 90s to the present, a mix of the indie and the commercial, and I got loads of good stuff, including some things I've tried in vain to track down ( in a slightly obsessive manner) in the past - like a 12" of the original version of 'Grindin'', rather than the easy-to-find-but-rubbish 12" with the Sean Paul remix. Yes, it was released back in the days when the coolest thing to do with your remix was to get SP to phone in 16 bars of priapic patois-lite.

So I'm now all set up to distract myself mixing all my new purchases into a tasty musical stew. Of course, all this is a bit stupid, for two reasons. First, the tentative offers I've had for DJ work have been for dubstep mixing; so really, my record budget should be going on dubstep records, not Kool Keith LPs. Second, a few years from now, I'm going to have to face a horrible decision: bankrupt myself shipping my US collection back to Britain, or wave goodbye to all my precious acquisitions? I'm dreading that day already.

photos

The Facebook links that previously appeared in this post were apparently misbehaving, so instead, I've spread my digital self a little more thinly and created a Flickr account. Go
see, if you' couldn't before. Even if you could, there are new pictures of lizards and rain.

I'll try to add photos fairly regularly. As a preview, here is a nice picture of the sky and some flags.

You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think

OK, so I've been here a couple of months now. I've seen some alligators, been on a beach, massively increased my chances of skin cancer - the list of Miami cliche activities is being ticked off. One cliche I hadn't investigated till this weekend, though, was the city's reputation as having less culture than the average Brie. It turns out to be half true, half not (take that, bivalent logicians).

A dig around the internet and the local listings mags reveals a few art galleries, theatres and the like, as you'd hope in a city of two million people. As with everything, access to most venues is a problem for anyone who doesn't drive, but on Friday, I managed to get to the Carnival Centre by public transport easily.

The Carnival Centre is an enormous performing arts complex North of downtown, in the middle of pretty much nothing -it's surrounded by building sites, and seems to be the vanguard of an attempt to reinvigorate the Omni district. In the best tradition of big public projects, the Centre was built at a cost hugely in excess of the original budget, and is currently facing big running cost overspends, exacerbated by smaller audiences than was expected. It seems they might not come even if you build it. So it was good to see the auditorium almost full for the Classical Theatre of Harlem 's production of Romeo and Juliet.

As you might guess from the name of the company, this was a version of the play set in modern times, with hiphop playing in the party scene, gunfights instead of swordsmanship, and so forth. The language was unchanged, apart from a few extra anachronistic exclamations (Nurse: 'scurvy knave!' Mercutio: 'ya mama!'). It worked fairly well, but ran foul on the problem that afflicts most productions of R&J; Romeo is such an idiot, such an unsympathetic dithering twit, that attempts to emphasise, say, the tragedy of the main story or the theme of warring families are stymied by his presence as the main catalyst for events. Another of those superficially heroic, but actually quite unpleasant, main characters Shakespeare did so well (cf Antonio in Merchant).

Saturday, and back relying on lifts, the Miami phil dept foreign legion (four of us) took a trip to the Bass Art Museum on South Beach. A relatively small museum with a much larger collection than in can show, and plans to expand, the Bass has three galleries for its collection and one for transient shows. The collection galleries do a lot with little space; in particular, the gallery of Renaissance and Baroque art gave an excellent overview of the period despite only displaying a handful of paintings. The touring exhibition this time was by a Cuban-American artist, and included an installation that was the first I've seen, I think, to include smells as part of the art.

On the way out, the volunteer (I think) at the entrance desk stopped us and gave us each a lovely book documenting a previous show at the museum, and chatted to us about the Miami art scene, giving us some tips about events, places to go and so on. This could have been kindness to foreigners, or it could have been a reward for (my) attentive listening on the way in to his tales of his trip to 'your wonderful country' and his adventures in 'Edinboro' and Parsons Green.

Or it could simply have been because, on a Saturday afternoon, we were four out of only six people to visit the gallery in an hour and a half. And that seems to be the true part of the Miami culture cliche; the infrastructure's there, but persuading the residents to partake is hard when there's all that tanning to do...

A few thousand words' worth

I've spent the last couple of days trying, and failing, to write something perceptive about McGinn's theory that consciousness is matter without committing the cardinal sin of calling the theory bunk. So I'm no mood to write much. Fortunately, I bought a camera last week, so I can show you some pictures instead. Unfortunately, it's been raining in Miami for much of the last week, so I can't show you any pictures of the city in refulgent splendour. If I take enough goodies, I'll perhaps start an online gallery of some kind. In the meantime:

Here's the view towards downtown from the university metro station....

Here's the view towards downtown from the philosophy department....

Here's a view of part of campus from the philosophy department...

And here's the view I've mostly been enjoying this week when not in the philosophy department.


If you click on the pictures, they go all bigger and stuff. If anyone has any particular things which they'd like to see, let me know. Or anything they'd like me to write about. Though bear in mind my mother reads this (hi Mum).

Might also be worth mentioning I'm now Skype-equipped. If you are, you should be able to find me if you can spell my surname, and then you can audit my accent for any americanisms.

Left leg out

My experience of the famed Miami nightlife has so far been limited to a couple of trips to South Beach in the company of some other grad students. We've gone to a few bars that were pretty grotty, kicked about the streets a bit, gone home. Nice enough, but given the place has a reputation for a thriving club culture, I was looking for a bit more.

So when I saw that Mala and Skream were playing at a SoBe venue, for free, on Friday I was determined to go. So determined that I was prepared to go alone, even if that did mean an hour- and a half journey each way on public transport that really does seem to like eight hours' sleep a night.

(Mala and Skream are dubstep DJs from the UK, big on the scene, usually you could expect to pay a tenner or so to see either play out).

In the end, I managed to recruit a couple of my fellow grads, which was a surprise - their tastes in music seem to run mostly to rock of various kinds. Also a relief, since it meant I had lifts there and back. Wasn't sure what they'd make of it, didn't really care that much.

So, a drive through the night to South Beach. SoBe, the southern portion of an island just off the mainland to which it's linked by several causeways, is more like movie Miami. It's full of bars, clubs, 'glamorous' people, and there is of course a beach. As the driver said as we headed through downtown's illuminated skyscrapers and on to one of the causeways, it's like you're going to a different city - a world apart from the sprawling, quiet suburbs.

My first thought on entering the bar was: wow, that's a lot of bassbins. Unfortunately, this was soon followed by: oh, they're washing machines. The place is called the Laundry Bar, and the gimmick is, it really does double as a laundrette. You can come along anytime it's open (day and night) with your dirties and clean them in the lovely hygienic bar atmosphere (Florida still allows smoking in clubs and so on).

The place is small, 150 capacity tops I'd say, and the PA wasn't, as it turned out, the most stomach-churningly bassy I'd ever heard. But it felt more like what I think of as good club/bar; less of the tacky decor, more of the tacky floor, dim lights, and people there for the music as much as anything else. Dubstep is a small scene in the UK, and here it's tiny - this was the first time, I think, that a 'name' DJ had played in Miami, and people had flown from Georgia and Texas, amongst other places, to be there.

So the crowd was pretty excitable, and when the warmups stopped and the main men started, they went for it in a way I've never seen at a UK dubstep night. The music lends itself to a slow, languid kind of dancing, but these people were going like it was fast fast jungle, hanging off the staircase near the DJ booth, whooping, cheering every tune they knew. The music helped that, I think - there was more variety of tempo than in most of the dubstep sets I've heard, plenty of tunes that really did double up the snares instead of just suggesting a faster speed via the hats. Lots of records I hadn't heard, lots of them really good, the sets were everything I'd hoped for.

And the people I'd dragged along enjoyed it too, it was completely new to them but I was surprised at how positive they were about it; dubstep maybe isn't the most amenable form of dance music if dance music isn't your thing. So we all left happy at about half three, with the party still going strong. I think I'll still need to broaden my social circle from the philosophy department if I want to do this kind of thing more regularly, but for now at least, I've finally managed to get to something good. Nice one.

Swamp things

It's been suggested to me that I'm not properly fulfilling my remit here. Never mind the academic stuff - what about the beaches? The rollerbladers? The vice? What about Disneyworld?

Well, all in time, apart from the last, but one's off the list now. Yesterday, I went to the Everglades, or a small part of it. The area designated as a national park is 2357 sq miles (the Lake District national park is 885 sq miles), so you can only take in a small part on a day trip. Of course, not that much of it is really accessible, being wild marshland, but anyway.

I went with a couple of philosophy grads and one of their friends, visiting from Estonia. The hour and a half drive from Miami impressed upon me just how flat Florida is (highest point: 345 feet). It reminded me of the Netherlands, or more precisely, those seventeenth century Dutch landscape paintings where the sky takes up three quarters of the canvas and accounts for most of the picture's expressive content and interest.

We stopped at Shark Valley visitor centre and hired bikes to take a 15-mile circuit along a wide asphalt road through part of the area called the Shark River Slough, or Sea of Grass. This is a formed by a vast, slow-moving flow of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee in the middle of the state to the south coast. The water spreads across and flows south down a flat limestone shelf about 40 miles wide, creating an enormous marshy plain. The swampy cliche of the Everglades is fulfilled in the south, but here and for much of the area, the landscape is covered by knee-high sawgrass (sedge) growing from the marsh, interspersed with 'hammocks', small raised areas of land on which scrubby clumps of trees grow. So as a landscape, it's open and fairly featureless.

The interest comes from spotting the beasties. There were plenty of beautiful flying insects, dragonflies and butterflies, an enormous variety of colours. There were several wading birds, herons and the like, and a wide -winged cormorant-like one that I later found out is called an anhinga. Floating in the thermals, we saw several raptors of some description, probably red-shouldered hawks, maybe ospreys. Also, a few turtles, swimming around in the water by the side of the track.

And, yes, alligators. Plenty of them, lying in the water about ten yards from us as we cycled by, the largest about seven feet long, the smallest a little six-inch baby that scurried off the road as we approached. They're obviously quite placid creatures, otherwise one wouldn't be allowed to get so close, but there's still an air of menace around them; that feeling that if they wanted to, they could have your leg for dinner.

We did the circuit in a couple of hours, finishing thoroughly soaked from the predictable 30C+ heat. We then went on a looping drive along a rough road that left the national park, but took us through a more wooded area of the Everglades. The dominant tree species was cypress - I think mangroves are more common in the south where the fresh water meets the salt. We saw, again, a couple of alligators, one slinking off the road in front of us, and a few racoons. At one point, we stopped and followed on foot a boardwalk about a mile into the woods, hoping to see some more big lizards, but got no reward except another couple of anhingas.

Still, some alligators is an improvement on my score of none till then, and it was good to get out of the city for a while. So, one item on the cliche list experienced and recorded. Next, Nick goes rollerblading. Maybe.

Arboriculture Florida

I was asked before I came here to report on the trees and the surgery thereof. It's taken me a while, because I wanted to find out a couple of names, and my enquiries along these lines amongst my peers met with flatly uninterested 'dunno's. It seems the only naturalism philosophy grads are interested in is the Quinean kind (philosophy joke. Sorry).

Well, anyway, I should say that I'm not really describing Florida's trees, just Miami's. Doubtless they're rather different in the north, and of course will be very different in the Everglades. So, suitably qualified, onwards...

Two things are immediately striking about Miami's trees. First, the ubiquity of palm trees and similar tropical species. You know dragon trees, those spindly little things kept as houseplants in the UK? There's one in my back garden with a trunk as thick as my, err, trunk. Second, there's a lot of them. The city being so sprawling, there's plenty of space for trees, so that if you're in a tall building, the place looks incredibly verdant.

Looking beyond the palms, a lot of the species are pretty similar to UK ones, although they're probably tropic-adapted subspecies. I've spotted oaks, beeches, and elms, for example. It'll be interesting to see how these deciduous ones behave in the autumn and winter. I suppose it's quite possible that these are imports - that the majority of the trees, like the majority of the population, aren't indigenous. This is certainly the case with the first of the two that have caught my eye most.

This is the royal poinciana (Delonix regia). There's a few of these on campus. Native to Madagascar, they're fairly low, with wide-spreading canopy. The attractive thing about them is the combination of their leaves, which are very like ferns, and their big clusters of small flowers, red or yellow usually.



The second one I particularly like is the banyan, or strangler fig. This really refers to a few similar fig species, two of which are native to South Florida. They germinate in cracks in the trunk of a host tree or some structure, and send roots groundwards. These roots are long red strands. When they touch the ground, the roots, err, root, and harden into trunks. Sometimes they're wrapped round the trunk of the host, sometimes they're free-standing. Eventually, the host tree/building is killed off, and the banyan is left alone, a network of trunks. These can grow really, really enormous...



As for surgery, the approved method with palms seems to be similar to how you look after yuccas or dragon trees; wait for the leaves to die, then strip them off. Either that, or just leave them alone and let them fall. There's huge dead palm leaves all over the place. With other trees, the Americans have apparently taken all the danger, fun and skill out of tree surgery by replacing climbing with sitting in a cherry-picker, like you use to change streetlight bulbs.

Well, that's trees. Maybe I'll do wildlife next, alligators have been spotted in the campus lake...

Activity summary

A fragmentary account of recent and coming events. I've got some thematic posts planned, but I'm a little too frazzled to think coherently. Expect something about trees soon.

I'm am little frazzled because I've spent the last five hours trying to write my paper for tomorrow's graduate seminar. All new grads are obliged to do one in the first semester, and I thought it would be better to get it out of the way before the work piled up. Unfortunately, I thought I'd try out some new ideas that were crystal clear. In my head. Having disseminated the title, I've now found that these ideas are rather less tractable when it comes to actually expressing them. Always the way. I think I've got it sorted now, but it might feel rather different tomorrow. An additional worry is that faculty attend and participate in these seminars (unlike at Sheffield). I'm looking forward to Colin McGinn telling me why his theory of imagination is way better than the Sartrean one I'm expounding, and then exploding with indignation when I tell him I've not read his book.

What else? I've ordered myself a nice shiny new lappy - Should be here in a couple of weeks. I considered a sexy Apple, but went with Dell because 1) better discount, 2) better machine for same $$, 3) don't trust Apple's all-in-one philosophy, 4) might one day get round to converting to Linux. Anyway, generous educational discount + generally cheaper consumer electronics = a bargain of a machine.

Speaking of bargains, I found some guy who sells brand new but old hifi equipment. End of line stuff that was great in its day but no shop can shift any more. So last night, I got a Sony amp/tuner (original RRP $250) and a pair of Polk speakers ($300) for $130. He also threw in a Sony CD player, which I didn't really want, but came with the amp. So that was probably $100 or so back in the day. I haven't rigged it up yet, principally because I didn't get any speaker cable from him; I'm off to get some tonight as a reward for finishing that paper.

I'm keeping an eye out for secondhand decks, but I'm not sure what's best; buy some decks first, and have nothing to play on them, or start with buying records. Or do neither and save money for flights. Hmmm.

Anyway, I'm off to buy some speaker cable, and panic a bit more...

Staying, for sure

Just a quickie:

Those of you who've had to put up with me muttering ungratefully about how I'd consider coming back to the UK in the event of an AHRC offer will have no more such grumbling to contend with. As expected, the skinflints wouldn't spare me a penny or several million, so I'm staying here in sunny Florida till I've got either a PhD or a heat-induced psychopathological condition... (is that a real word?).

Soccerball USA

I'm not going to discharge yet my promise to write about courses; I think it's fairer to wait until they've settled into a routine before making judgments about them. So instead...

Yesterday evening, I attended a 'tryout' session for the uni football team. Those of you familiar with my footballing ability will appreciate how ridiculous it would be for me to bother doing the same in the UK. Those of you who aren't, well, try to imagine me displaying skill, speed, poise, power, grace...

Finding it hard? Images of flailing limbs and the occasional pratfall instead? Right on. At my best, I'm competent. So I approached these trials with trepidation, and partial expectation of humiliation. On the other hand, I thought it was worth going a) for the exercise, b) for something to do, and c) because it was possible the standard here was really a lot lower than in England.

Miami, you might have gathered, is a hot and humid place in the summer. The session started at 6pm, and I'd already worked up a decent sweat getting from the metro to the pitch (five minute walk). By the end of the warm-up - three laps of a three-pitch area - I was in the odd position of being barely out of breath (it was jogged, and distance running I'm ok at), but literally dripping with perspiration.

Anyway, on to some basic ball drills, and then a series of short practice matches in which the first team took on teams of newcomers. And do you know, the standard here really isn't that great. Nobody from the first XI seemed to be any better than some of the people I played 5-a-side with in Sheffield, and although a few of the newcomers - in particular, two Brazilians - were obviously good, the level was by no means above me. Humiliation avoided.

There's more of these sessions tomorrow and next week before they sort out the final squad. I'm not particularly bothered about making that; I'd really rather just play scratch five-a-side once or twice a week than do boring training sessions. But turning up to these things is a good way of meeting like-minded people, and a run-around too. Hopefully, by this time next week, I'll know enough casual footballers to sort out a regular, informal game.

Other than that, nothing much to report. No news from AHRC in England, and not much news here...

Addenda and replies

Some things I forgot to mention and some replies to comments.

Orientation: I should have mentioned this highlight, from a talk on the university's graduate student "honour code".
Speaker: The code also prohibits cheating. Can anyone tell me what cheating is?
[silence from room full of patronised grads refusing to play along]
Speaker: OK, well the honour code defines cheating as: using any device or means to cheat.
[muffled snorts from other phil grad student and me at triviality of definition].

I checked later, and it really does say that.

Housing: I've realised I've been suffering from a misapprehension for a while. I don't know if it's common, or if everyone else had kind of thought about it a bit more. So this will be either enlightening, or evidence of my occasional utter daftness.

Anyway, I'd always though that American streets must be really, really long, because I'd assumed that, if your house was number (say) 9300, that implied the existence of 9299 other houses in the street. It turns out that this isn't the case, the streets are normalish length, and the houses are numbered by some complex system that I don't yet understand. My neighbour on one side is 9250; I forget the other.

Replies: I might consider getting a bike when it cools down a bit, but at present, it's far too humid. Arriving at your destination dripping with sweat isn't a good look. I suspect rollerblades may be even more undignified. Sports cars are, well, do you know how much money I'm getting here? Ill gull wings though.

Wedding photos: Class, send 'em along. There's some on facebook already. I can't decide if we all look suave and mature, or uncomfortable and dressing-up-box costumed.

Courses: Jules, I'll write more about this once I've actually had some classes, but I'm taking a general epistemology course, one on naturalisation in epistemology and phil of science, and one which was advertised as ontology but seems to be more like phil of physics. So depending on how you look at it, I'm either getting an excellent opportunity to round out my background in unfamiliar areas, or I'm pissing about studying things that I don't really care about instead of getting on with the research I actually want to do....

I'll house you

Classes officially start today, but none of the ones I'm taking begin till Monday. So apart from some preliminary reading, I have plenty of time on my hands. I've just about sorted the mounds of paperwork, and the next couple of days are about exploration.

So before I expand my horizons, and since Dan (I'm not sure which one?) asked, I'll say a bit about my accommodation. I'm living in a large house with another (part time) phil grad student, the house's owner, and her mother (and two dogs and two cats). This is by no means an unusual arrangement here; a lot more of the housing is of the lodgings type, rather than shared houses. By many measures, I've fallen on my feet somewhat. My rent is cheap, the other occupants are friendly and relaxed, and I have all the facilities I could reasonably wish for. And a pool in the back yard.

The house is in a suburb of Miami, about four miles south of the university. Again, the distance isn't unusual. Since everything here is arranged for driving, the city is sprawling, and most amenities are awkwardly spaced for the pedestrian. I have a 15 minute walk to the nearest metro stop, from where I can catch a train that deposits me right outside the university. I also have a 15 minute walk to pick up the most basic of groceries; laughably, this means that it takes me as long to acquire a pint of milk here as it did when I was living in Langdale. I have absolutely no idea where the nearest pub/bar is. I suspect there isn't one within walking distance.

I did investigate one other possibility for housing at the weekend; a room in a solidly constructed treehouse, in a smallholding bizarrely situated in the middle of one of Miami's less salubrious districts, run and rented by a greying hippy. The room was very, very cheap, and the place itself an incredible oasis of green. But is was far, far too far from the uni, and the landlord struck me as having that brusque self-interest that you sometimes find in old hippies, which seems jarringly at odds with their professed ethos.

So anyway, I'm staying here in Kendall for now, and probably for a while. If you'd like my postal address, email me for it. Anybody could be reading this.

Orientated?

I've been here less than 48 hours, and so far as the university are concerned, I'm now officially orientated. The process included some wonderfully vacuous speeches from various university dignitaries ("you join UM at a pivotal moment in our history"), some helpful information from the health service ("if you show up without insurance, we keep your first-born until you pay"), and, especially for international students, advice on how to adjust to American culture (fast food is key, it seems). A particular highlight was the university's President exhorting the room full of new grads to cheer at someone dressed in a big furry ibis suit ("we take school spirit very seriously here"). I kept quiet.

Of course, I'm anything but orientated. I've found the nearest grocery store, set up a bank account, and worked out the best way to uni on the surprisingly efficient public transport network. I haven't by any means got used to the idea of living in such a car-happy city. Nor have I seen any beaches, boys on rollerblades, alligators, or art deco buildings. But there's iridescent dragonflies flitting amongst the palm trees on the campus, and little lizards jumping into the bushes as you approach on the pavement. And, perhaps, a hurricane on the way. Enough excitement for now, I think.

Disorganisation

A grey day in Durham, train in two and a half hours, still packing. One day, I'll learn to do that further in advance. On the other hand, last-minute specific packing panic means less time for general emmigration panic.

Think I've got everything; bit late now if I haven't. Dollars, passport, I-20, flight booking reference, clothes. What else? Nowt I can think of...

OK - off to put them in a bag. Next time I write something, hopefully more coherent and at greater length, I'll be a lot warmer than I am now....