Some photos of birds and alligators.

This past weekend, a friend and I put our bikes on a rack and drove to the Everglades, planning to cycle round a particular path. When we got there, it was absurdly busy, possibly because this was the first genuinely nice weekend day for a while here. We decided we didn't fancy riding as part of a peloton, especially since most of the wildlife would already be scared away, so we drove further West and then took the rough loop road through Big Cypress Preserve.

Big Cypress is an area contiguous with the Everglades, and in many ways continuous, but it's a quite different ecosystem. The Everglades, for much of their expanse, are a 'river of grass' -- a body of shallow-ish water moving incredibly slowly South through a dense mass of sawgrass, with the occasional tree. Things get more swampy nearer the coast, as the salt water mixes with the fresh and mangroves replace grass. Big Cypress is all swamp, freshwater swamp populated primarily by cypresses. It breeds insects and minnows, and things that feed on them, in droves. So you get lots of wading birds, lots of small fly-catching birds, and things that feed on them; alligators, hawks, vultures.

We saw so many lovely, amazing things on the trip. I took lots of photos, and you can see them here. There's a preview below. Mostly, the photos are of big birds, which tend to stand still for longer. We also saw plenty small birds that we had no hope of identifying, and innumerable dragonflies.

It's funny how some things quickly become quotidian. There are so many ibis on the University campus, for example, that I barely glance at them, and by the end of this trip, we had stopped being impressed by anhingas. But I don't think I'll ever stop being excited by hawks, or by alligators. And last night, I saw a raccoon in my back garden. They might be pests, but even pests are exciting when they're novel.

Educational economics

It would be nice to think that, once I've finished with this doctorate, I'll be able to return to the UK and find an academic post. But the job market in philosophy is a small pond with many fish chasing not much food, and the situation doesn't look much like it'll have improved by the time I'm a fully-qualified fish. Two months of hints culminated in the recent announcement by the Higher Education Funding Council for England that the budget for universities would be cut by 5% next year, in addition to large 'efficiency' savings already demanded, with no guarantee that subsequent years won't see further cuts.

Risibly, the business secretary "expect[s] universities to make these [cuts] in a way that minimises the impact on teaching and students". Pace Peter, many universities are already planning redundancies among academic staff and alterations in the ratio of permanent professors to short-term teachers. Indeed, some are already implementing these plans. KCL's decision to lay off two members of their philosophy faculty and forcibly retire a third, as part of a "restructuring" of their humanities division, has provoked great outcry. I imagine that such moves will soon be so commonplace that nobody will muster the energy to complain. That comfortable Chair, which was already something of a pipe dream, is disappearing over the horizon of possibilities as fast as an abstract object can.

(Two digressive comments. First, I've no idea about the situation in Scotland or Wales. Perhaps the SCRs there will still be fully furnished. Second, that the business secretary is in charge of universities speaks volumes about the Government's attitude to higher education.)

Some of the moves mooted will make the model of higher education provision in England more similar to that of the US; for example, relying on adjuncts and postgraduates to do a large proportion of undergraduate teaching, greater specialisation of institutions, and Mandelson's proposal of two-year degrees. Given the continued pressure from the Russell Group of "top" institutions for more leeway to charge higher fees, and the increasingly assertive attempts by the University of Bristol to persuade me into giving them lots of money, it seems that many in university governance see the economic model prevalent in the US as the future for the UK as well. So it's worth looking in more detail at what that model is, and how it works.

Before I moved here, I thought that all American universities were private institutions. It turns out that this is not the case. About half of the 3000 or so accredited universities are public, and their finances work much the same as in the UK. That is, a large proportion of their income (about 40%) comes directly from their home-state governments, and much of the rest is made up by tuition fees. Fees vary widely, and it costs far more to go to a public institution outside your home state than it does to stay (relatively) local. But as a rough generalisation, private universities charge around twice as much on average as public ones. The public universities accept some constraints on their freedom to set fees, and on other aspects of economic and institutional governance, in exchange for the regular supply of state money.

Now, the mess in the UK has been caused by, or at least is being blamed on, the pervasive economic malaise that's settled upon the Western world. The US being as much part of that world as the UK, it's not surprising that public universities here are facing much the same grim financial prospects. Florida State University, one of the better public ones, has had about 20% of its budget cut, on top of large reductions in previous years. The best state institution in the country, the University of California at Berkeley, is facing similar cuts, which have prompted massive protests among the students and faculty (if you like the look of that article, let me know and I'll send you the full thing).

One proposal to sort out Berkeley's problems -- also mooted for other stricken public institutions -- is privatisation. Take the school out of the state's hands, raise fees, compete more aggressively for private grant money. There's a precedent and procedure for this process in the US. Obviously, there's not in the UK, but lack of precedent doesn't preclude possibility. I wouldn't be surprised to see it at least suggested soon. So the question is, how would privatisation help struggling public institutions, if it would at all?

Most obviously, since private institutions don't depend on state funding, they've not been as badly hit by the general financial chaos and concomitant cuts in public spending. That's not to say they've escaped. A lot of the income of some private institutions is from the return on invested capital, that capital being made up of the endowments that they're so keen to wring out of alumni. As much of the recent trouble was caused by (or caused) bad investments, some of the American universities have suffered according to the wisdom of their investing. Harvard lost over $10 billion in a year (reducing its endowment to a mere $27 billion). Yale recorded a 30% shrinkage from 2008 to 2009. So the income from the investment of those endowments has of course been reduced.

Not all private universities have been quite so embarrassed, however. More cautious investing has preserved some endowments, and some places were not so reliant on endowment income anyway. The remarkably chatty president of the University of Miami has delivered a stream of emails to all staff and students over the last few years, assuring us that (despite various cost-cutting measures) we are on a reasonable financial footing, having never been dependent on investments for revenue.

It was one of these emails that prompted me to investigate where the money does in fact come from. The University of Miami is a private university whose environs exude an air of monied comfort (if not opulence) that's quite different from the shabbier surroundings typical in the UK. When you compare income relative to student numbers, this air isn't surprising. My last British ivory tower, the University of Sheffield, had 19 000 or so full-time students (UG and PG) in 2008/9, and its income for that year worked out at about $33 500 for each of those. The University of Miami has just over 14 000 full-time students, and its income in 2009 worked out at $128 000 for each. Yes, really. Nearly four times as much.

So, again, where does the money come from -- especially given that about 32% of Sheffield's income was from the state, and none of Miami's was? Before I looked, I thought that the answer was: tuition fees. Students here pays around $35 000 a year for their education. But, it turns out, this isn't the answer at all. It's true that Miami's income from tuition fees approaches Sheffield's income from the state and from fees combined ($369.5m against $386m). But tuition accounts for just 18% of Miami's income; it's 27% of Sheffield's. The big earner for Miami, generating 48% of the university's income, is money paid by or on behalf of patients being treated at the three hospitals it runs. The university made $996m last year from "patient care".

However, much of this goes straight back into the operating costs of those hospitals; "patient care" accounted for $982m of expenditure.That's still a healthy $14m profit; easily enough to run a couple of Arts or Humanities departments. Sheffield spent about that much last year paying off people who took up their voluntary severance scheme. But even if you eliminate the hospital income stream, the average Miami student would still have nearly twice as much money behind them as their counterpart in Sheffield. As I said, the difference is not down to tuition fees; the difference in income of that sort just covers what Miami doesn't get from the state. Nor is the real difference the endowment income; though Miami's is much larger, it's only 6% of income (1% of Sheffield's). Leaving out the hospitals, the big difference is the amount the two institutions attract in (mostly private) grants and contracts. Miami attracts about three times as much investment of this sort.

How come? I can only speculate, but I've had enough of numbers and stuff, so here I go. Two possible reasons are firstly, that Miami can take whatever contracts it likes, and secondly, the university has a more diverse base of expertise and facilities than Sheffield. I would guess that much of the contract income is to do with the hospitals, the school of marine science, the atmospheric research centre, that kind of thing. Sheffield doesn't have the same sort of rare specialities. Every university has engineering departments, physics departments, and so on; what's needed is some particular, potentially lucrative research strength that's not available easily elsewhere.

This seems to suggest that the prospects for places like Sheffield competing with the likes of Miami for such contracts are quite grim, in the short term. Again, I'm speculating, but I'd guess that a lot of the contracts and grants and so on are awarded to pre-existing research departments. That is, one needs to spend the money to build the facilities and recruit the faculty before one can attract more money from outside. But, in the longer term, it's not impossible. It would, however, require concentration on one or two likely candidates among research projects, and brutal axing of other departments that are less likely to generate money.

So bad news for philosophy? Well, not at all. Under the American private system, arts and humanities departments are very much secure, provided that they can keep their recruitment numbers up. This is because they're very cheap to run; you need faculty, a few extra teaching staff, a pot for conferences and so on, and some office space and classrooms. That's it. No expensive particle accelerators, weather balloons, boats, supercomputers, and so on. So the bulk of the fees that their students pay can go towards subsiding other, more costly departments. Here's an example: the vast majority of first-year undergraduate teaching in the philosophy department is done by teaching assistants (TAs) like me. The fees paid by one student in my class fall just short of covering the annual stipend of two teaching assistants. So the fees paid by my class of 25 students can cover the cost of paying all the 25 or so TAs in the philosophy department, and also most of the cost of paying the TAs in another similar-sized department. Thus, arts and humanities departments -- at least, popular ones -- are quite likely to survive radical moves to a nakedly commercial economic model, because if tuition fees can be set at any level by the university, it's easy to make such departments profitable.

None of this is meant to suggest that I think it would be a good idea for British universities to become more like American ones. Privatisation of any sort raises my ideological hackles. What I do mean to suggest, though, is that it's quite possible that it'll happen, and that the possibility shouldn't necessarily lead philosophy departments (and people who might want jobs in philosophy departments sometime soon-ish) to fear for their future. Unless philosophy stops seeming sexy to seventeen-year-olds, and what are the chances of that?

As frosty as it gets.

When I got back to Miami, a week and a bit ago, it was cold. And not cold in a typical South Florida oh-low-teens-break-out-the-woollens way; cold in a near-freezing, good-grief-why-did-I-come-back-here way. It was the coldest cold snap here in 30-odd years, and a big enough event to still be the talking point a week later in my regular focus group of retired white women (it turns out that botanical gardens tend to draw their volunteers from a quite well-defined social group).

The funniest thing about genuine cold here is how utterly unprepared for it everything is. The mercury heading towards 0 (or 32, as it is here) triggers crisis and panic in the same way that an inch of snow brings the South of England to a grinding halt. Many buildings have absolutely no heating. Air con, of course, but no heating. The philosophy department was as cold as the air outside; people were wearing three jumpers and a coat at their desks. Since nobody has the right clothes, Michelin-man outfits become briefly the hot style -- layer upon layer of whatever can be fitted on top of what's underneath.

People get by, anyway, but the plants and animals don't so well. The nursery at Fairchild has lost a lot of plants. My back garden was littered with lizards that had frozen to death. And there are many stories involving iguanas hibernating in trees and falling out on to people's heads, or trying to take refuge in heated pools and getting sick from chlorine.

A week later, and things are back to normal. Today, it got up to 27 degrees C. The lizards still left are basking and scurrying, and the iguanas are as active as they ever are. Two days ago, I saw a group of manatees in the river on the way back from school. I was so excited I nearly fell off my bike and into the river myself. They look far more graceful and natural in the flabby flesh than they ever do in photos; movement suits them.

So far as my work goes, things change this semester. No more coursework and essays. Instead, I'm reading for a qualifying exam that will determine whether I get to go on and write a thesis. The exam is in early May, and I have a reading list that works out at two books a week till then. Big, dense works of philosophy. I'm not panicking yet, but give me time.

Finally, apologies for the long hiatus between posts. I had somehow got the idea that nobody much was reading this any more, but over Christmas, several people -- some of whom aren't even related to me -- asked me what had happened to the thing. So, back once again, and hopefully more assiduous about it this semester. If I don't drown in reading.

In gardens where we feel secure

You'd think that growing stuff in Florida would be easy. We're blessed with year-round sunshine and warmth; no need to worry about chills, frost, and the rest. Even on the Winter Solstice, we get over 10 hours of daylight. There's far fewer pests than you might expect, including a glorious absence of slugs. All you should need to do is plant your seeds, and watch them shoot up.

In reality, though, the conditions in Florida can be baffling for anyone used to gardening in more temperate climates. The heavy rains and heat of the summer batter seedlings senseless and scorch better-developed plants. The winter's main problem is that daylight figure. Though, of course, 10 hours is a lot for December, it's not enough. The sorts of plants that are suitable for the winter weather are generally those which also need long, summer-like days before they're persuaded to fruit or flower. One ends up with plants that grow quite steadily, but refuse to produce, and eventually settle at some stage of development, awaiting a longer day that never comes (the Summer Solstice enjoys about 12.5 hours of daylight; there's not much variation in day length this close to the Equator).

To get round that last problem, you need careful selection of short-day varieties. The problem, it seems, is that there are very few edible plants native to Florida. The whole state's ecosystem, in fact, is curious, in that the enormous biodiversity of plant and animal one would expect is simply absent. The few native plants that there are do very well; the thick creeping vines in my garden have put on at least eight feet of growth in the past month. But most things grown by people are transplants, imports, exotics, which may or may not be well-adapted to the climate. In large part, it's a guessing game and a gamble.

All of the above might have been enough to stymie my efforts at growing vegetables last year. The main factor, however, was the gang of feral-ish cats who, with my housemates' imprimatur, hang around our back garden. I was growing in containers (why are landlords always so prissy about having lawns replaced with potatoes?) and the cats took great pleasure in sitting and sleeping in them, smothering all the poor seedlings. The net results of my efforts were a few wildflowers, a broccoli plant in one of those states of arrested development, and enough lettuce leaves for a supermodel's salad.

I am not yet discouraged, and have just bought some new seeds to plant, along with some cat deterrent stuff. Wish me luck. In the meantime, the garden comes with enough cat-proof produce to keep me mildly happy. The mango tree is, so I hear, hugely productive. Unfortunately, fruiting season is June and July, so when I left for the summer in May, it was heaving with unripe fruit, and when I returned in August, the tree was bare. My housemate who stayed over the break attests to a month in which he ate two mangoes a day and gave plenty away too. More happily, the avocado tree has in the last month given us several fruit. This might not sound like much, but these are Florida avocados. They're distinguished from more common cultiavars by their smooth, light green skin, their slightly less oily flesh, and most of all, their outrageous size (see picture -- that's my hand). One of these, suitably prepared and accompanied, is a meal for two.

The other thing that grows in the garden is a minor cause for consternation. Growing above the decking outside the back door are two 25-30 ft coconut palms. In the winter, when the coconuts are ready, the landlord sends round a guy skilled in climbing palms to harvest them. That's some months off; at the moment, there's just nascent fruit. The young coconuts are green, hard, and woody, about the size of a squash ball. And they have an alarming tendency to decide that they can't be bothered with this growing business, and instead hurl themselves off the tree to crash loudly on the decking far below. It surely can't be long before one of us is hit hard. Or maybe until one of the cats is hit. Now that wouldn't be so bad at all.

The last time England regained the Ashes, four years ago, I watched the final day's play in the living room of the house in Sheffield I'd moved into the day before. New to the city, I knew nobody with whom I could share the occasion, jubilant texts to friends elsewhere substituting for in-person celebration. This time, I listened to the last two sessions in the house in Miami I've inhabited for the last year (less three months of summer), again devoid of company, again with digital communication compensating. Four years ago, the particular was new, but the general familiar; a new house and an unfamiliar city, but a city whose character was of the same stock as every other English town, pace that mythical South Yorkshire exceptionalism. This year, it's somehow the opposite. The particular - the house, the city - are familiar, but the general seems as strange as ever.

It takes me perhaps a day of being back in the UK to feel comfortable. Here, I reckon on a fortnight, particularly after the long summer holiday, before I feel settled. Just like when I return to Durham, I can note the changes in my immediate environment: the creepers that have grown 10 feet over the summer to swaddle the hammock, the avocado tree now laden heavy with coconut-sized fruit, the spiny-backed orb weavers (below) whose summer webs crisscross the garden. But the sense of secure belonging in the wider context that I enjoy back home is unsurprisingly absent here.


Having been here before, though, some things are easier than they used to be. A couple of emails, and I was set up for a game of football three days after I arrived. A typical Miami experience, this. I cycled for 10 miles through a heavy thunderstorm, eschewing the road for the pavement owing to the four inches of standing water flooding the inside lane. The storm cleared as I got to the pitches, leaving a clear and sunny day, but somehow not assuaging the humidity. The moisture that beads on your palm if you clench your fist might have been wrung from the air rather than formed from your sweat, so thick is the air. 90 minutes later, and another 1o miles cycling home, my teammates expressing bewilderment at my readiness to go such a distance under my own steam. Night fell fast as I went; no drawn-out dusks this close to the equator, and no let-up in the heat either, the nights barely four degrees cooler and still cloying.

Term starts again on Wednesday, my final semester of coursework. The days before it does have been and will be filled with administration and preparation. Renewing my ID card, servicing my bike, writing my syllabus, catching up with friends, readjusting to a life both mine and not mine. The summer, fun as it was, has gone, and isn't a fair comparison to life here anyway; I can only enjoy those three months as I do because I come back here to do this. Give me a week or so, and I'll be enjoying this too again. For now, though, it's mostly feeling like duty.

WMC

I know that I said that the next post was going to be about economics, and that one's still in the works, but I'm sure you'd rather hear about some fun things instead. Last year, I entirely ignored the Winter Music Conference. Three good reasons. Firstly, the music at the huge majority of the events is boring house and its cousins. Secondly, this being Miami, and this conference drawing a crowd of people either a) on expenses or b) too rich to afford common sense, the huge majority of events take place at the kind of venue that charge you $30 to get in, $100 if you want to get in fast and not queue, and $10 for anything liquid.

Now, both these obstacles to having WMC fun are surmountable. With some careful scanning of the official event list (check how long it is!), and some blog trawling for off-list events, you can string together a whole week's worth of free fun. The third obstacle was the killer last year: nobody to go with. My friends here are a lovely bunch, but unfortunately, absolutely uninterested in any (modern) music that doesn't involve guitars. And going clubbing on your own is not just lonely, but very awkward in a city where the events take place miles apart, and the public transport system mostly turns into pumpkins past midnight.

This year, though, things were looking up. I'd recruited a dancing-buddy, best described as rave-curious rather than fully out of the clubbing closet, and made some judicious selections from the various events. Quality, not quantity. I could have been out every night of the week, but Spring Break was the week before (shame), and the demands of school preclude seven nights of parties. This was also slated as my last weekend of two-day guilt-free enjoyment before the end of the semester as the deadlines pile up. What a way to do it.

First up, Thursday night, a Bersa Discos/Tormenta Tropicale showcase. It was in the bar of a super-posh SoBe hotel spa, and it was really, really badly attended. There were perhaps four people there specifically for the thing, and a few others drifting through. Plenty of reasons for why, but gutting for the guys putting it on all the same. Still, great tunes, nice warm-up for the weekend. I had a good chat with one of the Bersa boys (Disco Shawn), and in the end, we (I say we, I made the offer but I was just another passenger) gave him and his GF a ride back to their hotel. Saved them a load of cab fare, secured a guest list at TT if I ever make it to SF/LA at the right time. Seriously nice, straightforward guy, and they were doing a proper WMC-style party the next night, so hopefully they got the crowd and the pay they deserved. (By the way, if you don't know much about the cumbia stuff that Bersa do, this mix is as good a place to start as any).

Saturday night: the big one. Three top-notch labels/crews — Mad Decent, Turntablelab, Iheartcomix/Trouble and Bass — come together to put on a party in a downtown gallery. The event's off the main list, strictly for the cognoscenti, and the flyer (see below) promises free entry and drinks all night. The RSVP thing turned out to be a kinda joke: I'm guessing it was a legal dodge. "But officer, this is a private party, all these guests have RSVPed, and we're not selling any booze, so kindly go and arrest some criminals or something". The venue was a gallery, all right, but a gallery with a massive warehouse-like space attached, and a large outdoor patch of concrete as a chill-out area. The free drinks were for real, and there was a constant long queue for them, meaning the grinning guy across the road in the convenience store made a killing by staying open all night and selling beer and water to the impatient.

And yeah, it was a proper good party. Wild, bouncing, unpretentious crowd, killer tunes, sweat dripping off the walls (party in Spring in Miami in non-AC'd building = outrageous perspiration). Slightly dodgy soundsystem, occasional power outages, all a bit reminiscent of good old Matilda. We got there a bit before 12 and I don't know who was on, but it didn't sound too promising; the first thing I heard them drop was, err, Faithless' 'Insomnia' — straight up, no remix. Gulp. But anyway, whoever got off, and then Trouble and Bass came on. Oh me. If you don't know their stuff, check out some of the mixes on their blog. Big bassy tunes and drops and constant ear-banging breaks. Naturally, like every other hetero-bass-boy, I now have a medium-size crush on Star Eyes.

After that: Sega: OK, but not really feeling the whole metal mashup thing. I sort of see it, but you know, don't. Next up: Rusko: dubstep. Great for a bit, went on too long. It's 3am and I want to jump, not skank. But good all the same. Boy looks like a pikey.

Then the main event: Diplo. Oh, the man knows how to rock a party. Tunes and mashups and Baltimore and bass and baile, new stuff, old stuff, that horn riff recurring... and guess who he brought along as his MC and hype man? Lil' John. Yeah, I guess, why not? They're apparently working on tunes in the studio, so it makes sense. And whatever you think of the man's own records, he complemented the sound perfectly, hitting you with all those lines that only make sense in a club with a crowd who want them to make sense.

We left towards the end of Diplo's set -- it was 4:30am, getting to be more about endurance than enjoyment, and a half-hour walk across town was between us and transport to our beds. And apparently the guy on after him got his set cut short because things were shut down early by some of those law enforcement officials who think their job description includes the strict regulation of fun. So a well-timed exit. But all in all, ahhhh, so much fun. The kind of party where, if you happen to see someone you saw there somewhere else a while later — the supermarket, the street — and they clock you too, you exchange a sly smile and go on your way, because nothing more need be said.

Worst Form Ever

This post is something between a rant and a whine, and as self-indulgent as that sounds. Do excuse me, but I've been driven to this by the Student Loans Company. Reproduced below is the most confusing, ambiguous, ill-thought-out form I have ever had the misfortune to be asked to fill in. Don't worry if you can't make out the details (if you wanted to); I'm going to reproduce the salient points in the text.

There are bad signs from the start. The request in the first block of text to enter any "amends" of name and address on the next page doesn't speak well of the English of whoever wrote this. Nor does it say much for the SLC's efficiency that it requires three separate unique identifying codes to know who I am.

But let's pass over these minor quibbles and get to the real problems. The form, as it says at the top, is one that I should fill in if I'm overseas. The second block of text says that the purpose of the form is to establish my "employment status and potential earnings over the next 12 months". With these two things in mind, consider these requests for information:

"Please give the date you left (or will leave) the UK".
"Please give the date you will resume (or resumed) UK residency".

These are very odd questions. Firstly, If I'm filling out this form, I'm overseas. So the date I will leave the UK and the date I resumed UK residency aren't relevant bits of information. If either of those are dates I can give, I'm not overseas. Secondly, if the purpose is to determine my potential earnings over the next twelve months, the date I left (and the date I returned) is surely irrelevant. Thirdly, unless I'm going to resume UK residency within the next 12 months, the date I resume it is again irrelevant. So all the information requested is irrelevant to the stated purpose of the form.

Next, I'm asked to "tick the relevant box in section A or B" to indicate my current employment status. Section A contains various sorts of employment; Section B lists things you might be doing other than working. The obvious problem is that I am both employed (A) and pursuing further study (B). So to be accurate, I need to tick a box in both sections. Not a huge issue, maybe, but it suggests that the SLC just doesn't know its clientele. Almost every UK graduate studying in the US will be in a similar position to me.

Finally, and the last straw, is section C. Here, I'm asked to give my "Total Income". Just that. What the hell do they want to know? There are (at least) four plausible options:

i) Annual income over previous year;
ii) Predicted annual income over next year;
iii) Total earnings over stay abroad so far;
iv) Predicted total income over whole stay abroad.

Additionally, for each of those options, there are two sub-options. Is the figure meant to be gross or net of local taxes? So we have eight alternatives. Absolutely no indication is given as to which I'm supposed to provide, and I can hardly work it out from the rest of the form, given how confused that is.

I'm so tempted to send the form back uncompleted, with a letter outlining all these points as an explanation for my failure to fill it in. But, since the SLC is doing its best to get militant with me, I suppose I'll make a guess at what they're after and see what happens. Really, though. What a sorry piece of bureaucratic rubbish.

Rant over. Don't get too excited, though, the next post I have planned is about economics...

Some pictures of some birds

Winter lasted longer than usual in Miami this year, but the weather broke last week, and it's back to sunshine and shorts. So Saturday morning found me in the hammock, in the garden, doing some reading. An odd tapping noise was distracting me slightly. Sounded like a woodpecker. Turns out it was two woodpeckers.Our garden's not much of a bird haven. Too many cats. We get a few blue jays, which are unremarkable; they look sort of like fat blue tits. Flocks of macaws fly overhead now and again. Sometimes, they all settle in a tree and do some screeching. Same in my last house, where this one was taken.
The macaws and the jays are quite common here. The other two species that you see regularly are ibises and turkey vultures. The ibises strut around everywhere. The mascot of the University of Miami is an ibis.
The vultures are normally way up in the thermals. You sometimes see them on the ground squabbling over roadkill, and you realise that they're very big birds indeed. The first football league I played in here was held on some pitches in the middle of a golf course, so there was lots of open space, and the vultures flew lower, circling above the playing area. There's something disconcerting about running yourself into the ground in 30 degree heat, feeling like you might die quite soon, with scavengers floating about above you ready to descend when you drop.

In other wildlife news, manatees have been spotted on campus. I'm on the lookout for them, and also for a good alligator photo; I never have a camera when I see one. Watch this space.

Stuporbowl

I have a Facebook 'friend' who seems, in the eight years or so since I last saw him, to have developed a predilection for American football. I know this because it's one of the three themes of his semi-literate status updates. The other two are stories of his child (who may well be charming), and manifestations of his taste in music (which is apparently execrable).

I imagine he, like me, watched the Superbowl last night. But he probably didn't watch it with about 150 other people in his landlord's back garden. Our landlord lives just down the street from us, and has apparently being putting on an annual Superbowl extravaganza for 20 years or so. He'd hired a massive flatscreen telly, got a load of seating, laid on a quite ample amount of food and beer, and invited over about everyone he could think of, it seemed. At half time, there was some prize-giving ceremony that I could make neither head nor tail of, and a massive firework display in the middle of the street.

So, yeah, people make a real fuss over this (can you imagine a similar event in the UK for the FA cup final?). The actual game seems almost incidental, which is handy, because there's not much actual game to go on. This was the first time I'd watched a full match, and what's crazy is how long the thing lasts relative to the amount of time they actually play. A game lasts for four 15-minute quarters, but because of the amount of stoppages, length of halftime, and so on, that hour stretches to something like three. And all of the breaks in play are filled with advertisements. Not just a quick one, either, but usually a full break's worth of three or four. This means that it can be quite hard to follow the progress of the game, since by the time it restarts, you can hardly remember what was going on before. I can usually watch pretty much any sport on telly and get interested (though not to the extent of an ex-roommate who could get properly involved with absolutely anything; I balk at golf), but the lack of continuity makes it hard.

Luckily, despite barely watching any, I do somehow know at least roughly the rules of the game. I think this is some long-buried memory from the time in the 80s or early 90s when there was a brief attempt to make the game popular in the UK. I remember buying a book on American football at a Blue Peter bring-and-buy sale across the road, so perhaps that's where my familiarity stems from. Incidentally, at that time, the best team in the US were the Miami Dolphins, which I think explains why most people in the UK can still remember their name despite the fact that since then, they've apparently been consistently awful.

So I could follow the game without peppering whoever was standing next to me with annoying questions, and from what I could tell, it was a pretty good one. Back and forth, and a last-minute winner. I don't think I'm going to be making a habit of watching American football - though I really ought to go to a game some time - but it was quite a fun experience, all in all. If only I could find a 150-strong crowd of people with whom I could watch the forthcoming West Indies-England Test series. Unfortunately, I think I'll struggle to find one person who cares. Sigh.

A few connected thoughts.

Following comment and criticism from both my regular readers, I've resolved to be less concerned with writing long-ish, careful pieces here, and more directed towards actually updating the thing regularly, even if it seems a little slapdash See how long that lasts.

Anyway, having spent the holiday in the UK, I'm now back in Miami, having added another couple of transatlantic flights to my list of climate crimes. Airports and aeroplanes have a strange effect on me. Everything seems to become disconnected in my head, more immediate and visceral. I'm not sure why. Something, perhaps, to do with the peculiar stasis of transit; hours (many of them) sat still, uncommunicative and unreachable, headphones jammed in to drown out the other people. So here, in no particular order, are some vaguely connected thoughts that occurred to me on my way back here last Tuesday.

Regarding the men's toilets at the departure gates at Heathrow: how deludedly optimistic would one have to be to buy condoms immediately before flying?

On the subject of the third runway: it's not the fact that they've decided to build the wretched thing that makes me angry. Well, it does, but what really makes me angry is that it's been obvious ever since the idea was first mooted that this was going to be the outcome. How long ago was that? Three years, four? Since when, we've had inquiries, consultations, coy statements from ministers about how no final decision had been reached, all this verbiage and money and time wasted in an attempt to... to what? To convince the population at large that this wasn't a foregone conclusion? It depresses me that they think anyone was convinced by it all. Why not just do it? Same with everything else: privatising the post office, building new nuclear plants, and so on. Give up on the sham 'listening' or whatever, save us all the bother, and just do what's going to be done in the end anyway.

In-flight entertainment: the last Woody Allen film ("Vicky Cristina Barcelona") might be a wonderful piece of cinema, considered as a whole, but the first half hour is so execrable that I had to stop watching it, so I couldn't tell you. Linked to the comments above about the experience of flying, it seems that my reactions to films are sharpened considerably. I'm either utterly engrossed, or totally turned off. Examples: "I'm Not There", on the way back here this time, had me wishing fiercely that I could be any of the pseudo-Dylans featured, in a way that I've not reacted to a film character since I was young and impressionable. "Juno", a couple of flights ago, I couldn't stomach, though I'd digested it quite happily the first time round in the cinema. And so on.

Terminal 5: is wonderful. Seriously, both arriving and departing are smooth, quick, and easy. Compared to the horrible Miami International, where the weary traveller is greeted by an hour-long queue for passport control and then spat out into a chaotic underground mess of moving vehicles, Heathrow is just lovely.

I think that's enough of that. New rambling tone established. As I said, I'll try to be more regular about all this... Until I get bored. Or you do.

Fat bottomed girls

As those of you unfortunate enough to be familiar with Queen's work will have realised from the title, this is a companion to the post I wrote a while ago that maybe should have been called "I want to ride my bicycle". I forwarded that to a couple of bike-trainer type people I know, both of whom chastised me gently for my pusillanimous habit of riding on the pavement. Well, hopefully they will be glad to know that these days, I play in the traffic.

I'm cycling more this year. The route in to uni is a lot more agreeable. I'm closer by two miles or so, but more importantly, it's easy to get onto a cycle path. Previously, I had to go half a mile along a six-lane road, then negotiate a maze round a shopping mall, then dodge round some back streets, before finally joining the metropath (a cycle path that follows roughly along the North-South route of the Metrorail). From my house now, though, I have a quick 100 yards or so along a similar road, before I can cross it and join the same metropath. From there, it's a straight 2.5 mile blast to university. The path, admittedly, is far from ideal. The surface is awful in places, it includes chicanes for no apparent reason, and the junctions with roads are all set up for the convenience of motor traffic, meaning frustrating detours. But compared to last year, it's a great ride, the main risk being that one forgets to take it easy, starts imagining oneself as being in the final stages of a Tour de France stage, and arrives at university looking far from elegant; it's impossible to cycle at any speed here without becoming drenched in sweat.

My main ride of the week, though, is to Fairchild. Like last year, I have no other way to get there, public transport to the garden being pretty much non-existent. Unlike last year, it's now almost 7 miles from where I live. The way I take is, in many ways, lovely. I go through Coconut Grove, a pleasant shopping-type area, join the oddly-named Main Highway (nothing Main about it, not much of a Highway), and from there, go along Ingram Highway and Old Cutler Road. All three roads are tunnel-like, arched over with massive tropical trees, and since they're slightly away from the main urban parts of the city, great for wildlife. I regularly see iguanas, snakes, crabs, sometimes turtles. There's two enormous orange iguanas that I see every week, and one day, I'll remember to take a camera and photograph them (in the meantime, there's a picture at the end of this of a dragonfly in my back garden).

However, both Main and Ingram highways have no cycle lanes, no pavements, nothing. Old Cutler Road does have a cycle path of sorts, but it's far worse than the metropath, a humpbacked, bumpy ride over tree roots and through patches of sand and gravel, more like an offroad track than anything else. But the only alternative routes would add a mile or more to my journey, so I brave it. And it did feel brave, the first couple of times. All the roads are narrow - one lane each way - and the traffic is, of course, made up of impatient drivers, mainly of SUVs, 4x4s, hummers, pickups, and the like.

After a while, though, it turns out that the cycle-trainers were right. You get confident, quickly. These days, I'm a badass aggressive biker. If someone in a hurry is behind me, itching to overtake, frustrated by traffic coming the other way, I don't care. I don't huddle myself as close to the edge of the road as possible; I move further towards the centre and make it clear that he is not getting past me until the other lane is clear. I ride with earphones in, at low enough volume that I can hear traffic noise, but I was loath to do that initially. I've even adopted the unspoken rules of Florida driving, along with the codified ones. Amber lights, here, do not mean "slow down and stop".

All this road cycling is seen as somewhat silly by some of my peers. Several cycle, but all are terrified of the roads, and admittedly with some reason. Cyclists do die here, not too infrequently. But most of these accidents happen at night, or on very busy roads, and I feel perfectly safe on the ones I use. The only thing is, the increase in the miles I'm covering on my bike is leading to expensive thoughts. The problems with what I'm riding now are twofold. Firstly, it's too small for me. I didn't really care when I got it, given that it only cost $35, but now that I'm riding it more, it's beginning to grate. Secondly, it's inappropriate for the cycling I'm doing. It has a heavy mountain bike frame and 15 gears; I ride almost entirely on concrete or tarmac, and occasionally, if I'm feeling lazy, I change down from the highest gear to get up the landscaped hump on the uni campus, the only incline I ever encounter. And so, thoughts turn to a nice, lightweight, road bike frame, properly sized to own my gangly, lightweight frame... another item on the ever-growing list of stuff to buy. Sigh.

Anyway, as promised, here is a dragonfly in my back garden.

And here is a plug: There is a great show on, of all things, Aberdeen student radio that you should listen to. It's on Tuesday, 9-10pm. But more excitingly, you can download MPfrees of the thing here, and grab a tracklisting, and listen when you want. What are you waiting for? Show the man some love...

God was in the building

Last Friday, Barack Obama held a "women's rally for the change we need" at the University of Miami. Despite being neither a woman nor an American voter, I managed to secure a ticket, by virtue of responding to am email quickly. Can you imagine 8000 tickets, even free ones, to go and hear any British politician speak being snapped up in a few hours by the student body at any UK institution? That's what happens here, and several people I know who were far more clearly within the target audience than me missed out.

So with their imprecations in mind, I refused to be daunted when I arrived at the venue, 15 minutes before the doors opened, to find a queue snaking along several roads. I had completely failed to meet the two friends I was supposed to meeting, but luckily, ran into another couple in the queue. Luckily, because once we'd got past the airport-style security, we found we had a while to wait until the main event. Without someone else to trade cynical comments with, I'd have been forced to listen to the warm up acts attentively.

We were seated by about 10:15am. The man himself was due on at 11:45 (though in true rock star style, he was late on stage). In the meantime, we were treated to a selection of local dignitaries, legislators, and the like - all women - indulging in an array of McCain-mashing, Barack-bigging, and rabble-rousing. It looked like all my preconceptions about American politics were going to be confirmed. The speeches were punctuated by rapturous applause, chants, and cheers. The name 'McCain' was greeted in the style of a pantomime villain. We were asked, amongst other things, to join in prayer for something or other, stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and shout slogans in unison. In between speakers, we were treated to a soundtrack of U2 and Stevie Wonder. It was loud, manic, rhetorical, and almost entirely vacuous.

Then, at last, Obama took to the platform, pausing on the way to shake hands, hugging his support acts, grinning broadly, looking energetic. He had to appeal several times for enough quiet to begin speaking, and throughout his speech, was interrupted by (and occasionally responded to) shouts of 'Barack, I love you!' and the like. It really is about personalities here, and people attach themselves strongly to their politicians. Again, can you see Cameron, Brown, or Clegg having to deal with such interjections?

Since it's about personalities, it was no surprise that the first portion of Obama's speech was based around personal anecdotes. The theme was women's issues, and each one he discussed was set up by a story about his mother, or someone he knew, or his wife, or his children. At this point, I was smugly ticking off my list of expectations. Anecdotes, vague promises, rhetoric, issues addressed in general terms... but no policy, content, or the like.

The second half, though, changed this. Obama went on to talk about actual policy, about what he might do to address the issues he was discussing. Or at least, that was the impression one got. But, thinking back, there was a curious disconnect between the two halves. Although he mentioned a fair pay act, and pledged to support Roe vs Wade (and thus abortion rights), most of the policy stuff was about the economy, the tax system, a bit about renewable energy... all quite laudable, but nothing really to do with the issues he had previously brought up. The neat trick was that it was hard to notice this, the speech flowed so smoothly.

On the other hand, I was surprised at how often he stumbled, hesitated, lost his place, and so on. This wasn't the practised orator I was expecting. He seemed far less polished, far less certain, then I imagined American politicians had to be. He was, it seemed, genuinely put off by a brief interruption from some crackpot protestors who were escorted from the building by some fearsome looking security types. You'd have thought he'd have learnt to take such things in his stride.

I don't know that I can I say my prejudices about politics here were dispelled by seeing all this. The whole thing was so much more managed, so much less about conversation and more about conversion, than any encounter I've had with British politicians (and I think they're generally awful too). But as Obama left the stage to the strains of "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours" (?!), I was somewhat reassured. The guy seems credible, intelligent, a person genuinely concerned with the right problems and somewhere in the ballpark of the right solutions. And, given how so many people here react to his campaign, it's impossible not to get caught up in it all slightly, and hope that his election may bring some significant changes for the better in both America and in the wider world.

He's going to lose, isn't he?

Start, stop, back, forth

I've been back here a month now, nearly, and it doesn't quite feel like I've begun the new school year properly yet. The past four weeks have been somewhat disjointed. The semester itself has had an odd stop-start quality; the first day was a Wednesday, then there was a bank holiday, an extra day or two off owing to (unnecessary, luckily) hurricane precautions... and more than all that, I spent a week recently in Poland at a conference. Completely ridiculous: I spent three weeks back in Miami before getting on yet another transatlantic flight, and was in Europe just long enough to conquer jet lag before returning. I did, jokingly, ask if I could extend my summer break by three weeks and cut out the big travel times, but since I'm teaching this semester, that wasn't at all possible (that's going fine, I'll write about it later in the semester).

The Poland trip was good. I wasn't particularly looking forward to the flying, but that was OK, I had a row of seats to myself on the way back which is a godsend on a 10 hour flight. Though if Air Berlin/LTU continue to run Dusseldorf-Miami flights half-empty, I suspect they may go the way of Zoom soon. I stayed a night in Berlin on the way there, and on the way back, which was lovely, just because I was staying with a friend who I had meant to visit during the summer but hadn't due to lack of time, money, and organisation. Better brief than nothing at all.

The conference took place in a tiny town called Kazimierz Dolny, on the banks of the Vistula, near Lublin, about a two hour drive south-east of Warsaw. I got there by first, a train from Berlin to Warsaw (six hours, unremarkable) and then a bus laid on by the conference organisers to save us a struggle with Polish public transport. It would have been a struggle, too, because Kazimierz is not on the beaten track. It's a popular weekend destination for Poles, but not at all on the international tourist radar.

Perhaps it should be, because it's rather charming. It's about the size of Ambleside, but considerably prettier architecturally, and with a rich local history encompassing plagues, ghost stories, tales of the old Polish kings, and of course the horrific recent past, from the Holocaust to the Communist era. The town dates from the 15th century, and became rich during the 16th owing to its position as the most convenient place for grain from the fertile soils in and near the Ukraine to be loaded onto barges and sent to Warsaw or Krakow. It's renowned as a destination for artists, and surrounded by ten km of canyons packed into a single square km.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much chance to explore them, because (despite what some have suggested) this was not a holiday. The conference was intensive; most of the above was gleaned during the single free session programmed, during which we were treated to a guided tour by a woman with the most fearsome painted eyebrows I've ever seen. The rest was solid philosophy, 8:30am to 6pm, and since it was a small event, a workshop rather than a conference, the option of sneaking off for an hour or two wasn't really available. Still, all the work was rewarding, and we did get a chance to eat plenty of Polish food. Hearty, I think, is the best word.

Anyway, I've been back here since Thursday, and after a dull weekend catching up on my reading and going to bed at 10pm (jet lag again), I'm now ready to engage with the new year properly. Main aims: expand my social circle and range of activities, and find something insightful to say about the elections. I'll let you know how I get on.

Our house, and all the other obvious ones

So, back in Miami for the new year, and a lot of things are just as startling as the first time. The palm trees, the lizards, the early, sudden nightfalls; I'm being surprised by it all over again. The night I got here, I was greeted by heavy rain. Two days later, an enormous thunderstorm. I'd forgotten just how damn enormous they are.

One thing that isn't striking me so much is the temperature. Though it's undeniably hot, and humid, it feels more like a duvet than a blast furnace. I noticed whilst in the UK that I was feeling the heat less. Perhaps I'm setting myself up for a lifetime wrapped in blankets as soon as autumn rolls round.

I've moved into a new house with three others (two yet to return from summer holidays). No longer a lodger. If you want the address, email me. It's a one storey place, built in 1939, so ancient by Miami standards (the oldest building here was built in 1877). The garden is huge, with a fairly parched lawn, plenty of trees - oak, palms, mango, avocado - and a jacuzzi. Yes, really. The interior is sizable, in generally good nick, but at the moment it all still feels a little provisional. The place came unfurnished, like most houses here, and though the landlord has donated a miscellany of old furniture, there's some way to go till it feels like a home. Interesting how priorities can vary so much; one of my housemates has been here for two or three weeks now, and has sorted out all the things he needs to work from home, but has managed quite happily without a saucepan.

So I've been spending some time trying to acquire a fair range of household goods. This is harder than it sounds. I'm much better located than I was last year, closer to one of the main shopping areas of the city, but that's 'shopping' in the leisure sense. Coconut Grove is not the place to buy kitchenware or coffee tables. Annoyingly, the place I lived in last year was; it was the day-to-day stuff that was maddeningly hard to get hold of there.

Choosing what to buy involves a bit of a delicate decision making. I'm normally of the mindset that it's worth spending a bit more on things you're going to use often, like pans, to get something that's going to last. But I'm well aware that (hopefully) I'm not going to be here longer than four more years, and there's no way I'm going to be shipping stuff like that back to the UK. So I'm trying to pick out the items that will last the distance, but not much more, and save some money by doing so. Mind, there's still things that I'm sorely tempted to pay top dollar for. Kitchen knives, for example. I mean, they're portable, right? I could bring them back...

All in all, I think that once I'm settled, nested, this is going to be a great place to live. I went for a walk around the area earlier today to remind myself what was here, looking with a resident's eyes - I've only ever been here to go for a drink or to the cinema. Everything's much handier than last year; closer to the metro, to a supermarket, to bars, to interesting and useful places to shop. And of course, I'm much better set up to accommodate guests. I've spent a fair bit of the summer sleeping in various spare rooms or on sofas, and someday, I hope that I can reciprocate some of that hospitality (though you're not disqualified from visiting if I haven't graced your home with my comatose presence).

Anyway, I must go; I need to check how high the bidding's gone on a secondhand set of Globals...

'High Class' Clubbing

As I think I've intimated, and perhaps you knew anyway, Miami has a reputation for glamorous, classy clubs. South Beach is supposed to be the place where the beautiful people party, as ostentatiously as they can. Probably the best known of these is Mansion. It's a noted hangout for all kinds of celebrities, it's featured in a few rap videos, it's successfully cultivated an image to fit the South Beach cliche.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? And you can imagine the corollaries to the above; dress codes, queues, expense. Still, it would seem remiss to spend so long in Miami and never go to confirm one's prejudices. Last night, somehow, the Graduate Student Association had persuaded them to let grads in for free before midnight (instead of $20), skip the queue, and enjoy free vodka for an hour. I have no idea how they managed that. Normally, there are three ways to get into the place without queuing for a good hour: be a famous person, be a member of a group including a significant number of attractive girls, or buy yourself VIP status (more on that in a minute). None of these being realistic options for me, this was the perfect opportunity to have a look at how the other half go clubbing.

There was one associated expense that I might have wished to avoid; shoes. We weren't excused the dress code, and that includes the stern 'no sneakers'. Now, I have to admit that since I've been here I've been seduced by the cheap cost of creps, and now own rather more pairs of trainers than I ever have. But my tastes don't run to 'proper' shoes, so yesterday's essay break was a trip to the nearby Discount Shoe Warehouse to find some footwear offering the optimal compromise between cost, comfort, and not looking bloody stupid (is it just me, or are squared-off toes really ugly?). I found something suitable for $35 (discounted from some risible list price). I should be able to get enough wear out of them in five years to justify that, I think.

Anyway, suitably shod, I set out with a couple of other grads. We negotiated the chaos at the door without too much hassle, drawing envious looks from people who'd obviously being waiting a while, and crossed the hallowed threshold into an anteroom with a small bar, bathrooms, and a roped-off staircase (I don't know if there's a cloakroom. Who goes out at night with a coat in Miami?). For no apparent reason, the staircase is hung with reproductions of miscellaneous French paintings, including a portrait of Napoleon, and Delacroix's 'Liberty Leading The People'.

Things get far more ludicrous in the main room (apparently, there are other rooms, but they weren't open last night). This is a big space, the majority of which is taken up by a VIP area containing the only seating. The plebs are given standing room only, perhaps two thirds of the area of the exclusive space, at the door end of the room, with the red leather sofas between them and the distant DJ booth. To gain access to this haven of comfort, one has to commit to 'buy' a table. This means shelling out $200, at least, on a bottle of spirits for you and your friends to drink at said table. On some nights, it's two bottles. So, cattle class for my friends and me it was.

Anyway, who needs bottles of liquor when you have free vodka? Well, as it happens, I'm on the wagon for this month (no big reason, several little ones). So I wasn't taking advantage of that. In some ways, this was a shame; a free bar with a time limit but no volume limit can be perceived as a challenge. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't, because I was at no risk of being seduced into buying $10 bottles of beer or similarly priced spirits once the time was up. Free from temptation, I sipped my lemonade and gawped at the decor.

Now, of course, one man's glamorous is another's tacky, and conceivably, I'm so out of touch that what I think is ridiculous is in fact the acme of classy club decoration. But, really. Glittering chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, along with branched pairs of shaded lamps fixed at intervals on the wall. A plaster set of arches covered in fake ivy. Staircases on either side of the room leading to the super-VIP upper level. Poles, for dancing, at the corners of the couch area. The place looks it was designed by someone who had heard a bit about how grand houses in Europe are decorated, and seen a few pictures a while ago, and just threw together everything he could remember in a big mess of glittery things and mock grandeur (I wonder how far from the truth that is?).

As for the music... well, it seems that Mansion sometimes has credible DJs, playing music that, if not to my taste, is at least chosen with discernment. But last night was its standard Friday night fare, and I can only describe the style as 'provincial English disco'. There was a leaning towards poppy R&B and hip hop, some obvious soul, an interlude of rock, charty house stuff - it was like the DJ was making his selections exclusively from the last five years' worth of Now albums. The kind of thing that, if you suspend your taste for an evening, can adequately soundtrack a few hours of drinks, dances and bubbles without leaving any lasting impression. But the kind of thing played in the cheap and cheerful places that you would never pay more than a couple of quid to enter, and they better have drink specials on too.

So, the evening passed amiably enough. I got to see the jewel in the crown of Miami's nightlife without any of the usual expense, and am now satisfied that the crown is gilt and the jewel is cubic zirconia. It did make me think, though, how long it's been since I went somewhere I liked the music, for the music, and spent a happy few hours dancing. A big part of the summer plans, I hope.

Summer flight dates

Since I've got them, I might as well post them: I'm going to be back in the UK from May 14th to August 12th.

Three months, close enough. What am I going to do with all that time? Well, it depends to some extent on whether I need to get a job; I'm still optimistic that I might scrape by without (though anyone with a job offer is welcome to tell me). Otherwise, well:

I'd like to get some extra-curricular work done - revise a couple of papers, do some reading;
there's some conferences I might go to;
couple of weeks doing permaculture at Glastonbury;
John's Rye weekend;
trip to visit people in Europe - Berlin, Rotterdam, Paris, Granada;
places and people to see in UK - York, Sheffield, Bristol, London, Nottingham, Glasgow, Lake District, Reading (if I must);
and y'know, general hanging round having fun.

Anything I've missed there? Anyway, point is, filling the time shouldn't be hard at all. Nor should it be hard to fill the time till I leave here. On which note, back to the essays....

Calle Ocho

Calle Ocho means two things in Miami. First, as the literal translation suggests, it refers to SW 8th Street, or more precisely, the long stretch of the street that's regarded as the centre of Little Havana. It's where the Cuban expatriates congregated when they first arrived here, and is still the place that news organisations go when something happens in Cuba and they want some commie-bashing quotes from old men playing dominoes and drinking cafecito.

Second, Calle Ocho refers to the annual festival held on the street around the start of March (a completely arbitrary date, so far as I can tell). The event was first held in 1978, and is intended to celebrate Miami's Latino culture. It's sometimes referred to as a carnival, but the pedant in me points to the lack of parades and masquerades and sticks with 'festival'. I imagine that it was overwhelmingly Cuban originally, but these days, though Cuban flags and colours still predominate there's strong representation from every Spanish speaking country and island in the Americas (and the Portuguese speaking one, too. This pedant in me can be tiresome sometimes).

For Calle Ocho the festival, a two mile stretch of Calle Ocho the street is bookended by stages, and lined with stalls. At most intersections, another stage is placed, blocking the intersecting avenue (streets run East-West, avenues North-South). The stalls are a mixture of food places, people selling stuff, and corporations giving out freebies. The biggest queues were for the freebie stalls. People were patiently lining up and waiting probably half an hour to get some free toothpaste, or a cheaply made bag, or some other pinchbeck, branded tat. Every other person seemed to have got something or other from one of these places. I couldn't understand this eagerness to grab corporate goodie bags in the full knowledge that their contents were crap, but never mind.

The smell as you walk along the road is exclusively of meat cooking over coals or being fried; Cuban cuisine, and it seems most Latin American cuisine, is based around huge hunks of flesh, often pork, cooked simply and eaten without ceremony. The most famous Cuban dish - the high point, the zenith of their culinary culture - is the Cuban sandwich. This consists in roast pork, ham, 'Swiss' cheese, thinly sliced dill pickles, and yellow mustard, layered between two buttered slices of Cuban bread (soft, sweet, moist white stuff made with lard) and lightly toasted somewhat in the manner of a panino, but without the grooves in the grill. They're quite satisfying, in a suspicious sort of way, but hardly subtle. In truth, there are some good Cuban recipes for things to do with black beans, rice, and so on, but not many were on display at Calle Ocho, just the meat. I saw one despondent looking guy sat behind his stall, a large pile of fruit and two pristine, unused juicers on the table.

The combination of this diet and the music everywhere produced some truly horrifying spectacles. You think the freaky documentaries on C5 are bad? You've seen nothing till you've seen a 17 stone Cuban woman dropping down and shaking everything her mama gave her and all she's added since to some dutty piece of reggaeton. Seriously, seriously disturbing. The music was, of course, mostly Latin-influenced, but this ran the gamut from the aforementioned reggaeton, to flamenco, latin jazz, Spanglish hip hop, some pretty terrible latino house hybrid stuff... and several more styles that I can't distinguish descriptively. Sorry. Peculiar exception: there was no Diplo-style funk carioca or the like. Maybe it just doesn't sound right at an event running from 11am to 7pm.

The curious thing about Calle Ocho, I found, was that though it's ostensibly vibrant, it seems rather polite, lacking in edge, somehow. It's a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, but seems too well-behaved to be really fun. I also realised, as I left, that I'd seen nothing overtly political, apart from the wizened chap in the white suit and red bow tie who is always hanging round the area with his sign saying "Muerte es Fidel'. I even saw someone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, apparently unconcerned that he might get lynched. I do wonder, for all the talk of exile, how many American-Cubans would return to the island if it were to be democratised tomorrow. It seems that the political attitudes are more a kind of article of faith these days, rather than a fervently held opinion, certainly amongst the younger generations who've never even seen Cuba. As Calle Ocho demonstrates, with its massive turnout and close attention from the corporate big boys, the Latino presence in South Florida is firmly established, and these days, intrinsically American.

More photos

For those sensible people not on Facebook, I've updated my Flickr site with new(ish) photos. It's a bit messy, since they don't let me have more than three albums without paying, but you'll manage. Some more lizards, some parrots, and a lot of slightly blurry eclipse photos. This was a frustrating evening; the cloud built up at the same rate as the event, scattered at the start, a complete blanket during the total eclipse phase, and then completely clear right at the end. Anyway, some of them are quite good.

Shaw thing

I've been trying hard, in best scientific style, to not just look for confirming instances of my stereotypes and cliches regarding America. After all, it's an enormous place, and as I'm told with wearying regularity, Miami is very different from the rest. This post, though, amounts to a long endorsement of the George Bernard Shaw commonplace about the US and the UK being two nations divided by a common language.

It's easy to trot off a list of words, mostly nouns, which have different meanings on either side of the Atlantic. I cooked a meal the other day involving aubergine, courgette, and coriander; after a conversation with my housemate about what I was making, I wondered if I could have possibly made anything (palatable) with more ingredients whose name we disagreed about. But the linguistic divisions go deeper than individual words. It's a lot to do with rhetorical forms, inculcated call-and-response routines, and differences in tone.

A few examples to illustrate that obtuse little list. During a class discussion on rhetorical figures of speech recently, litotes was mentioned. The (English) lecturer and I had no difficulty
in dashing off a long list of examples - 'not so bad', 'none too shabby', 'no big deal', and so on and so on. The American students were still struggling slightly with how the trope was supposed to work. The idea of asserting something by uttering its negation just seemed completely alien to them; the rhetorical form isn't part of American speech.

By 'inculcated call-and-response' routines, I mean the kind of everyday conversation-oiling exchanges that you can spell out in advance; greetings are a good example. I've still not got used to being asked 'what's going on?' as a form of 'hello'; my mind starts scrabbling around for a literal answer, whilst an American has some non-literal, non-committal answer instantly ready that gets the conversation going. By contrast, when I, in typical English style, greet someone by saying 'Y'alright?', or similar, they often look slightly surprised... 'yeah, I'm fine, why, do I look ill or something?'.

As for differences in tone, well, I think this might be the origin of the canard about Americans not getting irony. Most do, at least in print. But they often fail to notice every instance of irony in my speech, because (it seems) they don't recognise the contexts, intonations, and sentence-forms that indicate that I'm not being serious. This isn't just to do with me; I've noticed the same thing happen with other English people, in person or on film or TV. It's as if the tone, the tenor, of English-English discourse is more allusive, less direct, more replete with extra unspoken meaning and opportunities for irony.

So what of all this? Two consequences occur to me, one personal, one more general. The personal aspect is that, without (heaven forfend) adopting an American accent or vocabulary, the tone and content of my talk is changing slightly. I've been making a more or less conscious effort to not use much slang or dialect words, since I'm tired of having to explain them; but additionally, without deliberately trying, I seem to be using more direct forms of speech, fewer distinctively English non-literal phrases, less irony and so forth. I'll have to watch that I don't become excessively bland by the time I leave.

The general consequence is rather speculative, but worth thinking about. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis says, roughly, that the thought of a population sharing a language is shaped at least partially by the nature of that language. A lot of people accept the converse, too; i.e., that the thoughts of a population are reflected in their language. So it's interesting to wonder about the American preference for direct speech, its origins (perhaps in 'plain-speaking' pilgrims?), and the way in which it may have shaped the country's self-image and behaviour. I also wonder, listening to the apparently vacuous pronouncements of the presidential candidates, if the things they say are in fact replete with meaning for an American, meaning that's lost on me as an outsider; that is, whether the words and phrases ('dreams', 'hopes', etc) just don't have the same resonance in the English mind.

I don't suppose that's the case all the time, mind. When Miami city commissioner (cf councillor) Marc Sarnoff says of the assault rifles he's trying to crack down on that they're 'designed to kill with lethal force', I'm pretty sure that he's talking thoughtless rubbish, whatever language he thinks he's speaking.

Full Cycle

Decent article from the Miami New Times here about cycling in the city (though the headline's rather lurid, and the webpage is horribly cluttered). If you get through the thing, you'll get a good idea of why Miami should be, but isn't, a great city for cycling.

I was never a cyclist in the UK. I always lived within walking distance of most places I needed to get to, and moreover, I always lived in places with many big steep hills. Miami has no hills, and most of the places I need to get to are further than is feasible on foot. Moreover, the public transport network is, at best, skeletal. So I've taken to two wheels, on a second hand mountain bike that's probably a little too small for me but was only $35. It has numerous gears; I don't even know how many, since I never shift it from the top one. It took me a while to find the top one, in fact. The right hand shift is numbered 1-5, and the left hand one has a series of lines with 'low' at one end and 'high' at the other. It was a couple of weeks before I realised that the lever could be pushed well beyond the point marked 'high', thus engaging a higher gear (set?). I had thought until then that I'd become disastrously unfit, but I was just being dense.

When I got it, I borrowed some Allen keys from the head of department, a keen cyclist, to adjust the handlebar height. He warned me to be careful, because Miami drivers 'don't see cyclists'. I asumed this was just colourful exageration on his part, but after a couple of incidents in which I was nearly mown down by vehicles pulling out of intersections, I realised that he was speaking with proper philosophical precision; they really don't see cyclists, probably because they're not used to looking for them.

Actually, they sometimes do see cyclists, and that's where the real problems can start. As the New Times article suggests, the attitudes of the drivers here towards cyclists range from the inattentive to the downright murderous. Riding on the carriageway (like you're legally meant to) is an invitation for drivers to shout abuse, honk horns, and if they're feeling particularly frisky, see if they can run you off the road by passing far too close and then sometimes even swerving closer as they do so. After a few too many experiences of this nature, I gave in and became something that, in the UK, I hated; a pavement cyclist.

I assure myself that this is less of a sin here, because there's hardly any pedestrians to mow down. I cycled 1o miles earlier today, and saw four, three of whom I passed on a cycle track/footpath. However, cycling on the pavement is frustrating. The surface is often awful, and you have to stop, or at least slow down, at every one of the frequent intersections. Better, though, than risking the road. My ride earlier today was in some ways the most pleasant I've had, because it involved some of Miami's very few dedicated cycle lanes. To be able to go fast and feel safe was a sort of revelation about how efficient cycling can really be given the right conditions.

Really, I should overcome my road phobia. Plenty of my peers cycle in the traffic, and none have yet come to calamity. According to the New Times, there's a small Critical Mass group in Miami. Hooking up with them, perhaps, might be the way to conquer the city from the saddle.