This morning, when we woke up, we noticed two large orange trucks parked across the road, bearing the legend 'ASPLUNDH tree expert co.' As I've been working this morning, I've heard various sounds of power saws, bits of tree being thrown to the ground, and occasional shouts in Spanish. It's now mid-morning, and I've just looked out of the window into our back garden, and noticed a man sitting in our large pecan tree with a power saw, along with various ropes and pieces of equipment, and lots of branches and leaves all over the ground. There are other men doing similar things in neighbouring gardens. Presumably they've been sent from the electricity company, in order to cut back the trees from the overhead wires. Which is fine, but in the UK, they would at least have knocked on the door and asked if we minded them coming onto our property first, not to mention hacking bits off our tree. I've noticed that Americans are quite cavalier about the concept of personal property: for example, it's not considered rude here to drive your car into someone's front drive in order to execute a three-point turn.
Added to which, we could have saved the trouble and expense of getting our trees cut back approximately six months ago.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Measurement
America is still completely wedded to the imperial system of measurement, and even if the whole world ends up going completely metric, I'm quite sure they will never change. (Who cares what the rest of the world does, anyway?) No American has any idea what a centimetre or a kilometre is. Distances are measured in miles, lengths are measured in feet and inches (even down to small, precise measurements like an eighth of an inch), the weight of everything is expressed in pounds, and liquids are measured in gallons.
I have mixed feelings about this. Like most British people of my generation, I grew up in a strangely conflicted environment, where I learnt about (and did calculations in) centimetres, litres and kilograms at school, but talked about inches, pints and pounds at home, because my parents and grandparents only really thought in these terms. Indeed, they were still only just recovering from the shock of adapting to decimal currency, and my grandmother never really accepted the fact that 10p was 10p and not two shillings. But there was no real choice about this for me: the old system was entirely obsolete by the time I was going into shops and buying things, so I only ever learnt about it second-hand (and imperfectly). But in other areas of life this was not the case, and even now I can only conceptualise height expressed in feet and inches, distances in miles, speeds in miles per hour, and drinks in pints. As for weight, I don't really understand that at all, and to this day remain hazy about whether a pound or a kilogram is heavier.
Which, you would have thought, should have set me up well for life as an American: but it's not that simple. The imperial system is endlessly complex, and incorporates several units which are pretty much obsolete, or only reserved for specialist uses, in either or both of the UK and America: furlong, pole, perch, gill. A gallon, for example, is something I previously associated only with buying petrol - here, it's used for mineral water, milk and orange juice too, so I can now, for the first time in my life, visualize a gallon in terms of size. On the other hand, the stone (as a unit of weight) is not used here, so I am forever trying to divide by 14 in my head whenever somebody is referred to as weighing so many pounds.
The ubiquitous use of the imperial system in America has its benefits: there is none of the confusion between generations or even within one individual which exists in the UK; everyone knows and understands one system. It has even resulted in certain accepted terminologies to describe things beyond the units themselves: a 'two by four', for example, is a standard size of wooden plank measuring two inches in height and four in depth (and varying in length according to need); everyone in America knows what this is, but I had to learn. But, as Europe worked out some time ago, the system is horrendously complicated and fiddly, and its retention here is one of the principal things which makes America feel a little old-fashioned and complacent to me.
I have mixed feelings about this. Like most British people of my generation, I grew up in a strangely conflicted environment, where I learnt about (and did calculations in) centimetres, litres and kilograms at school, but talked about inches, pints and pounds at home, because my parents and grandparents only really thought in these terms. Indeed, they were still only just recovering from the shock of adapting to decimal currency, and my grandmother never really accepted the fact that 10p was 10p and not two shillings. But there was no real choice about this for me: the old system was entirely obsolete by the time I was going into shops and buying things, so I only ever learnt about it second-hand (and imperfectly). But in other areas of life this was not the case, and even now I can only conceptualise height expressed in feet and inches, distances in miles, speeds in miles per hour, and drinks in pints. As for weight, I don't really understand that at all, and to this day remain hazy about whether a pound or a kilogram is heavier.
Which, you would have thought, should have set me up well for life as an American: but it's not that simple. The imperial system is endlessly complex, and incorporates several units which are pretty much obsolete, or only reserved for specialist uses, in either or both of the UK and America: furlong, pole, perch, gill. A gallon, for example, is something I previously associated only with buying petrol - here, it's used for mineral water, milk and orange juice too, so I can now, for the first time in my life, visualize a gallon in terms of size. On the other hand, the stone (as a unit of weight) is not used here, so I am forever trying to divide by 14 in my head whenever somebody is referred to as weighing so many pounds.
The ubiquitous use of the imperial system in America has its benefits: there is none of the confusion between generations or even within one individual which exists in the UK; everyone knows and understands one system. It has even resulted in certain accepted terminologies to describe things beyond the units themselves: a 'two by four', for example, is a standard size of wooden plank measuring two inches in height and four in depth (and varying in length according to need); everyone in America knows what this is, but I had to learn. But, as Europe worked out some time ago, the system is horrendously complicated and fiddly, and its retention here is one of the principal things which makes America feel a little old-fashioned and complacent to me.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Panhandle
Dave Gorman points out, in his book 'America Unchained', that there are three US states which claim to have a panhandle, but Oklahoma is the only one whose panhandle really does look like the handle of a pan. I quite agree.
Actually, the story of why that strange slice of land is stuck on to the northwest corner of Oklahoma is quite interesting - I learnt it not long ago from a colleague who teaches music at the Oklahoma Panhandle State University (yes, really - despite my initial misgivings about that particular institution). Apparently, in the 19th century as America expanded west, the states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas were created by drawing latitude lines at equal intervals running south from the Canadian border. At that time, Oklahoma was still known as the 'Indian territory' or the 'unassigned lands', and was the area which had been specifically created - 'in perpetuity' - for Native American tribes after their enforced migration from other parts of North America.
The obvious thing was for Texas (which had briefly been an independent country earlier in the 19th century) to claim the land to the west of Oklahoma running up to the Kansas border, but according to the rules of the time, in order to maintain its status as a confederate (slave-owning) state, it was not allowed to claim any land north of the Mason-Dixon line. So all the land to the south of that line became part of Texas (the 'Texas panhandle', in fact, though it looks nothing like a panhandle to me - or to Dave Gorman), leaving a thin slice of land by itself. When Oklahoma was granted statehood in 1907, one of the conditions was that it incorporated this slice of land which up till then, no-one had known what to do with (evidently Texas, by that stage, didn't want it).
According to my colleague, this history has resulted in a certain sense of autonomy and rebellion amongst the Oklahoma panhandlers, many of whom don't really feel part of Oklahoma to this day, and there is even some kind of secessionist movement. It is, as far as I understand it, pretty empty of anything apart from cows, and the Oklahoma Panhandle State University. I met this colleague again yesterday at a conference, which is what reminded me about this issue. I mentioned to him that when the Oklahoma weather comes on TV, the far western part of the panhandle is actually obscured by the TV station's logo. 'Oh, that's all right', he replied, 'no-one lives there anyway'.
By the way, in case you're wondering, the third 'panhandle' state is Florida.
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