Thursday's Aren't Like This At Home

Wednesday evening I had dinner with Judy and Kurt from Queensland and their friends who live on the north side of Sydney harbour. This is the view from their living room (lighting is from my creative exposure efforts; it wasn't that surreal). I thought it was only fair to return the favor and share my view with them. So we all had brunch on my patio over the ocean Thursday morning. My work schedule is flexible, so it was fine for me. But others have jobs, and I learned what
chuck a sickie means. Strong coffee and the summer fruit that is just starting to show up in the markets made up for the fact that it was a bit overcast.

My next meal was not an average one either. The just-forming Princeton club of Australia (along with the Harvard and Yale clubs) hosted a dinner with the newly-installed US ambassador to Australia. I can assure you that I went in order to meet my fellow alumni - certainly I did not expect to like the things that Ambassador McCallum was going to say. His job isn't the most challenging ambassadorial posting in the world, especially when Australia is right up there in the coalition of the too-intimidated-to-be-unwilling. Prime Minister John Howard is Bush's best friend in the southern hemisphere (but he's part of the Liberal party. Liberal means conservative here, evidently, cause the party is centre-right) so the job is not a huge challenge. It typically goes to a crony of the president, and McCallum is Bush's college buddy. Never been to Australia before he was given this job. Excellent choice. His speech started off fine, with tales of his induction into the world of Aussie rules football (another crazy sport I don't have the first clue about), but by the time he got to telling us that Australia is safer, and not increasing its likelihood of being a terrorism target, by having troops in Iraq, it was clear who his boss is. He also talked about North Korea and did this twisty thing where he was explicitly talking about how our countries should be united against their crazy leader (agreed) but somehow he was blending that subtly with justifying the war in Iraq. It's getting me all irritated just thinking about it again, so I'm not going to write it all out. You get the idea, anyway. Don't want to end on a sour note, because the evening didn't. A few of us went out for a beer after the dinner which was fun, and now I know twice as many people in Sydney as I did before. I also got my absentee ballot for the Nov. 7 election in the mail yesterday, so I'm doing what I can to support regime change.