Category Archives: US vs UK

US presidential election: The best night ever!

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in US vs UK

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

“I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”–the Queen Mum, upon the bombing of Buckingham Palace by the German Luftwaffe in 1940.

To which I say, “I’m glad we’ve been Obama-ed.  It makes me feel we can look the rest of the world in the face.”

The Empire State Building, New York City, upon the election of President Barack Obama to a second term.

Close-up: the Empire State Building after Obama has won his second term. (Note to non-Americans:  Democrats are blue, Republicans red.)

Election night, Chicago 2012

AP photo Jerome Delay

Courtesy Timeline Photos

You said it!

Stormy weather–now and forever

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in How we're coming along, US vs UK

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Courtesy Spencer Platt, Getty Images

First, I want to say thank you to my family in England and Scotland, and to my friends in both the US and UK who contacted me asking how we’d weathered the storm here in Boston.  The answer is, we are fine, but so many are not.

New Jersey, New York (especially lower Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens), Connecticut, and West Virginia took the brunt of the storm.  We had some trees down in the Boston area and some loss of power, but nothing like the places mentioned above, where people lost loved ones, their homes, their possessions, their access to food, electricity, and water, and their sense of security.

Courtesy, ABC News

My dad, a farmer’s boy from Derbyshire, a scholarship student at Cambridge University, and later professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, had long warned about the hazards of climate change.

A friend, a former reporter for the Boston Globe, emailed me this afternoon saying, “I wanted to let you know that I have been thinking about your father in the last few days, with all the talk and articles in the Globe about potential flooding and damage in Boston in coming years as a result of global warming. I remember very clearly his work and his comments about this likelihood. He was a man of so many talents and insights.”

My friend interviewed my father for an award-winning series, spent a lot of time with him,  and got to know him quite well.  She also read his manuscript, Living Safely, a combination memoir of his life as a farmer’s boy and research professor and a warning about global hazards due to climate change.

Houses burned down in Queens, New York.  Courtesy Spencer Platt – AFP/Getty Images

In his last years of life, my father became deeply concerned about the dangers posed by climate change caused by human activity, including extreme heat, storms, floods, drought, earthquakes, escalating CO2, and the rising level of the ocean.

Today happened to be the ecclesiastical celebration of All Saint’s Day in honor of those who have departed this earth, a time when I especially remember my father and what he was passionate about:  trying to preserve our planet.  (You can read more about him here.)

I want to leave you with this video of Mitt Romney, who has been busy lying through his teeth and mocking people, including my father, other eminent scientists, and those of us who are increasingly frightened about what climate change will mean to the ecology and preservation of the earth. (Please copy this into your browser if the link doesn’t go through–it’s pretty powerful).

http://grist.org/politics/the-most-brutal-ad-youll-see-this-election/#.UJZlV95xNKU.facebook

To those in the US, on Tuesday please vote for our incumbent president, Barack Obama, who will continue to do his best to preserve our world and reverse, or at least slow down, climate change.

President Obama in Brigantine, New Jersey.  Courtesy Jewel Samad – AFP/Getty Images

And to those overseas, please know that many Americans share your deepest concern about the need to protect this fragile earth, our island home.

The stone walls of New Hampshire

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Back in Boston, US vs UK

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

If you’ve been reading my blog over at The Year of Living Englishly (theyearoflivingenglishly.wordpress.com), you’ll know that I’m crazy about (in a good way) stone walls and just about anything historic except leeches, sewage running in the gutters, and various deadly plagues. My previous post about typical English stone walls and how to build them can be found at:  http://theyearoflivingenglishly.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/how-to-build-a-stone-wall/

Today I’m in New Hampshire visiting my son on his 16th birthday at his boarding school, and it’s wonderful to see how happy he is there. We stayed at a beautiful old inn near Littleton, NH, a former 200-year-old dairy farm with stone walls that have been badly overgrown over the years.  The new owners are busy clearing away the undergrowth and have managed to reveal several stretches of wall.

Here’s the New Hampshire wall:

A stone wall in New Hampshire

It’s been estimated that at their peak just after the Civil War, there were about 240,000 miles of stone walls in New England, though I haven’t found a more recent estimate.  In contrast, England has about 70,000 miles, which seems small in comparison, but in general they’re much better maintained and still in use.  Many of the New England walls have fallen down or been swallowed up by new growth forests that appeared when farmers moved to Ohio and other points west for more fertile, less stony ground.

The wall I saw in New Hampshire looked remarkably like the one I saw several months ago at the National Stone Centre in Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derbyshire, England.  Here’s the UK wall:

A typical Highland Scottish wall. Note that it’s only one boulder wide, and that the boulders themselves are immense. This type of wall is also seen in North Wales and Dartmoor.

Both walls use huge boulders as single stones, both tip the stones slightly downward so the water drains off, and both have slight “gaps” between stones which is believed to help keep sheep in the field.

UK stone wall

US stone wall

Clearly the person who built the New Hampshire stone wall 200 years ago knew how to work with huge boulders–perhaps a new immigrant to America from Scotland, North Wales, or Dartmoor.

If you’re interested in reading an article in the Atlantic magazine about the world’s best builder of stone walls (or “waller”), take a look at: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/05/finkel.htm

Thanks for reading this post about one of my passions which, luckily for me, can be found in both England and its namesake, New England.

Getting shirty with Obama

16 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in How we're coming along, US vs UK

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Hard to believe, but it was only a year ago that I was fighting with the UK Border Control people at Heathrow, trying to get them to allow my two daughters into the country with me for our Year of Living Englishly.

Upon our arrival, the first thing the agent said to me was, “Why are you here?”

My immediate response, which I luckily managed to stifle in time was, “Hmm, let’s see.  The US has Obama, the UK has Cameron. You’ve got a point:  why would I want to be here?  (You can see the entire post at:  http://theyearoflivingenglishly.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/sept-10-2011-heathrow/ )

I have to admit that I was not an early adopter of Obama.  I was a Hillary person.  I thought that Obama hadn’t yet earned his chops, though of course I voted for him.  I continue to think that Hillary will be an excellent president and I hope to vote for her in 2016.  But I also think that Obama is doing an amazing job and I love waking up in the morning knowing that Barack Obama is my president.

The week before last I was in Chicago–Hyde Park, on the South Side, home of the University of Chicago–with my sister, helping our mother move her furniture etc. from her apartment prior to selling it.

My dad’s old building in the University of Chicago quadrangle.

Before becoming president, Barack and Michelle Obama lived and worked in Hyde Park and their children went to school there. I also lived in Hyde Park from ages six to seventeen while attending the same school as Malia and Sasha, The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and then again when I was just out of college.  My parents continued to live there, so I know Hyde Park well.  Last week, wherever I went, and no matter whom I talked with, people had stories about Obama.

A woman in her 30s, an employee at the late lamented Coop grocery store where Obama  (and I) used to shop, told me about a time when, not knowing who he was but thinking he looked “fine,” helped him grab one of his young daughters as she was heading out the door and hoped that by doing so he would see her as excellent marriage material. (Since Obama did the grocery shopping for the family, this woman had never seen Michelle and had hoped he was a single parent).

Another woman who knows him very well and has stayed at the White House a number of times was telling me stories about Obama and Michelle that I really can’t repeat here because they have to do with one person telling the other person the exact errands he needed to run when he returned home on Friday nights from downstate Illinois from his job as a state senator, and another story about the sort of food one person was ordering and having delivered to her home prior to becoming First Lady which didn’t sound at all nutritious but I really can’t say any more than that.

Obama’s favorite restaurant when he was working as a law professor at the University of Chicago and as an elected official was the Medici on 57th Street.

It’s a really great place–terrific food, relaxed ambiance, reasonable prices, and you’re allowed to write on the walls and tables. During the five days I was in Hyde Park, I went there once a day, sometimes twice or three times a day, for pizzas and their killer “Arnold Palmer iced tea,” half iced tea, half lemonade, poured over crushed ice.

I’d heard that they sold t-shirts proclaiming the fact that Obama was a regular diner at their establishment (or words to that effect), and I wanted one.  Desperately.  At the maitre d’s station, the hostess told me they no longer sold them.

Damn! I thought.  I would have really liked that t-shirt!

I turned to go, and then I saw the t-shirt pass by me in the kitchen, on the back of a dishwasher (a person, not the machine).

I can’t believe I did this, and I’ve never done anything like this before, but I said to the hostess, “Can you ask that man if he’ll sell me his t-shirt for $40?”

She looked at me funny, then went into the kitchen.

She came out with a sweaty t-shirt and I handed her the $40 for the man.

And this morning, after Romney’s comments about the 47% of Americans who “pay no income tax,” “are dependent on the government,” and believe they are “victims” who are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it,” I am wearing this t-shirt more proudly than ever.

In more ways than one, Obama’s got my back.