It is forecast to snow 

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Sadly I have been strongly advised to drive in and out of the Grand Canyon as a severe cold front is coming through Thursday and it is as inevitable as the inauguration of Trump on Saturday that it will snow for about 4 days! I may be trapped and as I have a plane to catch I can’t risk staying. 

I have vivid memories of that childhood Looney Tunes story of Sylvester the Cat snow bound in the house with Tweetie Bird whilst the quaint old woman has left to buy provisions and every cupboard in the house is filled with Birdseed! Fearing starvation obviously as there is no cat food, Sylvester spends the next 12 minutes of the cartoon trying to catch and eat Tweetie Pie! Even at age 8 one knows this is inevitably futile but there is a childlike degree of sadistic pleasure in seeing the poor pussy thwarted and frustrated to within a inch of his nine feline life’s. 

Anyway I decided to shout myself a helicopter ride – 50 minutes of breathtaking scenery – more than adequate recompense for missing the extra night and day. 

When one thinks of Arizona one thinks of cactus, Cowboys and Indians and searingly hot deserts- at least I did. I was totally dumbfounded to see snow in and around the Grand Canyon Park. I was also amazed to learn that we ascended in our tourist van to 7000 feet and then drove for miles across the plateau (“mesa” in Spanish ). The Grand Canyon is thus a gigantic river valley at 7000 feet and the canyon descends for 3000 feet into the Colorado River basin floor. Please excuse the empirical measurements, I am too lazy to convert to metric. Our tour guide was a delightful man called Mac. If he were Australian and happened to be thin – indeed gaunt, then in our laconic and ironic way his nickname would be naturally “Big Mac”. But this is America ! Mac was by no means undernourished and so he indeed was known as Big Mac! He had a charming Garrison Keillor homespun philosophy to his blurbs as he drove along Route 44 in the Dodge Van at a breakneck 75 mph. 

Those white patches are snow!



The Red Centre of America 

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A few photos of the amazing geology that surrounds Sedona Arizona. This area is where all those cowboy movies I watched wide-eyed in the  50s and 60s were filmed – I am truely on location. 
The other piece of trivia is that Lucille Ball had a Mexican style villa in Sedona still standing and a must see item on every tour company’s itinerary 

MLK day

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​​​Today is a national public holiday – The anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. I was not aware of this and was so bemused by the desolate major roads in the city – so desolate as to make Adelaide on an early Sunday morning appear as congested as a Catholic Church at midnight mass!

I politely asked a passing pedestrian if it was indeed Sunday?  She was in a severe degree of,  I presume drug induced brain fog and shrugged! The iPhone came to the rescue and having already automatically set the date and time to  American central time informed me it was in fact Monday and moreover MLK day! 
There was a picnic in the park and the entertainment on the stage included this offering.  Vivienne may well be invited to join the band – if she can send off her saliva for genetic testing and confirm her Afro-American roots

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6 degrees of geographical separation 

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All American medical conferences have routinely between 5 to 10000 registrants, in other words they are big! This “breakthrough” event was small , I would hazard a guess at about 1500 neurologists. On every table at which I sat, the conversation would immediately or within minutes, rapidly open with a passing query as to from whence one came. “Oh I am in Philadelphia, County Clinton, east side”. The other responded that he had recently moved down south from Alaska to New Mexico, County Cibola, west side. 

Now the USA covers an area of 9 million square kilometres and has a population of 435 million. It is a remarkable fact that into which each and every conversation I eavesdropped, not one of the attendees did not immediately give the nonchalant impression that each, to within a bald eagles pin feather, knew precisely where the other lived as they forked food to mouth. 

“Oh yah” each says in a way that reminds me of laconic Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson in that memorable Cohn brothers movie Fargo. Turns out that each had either been born in the others current town or attended the local kindergarten or went there over more than 25 years to spend every Thanksgiving with their Ma and Pa or did a year of their training at the city hospital in 1995.

This compares to my response if I attend an Epilepsy Congress in Adelaide ( local) and a colleague shares his present address as Clovelly Park in the southern city of Onkaparinga. 


Upon my return will install a similar billboard at the intersection of Grand Junction Road and Main North Road 

Brain Screening can help you think clearly

Bulk billing with Dignity

Norton Synapse Institute

Last day at the Wild Horse Pass 

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I boast that religiously and attentively I attended all the sessions over 2 full days – which were indeed fascinating and many of the breakthroughs will not be routinely available until well past my retirement!

This is the hallway to the conference centre

This panoramic picture is of a nearby “village” called Rawhide! It’s a giant film set and a tourist village basically a forlorn imitation of the many genuine villages and tourist towns- Sovereign Hill in Australia springs to mind

This is the SMALLEST takeaway cup of coffee one can purchase at any and all coffee outlets! Full cream milk is called “2+2” . It may the creamiest concoction to leave a cow’s udder, but it ain’t gunna rescue the revolting black percolated coffee in the monstrous cup. Sadly the Americans fail in quality and predictablely score 100 for quantity. 

As an unrelated aside, one knows one is getting old, when the huge advertising screen extolling the entertainment at the Sheraton Casino, flashes not a 60’s night, not a rock and roll night, not even an Elvis night, no –  Tuesdays are the nostalgic 80s! 

The Naive American – an oxymoron?

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From afar the daily news of deadly gun massacres, the impending Trump presidential ascendency, paints the USA as a confusing, frightening cauldron of reactionary discontent. Yet from my first step on American soil I am amazed at the open, friendly welcoming citizens. They are to a man and woman – genuine! “You’re welcome” they respond to my “thank you” and I actually believe they mean it! 

I ordered for “starters” at dinner last night the Purple Kale, pine nuts, raisins and Arizona goats cheese salad with a quince aioli dressing! My attentive waiter, Brian responded with a somewhat unsettling instantaneous, ecstatic affirmation of my request, so effusive, that I reasoned that I must have been the first person to order this wondrous salad which had been added to the menu 4 months ago at the beginning of autumn and neglected by every uneducated, unadventurous diner till this obviously cultured antipodean gourmet descended upon the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Restaurant on January 13th 2017. It apparently was their autumn signature salad. Again I actually believe he was genuine in his praise of my choice compared to the mostly superficial response “excellent choice” by his Australian counterparts.

Super size me is an American expression and the starter size salad set before me, was sufficient to satiate the entire table of 8 morbidly obese Americans seated at the adjacent table. For one fleeting moment I considered that the serve size of my Purple Kale signature salad was a consequence of the possibility that I was the lone order for the evening, and that the kitchen was faced with the prospect of a rather large barrel of wilting Kale lettuce by midnight. The Arizona goats cheese of course would be all the better for another 24 hours of maturing. I dismissed this as an unedifying if not unpalatable thought.

The other slightly unsettling aspect to my dining experience was that having done justice to the salad, Brian returned seeking my mains order and understandably I guess with breathless anticipation assumed I would opt for the Cheeks of Arizona Prairie Bison poached in elderberry juice with roasted cactus pine needles. I had to politely decline and he became as crestfallen as the Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoon.

Finally it was brought home to me as I dined in the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass restaurant, that Americans have a 2 step approach to eating: cut and dice with knife and fork then drop the knife and use the fork to “spoon ” food towards the mouth. I felt on principle I would continue to eat with both knife and fork as my dear mother demanded all those years ago holding the knife as it SHOULD be held ( never like a proletarian pencil – a solecism that invoked the feather duster across the knuckles).

 To a man I was convinced that every diner lay down their fork and gazed at me as I demonstrated my dexterity and were in awe of my manifestly amazing fine motor skills. 

The Princess and the Pea.

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Let’s face it: 13 hours in an Emirates, Qatar or Qantas 380 is still 13 unlucky hours. A business class seat in an Emirates, Qatar or Qantas 380 is still ultimately a vaguely uncomfortable bed. I have always slept on my belly and despite this, manifestly avoided the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. To compound the theoretical risk, I also confess that I have been a life-long duck-down soft pillow addict. 

These somewhat personal disclosures explain why I not only sleep soundly but silently. I am not a snorer. However I admit openly that I am guilty of the modern cause of bedroom noise pollution – podcasting. 

Anyway the point of all these rather repressed catholic confessions is to set the scene for the saga of the Business Class flat bed. 

The first thing is it’s not bloody FLAT. it’s heads up by several degrees compounded by the lumpy cushion which no matter how viciously I pummel and pound, does not morph into a duck-down pillow at bedtime. “Poor little rich girl” I hear you cry, “guilty as charged” I respond. I empathise with the heroine in that Little Golden Book – The Princess and the Pea. I am still awaiting rescue.

 Secondly there is a gap of several centimetres between the top of my Qantas “flat bed” and the capsule. Through this not insignificant gap, whilst asleep, may fall one’s iPod or worse, an arm. Rescuing the lost iPod from the depths of the business class seat/capsule may require return of the 380 to the maintenance workshop and physical removal of the whole seat. This is a minor hiccup compared to waking up finding one’s dominant arm dangling in the gap between bed and capsule. Should the limb be successfully extracted without the need for amputation, it is invariably completely flail, not recovering completely for several hours and so disabling as to prevent the enjoyment of the pending Business Class breakfast. I may have just as well travelled economy class.

Is it Uluru?

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The Wild Horse Pass Sheraton Resort sits in an arid part of Arizona. It is the venue for the 2017 Breakthroughs in Neurology conference. No doubt this is a great facility and I am going to book in for a Spa treatment and rejuvenating facial mask rub using a very expensive “mud” of cactus sap, coyote saliva and fine particles of Arizona desert sand.

The resort has a similar ambience to the resort complex of Uluru but it comes no where near to the magic of the geography and geology of the Australian Red Centre. But I pen this before I visit the Grand Canyon national park 

Golf anyone?


Why the Recorder is not an instrument of the orchestra!

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Great social get together at home on 23rd December, 2016. its the end of my fourth year of learning to play a musical instrument from scratch! – the Alto Recorder. In the brief video, captured on an iPhone 5 – an unashamedly way of suggesting that this method may be a contributing factor to any perceived amateurish hiccups – the ensemble comprises Wing on piano, Caryl on Bassoon and Charles and Jonathan on Oboe. If your complaint is that you can’t hear me , that is in truth a good thing. Let me explain – if the Recorder is not sticking out like a sore thumb, it means

  • I am in tune
  • I am playing all the notes correctly
  • I am ‘on time’ … and of course there is a fourth and final explanation
  • I am not really playing it at all but mouthing it.

make sure then volume of your device is set at around 50% as the sound distorts on maximum volume!

 

for those of you who are interested , it is part of the First Movement – Larghetto- of The Sonata No 4 in F major for Treble Recorder and basso continuo.

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Yasmin and me

 

NO …I have become a grandfather again….OR perish the thought, a GREAT grandfather. This is Yasmin, the daughter of Charles the oboe player! The moist spot on my trousers is nothing to worry about.

Finally this is our dessert and what must it be for an Australian Christmas?  Made by Margaret with 10 eggs…. she did not disclose the volume of cream.

 

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