I Predict A Riot

It's been a bad year for your correspondent and riots. I enjoyed a Thai riot during my trip to the company sales conference and a Nepali Maoist riot in Kathmandu on May Day. There have even been riots in London over school fees, teacher strikes, and now the 2011 budget unveiled this week has incited someone to hang a large "STOP THE CUTS" banner on the road heading to my university.

So it was with a sigh that I heard a ruckus this afternoon floating through my bedroom window. Another protest, I figured, and dismissed it from my mind. Not that I wasn't distracted throughout the afternoon by the occasional loud cheer and bursts of chanting.

Eventually I got curious and wandered down to see what the fuss was really all about. To my surprise, I discovered: it wasn't a riot at all.

It was the Indian cricket team fan club. At the pub next door.

There's even someone wearing an Indian flag

No wonder I didn't know what it was. Not even Six Nations Rugby can get Brits to cheer that loudly. A trip to the World Cup Cricket Finals, tho, and the place was going wild. I even heard the sound of drums coming from inside.

Well this is much more fun than arguing over pensions. Good luck, India!

Amazonians

One of your correspondent's friends from her younger days is a raving Amazon brand advocate, and gleefully forwarded this link along to the old college circle. "Another reason to buy music from Amazon," he called it.

Just like the old days, your correspondent countered with a sigh and then a flying tackle. (We did, after all, go to a football school.) In the middle of my obligatory publishers-indignation-at-Amazon, I realized that this friend probably had no idea about the teeny tiny margins Amazon offers to publishers, the way the used book market has dissolved educational book sales, and the erosion of our preferred route to market, the chain bookstores. The punters just see Amazon as a great place to buy books.

That's kind of why I'm not sure if I would prefer to bury Amazon, or to be them. They do understand what makes customers tick.

I don't know, then. If a job opened at Amazon next year, would I apply? Would I accept? Seattle's not a bad place to live, and I can't exactly complain about the weather from where I'm sitting in England. The Kindle is doing great things for reading, and they're even starting to bridge cultures through their own translation imprint.

The real problem for me is the reliance of price on their marketing mix. Ebooks are great for consumers, especially if you price them at $0.99. I can buy loads of ebooks for that amount! But, really, is that good in the long run? What kind of book can you profitably produce for that amount of money? Should someone's Great American Novel cost as much as one song on iTunes?

It's pretty clear I will buy ebooks for higher prices than I would print books, for the convenience factor. As long as they're worth reading. If publishers stop making money and I have to slog through self-published novels--which I'm sure are great but are just overwhelming in their sheer volume--I will probably end up unhappy.

Something tells me the final answer to my internal debate over Amazon won't be settled until this trajectory is either changed or ... we hit a wall somewhere. Until then, I sure am glad I'm not employable for at least a few more months.

Interview Fail

The European CV is twice the size of an American resume. In the USA we're told to put all of our information on one page (which, as a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet, is smaller than the UK standard A4). In the UK you need two sides of A4, and, no, large font and flowery writing do not earn you any points.

After tossing on as much information as I could, and inwardly rebelling the entire time, my CV was still looking one line short. So, to balance all the line items about travel, books, more travel, and foreign things, I decided to put one mention of strictly American hobbies down at the very, very bottom.

Last Thursday, I had a half-hour interview with a Dutch company about a potential summer internship. At minute twenty-seven, the publisher looked at this final entry and started laughing to himself.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I couldn't help but notice that you like American football and ice hockey."

"Yes, sir," I replied.

He shook his head another moment, and then giggled, "How violent."

D'oh.

"It's funny," he explains, "because I don't even know girls who like European football, let alone American football. I suppose it's because you went to Notre Dame."

Yes! Of course it's because of my prestigious university, sir. That must be it.

Anyways, I can't see how my sport of choice could be any worse than rugby. I can, however, see the merit of changing my favorite sport to something like, um, baseball. Batter up.

You're Telling Me, They're Hunger Games

There's a new debate of the day in book publishing circles. Now that we're pretty clearly in the realm of e-publishing and the proportion of book sales has tipped in favor of electronic copies in the US, no one is questioning whether customers will read books onscreen. Now the question is, how much can we get them to pay?

It's sort of a shame when you hear that authors are selling their books in the Kindle bookstore for as little as $0.99, or even giving it away for free. I loved this post from Roxane Gay for a lot of reasons, but mostly for this paragraph right here:

If we as writers don’t value our craft enough to price our work appropriately, how can we expect readers to want to pay appropriate prices? If you have to basically give your writing away, what does that tell you? [. . .] I could see myself selling a short story for a buck or two but a book, a whole book? My work is worth more than that. Your work is worth more than that.  If I cannot sell my books at a ore reasonable $8-$10 price point, perhaps the market is telling me something about my writing. Humbling? Perhaps.

On the other hand, this weekend I downloaded the first volume of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins to my Kindle. Big mistake. I loved it. When, ten hours later, I finished the first book, the first thing I did before going to bed (at an ungodly hour, of course), was download the second book. I read that one in its entirety the next day. The third book was started before breakfast on day 3 and, just because I wanted to draw it out, I finished after class on day 4.

When was the last time I bought three print books in a row? Especially new? Amazon just made loads of money off of me. So did the publisher. More than I would have spent otherwise. But, my goodness, now I appreciate why it would be nice if ebooks could cost less. That's even though I know exactly how much goes into each book, and the giant commission Amazon gets per sale.

I suppose the trick is, convince publishers to drop the prices while I'm a student, so I can still eat. As soon as I go back to work for a publisher, move the prices back to normal, so I can keep eating. Doesn't that sound like the best solution?

Studious

Your correspondent has no control over the selection of her uni's film society, but when they advertised a showing of the Bollywood hit 3 Idiots . . . Well, I'd be an idiot not to attend!



The film's message is the importance of life lessons over school lessons. Real learning over school memorization. The dangers of too much pressure on students for a few meaningless grades on a paper. Sounds good to me! So I guess it's OK to spend the rest of my afternoon studying whether I should prefer Shah Rukh or Aamir Khan.

Black Sheep

My favorite complaint about Oxford is its teeny tiny size. I'm training for yet another marathon, which means sixteen- to eighteen-mile runs at least once a week, which last time resulted in a few rather unfortunate run-ins with cows.

This time, I've gotten to know the area a bit better and found a lovely path following the Thames for miles and miles, which, technically, could take me all the way to London. It won't, however, because I run in the opposite direction, north through the Thames river valley, and into wide open fields where soon there's not a building in sight. Just miles and miles of fields, and, of course, new dangers.

Mile eight of yesterday's run found me blissfully trotting along in one of these fields, enjoying the peace and quiet of the river, when suddenly, I rounded a bend and saw them coming at me: sheep! Not just one or two sheep. A herd of sheep. Maybe a hundred, maybe more.

Worse, they were being herded. There was the sheepdog barking them forward, there was the farmer driving them from behind, and now here comes me, sprinting right for them, which was no less surprising for me than for the sheep.

"Baaaaaaaaaah!" they called.

"BAAAAAH!" I cried back.

Now, of course, the sheep saw themselves as being herded from all sides, so they reacted as sheep usually do: blind panic. Sheep everywhere! I considered jumping off the narrow path, but then I'd be running through some random field and did it belong to the farmer? Would the farmer like that? I couldn't cut through the herd without dispersing sheep everywhere, and the farmer was giving me a look that, if I wasn't already running, would have set me off at a sprint immediately.

So, I turned tail and was chased for the next mile or so. By sheep. What can I say? At least it was good training: I can't remember the last time I've run so fast.

The Irish Rover

It's St. Patrick's Day today, one of my favorite holidays, if not one that I've had much success celebrating in recent years. For the second year in a row I've missed my college friends' reunion over pints of Guinness and probably just a little bit of mayhem - as alumni of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, it's a holiday we take seriously.

Last year was a wee bit harder than this one, of course. I was in India and besides the obvious technical difficulties and the paucity of corned beef and cabbage, there was one more problem with my attempts to share the holiday with my friends.

I walked into the office with a bright green shirt on and a big smile on my face, only to run smack into one of my coworkers. He looked tired, drawn, and he had a streak of white on his forehead. He explained, he was celebrating a holiday too - the days of Vasant Navratri leading up to Ram Navami - and he was fasting.

So, no green beer, in other words.

That was probably the quietest St. Patrick's Day I'd ever had. No matter where I'd spent it, though, it would probably be hard to top the time I actually lived in Ireland, the holiday's spiritual home. My sister was in town, and besides the usual tomfoolery we stumbled across a céilidh and danced like idiots with half of Dublin. The rest of the night, we [scene missing].

More than anything, today's celebration of its patron saint makes me reminisce about the good times I had there both as a student and more recently for a rather long run. Maybe it's time for an impulse trip back to the Emerald Isle . . . You never know . . .

Trinity College and Dawson St

O'Connell St looking towards the Dublin Spire

Cadbury Without Borders

An Iranian friend and I were chatting yesterday about where to go on one of our weekly lunch dates. As often happens, the conversation veered from a description of a traditional English Sunday Roast to one of our own respective traditions. As it turns out, the Persian New Year, or Norouz, begins next week.

My friend tried to describe the festive table setting Iranians have to celebrate the new year. It's called haft sin, where sin is a letter of the Persian alphabet (س). Seven foods are placed on the table, each starting with the letter sin, and each carrying its own symbolic meaning.

We were sitting in the school's computer lab, so we clicked over to Wikipedia for a full list. (It's not very easy to describe your own traditions without visuals. Last season this same friend asked me why we decorate Christmas trees and I could only quote Jim Gaffigan.) Sure enough, there was a list of seven foods - sabzeh (wheat or barley), sib (apples), senjed (oleaster), somaq (sumac), sir (garlic), samanu (a sweet pudding), and serkeh (vinegar).

"That's so funny," I said. "That sounds a lot like something we do in Italy, where we eat seven fishes for Christmas."

"Sometimes you have other things," she added. "Not just those seven." She pulled up one of the many photos of various haft sin spreads.

Haft sin spread, by Mandana Asani

"That's lovely!" I said.

"But . . . Wait a minute."

Peering closer.

"Is that . . .?"

"Um, those look like Easter eggs," I told her.

They are clearly not Easter eggs, of course. But, at the same time, they are. Hard-boiled eggs, decorated and painted, although in Iran you place them on the table where in America we hide them and make small children go hunt for them.

So we reminisced together for a while about decorating eggs. It was all well and good, of course, until she asked me about Easter.

"Um . . ." I said. Where to begin - the high religious significance, or . . . "We celebrate with . . . the Easter . . . bunny? Who lays . . . chocolate?

"Shoot, we're going to need a visual."

And then I just *chundered* *everywhere*

Is it awful that I watched this and thought, "Hey I've totally done that!"

Except I've never taken a gap year, and certainly not a 'gap yaah'. Americans don't have gap years! We don't believe in taking a year off just to be young and travel. You graduate . . . You work! You work while you travel! And when Americans "chunder everywhere" (which, yes, I've done that too), it's probably e.coli, not "being on the lash".

It's funny you should say that, tho. That totally reminds me of this time, on my year-of-working-in-random-far-off-locations . . .

Lording over you

Some whispers went around last week that someone in your correspondent's circle is the son of a Lord.

I needed this explained to me. What, exactly, makes you a Lord? Does this make my acquaintance a Lord? Is it anything like being a Knight? Do you have a say in Parliament? And, for goodness' sake, since when have there still been things like Lords in the twenty-first century?

One friend (who is a subject of Her Majesty, though not English) tried to explain: "It's kind of like the Kennedy family in America."

I thought back. Sure, they're the most famous political family we have. But, no disrespect to the Kennedy family, but they're also famous for various assassinations and the occasional scandal on Martha's Vineyard. Plus, when John F. Kennedy was elected president, it was under much suspicion - he was the first Catholic in office, and many thought he would be answering to the Pope.

"No," I disagreed. "I don't think we would consider the Kennedys anything close to a Lord."

For lack of a better analogy, we let the subject drop, and to this day I'm still not entirely sure what a Lord is.

As I found out, however, they are definitely still alive and well in the United Kingdom. I booked myself a flight to Morocco last week, and as I was entering in my passenger information, a drop-down menu offered me a choice of honorifics - Doctor, Mister, Miss, Ms, Mrs . . . Lord . . . Lady?

As tempted as I was to fly as Lady Your Correspondent, something tells me this sort of joke would be strongly frowned upon, and I'm not crazy enough to try. After all, as the expression goes, I'm no Jack Kennedy.

Thought of the Day

I found this quote in an Economist article, and felt I had to share:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. -- Mark Twain

At the very least, Mr. Twain has just justified the flights I've booked for Casablanca and Barcelona in April. One woman's lying on the beach is another woman's horizon-expanding fight to eliminate prejudice. You wouldn't want me to become narrow-minded, would you?

You Say Potato, I Say French Fry

Since moving to England, I've really missed the opportunity to do some good outside of class. Last week I was happy to stumble across the website of a local homeless shelter which seemed to match my old volunteer work: low-key, non-denominational, and non-judgmental. I went today for my first tryout and, as usual, found a few surprises.

Oxford is such a small town, so small that it literally takes me five minutes to run myself out of town. Sure, there's a bit of scruffy neighborhood down Cowley Road, but the group I joined was just open for a few hours every evening between the day shelters and the night shelters.

In those two hours, over one hundred people showed up.

Obviously, they need the help, so I will most definitely make it a regular occurrence. Next time should go better now that I've learned where they keep the plates and cutlery. Getting the terminology down is key, too.

"Do we need more cheese and crackers?" I asked the other kitchen volunteers. No answer. Blank looks.

Someone popped in from serving tea up front. "Do we have any more cheese and biscuits?"

Oh.

"Can you pass me the aubergine?" someone requested.

I stared at the pile of vegetables next to me.

". . . You might call it eggplant."

Oh.

The kicker came when one of the volunteers popped into the kitchen and asked me, "Quick! Can you make one of the ladies a Marmite sandwich?"

Ugh. Marmite. Marmite is one of those strictly English foods. I've never seen anyone eat it who wasn't a Brit. It's meant to be really good for you, but no matter how many times I try to give it a chance, it's still disgusting.

You're not doing it right, my friends tell me. You're supposed to put only a teeny little bit on toast. And lots and lots of butter.

"Are you sure I should be doing this?" I asked, when someone handed me the jar and a knife. "I'm an American! An American!"

But, I was there to pull my weight, and I dutifully followed the instructions I had been given hundreds of times. I handed my finished open-faced sandwich to the volunteer and waited for her reaction.

"No, we need more Marmite on that," she said, handing it back. "There's barely any there."

"I'm an American!" I explained again, and, shrugging, added more Marmite.

"Ew!" said another woman. "That's way too much Marmite!"

Lesson learned. I handed in my knife, and decided to wash dishes instead. Eating it or preparing it, I just can't win with English food!

Sacre Bleu!

The other night, I was standing in my local grocery store looking for a good beer to pair with dinner. Surrounded by Fuller's and Old Speckled Hen, nothing caught my fancy, nothing seemed to do. The English are so proud of their "real ales", but was that what I wanted?

Then, I spotted a four-pack of Guinness in the corner, straight from Ireland. I bought it without a moment's hesitation.

A few days later, I was lost for inspiration and turned my internet radio on to the first channel I came across. That night, I happily finished an entire paper nodding my head to nothing but rap music. Even though I wasn't a big fan before, for some reason out here I can't get enough Outkast and Eminem.

This morning, I realized I've spent the past week swapping between two other internet radio stations: what I call "yeehaw" country, and pop music from . . . France.

My goodness. It seems as though six months in England has turned me into the walking cultural opposite of English-ness. I suspect my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

The Inspiring City in Spires