Oz Day Abroad

Well, no public holiday for me today. I walked past American flags as usual on my way to a class full of Americans (there really are flags everywhere you look here!). I don't actually think I'm missing much, Australia Day is usually just a barbie for me anyway.

But realising what day it was I decided to make some Vegemite sangers to munch on in class. (Luckily this is not one of the things I can't buy here. The corner store, which specialises in exotic foods, stocks it.) One of the other HPS first-years, Larry, has on quite a few occasions seen me eating a Nutella sandwich and demanded, "Is that Vegemite?!" Obviously he has encountered Australians before me but I can't believe any of them could have stomached Vegemite spread as thick as I spread Nutella! With this in mind I made two Vegemite sandwiches and cut them into quarters so I could more easily share them with Larry. Of course he refused but a few other students, who had never tried it before, had a taste. One even claimed she liked it but all the other Americans just assumed she was lying.

Job Talks

I'm impressed with the sort of respect graduate students are accorded in my department. HPS is hiring a new professor (specialising in philosophy of physics) and it's down to four contenders so they are letting the grad students see the CVs! All the applicants are coming and giving talks (which we're all expected to attend and are encouraged to ask questions).

The best bit for the students is the free meals! The applicants, like any other guest speaker, need to be entertained so there is a lunch and a dinner provided at local restaurants and the dept pays for 2 or 3 students to go along. So I'm having dinner Tuesday and lunch Friday. Now I just have to think of something intelligent to ask a philosopher of physics.

American Puritanism

I just got back from the supermarket where I was refused alcohol for the first time. (No, I wasn't drunk at the time!)

A strange thing about Indiana is that they have alcohol in the supermarkets, in an aisle open to everyone (as opposed to Australia where kiddies are not even supposed to see the grog) but the state forbids alcohols sales on Sundays! (There are some exceptions eg restaurants.) So the checkout-chick asked me, "Isn't it Sunday today?" but I didn't get what she meant until she told me I couldn't buy alcohol. I already knew the law but just wasn't asking myself, "What day is it today?" when I picked up the bottle. And I wasn't even planning to drink it tonight, I only wanted it because it was on sale!

I think if they want to reduce alcoholism they should just tax it a little more. Anything bottled in the USA is very cheap, about as cheap as duty-free! But if they did that they'd certainly keep the no Sunday sales rule as well as the 21 years drinking age, both of which only serve to make it more attractive to young people.

The situation reminds me of a quote from H.L. Mencken:

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

If I stay here long enough you might see me wearing a tall hat with a belt-buckle on the front!

Back to the grindstone

After a few weeks break from classes today I start a new semester. I'm on the usual start-of-semester high, enthusiastic about all the new stuff I'll be learning. (But not quite as much as usual because I still have a couple of papers from last semester I'm yet to complete!)

Today I have Contemporary Ethical Theories with Marcia Baron. She's well respected as an ethicist and the students speak very highly of her so I decided to take this class this year while she's teaching it. Looking at the reading I think I will enjoy it more than the abstract and abstruse meta-ethics class I took last semester.

Tomorrow I have Survey of the Philosophy of Science with Jordi Cat. I enjoyed his class last semester, as hard as it was. This twentieth-century material should be much closer to the HPS I learnt at UNSW but with Jordi I'm bound to learn plenty of new things.

Thursday is Survey of the History of Science Since 1750 with Jim Capshew and Sandy Gliboff. I think this one could be a lot of fun because it covers all sorts of sciences. The reading load is huge -- a book every week! Fortunately it's all secondary literature so it shouldn't be too dry.

Give a man a phish you feed him for a day...

I've been doing a lot of shopping over the internet since I got here; mainly books but a few other things too. Bloomington doesn't have a lot of stores, and the campus bookshop is useless. It's very easy to do here as Froogle allows you to find the best price.

Then last night I got an email receipt from PayPal saying I'd sent someone $395.85 for a watch, which I knew nothing about! I assumed someone had got into my account and sent the money without me knowing, so I went to stop the transaction. But the link I clicked on from the email didn't take me to the real PayPal site, I took me somewhere else with an identical façade, hoping I'd enter my password on their site. Luckily, I noticed the wrong URL before I gave them any info! They hadn't broken into my account at all, they just knew I'd rush to stop them and perhaps not notice anything suspicious while in such a panic.

So everything is fine after all. I forwarded the con email to the people at PayPal; hopefully there's something they can do to stop them. I guess the moral is: when clicking on links, always look at where they're taking you.

At least it's not cat

One thing I didn't mention in my earlier post on American food is that Chinese here is different. Instead of Beef in Black Bean, Lemon Chicken or Mongolian Lamb, they have Kung Pao, Orange and General Tsao's Chicken. Rob Lamb did tell me that bad Chinese food was one of the few things he didn't like about living in the US. But most of the Chinese students here in Bloomington seem happy with it so I think it's probably because we get mainly Cantonese food in Australia and here it is Mandarin cuisine.

I mention this now because I had dinner with friends at a Chinese restaurant on New Years Eve and one of the dishes had such an interesting name I felt compelled to order it: Bum Bum chicken! I wasn't sure whether the name referred to the cut of meat used or the flavour but I ordered it and did enjoy it. I later asked a Chinese friend who told me that the name has something to do with sticks. I then had to explain the joke. I guess they didn't see any problem here in Indiana as Americans always say "butt", "fanny" or "ass" (sic.).