Great Egg Hunt

Emily, Ella, Flynn, dot and I all went  to a kids' Easter party this afternoon hosted by one of Emily's friends and one of Ella's playmates. In essence it was an egg hunt with something like 300 plastic eggs scattered over the garden most containing some small gift. Chocolate eggs are not common in the US unlike much of the English-speaking world, and plastic ones are re-usable.

Ella arrived wearing her cute bunny ears and had a basket to contain the eggs she collected. Since there were, at my count, 16 kids in attendance, all roughly Ella's age, it was a noisy and competitive occasion. However, with ages mostly less than two some of the social skills commonly used at parties were missing and I had the feeling that I was watching a large number of lone rangers. Still, they enjoyed themselves, as did the parents and even in a few cases grand-parents. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story, though Dot and I occasionally feature in the background.

Two Lovely Grand-kids

I've been meaning to provide a couple of pictures of Ella and Flynn for a while. So here goes, and thank you Dot for the images. Ella is now running, climbing everything within her capacity, repeating many of the words we say ... so be careful (!), counting out her numbers, and loves building tall structures. Maybe she'll become an architect. Meanwhile Flynn, who is one month old, has become a voracious drinking machine and adding weight fast. Fortunately, Ella is beginning to show sisterly interest in Flynn and it looks like they'll get on great.

AS

Great American Deserts

Having just flown across America twice from San Jose to Dallas and Missouri I am struck be the expanse of nothingness here in Arizona, New Mexico and even western Texas. I saw some beautiful but desolate landscapes from 12,000m asl and wondered about the horrendous journeys undertaken in the 19th century by early pioneers. Coming back yesterday I saw, for example, in the space of a few visual frames, empty treeless deserts with barely a blade of grass and awesome mesas and buttes, abutting snow capped mountains (though the snow had clearly thinned with the onset of spring), and nearby a large meandering river - but again with no vegetation in its banks. Alas, my window seat was over a wing of the plane and offered me little opportunity to photograph the scene, so here's a few pictures going eastwards a week ago.

Occasionally, in the middle of the deserts, the exploitation of some river or ground-water resource permitted an irrigated oasis like the one shown here. Likewise, the occasional mineral resources was exploited leaving a large hole in the ground.

Then, when flying over the west of Texas, I saw lots of concrete holes in the ground. I imagined that these might have been missile silos, but that image disappeared from my mind when I encountered square kilometres of wind farms all churning round slowly. I later discovered that Texas generates the greatest quantity of wind-power of any US state.

My final images are not of deserts, but of US cities whose design some purists might term an urban desert.
On the way in to DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth for the uninitiated) we saw urbanism splurging out over the countryside. DFW - which are twin cities - are home to more than 6 million people, one of the fastest growing locations in the US and containing about 30% of Australia's total population. It's not a pretty site! Here are two images of Fort Worth, one showing the city centre and the other a spaghetti junction. The region is criss-crossed by enormous free-ways and entirely car oriented, which is unsurprising given the low price of US gasoline which would make Europeans, and less so Australians, envious. Petrol is only $US 1 per litre or less.

AS

Covered Bridge

I have seen many covered bridges like these in Pennsylvania and in movies, but not elsewhere. This bridge lies close to the house where I'm staying near Columbia in Missouri - my friend Brian Dabson is host.

Apparently the tops and side covers were used to guard people on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages from attack by robbers when crossing creeks like the one here. I don't know if the system worked, and there's certainly no need for such contrivances today. However, they are very picturesque and, in a way, romantic!

I have been entertained royally here, with a succession of lovely meals, great talks with a host of colleagues interested in the same themes as me - literally hours of contact, and a successful bankers' lecture today covering among other things the global financial crisis - its impact on regional Australia, and how to fix it.


AS

Churchill Museum

And Fulton actually has a Churchill Museum right next to the church and wall. This is not surprising because just over 67 years ago and just 9 months after I was born, Churchill made one of the signature speeches of the 20th Century at Westminster College in Fulton. The museum contains correspondence between him and the college inviting him to give the John Findley Green Foundation Lecture it in March 1946, a gathering at which President Harry S Truman was present.

The lecture was the first occasion in which the term Iron Curtain was used. The museum itself contains a huge amount of material, some original, documenting Churchill's entire life from birth to death and I now have a CD of the speech itself. Unfortunately, neither he nor the museum mention the my mother actually talked to the great man inside the cliffs of Dover when he paid the WRACs a visit during the war. The following pictures give some idea of the flavour (or is it flavor) of the museum, which was fascinating. Some of the pictures might not turn out the right way up. Apologies!

AS

Wren Church and Wall

I paid a visit to Fulton, Missouri, yesterday and came across several very peculiar items in this small country town. I'll start with two of them here and move on to the third in the next post.

Did you know the Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul's in London, built a church in Fulton? Well, have a look at these photos:

It is actually a Wren church built by 1677! But its original location was Fleet Street in London and it was gutted in the bombing of London in the second world was. In short, it was removed block by block from the UK and reconstructed in Fulton ... and of course cleaned up.

The wall standing alongside is a sculpture made from eight sections of the Berlin Wall to commemorates the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War and is the work of artist and granddaughter of Winston Churchill, Edwina Sandys. It was dedicated to Westminster College in 1990 by former President Ronald Reagan.

AS

Ice Hockey in Dallas

Before last night I last went an ice-hockey match in my home town, Brighton, in England and that must have been over 50 years ago. So, it's a long time between games but I managed to get to one last night in Dallas, which is 60 miles - maybe 110 km - away from where I'm staying on a rural residential subdivision in deepest Texas.

Well, the event was a great spectacle in the American style. The huge indoor stadium (ice tends to melt outdoors in Dallas) seated 28,000 often screaming fans, many of them drink coke and eating burgers as you'd expect. The microphones were turned up full volume for the occasional commentary or the beat of music during the many of the intermissions when the dancing girls with pompoms were strutting their stuff or adverts were shown. High above the ice there was a square array of TV screens providing review of key plays and other 'entertainment'. In fact the entire arena was full of flashing lights of various kinds attempting to energise the crowd. 

The game itself was played at a furious pace, something that I could remember from 50 years previously, often with seemingly violent crashes between opposing players, which the crowd seemed to like - all part of the theatre. I was supposedly supporting the Dallas Stars who lay in the middle of the table and they were playing the Chicago Black-hawks who sat, and still sit atop the table. It was difficult to be enthusiastic about a side beaten comprehensively on skills and losing 7-1! Indeed the distinctly unenergised crowd began leaving in droves at 2/3rds time. 

The game is played over three 20 minutes periods, but it true US style the game actually took 3 hours to complete. In other words, the game had frequent stoppages for, ahem, TV ads, re-surfacing the ice (clearing away dangerous detritus and laying extra water), staging of the dancing girls, singing the national anthem, running strange 'sporting' events for lay people and so on. One had to be quite creative to spin an hour's worth of ice hockey into 3 hours. Also the players were rotated regularly taking more time out.

Oh well, the better side won and I really didn't have to support one side or the other even though my hosts here generously paid for my expensive ticket and the burger meal. After all, Dot has relatives living in Chicago and I know that city rather better than I know Dallas, having been here only once before. All in all though it was a great experience, a bit like the football (American-style) game I saw in Madison, Wisconsin, nearly 15 years ago among a crowd of 70,000 students.

 AS

Return to E & G

After spending what seems an eternity in a motel in Mountain View my chest infection had cleared up by today sufficiently so that I was no longer a threat to either Ella or young Flynn. It was a real joy to come through the door and see Flynn again and Ella made the trip back home in the car with us ... even better with instant recognition. I got to read Ella some books and build impressive structures with her Lego blocks.

And I got my first real exercise in two weeks when Greg invited me to play tennis with me, which he won by an embarrassingly wide margin. Still, it was my first game in what must be 20 years so I had an excuse! After that we threw a Frisbee for maybe half an hour or so in the adjacent park while keeping an interested eye open at a game of Quidditch being played alongside us. This previous fictional game featuring in Harry Potter books and movies has been elevated to a real sport in California and other nerdy places. The players in each of the two teams ride witches' brooms while trying to wrest a ball from their opponents and throw it through raised circular hoops - presumably scoring a 'goal' of sorts.

This picture shows what I've just described ... I think! The brooms seem to be held in place with one hand, which only allows one free hand for all the rest.

Anyway, I can't see myself taking up this particular sport, nor tennis for that matter. I'll stick my bike back home. After a pleasant afternoon in  the park and Ella had returned from her own sessions there with Dot, it was back to child-raising activities like those already mentioned and holding young Flynn while Emily was preparing herself for feeding time. Here a two more photos, one of me holding the now 17 day old baby and the other of Emily holding an interested Ella, who is now coming I think to accept that mummy has two objects of attention.

Apologies for the first of these. The picture I added was rotated through 90 degrees, but the BLOG will only add it in current format!

A Scary Evening?

My BLOG posts usually report on past events, but this breaks the mould by expressed reservations about a lecture I've been hired to give in just under two weeks. And it has a particularly scary angle to it! Well, to shorten the suspense, I am delivering the Trulaske College of Business & Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs Missouri Bankers Chair Lecture on Thursday, March 21, 2013. This comes on almost the 67th anniversary of another much more famous presentation in small town Missouri, which took place only 23 miles (39km) from where I am about to deliver mine.

I will start by pointing out that I am not a banker, though our superannuation fund has a substantial holding in bank shares. My presentation is simply about doing effective regional economic development and the roles played in that by small and medium enterprises and the market system including the creation and circulation of venture capital. I am using my own libertarian background and ideas from all over the place  to development my argument.

That other presentation 67 years ago ... just 9 months after I was born, had the US president in the audience - Harry S Truman after who my host School was named and he, too, was from small town Missouri. I should say that I have no expectation that President Obama will be in my audience because the person who delivered that address in 1946 was one of the most famous persons of the 20th century and he delivered one of the most famous speeches of that epoch: Winston Churchill and his speech that gave us the term "the iron curtain". The venue was Westminster College at Fulton, Missouri. Of course, Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, but over 200 km from Columbia.

I'll let you know my efforts were received after the event and hope you wish me well. By the way, I have two presentations to give at Denton in Texas before reaching Columbia, both on similar themes, and it's useful to do dry runs. And how did I wind up travelling to Denton and Columbia. Well, my host at the former, Terry Clower, has previously hosted me in Dallas and is a member of the editorial board of the journal I co-edit! And the head of the School of Public Affairs in Columbia and I co-presented at a conference at Hervey Bay in SE Queensland last Novemeber and he liked what I said ad invited me across! Isn't networking wonderful?

AS