Stoop to Shower

So I'm in the Sheraton Four Points in Sydney. Nice hotel, right by Darling Harbour. Great sunset view over Darling Harbour from my room. Nice lobby, great location, pleasant staff, yadda yadda yadda. Oh, and free breakfast, too.

But why is the damn showerhead so low? Us tall people like to be clean too. I mean, I have to stoop to shower. I'm taller than the average guy, but it's not like I'm Yao Ming. But the shower hits me at the chin. So I really have to bend to get my hair wet.

I've stayed in a lot of hotels in Australia, in half-a-dozen cities. This is the first "short-shower" I've encountered. So come on Sheraton Four Points, shape up. Australia is not a country of short people - they are taller than Americans on average. This is the sort of shower I expect to find in some small business hotel in Japan, not at an international quality hotel in Sydney.

Boo!

AC/DC - No Joking Matter

Today the Sydney Morning Herald ran a report on a study by a professor Robert Oxoby of the University of Calgary in the Great White North (aka, Canada). In his paper, On the Efficiency of AC/DC: Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson, Oxoby found that students listening to a Brian Johnson AC/DC song (Shoot to Thrill, apparently about hunting) had a better effect on efficient decision making than the late Bon Scott's haunting rendition of the little tune, It's A Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock-and-Roll.

Oxoby concluded that people would be better off playing the Johnson-era AC/DC than the older Scott stuff when engaged in negotiations.

More academic tomfoolery? Actually, no. It was all a big joke, says Oxoby. He's surprised that anybody believed it. Even renowned economics professor Steve Levitt thought it was real, and said so at his Freakonomics blog. Levitt's defense - you see some pretty strange academic papers.

Who Was that Mad Man?

A bookstore owner in Alice Springs (in the middle of Australia) had a scare when a customer said a man was vandalizing books. Turned out that customer didn't recognize best-selling author Stephen King, who autographed half a dozen of his books.

Seems unfair that the customer actually got to buy one of them.

Not So Diplomatic

An American diplomat (just retired) named Patrick Syring has been indicted for sending threats about Arabs to the Arab-American Institute. Indicted because his views were somewhat less than diplomatic.

According to prosecutors, Syring allegedly said, "The only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese. The only good Arab is a dead Arab." He also said in an email, "You wicked evil Hezbollah-supporting Arabs should burn in the fires of hell for eternity and beyond" and "The United States would be safer without you."

Rather an undiplomatic turn of phrase for a professional diplomat, what?

Behave on Those Aircraft, Cobber

Flying while different in the US is more and more dangerous as security personnel, flight attendants, etc all practice greater levels of awareness (or paranoia, depending on your perspective) in this crazy post-September 11 world of ours.

The latest story is about an Australian woman called Sophie Reynolds, who when told by a SkyWest flight attendant there were no more pretzels (d'oh), said "fair dinkum." Apparently, the flight attendant (who hasn't read my blog with its valuable Australian language tips) took this for some sort of obscenity and had security ready to meet the aircraft when the plane landed in Pittsburgh. In this context - Reynolds was apparently frustrated - it means something like "sheesh" or "rats" or maybe "oh heck". It isn't an obscenity.

Airline officials said Reynolds had been "aggressive" too. Who knows? But for any Aussies planning a trip to the US - best avoid "fair dinkum" on aircraft or while in lines at the airport. And if you find you can't get any pretzels, definitely don't say "bugger".

Wanted: An Accountant for Woolworth's; or Misadventures in the Produce Section

I do most of the grocery shopping at a Woolworth's. And occasionally I find things there that befuddle me (not just kangaroo cat food, vast displays of Vegemite, and tinned beetroot slices). Specifically, I see some very very strange pricing strategies.

For example: Last week I was looking to score some regular onions - us Americans call them "yellow onions," while Aussies say "brown onions." Clearly the International Onion Association needs to convene a meeting to help standardize names for onions so we aren't all confused. For example, here they call what in the US is known as a "green onion" as a "shallot" or "eschallot," and what we Yanks call "shallots" are called by the Aussie greengrocers "French eschallots."

But back to my yellow-brown onions. They have them loose sold by the kilo, and in bags. Last week a one-kilo bag of yellow-brown onions sold for 89 cents. The loose ones were 99 cents per kilo. And the two-kilo bag of yellow-brown onions was $3.39. I stood there and studied the bags and loose onions closely. Same regular old run-of-the-mill onions. Equally fresh and nice looking. Packed by the same company even (the bagged ones). But Woolies was charging nearly DOUBLE the per-weight price for the bigger bag, in complete contradiction to the normal pricing routine of a larger unit of a given good being cheaper per weight than a smaller box, bag, or carton. So I bought the one-kilo bag.

Similarly, they had plain old carrots, conveniently also called "carrots" here in Australia (unlike capsicum -- see the end of this post for the American name for these) so no confusion. Usually in the US at least, produce that is sold prepackaged in bags is cheaper per weight than produce sold loose. Apples are always that way, for example. Well, these carrots were $2.25 for a kilo bag. And they were $1.98 per kilo, sold loose. So I bought the loose ones.

It's not just produce. I carefully studied two different bottles of Ocean Spray cranberry juice. The one-liter size was $4.59. The 1.5-liter size was $6.99. In other words, again the larger size was more expensive per unit than the smaller.

This isn't just one week's pattern either. I see this sort of thing at the Woolworth's I shop at all the time. So I can't tell you for sure whether there is just one mathematically-challenged store manager setting prices, or whether the entire Woolworth's chain is screwed up. But they might try advertising for an accountant. Or a mathematician. Or for that matter, an averagely-bright 10-year-old with a calculator.

Capsicum? What we Americans call a bell pepper. One of the few things cheaper here than in the US.