Across the Pond

On a chilly Sunday night in February two young girls in jeans and light blouses were standing in front of the artists' entrance of one of two local art theaters in Pasadena, California. The pathway beyond the barrier, an iron gate, was barely lit. It stayed empty for a long time while the girls, shifting weight from one foot to the other, chatted and giggled. After a while a figure emerged from the shadows. The girls fell silent but it was the wrong actor. When the right man, Bradley Whitford, finally appeared he was wearing a bicycle helmet pushed way up on his forehead. Whitford is best known for playing Josh Lyman in the TV series  The West Wing   but on that night he had performed in the Pasadena Playhouse's production of Yasmina Reza’s   Art.  The girls stopped the actor, told him about their social studies class and how the teacher would have them watch The West Wing.  Whitford smiled, asked, "Which school is it?" and autographed the two print...

If I had a chicken farm... Wild hen or rooster on Kauai. So your kid goes out with a basket ball and breaks the neighbor's window. You groan but you pay for the replacement of the window; you also let your child know that it will be responsible for the cost if it breaks another window. Next week your child goes out with its ball and - more broken glass. You do what? Bail him or her out again? The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is going to buy 40 million Dollars worth of chicken from the poultry industry and donate the birds to federal food assistance programs. It's the bail out of the chicken farmers  because they are having a hard year. The price of chicken food and the production of chickens have increased while consumption of chickens and thus their market price have dropped. Sounds like a horrible situation, farmers squeezed from both sides, the classical double whammy. Alas, this is not he first time we are bailing out the chicken industry. According to ...

51 percent of Californians under 18 are now Latino, and for L.A. county the number is even higher (62 percent). These details of the 2010 census results were published this week. What does the shift in balance mean for the future of the golden state? NPR's Morning Edition ran an interesting interview on the topic this morning. UC Irvine anthropologist Leo Chavez talks about white Californian people's fears, about how Latino immigrants add to the existing culture, about the economic challenges they face, and about possible changes in voting habits. To listen to the piece go to the NPR website and click on the link that reads: Hispanic Population Grows Dramatically in California. More on the topic also in my previous post Diversity in Numbers: Defining the Angeleno Family  and in the comments to it.

Washington thought long (and hard?) about how to best tackle the obesity problem in this country. This week it published new dietary guidelines for Americans: eat less, avoid oversized portions, drink water instead of sugary drinks. According to the two agencies which came up with the new plan - the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture - the new recommendations provide "authoritative advice for people 2 years and older about how proper dietary habits can promote health and reduce risk for major chronic diseases". The suggestions are "based on the most sound scientific information". Which information? Scientific? Avoid oversized portions. Isn't that a no-brainer? The governmental departments of Health and of Agriculture have been in the dietary recommendation business since 1980 and have published new suggestions for healthy eating habits every five years since then. All the while we have grown bigger and bigger....

If you were a head of state and a foreign leader came to visit - what would you serve for dinner? Germany's official international cultural institution, the Goethe Institut, recently posted an article on this topic on its homepage. From it we learn that "it is part of international diplomacy nowadays to strike up personal friendship between leaders, to invite them into your home – and to give them a sense of national cuisine". In the case of Germany, national fare tends to be on the heavy side. Chancellor Helmut Kohl treated his foreign counterparts Francois Mitterrand, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan to Saumagen (pig's stomach) and Blutwurst (blood sausage); Japanese Princess Hisako Takamado got to eat Schweinshaxe (leg of pork) with Chancellor Angela Merkel. I tried to find information on what other countries' leaders put on the table for guests of honor and am happy to report that Austria likes to show off its national cuisine too. In 2006, when it wa...

Last week the Ministry for Women presented its latest report on the situation of women in Austria . The good news is education: Women constitute slightly more than half of all people with college degrees. Gender equality at last! Let's get out the champagne, sisters! Should we? Here are some other facts: Only 7.8 percent of women with college degrees hold leading positions in the workforce, but every fourth man with a college degree works in a leading position. Women are less likely to make it into the echelons of publicly traded companies. In the year of 2008 (the last year for which data are available) there was not a single woman leading a large company in Austria. Representation among board members was six percent. Women are less likely to hold high positions in universities. Only 15.8 percent of professors are female. I find these numbers sobering enough, but what really gets me is that for the same work, women in Austria earn less money than men...

The debate over burqas has reached Austria and the approximately one hundred women who wear burqas here. Over the past two weeks Chancellor Werner Faymann and the Minister for Women, Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek (both Social Democrats), as well as the Minister of Interior, Maria Fekter (People's Party), have called for a ban on burqas. Their arguments: Traffic becomes unsafe when drivers wear full body veils; burqas are a symbol for the oppression of women. Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek said in an interview in April, "the burqa is a symbol for the disdain of women and for their discrimination". She said she was open to dialogue with all parties involved but she also called for a ban on burqas in public buildings, banks, and hospitals. The minister added: "Burqas, being clearly discriminatory, do not belong in our society. There is no room for burqas here." Let's think this through: the burqa, a full body garment worn by women in some Islamic traditions, is used i...

The difference between politics in the USA and in Europe is often as small (or big) as one three letter word: God. In Sunday's debate on health care Rep. Dale Kildee (D - Michigan) mentioned the afterlife. "I'm not going to jeopardize my eternal salvation", he said, assuring listeners that federal money would not be used to pay for abortions and that he could vote for the bill. To many Europeans such words, especially in the context of a parliamentary debate, sound bizarre. Is this because most European countries have clear rules for the separation of church and state? Or is it because the secularization of the Old World has reached a point where people dare not even think along religious lines? Take Austria, a country rooted in Catholicism: In left leaning circles atheism is defended with a vehemence reminiscent of the fundamentalism of the Christian right in the United States. It will be interesting to see if and how things change over the next decades, as Mus...