Entry 47: It's a Good Weekend (to be in Newcastle)

[Nobbys Head Lighthouse, Newcastle Australia]

This weekend is a great one to be in Newcastle. For one, the weather is gorgeous. I saw some online images of a snow-dusted DC, with the people on the street bundled up like the younger brother in A Christmas Story. Then, I looked outside my window, at all the shorts and t-shirt clad passers-by and pondered when I should step out in this 85 degree weather and join them. It was a nice thought.

For two, people are nice here. Cars stop for you at the crosswalk, pedestrians move out of your way on the sidewalk when you’re running, and nobody steals your shoes when you leave them onshore and have a dip in the ocean (at least not yet). I heard the Australian comedian Jim Jefferies on the Adam Carolla Show, and he commented that Australians are nicer than Americans. He was mostly joking, but I certainly can’t disagree. We Americans should try to adopt the Australian way and just be more civil. Every place has its assholes, I’m sure, but I feel like the percentage in the US is disproportionately high. An anthropologist should do a study on this. Is Margaret Mead still alive?

[See, even the insulting graffiti is nicer.]

Anyway, it got me thinking on a bit of a tangent. A mindset of many Americans that really bothers me is that emulating other countries is somehow anti-American. We see this in things like public transportation, gun control, legalization of marijuana, and healthcare. Politically, it doesn’t help your case – in fact it might even be detrimental to it – to point out that we already have a working model for some of these things in other countries. It’s frustrating, and it’s a loser mentality, because you end up continuing to do things in an inferior manner for no good reason. What winners do is incorporate the successful characteristics of other systems into their system. Smart business leaders and football coaches know this, politicians struggle with it. The US does a lot of things right, and we do a lot of things better than other nations. However, with the things we don’t do so well, let’s try to cherry pick from the rest of the world, and get better. It seems like common sense, really, and yet it’s not common at all.

OK, I’ll hop off my soapbox now and show you all some more pictures. I ran to the Nobbys Head Lighthouse this weekend, and saw a new and beautiful side of Newcastle. Nobbys Head is where part of the ocean splits off and forms the Hunter River. The beaches there are quite nice and relatively empty, even on a Saturday. This is the best thing about Newcastle, in my opinion. The beaches are on par with Sydney’s, but much more conveniently accessible and much less populated (Newcastle’s population is about 1/16th that of Sydney). As I was running, I couldn’t help but think that if beaches like this were in a city like, say, DC, they probably wouldn’t be that cool, because on any nice weekend there would sixty thousand people there fighting for a few feet of sand, polluting the area, and congesting the roads.

[A beach in Newcastle. I think this one is actually called Newcastle Beach.]

[The Hunter River. I'm not sure when the building in the background was erected.]

[Nobbys Head Lighthouse from the "other side". This is my favorite picture I've taken so far in Australia. The big stone blocks in the foreground with the little lighthouse in the background. I don't know... it just looks cool.]

Anyway... Surprisingly, Newcastle was referenced by the aforementioned Jim Jeffries. He talks about recently meeting Crowded House’s Neil Finn. Apparently Jeffries, when he was 15, went to see Crowded House in Newcastle, but the show was canceled due to a now infamous earthquake that destroyed the venue. He tells a rather humorous anecdote about relying this to Finn. It also involves his drunken girlfriend and Paul McCartney. I found it quite funny. Here’s the link if you want to hear it. (Click “Listen Now” then “Adam Carolla Show: Jim Jeffries”. It starts at about the 79:00 mark and takes about five minutes.)

Well, that’s all for this entry. Catch ya on the flip side.